Toyota Research Institute Girl Geek Lightning Talks (Video + Transcript)

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Kelly Kay, Rita Yau, Suzanne Basalla, Jen Cohen, Carrie Bobier-Tiu, Ha-Kyung Kwon, Steffi Paepcke, Fatima Alloo

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) girl geeks: Kelly Kay, Rita Yau, Suzanne Basalla, Jen Cohen, Carrie Bobier-Tiu, Ha-Kyung Kwon, Steffi Paepcke, and Fatima Alloo, at TRI Girl Geek Dinner in Los Altos, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Transcript of TRI Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Angie Chang: Okay. Hi. Thank you all for coming out tonight. My name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. If this is your first time, welcome. I’ve heard several stories of women who have got tickets for Girl Geek dinners over the last decade and missed one, two, three and four and they’re here tonight. So thank you so much for coming after a long day of work and having fun with us at Toyota Research Institute. I’m really excited to be here and learn all about the cool things. I wanted to point out at these actually really fun stickers. They have the robot arm and the car. If you want to pick them up, they’re not business cards. You can pick them up and take them home with you.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Hi everybody. I’m Gretchen also with Girl Geek. How is that food? Can we just all applaud for how amazing that was? You guys, Toyota has just killed it tonight unlike every level. It’s [inaudible] and I’m not jinxing anything. I swear. And if this looks fun, you can do it at your company too. We do these almost every week and a different company hosts. And so grab someone in a red t-shirt who can put you in touch with someone who actually did the planning, who can tell you how much work it takes, that it’s really fun, that you can bond with your colleagues, that you’re elevating women in your company. You have a cool video to submit to Grace Hopper next year. All these awesome things that can come out of it. So with that, how many of you it’s your first time? Okay, so we want to see you. You can come all the time now. You can do this all the time with all these awesome women. Okay, perfect. I would like to welcome Rita from team Toyota.

Rita Yau: Thank you, Angie and Gretchen. Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming tonight. Hopefully you guys are full with all the food and have a beverage in hand. A few shout outs. We have a few of our executives here this evening. We have our SVP of our autonomous driving organization, Ryan Eustice, as well as his two VPs, Wolfram Burgard and Steve Winston here with us as well. And then we have Max Bajracharya, who is head of our robotics organization. And so we’re really excited to have you guys and have them supporting us. And with that I just wanted to give the platform to our Executive Vice President and CFO, Kelly Kay, who’s going to go over our mission statement.

Kelly Kay speaking

EVP and CFO Kelly Kay gives a talk on “TRI’s Mission: Improving the Quality of Life” at Toyota Research Institute Girl Geek Dinner.

Kelly Kay: Welcome everybody. I’m super excited to have you all here today, and it’s been so much fun to wander about and hear everyone talking and learning more about what we do here at TRI. It feels like we’ve been living in the shadow and now that so many wonderful people have come to learn more about what we do, I’m hoping we could do more events like that here at TRI. I need the clicker. Okay. So I want to talk a little bit about improving the quality of life and TRI’s mission, but I’m going to actually start with myself and my journey that actually brought me here to TRI.

Kelly Kay: I actually went to Ohio State, go Buckeyes IO. So really excited, especially since we have partnerships with the University of Michigan and when I go to Michigan, I have to wear my Ohio gear. Sorry Ryan. I also went to law school, so I’m actually a lawyer. I practiced law for over 20 years before I made it to TRI and I did so kind of in a unique way. My life was actually really focused around taking traditional products and turning them into online products. So I started in the banking industry, so and I don’t want to date myself, but back in the day before you could actually log into a website and look at your bank balance or pay your bills online or apply for a credit card, I was working at a bank trying to make those products possible.

Kelly Kay: So it kind of progressed through my life of kind of taking these really old fashioned, old school regulated industries and turning them into something that was cool and new and innovative. And it kind of ended most recently at Lyft, where I was working as the VP of Operations and helping them actually take their product around America and working in negotiating with different regulators on how you actually take what’s traditionally a taxi industry and turning into a ride sharing industry. So it was really fun to help Lyft grow. And I came to TRI, actually, to be the Chief Operating Officer almost three years ago, and it hit me at just the right time.

Kelly Kay: So Lyft is an amazing company. I was doing amazing things, in my opinion, changing the world as it came to transportation. And when I was approached by TRI, they came to be in the first conversation was more about the mission at TRI. And I was in a really unique place in my life where my stepmother had just had two strokes. My father had fallen trying to help her get up. They ended up on the floor or calling me and calling 911 and they’re like, “Wow,” I’m like, “What’s going to happen to my parents when I live so far away and I have to find a way to actually make sure that they can take care of themselves at home because we can’t always be there and it’s really hard and expensive to afford a home to put them in.” At the same time, my dad could no longer really drive well because he’s disabled and I was thinking, what am I going to do?

Kelly Kay: And when I was talking to the recruiter, they were telling me about the vision and the mission at TRI and what it was all about. You guys have learned quite a bit about it tonight and I was thinking, wow, this company, I could go work at a company that’s actually going to change the future and enable people like my father and my stepmother to actually be able to stay home and age in place and not have to worry about caregivers coming in and being embarrassed by caregivers coming in and taking care of them all the time. And my dad’s not going to have to worry about how is he going to get to his doctor’s appointment or how is he going to get to the grocery store because he can’t drive anymore, because we’re going to have autonomous cars and I’m going to work for a company that can help solve these problems for people in my life that I care about, and ultimately for myself.

Kelly Kay: This probably isn’t going to be around when my dad is still alive, but it’s going to be around when I need it most. I’m an only child. What happens when I’m by myself at my house and I need to get to the doctor? So our vision and mission is really about that. We are actually envisioning a future where Toyota products dramatically improve the quality of life for everyone. And our mission is to develop automated driving robotics and other human amplification technology for Toyota in this space that will enable us to actually allow people like my father and your parents to age in place gracefully, to be able to still move around the home and have robots help them move around the home, and help us transport ourselves from point A to point B in a safe way through autonomous vehicles. So, our leadership team was another thing that really inspired me to come to TRI.

Kelly Kay: We’ve got some of the most amazing minds when it comes to autonomous driving and robotics here at TRI. And the best part about them, is I was very scared, I’m a lawyer, I’m not an engineer. What am I going to do? How am I going to sit at the table with these people because they are so smart and they don’t have the egos that you think these people would have. There’s a lot of doctors that you’re seeing. So most of these folks are PhDs and they really bring a lot to the table without the ego that usually comes with it. And I found that to be one of the other amazing things when I was thinking about coming to TRI, is the people I’m going to be working with really matter.

Kelly Kay: And we just spent three days together, everyone on this screen, actually, learning and thinking together about how to design the future of TRI and what should we be thinking about? How do we even be more innovative than we’re being today? It’s a constant question that we’re asking here everyday at TRI is how do we do more? How do we think about the next great thing that we’re going to do to help transform Toyota and the world today to be more mobile. And our values are another reason why I wanted to come to TRI. When I came here there were… Toyota has principles and it’s got these 10 principles that they bring from Japan and they exist and it’s really, how do you think about working at Toyota? But I wanted TRI to have its own values.

Kelly Kay: And what I did with the team was really think through what we want them to be. And I wanted to put a lot of myself into this because at that point in a lot of what my role is, is really about enabling the company as a whole to be more effective, to helping them design the future, to work with the HR team on the type of people in the culture we want here, to work with the engineering team to get things done, which should the processes be that we have to get things done, building all of that within the company. And the values really are the contract that we have. And when we think about how we work together at TRI, the be yourself value is the one that is the most important to me. And I’m kind of the sponsor of that value, if you could possibly sponsor a value.

Kelly Kay: And we spent some time during our retreat with a famous actor, a Japanese actor, and if anyone watched the TV show Heroes? Yes. So, the Japanese character that reads the comic book and goes back in time. So he came to our retreat with us and worked with us on actually being yourself even more and kind of almost being a child. And we were doing improv and he’s like, “Make a blue doctor machine.” And we’re like, “What?” So we all had to act out a blue doctor machine. It was really like anything you could think of to really be yourself. And he’s like, “Everyone is a genius.” And he really got us to think of our internal genius. So even though we all bring different skills to the table and we all have different levels of education, we actually are in each individual a genius in and amongst themselves.

Kelly Kay: So what my genius is may not be the same as somebody else’s, but we each have individual characteristics and at TRI, it’s really important that everyone has a seat at the table and a voice at the table to bring their unique characteristics to what we’re doing here. The next is respect one another. And that one is just as important as being yourself. And I think they balance each other out really well because if you’re a jerk, you still have to respect somebody else. So we think about these of kind of making sure that we’re really thinking about all of these as a whole and respecting one another is another one. It’s super important. Again, we might not all have the same opinion, but we want to hear everyone’s opinion.

Kelly Kay: We want to think about it, we want to debate, we want to make informed decisions. So we have to sit back and respect everyone’s opinion here at TRI. And the next is assume best intentions. And this picture is mine. And I will explain the picture to you. I foster kittens throughout the kitten season here in Silicon Valley. We do about 2,400 foster kittens every season here. And I have a German shepherd and he loves to play with the kittens. He’s always licking the kittens and things like that. And the question is, is this dog eating the kitten or is he saving the kitten? He’s in fact saving the kitten. And even dogs are basically good. So we’d like to assume here at TRI that people are basically good. We need to assume best intentions.

Kelly Kay: We’re working in an interesting environment. We have offices all over the world. A lot of email and email can always lead to miscommunication and misunderstanding. So we’d like to make sure that when we’re like, when we get upset, when we read that flaming email, it could be a cultural issue because people are speaking many different languages at Toyota. It could be an issue someone’s just grumpy because they worked late and they just sent something out they shouldn’t send. So we like to think about things of always step back, don’t get upset, assume best intentions, and that really allows us to interact in a different way here at TRI than you would find in other companies where you’re like, people come in very aggressively into meetings like, “Well, why did you send that?” We are like, “Hey, now I assume you didn’t really mean this, but this is how I took it. Let’s talk.”

Kelly Kay: So we just take a different approach to things here. And then thinking globally, again, we’re a global company. TRI’s a small part of a really large company. There’s 360,000 people at Toyota. We are 350, 340 people. So we need to make sure we’re thinking globally on everything we’re doing when we’re designing the car, when we’re designing a robot, we’re actually looking at it from a broader perspective than most companies would. And then finally, make it happen. We’re here, we’re in Silicon Valley, we need to move quick. Japanese companies are historically slow. TRI I was created to actually move faster than a traditional Japanese company. So we’d like to think of ourselves as kind of this company of making things happen.

Kelly Kay: That means taking risks, doesn’t mean jeopardizing safety, but it means taking risks and making decisions and things like that to allow us to move as quickly as possible. I probably completely failed to talk about what I was supposed to talk about, which is what I do here, but these are the things that I put together that are a main part of what I do here at TRI. I have CFO in the title. It’s about this much of what I do. I spend a lot of my time in meetings, just making sure things actually get done. Sometimes it’s coaching people, sometimes it’s helping with reorganizations, sometimes it’s figuring out what should we do strategically? How should we design a program? Why should we do things in a certain way?

Kelly Kay: So I spend a lot of time with the executive team, with anyone who wants to come and talk to me. I believe in an open door policy, and I work really closely with the CEO as well. So, if you want to know anything about TRI, I probably know it. If you wanted something technical you should probably talk to somebody else. But I am a work in progress. So a lot of the professors have taken me under their wing and have been teaching me a little bit more about the technology behind what we do. But again, I think we have a great lineup of some amazing technical people who are going to come up and talk to you and some of our really good leaders here at TRI. So thank you for all coming out. And again, if you have any questions, feel free to ask me or anyone on the staff. We’re super excited to have you here tonight and hopefully you learn a lot about TRI. Thanks. And I didn’t do everything and that’s what really matters.

Rita: Thank you, Kelly.

Kelly Kay: Do you want this?

Rita: All right. So I also just wanted to add to that, one of the reasons why I joined TRI was because of the amazing, awesome things that we do here. And everybody here at TRI really does have the same mission and goal to better the world. And so I’m super privileged to be working with a bunch of amazing, awesome people. And with that we are going to kick off our next round of lightning speakers and we’re going to have the next couple of speakers come up. And Carrie Bobier-Tu, who is our manager of the… Or one of our managers in our autonomous driving organization is going to come up and give us her overview of why she’s here.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu speaking

Manager of Control, Planning and Control Driving Team Carrie Bobier-Tiu gives a talk on “Building the Uncrashable Car” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: Thanks everybody for coming. I’m really glad to see so many people here. My name is Carrie Bobier-Tu, and I’m the manager of our control team, which is part of our autonomous driving team. And I’ll talk a little bit more about what that means in a minute. But first I’m also going to tell you kind of how I got to TRI. So, the first kind of engineering project, hands on project that I worked on was, I was a member of the Solar Car team at Stanford University when I was an undergrad. So it’s the picture of upper left for you guys.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: But I worked, as you can see, on a team of me and a bunch of guys, pretty much, and we built this solar car and raced it from Texas to Canada–cutting out–over a week one summer. And that was kind of my entry into cars and my love for cars. A lot of hands on experience there in engineering and also met who would become my advisor for my PhD and kind of build the next many years of my life at Stanford. So Chris Gerdes is a professor at Stanford in vehicle dynamics and control, and I started talking to him about suspension design for the solar car, really got along with him and his students [inaudible] lab and ended up staying in the lab for the next eight years to do my masters and PhD there.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: The two cars that you see that kind of looked like black dune buggies are the vehicles that I worked on there. The top one I used for my research, which was based around safety systems and advanced stability control and how we can kind of take the stability control that we have and vehicles on the road to the next level by having advanced sensing capabilities. And I also worked on building a new platform, which is the car on the bottom, two students and many after us, kind of, we worked on this car together and I worked on designing a suspension system that can enhance friction estimation capabilities. So I really got deep into vehicle dynamics and engineering here. I was really hands on with it.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: I liked building cars in our test beds and working with all the sensors and computers, but when I graduated not that long ago, even, there weren’t really any autonomous driving or vehicle control jobs in the Bay Area. So I went to work at HGST, which is a hard drive company. It’s now part of Western Digital. But I am really glad that I went and worked there because I got the experience of designing a control system for a product that you had to have this controller that worked on millions and millions of devices that were going out to customers. So I think having that product experience early in my career was really helpful to me in seeing how to design a robust product and a robust controller. I also got into CrossFit there and got to work with my husband, who’s the second from the left in that picture with all of the red shirts.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: They had a CrossFit company, or CrossFit gym, at the company, which was really cool and kind of has spurred my interest in health since then, which I’m really appreciative. But I really missed working on cars. So after a couple of years, the autonomous driving business was kind of starting to pop up and I went to work with a few of my old lab mates at Renault, which is the sister company of Nissan for those of us in the United States who aren’t familiar with Renault. But they have a small outlet here in Sunnyvale. So we built this a test vehicle, Callie, the white car with the stripes, and it was just a team of three of us. We were working on controls research. It was basically an extension of my PhD. We were all kind of coming from that same background.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: So I had kind of the research experience there that I was really enjoying, but it wasn’t going anywhere into a product or out into the company. And we didn’t have a lot of support from the Renault or Nissan itself to do that. So I was starting to look for something different. And what drew me to TRI, it was a couple of things. One was that continued ability to do the research that I was really engaged with, and continuing on for my PhD and bringing that experience with me. And the other piece of it was the ability to work on a safety system that would go into real vehicles. So around the time that I was at Renault, I had a son. So it became very important to me.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: It’s kind of like figuring out how to make cars safer for my family and for everyone that I know and since I have that background and expertise, I was really excited to come here and work on the guardian system that we have, which I’ll get into in a minute. The other thing that’s really great about TRI is our ability to do research with universities. That’s been mentioned a few times before, but this is the bottom of the last picture is me with some of the students at Stanford. We went out and got to drivers around with one of Toyota’s Drift drivers.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: So, TRI, we have kind of two approaches to automated driving. So we’ve talked, think of it as one system, but two modes that are built on the same technologies. The first one is Guardian, which is a parallel autonomy system where the driver is still in control of the car. So we try to follow the driver’s intended commands but with minimal and intuitive interventions to maintain safety. And then the second half of our automated driving stack is the one that more people are familiar with, in general in the industry, which is the fully autonomous system where the autonomy system is determining some kind of policy for the vehicle to drive.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: And we calculate commands that can maintain the safety of the vehicle, like for steering, acceleration and braking. So how does my team’s work fit into this? In the autonomous driving stack, as we call it, which is kind of the full set of software that runs the autonomous vehicle, we have some large groups of kind of algorithmic expertise or design. So there’s a perception system, which is taking in all the information from the sensors of the vehicle and figuring out what does the road look like, who’s on the road around us? And then on top of that comes the prediction system, which is, we know what’s happening now, but what’s going to happen in the future?

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: And finally, planning. So what should the car do, given what the environment looks like or in the Guardian case, what do we think the driver’s going to do in the near future? And control is a part of this planning problem. So what my team does, is something that we call Envelope Control. It’s something that I started developing, as I mentioned when I was doing my PhD. Envelope Control is a holistic control scheme that keeps a given system inside a safe operating regime or envelope. So we have a few things that we have to do. One, is stay on the road and don’t hit anything.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: Two, is to maintain stability of the car. So, for example, if you’re driving on an icy road, you can lose control of the car and spin out. So we’re trying to prevent situations like that or situations where like a kid runs out in front of the car and you might not have time to stop, so you have to swerve around them. We also don’t want to ask the car to do something it can’t. So if it can’t swerve around for some reason, there’s something in the way, don’t ask it to do that.

Carrie Bobier-Tiu: If we don’t have enough steering capability or enough or the ability to brake fast enough, we can’t ask the car to do that. So we need to know what the limits are. And finally, for the Guardian system, we want to give the driver as much control of the car as possible, but help them maintain the safety of that vehicle. So the technology that we build kind of incorporates all of these things together. And that’s how we, here at TRI on the control team, are trying to create an uncrashable car. Thanks.

Ha-Kyung Kwon speaking

Research Scientist Ha-Kyung Kwon gives a talk on “Accelerating Materials Discovery by Helping You Fail Faster” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: Hi, my name is Ha-Kyung Kwon, research scientist on the Accelerated Materials Design and Discovery or AMDD team here at TRI. So I’m also going to talk about my path to TRI, but I’m going to start from the very beginning. So I was born in Seoul, South Korea. Spent most of my childhood and adolescent years in Manila, in the Philippines, where my dad’s job took us. And it was fantastic growing up in the Philippines. There’s warm tropical weather, great food, white sandy beaches, which was on the picture there. But my favorite part was meeting friends from all over the world.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: And in fact, when I’m not here talking about science on a Thursday night, I’m out there playing flag football with my high school friends, their college friends, and their friends. So anyway, when I graduated from high school, I went to Princeton to study chemical and biological engineering. And my first year at Princeton I started doing research in an organic solar cells lab, and I loved it so much that I continued to do research in the same lab for the next three years. When I graduated from Princeton, I decided that I wanted to do even more polymer science research.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: So I went to Northwestern to get a PhD in material science and engineering. My PhD work was on the face behavior of ion containing polymers. These are polymers that are great candidates for polymer or plastic batteries. Plastic batteries, you might ask. But think about all the plastics or polymers that you know, and their rich properties, like styrofoam, which is light but rigid, nylons and polyesters, which you can wear, and Kevlar, which is extremely tough. It’s Bulletproof. Think about this wide array of properties that polymers have and imagine the possibilities. A polymer battery that is flexible, lightweight, safe, and even recyclable is not out of the question, but it’s going to take many, many years before we can get there and that’s because the scientific research process is incredibly slow.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: First, you have to understand the problem. What are the technical challenges of making a polymer battery? What’s been tried, what hasn’t been tried? Then you have to formulate a hypothesis. Maybe this material has a mechanical strength in the ionic conductivity that’s relevant for a polymer battery. Then you have to figure out how to make that material. Then you test it to see if it has the properties that you want. Once you have the results, you analyze them. Did your hypothesis work? Yes, no, maybe you don’t know. So you have to repeat the entire process. And this process is slow, not only because each step can take a long time, but because many scientific hypotheses end in failures, and that’s part of the process.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: It’s what enables us to learn, to refine our understanding of science and to take a step in the right direction. But this necessary process is unnecessarily slow. In a traditional industrial lab, the R&D cycle can take anywhere between five and 25 years, even more. And we don’t have this kind of time to solve the challenges that we face today. As of 2017, transportation accounted for more than 29% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and more than 82% of that came from driving. The technologies that we have in our cars and trucks today simply aren’t cutting it. For a sustainable future we need new materials and new technologies, and we can’t wait tens of years. So how do we accelerate this materials discovery process while enhancing scientists’ ability to learn, to discover, and to advance scientific knowledge?

Ha-Kyung Kwon: And that’s where my team comes in. Using big data, machine learning methods, and high throughput automated experiments that are driven by these methods, we develop tools to accelerate the design of advanced materials for zero emission technology, such as batteries and fuel cells. Our tools accelerate materials discovery by helping researchers fail faster. And what does that mean? Here are some of the projects that our team’s been working on. Matscholar uses natural language processing that contains over… Sorry. It contains information from over four million scientific abstracts. In the matter of minutes, it can help you discover whether materials that are similar to yours in composition, property, or application have already been studied.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: Something that without this tool could have taken you years, if not decades, to achieve. Using machine learning methods, we’ve also created beep, which can predict the lifetime of a battery from just the first hundred cycles. And this saves a ton of time on the battery development cycle because currently in order to test a battery’s lifetime, you have to cycle it until it dies, which can take more than thousands of cycles. In addition, using optimal experiment design, we can recommend the next set of experiments to run, given the last set that you ran and its results. We can even teach a scientific tool the scientific method in CAMD.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: Given an objective, such as discover a new stable material, it can formulate its own hypothesis, launch simulations according to that hypothesis, refine its hypothesis according to failed simulations, and keep running them until it discovers a new stable material, and it does the leg work so that you as a researcher don’t have to start from ground zero. As you can see, our work in AMDD really spans many materials, many applications, and many scientific disciplines. And this brings me to my favorite part, the people. Our team really brings together scientists and engineers from a diverse set of backgrounds anywhere from computational physics, applied math, to software engineering, who are passionate about discovering materials and accelerating materials discovery for zero emission technology.

Ha-Kyung Kwon: Our tools are interdisciplinary because they’ve been developed, tested, and used firsthand by researchers with diverse backgrounds: us. We also maintain deep connections to fundamental science. Our tools really draw from and build upon the intuition and knowledge of scientists and seek to empower scientists in their learning. And to do this, we work very closely with our consortium of more than 10 university partners and 125 researchers from those academic institutions. Our goal is to accelerate materials discovery, not just for the autonomous vehicle industry, but for the scientific community as a whole. By building tools, we’re building connections and communities because we believe that working together and failing together is the fastest way to sustainable solutions. Thank you.

Rita Yau: Thank you, Ha-Kyung. All right. Okay. To kick off the next section, we are going to be having Jen Cohen, our VP of Operations to tell us about her journey.

Jen Cohen speaking

VP of Operations Jen Cohens gives a talk on “I am the IT Guy” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Jen Cohen: Hi, everyone. I’m so glad you’re here tonight. Thank you, Rita, for the introduction. My name is Jen Cohen, I’m VP of Operations for TRI. You’ll notice my presentation is I am the IT Guy. I promise I’ll explain that. How many people here are in IT? All right, I guess I kind I am. Ian, did you raise your hand back there?

Ian: Halfway.

Jen Cohen: Okay. Halfway. How many of you have had to say, “I am the IT guy?” Okay, so it’s not just me. I feel better. So I’m going to talk to you a little bit about my journey, a little bit about operations, and some of my hacks for high performance teams. So over the years I’ve had to say I am the IT guy. And recently I had to do a presentation talking about my career, and I realized that not only have I had to say it a lot, but I’ve actually learned to love it. I love that surprise when they realize that it’s actually me who’s going to be giving them the answer. And, you know, Facebook’s great about reminding us of what’s happened in the past. So I found this memory recently from 2011.

Jen Cohen: So apparently I’ve been saying the same thing for a while, “Wow, just had another vendor say, ‘Your IT guy needs to…’ It’s funny and sad that they never assume it could be a woman.” But at the end of the day, I love it now. I’ll share that way back when those were popular phones, I started my career as a sys admin at Cisco and I grew my career to do IT management at companies like Smith and Hawkin, which is gone now, but Birkenstock, anybody rocking the Birkenstocks tonight? The big question is do you have socks on? And then I grew from there to do technology development and platform management.

Jen Cohen: So platforms in the convention and real estate industry and the gift about doing technology, the gift about being in IT is that you get to see problems across the entire organization. And I really love to problem solve, but I realized technology wasn’t going to be enough. And so recently, a few years back, got into operations management at Line2, and then here at TRI. I will also share with you that I’m a mom. I have a daughter, Sabrina, who is a junior in college. She’s a computer science major, but she thinks she’s totally different than me. And I have my son Logan, he is a senior in high school and he’s an artist. And based on these slides we know he didn’t get it from me.

Jen Cohen: And then I’d like to talk to you a little bit about operations at TRI. So the teams that I am either responsible for or support some of them, IT of course, because I am the IT guy. But there’s more than me and the amazing team that does that work. CyberSecurity. I co-sponsor the Infrastructure Engineering team. So, that’s essentially a fancy way of saying dev ops. Facilities, Internal Comp, I’m not going to go through the list, but a good group of people who support a lot of fun things here. We have three sites in California, in Michigan, and where am I missing? Massachusetts. I can’t believe I forgot that. I was born there. I should remember.

Jen Cohen: We manage over a hundred key systems, and we support over 300 employees, contractors, and interns. And I decided to show you a picture of some of the amazing folks we have in our ops team because while I say I’m the IT guy, these are the really, the folks who make it happen. And the challenges that we have as Operations at TRI are speed. And while I’d like to have that car, that’s not actually the speed I’m talking about. We move really fast. Our researchers, they need things. We need to make sure that they have what they need at the right time, and we need them to be able to move quickly. We need to be, as has been mentioned, able to fail fast, and we need to get it done at my absolute favorite deadline, which is yesterday.

Jen Cohen: Ask anyone on the team. But we also have to have balance. Part of our job is to protect the company, to protect ourselves. And so we need to make sure we have things like cybersecurity. At the same time we need to enable people to use the technology and get out of their way. We need to have freedom within constraints. And we have these amazing, really smart researchers and software developers. And so we want to make sure that they have the time to work on the things that they’re there for and don’t have to build the technology. But at the same time, some of them know far more about the tech at their desk than we do. So we want to make sure that they have the self-service.

Jen Cohen: So we’re not blocking them. And finally we want to make sure that we’re flexible because there are things that are failing fast, and we need to make sure that we can pivot when the direction of research changes. And we need to build platforms that don’t pin us into a corner. So flexibility. So that’s a little bit about TRI, and the fun things that we do in our Operations team. And then I will briefly share with you three of my hacks for building high performance teams. So how many people here have heard of the concept tank in relation to support teams? Lauren, you don’t count. You know what that is. Anyone else?

Jen Cohen: So learned about tank, a few companies back at a PagerDuty summit, and the idea comes from video games, and I hate to say it, but it’s the person who takes all the hits in a video game, right? So from a support perspective, we have tier one and we have tier two and we want to make sure that our tier two teams who are handling escalations also have time to do the projects that they need to do to help our researchers be successful. And so if they’re handling escalations all day long, they’re not getting the chance to do their project work. So the idea of tank is that one day a week, each sys admin takes on the escalation, they get all the interruptions, they have to deal with it, they don’t get to do their project work, but they get four days the rest of the week relatively uninterrupted.

Jen Cohen: The nice thing about this is it absolutely forces cross training. So if Ian is the only one who knows how to fix the mics and Ian is on vacation, somebody else knows how because they’ve had to handle it on their escalation day. So that’s probably the most powerful thing I think we’ve brought to IT and Infrastructure Engineering here at TRI. My next hack is to celebrate wins. Now I know this can sound a little bit Pollyanna, but I will say, how many people here are problem solvers, and how often do you think about the ones behind you that you finished? Are you mostly looking at the ones coming forward? Yeah, so the problem with that is it’s easy to burn out. So I think it’s really important that we celebrate our wins, not just look forward to the next problem.

Jen Cohen: So in our weekly meetings, our teams list their wins first, so we get a chance to memorialize them and then we list our challenges, so that we have that moment of really acknowledging the work that we’ve done. The other nice thing about this as we put it into a deck that we can go back and look at, because I don’t know about you, but I have no idea what problems I was working on in January, February, March. Anybody here remember theirs? So the nice thing is because we memorialize this, we can go back at the end of the year and look back at what we’ve done and have that moment to remember. And I think that’s really important for support teams, especially, to keep moving forward.

Jen Cohen: And my final hack, and I am the IT guy and I love my technology, but is get off your keyboard. How many of you have been on the email, the GChat, the Slack that has turned into a book? Yeah, not just me. One of the things I found a few years back, I was working with these two developers who were, I think, on GChat and they were going at each other, but they were saying the same thing. They just didn’t realize it. We got them on the phone and within five minutes, they realized they were saying the same thing. The argument was over and they were coding the solution. And I realized at that point how about some part of my job is making sure that people connect.

Jen Cohen: So how many of you have seen the keyboard warrior at work? How many of you have been the keyboard warrior? I’ll admit it, I’ve been there, I’ve sent a flame email I probably shouldn’t have. So the reason I put this up here, and whether you’re a manager or you’re an individual contributor, doesn’t matter. Get off your keyboard. If that’s starting to happen, get on a call. I hate the phone too, but get on a call, get on a VTC, go to somebody’s desk. Because that really will help to work out those problems. And I will also say use Kelly’s tip. Assume best intentions when you do. All right, that’s it for me. Thank you guys so much.

Fatima Alloo speaking

Legal Counsel Fatima Alloo gives a talk on “Navigating the Intersection of Law and Technology” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Fatima Alloo: Hello? Looks like it’s working. Thank you. Hi, everyone. My name is Fatima Alloo and I’m part of the legal team here at TRI. Thank you for coming. So many of you. So, I actually will be talking about navigating. It’s actually a less daunting presentation that’s, than my title might indicate. But what I really want to do is share a little bit about what it is that I do here and some of the awesome issues that we get engage on here as part of the legal team at TRI. And, first I’ll go ahead and start with my career background. So for me, it all started a long time ago when I graduated from law school. And there I am with my parents who are super proud and excited at the time.

Fatima Alloo: After law school, I went into patent litigation, and essentially, I was defending clients in patent infringement lawsuits. So that meant that I had to get quickly up to speed on the mechanics of various technologies, including fun topics like semiconductor fabrication and audio and visual signal processing. And while I loved it, the more I interacted with various tech companies, I started realizing that I was more interested in how the technologies that I was defending were actually developed. So I knew someone at an augmented reality startup called Meta, and it turned out that they needed some legal support. So, I convinced my law firm to second me there, part-time.

Fatima Alloo: And in short, I absolutely loved it. And since that time, I was just so eager to find a way to work full time for a cutting edge tech company with a heart. And that’s how I ended up here at TRI. Now, from all in working with these clients and companies on various, on existing and new technologies, what I realized is, I actually discovered something about the law. And what I realized is that while it’s obviously really important as a lawyer to know what the existing laws are, the law is actually a pretty dynamic and adaptable and can actually be shaped by individuals in this space. In short, the law can actually be fun. Surprise, surprise.

Fatima Alloo: So let me take a quick poll. Who gets excited when you hear the words, “legal’s involved”? Wow, thank you. Wow. It’s more than I expected. Most of you probably think something closer to this. And don’t worry, I’m not going to take any offense. Sometimes these feelings or thoughts are justified, but at TRI, as part of the legal team at TRI, we like to see ourselves a little bit differently instead of trying to attack or pounce on your project, we’re here to support it. And while I can’t help you with the technical side of things, what I can do is amplify your voice in how the next generation of tech is received. I can enable you to partner with other players in this space and I can help ensure that all of your hard work is properly secured.

Fatima Alloo: And ultimately for me, this is what makes it super rewarding to be part of legal team here at TRI. Now, I’m sure all of you are just itching to know, what does my day to day role look like as a lawyer at TRI? Fear not. I have put together three words to describe what I do here, and my team does here. Pioneer, partner and protect. First as a lawyer at TRI, we get to pioneer and all of you have heard Carrie’s presentation, all of the awesome work that we’re doing in the automated vehicle space. And we all have some sense in terms of how automated vehicles are going to disrupt the automotive industry. But the big question on the legal side of the equation is what should the laws and regulations that govern automated driving look like?

Fatima Alloo: What standards should manufacturers that are making automated vehicles adhere to? So, imagine with me for a moment that you are in an automated vehicle and it’s taking you to your destination, but for some reason you need to stop abruptly. Where is the stop button? What does it look like? What color is it? What shape is it, where is it located? And is it located in the same place across vehicles made by different car manufacturers? These all might seem like trivial questions, but it’s important to build a consensus with commercial players in the space for the industry to flourish. Now, we’re super lucky here at TRI because we’re part of Toyota and one of the biggest automobile makers in the world.

Fatima Alloo: And because Toyota is also part of the automated vehicle space, we actually get a seat at the table in determining how these laws are developed. And as a lawyer, consensus building, negotiation, drafting laws and regulations and standards, those are right in the wheelhouse of my skillset and our skillset. But what we need to do is hear and understand from our engineers on what they think the solutions to be to issues like this. And once we do hear from them, we can actually advocate on their behalf. The second thing that we get to do is partner kind of like C3PO and R2D2. Anyway, so as you’re on your way to bringing, onto building groundbreaking technologies, you’re going to need some support. And while we have many brilliant minds here at TRI, many of whom you’ve heard from and will hear from, no company can do this alone.

Fatima Alloo: So you might need to find support outside of our company. Maybe you want to partner with a university or a consultant or a startup that’s developing a component that you just need to have to make your solution come to life. Our job then becomes to make that partnership happen, support the development of your tech, and then to think through about whether this project is really in the business’s best interest. So let’s say, for example, you’ve decided to partner with one of our universities and, as Carrie mentioned, we partner with so many universities, and Ha-Kyung. And so let’s say one thing you might want to think through is, what does each player want to get out of that deal?

Fatima Alloo: The university might want to ensure that they own the IP that’s generated in a joint collaboration. TRI might then want to ensure that we have licenses to that jointly developed technology in case we want to commercialize the tech down the line. The point is, that as lawyers, we often have to think through these situations and then memorialize these agreements in writing. The last thing that we do is protect. Now while you’re engaging with different partners, one big question for TRI is how do we make sure that we’re protected in the process? So I often, am asking several questions, basically. For example, does the partner have access to our systems, data, or code?

Fatima Alloo: Has a partner agreed to be liable if they fail to protect our systems, data, or code? And, sometimes it’s more along the lines of are their cybersecurity standards strong enough to actually guard our code? Occasionally I ask the question of–sometimes the questions are very different in, might be something closer to, as a TRI employee, you think copyrighted images that they don’t have a license for when giving a presentation before hundreds of people. The point is that because we’re in a very hot space, that being self-driving car research and robotics for mobility, we’re subject to a lot of both malicious and inadvertent threats that could cause a company like ours to lose their competitive edge.

Fatima Alloo: And for you Black Panther fans out there, I like to think of our role as protecting the secrets of Wakanda. So, now that you’d have a better idea of what it is that I do here at TRI, and what a lawyer does more generally at a tech company in terms of pioneering, partnering, and protecting, I hope that the next time you have a project you might be the one to get legal involved, and see how we can help you get to wherever you’re going. Thank you.

Rita: Thank you, Fatima. All right. With that, we’re going to welcome Steffi Paepcke who is a Senior UX Designer on our robotics team to the stage.

Steffi Paepcke: All right. Am I on? Can you hear me?

Audience Member: Yes.

Steffi Paepcke speaking

Senior UX Designer of Robotics Steffi Paepcke gives a talk on “Designing Robots to Serve an Aging Population” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Steffi Paepcke: Yes. Okay, great. Cool. Hi everyone. My name is Steffi Paepcke. I’m a Senior UX Designer here. I work on the robotic side of the world and I don’t want to leave you hanging. I’m going to tell you how I got here as well. I started by studying psychology at UC Santa Cruz and after that I kind of didn’t really know what to do. I thought about being a therapist. That had been sort of my goal for a long time. And I wound up at Willow Garage as a research assistant.

Audience Member: Oh.

Steffi Paepcke: Oh, someone’s heard of Willow?

Audience Member: Yes.

Steffi Paepcke: Yeah, cool. Willow Garage, for those of you who don’t know, it was a now defunct privately funded research company. We did all kinds of really exciting work. The PR2 robot, we made turtle bots. We made what now is beam telepresence robots and we did a lot of the maintenance, the primary maintenance on ROS robot operating system and it was at Willow Garage, it was really a pivotal position for me is where I realized that I can combine my interest in humans and how they think and feel and interact with other people and objects. I could combine that with technology and in this case robotics.

Steffi Paepcke: And that was a really big sort of turning point for me where I kind of found robotics is the field that I wanted to work in. I realized also that I needed more training. So I went to Carnegie Mellon and received a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction. And then after that I came back to the Bay Area where I grew up and co-founded Open Source Robotics Foundation, which is now just called Open Robotics. And they are now the primary maintainers of ROS and Gazebo, which is a physics-based robot simulator. One of the biggest projects OSRF worked on was the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Steffi Paepcke: Which was a little while ago now, but it was a very impressive program put on by DARPA where teams competed in search and rescue tasks with an Atlas humanoid robot or with a robot that they had built themselves. And the program manager of that project was Gill Pratt, who is the TRI CEO now. So I ended up here and have been working on really exciting robots since arriving about three years ago. So I’m part of the UX team. We have user experience researchers, designers and industrial designers. And our main goal is to help TRI figure out what sorts of robotic capabilities to make to improve the quality of life for an aging population.

Steffi Paepcke: So you’ve probably heard that the population is aging relatively quickly in the world right now, approximately 8% of the population is 65 and older. By 2050, that’s supposed to double to 16%. And in Japan, this problem is the most pressing. That’s where the population is aging the fastest. Currently about a quarter of the population in Japan is 65 and older. And by 2050, that number is supposed to be one third. If you think about it, that is staggering, it’s one out of three people will be 65 and older in Japan in 2050. So it’s critical that we find solutions also to the shortage, the caregiver shortage.

Steffi Paepcke: The goal is to make robotic capabilities that can support older adults aging in place longer, taking care of tasks they don’t want to do anymore or can no longer perform. And also alleviating some of the sort of day to day tasks that caregivers need to take care of. So alleviating the chore-like tasks so that they can focus on the human to human interactions that really make caregiving what it is. So that’s our main goal as a UX team here and user experience as a field has become a lot more prevalent in tech companies over the years. It took a little while for companies to really understand that UX was a critical part of creating a successful product.

Steffi Paepcke: And it’s been similarly slow now with robotics as more and more robotics companies crop up. Some of them have user experience teams, a lot of them don’t. I think hardware is obviously very challenging and takes longer than software in terms of development process, but it’s really critical that we have UX in the workflow from the very beginning because you can spend a whole lot of time creating a hardware solution and then you get to the point where you realize you were solving the wrong problem or a problem that doesn’t even exist and then you’re really sort of in trouble.

Steffi Paepcke: So I’m going to walk you through some of the methodologies we use to combine user experience with robotics. What you probably have heard of is just interviews and focus groups. So we do those. Those are pretty standard in UX and we also do participatory design sessions, which is when you work with your target population, in our case, older adults, to come up with solutions together. So you’re not just doing the research and then going back to your office and coming up with the solution. You’re actually sitting down with an older adult and designing something together and co-creating it. Another really valuable methodology we use is called contextual inquiry, which is when you follow someone around and observe them doing a task that you want to learn more about without really interrupting, just sort of asking questions so that you understand the process.

Steffi Paepcke: And in our case we wanted to understand the grocery shopping process for older adults. So we followed them, we met them at their house, followed them in their car to the grocery store, did the whole loop around the store, came home, watched them bring the groceries in, put them away. And it was very illuminating. You can see on the bottom there’s one kitchen that we saw, which has pretty much no mess in it. It’s pretty sparse, a lot of cabinetry, really spacious. And then compared to the kitchen above, it was a very small little apartment with items stacked on the walls and the cabinets were very full.

Steffi Paepcke: So it’s important for us as designers to understand the workspace that our robots will be functioning in, but also very important for the engineers to see what sort of dynamic environment their robot needs to be successful in. You can also see the white cabinetry is pretty reflective, which can cause problems for certain sensors on robots. This is all really important information to bring back to the engineering teams and we try to bring at least one engineer with us when we do these visits so that it’s not just us sort of regurgitating what we saw, but really bringing them along for the ride. Another valuable insight we got was the image with the fridge.

Steffi Paepcke: So we opened the fridge and notice that the woman we were chatting with had kept all of her items at the very edge of the shelves. And when we asked her why that was, she said, “Oh yeah, I just can’t bend over and reach in.” And it’s not something that I would have asked about, “How far back do you put your items on the shelf?” But by being there and really observing it firsthand, we’re able to understand that, that’s one of the problems that comes up a lot. And that turned out to be a really big trend. Being able to stoop safely and without pain is something that is challenging for a lot of older adults, which is sort of common sense, but it helps to see this in the context of people’s lives over and over again. It really drives it home.

Steffi Paepcke: Finally, we do a lot of home walkthroughs, which are probably my favorite. We find people who are pretty open to sharing their lives, which not everyone is, but we meet them at their home and we go into every single room in their home and talk about the tasks that they do in their home, the challenges that they face and the goal there is to figure out if there are any things that we can create solutions for to help them. This again, is really good for context setting for us. There’s one, I apologize that it’s so small, but there’s a person, she wheeled an office chair onto her little patio and she weatherproofed it with plastic bags and whenever she needs to reach the hose that’s on the ground to water the plants, she sits on the chair, lowers herself down, reaches for the hose, raises herself back up and does it that way.

Steffi Paepcke: And that’s not ever something I would have thought to ask about. How do you reach the hose on the floor? But we, by being there with her, we got to witness the trouble she goes through, right? To do something as what I would consider simple as picking up a hose. It can be a real challenge for some people. She also is the owner of the closet next to her and she said that anything above about shoulder height she just pretty much consider as lost and she doesn’t ever expect to get to it again. Yeah. So you really learn about the challenges very viscerally that people face. And then finally, I really like the dishwasher down below.

Steffi Paepcke: This was another participant who doesn’t generate enough dirty dishes to need to run the dishwasher. So she stores her plastic bags and her plastic containers up there. And again, she doesn’t use the lower rack because that’s too far down. So we learned a lot about the importance of designing robots that can reach areas that older adults are not able to, or people with different physical abilities. And yeah, so these are some of the methodologies that I think are really critical in getting on the right track to making a robot that actually solves real problems. You can get pretty far with the interviews, but the data is just much richer when you can actually follow people around. And whenever I have a captive audience, I like to make a plug for getting more diverse folks into robotics. Robots are going to be everywhere in our homes, all over.

Steffi Paepcke: We’re going to be riding around in them. And if robots are not designed by a very diverse group of people, they’re not going to serve people equally and fairly. And we’re at the point now in robotics where it’s really starting to pick up. And if we don’t have diverse designers working on these challenges now, it’s going to take a really long time to catch up in the future. So there’s a niche for everyone really in robotics. You can come at it from the law perspective, mechanical software, electrical engineering, design, psychology. There’s so many ways that you can contribute to the robotics field. And if you’re thinking about making a change, I really encourage you to consider the robotics field and just getting involved. It’s a really exciting time to be a part of this industry, and that’s all I got.

Suzanne Basalla speaking

Chief of Staff Suzanne Basalla gives a talk on “2020 Olympics Showcases Mobility and Inclusion” at TRI Girl Geek Dinner.

Suzanne Basalla: Good evening everybody. I’m Suzanne Basalla. I’m Chief of Staff here at TRI and I’m going to talk to you about mobility and inclusion and really talk about inclusion from two different lenses. Like the speakers before me, I want to tell you a little bit about my path to TRI, which is a little bit different. I did actually take a fair number of STEM courses when I was in college, but I majored in Asian studies and the reason I had STEM courses is because I joined the Navy right out of college and spent 13 years as an intelligence officer in the Navy. And so I took the engineering and physics classes you need for that.

Suzanne Basalla: And the Navy is what gave me the opportunity to go to Japan. And what you’ll see about my career and what brought me to TRI is I’m very passionate about working with US and Japan, both countries, and bringing the best from both countries to solve problems and the issues that are super important to both of our countries, whether it’s our economy or our national security or issues like that. So the Navy, I was with the Navy in Japan for four years and I really fell in love with Japan. And more importantly, I found my passion, which was to really work at that intersection between the United States and Japan, and committed my career to alliance management, which is really focusing more on the national security side first of the relationship.

Suzanne Basalla: And so through my career I’ve had a chance to work between Japan–Tokyo and Washington, DC, mostly on the relationships. So I had a chance to work for brief time at the White House, worked at the department of defense where I was the Japan director working on our defense relationship. And then I also had a chance to serve as the Senior Advisor to our ambassador in Tokyo. And that was a really pivotal time in my life because I was in Japan on March 11th, 2011, which if you may remember, was the triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and the nuclear disaster and was part of the US government’s response on that.

Suzanne Basalla: But I actually then really realized that I wanted to get involved in the nonprofit side of… I’d gotten [inaudible] nonprofit in order to really help the people because fundamentally it’s the people of our two countries that make the relationship strong. So I spent five years as the COO, EVP of a nonprofit, the US-Japan Council. And the bulk of my work that I was doing was helping the next generation for US-Japan relations, particularly a lot of work on women and girls empowerment, which was really exciting for me. Now working in US-Japan relations, Toyota… I, of course, got to know Toyota. Toyota is a global brand.

Suzanne Basalla: If you’re in Japan, Toyota is such a dominant company. There’s even the headquarters is in Toyota City, which gives you a sense of how important Toyota isto Japan. It’s also really important the United States. We have plants in 10 states in this country and many, many jobs are created through Toyota. So when I was invited to come and work at Toyota, at TRI, for me it was a huge opportunity to continue to my work on really solving the most important problems before our countries working in an exciting space of AI and thinking about the important economic and social issues from robotics and automated driving that you heard about earlier tonight.

Suzanne Basalla: So I am Chief of Staff and a lot of people ask me, “What is Chief of Staff?” And I usually tell them that means I’m a Jack of all trades. But today I’m excited to say I’m a Jill of all trades. And so I want to talk to you about two areas that I get to focus on, what my job is to really follow the priorities and strategic issues that are important to my CEO. And the two I want to talk to you about, one is the Olympics. So I hope you all know that the Olympics going to be Tokyo next summer, Tokyo 2020, and Tokyo plans for that to be the most innovative Olympics in the history of the Olympics. You may or may not know that Toyota is the most… The largest sponsor of the Olympics and Paralympics and Special Olympics in history.

Suzanne Basalla: And we’re going to be sponsoring the Olympics all the ways to at least 2024, the Paris Olympics. Here at TRI we’re really privileged because we’re working on a lot of the technology that’s going to be shown in Toyota’s demonstrations at the Olympics. So the bulk of the driving team and much of the robotics team and others in the ops and PR part of TRI are focused on getting ready for Toyota’s presence at the Olympics next year, which is really exciting. My job as Chief of Staff includes kind of helping the leadership team organize across the company so that we are prepared and doing what Toyota needs. And then kind of my sweet spot is engaging with the external stakeholders, especially in Toyota.

Suzanne Basalla: But I also get to work with the Olympic committee. I get to work with other companies that are sponsors, such as Visa or Intel. I also get to work with the broadcasters, and really cool, as occasionally I get to interact with some of the athletes and the Paralympians and they’re super inspiring. Toyota is sponsoring the Olympics because it wants to transform ourselves as a company into a mobility company. And what I’ve been really proud of is, through my work, seeing how much Toyota is using its sponsorship to lift the Paralympics and really focusing on the topic of mobility for all, which aligns with the things you’ve already heard tonight, and accessibility and inclusion.

Suzanne Basalla: The second area that I get to work on is be a champion for diversity and inclusion in the company, which is very important to our CEO. And you heard from Kelly who… Our Executive Vice President. Diversity and inclusion is important throughout the company. It’s not my job to do it. I’m the champion for it within the company, but it’s the responsibility of all the leaders. And you saw that all of our leaders from… Who are here in the headquarters today are here showing their support and that is very typical of the company. But I have the privilege of being the champion for diversity and inclusion in the company, which means I get to be in a lot of different conversations and continue to help us to think about how we can do better and do more.

Suzanne Basalla: Because we want to create as inclusive environment as possible here to attract diversity and get the most out of diversity that’s here. People call employee resource groups different things at different companies. But we at TRI have started three employee resource groups and these are initiated by employees. We’re still a pretty new company. I don’t know if that actually came across in the speeches yet, but we’re pretty new company. We’ve only started our ERG program just a little over a year ago and we’re really excited that we have three employee resource groups already up and running. One is Women and Allies. Yeah. One is LGBTQ, sorry. Plus.

Suzanne Basalla: And then one is Parents, which is our newest ERG and were just started and it’s focusing right now mostly on new parents or parents, young children, but bringing together people who are facing issues as working parents. And so we call these resource groups for a couple of reasons. First of all, they’re a resource for the members of the affinity group that belonged to it. It’s a place for them to get together and share their concerns and work together to find creative ways to address those concerns. They’re also a resource to the TRI leadership, to the CEO and the leadership team because it gives us a way to hear about what are the issues that are important to those communities and they are a resource for the company.

Suzanne Basalla: Because they advance a caring community in a respectful environment in the company, which aligned with the values that Kelly talked about earlier. So hopefully you’ve had a chance to learn about some of the ERGs. If not, ask us more questions. We love to talk about the activities in the ERGs but of course, part of the emphasis we place on diversity is why we’re so pleased to be hosting Girl Geek X tonight. We are so grateful that you’re here tonight. So I want to thank you. I’m going to turn it over, I think to Rita for some final remarks, but thank you very much.

Rita Yau: Thank you. Did all of you guys have a good time tonight? Yeah. Awesome. We again, we are so thankful for Girl Geek. Thank you guys for coming tonight.

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Podcast Highlights: 15 Helpful Insights on Managing Up

In continuing our Podcast Highlights mini series, this week, we’re sharing 19 helpful insights from the Girl Geek X podcast that will help you manage your career by “managing up!”

If you haven’t already subscribed to the Girl Geek X podcast, head on over to iTunesSpotifyStitcher, or Google Play and get ready to start binge listening! 

This week, Girl Geek X Co-Founder & CTO Sukrutha Bhadouria is breaking out quotes and insights from her favorite release on the Girl Geek X Podcast — Episode 15: Managing Up & Working with Your Manager.

Why this topic matters, and why it’s her favorite episode:

Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

“I think managing up is so hard that no one really taught me, or it didn’t even come to my attention that I needed to focus on it until at least five or six years into my career. It’s really hard to know what’s expected of you and how you’re being evaluated if you don’t know how to manage up. I think the best way is to get on the same page and understand a bit more about what your manager wants to see, what their goals are and how you can help them reach their goals. We don’t talk about this enough, and learning how to manage up earlier could help so many of us move ahead faster.”

15 Helpful Insights on How to “Manage Up”

15. Make your manager look good.

“If you want to be a better employee, think about ‘What is my manager measured on, what would make them look good to their boss?’ What are the metrics, what are the things that they really care about? Then when you’re prioritizing your time, think about your decisions in the context of ‘How can I get my manager promoted?’ Because if you can get your manager promoted, you make everybody look good.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

14. Ask questions.

“Have direct conversations. Do not guess. Do not try to guess. For example, I was hired for a job and two weeks in, my boss was fired. My brand new boss was fired. He and a few other people who were brand new to the company and brand new to the team – we were opening a San Francisco office – they were all I had to turn to.

We had a trip planned to go to New York, and my colleague who’d only been there a few months longer, was like, ‘Well, I don’t know if we should go.’ And I was like, ‘I’m going, and I’m going to sit down with the CEO while I’m in New York and I’m going to ask him, ‘What were your expectations for my role? What were the goals? What are the things I could do in the first 90 days?’ Because I don’t have a manager anymore and I need to know.’ It was a brand new role.

If I hadn’t asked questions, I would have worked on the wrong things. I wouldn’t have prioritized my time in a way that would have allowed me to meet expectations.

And my colleague’s first response was this idea that you shouldn’t go meet, you shouldn’t go ask, and you should just sort of sit back and wait to see what happens. I’m so glad that wasn’t my first instinct and that I went in and had the conversation.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

“I’ve asked questions like, ‘What is the thing that’s worrying you the most, work-wise? Or what is your biggest goal? What do you want your org to be known for?’ And through that, I get a sense of where I can insert myself and make my manager successful. That is the main thing. When you’re managing up, you want to make your manager a success in their job by basically managing them.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

13. Be vulnerable.

Sandhya Hegde speaking
Sandhya Hegde, EVP of Marketing at Amplitude

“You have to be vulnerable. You have to say stuff like, “Hey, I care about how you feel about me,” which is a vulnerable place to be. When I worked up the courage to say it, it made a huge difference. Because you are vulnerable, the other person starts being more vulnerable. So yeah, if you feel like you’re working with someone who’s not opening up, honestly the best thing to do is just be vulnerable with them and create that space for them to reciprocate.” —Sandhya Hegde, EVP of Marketing at Amplitude

12. Learn your manager’s working style.

“Try to understand your manager’s style. Do they like going for walks in their one-on-ones or do they prefer it to be a coffee? Or do they prefer to be in a conference room? Trying to understand more about their working style will help you get on the same page. It will break the ice, and then you can get to the real stuff.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

Angie Chang, CEO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
Angie Chang, CEO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X

“Managing up is about the willingness to do a little bit of work and ask more questions instead of just being like, ‘Well, my manager is not giving me what I want and I’m just going to be resentful.’ Ask more questions to figure out what the working relationship is going to be with this type of person. I’m sure there are professional tests that will then name this personality and give you hints on how to best interact with this type of person that you can investigate.” —Angie Chang, Co-Founder & CEO at Girl Geek X

11. There’s an app for that!

“There’s a piece of software if you’re using Gmail for work called Crystal Knows – it’ll tell you how to best communicate with anyone through email. If you were to read mine, it would be like, ‘Use short, concise sentences. Make your point quickly. Don’t use a bunch of flowery language.’ That sort of thing. And I thought it was pretty accurate, but it’s super interesting. I think you can get an initial thing for free and then you have to pay, but it’s pretty amazing. Even if you just run it on your own inbox to see, ‘Oh yeah, that is how I like to get emails.’” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

10. Talk to your manager’s past reports.

“When I get a new manager or assigned to someone new or move to a new org, I talk to people who reported to them for a long time. I try to get a sense of what it’s like to report to them and what their managing style is. Just so that I’m better prepared. It’s helped me so much to know what kind of things they focus on from someone else’s perspective.

I personally don’t think anyone is a perfect manager. A lot of how good of a manager someone is to you is within your control. I have had some good managers in the recent past, but I’ve also seen other people struggle to report to them. Taking things into my own hands and really, really focusing on the relationship and managing up has helped tremendously. I did my homework to get a sense of what it’s like to report to them, what they like and what they don’t like. And I figured out how to work around their dislikes. I haven’t had a situation in a really long time where things just aren’t working, because I invest a lot very early in the relationship.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

“If you’re reaching out to a new manager’s former team members, you just have to approach it from a positive angle. Like, Hey, I’m just trying to do really great. If you could give me three pieces of advice on how to be successful in working with him, what would you say?” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

9. Know when to move on.

Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

“There are people that are just not people that you enjoy working with, and that’s managers or colleagues or subordinates and at some point, there’s only so much you can do to try to smooth that over. Then you just either take that person at face value and accept that there are just times where things aren’t gonna work, or you go somewhere else.

Sometimes you’ll have a manager and you just know that they are never going to lift you up. They are never going to put you center stage. They are always going to keep you in their shadow. I’ve had those, and you have to move on. You absolutely have to move on. You cannot let someone steal your spotlight. Not on your career path.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

8. Ask for a performance review.

Sandy Liao speaking
Sandy Liao, Head of Talent, Culture & People Operations at HomeLight.

“Incorporating performance data is crucial to the business, as well as your own career growth. If your manager has not spoken with you for the past quarter or past six months about how you’re doing from a performance standpoint, it’s super important to make that calendar invite and make them have that conversation.

Especially working in a startup, these things kind of get out of hand when we’re trying to do like 100 things at once. But before any of us start analyzing a new opportunity, it is just necessary to have conversations with people that are mentoring you and that are working with you directly.” Sandy Liao, Head of Talent, Culture & People Operations at HomeLight

7. Be objective & use data when navigating a challenging relationship.

“Using data is a great way to ask for help and make progress with your manager. It’s like, ‘Okay, we set these goals and I didn’t meet two of them, so here’s what I need to meet the rest.’ If you’re able to kind of frame these conversations with your manager objectively, then that’s one way to get help.

Take it back to an objective place of like, ‘We’re here to do this job. These are the goals along those lines and can you just tell me the extent to whether or not I’m fulfilling that?’ I think being able to bring the conversation back to that is an effective way to manage a more challenging relationship.” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

6. Be specific when asking for help.

“Probably the hardest part of this when you’re earlier in your career is that you may not know exactly what you need to hit your goals. It’s hard to articulate to your manager, this is exactly why. ‘If I had XYZ, then I feel like ABC would…’ Right?

I think it can be dangerous if you’re like, ‘Oh well if I had this one piece of software, I could do this better. Or if I had an extra person, I could do this better.’ Those are hard cases to make to your manager, particularly if there’s an impression that you’re not hitting your goals already.

You want to be very specific on what it is that you’re asking for and what you think the ROI will be. Because a fuzzy ROI is a hard argument to make to a manager to get additional resources.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

5. Take responsibility for your career growth.

Don’t think that your career growth is just fully your manager’s responsibility. It is just as much yours. And so if you don’t see those conversations coming up, you need to be bringing it up. 

As a manager, I’m super excited and motivated to help people who seem like they want to be helped and who are motivated as well. It’s really difficult to grow someone’s career when they’re just not as motivated to do it. And that’s fine too. Sometimes people want to just stay at their level. That’s totally cool. But if you really want to grow, you want to be bringing it up a lot with your manager. —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

4. Know who your manager is investing in.

“Your manager controls your advancement and your visibility within the company. So if it seems like your manager is investing in other people and not investing in you, rather than just being a manager who doesn’t really invest in anyone in their team, definitely consider whether this is the right place for you. Because a manager can have a huge impact on your career, and you don’t want to be begging for attention from someone who’s just never going to give it to you.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

3. Find a mentor.

Vidya Setlur
Vidya Setlur, Staff Research Scientist & Manager at Tableau Software

“Some of the best mentors that I’ve come across have been people who were my managers in the past, maybe at a different company or in a different line whom I have respected and trusted, but because they are not my manager anymore there is a different type of relationship where it can be more mentoring as opposed to managing.

There’s a lovely inflection there that happens. So kind of seek out into your network and find those people that you’ve worked closely with, or that managed you — directly or indirectly. See if they can help mentor you in your next path or next effort.” —Vidya Setlur, Staff Research Scientist & Manager at Tableau Software

2. Maintain relationships with past managers.

“I keep really strong relationships with managers… and they’re people that I go back to when I’m looking for a new job. Not necessarily for them to hire me, but they know me so well, and when I’m trying to figure out what I’m good at, what I like doing, and what direction might I go in, their input is helpful.

A past manager is someone who knows you really well to be able to kind of give their two cents, even if they haven’t been working with you recently.

I mean, not all of your managers are people that you want to necessarily keep taking advice from, but I think I’ve been really fortunate that most of my previous managers are people that I want to reach out to. I still go back and can be like, ‘I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, help me!’ And they do.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

1. Remember that your manager is human.

Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X
Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

“Knowing how awkward the transition into management can be for people is definitely something to keep in mind when you’re working with your manager. A lot of people are put into this role without getting any kind of specific training or support on what it means to be a manager. Keeping that in mind when you’re interacting with your managers or setting expectations for what that relationship should look like. Definitely focus on the work that you have to do to maintain that relationship and drive your career forward, and involve your manager in that.” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

Check out the full episode or podcast transcript for more great insights on managing up and managing your career, or subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more insightful content on topics that matter to women and allies.


About the Author

Amy Weicker - Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X

Amy Weicker is the Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X, and she has been helping launch & grow tech companies as a marketing leader and demand generation consultant for nearly 20 years. Amy previously ran marketing at SaaStr, where she helped scale the world’s largest community & conference for B2B SaaS Founders, Execs and VCs from $0 to $10M and over 200,000 global community members. She was also the first head of marketing at Sales Hacker, Inc. (acquired by Outreach) which helps connect B2B sales professionals with the tools, technology and education they need to excel in their careers.

Ritu Narayan, Founder of Zūm, Modern Ride Service for Children, Wins Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award!

Ritu Narayan - Founder & CEO of Zum

Selected from over 1,500 Entries, Zum’s Founder and CEO wins Gold Stevie® Award.

Ritu Narayan, founder and CEO of Zūm, a modern ride service for children, has been selected as the recipient of a Gold Stevie® Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in the Consumer Services Category. This news comes on the heels of the company’s recent expansion to six new states. Zūm now serves over 250 school districts and 4,000 schools across seven states.

The Stevie Awards for Women in Business honor women executives, entrepreneurs, employees, and the companies they run — worldwide.  The Stevie Awards have been hailed as the world’s premier business awards. More than 1,500 entries were submitted this year for consideration in more than 90 categories, including Executive of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year, Women Helping Women, and Women Run Workplace of the Year.

A former executive at Oracle, Yahoo! and eBay, Narayan founded Zūm when she couldn’t find safe and reliable rides for her own children without sacrificing her career.

41% of U.S. women say it’s hard to advance their careers due to childcare issues, and 10 million women have already left the workforce due to a lack of safe and reliable options.

Ritu’s mission was to create a seamless service that makes child transportation easier, safer and more transparent for families and schools.

“As both a female entrepreneur and a working mother, this recognition is very meaningful for me,” says Ritu Narayan, co-founder, and CEO of Zum. “What started as solving a problem for me and my family is now disrupting an entrenched but severely outdated transportation system built around a fleet of 500,000+ yellow buses nationally. We are helping both schools and working parents address the needs of today’s busy schedules and wider transportation needs.”

Under Ritu’s leadership, Zūm continues to fulfill its mission to be the leader in safe and reliable rides for kids, with 3X YoY growth. The company has also doubled its number of employees during the past year, with women now making up around 50% of the Zūm team.

Ritu has successfully raised over $70 million via traditional venture capital funding, including a $19 million Series B led by Spark Capital in 2018, and most recently, a $40 million Series C led by BMW i Ventures with participation from Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Volvo Cars Tech Fund.

In a market with a lot of untapped opportunity, Zūm is poised for exponential growth and might just be poised to become the next woman-led Unicorn startup! Move over, Uber.

About Zūm
Zūm solves transportation challenges facing schools and families by providing a modern ride service for children. The use of Zum’s technology significantly reduces school overhead and commute times by providing the right vehicle for every trip while also providing real-time tracking of rides so parents know where their student is at all times. Zum drivers have clean driving records, several years of childcare experience and earn the highest hourly rate in the industry. Zum, founded in 2015, and based in Silicon Valley, is backed by notable investors including Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, and BMW iVentures. www.ridezum.com 

About the Stevie Awards
Stevie Awards are conferred in seven programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards®, The International Business Awards®, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 nominations each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at www.StevieAwards.com.


Mode Girl Geek Dinner & Lightning Talks: “Limitless” (Video + Transcript)

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

Meeting people is fun and easy at Mode Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco.

Meeting fellow girl geeks is fun and easy at Mode Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco’s Design District.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Transcript of Mode Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Heather Rivers: Oh my gosh, there are so many of you here. This is very exciting. Welcome to our very first Girl Geek Dinner, I am Heather. I am Mode’s CTO. Let’s see if we can get the technology to work. Yup, there’s me. Yeah. When I started at Mode, I didn’t have gray hair. This is dyed so long ago. So yeah, really, really excited to be hosting. You may have noticed that the theme for tonight is limitless. That can mean a lot of different things in different contexts.

Heather Rivers: Let’s just do a quick poll, why do you think we chose limitless? This is room of self-selected geeks. I am also a geek. Who here thought we meant the SQL LIMIT keyword. Anyone? Okay, not too many. Yeah, we got some Mode employees, definitely. Okay, raise your hand if you thought we meant the Bradley Cooper media franchise? Yup, okay. Yes, you’re all correct. We meant both of those. We also meant it in a third way.

Heather Rivers: So in 2008, at the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama famously said, “The only limit to the height of your achievement is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.” You’re about to see seven incredible women who fully embody this quote every day. I work with them, so I can say that.

Heather Rivers: Nobody joins a startup because it’s easy. Some startup people in the audience? Yeah. Any of you join startups because it was easy? No? Cool. Yeah, me either. Or obvious, or because success is guaranteed? No, not seeing a lot of yeses there. So, you join a startup because your dreams are high and because you’re willing to work for them. That’s what all of… Oh, it’s lo-res, sorry. Enhance. Enhance. No, enhance. Okay. Technology.

Heather Rivers: That’s what all of these women have done, along with the rest of the team day by day. They took a chance on the startup, they dreamed big, they worked hard, and as a result, they’ve set both themselves and this company on an incredible growth trajectory.

Heather Rivers: So in the six years that I’ve been in Mode, again, the hair. I’ve seen it go from a pre-seed proof of concept, in a super crowded market, by the way, to a simple but promising little app with a few customers, to a real product with traction and revenue, to a leader among data science platforms.

Heather Rivers: And it’s been really exciting to watch us win power users among data scientists and analysts, but we’re not done. There’s still so much more we can do. We don’t have to limit ourselves to just serving data science teams.

Heather Rivers: And that’s why just a couple weeks ago, we launched the latest step change in Mode’s trajectory. We call it Helix. So Helix is an instant responsive data engine that lets not just data scientists, but anyone, run analysis on huge data stats, up to 10 gigabytes at a time. All in the browser, and all without writing a single line of code.

Heather Rivers: Helix lets you explore your data without limits, SQL or otherwise. And I can’t be 100% sure, but I’m pretty sure that’s what Michelle Obama was talking about in her talk. Don’t try to look that up, that’s not verified.

Heather Rivers: So, in one way or another, everyone you’re about to hear from played a huge part in building, launching, and supporting Helix. So let’s give them a huge round of applause.

Kaitlin Hart speaking

Senior Enterprise Account Executive Kaitlin Hart gives a talk on “Sales is Life, The Rest is Just Details” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Kaitlin Hart: I’m super excited to be here, this is my first Girl Geek. I’d like to kick this off with a really quick question. Who here is in sales, can you raise your hands? Okay. All right. You saw the topic title there, I see that.

Kaitlin Hart: I want to start by exploring why I believe everyone in this room should raise their hands, but first I want to start with a little confession. I’ve been field testing this talk for years, usually in ride shares, as weird as that might sound, but it happened just yesterday. So it’s still very relevant.

Kaitlin Hart: And it happens when people ask, “What do you do?” And I tell them I’m in sales. What happens next is this crash between perception and reality that I get to explore for whatever the duration of the ride might be. Because culturally, we perceive sales to look like this. Or maybe this.

Kaitlin Hart: And we associate salespeople with the traits of being aggressive, competitive, maybe selfish and untrustworthy. And apparently, as men with slicked back hair.

Kaitlin Hart: So while it’s nice to know I’m not any of those things, it’s kind of sad for me to hear because none of these things reflect what I love about sales. In reality, sales to me is much more like this. Two strangers trying to devise a plan. A parent listening to their child’s problems. Or two robots trying to form a relationship.

Kaitlin Hart: I know exactly what you’re thinking right now. These looks like everyday interactions, except the robot part, bummer. And you’re absolutely right. There’s a ton of research on how sales and life are intertwined. Daniel Pink is one of those folks, you don’t have to take my word for it. He wrote a book on it, and he said, “If you spend time persuading, influencing, or convincing others, you’re in sales.”

Kaitlin Hart: So, regardless of what business unit you’re in, you might be a PM, you might be in Dev, you might be in marketing, doesn’t matter. Because about half of your job is still spent on sales related activities.

Kaitlin Hart: So, are you reconsidering yet keeping your hand up? The point here is that sales is just life. You don’t need a special degree. We don’t need to learn any special language. And forget about it being your job title, it doesn’t even need to be in your job description. That’s how ingrained it is into your everyday life.

Kaitlin Hart: Basically, you’re all in sales, and now hopefully you know it, congrats. Comp checks are going to be at the end, [inaudible]. But we’re not going to end there. Because the details are also really important. And what really separates us is how we spend our time and focus. I spend my time focusing on developing interactions and trying to make them more effective. You probably spend your time on something else. And maybe, until one slide ago, you didn’t even know you were in sales. So that’s okay, I’ll give you a pass.

Kaitlin Hart: In the meantime, I’d like to help you get up to speed by sharing some specific skills, aka details, that we know lead to success and growth over time. And I’m not just saying this, we have data to back it up. It’s called revenue. So let’s just dive in.

Kaitlin Hart: The first one is being curious, and this one’s super close to my heart because I was born curious. Over time when I started my career, I realized this was much more of a skill than it was a trait. Because when you approach conversations with a genuine curiosity, people feel that. And when you learn, or when you ask questions that are based on understanding them, and then you listen to their responses instead of thinking about your responses, there’s this feeling of trust that’s built in your conversations.

Kaitlin Hart: And then to take it a step further, you’re going to replace judgment with curiosity wherever possible, and you’re going to avoid assumptions by, again, being curious instead of diving into your assumptions. And this is both for your career and your personal lives. Knowing nothing about someone, this is how you build a relationship rooted in respect right out of the gate. If I don’t know you, but I ask you questions that are thoughtful, and I ask and I listen to understand as opposed to respond, that’s the start to a very fruitful relationship. And then you practice this over time and you see as it grows in other areas of your life.

Kaitlin Hart: Another thing people in sales love, plans. We have account plans, territory plans, comp plans. Name it, we probably have a plan for it. But what we know is that there’s no such thing as a perfect plan. So instead, I like to take the approach of being prepared. Because when you think of being prepared, you can think of it as an outline as opposed to a filled out plan to perfection.

Kaitlin Hart: So, as you outline what it is that you want to achieve and you think about your desired outcomes, think about the how. And then you adjust by collaborating with others, being flexible to changes as they might come, and over time you learn. It’s definitely okay to fail here. That’s part of the learning process. And over time, you’ll naturally learn what leads to more successful plans and you’ll be able to grow from there.

Kaitlin Hart: And then third, we have storytelling. Anyone here read Sapiens? Or listened to the audiobook, that counts. Okay, cool. So basically, Yuval says that stories are the reasons humans rule the world. And he even says that society was built by stories. So look at politics, religion, societal norms. And so without stories, we’d be living in a very different world today.

Kaitlin Hart: But the reason stories are powerful is because they tap into emotion or imagination. Data and facts simply can’t do that. But you don’t have to take my word for it, I have a couple examples for you.

Kaitlin Hart: Here’s an ad that uses facts. Okay, this is a shoe that is breathable and supportive. How does it make you feel? Let’s compare. Here’s an ad that uses a story. Note that there’s no features, there’s not even a product clearly defined here. They’re 100% relying on storytelling and the feeling this imagery plus words are making you feel.

Kaitlin Hart: Maya Angelou actually said it best. It’s not about what you feel, I think I’m missing a slide here, that’s okay. It’s not about what people say that you remember, you remember what people make you feel. And when you think about telling a story, then you should think about how it is that you want to make someone feel. Because there’s a lot of power there.

Kaitlin Hart: And so in order to do that, you just apply this really simple framework. Know your audience, have a clear point, and use either emotion or imagination to deliver a why that connects with the audience. Then you practice. And then you field test, I hear ride shares are great for that. And over time, you’ll discover how to deliver your own powerful stories.

Kaitlin Hart: Ultimately, my hope is that you adopt curiosity, preparedness, and storytelling, and then you develop them over time, both separately and together, to unearth your own limitless opportunities. And selfishly, maybe next time when someone asks if you’re in sales, you’ll raise your hands. Thank you.

Heather Rivers: All right, next up we have Senior Product Designer Sam Novak.

Sam Novak speaking

Senior Product Designer Sam Novak gives a talk on “R, Rice Chex, and Re-usable Frameworks” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Sam Novak: Hi everyone. I’m excited to be here today. I’m going to be talking to you about rice Chex, R, and reusable design frameworks. Here’s a photo of me with lots of pixels, but to really set the stage for this talk, let’s go with something a bit more historically relevant. There we go. Let me paint the scene. But be warned, you might need to prepare yourselves for a bit of nostalgia.

Sam Novak: The year is 1996. Pokemon has just been introduced to the world. Independence Day is the largest grossing film. The Macarena is a song and dance beloved by all. And I am almost seven years old. My favorite food is, and I quote, “white rice with butter.” But when I’m not eating buttery carbs, you can find me playing video games on my Windows 95. But alas, this story is not about me. This story is about cereal. Chex cereal.

Sam Novak: In fact, I was merely one of about six million children to fall in love with one of the most ingenious computer game strategies in all of history. That’s right, I’m talking about Chex Quest. For those not familiar, Chex Quest was the largest single mass replication of a CD-Rom ever. 6,000,000 free video games delivered as prizes in boxes of Chex cereal. How did they do it?

Sam Novak: The team was six people. The budget, $500K. The deadline, six months. They were tasked with the objective of creating an educational video game with the ultimate goal of reinvigorating the Chex cereal brand. So they set off to invent a video game from the ground up, to teach users about Chex cereal that kids would want to play. In six months, no big deal.

Sam Novak: The original game concept involved navigating around a cornfield with a flashlight, looking for ghosts. But despite their efforts, the game was just not landing with children. Until leadership came to the team and said, “Look, you’ve got 24 hours to come up with a better idea.” Enter Doom. For context, Doom is a first person shooter game that had been released three years prior. The style of gameplay was really landing with kids, and even today it is still often cited as one of the greatest video games in history.

Sam Novak: Now you may have heard this phrase. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Well, the team did just that. They relicensed the Doom engine to build Chex Quest. Now, the Doom team was pumped. They actually thought this was a really creative use of the engine. And the Chex team was happy. It was Doom with a facelift. The gameplay was largely unchanged, and this decision sped up the decision making process tremendously. They were now able to focus on creative ways to make the game nonviolent by redesigning the weapons, and by having the main character, yes a piece of Chex cereal, save the world by sending aliens back to their home planet.

Sam Novak: Everything started to come together. Finally it was time to release it to the world. All six million copies sold out in 6 weeks. Chex cereal sales went up 248%. It received major awards for advertising effectiveness and promotional achievements, and despite a bit of initial heat from video game critics, it developed this huge cult following really quickly. All in all, the project was a hit.

Sam Novak: The thing I love about this story is that the team had no pride or fear around leveraging existing technology. And reusing a style of gameplay that was already resonating with children. And as a result, they ended up creating something pretty inventive and magical. By applying this huge limitation, the results became that much more limitless. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Sam Novak: But what does any of this have to do with modern product design? Well, there seems to be this never-ending debate in design that if you merely copy what others are doing around you, you will never truly innovate. And yet, here lies Chex Quest, one of the most innovative promotional strategies of the 90s. So how can we reconcile these points? How can we take this success story and apply it to modern software development?

Sam Novak: After all, relicensing a video game engine isn’t exactly the same thing as copying an interface, and stealing the user experience workflow. But what if it was? What if we weren’t afraid to get up here and talk about our justifications for stealing, when it led to great design schemes?

Sam Novak: So I’m going to use one more recent example from [inaudible]. The introduction of the [inaudible] notebook interface. I’ll justify stealing from two angles. First, you need to have the right intent. And second, you need a goal of building user trust. Are you ready?

Sam Novak: The timeline for the R project was three months, which was a super aggressive deadline. And the goal was to add support for R, a statistical programming language, in addition to Python while fitting in as many design improvements to the interface and experience as we could. Make no mistake though, this was a redesign of our notebooks. A redesign that would involve a fair amount of stealing.

Sam Novak: So my first justification for stealing is having the right intent. What do I mean by that? Well, you could have argued that our goal was to simply add support for R to our existing UI, but in reality RStudio in IDE was far more popular than writing R in a notebook interface among our user base. So in the same way the Chex team looked to Doom, we stepped back and asked ourselves, why do people love RStudio so much, and how can we recreate some of that passion in Mode? So we asked. Not what features do you like, but what makes RStudio a great experience for you? We documented ideas that were resonating and time and time again, in-app documentation came up as being particularly valuable. So we built in-app documentation. It didn’t matter that our interface wasn’t the same as RStudio, or that they had built documentation first. Adding documentation was just a clear user improvement. Now, the intent here was not to check a box. It was to help both Python and R writers learn about having to leave the context of our notebooks.

Sam Novak: My second justification for stealing is building user trust. Predictability and dependability are two of the largest foundations of building trust with your user base. Now, our old UI resembled a notebook, yes. But it didn’t look or work much like Jupiter Notebooks, the most widely adopted notebook interface. And as a result, the switching costs and the cognitive load, the mental energy required to learn our notebooks increased. It felt different, it looked different, and that difference didn’t necessarily lead to immediate user trust.

Sam Novak: Now, imagine trying to get a ride at the airport in a hurry, switching over from Uber to Lyft and having to learn an entirely new paradigm. But you don’t need to do that, it’s extremely easy to jump between the two. The point I want to make here is that there are workflows and patterns out there that are understood, that are resonating with users. You should have really strong reasoning to completely reinvent something new. Significant change will almost always increase the cognitive overhead required for users to adapt a product.

Sam Novak: What I’m not saying here is that there are never good reasons for introducing newer, better ways of doing things because of course there are. What I’m talking about instead is avoiding an NIH, an acronym that stands for “not invented here” syndrome. Don’t be afraid to reference design patterns that are working well just because you yourself didn’t design them. So, we re-skinned our interface to make it more trustworthy. Better accessibility, better usability, and frankly a familiarity you should come to expect after using other notebook products.

Sam Novak: So in closing, I would challenge you to keep these two justifications in mind when you’re looking to steal. First, don’t just steal for the sake of stealing. Your aim is not to win a feature [inaudible] contest or skip the design process altogether. The goal is to recognize great ideas and innovate on them. Your intent should be to learn and improve. And second, know when to steal. Borrow when it helps to build user trust. By creating something that feels familiar, dependable, and predictable, you reduce both cognitive load and switching cost to your platform.

Sam Novak: And finally for the sake of innovation, I’d like to make one slight improvement to Pablo’s phrase. Good artists copy, great artists steal, but the best artists eat Chex cereal. Thanks, y’all.

Heather Rivers: I will immediately apply the lessons I just learned and steal the mic to introduce our People Operations Partner, Josee Smith.

Josee Smith speaking

People Operations Partner Josee Smith gives a talk on “How To Ruin Your Team’s Effectiveness in 5 Easy Steps: A Guide To Eliminating Psychological Safety” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Josee Smith: Hi everyone. My name is Josee. As Heather said, I’m the People Operations Partner. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about psychological safety. So here at Mode, I spend my days empowering our managers and building out people programs. In that work with my managers, I bet you all can guess the number one question that I get from our managers here at Mode. How can I make my team less effective?

Josee Smith: Okay, quick story. So, before coming to Mode, I worked as a paralegal at a law firm. And as part of this role as a paralegal, we would have performance reviews every six months with the HR manager. So she would go around to all the different attorneys and ask for feedback on our work, then we’d go over it during the performance review.

Josee Smith: So in the session, she proceeded to tell me about a mistake I had made about four months previously on a project I wasn’t working on anymore. I had some follow-up questions for her, such as was I still making the mistake, did other attorneys think I was making this mistake, or more specific details about the mistake. And she gave me nothing. She had no additional information. And I was really frustrated because here was this person sitting there telling me about this problem, this mistake I had made, but not giving me any information to adjust it or feel like I was being set up for success. I lost a lot of motivation in my work because I felt like they weren’t trying to help me be better at my job.

Josee Smith: So this brings us back to this question. But clearly, this is not what we’re going to talk about today, because no one wants to be less effective or less successful. But I can guarantee that there are companies out there doing things to make their teams less effective.

Josee Smith: So just some ideas of what this can look like. Asking employees for feedback, and then doing nothing with that feedback. Who here has experienced that before? Okay. Making big changes, and then not informing employees affected by those changes. Who’s experienced that? A few more people. My personal favorite. Inconsistent, vague feedback. Anyone, anyone? I think we should all, should all put our hands up. Because I think this is something, it’s a serious problem. A lot of us have gone through some of these things. I’ve experienced a lot of these things, including at the law firm, and I’m no longer at those companies because these actions not only make teams less effective and less successful, but they’ve been shown to drive away diverse talent.

Josee Smith: We’re a values driven team here at Mode, and underlying a lot of those values, there’s this idea of psychological safety. So, for those who haven’t taken a psych 101 course or if you don’t work in HR and think about this all the time. Psychological safety is created when team members feel comfortable taking risks and being vulnerable with each other. Here at Mode, we also see it being created when team members feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work. Of course, in a way that is respectful of their teammates.

Josee Smith: A climate of psychological safety makes it easier for people to speak up and share their different thoughts and perspectives. And not feeling comfortable sharing your thoughts, or not feeling safe in that environment to speak up, can be a powerful barrier to collaboration and good decision-making. Psychological safety is particularly important in regards to underrepresented groups as a lack of the safety can lead to the kind of undermining behaviors that can drive these groups out of tech, such as feeling excluded from meetings or social events, feeling talked over, or feeling like your thoughts and perspectives aren’t being heard.

Josee Smith: A lot of research has been done on this topic, including a 2015 report from Google summarizing their findings from a two year study of their highest performing teams. And so I’d like to go over some of those traits. At a high level, successful, psychologically safe teams foster curiosity. So just encouraging teammates to study topics outside the scope of their role.

Josee Smith: Taking and encouraging risks. Skydiving, that is me up there. It doesn’t always have to look like skydiving, of course. It can be starting a new project that might fail for the sake of learning from it.

Josee Smith: Promoting respect throughout your company and your team and being thoughtful about how teammates talk about each other. And it also looks like encouraging candid conversations, such as managers asking employees for feedback and then actually doing something with it.

Josee Smith: So, as I mentioned, we’re a values driven team here and I see psychological safety being created through some of those values. I’d like to focus in on one specific value that has been instrumental to my success here at Mode. Honest words, kindly delivered. So I’ve been at Mode for about two and a half years. In that time, I’ve had the same manager, her name is Bailey. Maybe you’ve talked to her tonight. And one of the many great… Obviously one of the many things I can count on from her is consistent, constructive feedback. I know that as soon as I make a mistake, but also as soon as I’m doing really well, she’ll tell me about it because it’s important for her, it’s important to her to make sure I understand how my performance is doing. And that makes me really happy. My performance is not a secret to be talked about every six months.

Josee Smith: Okay, so, you might be sitting there and thinking, “Well great, Josee, that’s excellent for Mode. So happy for you that you found this place, but how do I practice it? How can I go about creating a more psychologically safe team?” Don’t worry, I have some tips. Here at Mode, we make it a habit of appreciating when someone is vulnerable. It can be hard to express yourself and take risks, especially if you don’t know how it’ll be received. So, when someone speaks up in a meeting when they’re normally silent, or if someone says they’re nervous about a project or presentation and then they go in and then absolutely crush it, give them some kudos. Let them know that you appreciate their efforts and you’re proud of them for stepping outside of their comfort zone.

Josee Smith: So I learned this next tip from Heather, actually. She’s somewhere. Oh, there she is. Be mindful about meetings. Not everyone likes to speak up during meetings, nor should they have to. So pay attention during meetings to who is and isn’t speaking, what is and isn’t being said, and encourage your teammates to expand on their thoughts. Consider sending a follow-up message after the meeting summarizing your thoughts, and asking your teammates to chime in with their opinions. You might unearth a perspective that didn’t come through during the meeting, but could be vital to the task at hand.

Josee Smith: So in my experience, the number one way to create a psychologically safe environment is to change your mindset around failure. To some, failure is the worst possible outcome and something to be avoided at all costs. In a psychologically safe environment however, failure can instead be viewed as a stop on the road to success or as something to learn from. So, when considering how failure plays out in your own work, don’t view it as something to be avoid, just the worst thing that could possibly happen. But instead, think about how it can be something to learn from or how it can get you one step closer to the right solution to a tricky problem. Sometimes, you have to fail to get there.

Josee Smith: I encourage all of you to think about how psychological safety plays out in your current workplace. Do you think you could bring up the topic or these ideas with your manager? If you don’t feel like you could bring this up because you think your manager won’t listen, or you worry they’ll think you’re a low performer for caring about this subject, think about how, what kind of workplace you’re going to thrive in, and what role psychological safety will play for you, like I did at the law firm. And, if you feel like you’re not getting anywhere, that your manager isn’t listening, lucky for you, Mode is hiring. Thank you.

Heather Rivers: We have one last talk before a quick break, and this is from Back-end Engineering Manager Max Edmands.

Max Edmands speaking

Backend Engineering Manager Max Edmands gives a talk on “Constructing Feedback Loops for Fun and Profit” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Max Edmands: Hi. This is me, kind of. It’s a really pixelated version of me. This is an animation of someone pouring milk for a cappuccino, but this talk is not about being a barista. This is actually a talk about feedback loops. So, I want to start by breaking this term down a little bit.

Max Edmands: Feedback generally means conversations between humans. Someone noticing something about what you’re doing and giving you an opinion about it. Totally true, but feedback is actually more than that. Here is an example of extremely valuable feedback. As the barista’s pouring, they can see and feel the results of what they’re doing. Are they keeping the espresso crema intact? Is the milk the right ratio of liquid to foam? Is the pattern on the top of the milk glass the pattern they wanted to create? Are they filling the glass to top? Is everything the right temperature?

Max Edmands: All of this can be generalized into three attributes for great feedback. One, great feedback is high bandwidth. Lots of information coming in as quickly as possible. There’s the weight of the cup and the milk jug. There’s the temperature of the liquid in the cup. There’s the pattern that the milk is making on the surface. There’s the sound that it makes when it’s pouring. There’s so much there.

Max Edmands: Two, great feedback is relevant. There’s very little distraction here. Everything is signal and there’s no noise. You’re seeing it and you’re holding it, and all of the senses you’re getting are relevant.

Max Edmands: Three, great feedback is timely. It’s actually all in real time. The barista can change the angle of the cup and immediately they see a change in the surface area of the crema and the resulting change in the milk pattern they’re creating. So that’s feedback.

Max Edmands: Now let’s talk about feedback loops. A feedback loop is when you can take the feedback you got and try to use it again, or sorry, use it to try again. But this time, a little bit more effectively. And then use the results to get more information and then do it over and over again.

Max Edmands: So, there are a lot of great examples of feedback loops in video games. This animation is from a game called Celeste. Definitely recommend this game, by the way, it’s super great. Every feedback loop follows five steps.

Max Edmands: So step one, identify a goal. In this case, the goal is get the strawberry and bring it to the top left hand, right hand corner of the screen. Two, take concrete actions toward that goal. So jump on the block and ride it to the other end, and then try and jump off of it onto the platform and, oh no, falling into the spikes. So three, step three, evaluate your feedback. Ask yourself questions like, what did I learn just there? In this case, really clear information, if you jump in that way, then you’re probably going to fall onto the spikes and that’s bad.

Max Edmands: So then four, adjust your approach and try again. Maybe this time let’s try a dash jump when we’re in the air so we jump a little bit higher, so we can get onto that platform. And then see what we can do when we’re up there. And it works. Cool. Do it over and over again until we reach the goal. But now we’re on the platform, we have to figure out what to do next. So now, probably, we’re going to start a new feedback loop with a slightly different challenge. Great. So that’s games.

Max Edmands: But what about stuff you’re probably doing every day? Here’s an at-work example for those of you who write code. Test-driven development. So, here we have two sides of the screen. One of the sides has test results, and the other has the code. We’re adjusting the code in order to make the test suspect something that isn’t true yet. Then, we’re adjusting the code to make the test pass again, and then repeat. We know that something’s, I guess, needing to be fixed when stuff is showing up in red, and we know that stuff needs to be made to fail once stuff is showing up in green. It’s a very clear set of what do I do next.

Max Edmands: There’s another, smaller loop going on there too. As we’re editing the code, the editor is underlining certain things in red to let us know that the syntax isn’t quite right. The moment that we finish typing a line, or the moment we fix the syntax error, the red goes away to let us know it’s fixed. And then repeat.

Max Edmands: Working together with other humans is another great way to create an immediate feedback loop. I think this is a super cool photo. Two early programmers, collaborating on one of the world’s first computers. Early pair programming. I’m not 100% sure what they’re doing here. In my imagination, Esther is holding a specification that says what patch cords need to be connected to which ports. She’s reading the list out to Gloria, giving her time to connect or verify each one, and probably doing a visual check too just to make sure. Esther’s also got a bundle of extra cords ready for when they move onto the next one.

Max Edmands: So together, they’re able to keep track of where they are and move from one step to the next. They’re much more likely to notice and correct mistakes early. They’re somewhat less likely to get distracted, since they’re both concentrating on the same thing at the same time. And they’re way more likely to come up with new approaches or make adjustments to their process as they go.

Max Edmands: Which brings me back to conversational feedback. Retrospectives, one on ones, coffee walks. Words are an incredible way to fit lots of information into a really small space. Setting up regular places to have more of those conversations between either teams or between individuals, you and your manager, you and a peer, gives you way more opportunities to get and give feedback.

Max Edmands: So, how do you go from no loop to a feedback loop? Well first, we have to define the goal. Let’s say I want to draw an owl. So, now we need to figure out how we’re going to do it. I already have a process for drawing an owl. It’s something along the lines of flail along the page with a pen for a while and use a lot of white out. Eventually we got somewhere interesting. If I put it on a timeline, it might look something like this.

Max Edmands: So, next up is we identify specific decision points that’ll get us there. In this case, every time that I’ve scribbled on the page a little bit, I take a step back to figure out where to start adding the next round of details. But which details specifically should I add? This is the perfect place to start getting feedback. So, what feedback would be good here? Feedback could be comparing it against another implementation of the goal and figuring out what tweaks to make. It could also be user testing. Show your picture to another human, ask them what they think. It could also be, try to sell it and see if people will buy it. Would you buy this owl?

Max Edmands: Then iterate. Keep thinking of ways to increase the number of decision points and increase the quality of the feedback you’re getting at each point. Warning though, make sure that the additional process you’re adding is worth the cost you’re paying for it. Too much process is busy work. Nobody likes busy work. Too little process is confusion, doing the wrong thing. There’s a really fine line between the two, and staying in that balance itself is actually pretty tricky. Which is why I recommend, build feedback loops out of the quality of your feedback loops.

Max Edmands: It sounds like a joke, but I’m being completely sincere. The best way to figure out if you’re balancing cost versus benefit of process is to think about the process in exactly the same way that you’re thinking about the thing that you’re doing. Be continuously learning if there’s too much or too little, and be continuously adjusting as you go.

Christin Price speaking

Senior Manager, Business Strategy & Operations Christin Price gives a talk on “Ops, Table for 1” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Christin Price: Hey everybody, thanks for coming out tonight. I am Christin Price, and I work in the finance and operations department at Mode. Tomorrow actually happens to be my two year anniversary. So, I joined Mode shortly after we raised our series B and I was our first in-house finance hire. And that sounded extremely cool to me.

Christin Price: So at the time, Mode was experiencing some of the typical growing pains you might see at a series B startup. For example, we’d grown out of our office space. At the same time, I was going through some of my own growing pains. I was getting whiplash from how quickly my job title kept changing. I went from leading an annual planning cycle to doing a deep dive audit on a revenue number to prepare for a series C, and I even inherited a sales ops function.

Christin Price: As these demands kept mounting, I felt like I always needed more time or more people to get anything done. Everything felt like a fire, and I didn’t feel like I was getting to do my best work. As this persisted across multiple months, I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. My career trajectory felt like it was getting buried under the number of tasks it took just to keep the lights on.

Christin Price: Historically, I may have taken this as a sign that Mode wasn’t invested in me. And a mentor challenged me on this line of thinking. She asked me if I knew what the difference was between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset was believing that the situation was permanent, and that I had no power to influence or mold it into something different than what it was. Whereas, a growth mindset was to develop a true love of learning and believe that the best learning opportunities are presented through challenges.

Christin Price: Here are some examples of fixed versus growth mindset. Wow, that feedback really hurts my feelings. I’ve been working on this for months and clearly I’m not valued here. Versus, that’s an interesting perspective this person brings. I wonder if I incorporate that feedback into my work how it will change my work product. Or, I’ve never gotten along with this person and we just shouldn’t work together. Versus, these are this person’s strengths and these are my strengths. I’m really interested on iterating on them together to figure out how we can best work together.

Christin Price: So tonight I’d like to share a framework with you that I use to develop a growth mindset while also ensuring my career trajectory doesn’t get buried beneath the day to day. First off, do I have an executive sponsor? A mentor is someone we rely on and learn from their experiences to shape our own viewpoint. A sponsor is someone who will fight for us behind closed doors. I encourage you to ask your direct manager to be this for you. Ask them what would it take for you to have zero hesitation fighting for me?

Christin Price: The second question I ask is, am I soliciting continuous feedback? Y’all, feedback is exceptionally hard. Sometimes I feel like I’m walking to the edge of a cliff and asking someone else to push me off. But, with time and practice, I’ve gotten quite comfortable being uncomfortable. The best way to solicit feedback is to make a verbal contract with everyone you work with. Say, “I’d like to solicit ongoing feedback. Are you able to do this?” And then as you work together on projects, check in frequently, and I’m talking a couple times a week, and say, “Hey. What do you think is going well and what could I be doing better?”

Christin Price: Am I advocating for myself? As a society and especially as women, I feel like we’re pre-conditioned to believe that hard work in and of itself pays off. And I haven’t found this to be particularly true. Now that I’m comfortable being uncomfortable, I practice stepping outside my lane. I ask to be in the room.

Christin Price: Last month, there was a strategy meeting about how we hit our revenue number for the remainder of the year. It was 8 pm on a Tuesday night and I was asked to put together a model for the meeting the next day. I did so and I got my boss up to speed on it, and then I thought, “I have a valuable contribution here and I’m an expert on the subject.” I asked to be in the room. Not only did I join the meeting, I ended up leading it and one of our co-founders chased me out of the room with follow-up questions. It ended up being one of my most productive meetings in my two years at Mode.

Christin Price: Asking for public recognition. This past spring, I did a reboot on our commissions policy for our customer success function. And it took a lot of hard work, and the head of that team thanked me, privately, for the work I’d done. I asked him if he’d stand up at our Thursday all hands meeting and give me that recognition publicly. Not only did he agree to this, he thanked me for asking him. These small asks will increase your exposure to others within the organization, and also increase your level of influence.

Christin Price: Building multi-threaded relationships. This is actually a sales strategy. Imagine you’re working a deal, and your single point of contact leaves the company. It makes that inherently risky. Similarly, by building multi-threaded relationships with all different people at all different levels and in all different departments of your company, it ensures that there’s no single point of failure. Our CEO left on maternity leave earlier this year. If I relied exclusively on him to give me a voice within Mode, I would’ve been starting from scratch. Instead, I had many strong relationships to lean on during that time.

Christin Price: Don’t try to be everything to everyone. I had an epiphany about a year ago. I have always considered myself a direct person who establishes clear boundaries, but reflecting on my time, I’d realized I was trying to prove my worth by being a yes woman. Telling people I need more time, or that a project isn’t high priority, and then subsequently not doing all of the late work necessary to find that project a home is a really good practice. Others respect my ability to prioritize, and more importantly, I have the energy to bring the intellectual and emotional intelligence to the work that does fall within my purview.

Christin Price: Am I giving myself room and grace to make mistakes? I had a pretty serious miscommunication with a senior leader at Mode. Instead of accepting that I burned that bridge and beating myself up over it, I decided to apply a growth mindset. I apologized, I collected feedback, and I incorporated that feedback to rebuild our relationship. Today, I can gladly say we have a great working relationship. And furthermore, I don’t regret that mistake because of how much learning I got out of it.

Christin Price: So yes, this framework is a work in progress and yes, it takes serious energy to execute on it every day. And no, by no means have I mastered it. But I choose to apply a growth mindset and believe that with time and practice, I can continue to improve. It will become second nature. And I do truly believe there is something to be learned from every situation, especially the tough ones. And every day, I see the dividends of this practice.

Christin Price: Today, I am no longer on an island, as other people have joined the department. I was promoted to be a people manager, and I even have two open recs to continue growing the team. So, if you are a pace setter with a growth mindset who is hungry to learn and step out of your lane, Mode rewards that. And come find me after, because I want you on my team.

Christin Price: So today, I’m glad to say my relationship with Mode is mutually beneficial. It’s both give and take, and my career trajectory continues to crystallize. And with my growth mindset, I see limitless opportunity.

Heather Rivers: Next up, we have Senior Product Manager Nishi Patel.

Nishi Patel speaking

Senior PM Nishi Patel gives a talk on “Limitless Success: Influencing without Authority” at Mode Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Nishi Patel: All right, hi everyone. As Heather mentioned, my name is Nishi and I’m a PM here at Mode. I’m going to start off with a little story. So, it’s 2013, I had just landed my first PM gig after many interviews and I was so excited. I was bright eyed, bushy tailed, had done all of the reading I needed to do, and walked in on my first day. Within the first few weeks, I had been given the perfect project for our team. I’d been working with the design team, the engineering team, we’d done customer research, we’d built a bunch of prototypes, done testing. And we thought we had the ideal solution to bring our company’s first app to life.

Nishi Patel: So, in the following weeks we were going to have our first planning meeting. The CEO was going to be there, there was going to be a lot of stakeholders, some people that I hadn’t really even talked to yet. But I felt really confident in our solution and I was ready for it to be applauded and praised, and just feeling really good about it. What actually happened was that the CEO, amongst others, questioned every single point that I brought up. He pretty much shot down every single one of our ideas, and he couldn’t really connect the dots between how what we were doing and what we were proposing was going to get us to our revenue goals in three months, which is what was really on his mind.

Nishi Patel: I left, feeling pretty defeated. I went home that night, I remember, and was just circling all of the thoughts in my head and thinking what could I have done better, I thought I did everything I was supposed to do. But what I didn’t realize at that time was that our solution was actually pretty spot on to what we would end up building in a few months. They just didn’t resonate with the audience, and fell flat in that meeting that we had.

Nishi Patel: So what could I have done better? In one answer, instead of trying to explain a bunch of tactics around how we were going to build a solution, I could have used influence. So bringing us back to the point, why is influence important?

Nishi Patel: A lot of us here today are in tech or at startups, or maybe both. And we find ourselves working more and more cross functionally. On top of that, orgs are getting flatter, and so there’s a better chance that we may or may not have direct reports to help us ease into influence.

Nishi Patel: Daniel Pink, which apparently is popular amongst our group of speakers, I’m going to bring him up again. He said that we spend about half of our time at work trying to persuade others to part with resources. Resources in this context can mean time, someone’s ownership, someone’s decision making, or maybe even money. So, if it’s something that we all need to do, what are some ways to get there?

Nishi Patel: I’m going to talk through a few tactics that have worked for me, which is by no means exhaustive, but a few that I’ve had a great experience with. And also I’m going to talk a little bit about why sometimes we fail, and things that we can do to combat those failures.

Nishi Patel: So here’s one of the first influence tactics. Know your audience. I’m sure we’ve all heard this, but it’s something that’s really easy to glaze over when you’re really excited about something. What are the things that they care about? What are the things that get in the way of them doing their job? What are the things that keep them up at night? What are the things happening in their day to day that maybe affect them that you don’t even realize? I think most importantly out of all of this is really understanding how what they want, their incentives, and their motivations, can really align what you’re trying to bring to the table.

Nishi Patel: So going back to my story from earlier. I could have been much better at influencing and getting my message across if I was to understand better who was going to be in that room. I could have socialized the idea beforehand, and probably learned that the revenue goals were huge for our company and I could have better framed my story, to better connect the dots between why our solution was going to get us there and make our users happy.

Nishi Patel: Next, build trust and be vulnerable. This is easy to say, but pretty hard to do. I think the things that have worked best for me are just showing that I care and empathizing with the people that I’m talking to. And most importantly, being vulnerable. Definitely scary at first, but once you learn to put yourself out there, you can really show everyone that you’re talking to that you’re human. Consistently showing up is an amazing way to build trust and show that you care, because people can clearly see it.

Nishi Patel: So something I could have done in that situation is instead of just walking into that room with this really great presentation and this really great solution, or so I thought, I could’ve built a relationship with some of the people that were going to be in that room and really gotten their trust prior to entering and presenting.

Nishi Patel: And lastly, be clear about what you’re proposing. Be clear about how it impacts them, what you potentially need from them, or from my quote earlier, what resources they need to part with, and how it could positively benefit both their day to day and make their lives easier, and benefit the company. And also, stay true to you. If you’re not convinced about what you’re saying, they’re not going to either.

Nishi Patel: All right, so this is all good and great, and you might have even seen some of these, heard some of them, I know I have an inbox full of blog posts and newsletters that I could probably find even more tactics. But, sometimes we have every intention of doing all of these things and we prepare, and our message just falls flat. And we have to ask ourselves, why? So for me, the reality is we get in our own heads. I know in that situation, I was thinking, why would the CEO believe me? What if I fail? I’m new, why would that person even want to believe what I’m saying?

Nishi Patel: And a lot of this is fear of failure, and a lot of this is imposter syndrome. It’s a vicious loop. We don’t want to fail, so we don’t put ourselves out there, and we don’t put ourselves out there so we can’t even set ourselves up to succeed or even to fail. So at this point, we’re kind of just stagnant and we’re not doing anything at all. So if we get in our own way, how can we get out of it?

Nishi Patel: Here are a few things that I’ve come up with. Socializing your ideas. Pressure test your idea, and share it with others. This is a really simple way to start small, especially if you’re not this comfortable with everyone you’re going to be with in that room. And it’s a great way to get a signal of the things that are on people’s minds and how people feel about things. It’s also a great way to get advanced feedback, make sure no one is hearing it for the first time, and also to learn the opposing viewpoints that can help you in advance to shape your message when you walk into that room.

Nishi Patel: At Mode, we have a culture that’s pretty open and we have lunches. And so we all try to eat lunch together, and that’s a great way to have some of these casual conversations. Or, we also do a lot of coffee walks, and this has been a great way for me to kind of understand what’s going on around the company.

Nishi Patel: Secondly, observe and adapt to what works. So Sam talked earlier about not necessarily needing to reinvent the wheel if something works. So if there’s someone that you look up to, or someone in your company that you see that’s really good at influencing or maybe even in your life, build that into how you influence people. Analyze and pick up the things that work and put that into your message. Like Sam mentioned earlier… Sorry, not Sam.

Nishi Patel: Another story with Sam is earlier this year, I was actually doing a talk where I had to really incorporate the audience and really influence them with the case study that I was presenting. And there was a lot of things that I had observed with her when we practiced with each other that I was able to incorporate into my own talk.

Nishi Patel: And lastly, as a PM, I have to put in a shameless plug for learning and iterating. So in true product fashion, learn what works, learn what doesn’t, and iterate on this. And apply this thinking so that you can continuously improve.

Nishi Patel: So if there’s a couple big takeaways, it’s these. Find what works for you, and know that not all of these tactics are equal. There’s not one good formula and perfect formula to use, but the more you put yourself out there, the more you can try and figure out what works for you. And for those times where maybe the message doesn’t land, or you don’t influence the way you want, that’s totally okay. We’re all human, and the one thing that we have control over is that we can always and forever learn and iterate. Thanks.

Heather Rivers: All right, we have one final talk by our director of back-end engineering, Ushashi Chakraborty.

Ushashi Chakraborty speaking

Director of Backend Application Engineering Ushashi Chakraborty gives a talk on “Limitless Growth: Practicing Inclusion in Performance Reviews” at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Ushashi Chakraborty: Thank you. Hello everyone, Ushashi. I’m going to be talking about limitless growth, who doesn’t want that? Practicing inclusion in performance reviews.

Ushashi Chakraborty: So for those of you who are people managers, hopefully this talk is going to help you practice performing reviews in such a way that they are inclusive and they incentivize engineers with different kinds of stress. For those of you that are not people managers, hopefully this talk sparks an idea that helps you to ask for things from your manager when you’re sitting across them, and being deliberate in performance review.

Ushashi Chakraborty: This talk is going to have three takeaways. Let’s begin with the first one. That’s not a takeaway, that’s me. That’s the takeaway. Every engineer is different. Think about that for a second. Think about yourself, then think about your peers, various engineers that you have worked with. Seniors, juniors. Think about their strengths. Think about their ways of working. You’ll find that every engineer is different from each other even if they have largely to similar strength areas, for example, both of them are good at JavaScript. Even there, you will find nuanced differences.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Very recently, I was at the Grace Hopper conference, and there was a lot of chatter about bringing more underrepresented folks into computer science. It is great that we are at a place where we are encouraging everyone, everyone that is interested to come to this industry. Yet, don’t you think it’s absurd that we still think that people that are good at math and science, or people that are coming from traditional computer science backgrounds are the only ones that can make it well in this industry?

Ushashi Chakraborty: That is a flawed ideology. And if you take that flawed ideology, you are going to have biases. And if you start building a performance framework, you’re going to end up having a flawed performance framework.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Takeaway two. Don’t look at only one type of data. Data is great, but if you look at only one type of data, you will end up incentivizing engineers with one kind of strength. And if you incentivize engineers with one kind of strength, ultimately you will be left with an org where the engineers can solve only one kind of problem. And we don’t want that.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Most reviews that I have been part of have focused heavily on delivery. Things like code reviews, the number of code reviews that you have given. Number of comments, code quality are often given a lot of emphasis. I understand, because there’s a very easy metric to attach to these skills. And they are important skills to have. But sometimes, a different value that you add to an org, for example mentoring and interim. Or perhaps, sitting with your coworker and helping them debug a problem. Or perhaps writing a blog post for your eng blog.

Ushashi Chakraborty: We have to find ways to incentivize those skills, because all of these skills are important to excel as a software engineer. As an engineer myself, I have had reviews where those four skills are put together in one group, one bucket. And these skills are different from each other. And hence, those skills need to be talked about.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Takeaway number three. While a review conversation walks you through how your past performance has been, it is incomplete without a conversation about your future growth. How many of you here have gotten a performance review that scored you as does not meet, or meets, or exceeds? You’re familiar with that framework, right?

Ushashi Chakraborty: Now, something that has happened to me in the past is that I would get a great review that has been, a couple of times, in the past where I have gotten an exceeds. And I would be sitting there across from the manager waiting for the promotion to happen, very excited. Only there would be no promotion, there would be no talk about it at all. And I would be too uncomfortable at that point to ask for it, or ask why I didn’t get it.

Ushashi Chakraborty: When I look back at my career today, I can understand why I did not get it. Even though I was doing very well for my role at that time, I still had gaps for the next level. And hence, while the meets, not meets, exceeds framework is great, and its giving you context about how you are doing, that context is not complete unless you know how far you are from the next step. And hence, managers need to have that conversation when they’re giving you your performance reviews.

Ushashi Chakraborty: So now that we have learned about those three takeaways, let’s talk about how we do engineering performance reviews at Mode. We have adapted heavily from a framework built by Medium called Snowflake. It’s open source, you can check it out. And we rely a lot on robust conversations from managers to employees about their performance, as well as future growth. And we also take into account the inclusivity, such that engineers with different kinds of scripts are able to thrive.

Ushashi Chakraborty: The framework has four main tracks: build, execute, support, and strengthen. We will look at our favorite engineer’s performance review last quarter. Yeah, we are not embarrassed to say we have a favorite engineer. That’s our favorite engineer, Marshawn.

Ushashi Chakraborty: So let’s look at Marshawn’s performance review. So right now, Marshawn has not yet gotten a review, I’m going to review Marshawn very soon. First, let me explain the framework. So, on the right hand side you see a flake. We will start coloring that flake up as Marshawn gets some points. On the bottom, don’t worry if you can’t see, or if you can’t read what they say. The colors depict the different tracks I talked about. The building track, the executing track, the strengthening track, and the supporting track. We’re not going to get into the details of those tracks, but each track has about three to four skills.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Building is all about your code. Executing is everything that you do to get that code to production, for example in project management, communication. Supporting is the skills that you need to be supportive of your team, for example, their well-being. And strengthening is about building community inside and outside, for example, evangelism, recruit, those kind of things.

Ushashi Chakraborty: So each of these skills go from zero to five, and your manager evaluates you on those. At present, Marshawn is at zero and is an Engineer I, and total points zero. We’ll be walking you through two different scenarios of two different personas of Marshawn, and see how Marshawn plays out in these.

Ushashi Chakraborty: In the first persona, Marshawn is now having some depth of skills, or some really good skills around building and executing. You see those colors pop up, those are like getting two and three numbers in those skills. You see now, Marshawn’s title has changed to Engineer II, and Marshawn has 18 total points. So here, Marshawn is getting incentivized because of their deeper skills in building and executing, and they have shown depth in a portion of the flake.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Let’s talk about a different persona. Marshawn as a different engineer. This flake looks different. In this flake, Marshawn has a different kind of skill set. Once again, Marshawn is now in Engineer II with 18 points, but is a more holistic skillset that encompasses larger breadth of the flake. So perhaps lesser on the executing and building side, but still there, decent amount of skills. But they’re also having skills on the supporting and strengthening side of things.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Now let’s go back to those takeaways that I talked about. First, every engineer is different. So we see those personas. Those are real life engineers that we perhaps work with, having those skills. And now we are learning how to incentivize all kinds of skills while also having a way of our framework where we can provide feedback for the other kind of skills that they need to grow or hone.

Ushashi Chakraborty: The next thing, don’t look at only one type of data. Had we only focused on [inaudible] focusing on the blue and green that is the building and executing skills, and then Marshawn in persona two wouldn’t have been as successful.

Ushashi Chakraborty: Takeaway three. The framework should force the conversation about future growth. So in this little block here, the points to the next level which is 18, we see that Marshawn has 18 more points to get to the next level. So while your manager will be having a conversation with you as to how many points you are at today and how did that add up, they’ll also be having a conversation with you about how far you are from the next level and what you need to do to get there. And build this strategy with you to help you progressively get to there.

Ushashi Chakraborty: In conclusion, [inaudible] whichever side you’re sitting on during the performance review conversation, it is a challenging space to be in. I get it. And handling it with inclusivity is going to help you build an org that has all kinds of engineers that can thrive there and have professional growth that is wide, that is limitless. Thank you so much.

Heather Rivers: That was our last amazing lightning talk for the evening, but the party’s not over. Feel free to hang out here until 9:00. If you’re interested in talking to anybody about Mode, we have these green shirts, or if you’re interested in learning more about our product we have a little demo booth over there, very cool. And finally, we’re hiring in all departments, so feel free to ask any of us about our open roles. And yeah, let’s just hear one last huge round of applause for all the amazing speakers.

Mode girl geeks attending

A warm round of applause for all of the speakers at Mode Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


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Podcast Highlights: 9 Key Takeaways on Intersectionality

Intersectional feminism

In continuing our Podcast Highlights mini series, this week, we’re sharing 9 quick takeaways from the Girl Geek X podcast that employees and managers everywhere can benefit from!

If you haven’t already subscribed to the Girl Geek X podcast, head on over to iTunesSpotifyStitcher, or Google Play and get ready to start binge listening! 

This week, Girl Geek X COO Gretchen DeKnikker is breaking out quotes and insights from her favorite release on the Girl Geek X Podcast — Episode 12: Intersectionality. (Apologies for the sound quality on this one, we’re still learning!)

Why this topic matters, and why it’s her favorite episode:

Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

“This was an important episode because we’d been hearing intersectionality as a buzzword, often erroneously used as a synonym for inclusion, and wanted to offer clarification. Understanding how various parts of our identities intersect in both oppressive and privileged ways is absolutely critical in building workplaces where everyone can thrive. Solving the issues of the most marginalized among us raises up everyone. It’s absolutely essential that we have acute awareness around this as we do the work.

9 Key Takeaways

9. “We need to move away from ‘diversity,’ which has a limited meaning and actually is not aligned with the goals that we’re trying to build. We need to build balance in our organizations. We also need to move away from ‘inclusion’. Inclusion assumes that I can fit like an add-on into a power structure that was built for straight white men, and I have no interest in doing that. I’m not any of those things and I don’t know how to show up that way. I wanna actually build belonging, I wanna show up in a space where I was considered and where I was thought of.

Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Belonging at Atlassian
Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Belonging at Atlassian

It can be the littlest things that show consideration. You’ll see here, research shows that women feel like they belong when there’s more plants in an office. You’ll see that our bathrooms, even the ones that because of building codes have to have gendered words on them, do not actually contain pictures of what a man or a woman looks like. That might not matter to a lot of you. But to folks who are gender-nonconforming or non-binary or transgender, that has huge meaning. That little subtle clue actually tells their brain that they belong in that space, and that’s what we’re trying to build at Atlassian. I think we can all resonate with wanting to feel like we belong.” —Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diveristy and Belonging at Atlassian 

8. “Silly pop culture example that I always think of, there’s an episode of Scrubs where Elliot, who’s a white female doctor, and Turk, who’s a black man, are having this debate about who has it harder, black doctors or female doctors, and then thankfully a black woman doctor walks by and they’re both like ‘Ooh. Wow. This argument is dumb for the two of us to be having.’” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

7.  “When you’re talking about privilege and talking about intersectionality and diversity and inclusion, I think sometimes they all get swirled together and you can lose sight of what those things are individually and what they mean individually, and that they are very unique distinctive things. —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X

6. “I think it’s important when you’re trying to create an equal environment that there’s no one definition of equal, right? That’s the whole problem when you assume there’s one definition of what it means to feel marginalized or to feel like a minority, so you have to identify where you stand and what the differences in experiences are for other people.

Learn more about other people’s experiences, especially when they’re different from yours so you can be more informed when you’re trying to create a more equal environment. But you have to have a good understanding of what it means and not have a blanket, oversimplified definition of what intersectionality is in the first place.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

5.  “If I — as a queer Latina woman — can succeed in the organization, any changes that are made are definitely gonna benefit straight white women, too. But when we start with ‘diversity = women’, we only build programs, processes, and structures that help straight, white, economically-privileged women succeed.” —Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diveristy and Belonging at Atlassian

4. “I think intersectionality reminds us how much further we have to go and be open to continuing to learn about each other, this evolving conversation and just keep trying to be curious about other people.” —Angie Chang, Co-Founder & CEO at Girl Geek X

3.  “Psychological safety more than anything else is critical to making a team work. And so what is psychological safety? It’s the shared belief held by members of the team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

Psychological safety may sound like it’s all about the emotions or about the mental aspect of the game, but really it’s the way that you encourage and promote behaviors that reinforce trust and respect and mutual empathy and authenticity, and discourage behaviors that tear those down.” —Heidi Williams, CEO & Co-Founder of tEQuitable

2. “I think white people in this country, myself included, need to get very comfortable with the fact that we are all racist on some level, and that everyone has racist behaviors… and that while the word is really powerful, we need to actually think about the definition of it and what that means, and how to correct those behaviors. Because even a racist will tell you they’re not racist, they’re just separatists. They just want you live over there. ‘I don’t not like you, I just don’t wanna live with you!’ kind of a thing. So just understanding there are racist behaviors is important. We all have them every single day, and we need to be open to hearing that feedback.” —Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X
Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

1. “You’re setting yourself up to fail if you’re using definitions of these things that are empty or you’re using solutions that only work for the group that’s struggling the least out of everyone. We’re at a point where people can very easily see through these things when they are bullshit. People aren’t just gonna say ‘we have a culture committee’ and take that to mean the work is done. People actually want to see tangible results. Hold people accountable to do the actual work and not just fly a diversity flag and say the work is done.” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

Check out the full episode or podcast transcript for more great insights on intersectionality and questioning your own bias, or subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more insightful content on topics that matter to women and allies.


About the Author

Amy Weicker - Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X

Amy Weicker is the Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X, and she has been helping launch & grow tech companies as a marketing leader and demand generation consultant for nearly 20 years. Amy previously ran marketing at SaaStr, where she helped scale the world’s largest community & conference for B2B SaaS Founders, Execs and VCs from $0 to $10M and over 200,000 global community members. She was also the first head of marketing at Sales Hacker, Inc. (acquired by Outreach) which helps connect B2B sales professionals with the tools, technology and education they need to excel in their careers.

Intuit Girl Geek Dinner: “Powering Prosperity for Small Businesses” (Video + Transcript)

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Transcript from Intuit Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Angie Chang: Thank you to everyone for coming out tonight to another Girl Geek dinner at Intuit. I know we were here five years ago and had a terrific time and this time it’s going to be even better. In case you missed it, there are amazing demo stations with engineers and product managers speaking and giving talks about what they’re working on – and donuts. So, they’re out there and thank you so much to the folks at Intuit for hosting us again. This is an amazing welcome. The campus is even more beautiful than I remembered and thank you so much for bringing these amazing women together.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Hi, I’m Gretchen. In addition to doing these almost every week, which if this is your first event, raise your hand. Okay, so now you know that we do these almost every week, so you’ll be on our mailing list, come check out more of them. We also have a podcast, we’ve done like 20 episodes now and we would love some feedback because we’re thinking about what we want to do for the next season.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, mentorship and career transitions and switching job function and the definition of intersectionality, like all sorts of stuff. So definitely go check that out and rate it and please give us your honest feedback because that’s the only way we’re going to get better. Then we also have … We’re going to do our virtual conference, our all day online conference. I don’t know how many of you guys have come the last two years but it’ll be just before International Women’s Day on March 6th.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So keep an eye out if you think you might want to have your company participate or if you might want to be a speaker, then start thinking about those topic ideas and then we’ll let you know when we’re sort of ready for all of that. If this looks like a good time, you could do it at your company too. So, just email us or grab us. Our information’s everywhere on the web and we’d love to talk to you about it. So, thank you.

Tracy Stone: Thank you. So welcome to Intuit. We are so thrilled to have all of you here tonight and thank you to Angie and the Girl Geek team for partnering with us on this wonderful event. For those of you who we haven’t had a chance to meet, my name is Tracy Stone and I lead the Tech Women Intuit initiative here at Intuit, and that initiative is sponsored out of our CTO’s organization as an initiative to attract and recruit, retain and advance women in technical roles.

Tracy Stone: So an event like this is so wonderful for us to partner with Girl Geek and to be able to bring the community together as we build connections and empower our women in technology. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Intuit, I hope you got a chance, as Angie said, we had some amazing demos from our technologists of some of the technology that we’re developing as we are in our mission.

Tracy Stone: Our mission at Intuit is to power prosperity around the world. We are a global financial platform company, makers of QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint, and so I hope tonight you’ll get a chance to learn more about Intuit, about our products and the technologies. In addition, we featured some of our small business customers today, so I hope you got a chance to interact with them, get some of the swag to take home, some cool stuff.

Tracy Stone: So I hope you got a bag and got to take home some of those, some swag and the treats from our small business customers. So tonight we have amazing program in store for you. We’re going to start with a fireside chat with our CTO, and then we have some of our technologists and leaders across the company going to share some of their lightning talks with all of you. In the middle of all that, we’ll offer raffle prizes throughout the evening.

Tracy Stone: So, we’ll go ahead and get started. I want to introduce our first talk, which is a fireside chat with our CTO, Marianna Tessel. Olga Braylovskiy will be leading the chat with Mariana. Olga leads HR for our technology teams and partners closely with Mariana and all of her organizations on talent related items. Mariana is our CTO and as our CTO she oversees technology strategy and leads our product engineering, data science, information technology and information security teams worldwide.

Tracy Stone: She joined Intuit in 2017 to lead product development in our small business and self-employed group. Before Intuit, she was an executive vice president of strategic development at Docker and she’s held engineering leadership roles at VMware, Ariba, And General Magic. We’re so thrilled to have both Olga and Marianna with us tonight.

Olga Braylovskiy: All right, welcome everyone. What a turn out, incredible. Lots of power in this room. So, let’s start, Mariana, with you sharing a little bit of your career journey and how did you get you this amazing role of being CTO at Intuit?

 

Marianna Tessel speaking

Intuit girl geeks: CTO Marianna Tessel shares her career journey with VP Olga Braylovskiy at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner in Mountain View, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Marianna Tessel: Wow, well, thank you. First of all, thank you everybody for coming in today. So wonderful to see so many geek women, I love it. So, a little bit about my journey. I’m an engineer in my background, so I studied engineering and then I worked as an engineer for quite a long time. I actually started, I’m from Israel. Anybody from Israel here? Whoo, hi, shalom.

Marianna Tessel: So, I started in the Israeli military as an engineer. So I worked there for some time and then I came here to the US after that and I worked in a company that was trying to do devices like iPhones and we weren’t successful, but there was a documentary on the company, it’s called General Magic. You should look it up. It basically says that almost any device today, you can trace back to the roots of that company because the people that worked on iPhone and on Android both came from General Magic.

Marianna Tessel: So that was actually a real pleasure to work with an amazing set of people and doing something so like envelope pushy. Is that a thing? Yeah, pushing the envelope and then just thought I’ll use it in a different way, why not? Then actually I worked in other companies. I worked at Ariba, et cetera, but actually at General Magic I became a manager. I didn’t expect that, they had a need for a manager and they came to me and I said, what me? And then I said, actually, I really like it and I started my leadership career then, and from there on I was a leader in multiple companies.

Marianna Tessel: Then, just before actually coming to Intuit, I spent a long time in infrastructure. So that means that VMware and Docker. VMware by the way, I learned way too much, more than I ever wanted to know about storage, network compute and whatnot, really down in the guts of systems. Then when I came to Docker, that was amazing because that was like a start-up and we were changing the world and that was a really great experience.

Marianna Tessel: But I decided to join Intuit and to your question, Olga, I’m trying to answer your question. To your question, how I became a CTO, I think that I spent a long time as actually an engineer and then I became a leader and kind of grew with different roles, and because I had really different roles, actually I think I had like different perspectives and sometimes it’s luck, sometimes I grabbed the luck when I had it and here I am and I’m really happy about that.

Olga Braylovskiy: Luck is largely about preparation and clearly you had a good one. You should also mention how passionate you are about people and technical talent, which leads us to another question. Intuit is a really special company, a little plug-in for Intuit and we have amazing culture and we have very unique engineering culture that I know you’re super passionate about. So what’s unique about our engineering culture?

Marianna Tessel: Yeah, I think Intuit is really known for its culture and I knew it before coming to Intuit, but I think what’s really unique about Intuit and for engineers here is that you actually get to work on things that are really meaningful for lives of people, and that is a great feeling. You heard our mission is to power prosperity around the world and you saw some of our customers here, and when you work on something that you feel fundamentally touches the lives and people and really help them, that is really, really powerful.

Marianna Tessel: At Intuit, we are very good about looking at it this way and not just building awesome technology, which I’m really passionate about, but also thinking about how it helps our customers. So I think that intersection of really working on great technology and being able to, across the stack, really exercise your craft as an engineer, then working on a mission that is meaningful and then as a company having this culture where it’s really welcoming and nice, and just kind of not that very cut throat, et cetera.

Marianna Tessel: So, it’s kind of unique in its culture of how it’s a very welcoming of people and I think that’s why we actually have also actually high percentage of women relatively because we’re a very welcoming culture where you can feel like you can come in and be yourself, a lot more than I’ve seen in other companies.

Olga Braylovskiy: Awesome, so we use the word awesome a lot and that applies to our culture.

Marianna Tessel: That’s awesome.

Olga Braylovskiy: You touched on amazing, kind of use of amazing technology and being part of our culture. What are some cool and interesting uses of technology, especially more modern tech really as we try to fulfill on our mission of powering prosperity around the world?

Marianna Tessel: Right, and as all you guys you know, we declared our strategy to fulfill that mission to be an AI driven expert platform and what that means … And by the way, this is one of the things about Intuit that I’ve learned. You are very clear about our mission, our strategy, our values. In the beginning, I was like, wow, that’s really heavy, but I actually learned to really, really appreciate it and the clarity that it brings.

Marianna Tessel: So, I really appreciate it now. But our strategy is to be an AI driven expert platform, and what that means is actually it’s a combination of technology and being a platform, both in terms of how we build product, as well as interacting with other entities and actually people because what we have also coming to our platform are real people experts and bless ya, accountants, et cetera. So we are allowing, not just we’re building a great platform but we’re allowing people to be very, very productive on our products.

Marianna Tessel: The AI part is the one that I’m recently very excited about because this is where we really use innovation and a lot of kind of industry buzzwords and applying them to customers to again, like in a real life changing way. We actually we’re … One of the things and nice things we’ve done, we actually defined AI for ourselves, and we said, when we talk about AI, what we mean is machine learning, knowledge engineering and natural language processing.

Marianna Tessel: Now, you’ve probably heard about machine learning and natural language processing, but just to give you a bit of a taste of knowledge engineering, it’s actually about taking rules and relationships and turning them into code. Where it becomes very interesting for us is as you know, we have a leading tax product and other products that have to do with compliance, and what it enabled us to do is really encode compliance in a super efficient way. So that’s kind of one of the things we’re super excited about.

Marianna Tessel: So here is like, on the surface, a problem that could be like sounding to an engineer, slightly boring like compliance and you go ahead and you end up with a technology that’s actually really amazing and completely revolutionizing that field. So, that’s some examples that I’m excited on.

Olga Braylovskiy: Awesome, so if you reflect back to earlier in your career, what is something that maybe a true that you held at the time that you no longer hold true? Like you kind of reevaluated, your perspective shifted.

Marianna Tessel: How early? Like yesterday or?

Olga Braylovskiy: When we’re saying earlier, think back maybe 10, 15 years and I know that our perspective shifts all the time. Something that would be useful especially to this group of geeks who aspire to be the CTO.

Marianna Tessel: Right, I actually … There’s a lot of things that I change my perspective about, but let me kind of touch on a few that came to mind when you asked. The first one is how much do I want to plan my career or not? So, early on I was like this, I would say, like a leaf in the wind that I was like, oh, whatever that takes me. I’m like that sounds interesting, that sounds interesting and I didn’t really plan my career.

Marianna Tessel: I was like, oh, whatever is the next thing, if it sounds good, I’ll just go with it. What I realized at some point is that I need to have a little bit more direction to my career and not necessarily that I have to decide that I want to be like a CTO or whatever, but just kind of think about how the combination of my experiences is actually adding up and where am I going is not just like, oh the cool people. It’s also like, hey, what does it mean? How is it all adding up as a path?

Marianna Tessel: So that will be like one thing that at some point I was like, I’ve started to think … So I’m not a huge planner of my career, but I will be thoughtful about, you know what, I don’t think I’m learning anything here or I don’t think this is like … Doesn’t sound like the traditional step, but I think I’m going to learn a lot, so I want to go and do that. Like an example would be at VMware and it would be at Docker.

Marianna Tessel: I did end up doing a lot of business development while still having an engineering role and I’ve learned a ton from it. That’s something that early on I would be like, no, I’m an engineer, don’t talk to me about anything else. Another thing that I changed my mind about is around leadership. Early in the leadership … And maybe again because that’s kind of a little of what was expected from me, at least I felt, is like I was really focused on the people leadership side.

Marianna Tessel: This is an area that I’m gravitating to anyways. So I would really think myself as a leader of people and I just focused on that as in my leadership, and what I’ve noticed is that I actually really need to continue to develop my craft and I also need to be a technical leader, not just kind of a people leader. So that’s another thing that I changed my mind about how I lead and now I really focus on making sure that I follow technology, I understand technology, I understand the craft to a really big depth, not just focusing on leading people and that’s just like its more fun, but it’s also like, I feel like I add a lot more value to companies when I do it this way. So, I can also talk about other things about learning to be more assertive and things like that, but at a high level, those are a couple of examples.

Olga Braylovskiy: Awesome, last question. I think we have time for one more question. This is super powerful event. We’re all here to learn, share ideas, network. What’s your perspective on leveraging this type of event to the fullest? And just advice on how to make it most effective as a contributing factor to developing relationships and career.

Marianna Tessel: One of the things that actually I’ve learned in, again in my path that your network is one of the most important things that are going to help you in your career. Sometimes you find it in an unexpected places, so just to give you a few ideas around it. When you think about network is like the people you know then later on they will go places, or you need something, or they need something and then you have that connection to really make a dent for them, for the companies, for you, for your career, for your company or sometimes even just getting advice when you need it or sometimes it’s finding that next job when you need it, whatever that is.

Marianna Tessel: So developing a network, if you take one thing away today to at least kind of from what I’m have to offer, developing a network is something super important and I will really focus on that. Then the … What I will say that it’s really important to develop a network, it cannot be like this give and take. You can’t say like, oh I have a bunch of people that when I need them I’m just going to call them, is you need to think about it.

Marianna Tessel: You want to give your network more than what you are taking and you want to really develop great relationship and really, really think about it. Not just like something that you, a tool but something that you’re really caring about. So again, I always focus on am I giving more to my network than I’m taking, because that’s what I think is like a best set up. Of course you don’t want to have people that just always take, take, take from you and will never … There when you need them.

Marianna Tessel: That’s not good part of your network, and then how you develop your network is through events like that. You meet people, you exchange maybe information, then you can follow up. Maybe you have like, you decide to have a coffee or et cetera, but invest time in that. When you think about your day and when you think about your week or your month or whatever, make sure you allocate time to develop your network and to again, make sure you meet with people, you continue getting advice, you continue offering advice, and remember the golden rule, you give more than you take. So anyway, that will be my advice.

Olga Braylovskiy: Awesome, thank you so much for all the insights, Marianna. One and only Marianna Tessel.

Marianna Tessel: Thank you, Olga.

Olga Braylovskiy: You’re welcome. We like hearts in Intuit. That’s true though.

Tracy Stone: You can put those there. Thank you, Marianna and Olga, we appreciate you being here and your wonderful words of advice. Okay, so as promised we’ll do our first raffle and our raffles tonight are some goodies from our small business customers. So, our first raffle is from the Basik Candle company up in South San Francisco, and so I need to draw a ticket. Everybody have their tickets ready? You didn’t get a ticket?

Audience Member: I didn’t get to.

Tracy Stone: Okay, so ready? It’s 691156. Right here? No worries, there you go. From Basik Candle-

Audience: Is this right, 69?

Tracy Stone: Yeah, you are winner, congratulations. Thank you. Okay, so next up we’re going to hear from Rajashree. So Rajashree leads our engineering team for Intuit’s external developer platform and third party app experiences, enabling an ecosystem of thousands of applications that connect to Intuit’s QuickBooks platform. She’s passionate about building purpose-driven engineering teams with a customer first thinking and an inclusive culture. Before Intuit, Rajashree held various engineering roles at PayPal. Thank you, Rajashree.

 

Rajashree Pimpalkhare speaking

Director of Product Development Rajashree Pimpalkhare gives a talk on “Building Solutions with 3rd-Party Developers to Serve the Needs of Small Businesses” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: Thank you. First of all, let me say this is amazing to see all of you guys here and then secondly, how do I get to follow that? That’s really not fair, but I’ll do my best. So, I lead engineering for Intuit developer group and my focus and my team’s focus is empowering developers that want to work with our customers, deliver solutions to our customers that work with QuickBooks, which is our main product for small businesses.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: I always like to start with customers. Actually, it’s the first thing I learned when I joined Intuit, that the customer is always in the house, and for us customers are three main type of customers, small businesses, self-employed and consumers. The key thing about all of these personas is they have their financial lives mingle between their business world and their personal world. So most small businesses will have bank accounts that they keep moving money from their personal account to their business account and so on.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So we always think of all of those customers in one breaststroke while we may provide different products for them. Then at the bottom you see our partners, so accountants, developers, financial institutions, mega platforms like the Amazons and Googles of the world, educational institutes and governments. These are all the partners that we work with. So, at Intuit we really believe that we want to power prosperity of our customers and we want to bring our partners along, and one big constituent in this part among the partners, are the third party developers.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So this is a little bit of geeking out. When you think of third party developers working with QuickBooks, they want to connect their applications to QuickBooks in one of three different ways. Before I go into the specific ways, let me put your mind to who are these developers, what are these apps and what is QuickBooks?

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So, QuickBooks is our product that does accounting for small businesses. We offer them a payment solution. We offer them payroll solutions, we offer them capital, so we take it off of their financial lives. But these same customers think of like a food truck that you might have seen when you entered building 20. The food truck has things that they need to order. They need a POS system that they need to run credit cards through. They might have some discounts or coupons that they want to give out and those go through social networks and so on, so they use many different apps.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: A typical small business uses anywhere from four to 15 apps to run their business and it is really critical that their data from these apps flow seamlessly into QuickBooks. Because at the end of the day, this is where they go to understand whether they’re making money, they’re losing money, or how are they going to pay for their dinner the end of the week, right. So there are three ways in which the platform enables us to or enable the third party developer to connect their app with QuickBooks.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: The first one is data connections. So, this is what most of our developers use. So an eCommerce app, or a POS app, or any kind of other app that’s doing financial transactions for the developer can write that data into QuickBooks. So that can be reconciled into our books if it’s inventory for a product based business. Somebody is selling something on Shopify, the inventory can reconcile with QuickBooks.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: If it’s a set of customers and a general contractor that’s doing 10 different jobs or a plumber that’s doing 10 different jobs for 10 different customers, those customer names can all come in here and they can understand where they spend money versus where they invoice their customers. So that data flowing in and out. So everything works together is the primary use case that our platform enables. The second use case is for certain types of experiences.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: When small businesses are into QuickBooks and they’re trying to run their business, they don’t want to have to go and open up another app. So this might be something like you are in QuickBooks and you want to pay your bills. Now, we don’t offer bill pay as our own capability, but we do power it through a partner. If you are a small business in the UK and using QuickBooks, you can actually run payroll through a product that’s run, that’s developed by a different company but the experience is seamless and the platform underneath enables that. Then the third piece is we want to be where our customers are.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So, if you are in Google and if you are responding to some emails from your customers, you are able to invoice your customers right from there, from Gmail and that invoicing is powered by Intuit. So the three kind of ways of allowing integrations or ways for third parties to integrate with us, are data connections, so everything works together.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: Powered by partners, so seamless experiences for our customers where they don’t know where our experience starts and ends and the partner experience starts. The third piece is powering through partners and this is really critical when we want to actually go and serve customers where they are. So what do we do with this? Why is this so important? So we are the small business platform of choice in the United States and increasingly in the global countries where we are.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: The reason that’s true is because we have over four million customers that use QuickBooks today and for all of those customers, they have needs beyond what QuickBooks provides. So small businesses say, I need additional tools beyond QuickBooks to help me run my business and I would rather get it from Intuit because I trust Intuit and Intuit knows what really is needed for my business to run, and for my business to work, and for me to be profitable.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: Then the developers need access to customers because if you are a small developer creating a niche app for a specific segment of small businesses, it is incredibly difficult to get them to know you and get them to pick you. There are so many different channels, but if they came in through, we have an App Store that the QuickBooks customers can view. If these developers put their apps in the App Store, they have access to all of their customers and they can put forth a value proposition and reach them.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So the developers come to us because they need access to customers to build a business that can grow and be profitable and we sit in the middle of it being able to really power that network effect. So it’s actually really, really gratifying because we work for developers and we work for customers and it’s great to be able to connect the two. A lot of build-outs. So I love this slide because it tells you a little bit about what kind of … So it tells you multiple things. First it tells you look at how big our ecosystem is.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: All of these apps that show up here are connected to QuickBooks in one of the three different ways that we looked at. The second thing it tells you is look at how difficult it is for small businesses to really know what they want and what they need and the QuickBooks at the center is where we really take our role really seriously. We want to recommend the right apps to our customers. We want to make sure they’re successful with those. We want to make sure they know exactly how they interact with our products and so on. So this is just to tell you where we are today.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: So I joined Intuit five years ago. I think Tracy said I came from PayPal and I came from a world where it was all about money, and all about revenue, and all about the money that came into the pocket of the company. I love PayPal as well, by the way, but at Intuit it’s just a little bit different, right? The purpose is just a little bit higher and the passion you can bring to the table is just that much bigger. In the last five years we have gone from about 700,000 QuickBooks customers to over four million.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: I think the number is 4.2 million today. 40 apps that were on the App Store to more than 700 and one in five customers of QuickBooks today use at least one app, and we are continuing to work on it and continuing to grow it. So just super proud to be associated with the Intuit developer group to be working here and we are the global trusted platform of choice. So, with that…

Tracy Stone: Thank you.

Rajashree Pimpalkhare: I assume you’re not taking questions now, but I love to talk to you about it after.

Tracy Stone: We would love for you to engage with our speakers after. We’ll have some time at the end of the session. So thank you, Rajashree. Now we’d like to invite Nhung up to our virtual stage up here, I guess. Nhung, you want to advance the slide. Nhung is the director of data science for our QuickBooks ecosystem and customer success data science teams. She leads the strategy and execution of applied machine learning programs that span the range of marketing product, forecasting, and other strategic capabilities.

Tracy Stone: Her applied machine learning teams build new to the world products and services backed by artificial intelligence to serve Intuit’s customers across the whole customer life cycle. So I’m excited to hear from Nhung. So let’s give Nhung a warm welcome.

 

Nhung Ho speaking

Director of Data Science Nhung Ho gives a talk on “Using Machine Learning to Solve Small Businesses’ Problems” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Nhung Ho: All righty, can you hear me? All right, so couple things as ground rules. I speak really quickly and I tend to pace. If I walk into these chairs, feel free to laugh at me. All right, so just a quick introduction about myself. I’m actually a former astrophysicist turned data scientist and one of the things I’m super passionate about is actually using math and code to solve real world problems. That’s why I escaped from looking at the stars, actually looking at people and turning my gaze down.

Nhung Ho: The other thing is I also love food and so if you’re traveling to any city and want restaurant recommendations, I have a running list. I made a Google maps, I pin everything and I have a list of all the dishes that I liked. So I’m happy to share that with anyone. All right, so I’m here to talk to you about how my team uses machine learning to solve small business problems because the business of running your business is actually really hard and it all starts with starting your business, right?

Nhung Ho: You would think that like Michael Scott in The Office, when he says, I declare bankruptcy, right? You can say, I declare a business and then you have a business. But actually that’s not true and this is just the first six of 25 steps that you have to take to even start a business, right? There are a lot of questions that you have to answer before you even get your first customer through the door. Once you start doing that, then you say, okay, I expect that I’m going to open a clothing store.

Nhung Ho: I’m going to be able to dress women, make them happy, make them look good and everything is going to be awesome, dandy. I’m going to go home feeling great, but what you do is you actually go home to a mountain of paperwork, right? I know this really intimately because I have 10 siblings and five of them own small businesses and every day they go home, the stacks and stacks of papers, stacks and stacks of receipts.

Nhung Ho: It is incredibly hard to manage. So, while during the day you’re satisfying your customers, you’re doing what you love, you go home at night and you’re dealing with paperwork because you actually have to run your business and make sure that you have enough cash flow to continue serving your customers. Just a simplified view of some of the things you need to do as a small business, you need to track your expenses.

Nhung Ho: You’re going to go buy supplies, you’re going to go buy inventory, and you’re going to have a stack of receipts and invoices that you have to keep track of. If you drive for a living, you have to keep track of how much you use your car because that ends up being tax deductible, right? You want to be able to track your income so now you have bank statements to take care of. If you invoice people, you have to keep track of that as well. Then, finally at the end of the year, you need to make sure you’re tax compliant, right?

Nhung Ho: So if you’re a sole proprietor, you need to know about this thing called a schedule C and you then you need an EIN. So there’s a whole host of things that you need to be able to do and know and manage as a small business owner that I think a lot of us who don’t own small businesses don’t realize. So where do I come in, right? Why do you need an astrophysicist here at Intuit for solving these problems?

Nhung Ho: It’s because a lot of these things that are really rote, and boring, and tedious, you can actually make much easier using machine learning. So I’m going to go through two examples. The first one is on receipt tracking. So I mentioned that a lot of small businesses go out and buy a bunch of things. They need to be able to track their receipts. They need to be able to take those receipts and actually transcribe every single piece of information into an accounting system. In this case, in QuickBooks, right?

Nhung Ho: So if you as a human, you have to go through and scan this and say, where did I buy this from? What is the address? When did I buy it? What are all the things that I bought? What is the individual prices? And then decompose that one receipt into individual lines in there. Think about how much time that takes and how tedious it is.

Nhung Ho: So what that ends up doing is actually causing you to say, it’s not worth it, I’m just not going to do this and then you end up leaving money on the table because you could have deducted these. So if you can imagine, what my team did was we actually married computer vision and natural language processing. You can utilize an OCR system to go through and actually pick out every single character. You can figure out exactly where the bounding boxes are for each of these fields and then begin to lift that information out.

Nhung Ho: You can then use a deep learning system to say, okay, I know that when I see Aroma Cafe, that’s a vendor, and when I see that number format, it’s actually a date, right? We can use the latest deep learning technology, scan through the system that’s already been OCR, pull out that information and then make sense of it. Then finally put that into your accounting system and you’re done.

Nhung Ho: This system is 10 times faster than what a human can do and we can go and grind through thousands of receipts for you as long as you send us the image. That’s kind of the power of what machine learning can do to help a small business succeed. So the next example I want to talk about is mileage tracking. As I mentioned earlier, how many of you here know that if you use a personal vehicle for business purposes, every single mile that you drive is deductible at 54.5 cents per mile?

Nhung Ho: Actually, quite a bit. Actually, I definitely did not know that when I started this. But if you are a real estate agent and you’re driving between showings, that could be hundreds of miles per day. That’s a lot of money that you can deduct on your taxes. We actually have a product called QuickBooks Self-Employed, that makes this really easy for you. You turn on our automated mileage tracking service, we will say, okay, we know that Nhung traveled from point A to point B on this day and this is the distance that she drives, which is super awesome, except we don’t actually know exactly what the purpose was, right?

Nhung Ho: Because again, you need to be able to say, this trip is a business trip versus a personal trip. If I drive to the grocery store, I can’t deduct that on my taxes and if the IRS finds out, it’s not going to be good times for anybody. So you have to go in and say, is this a personal trip? Is this a business trip? And if it’s a business trip, why did you actually use your car for that purpose, right? So it’s multiple pieces of work.

Nhung Ho: So to give you a real example that I have scrubbed a lot of personal information from is, meet Claire. Claire works at City Hall during the day and she actually teaches piano on the side. These are all of the trips that Claire took. You can see that some of them are for business purposes and some of them are for personal, but there’s no real pattern that jumps out here. In an average month, she takes 200 trips and you can imagine that if Claire, like I am, there’s a huge procrastinator, at the end of the month, she’s got to answer basically 800 questions.

Nhung Ho: What was this trip? When did I take this trip? Where was I going and what was the purpose of this trip? Is it for because I’m driving to teach piano or is it because I’m driving to City Hall for my job? We don’t make that distinguish. We don’t distinguish that, you do it for us, but I can build a machine learning system that can do this in less than a second for Claire and that’s exactly what my team did. We utilized frequent pattern mining and we essentially automatically learn very personalized and highly individualized rules per user.

Nhung Ho: So we can group all of the trips on the left side that she took exactly to the same destination, show that to her and say, we think that this is a personal trip and if it ends up being a personal trip or a business trip, here is a deduction that you get. For our users, they take 50 million trips per year. Now you can imagine building a system like this that is scalable, extensible, and is ready to use for any new user who comes in.

Nhung Ho: So what I hope I showed you was how machine learning can actually make the business of doing business much easier, right? And it’s not … I can tell you it wasn’t obvious to me when I started here, why we need a data scientist to work on accounting. Isn’t it solved? It’s so old, it’s so boring. But I can tell you some of the most boring, mundane things are the areas that are the most exciting because those are the areas that have not seen innovation in a really long time and that’s where you can go in and make a difference. So thank you for letting me share those with you.

Tracy Stone: Thank you, Nhung. I don’t think you tripped over the chairs either, but that might be my job then, huh? Okay, one more raffle now. So get your tickets out and this time our raffle prize is from Origaudio in the set of very cool noise canceling headphones. You like this? Yeah, all right. Let’s see if I can pull your raffle card. Okay, it is 691056. Anybody? 691056. Here you go, I believe you. Okay, wonderful. All right, so next we have Kristina Fox, and Kristina Fox is our staff iOS engineer working on the QuickBooks Self-Employed iOS app.

Tracy Stone: She has spoken internationally at over 25 meet-ups and conferences, including Grace Hopper, iOS Dev UK. Were some people at Grace Hopper a few weeks ago? iOS Dev UK, WeAreDevelopers World Congress and many others on topics ranging from Apple watch development to diversity inclusion. So thank you Kristina for being here and let’s give her a warm welcome.

 

Kristina Fox speaking

Staff iOS Engineer Kristina Fox gives a talk on “Using Mobile Capabilities to Save Time and Money for the Self-Employed” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Kristina Fox: Thank you everyone. Okay, so we’re going to be talking about using mobile capabilities to save time and money for the self employed, and this is really a topic that’s near and dear to my heart because, well I’m an iOS engineer and it’s basically one of the most versatile platforms out there. Okay, is there anyone here that doesn’t have a phone on them right now?

Kristina Fox: Exactly, so that’s why this is one of those platforms that’s literally always on you and it can make such a huge difference in your lives than it already has, considering the fact that none of us really travel without phones anymore. Okay, so let’s get started. Just to give you a bit of context, I work on QuickBooks Self-Employed, it was actually the app that Nhung talked about earlier, and for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it is an app that helps freelancers and contractors help manage their business finances.

Kristina Fox: So she talked a little bit about the mileage tracking. We also do transaction and expense reporting and also invoicing. So there’s lots of really cool stuff that our app does to help all of those self-proprietors out there, the sole proprietors out there. If you think about it, the types of people that we help are people like this freelance photographer out there or maybe even the Lyft or Uber driver that took you here today.

Kristina Fox: So lots of really interesting industries that we can also help out there. Okay, so the next thing that I basically want to dive into is specifically a project that I worked on and developed called Receipt Capture. This is this is one of these most probably my favorite project that I’ve ever worked on here, so it’s really fun for me to share this with you. Okay, so let’s take a step back and say, oh, we decided to go shopping and this is just to set some context about why receipts are so important to our self employed people, right?

Kristina Fox: So we decided to go shopping and we found a really amazing dress. It looked awesome on you in the dressing room and you decided to buy it and bring it home. But once you got home, you really … It ended up changing colors on you. You didn’t really know what color that dress was. Was it white and gold? Was it blue and black? You’re not really sure anymore. So, well, okay, you decided the blue and black doesn’t really work for you and so you want to return it and what exactly do you need usually to return things to a store?

Kristina Fox: Receipts, exactly. So receipts are really important to us as proofs of purchase as consumers, but for our small businesses, they’re really important to help prove that the things that we’re buying are actually business purchases and so this is really important, especially if the IRS comes to audit at some point, you need to be able to prove that the things that you purchased at the end of the day are actually for your business.

Kristina Fox: So, let’s talk about the basic Receipt Capture experience and so I direct your attention all the way to the left side. Usually you’ll hook up QuickBooks Self-Employed to your bank account and you’ll see the list of transactions coming through from your credit card or your checking account. From there, if you have a receipt for Starbucks for example, you’ll want to tap on Starbucks and then that will pull up a detailed view of your transaction.

Kristina Fox: From there you can tap, attach receipt and then you’ll be able to either take a photo or choose from your camera roll if you decided to take that photo earlier. That’s fine, pretty simple experience. You’re really just attaching a photo to a transaction, but one thing that’s kind of interesting about this is that if you’ve ever gone into your checking account or your credit card account and you just bought something, you’ll notice that there might be a pending transaction, right? It means that it hadn’t exactly cleared yet because maybe the restaurant doesn’t have your final total or your credit card is still being authorized.

Kristina Fox: So it can take generally about one to two days for these pending transactions to clear and unfortunately until that time we can’t really attach any receipts to it because it’s not a real transaction at that point. One to two days might not sound like very much time, but really anything can happen in these receipts in that one or two days, anything at all.

Kristina Fox: So what do you do? What do you do when you lose that receipt? Well, hopefully with our new enhanced Receipt Capture experience you won’t have to find out. So I’m going to do a quick demo of the new enhanced Receipt Capture experience that I ended up building for QuickBooks Self-Employed and this is going to be fun to juggle. So hopping in, I’m going to go ahead and end the show and I bring up my phone screen here. So this is the QuickBooks Self-Employed app. I’m trying to make this bigger.

Kristina Fox: You can go into the transactions tab where you can actually snap a receipt. So if you remember before we had to go and tap into an individual transaction to take a picture, well now you don’t really have to do that anymore. So you go into here, we’ll tap snap receipt and then we bring up this new camera view that we have, and so what’s cool about this is it actually does the cropping for you. So I’m shaking a little bit too much right now.

Kristina Fox: Demos are always nerve wracking. Okay, so we’ll steady. Okay, so now we’re able to get a cropped version of our receipt photo here and if you ever wanted to mess around with it, say it didn’t quite crop correctly, you could even go in, it takes you back to that original photo. So then you can manipulate those crop points or you can even rotate that image. So, there’s lots of really cool image enhancements that you can do here, and then from here all you have to do is hit at the bottom, use this photo and it disappears off. It gets uploaded to our service in the background and that’s it.

Kristina Fox: That’s all you have to do now. So this is our new enhanced Receipt Capture experience. So what exactly is happening here? Well, in the background we start off with QuickBooks Self-Employed. From there it actually gets uploaded to our document service. So this is where it actually stores that receipt image for you and then from there it goes to our data extraction service.

Kristina Fox: So, it’s something that Nhung was alluding to earlier where we can actually go and run optical character recognition on that receipt itself and then pull out the data that we really care about. So that’s stuff like, again, the vendor at the top of the receipt, we’re looking for the date, the total, and the credit card number too. So we can pull out all of that receipt data for you, and then we do automatic matching.

Kristina Fox: So now we go back into your list of transactions. Instead of actually having to go in and find that Starbucks transaction again, this algorithm actually takes that receipt and automatically looks at the data that’s coming in from that transaction and it attaches it for you. So it’s literally you take a picture and then you just forget about it and it’s already in your account, all done. Yeah, it’s literally a life changing event.

Kristina Fox: So what are some of the mobile capabilities of this? Well, obviously we’re using the camera to take a photo. We have a lot of touch … We have the touch screen capability where we can actually manipulate the photo if we need to, and we’re also running a lot of image processing algorithms in the background in order to make sure that the photo is usable. So you saw that it was telling me to hold steady.

Kristina Fox: In some cases, if there’s not enough light, it will tell me, oh, you need to add some more light to the background’s too dark, things like that. So there’s a lot of really cool things that are running in the background, just doing image processing there. It’s also a very on the go capability, like as you can see, a lot of the people we’re supporting are Lyft drivers. They’re a freelance photographers, they’re always constantly on the go, they’re gig economists and so they need to be able to have this type of capability wherever they’re going.

Kristina Fox: Of course, on one last thing, if you’re using the iOS platform, you might be familiar with Siri shortcuts, and so if I hop out again and on my phone. Okay, so let’s tell Siri, snap this receipt. It hops directly into that camera. So now the user doesn’t even have to go in and launch QuickBooks Self-Employed. You can just add a Siri shortcut with your own custom phrase and then it will go into the exact view that you need.

Kristina Fox: So we’re really taking advantage of all those platform capabilities here too, and here’s a look at what that looks like. So you can add this custom phrase to Siri and then it will do whatever you tell it to. So this is the one of the cool Siri shortcuts capabilities that we have. That’s it for me. Thank you so much.

Tracy Stone: Thank you, Kristina, and a live demo was so awesome. All right, next up, we have Cassie Divine and Cassie’s the senior vice president of the Intuit QuickBooks online platform where she leads the business units responsible for small business, self-employed, accountant, and the Intuit developer group. She is especially passionate about driving diversity and inclusion in technology with an eye on fostering a favorable work environment for women.

Tracy Stone: Cassie’s been awarded the Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence award and has twice received the Intuit CEO Leadership award. A passionate small business owner herself, she also has an Etsy shop where she sells her DIY kids’ Halloween costumes, might come in handy. So let’s welcome Cassie Divine.

 

Cassie Divine speaking

SVP of QuickBooks Online Platform Cassie Divine gives a talk on “Owning Your Career: Reinventing Yourself to Create Impact at Scale” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Cassie Divine: Thank you, Tracy. That glorious introduction just made my impostor syndrome in this room even worse. I’m so grateful to be here and crowned a Girl Geek with this amazing lineup of my Intuit colleagues. My topic, my lightning talk isn’t a technical one. It’s how to hack your own career and for all of you who know you’ve been working, there is so much conventional wisdom about what you’re supposed to do to move up, and advance, and create an enriching career.

Cassie Divine: By all of those conventional rules, I have done nothing right, and yet I find myself with a big fancy job, and title, and opportunity to make a huge impact. So tonight I want to tell you five quick stories. The stories are unique to me and they’re my crazy stories, but I think the lessons I’ve learned that I’ll share are applicable to lots of you, I hope. So I hope you hear something you already knew and needed to hear or something you could learn.

Cassie Divine: So story one, I started at Intuit 12 years ago and I joined as a senior manager and I had a plan to get promoted in two years. I had talked to the boss I came to work for. He had seemed to think that that was a reasonable expectation and I was at a point in my career where I was convinced that I was better than a lot of people and I needed to go. It was a sure thing that was going to happen. Of course in this story, it doesn’t happen that way and I was devastated.

Cassie Divine: I was devastated because I didn’t get this title that I wanted and the wisdom from my boss was just to work hard, to work even harder and to sort of ride the time and that it would happen in one to two years. I found myself being frustrated with the idea that I was waiting to get a label from someone else and in a moment I decided to create a label for myself. I’d been thinking about starting an Etsy store, a side gig, for a long time and I decided that this would be my moment and screw not being the title I’d wanted, I would be the CEO of my own thing.

Cassie Divine: And I kept working, but the work changed because so much of my creativity, and hustle, and anxiety, instead of worrying about some label, it went into something that was for me, and it was really enriching for me, and I actually probably stopped staying as late and stopped doing some of the things you do when you’re searching for a title and just started focusing on impact at work.

Cassie Divine: Because I had this creative outlet and don’t you know I got promoted six months later, and the lesson for me though was you define you, nobody else gets to do that. Titles can just be labels and we don’t like them when they’re bad, and I worry we give them too much power when we think they’re good and a lot of it is about the impact and the journey. Story two, I was coming back from my maternity leave and I got a lot of wisdom from women and men, which was, the plan was just to come back and show that I was the same person.

Cassie Divine: I could just, nothing had changed and I could work the same way and I remember thinking like, I don’t think I can even do that, everything has changed. I don’t want to be here the same hours. My priorities have shifted and I had never cashed in any of my street credibility or what I had had. I had never asked for anything and I decided that this might be the moment that I would, and I did my research, I talked to a lot of people who had organized creative arrangements.

Cassie Divine: A lot of people gave me advice that it was absolutely the worst time in my career to take a step back and there are a lot of studies that say women are going to earn less. I just decided to go for it and I asked to take 80% of my salary and have every Friday to be with my little girl. But I made a deal with my boss, which was, I will deliver the same impact, it just is going to look different. I did that arrangement for two years. It was so awesome and I got promoted after I came back full time.

Cassie Divine: I learned in it to ask for what you want. The worst thing anybody can say is no, but in asking for what you want, to be clear about what you’re going to deliver so people know what they get when they say yes. Third story, I was 15 years into my career, seven years at Intuit, and I had just been promoted to vice president and conventional wisdom is like, this is your career, this is what you’re going to do, this is your path. You build on it.

Cassie Divine: I had been unhappy for a long time and just going through the motions, and I loved the company, I loved the company’s impact, but I wasn’t finding it was meaningful to me, and I started working on my network. I agree with what Marianna said and I had always given to my network and this was a point I asked, I worked my network on what would someone take a bet on me to do that would be different from my job and I got my big break and it came with a demotion.

Cassie Divine: It came with giving back a team, which I had been led to believe that it was all about creating this big kingdom and you grow in giving … You grow and getting this big team and I went to being an individual contributor and people inside and outside the company thought it was a little crazy because it just seemed like it was too late to make a change and that it on paper looked a little insane to a lot of people. But I was so excited about it to get to have an impact on moving into a product business when I actually moved into the QuickBooks Self-Employed business.

Cassie Divine: I would move into a role in BizOps and I was excited because the person I was going to work for saw something in me that I didn’t even know I was capable of doing, but both of us were willing to take that bet. 18 months later after getting that job, I got the biggest job I’d ever gotten. I almost went for something bigger than what I had stepped down from, and it came when I wasn’t focusing on trying to get promoted. I was just trying to focus on the biggest impact. But the lesson that I learned in this is bet on yourself, but that has two parts.

Cassie Divine: It has the courage that you make the bet and it’s also about finding somebody who will make that bet with you, and my advice to all of you would be seek someone, your boss or mentor who sees what you’re capable of doing and suspends disbelief and isn’t just obsessed with what you’ve been able to do on paper already.

Cassie Divine: Fourth story, I was now in my big job leading this product business and it was really fun and I knew the rap on me is I had taken over from someone who was really successful. It was sort of like my was seen as the person who was just helping keep it up and running, and there was a job similar to mine that had been vacant for three to four months and it was bigger, and it was a lot harder, and it had a different profile and I wasn’t a candidate for it.

Cassie Divine: In fact, I was on the interview committee to go and search for the person who would be the right person and based on every discussion of what we thought we were looking for, wisdom said I had no business to do this. As we talked to the team and as we kept interviewing people, I started thinking, I think I could do this job and I actually think I could start to show that it’s not just about keeping the easy thing running, but I could show that I could work on something hard and lead a turnaround.

Cassie Divine: But I didn’t necessarily have the courage at the time to raise my hand to just take it, and so I raised my hand to help with it. I had said, what if I help in a capacity as we continue to search for this person and I will make it better. This team is in need, I have a great leadership team in Self-employed. They’ll step up and do more and I’ll play this dual role and six months later we decided that I actually was the right person for the job and I stepped into the role.

Cassie Divine: But more importantly, I showed that I was willing to take on the hard things. I was willing to do a lot more and as a result, I got my big job today, which is far bigger. What I learned in that is it’s okay to be your own hype woman and raise your hand and sometimes you’re the best person qualified to say you might be able to go do a job and be considered for it.

Cassie Divine: What I’d offer for you is, if you’re worried about it or if they’re worried about it, one of the best ways to get that shot is in a volunteer or rotational capacity because there’s nothing that is a downside to that except you do a lot more work in the meantime, but it shows you and it shows them that it’s a great opportunity. Last story isn’t a story, it’s something that has weaved through all of my stories, which is conventional wisdom is that career success is all about you and you answer this question, what do I need to do to get ahead and how can I show that I’m, I’m being successful?

Cassie Divine: What I found is career success is actually about making everybody else successful and investing in your teams, and your peers, and your boss, and your customers. One of my favorite books, I encourage all of you to read it is by Adam Grant. It’s called Give and Take and it is all about this idea that investing in other’s success is what creates the most success for us. Now, it feels counterintuitive when you think about what it feels like to give someone credit, God forbid it’s someone mansplaining something to you. It’s hard sometimes because it feels random.

Cassie Divine: Maybe you don’t know them or you haven’t … It’s not sort of about this give and take, but do it anyway. Real leadership is about creating impact and it is more easy to do. It is more fun to do with others, and as you do that, I promise it comes back to you. You become the person that everybody wants to work with and it has its ups and downs and I agree with Marianna, you have to worry about the people who are just taking and not giving back to that, but I encourage you to do it.

Cassie Divine: So the lesson I’ve learned there is what I’d call, what Adam Grant says is givers take all, and invest in others and raise others up and make that a part of your leadership brand. It will unlock things that are just amazing for you. To wrap up, start … I like starting with a plan. I like starting with a path. I like the point Marianna made about the things that are important. I would encourage you to be open to the idea that it can change dramatically and I would think a lot more about moving forward than moving up. Hack your own career.

Cassie Divine: You define you. Ask for what you want with accountability, bet on yourself and find the person who’s going to bet on you, raise your hand to take on work people didn’t know, but you did, that you’re capable of all while investing in others’ success. I’m so excited to find out what all of you will go and do and the impact that you create in your own careers. Thank you.

Tracy Stone: Okay, so with that, that ends our formal program tonight. I want to thank you all for coming. I want to thank all of our speakers. So these are some amazing women that work at Intuit doing some really cool work and leading teams around the work we’re doing to power prosperity for our 50 million customers and growing. You can just spend some time and interact with them as long as they’re able to stay.

Tracy Stone: Ask them questions; those questions that you had that you didn’t get a chance to ask. There are drinks out there. You can go out on the patio and network for a little while longer. I hope you all had a chance to connect with everybody and walked away with some few, those nuggets of wisdom that you’ll take as you go on to do amazing things, as Cassie said. So thank you all.

 

Cindy Osmon speaking

Distinguished Engineer Cindy Osmon demos “Smart Mirror” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Nirmala Ranganathan speaking

Principal Product Manager Nirmala Ranganathan demos “Shield” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Yi Ng speaking

Principal Product Manager Yi Ng and Senior Software Engineer Regina Garcia demo “QuickBooks for New Users” at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

 

Intuit Tech Women at Intuit Girl Geek Dinner group of women in tech

Thanks to all the Tech Women @ Intuit for hosting us warmly at Intuit’s Mountain View headquarters for our Intuit Girl Geek Dinner! Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

Best of 2019 – Girl Geek Dinner Videos

By Angie Chang (Girl Geek X Founder)

We’ve hosted 27 Girl Geek Dinners, of which 60% were located in San Francisco and 40% were located in the Silicon Valley. These dinners were attended by over 4,000 women this year and we are thrilled to continue to host Girl Geek Dinners for the 12th year.

Missed a few dinners? Don’t worry, we share videos of talks on the Girl Geek X YouTube channel. Subscribe to watch the latest videos!

GIRL GEEK DINNER TALKS IN 2019 – MOST-WATCHED ON YOUTUBE

Maybe you’re wondering where to start watching.

Here are the most popular Girl Geek Dinner videos in 2019, ranked by most YouTube views:

#1 – “Scale Your Career With Open Source” Confluent Girl Geek Dinner (video)Neha Narkhede (Confluent Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder) with transcript

#2 – “Thank U, Next: How “Diversity” Gets In The Way Of Gender Equity” Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner (video) Aubrey Blanche (Atlassian Global Head of Diversity & Belonging) with transcript

#3 – “Security First” Palo Alto Networks Girl Geek Dinner (video) Citlalli Solano (Palo Alto Networks Director of Engineering) with transcript

#4 – “Data + Scale + Community = Impact” Strava Girl Geek Dinner (video) Cathy Tanimura (Strava Senior Director, Analytiics & Data Science) with transcript

#5 – “Offline Performance Marketing: Using Art & Science To Drive Response & Revenue” HomeLight Girl Geek Dinner (video) Molly Laufer (HomeLight Director of Offline Marketing) with transcript

#6 – “Dossiers Of Awesome: One Way To Help Folks Get The Recognition They Deserve” Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner (video) Erin Dees (Stitch Fix Principal Software Engineer) with transcript

#7 – “Finding Your Niche By Identifying Your Strengths” Blend Girl Geek Dinner (video) Ashley McIntyre (Blend Sales Engineering Manager) with transcript

#8 – “Accelerating Computation For Real-Time Machine Learning” Xilinx Girl Geek Dinner (video) Jennifer Wong (Xilinx Vice President of FPGA Product Development) with transcript

#9 – “Machine Learning In Support: Infusing A Flagship Product With Innovative New Features” Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner (video) Eleanor Stribling (Zendesk Group Product Manager) with transcript

#10 – “People-Powered Innovation” Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner (video) Tracy Sun (Poshmark Senior Vice President of New Markets & Co-Founder) with transcript

GIRL GEEK DINNERS IN 2019 – HIGHEST ATTENDEE-RATED SESSIONS

Prefer the metric of quality over quantity? Maybe the Girl Geek Dinner happened later in the year, so there was less time to amass YouTube views.

Here are audience favorites from Girl Geek Dinners, ranked by attendee ratings on content and speakers in 2019:

#1 – Mode Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#2 – Blend Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#3 – Strava Girl Geek Dinner (video) 

#4 – OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#5 – Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#6 – Confluent Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#7 – Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#8 – Okta Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#9 – Xilinx Girl Geek Dinner (video)

#10 – Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner (video)

GIRL GEEK DINNERS IN 2020

We would love to have more Girl Geek Dinners at med/health companies, biotech companies, consumer-facing companies… We are interested in partner more with the scientific and ethical-minded companies out there in addition to our slate of tech companies hosting Girl Geek Dinners.

Here’s how to partner with Girl Geek X in 2020. We are currently working with sponsors for 2020 dinner dates, and excited to continue partnering with companies to host Girl Geek Dinners!

“X” IS FOR PODCASTS AND MORE

Girl Geek Dinners, Girl Geek Elevate, Girl Geek Podcasts, and much more!

Here are the best 10 Elevate videos from 2019, and the most-downloaded 10 Girl Geek Podcasts from 2019.

We’ll be releasing the best of 2019 lists for more content soon, stay tuned!

#1 – “Scale Your Career With Open Source” Confluent Girl Geek Dinner (video)Neha Narkhede
#2 – “Thank U, Next: How “Diversity” Gets In The Way Of Gender Equity” Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner (video) Aubrey Blanche
#3 – “Security First” Palo Alto Networks Girl Geek Dinner (video) Citlalli Solano
#4 – “Data + Scale + Community = Impact” Strava Girl Geek Dinner (video) Cathy Tanimura
#5 – “Offline Performance Marketing: Using Art & Science To Drive Response & Revenue” HomeLight Girl Geek Dinner (video) Molly Laufer
#6 – “Dossiers Of Awesome: One Way To Help Folks Get The Recognition They Deserve” Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner (video) Erin Dees
#7 – “Finding Your Niche By Identifying Your Strengths” Blend Girl Geek Dinner (video) Ashley McIntyre
#8 – “Accelerating Computation For Real-Time Machine Leearning” Xilinx Girl Geek Dinner (video) Jennifer Wong
#9 – “Machine Learning In Support: Infusing A Flagship Product With Innovative New Features” Zendesk Girl Geek Dinner (video) Eleanor Stribling
#10 – “People-Powered Innovation” Poshmark Girl Geek Dinner (video) Tracy Sun

4 Halloween Ideas For Girl Geeks

Looking for a last minute Halloween costume? Here are some of our favorite women worth talking about – and dressing up as for inspiring STEAM Halloween costumes!

Katherine Johnson – Mathematician

Katherine Johnson.

NASA Research Mathematician Katherine Johnson calculated trajectory for spacecraft missions. She verified results made by electronic computers to calculate the orbit for spacecraft.

Her work was made famous in the book and movieHidden Figures” about African-American women mathematicians who fought against segregation, discrimination and sexism to work and excel at NASA. Go watch it if you haven’t already!

Her alma mater erected a statue of Katherine Johnson, and a children’s book “Counting on Katherine” has been published. Check out these adorable girls who rocked the Hidden Figures look!

Grace Hopper – Computer Scientist

Admiral Grace Hopper.

Grace Hopper joined the U.S. Navy during World War II and was assigned to program the Mark I computer.

She was at Harvard as a research fellow when a moth was found to have shorted out the Mark II, and is sometimes given credit for the invention of the term “computer bug” — though she didn’t actually author the term, she did help popularize it.

She also popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL. Check out this professor’s great Grace Hopper costume!

Maggie Gee – Pilot

Maggie Gee in her pilot’s uniform.

Did you know that not a single major airport in the United States is named for a woman?

There’s a campaign to rename Oakland Airport for Maggie Gee. A physicist and researcher, she was one of the first American women trained to fly military aircraft, and was one of only two Chinese-American women to serve as a pilot in Women Airforce Service Pilots in WWII. As a WASP pilot, she helped male pilots train for combat, as female pilots were not allowed to serve in combat at that time.

A children’s book based on her life “Sky High” has been published. You can easily buy or make an “Amelia Earheart” costume and share the story of Maggie Gee!

Frida Kahlo – Painter

Frida Kahlo, circa 1937.

Known as one of Mexico‘s greatest artists, Frida Kahlo is remembered for self-portraits, pain and passion, and vibrant colors. Having suffered from polio as a child, she then nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager and endured 30 operations. She has created approximately 200 paintings, sketches and drawings. In 2006, her self-portrait went for over $5 million at Sotheby’s auction.

You can visit her museum in Mexico City, where her belongings are on display throughout the Blue House, as if she still lived there. Many Frida Kahlo books and toys have been produced. Beyoncé dressed as Frida Kahlo a few Halloweens ago.

More Resources:


Podcast Highlights: 6 Quick Lessons on Branding

Branding to Stand Out - Personal Branding

Whew! We just wrapped our 20th podcast episode, and now we’re taking a look back over the past few months at all of the amazing conversations we’ve had, the laughs we’ve shared, and the tough topics we’ve tackled… and we figured it’s the perfect time for the Girl Geek X team to share our top takeaways that women in tech and allies everywhere can benefit from!

We’ll be doing this via a mini-series of blog posts in the coming weeks, where we’ll break down our key learnings, salient moments, and hard-hitting realizations and share them with the community as bite-sized nuggets that you can quickly devour while waiting for everyone to join your morning conference call. (Can you hear me now? Everyone please mute!)

If you haven’t already subscribed to the Girl Geek X podcast, head on over to iTunesSpotifyStitcher, or Google Play and get ready to start binge listening! 

First up, Girl Geek X CEO & Co-Founder Angie Chang is delving into her favorite (and our most recent!) release on the Girl Geek X Podcast — Episode 20: Branding to Stand Out.

Why this topic matters, and why it’s her favorite episode:

Angie Chang, CEO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
Angie Chang, CEO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X

“I enjoy how we as the Girl Geek X team can talk thru the uncomfortable reality of branding for women in their work lives and work places. Each place and situation is different, so it was fun to hear the diverse perspectives we all have, and share some common themes in how we feel we show up at work and how to be most effective while being true to our selves.

6 Quick Takeaways

6. “Part of what a brand is, is an emotional connection. It’s how you’re perceived. It’s how we’re perceived in the workplace. And I would say, as a woman in business, and as women often are told in tech companies, you’re either too nice or too aggressive. Or, you’re too mean. Or, you’re too sloppy. Or you’re too proper, or whatever. The list can go on and on. Everybody in this room has some anecdote of a time when they felt they got conflicting messages or they weren’t quite sure ‘how do I show up in this meeting?’

I think for a lot of us, throughout our career we’ve found a way to find that balance of, how can we show up at work in a way to be super effective and so that people listen and we can do really good work? And how do we stay true to who we are?” —Khobi Brooklyn, VP of Communications at Aurora

Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X
Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder of Girl Geek X

5. “When I was very deliberate about what brand I wanted for myself or what I wanted to be known for, I then was very clear about what opportunities I wanted to seek out for myself, in addition to what I was already doing. That helped me.” —Sukrutha Bhadouria, Co-Founder & CTO at Girl Geek X and Sr. Manager, Engineering at Salesforce

4. When I was earlier in my career as a Girl Geek, I would run from the idea and the topic of branding. Because I’m like, ‘That’s just marketing.’ I didn’t want to deal with that.

As you get more experienced in your career, you start to see the bigger picture and how your manager or other people need to be able to pick you out from a crowd. And then the branding issue becomes something that you actually pay attention to — what you want to be known for, and then tying it to your authentic self and making sure it’s aligned.” — Angie Chang, Co-Founder & CEO at Girl Geek X

Leah Mcgowan-Hare, VP of Trailhead Evangelism at Salesforce
Leah McGowan-Hare, VP of Trailhead Evangelism at Salesforce

3.Focus on the value you add and everything else will begin to fall in place. It’s really easy to get caught up in that branding piece, particularly with social media and all this good stuff. And I’m always like, well, let’s take step back. What is your story? What are you trying to build? What is the story you’re trying to create?” —Leah McGowen-Hare, VP of Trailhead Evangelism at Salesforce

2.Your brand goes so much farther beyond the one specific company that you’re working in. It really exists in your whole network. It’s how you represent yourself to your whole network. Within your job, outside of your job.

I think what’s tied all the things that I do together is definitely storytelling and social impact. With everything that I’ve done in my career and all the outside of work things that I’ve been doing, those are the threads that tie them together. That’s how people view me. Regardless of what aspect of my career I’m showing up in.” —Rachel Jones, Podcaster at Girl Geek X

1. “Your brand in college is not the brand you had in your 20s, and is not the brand you had in your 30s, in your 40s, in your 50s and 60s. Your personal brand is going to continually be a work in progress.” — Gretchen DeKnikker, COO at Girl Geek X

Check out the full episode or podcast transcript for more great insights on organizational and personal branding for women in business, or subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more insightful content on topics that matter to women and allies.


About the Author

Amy Weicker - Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X

Amy Weicker is the Head of Marketing at Girl Geek X, and she has been helping launch & grow tech companies as a marketing leader and demand generation consultant for nearly 20 years. Amy previously ran marketing at SaaStr, where she helped scale the world’s largest community & conference for B2B SaaS Founders, Execs and VCs from $0 to $10M and over 200,000 global community members. She was also the first head of marketing at Sales Hacker, Inc. (acquired by Outreach) which helps connect B2B sales professionals with the tools, technology and education they need to excel in their careers.

Scale Your Career with Open Source: Girl Geek X Confluent Talks & Panel (Video + Transcript)

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

Angie Chang and Sukrutha Bhaduoria speak

Girl Geek X team: Angie Chang and Sukrutha Bhadouria welcome the sold-out crowd to Confluent Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Transcript from Confluent Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Angie Chang: Hi, everybody, thank you for coming out tonight on a Sunday night. This is our first Girl Geek dinner on a Sunday night after over 10 years of hosting almost weekly Girl Geek dinners. My name is Angie Chang, founder of Girl Geek X. I wanted to say thank you for coming out on a weekend. It’s really great to see everyone’s faces here at Confluent in San Francisco, to meet everyone, and also really excited to introduce Sukrutha, my co-organizer at Girl Geek X, who is six weeks into her maternity leave. So she has the littlest Girl Geek now.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, everyone. Welcome. Like Angie said, so nice to see such a huge crowd on a Sunday. I honestly can’t tell the difference anymore between a weekend and a weekday. But thanks for reminding me it’s a Sunday. But hey, I really wanted to explain, we always do this, we ask how many of you, is it your first time at a Girl Geek dinner? So do raise your hands. Wow. What’s been amazing in the last, I don’t know, a little over 12 months is that that number’s been increasing and increasing. And that’s been great because we want more and more people to join our community.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Why we do this is we want to elevate more women in tech, in various roles in tech, and each dinner and each event is sponsored by a different company. And these companies are kind enough to host all of you in their space and they provide you with great content through their talks. We also use this content in our podcasts because Angie and I used to do these long drives to Girl Geek dinners all across the Bay. And we started to talk about what else we should do besides dinners. And now in the last 11 years, we’ve evolved beyond dinners to podcasts and virtual conferences as well. So we’ve had two virtual conferences so far, and we want to make it annual. Do check out our podcasts. And we want to know if you have any other ideas for what you’d like the content to be, please share it with us. Do share on social media tonight. Know we have a lot of great speakers tonight. So do share what you’re learning tonight with the #girlgeekxconfluent. I can’t speak full sentences anymore. But that’s all I had to say. I don’t want to take any more time. Thank you again to Confluent for making this happen. Thanks.

Dani Traphagen speaking

Senior Systems Engineer Dani Traphagen emcees Confluent Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Dani Traphagen: All right, what a beautiful crowd. There’s so many of you here and we absolutely love to see that. So welcome, everyone. We are really happy to have you here for dinner in our special San Francisco office. This is actually a satellite office to our home down in Palo Alto, and we’ll actually be moving soon next Wednesday to a new home in Mountain View. So we’re absolutely thrilled to have this stellar company of Girl Geek Dinner, dinners here at Confluent tonight, and I’ll bet you’re wondering what we do here at Confluent. So I’ll have a couple words about that. I actually luckily consult people about that in the subject of my day to day life.

Dani Traphagen: So my name is Dani Traphagen, and I am a senior systems engineer here at Confluent. What I do on my day to day is I work with account executives, specifically in the sales organization. So I technically consult large organizations anywhere, basically above $1 billion in revenue on how to leverage our technology. So that’s what I do. I really like my job. I love working with large companies on how to leverage our infrastructure and working specifically in the software realm on how to use real time software specifically.

Dani Traphagen: So this is my third company doing this kind of work. I have a background in database technology. And this is my third open source project and working in an enterprise on that. I actually ended up transitioning from bioengineering, though, specifically, into a career in tech after college, and this was many years ago. I will not tell you how many years ago. And I heavily leveraged events exactly like this to end up making that transition. So I really believe in them and the power of them, networking with people, making key mentoring relationships, and learning from role models, like some of the ones that you’ll hear from tonight, and kind of how full circle things are here, which is super bizarre. One of the men here tonight, Peter Feria, was at one of the events that I went to. He’s one of our videographers. Tim Berglund, who if you know anything about the Confluent’s ecosystem itself, and who’s kind of who in that world, you’ll see a lot of his videos online. He is one of our developer relationship folks. And he was my first boss at a company called DataStax.

Dani Traphagen: So it’s kind of crazy how full circle things go. So I really encourage you to meet, to network, to speak with people. And to just kind of learn more about all the things that you could possibly do. So now, a word about kind of what we do in this very building that you’re in right now, to just kind of bring things to a real visceral meaning. So Confluent provides enterprises exceptional expertise and tooling around the open source project Apache Kafka, and Apache Kafka as a fundamental way of moving event driven data from different sources within an organization to other interested parties within that same organization.

Dani Traphagen: So the way that I like to think about it is pretty much like the true heartbeat of your data pipeline. And it has become the central nervous system of many organizations, those specific organizations that I consult. With the Confluent stack, businesses can support streaming data use cases and optimize their insights and user experiences for many of their mission critical applications. So these are applications that are essential to their day to day operations. It has become an industry standard for the modern enterprise.

Dani Traphagen: Apache Kafka is an extremely robust technology, and it was co-created by tonight’s speaker, and pardon me, I should probably use my mic here. It was co-created by tonight’s speaker, Neha Narkhede, who is also Confluent’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer. It was inspired back during her time at LinkedIn in an effort to help manage the massive scaling efforts, along with her fellow Confluent co-founders. Neha has been an exceptional role model for so many women, including myself, and she has shown me in a sea of Bills and Elons and Steves, that something more is so possible in this world. And that has left a truly indelible mark in my path. So please join me in giving her a sincere and warm welcome.

Neha Narkhede: Thank you, Dani, for a very warm welcome and welcome Girl Geeks to Confluent’s very first Girl Geek dinner. It’s been such a long time since I first spoke at a Girl Geek event. This was about seven or eight years ago when I was an engineer at LinkedIn. Today, I’m so humbled to be hosting one and be here in front of all of you. I hope that you learn something new from this event. I hope that you make new introductions, and thank you all for taking the time to be here.

Neha Narkhede speaking

Confluent co-founder Neha Narkhede talks about starting and scaling the billion-dollar infrastructure startup at Confluent Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Neha Narkhede: So let me start off by telling you a little bit about myself. I was born and brought up in India. I learned computers at the age of eight, mostly to play video games and draw on MS Paint. So while I didn’t learn programming while learning to write, like all the whiz kid stories that you might have heard in the Valley, it did interest me enough to take up computer science. So I moved to the U.S. to get my masters in Georgia Tech. After that, I took a job in a big company, Oracle, mostly to find a safe path into an H1B visa. This was during the 2008 crash. Pretty soon, I realized the power of the open source community to accelerate my growth and learn new things. So I specifically applied to a company that had a real investment in open source communities, LinkedIn.

Neha Narkhede: I taught myself distributed systems on the job. I was lucky enough to be on a team that got a chance to create a very popular distributed system called Apache Kafka. We open sourced it, it went viral. I sourced a business opportunity around Confluent, pitched it to my teammates. Fortunately enough for me, they agreed to start this company with me. This was five years ago. Today, we’re more than 900 people worldwide and growing very quickly. Over time, I’ve worn many hats. I started off as an engineer, and then I ran engineering teams, and I transitioned to product, so quite a few changes. That was a little bit about my technical journey. For fun, I travel, I go scuba diving, and I engage in a fair bit amount of retail therapy.

Neha Narkhede: So most of my career has been about introducing this new category of software called Kafka and event streaming into the world. So to tell you a little bit about why we started this, we were facing a pretty unique challenge at LinkedIn. And the challenge was that our users could use our product and they were using it 24 hours a day, in a very real time fashion. But all the software that LinkedIn had could only get access to all that data and studied enough to produce more patterns and produce better products, maybe a couple times a week. So that was pretty slow. We wanted to take that all the way down to real time experiences. And so this meant processing billions of events a day in real time. There was nothing out there that did that. So we started Apache Kafka to solve this very problem to process lots of events in real time. And to basically give all of LinkedIn software access to all of its data at a millisecond level.

Neha Narkhede: We thought that this couldn’t have just been LinkedIn’s problems, so we open sourced it and we were right. Pretty soon, in the early days, Silicon Valley companies, all the top tech brands that you can think of, adopted Apache Kafka. After that, it entered the enterprise. And today, we know that about 60% of Fortune 100 companies depend on Kafka as a foundational technology platform. And any company that starts off as a digital one, they ingest all their data is in Kafka from day one.

Neha Narkhede: So anytime this sort of an adoption happens for infrastructure software, there’s a lot more to it than a good product. There’s usually a paradigm shift that drives such a change. And 10 years ago, that paradigm shift was that every company was not only becoming a software company, but it was literally getting turned into software. So what do I mean by that? You don’t call a cab company anymore, you go to your app, and the entire ride is managed entirely in software. You don’t go to an ATM Teller, the whole transaction happens online. So entire parts of businesses and businesses themselves are being replaced by software. So that’s the entire sort of business paradigm shift. But that’s leading to a lot of technology paradigm shifts.

Neha Narkhede: So the rise of the public cloud for developer velocity, rise of machine learning to use data and software to make better business decisions, mobile first customer experiences, and last but not the least, event streaming, because all of these trends, if you look at them, they all need access to data in real time. And event streaming is sort of the underlying paradigm that ties all of these things together. So not only was Kafka, of course, a great product, all of these changes were happening at the same time over the last 10 years that led to that massive adoption curve that I showed you.

Neha Narkhede: Event streaming is disrupting entire industries. To give you an idea, this is what Kafka users and Confluent customers are doing with Apache Kafka. Your ride sharing apps are powering your ETA feature and surge pricing using Kafka. Your bank is doing your credit card fraud detection using Kafka. Practically every retail company is doing real time inventory management using Kafka behind the scenes and your Netflix movie recommendations are also powered by Kafka. This sort of a widespread adoption of Kafka was possible, largely because of a large and thriving open source community. That was sort of the impetus behind Kafka’s adoption. I just want to say that the same open source community can act as a real catalyst for your own career growth. This is what it did for me, and it can get broad reach. You can learn from a pretty large community of people. You can diversify learning. You can be part of actually multiple communities at the same time versus one particular company.

Neha Narkhede: Large foundational technologies today start off as open source. So if you’re in the community, you’re part of a paradigm shift in and of itself. And I think that kind of impact is pretty large, because whatever you work on gets adopted across many businesses versus one particular one. You get to learn quite a lot. So this is the theme for today, I thought I’d mention. So that was a little bit about the what, in my journey, I did want to spend a few minutes about what it felt like, my experience, my career has felt a little bit like this, an obstacle race of sorts, and not all of those obstacles were technical in nature. And in fact, many times I’ve had to work 2X harder than my male counterparts to get the same thing.

Neha Narkhede: And while that might sound a little stressful and unfair, I want to share some perspective that my brother shared with me. He’s a many time Ironman finisher. He says that if you have to swim a mile in the ocean, and you train to swim a mile in the pool and expect it to feel similar, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s the currents that you need to prepare for. So that keeps me going quite a bit. In the moment, it feels like an obstacle race. But when I zoom out, and I look back at the last 10 years, I’ve started realizing that it feels like crossing a chasm. And I like to call this the credibility chasm. This is a phenomenon that I’ve observed where underrepresented minorities early on in their careers, they get marginalized, doubted, have to work much harder than everybody else to prove themselves over and over again, until you finally cross and make it somewhere on the other side, where sort of the opposite happens, you get noticed pretty easily, you get celebrated pretty widely for your achievements. While I have not crossed this chasm, what keeps me going are two things, long term thinking and a lot of grit, judgment to make decisions sort of not optimized towards the short term objective, but towards some long term goal and the stubborn persistence to just keep going.

Neha Narkhede: I believe this grit is rooted at an early childhood value, that many of you who grew up in middle class urban India will identify with. This is what we now know as the growth mindset. My parents sort of instilled this value in me that if you were open to learning and worked very, very hard, that you can actually learn anything you want to and you can be whoever you wanted to. And that sort of has stuck with me the value of education and hard work. How many of you in the audience know what this picture is about? Blurt it out.

Neha Narkhede: Yeah, this is the ISRO project managers or scientists. ISRO is India Space Research Organization. This picture was taken when they were celebrating a successful Mars mission. They put a satellite in Mars’ orbit, and they made an attempt at probably one tenth, the cost of any other mission in the world that has done that. This picture went viral when it was published. When a young girl in India looks at this picture, I think she believes with conviction that she can be one of these scientists when she grows up. And I had the privilege to be inspired by a lot of role models, even though not these particular ones. And I can say that role models are a primary driver, I think of a lasting change. And I get very excited when I look at that picture. But not just role models, but I think, the one last thing I want to leave you with is developing a real sisterhood will take us very far in seeing the change we want to see in the industry.

Neha Narkhede: What do I mean by that? Little gestures go a very long way. Pull a fellow woman aside who you think is screwing up, give her direct feedback, all the guys I know do that very often and it helps a long way, stop a conversation in a meeting to hear her out, vouch for each other very loudly in calibration discussions, and give credit if possible and very frequently publicly, these are all the little things we can do to sort of see the change we want to see in the industry. So that is sort of something I want to leave you with. With that, I’m going to conclude this very short talk and now we can move toward the next part of the segment. All right.

Dani Traphagen: All right, and for this next part of the process tonight, we’re actually going to have a panel session with Angie and Neha. So I’ll leave them to it.

Angie Chang: Awesome. So I have some prepared questions to ask you. Thank you for that presentation. So people might know Kafka from its creation at LinkedIn. And for those who don’t know what it is, can you briefly summarize what it is and how it’s evolved as a technology?

Neha Narkhede: Yeah, so Kafka is a highly scalable pub-sub messaging system. That’s how it started. What it does is it sits at the heart of your company’s data center. It connects up all the applications and all the data systems so that they can share data in real time and process data in real time to power all the things that you saw, real time customer experiences. Over time, we added functionality to Kafka that made a lot of sense. So the a-ha moment in Kafka is that it was not only scalable, which no other messaging system was, but it could remember, it could store data, so you can rewind and reprocess data. And that’s what caused its success in the world. Over time, we added related functionality, we added connectors so you can move data from all the other systems in a plug and play manner. We added stream processing so you can do sort of SQL on top of Kafka like maps and joins and aggregates.

Neha Narkhede: So this sort of combined functionality of pub-sub, connectors, and stream processing is what is now called an event streaming platform. So Kafka has evolved from a pub-sub system into an event streaming platform.

Angie Chang: Awesome. Yeah, I’m getting really familiar with event streaming platform as a category now. Let’s talk about your career. You started as an engineer, and then became an engineering manager, startup founder, and now you’re running product. Can you share something from your playbook with everyone here?

Neha Narkhede: Playbook? So yeah, that’s a lot of changes into it. So my playbook is I do a couple of things when I have to deal with a lot of change, like the first thing is I do believe, I firmly do believe in the growth mindset. So when I encounter something new, I’m fairly sure that if I spend enough time on it, that I can learn the ropes of it. The second thing I do is sort of this crazy knowledge gathering. So I read every book on the new subject, I reach out to experts, and I set up time and ask them questions. I just sort of like to learn a new area before I jump into it. And the third thing I do is reflection. I sort of sit down and try to calibrate myself on how I’m doing in that new area. And I talk to a couple of my close champions to sort of get their view on the subject, and then just keep iterating from there on. So that’s sort of my, I don’t know if it’s playbook, but I do that very often.

Angie Chang: It sounds good. There aren’t too many infrastructure unicorn companies that were started by women. I think we could only think of one, Diane Greene of VMware, and now adding to that list Confluent and Neha as a co-founder. And we hear women starting consumer companies, and they’re on the cover of magazines, but they’re often consumer. And before the infrastructure startups, we don’t see any women starting B2B infrastructure companies. So what is it about you, Neha, that’s different in that you can do this? And how can we get more women in infrastructure to start companies?

Neha Narkhede: Yeah, it’s one of my pet peeves is that there aren’t a lot of us starting, not only just infrastructure, but B2B companies. I think there’s there’s some luck and a lot of hard work. But if I were to hypothesize on why that is, I think there are a few things maybe. The first is that it’s a very male dominated field to begin with. And so when you don’t see people that look like you as founders of B2B companies, and when you know that starting a company is probably like five or 10 years of very hard work, then you may not be encouraged to take that very first step.

Neha Narkhede: So that’s probably one reason. The second one is, and I think I can only hypothesize is, I think there’s some perception that women may be uniquely qualified to start consumer companies or marketplace companies, because you have a better understanding of the end consumer. And while I’m really happy about the rise of consumer unicorns, I think that’s the same reason that women are successful with consumer companies, this is the same reason they will be successful with B2B companies is we’re smart, capable people. But I think that will change over a period of time. 2019 is probably the first year when we saw so many unicorn companies that were started by women. That’s like the first step in the change. I think we need a couple more women starting B2B companies. I will say that starting B2B companies is much more of a playbook than starting consumer companies. Predicting company behavior is a lot easier than predicting consumer behavior, so if you’re thinking of starting a company, I can tell you that a B2B company will be easier to start and grow. And I think we just need to see a couple more successful examples to tip that.

Angie Chang: Definitely, I think, so I would definitely like to say, people that we know on a first name basis, Mark, Larry, whatnot, now we add Neha to that. So tell your friends. We need more role models out there. So thank you for hosting us tonight. We talk a lot about women in tech in general. So let’s focus on the leadership aspect. Based on your own experience, what’s the greatest barrier for getting women into leadership positions?

Neha Narkhede: Wow, I wish there was just one barrier. That way, it would be much easier to cross. I’ll say a few things. I think we hear a lot about the imposter syndrome, and I can tell you that not just women, but men face it too. I think the reason it’s so much more magnified for minorities is because this sort of external feedback loop is much more skeptical than the usual, “Go man, you can just kill it, and you can do this.” So it’s a lot harder, but I can tell you what it does for leadership is it can sort of not encourage you to take risks, because if you think about what leadership is, you’re there to take a few calculated risks, and then lead successful execution of that.

Neha Narkhede: And so, if you can think about it, just sort of take the first leap. The second thing is, there’s a ton of unconscious bias, and just sort of you experience it, as you grow in your career. And the impact it has is women are evaluated on experience and men are evaluated on potential. So the same thing that you think you deserve and which you do, you get it later down the line. And for that, I would say that ask for that thing until you hear a very loud and clear no. Hearing a no never killed anybody, and it will only help you in that journey, and that’s what I’ve done. But I think those are a couple of really big barriers, I would say. There are a lot of upsides too. So when you’re growing in your career as a minority, it’s much easier for you to get noticed and so it’s much easier for you to recruit good mentors. There are people in the Valley who want to help women in tech and want to help minorities in tech, and they will gladly allow you to sort of reach out and give you the time.

Angie Chang: Great. The theme for tonight’s Confluent Girl Geek dinner is open source for career paths. And what are some things that Girl Geeks can do to leverage the open source community for their technical growth and learning?

Neha Narkhede: All right? Well, let me start off by saying that I don’t want to recommend open source as sort of a silver bullet for your career growth. But I will say that any outcome is driven by a series of choices you make. So in so far that open source is one of the choices that are presented to you, I would say think very seriously and probably even take the leap. The reason is that you get a lot of broad reach, you can learn a lot of things, but you also don’t need to invest all your time. So there are many ways to get involved, you can get involved in community discussions and critique designs or you can submit newbie patches or you can take up a full time job and get paid to work in open source.

Neha Narkhede: I think the best thing about the community is evangelism. So if you try out a new software, write a blog post about your user experience or if you want to critique the design, write a blog post and explain what you thought was good and bad about the design. I can tell you that Confluent has done a lot of successful recruiting by reaching out to people who wrote blog posts, and not just good ones, the critiques also. And so you will get noticed and obviously learn a lot along the way when you write about something.

Angie Chang: That’s really good advice, to write a blog post. All right, let’s get down to the nitty gritty for the technical in the audience. Kafka is known for its scalability. So where there is a continuous flow of streaming events, what’s the operational challenge in navigating new software versions, especially if something is backward incompatible? And how do you ensure the high quality of service?

Neha Narkhede: Lots and lots of things to say here. I think this would be a a segment of its own. But I’ll say two important things. I think really paying attention to the public APIs and contracts of your particular system is really, really critical. And especially so for infrastructure software, because a lot of applications depend on it and you have to be clearly careful about compatibility.

Neha Narkhede: Something the Kafka community did to be careful about this is a discipline we call Kafka improvement proposals. So we took a leaf out of the Python community playbook, and we introduced this discipline, because over time, you don’t get time to review code patches. Everyone gets busy. So this is a discipline where we ask people to write a wiki on the public API and contract chain so that the community can pay closer attention to version compatibility, and also the user experience, so that goes a long way.

Neha Narkhede: The second thing, because you asked for quality of service, I think being able to operate that software as a service in a company or as a fully managed service goes a really long way. I think there’s one investment I can say about high quality of service, it’s operating it as a fully managed service. So something people may not know about Kafka is Kafka, its first claim to fame was it just worked right out of the box. And that happened because we always deployed the version of Kafka into internal LinkedIn systems and it’s sort of baked in production for some time, before we even released the version into the open source community. So the community always got a well tested baked in version. That wouldn’t have been possible if we couldn’t deploy it internally at LinkedIn. So it goes a pretty long way.

Angie Chang: Great. And final question, what is one thing that surprised you, something that you believed in earlier in your career, and isn’t true today?

Neha Narkhede: Fun. So I moved here to the Valley from a different country. So the impression that I had about the Valley, which is pretty well known is that that’s where the American Dream gets made, that it’s a very meritocratic environment, as long as you’re smart, and you can work hard that you can win. That is mostly true except for underrepresented minorities. It’s a little bit harder than that. So I was surprised about that. I came in with big, optimistic eyes, and I was a little taken aback by all the challenges.

Neha Narkhede: The other thing that surprised me, I think, is the tech industry’s appetite for failure. And that one is really important. There is a ton of opportunity, no matter whether you succeed or fail, and that was from my upbringing, that was sort of a surprise for me as well, whether you succeed or fail, there’s always going to be a good opportunity waiting for you. So I would say, definitely go ahead and take that leap. There’s probably something else that is good waiting for you, no matter whether you succeed or fail. And so take those risks.

Angie Chang: That’s great advice. Thank you so much for this fireside chat. And I think we will now hand the stage over to the Confluent Girl Geeks.

Neha Narkhede: Thank you for having me, Angie.

Angie Chang: Thank you.

Dani Traphagen: All right. Well, that was fantastic. I don’t know about all of you but my favorite part was about getting more of us into infrastructure, and kind of developing the B2B experience and more diverse voices there. I think that Neha outlined an excellent roadmap of how to start a business, so I hope you were taking notes. I think all of those questions were fantastic on how to do that and the play by play of it. So next up, we’re going to have Bret Scofield. And she’s going to give a lightning talk on her experience here at Confluent.

Bret Scofield speaking

UX Researcher Bret Scofield speaking at Confluent Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Bret Scofield: Thanks, Dani. All right, so I’m Bret Scofield. I do UX research at Confluent. And I wanted to start off with a little bit of background about me. So the theme throughout my career has been building things from scratch. So in undergrad, I built metal sculptures, did a lot of welding, all that sort of stuff. When I graduated, I transitioned into digital products and I worked as a product designer for quite a while. And then in the past few startups that I’ve been at, the big theme has been building a discipline and a team from scratch.

Bret Scofield: And so that’s what I want to talk to you all about tonight. So I wanted to talk through, this is a brief listicle, there’s a lot of stuff from Twitter, I love Twitter so tweet me. But the big thing here is five things that you need to learn or that you need before you build something like UX research or any sort of discipline from scratch.

Bret Scofield: So the first thing, sorry, the first thing is defining UX research. And because I think a lot of people in here have familiar with engineering, et cetera, and maybe you haven’t worked with a UX researcher before, so essentially, UX research is narrowing the gap between these two groups of people. So I think there’s always one set of people who are building a product, and then another set of people who are using that product. And the people who are using that product are doing all these amazing things with it. They’re talking about it, they’re doing unexpected things, et cetera, and they’re all these amazing insights.

Bret Scofield: And so the goal of UX research is really to narrow that gap between the people who are building the product and the people who are using it. It’s just sharing those insights with the people who are building things. And they will make better products if they know and can empathize with the people who are using it. So there you go.

Bret Scofield: So the first thing that I think you need to build something like UX research is fertile ground to build. And so when I came to Confluent, the concept of UX research existed. It wasn’t formalized, or anything, but a lot of product managers, designers, et cetera, were speaking with customers about designs, about ideas that we had, et cetera. And they knew that this was super important to do and to get feedback from our customers, from our users, all that sort of stuff.

Bret Scofield: And so when I came in, the work that I did to establish UX research is really just taking what had already existed, formalizing it, adding a bit more rigor, putting it on a regular schedule, that sort of thing. And with this tweet, I don’t necessarily think that Jay, our CEO, knows what I do, but I hope that Neha does. And so I hope that UX research can continue to grow.

Bret Scofield: The second thing that you need is really three people. And so the first person that you need is an unconditional believer. And so I think a lot of us, as underrepresented minorities, you’re going to have tough days when you’re trying to establish things. And so like with UX research, a lot of times there’s days when people are like, “What are you doing? What’s the value of this? I’ve never done UX research before. I’ve never heard of this thing.” And so you need someone who’s always in your corner, who’s always believing in you, and is willing to talk through those tough days.

Bret Scofield: The other two people that I think you need are a sponsor and a mentor. And so a sponsor is someone generally in your organization who can connect you to the right projects that have good visibility, high impact, all that sort of stuff. And then the last person is a mentor. So the best mentors that I have have been outside of my organization, and I think that’s really necessary. They don’t have to be outside of your organization, but they should be outside of your management chain. And I think that’s necessary because you really want that unbiased feedback. You don’t want people who are incentivized to have you act a certain way or do certain things.

Bret Scofield: So yeah, I think that mentor should be outside. And ideally, they’ve been in tech or your industry for longer than you have. And I think that’s super important, because essentially, they’ve seen the same situation happen 15, 20 times, and you get to leverage that knowledge. You don’t have to go through 15 or 20 like I want to smack my head against the wall, you get to leapfrog.

Bret Scofield: Then the third thing is just enough knowledge. So a lot of times, I think that as a UX researcher, we think that we have to inhabit and totally become the people that we’re studying. And so with enterprise software, these people are sys admins. There’s just no way I’m ever going to become a sys admin, a lot of them were born in the command line, all that sort of stuff. However, it’s super important that I do a certain amount of research and learn this is what the command line is. I need to be able to tell what people are doing in there, what their intentions are, et cetera. But I don’t need to know every single thing. And so it’s very important in the past experience I’ve had to learn but to draw the line and not totally become a sys admin.

Bret Scofield: The fourth thing is balancing strategic and tactical work. So I think the impulse when you’re starting something new is to right away be like, “How can I provide value? Let me do this tactical stuff that’s going to provide value and insights to the team. They can take action on it right away, that sort of thing.” And I want to encourage you to do that, of course, but to also balance it out with strategic work. And by strategic work, in the context of UX research, one of the things that we do that’s useful for the next six months to two years, et cetera, is personas and journey mapping. So deeply understanding our people, deeply understanding where are they touching the product, how are they feeling at each of those points, et cetera.

Bret Scofield: Whereas the tactical work is with an individual team. We’re focused on what can they take away from this research and immediately put into practice. So yes, so I think the fourth thing is really that mix of short term. This is valuable right away, and the long term, this can be valuable for a longer horizon.

Bret Scofield: And then the last message, I think, is to get popular first and then get selective. So in the beginning, people aren’t going to know what UX researcher is, they’re going to come to you with all this kind of science fair sort of ideas. And that’s awesome. You should say yes, to all of them, do all of them. And then as you’re doing good work, as you’re finding insights, all that sort of stuff, your reputation and your legend is going to grow. And then you can start getting selective about those projects and take the really high impact ones, that sort of thing.

Bret Scofield: So those are the five tips if you’re building UX research or any new discipline within your organization. The other thing here is that, the next thing that I’m looking at is people to join the team. We anticipate hiring in the next quarter or so. So please, if you’re interested in being the second UX researcher at Confluent, come chat with me. And I also want to hand over to Liz Bennett from our software engineering side.

Liz Bennett speaking

Software Engineer Liz Bennett talks about her epiphany about being a hedgehog in a workplace at Confluent Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Liz Bennett: Thanks, Bret. Okay, right. I’m Liz Bennett. I’m a software engineer at Confluent. So I’ll start with a little bit about myself. I went to school at Oberlin College, and I studied music and computer science. And after graduating, I went to LinkedIn. And I was on the newsfeed team there. And I really enjoyed being on the newsfeed team. But it didn’t take long for the itch to join a startup to get to me. So I went to Loggly, which is a cloud based logs as a service company. And that was really great. I learned a lot about streaming infrastructure. I got to work with Kafka a lot and Elasticsearch.

Liz Bennett: But after a few years, I wanted to expand my skill set. And so I joined the data platform team at Stitch Fix. And the data platform team is the team that builds all of the infrastructure and tools for the data scientists at Stitch Fix. And for those of you who might not know, Stitch Fix has an absolutely gargantuan data department. There were I think, 100 data scientists there when I joined. So I really got a chance to level up my big data skills. And I also built all of their logging infrastructure and their data integration infrastructure from scratch. But after about three years, I went looking for another change. And as of six days ago, I’m now at Confluent.

Liz Bennett: Neha asked me if I would speak at this. And my first thought was, “Yes, I would love to.” My second thought was, “What the heck am I going to talk about?” And at this time, I was between jobs. I had just left Stitch Fix, I was waiting to join Confluent. And the only thing I could think about was this job change I had just done. It was really actually quite a difficult experience. It was really painful, much more so than any of my other job changes.

Liz Bennett: So I wanted to just tell my story, and I hope that it might be useful for some of you out there, now or in the future. Okay, so why did I join Confluent? I could also frame this as why did I leave Stitch Fix, because that was kind of the real crux of what was going on. Every other job change I’d had before, I knew what I wanted, I knew what kind of opportunity I was looking for. It was much easier. This time, the one thing I knew was that something didn’t feel right at Stitch Fix. It didn’t feel like the right fit. It took so long to really put my finger on it. I was completely blindsided by it when I joined.

Liz Bennett: And I waited three years and it never felt right. It never got better. So I did a lot of soul searching and I came to a few realizations and I realized that the team I was on and the role I had was fundamentally mismatched with who I am as a person. So everyone, I’m a hedgehog. Has anybody heard the parable of the fox and the hedgehog? Anybody? So I heard this recently on the Hidden Brain podcast. And as soon as I heard it, it seemed to explain a lot of things for me. So the parable comes from this quote by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus. And the quote is, “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Liz Bennett: And over the years, this has been interpreted to be like there are two kinds of people in this world, foxes and hedgehogs kind of thing. And some psychologists have even used this as a way to describe two kinds of cognitive styles and people. There’re foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences, and they use many different strategies to solve problems. They’re comfortable with nuance and even contradictions. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, they see the world through the lens of one unifying idea. They love to think in terms of big pictures.

Liz Bennett: And as soon as I heard this, I was like, “I’m a hedgehog.” I told my best friend about it, too. And she’s like, “Yep, you’re a hedgehog.” And I also knew, all of my teammates at Stitch Fix were all foxes. My manager was a fox, my manager’s manager was a fox, not in a good way. No, just kidding. And so I thought, “Okay, is that what’s going on here? Should I just go find another data platform team somewhere else, hoping that there’s going to be more hedgehogs there?” And in the end, I decided no, that’s not what’s going on. What’s happening is the team I’m on is just a better fit for foxes. As a hedgehog, I need to find an entirely different kind of team. So I kept thinking this through, and I came up with something that ultimately really illuminated this problem for me. And it was a really useful device when I was trying to explain to my friends and my colleagues, and especially my manager, why I was leaving Stitch Fix and joining Confluent.

Liz Bennett: So I like to call it the product platform spectrum. What is the product platform spectrum? It is the spectrum of teams that exists within a technology company, that span product, customer facing teams on one end, all the way down to internal, low level infrastructure teams on the other end. And depending on where you are on the spectrum, your role is going to feel really different. So at the top of the spectrum, you have your product teams, these teams are very close to the customer, they’re generally the source of revenue for the company. You’re really close to the company mission, there tends to be a lot of separation of roles and separation of expertise, like they’ll be UX researchers on product teams.

Liz Bennett: Supporting the product teams, there’s usually platform teams, and companies invest in platform teams because hiring somebody on a platform team is like hiring somebody on all of your product teams. That makes them all more effective and more productive. Platform teams, though, are further away from the customer. They tend to wear more hats, I think. There’s less specialized roles. I think they tend to own more surface area. They have to own more technologies and services. Underneath the platform team, in some companies, this will vary, but very often, there’ll be infrastructure teams. And these teams own the very bottom layer of data systems and services. They’re like the bedrock that the whole rest of the company sits on top of.

Liz Bennett: And these teams are great because their work is leveraged across the whole company. They’re also the furthest away from customers. And there’s no platform team supporting them. So they kind of have to write their own tools. They do a lot of dog fooding. They can be very autonomous, though, they, they set their own strategies, they do their own research, and they’re masters of their own destiny. So at Stitch Fix, I was on the very bottom layer of infrastructure. I built all of the Kafka infrastructure, I was doing that. And where I really wanted to be, though, was at the very top of the product spectrum. That was where I had been my last couple of roles.

Liz Bennett: Since I’m a hedgehog, given my hedgehog nature, I thought it would be much more comfortable in that role again, where I could really focus on deepening my skills as a software engineer, and also be really close to the company mission. So how can I get from the bottom of the spectrum to the very top? Could I get there while I was at Stitch Fix? My answer basically was no. The product teams at Stitch Fix were mostly full stack Ruby on Rails engineers, and I didn’t want to completely retool myself just to get to the top of the product spectrum.

Liz Bennett: So at that point, I realized, okay, I need to make a change. I need to leave Stitch Fix. But where? What do I do? Well, smeared across this whole spectrum is our B2B vendors. So there’ll be platform as a service companies selling products to platform–or product teams. There’s infrastructure as a service companies selling products to platform teams. So all I really actually needed to do was go from here, at the very bottom of the spectrum, took one little step into the B2B space. And suddenly, I was going to be at the very top of the product spectrum again.

Liz Bennett: So I mean, the one thing is I left a consumer business and went to a B2B business, but I was in the B2B business at Loggly, so I felt pretty confident that that was going to be fine. So at this point, I realized I needed to, I knew where I needed to go, I knew what sector I needed to go to. So then the last question is why Confluent? Why did I pick Confluent?

Liz Bennett: Well, I had been working with event infrastructure for the last three years at Stitch Fix, and I had become absolutely obsessed with this mission, Confluent’s mission. And being a hedgehog, I just wanted to go deeper. I wanted to keep doing it. And I wanted to focus on that. And I realized, what could be more satisfying than going from building event infrastructure for one company at Stitch Fix to going to Confluent where I could build it for the whole entire world? So that’s my story. I hope that it’s useful for some of you out there. Transitioning jobs is really tough. I don’t think people talk about it nearly as much and give it as much credit for how hard it is. So if anybody wants to talk more afterwards, I’m super happy. Connect with me on LinkedIn. And thanks, everybody, for coming. All right, so I’ll hand it off to Priya.

Priya Shivakumar speaking

Senior Director of Product Priya Shivakumar talks about her career jungle gym at Confluent Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Priya Shivakumar: Hello, everyone. I hope everyone’s having a great time tonight. I certainly am. It’s a pleasure to be in the company of all of you. So my talk is going to be a little bit about my career path, some learnings that I’ve had along the way, and how that’s come to apply to what I do at Confluent. All of us are looking to grow in different ways. And so the paths we take sort of reflect that. But for me, the common theme throughout has been to continuously broaden my perspective and keep learning along the way. That’s kind of the key decision driver for me.

Priya Shivakumar: And so my career path has looked something like this. I’ve used this format, instead of the format that my colleagues and friends have used before me, for two reasons. One, because it would actually age me and the second because it just wouldn’t fit on one slide. So this is kind of the path that I took. Growing up, early on, I developed a passion for engineering. My dad’s an electrical engineer, and he encouraged my brother and I to sort of take things apart to learn how they work. And I remember him and I taking apart quite a few VCRs and a few transformers actually in his station to get to the magnets inside. And those magnets were coveted positions. So I naturally gravitated to engineering for my undergrad. And from there, my career has spanned three key disciplines: engineering, product, and consulting. And I’ll talk to you a little bit about each one of those.

Priya Shivakumar: So in engineering, it was about building the product, how do you build a product. I enjoyed all aspects of problem solving, logic, it was a natural fit. Success was mostly individual in nature. I could have been successful without having interacted with another soul, potentially, or at least having a little bit of interaction maybe.

Priya Shivakumar: But I did not get to see how my code was being used. What was the impact it was having, who are my customers. And so that’s the reason why I moved out of engineering. As I stepped into IT consulting as an engagement manager at BearingPoint first, and then later into product management, the focus shifted over to customers, stakeholders, clients. There were a lot of competing priorities and a dearth of resources, and that’s the name of the game. And that required–success now meant being able to influence people, align teams, kind of create common goals and create common objectives. And that’s a very difficult and hard skill to acquire.

Priya Shivakumar: And what little I know of it, I will attribute to my consulting days. An example comes to mind, there was a post merger integration project. One large company had acquired another large company. And as a result of that, the system and the processes we were putting in place would result in the elimination of 30 to 40 jobs. And the data that we needed to build the system had to come from these very same people. So you can imagine how painful and difficult it was. And this particular example actually falls on the extreme end, but most consulting projects have some element of tension or friction in them. Think about it. You’re an outsider, you’re trying to advise somebody how they should do their job, nobody likes to be told that, one. Two, they may have some kind of perception that they may lose some control. They don’t like that. And they may also kind of think that their domains are going to shrink, or there may be a job loss in the future.

Priya Shivakumar: And so all of these things create for some very delicate waters that you need to navigate and kind of balance. So I think that was a core skill but it’s still a learning. It’s never, I mean, I wouldn’t say I’ve completely mastered that. But that’s something that I picked up a little bit in consulting. I would like to share another key thing that kind of happened during this time. So when I was at BearingPoint, after a couple of years in IT consulting, the work got repetitive. And like most of you here, I have a healthy paranoia about stagnancy. I wasn’t learning. And I went to my MD, my managing director. And I told her that I really wanted to move into strategy, from IT consulting to strategy consulting, and BearingPoint had both of those practices. She was supportive, she was actually well intentioned, and she sort of grew me within my role, but I had tech expertise, and I was a billable resource. So it did not make business sense for her to move me to the strategy consulting practice within BearingPoint.

Priya Shivakumar: So I realized early on that that was not going to happen. But I had to stay put for two more years. And that’s because I was trying to get my green card. I was pregnant with my first child. And the key here is that that’s okay. Right? That’s okay. There will be times in your life when other priorities take over. There’ll be times when you have obstacles that cannot be overcome, things that are outside of your control, like immigration things. So in those instances, it’s okay to set your own pace. Take your time, wait, rather, bide your time. And when the time’s right, get up and get going again. Just know what it is you want and what makes you happy. Go after that, though. So in my case, I wrote my GMAT in my ninth month of pregnancy, finished out my B-School essays in my maternity leave, got my green card, and I was out of there.

Priya Shivakumar: So the next thing I did was I went into, post B-School, I joined LEK Consulting. It’s a niche strategy consulting firm. And the reason I joined that was because I primarily wanted to work only in strategy, in the broad discipline that is management consulting. So it was a bit of an insane choice to make. I call it insane because it required me to work 60 to 80 hours a week. And the work itself was intense. We were advising veterans in an industry, typically the C suite, about what they should do to grow their business. It required you to get up to speed on their industry within a short period of time, do the research that was needed to draw insights from data, model out the market size trends, things like that, and then advise them about what they need to do to kind of grow the company by X percent.

Priya Shivakumar: So that was intense. And my husband was traveling on a weekly basis. And I had a two year old to take care of, two and a half, three year old to take care of. So there was a fundamental thing that I did, which not only helped me survive, but succeed in that role. I still wanted that role. I still went and got that role. But the fundamental thing that I did was hiring the right child care, and people say this all the time, but I cannot enunciate that enough. I applied the same rigor that I would to my job to finding child care.

Priya Shivakumar: So to me, the criteria that I defined for that was that I needed an au pair who would be with us 24/7. She had to be educated so that my child would learn from her and it would be easy for the whole interaction for the family. Also, I preferred someone who would have taken on responsibility early on in their life, so that she could independently run the place. And so the au pair was Aleja. She was 24 years old from Colombia. She had a law degree. She had taken care of two siblings while growing up and while her parents were working hard on their small business.

Priya Shivakumar: She came home. She just seamlessly became part of our family and completely ran my household, enabling me to focus on my work. So there will be inflection points in your career. And during those times, you have to get the support that you need. Do not skimp on that. I’ve seen too many people make that mistake. And it just results in burnout and a lot of not very good things. So I would highly encourage you to do that.

Priya Shivakumar: One other–then the time came to become a partner at LEK, it gave me pause. It was a very lucrative path and one that was a sure path, actually. But the reason I paused and decided to leave consulting, first was because I realized becoming a partner meant greater focus on sales, and lesser focus on problem solving and casework, which is what I truly enjoyed. The second part was that as part of an advisory or a think tank, that’s what you do. You advise, and you walk away, right? There is an innate satisfaction in seeing things come to fruition, things that you build, whether it’s the product that you build that launches, or a strategy that you can come up with that is activated, and you see that work in the market. And I really missed that aspect of it. And lastly, the industries we were working on weren’t super exciting to me and I was always passionate about high tech. And that’s why I moved back into VMware, and now to Confluent.

Priya Shivakumar: So putting it all together, the engineer in me loves the innovation we’re driving at Confluent. We are fundamentally changing Kafka in ways to make it ready for the cloud. The market is nascent, there are no clear answers, this data is limited. And this is where I really lean on my strategy consulting frameworks to answer questions like how should we price cloud, what segments to go after, what features are important by which segment?

Priya Shivakumar: I think there’s significant competition in the market but I do believe that we are uniquely positioned to really make Confluent’s mission successful. So putting it all together, I would say my execution from my engineering days and strategy from consulting and product thinking from VMware, enable me to drive this key initiative at Confluent, which is to grow the cloud business. Thanks so much. Dani, over to you.

Dani Traphagen: Thank you so much, Priya. All right, so everyone, I hope that that was really informative and gave you some food for thought. And now let’s actually have some food. But before we do that, just a couple of quick announcements. The other thing that we’re doing, as well, is providing a Women in Tech events at Confluent’s headquarters down in Mountain View in November. So if you’re interested in that, there’s sign up sheets also out at the front. And we’re going to do a quick Q&A before we start to network and have some food as well. So I’m going to invite everybody up for that right now.

Liz Bennett and Neha Narkhede speaking

Confluent girl geeks: Software Engineer Liz Bennett speaking on a panel with Neha Narkhede at Confluent Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Liz Bennett: Okay, who’s our first victim?

Jiang: Hi, I’m Jiang, and I am particularly interested in the theme of this talk, because it’s talking about how open resource open opportunities for your career. I’m just wondering, how do you all kind of assess opportunities in your career? For myself, I kind of felt like sometimes it’s really hard to find the good opportunities. And I’m particularly interested how people looking for opportunities and how they consider those are the good opportunities.

Liz Bennett: Well, such a tough question. I think for me, I’ve usually, the best opportunities I’ve found are the ones where there’s the biggest vacuum, I guess, like there’s the biggest need for people who have your skills or experience or something that you want to learn. And you just go and find those vacuums, and you fill them as fast and as well as you can. I think that would be my short answer. Yeah.

Priya Shivakumar: I think that’s a great question. I want to add to that a little bit. I think, you go through the interview process, right? It’s really important to understand the culture of the place during that process as you meet people. One of the things at Confluent that I absolutely fell in love with was this smart but humble…requirement, almost. And that was very apparent throughout my interviews. I had eight separate interviews, and each person sort of embodied that requirement, I would say, and then I also look for how many women are at that company. And how many women are at the top. It indicates a certain thing, and it should not be… it is an important thing. Those are some of the things I look for, among other things.

Dani Traphagen: Next question?

Audience Member: Hi, I have a question regarding, I’m somebody who came from large companies and worked in the large company environment. And in that, you’re reporting to a manager, who reports into another manager, who reports into director or whatever. So you get a lot of hierarchy. So I recently switched from that large company environment. And now I’m at a startup where I reported to the CEO. So I’m curious, how do you manage that dynamic of this isn’t just my manager, but it is my manager, but they’re also here and not here. So any insights you have on how to define that relationship, how to set the tone for that relationship?

Neha Narkhede: I could probably add a little bit. So because you talked a little bit about the big company to start up transition, depending on the stage of your startup, early days or early years are all about survival, and that’s what the CEO is responsible for. So likely, they do not have a lot of time to tackle the day to day issues that a manager’s supposed to tackle as much as they would like to. Just the practicalities of running a start up don’t allow for that time. And so I would suggest sort of look for mentorship elsewhere, if you are running into those kind of problems, but really ask the person like, “What is your biggest problem?”.

Neha Narkhede: And that was sort of my way of working at LinkedIn is nobody really wanted to work on this Kafka problem. It was sort of just something that my co-founder, Jay was dealing with, and I sort of asked him, “What’s the biggest problem on your plate?”, and he was like, “Well, there’s this Kafka thing, but no one really wants to work on it.”, because it was sort of a mess of a situation at LinkedIn that we had to clean up using Kafka.

Neha Narkhede: So I think the what I learned from that is, if you work on the biggest problem their business is facing, and the CEO is likely to know that biggest problem, you’re quickly going to become a go to resource and you’re quickly going to learn quite a lot that would then position you for other opportunities in the company. So that’s sort of the way to look at it is expectation management is not going to have a lot of time for all the day to day problems as well as asking for what’s the biggest problem on their plate that you can take off.

Jenia: Hi. Thank you for your talks. Jenia, a founder of a B2B startup with its first paying customers. So I wanted to ask you all with the limited resources that companies have, especially in the beginning, how to make customers happy? What are the secrets like hacks?

Neha Narkhede: Well, I can add a little bit. So early days, and I imagine you’re probably talking about pre product market fit. And so I think pre product market fit is a lot more of an art than a science. I think Priya talked a lot about managing data to draw insights that happens later in the life of a startup. Early days is all about landing your first 10 customers. So it’s incredibly important to not worry too much about over fitting the problem, because first time customers are going to ask for the world, but it’s really, really important that you land them successfully, because then you know which are the next 100 customers that you want. So that’s probably a really important thing. Life is going to be very hard when you satisfy all the problems of your first 10 customers. You should just go in expecting that to be the case. That’s very expected. But landing your first 10 customers is probably your your biggest and most important problem in that phase.

Mike: Hi. My name is Mike. I have a question for you, Neha. I want to know what is your best practice or solutions that worked to receive feedback at the company and from your employees. I mean, there is so much to read in different books about recommended ways to receive feedback from employees. But having worked for a couple of companies, I see it being quite difficult for people at C level positions, specifically, to receive feedback from engineers. I want to know what are the things that work for you, like when was the last time that a really junior engineer could openly and honestly share with you feedback, how you receive that. I would appreciate your thoughts on that.

Neha Narkhede: That’s a great question. So something someone said to me reminded me of this when you asked this question, and he said that, Neha, you got to be careful in this stage of your company, because fat fingers cannot make small changes. And what he was really trying to say is, the more your company grows, and now we’re 900 people and more, is it’s going to be harder and harder for you to get that feedback.

Neha Narkhede: I think a couple things have helped us at Confluent to get that feedback, and I couldn’t deny that it’s getting a little bit harder, the first thing is setting the tone of the culture from the very early days. So when we started the company, all the founders, we encouraged a lot of open dialogue, a lot of open sort of pushback. You can actually get up and challenge the founders on their ideas, or even the CEO on many occasions, all the engineers could do that and they felt comfortable doing that. So when new people join the company, they could see that debate happening on an open Slack channel. So everybody could see how the people are dealing with it and we encouraged that sort of debate quite a bit.

Neha Narkhede: I think that sort of has helped us quite a bit. The second thing is anonymous sort of feedback channels, doing surveys in the company that sort of scales when you get to a certain size. And then what has helped me in particular is I have these friends who are sort of in different parts of the organization, and they’re at the beginner sort of medium levels. So they collect feedback, and they sort of bring it back to me, and they’re sort of my champions in their processes. There are some engineers who are going to bring sort of gossip or chat that’s happening at the lunch table. And I have other sort of champions sitting here that have gotten me feedback on what I should be careful about. All of that sort of really helps. You got to make sure that you have some of those champions sprinkled around in your organization, who could actually give you the second degree feedback, because people are not going to come and give you that feedback directly as you grow your organization.

Denise Hummel: Hi. I’m Denise Hummel, and I’m the founder and CEO of a technology enabled diversity and inclusion firm. And I’m way older than like 90% of you and it’s blowing my mind because I’m, generally speaking, the mentor of trying to move women through middle management to senior leadership. And I look at you guys, and you are an inspiration to me. So my first firm was a consulting firm that I scaled to 65 countries and sold to Ernst and Young, and became a senior partner there leading culture, inclusion, and innovation. And I thought, wow, this is just the story of the century. I was a single mom who raised two kids on my own while I was building this company. And then when I got there, I felt unable to navigate the nuance of standing out and fitting in, and everything that I had known to be the core of who I was and why I was successful as an entrepreneur, which is basically never take no for an answer and just keep forging ahead, was actually the bane of my existence, because I was considered to be too aggressive.

Denise Hummel: So here I am now. I have left to start this new firm, which basically is technology, using AI and nudge messaging to bring inclusive leadership to leaders in real time, which is super exciting. And I have to pitch for VC and I’m still running into the same issues that I was running into before, which is that as a woman founder, I have to be this assertive, take no prisoners person in order to convince VC that I have the stick-to-itiveness to get this done. But when I do, then I’m the aggressive woman, who isn’t like the quintessential female persona that they’re all looking for. So that’s a really long background question. But the actual question itself is, do you have any feedback on what we can do as women to walk that line to have that nuance between standing out and fitting in and being assertive enough to make it but not so assertive that we are the aggressive ones that no one wants to do business with?

Bret Scofield: I guess my initial thought on that is, because I think in a lot of situations, especially in enterprise and dealing with a lot of customers who are aggressive men, and I’ve tried being aggressive, assertive, et cetera. And it doesn’t feel right to me, it just doesn’t feel like Bret. And I think that’s fine because I think that I can be me and still get the message across and still be successful, and all that sort of stuff. And it feels better, it doesn’t feel like I have to be super pushy, and that sort of thing. So yeah, that’s where I come out on that because I think that you can try and be this person that you’re not, and it’s ultimately not going to come through as much as being you. So are there other thoughts on this?

Neha Narkhede speaking

Chief  Product Officer Neha Narkhede speaks on panel at Confluent Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Neha Narkhede: I can add a little bit. I’m going to channel an RBG quote on that, which is it pays to be deaf sometimes. And I say that because you got to keep going. You got to pitch your startup and it’s an extremely arduous opportunity. You don’t want to get bogged down by all this feedback, because it turns out that in order to start a company, you have to be ambitious and aggressive, and very, very persistent. So I wouldn’t worry a lot about the perception. There’s going to be feedback, I’ve gotten a lot of this feedback, “You’re too ambitious, you’re too aggressive.”, and I’m saying, “Well, thank you. I’m going to try to work on how that doesn’t come across sometimes.” But it’s absolutely necessary to sort of put your blinders on during a certain stage and just keep on going. Because you do not want to stop in your journey, because of a lot of this increased skepticism from the outside. So I’m going to just say, keep going.

Karen: Hi, I’m Karen, super lucky to ask the last question. First, thank you all for the talk. Totally loved it. This question is for Liz and Neha. I am a software engineer and I observed in my company, and maybe what a lot of companies, being an engineer, a female engineer, as you go up, you see less and less senior women engineers, actually have the data from my company. So I can’t share, but it’s like at some point, there’s a huge drop. Beyond that, you just don’t see women anymore. And in the industry, we definitely see less women architects or women CTOs as compared to other roles. So one thing I would like to know, is first, Neha, I looked at your LinkedIn. So I see you have a good career growth at LinkedIn. So at that time, what pushed you through getting to be a more senior software engineer? Same for Liz, I know you want to keep growing, being really focused on this one area. So what is your view of this problem? Yeah, I think that’s it.

Liz Bennett: Yeah, it’s definitely true. It’s kind of eerie how there’s so few women the further up the stack you get. I think, for me, I have always thought of myself as just a person. I don’t see myself, I don’t often think of myself as like a female engineer. I almost actively avoid thinking about how I’m the only woman in the room, and after years of doing that, it just kind of stopped occurring to me when it happened, and it just became a normal thing. And I think the less I think about that, the more I can just focus on being an engineer and focus on doing what I love doing, which is technical work.

Liz Bennett: I really love doing it. And I think people see that, and they see that you love it. And they see that you’re competent. I do have to go out of my way sometimes to advocate for myself. When I do it intentionally, and when I’m doing it, I’m conscious that I’m doing it. And it helps a lot when you say, “Hey, I built all of the streaming infrastructure at Stitch Fix.” People are like, “Oh, okay, she knows what she’s talking about.” You have to actually do that. There’s one thing that I think a lot about, well, I used to think about, but not so much anymore, but it’s kind of like the competency chasm that you’re talking about. I think for a lot of women, they’re seen as incompetent until they prove themselves to be competent. And for men, it’s the opposite. They’re seen as competent until they prove themselves to be incompetent.

Neha Narkhede: Sometimes.

Liz Bennett: So I think that I’m like, Okay, I have to go through this process, I have to prove myself. And I haven’t had too many problems with it. But it is something that I’ve come to learn over the years.

Neha Narkhede: I’ll add one more thing to that is, when you’re on this technology ladder, there’s going to be a point where you sort of feel like you’re running out of options. And that’s when you try to fall back to this management option, which is sort of a parallel option. And a lot of us take that because at some point, you get tired of advocating for yourself or pushing for that new opportunity. If it is the right choice you want to make, then you should take it, but if not, I would recommend, ask for things explicitly, ask for that new opportunity that, the same way Priya asked for this new opportunity on the strategy side, ask for things until you hear a clear no, because you never know where there is an opportunity where someone like you might be a good fit, but people are not quite thinking about it actively. You don’t want to wait until that sort of thing walks up to you. You want to go aggressively vouch for it and not be scared to hear a no.

Dani Traphagen: Cool. All right, thank you so much, ladies. Okay, so networking, deserts, maybe an added La Croix for the road. Whatever you’d like to do next, I hope that that was really useful for you. I know it was for me, I learned I’m a hedgehog. An informative night the whole way around. And yeah, if you have any questions for any of us, feel free to come up. The Confluent careers page is a fantastic place to check out. I hope you will. Feel free to check out our LinkedIn pages and and just go ahead and connect with us. If you have any further questions, we’re really happy to give you any advice that we can or help in any way and just actually have some friends in our community. So anything we can do. Thanks again.

Neha Narkhede: Thank you.


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Neha Narkhede and Sarah Allen

Confluent founder Neha Narkhede and Bridge Foundry founder Sarah Allen meeting at Confluent Girl Geek Dinner in 2019.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Why changing the face of “superstar developer” matters

Neha Narkhede began her career as a software engineer, working at Oracle and LinkedIn. She was a co-creator of Apache Kafka, a popular open-source stream-processing software platform that was created at LinkedIn. She spoke on a panel Girl Geek Dinner while she was still in engineering there. She saw a big opportunity with Kafka and convinced her fellow Kafka co-creators to start Confluent as a B2B infrastructure company in 2014 – Kafka’s event streaming is used by 60% of Fortune 100 companies today.

With only 2% of venture capital going to women entrepreneurs, Neha beat the odds and demonstrated that it’s possible to thrive as a technical leader. She served five years as the company’s Chief Technology Officer, and recently became Chief Product Officer to continue growing the brand. Confluent’s founders recently raised Series D venture funding for the company at a valuation of $2.5 billion, and they employ over 900 people.

Silicon Valley needs more Nehas! Read more.