Girl Geek X Microsoft Lightning Talks & Panel (Video + Transcript)

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Girl Geek X Welcome: Angie Chang kicks off a sold-out Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner at Microsoft Reactor in San Francisco, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

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

Angie Chang: So hi, everyone. My name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. I want to thank you so much for coming out tonight to the Microsoft Reactor. I’m super excited to see everyone here and to introduce you to all of Microsoft’s girl geeks, to see this amazing art and tech demos. Who here signed up for a demo? I saw a lot of people interested in demos and getting tours, so I’m really excited that you are able to do that. Thank you once again to Microsoft and to all the people who helped plan this night.

Angie Chang: How many of you this is your first Girl Geek Dinner? Wow. And how many of you consider yourself like a regular at Girl Geek Dinners? Thank you so much for coming back again and again. We do this almost every week, going to different tech companies, meeting the girl geeks, and we hope you tune into our podcast. We have a regular podcast on topics from internet security, to emotional security, to management, to working in the Silicon Valley. So please tune in on iTunes or Spotify. We also have a very active social media. So if you follow us at Girl Geek X, you can also tweet and share with Girl Geek X Microsoft tonight and we will retweet and reshare.

Angie Chang: Now I would like to introduce our first presenter. Her name is Kaitlyn Hova and she is the co-owner of Hova Labs, where they have designed and produced the Hovalin, which is a 3D printed violin. Kaitlyn.

Kaitlyn Hova: Thank you so much for having me. This is wonderful. So my name is Kaitlyn Hova. I currently work at Join and I also co-own a company called Hova Labs, where we like to make a bunch of weird projects. It’s kind of like one of those like, “If I had time, why wouldn’t I make this?” kind of companies. So it’s just me and my husband and the biggest thing that we really wanted to do was to find a way to convey what synesthesia was like in real time. Who here knows what synesthesia is? Yeah, it’s not very many people. It’s all right. So synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which two senses are inherently crossed, causing sensations from one sense to lead to an automatic but also involuntary experience in another. A version of this is called chromesthesia, which is when people can physically see sounds.

Kaitlyn Hova: I didn’t know this was in any way unusual until I was around 21 years old when I was in my final music theory course and our professor just mentioned, “Isn’t it crazy? That some people can see sounds?” Yeah, I ended up dropping my music degree and going into neuroscience, because that’s way more interesting, right?

Kaitlyn Hova: So, ever since then, I’ve been trying to find a way to display what synesthesia was like, because when you’re discussing it with people, it tends to end up going into the more like psychedelic conversation, and it’s not really. So, how to display it? I play violin, so we thought, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a violin that we could light up with the colors that I see in real time?” This didn’t exist, so of course you have to go to the drawing board, and the first thing on our list was, “What if we had a clear violin and we just put LEDs in that?” We couldn’t find a clear violin and if we could, it was probably too expensive.

Kaitlyn Hova: So, ended up deciding like, “Well, how hard would it be to 3D print one?” It took a year and a half to figure out how not to make a violin and then to figure out how to. I think we went through about like 30 or 40 iterations because you end up getting really desperate and saying like, “Well, what is the violin anyway?” because it’s really hard to make this. It started out as a stick with strings and then kind of grew from there.

Kaitlyn Hova: So now, here it is. Once we got our first prototype, we ended up deciding that this violin on its own, LEDs aside, was a really great product, so why not release it open source for people to 3D print their own music programs? We’re still seeing a trend in schools where music is systematically underfunded, while these same schools are getting STEM grants, so why not? Seems like a connection there. Thank you.

Violinist Kaitlyn Hova plays a few songs at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Emily Hove: Let’s hear it for Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn, thank you so much.

Kaitlyn Hova: Thank you.

Emily Hove: This is fantastic. What a great way to start off such an inspirational evening.

Kaitlyn Hova: Thanks.

Emily Hove: So thank you very much.

Kaitlyn Hova: Cheers.

Program Manager Emily Hove welcomes the Girl Geek X community to Microsoft Reactors around the world, from San Francisco to London!  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Emily Hove: Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the San Francisco Microsoft Reactor and the Girl Geek Dinner.

Kaitlyn Hova: Thank you, Chloe.

Emily Hove: My name is Emily Hove. I’m part of the global Microsoft Reactor program and we have a lot of synergies between Girl Geek and the Microsoft Reactors. Similar to the way Girl Geek inspires and connects women in technology, our Reactors are all about being community hubs and everything that is related to developers and startups, giving developers and startups the tools where they can learn, connect, and build. So, we hope you all find a night that is inspiring and where you’re able to connect and build today.

Emily Hove: If you’re interested in a little bit more about the Reactor program, we’ve got some cards around the room and they talk about some of the fantastic upcoming workshops and meetups that we have. So we’d love to encourage you to check out our calendar of events and invite you all to attend. With that, I’d like to bring up Chloe Condon, who will be our MC for the evening, and help introduce some of the inspiring people and inspiring women in technology that we have for you tonight. So Chloe, cloud developer advocate extraordinaire.

Chloe Condon: Hello. Thank you so much for coming. This is theater in the round. So I’m just going to keep walking in a circle like I’m giving a very serious keynote so you all don’t see my back. Thank you so much for coming tonight. We are so excited to have you here at the Reactor. Who’s first time at the Reactor, this event? Incredible. That is so exciting. I hope we see you here a lot more. If you want to participate in one of the Fake Boyfriend workshops that I put on here, you can build a button to get you out of awkward social situations, come see me after. We are doing those all the time here. They’re so much fun. Also ask me about my smart badge. This is a little scrolling LED badge that we’re probably going to do a workshop for pretty soon, as well. So come see me after if you’re interested at all in learning about those events and we’ll get you signed up for them.

Chloe Condon: I’m going to tell a little story before I introduce our first guest. I am so, so excited to be your MC tonight. I actually met Angie because I went to Hackbright. Do we have any Hackbright or bootcamp grads in the audience? No. Amazing. So, Angie spoke at my bootcamp and told us all about Girl Geek Dinner and I thought, “That sounds so cool. I would love to go to one someday.” So it’s literally a dream come true to be here with all of you today. This is my first Girl Geek Dinner ever, and I get to be your MC.

Chloe Condon: So, I’m so excited to introduce our first speaker tonight. She is incredible. Please, please show everybody how cool your dress is when you come up here, or I’ll be very upset. I would like to introduce Kitty who is going to tell us all about the incredible technology and fashion that she uses to make things like the amazing dress that I’m sure she’s about to tell you about. So Kitty, come on up. All right.

Microsoft Garage Manager Kitty Yeung gives a talk on “Hacking at the Microsoft Garage” at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Kitty Yeung: Hi, everybody. Good evening. Thank you so much Chloe for introducing me. In fact, I’m not going to talk about my dress. That’s for the demo later. I’m going to talk about actually what’s behind that, all the innovation work that we’ve been doing at Microsoft. So, I’m the manager of The Garage at Microsoft. How many of you have heard of The Garage before? Some of you, some of you I’ve met actually.

Kitty Yeung: So, this is a program that drives the innovation, drives a culture of innovation and experimentation. How do we do that? We say, “Doers not talkers.” We actually get our hands dirty. When we think about something, we act on it. These are the culture pillars for Microsoft. To a lot of us when we first see them, they saw just words, but how do we actually implement these and achieve this? We have all kinds of programs and mechanism to drive innovation in Microsoft. Hacking, we have global sites, we have internship programs, experimental outlet is how we ship projects out, and we have intrapreneurs program, and we do storytelling. So I’m going to go into each of these.

Kitty Yeung: The hacking at Microsoft has become the culture. We actually organize the world’s largest global hackathon at Microsoft, and The Garage is the organization that organizes it. Guess how many people attended this year? Globally, there were 27,000 people attending our hackathon, and everyone was excitedly bringing their great ideas to the hackathon and forming teams all around the world. Whether or not you know them, whether or not you’re from the same org, same teams, you can put your skills together and build something that you feel passionate about. We had thousands of projects every year submitted to the hackathon, and The Garage helps people not only have these ideas submitted, we help them grow their ideas into prototypes, and we help them ship.

Kitty Yeung: Satya is a big supporter of our hackathon. He walks in the tent and look at the projects. He said last year, “Bigger ideas, more customers.” So, we can hack on anything we want. So it could be small things. It could be something that we use every day. It could be something that has real impact in the society, we can really help our customers achieve their industry scale ideas. So we also work with our customers and we bring our customer come here to hack.

Kitty Yeung: The experimental outlet, we also call it a ship channel. So this is a mechanism for us to get those ideas in but also provide them with the business model, idea building, how to enter the market, and we help our employees ship those projects out. So if you go to The Garage website, you will see about 100 projects that’s already in the market, and we feature our employees who came up with those good ideas. You can see all the teams on the website, everyone who put their part time together to really achieve something. So, we also have very big projects that we collaborated with industry partners and customers.

Kitty Yeung: Intrapreneurs program is kind of a internal startup program. It involves these ideas, these teams, hackathon teams, to actually pitch their ideas to the leaders and get support. So some of these projects can grow into a feature of an existing Microsoft product, or sometimes they become a product of Microsoft.

Kitty Yeung: We also run our internship program very differently. If you are familiar with traditional internships, usually students come in and they work under one manager in a big team working on a small part of a big project. Instead, our interns come in as a team and inside a team usually we hire like 30 students per site. Silicon Valley just started our first pilot program, so we only had one team, but we have six really, really good students. Usually we’ll have teams of six to eight, and they have developers, usually a PM, and a designer, forming a complete skill set. Then business teams at Microsoft pitch their ideas to our interns and the interns pick which one they like to do, and they drive it like a startup in the company for 12 weeks. Then they can deliver the projects back to the team, or even better, we can ship it directly into the market. It’s a very, very competitive and rewarding program. So if you’re undergrad, think about applying to that internship program at The Garage.

Kitty Yeung: We also engage with storytelling, those ideas, those projects got shipped out. We tell a story, we have a PR team, and you will see a lot of news articles about Microsoft innovation. Pay attention next time when you read an article like that if they mention The Garage.

Kitty Yeung: The global sites is also our feature. We have seven global locations right now for The Garage, and we are expanding. Each location has our own ecosystem, and also, each location has our facility. We have maker spaces, we have technologies that we provide to our employees. They can do prototyping, they can bring their ideas to share with their colleagues. We do startup pitching. We do show and tell and workshops to educate our people and also give them a platform to achieve their collaborations.

Kitty Yeung: So these are the seven sites worldwide. We’re in Silicon Valley and we are now called The Garage Bay Area. And as you can imagine, we have a unique ecosystem of a lot of startups, a lot of big companies and universities. So we work with all of these people in the ecosystem and we collaborate to really build projects that can impact the world. So, as I mentioned, we work with our employees and engage with all of our business teams inside Microsoft, and we work with customers. We bring them to work on projects and hack with us.

Kitty Yeung: Here are some numbers. You can see that we have very global and diverse team, but we actually only have 20 people worldwide. So, the 20 people drive all of those activities that I just mentioned. 27,000 hackers this year is an updated number. Last year, behind that 27, there was 23,000. You can see that it’s growing every year. It’s only going to get bigger. 76 countries participate and we’ve held more than 100 interns already. With the most competitive schools around our local areas. You can find more than 100 projects that’s in the market and on the global website. 19 of them became actual Microsoft products and lots of social media posts, lots of news articles about Microsoft innovation. So, make sure you follow us on the social media.

Kitty Yeung: Some of the Bay Area’s specific projects. Seeing AI, we build a lot of projects that help the people with needs, people who have disabilities. Seeing AI is a project that we shipped a few years ago that help blind people see through technology. So you can hold a phone, the camera will detect what’s in front of you and also read it out, interpret. It can also detect facial expressions and people’s age. So it gives blind people information about their surroundings.

Kitty Yeung: Sketch 360 is a project we just shipped last year, is by an artist inside Microsoft, Michael Scherotter. He had an idea of, “Why don’t we sketch 360 pictures directly?” So, we can build like a full environmental canvas and you can draw anything you want. You can also put that into VR or AR to visualize it. We also last year shipped some apps. Spend is by MileIQ team. So, lots of local projects. We’re just going through our hackathon projects this year.

Kitty Yeung: So personally, that’s why I’m also here to do a demo. I’ve build some of the projects in The Garage to satisfy personal ambitions of anyone in Microsoft can use The Garage as a resource to build their communities, can build their projects. So I have built a lot of wearable technologies. I’m doing a demo right there. We have these different dresses with different sensors and AI, machine learning functionality, and robotic dresses that I can show you later on. But I also have a passion for quantum computing because of my physics background. I’m a physicist, actually. So, I see the need to build a community of people learning about quantum. So this is a study group that I founded in Bay Area, teaching people how quantum computing works, including physics, maths, the hardware, and software, and any employee with good ideas, they can do this. So we have a lot of employees who wanted to do, say AR tech community, they can come to The Garage and do that. Or they have passion for IOT, they can come to The Garage and do that. So, these are just some examples.

Kitty Yeung: So since Girls Geek is also sort of about career, I think this will be my last slide to show you something about your aspiration. This is a guide. So see where you are in this chart of Ikigai and see where you are and figure out what would you like to be. I think for me, I can feel Ikigai in Microsoft because I’m doing something I love, something the world needs, and something I can be paid for that’s important, and something I’m good at. So, if you can get to that sweet spot, that should be your goal. Also, think about how you’re aligned to the global goals. That’s what I can do. I highlighted some of the goals that I could do in the company as well as through my personal projects. I think I would love to expand this and I think this will be a good guide for everyone, how we can do more impactful work for the world. Thank you.

Chloe Condon: Okay. Wait. You cannot leave the stage without sharing this dress. I’m going to make you model it. It is so incredible. So, do you want to say a little bit about it first?

Kitty Yeung: Okay. This is one of my designs, among the other ones I brought. All of these prints are my own paintings. This is a painting of Saturn and I wanted to simulate Saturn on the dress. How do I do that? Because Saturn has a ring, so why don’t I make a ring that when I rotate it will show Saturn. It also has an angle detector. There’s an accelerometer in here. So if it achieves a certain angle it will light up like the stars.

Chloe Condon: Amazing, amazing.

Kitty Yeung: Thank you.

Chloe Condon: Thank you so much. When you wear such a fabulous dress, we should have had a catwalk. I’m so sorry everyone. Amazing. Thank you so much, Kitty. I really, really love that and I loved that final slide. I took pictures of it so I can look at it later and map out my own plan. I am so excited to introduce our next guest that is going to tell us all about machine learning. Priyanka, come on up to the stage. I have a little … do you need a clicker? Amazing. Here you go.

Head of TPM for AI Priyanka Gariba gives a talk on “Leading a large scale and complex machine learning program at LinkedIn” at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Priyanka Gariba: Hi, everyone. First off, I’m not showing off anything as cool as what the other women did, but I also want to say this is my first time here at Girl Geek Dinner and I think this is amazing. Look at the energy, like room full of women. How many times in a day do we get to see that, or even a month, right? So thank you for having me. My name is Priyanka Gariba and I lead Artificial Intelligence Technical Program Management group at LinkedIn. My talk for today is going to be how we are scaling machine learning at LinkedIn. We are one of the large and complex program that has been funded by our engineering group.

Priyanka Gariba: So, I’ve structured my talk into four different areas. I’ll give a quick introduction on LinkedIn and some of the products that are really powered very heavily by machine learning. I will then get into the problem statement of what we are trying to do in order to scale machine learning. Then talk a little bit about our technology, and then wrap it up with sure, we can scale with building a solution and with technology, but there’s also an aspect of people, and so how do we scale that, and what is LinkedIn doing about it? Okay. All right. With that, let’s get started with the vision and mission for LinkedIn.

Priyanka Gariba: Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every single member in the global workforce. Our mission is, the way we are going to realize it is of course by connecting world’s professional to make them more productive. Let’s take an example of this room itself, right? So many cool things that were shown up, so many cool people, so many cool women that we spoke to. Just imagine if we were connected to one another, there’s so much value we can bring in each other’s life, and LinkedIn can help us do that. So, how are we trying to realize our vision and our mission is through some of our products.

Priyanka Gariba: I’m hoping and I think everyone here is at least having a profile on LinkedIn, and if you’re not connected to the cool women here in the room, I encourage that before you leave, definitely connect with one another. But some of the products that really help us do that is People You May Know. This is a product line that really helps us build our connections. It understands, there is a recommendation system that runs behind it, there is machine learning models that run behind it, very heavily AI powered, and it really allows us to know who are the people, like minded people, that we need to be connected to, and the value we can bring in each other’s life by just having that connection.

Priyanka Gariba: Then of course there is Feed. Everybody who goes on LinkedIn as a platform is going to see Feed as the first product. Jobs is another product, which is very heavily powered by machine learning behind it. Why am I talking about all these products? AI at LinkedIn is like oxygen, and one thing that all these products have in common is AI. With that, what that means is we know that machine learning is everywhere. It’s powering every single product line that we build, it’s helping us bring the best experiences to all our members across the board. So, because of that one reason, we know that what we need to do is we need to enable more people to do machine learning at LinkedIn.

Priyanka Gariba: So, there are two pieces to my talk. One, which I think I’ll dive into more than the second one, is going to be technology. There’s one way we can scale technology, is by building a solution. How do we enable our machine learning engineers to really build and deploy models faster so that the experiences that they can bring to all the members is at a faster rate. The second one is by scaling people.

Priyanka Gariba: So, to tap into the exact problem that we are trying to solve, let’s look at our machine learning development life cycle. It’s as simple as any software development life cycle, right? Basically a machine learning engineer has an idea, there’s something you want to solve for, what is the first couple of things that they would do? They’ll think about what are the machine learning features that are available to them? How do you crank up all these features together? Try and test it in an offline model, train with some datasets, and once you value it and feel comfortable that this is something good, the next big piece is going to be actually serving it in production and then seeing results through AB testing and all of that.

Priyanka Gariba: I’m not going to dive too much into this. This really just is an extension of that life cycle. Basically you start with an idea and then there are different functions along the way. There is a product management, there’s dev, and the way we really make decisions on product is very heavily powered by our AB testing platform. We make ramp decisions only based on that. Once we see the results, only then do we believe that that is a model that we want to ramp further to our members.

Priyanka Gariba: Why talk about all of this? Why talk about the life cycle, right? If all these products are being built at LinkedIn and if so many people are doing it and all the teams are doing this, what that means is every single team is doing and deploying models in a very different way. There are many, many technologies, they are all on different stacks, it’s not standardized across the board, and one thing we encourage at LinkedIn is for people to move around within teams. So today if you want to work on a Feed team, tomorrow you want to work on a Job Recommendation team, how do you do that? Your stack is different. Half the days are going to be spent in just ramping up.

Priyanka Gariba: So, we introduced something called as Productive Machine Learning. Really our goal is to enable end to end experience of machine development life cycle to be more robust, reliable, and consistent, and standardized. The experience we are looking for is for an ML engineer, all you have to worry about is come up with an idea, and then there is everything else is opaque for you. There is a big box and you don’t have to worry on how you move from one phase to the other. Ideation to machine learning features to training to scoring to serving it in the introduction. You don’t have to worry about this and how are we going to do that.

Priyanka Gariba: So, we’ve put together this program, it’s to give you context, this is a really large scale program, about 6,200 engineers across the board working on it, different geolocations. The way we are structuring it is by talking about three different phases.

Priyanka Gariba: Model creation, going back to that life cycle that you saw, everything from ideation to training and evaluating your model comes under model creation. So we have multiple components that blend into that. Then the next piece for us is deployment. Once you believe that your model is really good and ready for serving, you deploy it in production. The third piece, this is not really a phase, but something that cuts across, is making sure your quality is accurate. Meaning features that you used for your offline training are very similar to what you see in online. So online, offline consistency.

Priyanka Gariba: So, I just wanted to, because I had 10 minutes, I just wanted to give you a flavor of this big undertaking that we are doing at LinkedIn and also give you a little bit of flavor of how we are structured. Typically, every time we build something, we follow a traditional model. You have a leader, you have multiple managers, you have engineers, and you come up with a goal on a project and everyone works together. This one, we wanted to do something different. What we did is, let’s bring every single person in LinkedIn who is really passionate about solving this problem.

Priyanka Gariba: So put together what’s your team, we had everyone across the board, in different geolocations too. There is someone who will be infrastructure heavy. There is someone who is a machine learning engineer who can help us really give us inputs when we are building the solution that it’s really going to work for them. Then there’s product managers, CPMs, engineers, across the board, but it’s really all of these coming together, forgetting the boundaries of management, realizing that there is one goal that we have, is to get an end to end machine learning life cycle ready, was the key thing for us. I already mentioned that, team of teams, we’re geolocated. That is also one reason why we wanted to do that, is we wanted engineers across the board because if we were solving a problem just for headquarters, which is in Mountain View, we will not be solving for everyone at LinkedIn.

Priyanka Gariba: Then of course with any product that you build in any company, there is a big piece of adoption. So, for us, the strategy that we have used is that let’s, the three big phases that we spoke about, let’s build small components underneath it and let’s allow every product team to pick up a component and adopt that depending on what their pain point is. So, for example, if a Feed team is really struggling with how do you train a model, then what we wanted to offer them is pick up that component and get adopted on that. Once you buy the idea, then slowly and gradually navigate into the adoption of the other components too. This helped both ways. This helped us get real early feedback from our customers and users, and then it also allowed us to load balance. So we could develop things while something was already being tested and we were getting that iteration loop from our users.

Priyanka Gariba: So, I spoke about the technology, and I spoke about the solution. The second thing that LinkedIn is doing, and I’m just giving a very high level preview of this, is in order for us to democratize AI or to make it readily available and to enable more engineers to do that, there’s a program that LinkedIn’s kicked off, it’s called AI Academy. There are three different types of courseworks of program, AI 100, 200, 300. As you graduate from one to the other, really the intensity of the techniques and machine learning increases. So AI 100 is really just getting a flavor of what AI is, what machine learning is, and get you familiarized with it. And then 200 you start understanding how do you build a model, and three is when you actually build your own model and put it in production. I can talk all about this and I’m happy to talk about it later on, but this is just a preview, and there’s a lot of blogs and things that we’ve already put on LinkedIn.

Priyanka Gariba: This is another blog for Productive Machine Learning for those of you who are interested in reading more about it, and I’ll share my slides as well. That’s it. Just a quick flavor. I had 10 minutes, so I thought at least I’ll come up here and talk to you and give you a flavor of what we are doing to democratize machine learning at LinkedIn. But happy to, I don’t know if I have time for questions, but I can take questions later on as well. Thank you.

Priyanka Gariba: Okay. I can take a question or two if … After. Okay. All right. Sure.

Chloe Condon: Thank you so much. All right. So, next up, I will take that from you. Next up we have a very special treat, but before I introduce our very special guest, I’m going to show you my favorite LinkedIn feature. How many people have added someone on LinkedIn tonight? Okay. Well now you’re going to add more people. So, if you go to your LinkedIn app in the very top in the search bar, there is a barcode, a scanning barcode, and if you click on that, instead of having to type out the person’s name and awkwardly ask for spelling, you can just scan their barcode tonight. So you can share that secret tip that I learned recently from someone else at a meet up that I now pass onto you to make spelling people’s names less awkward. So definitely scan everyone’s badge here tonight. My best advice always in tech is to meet as many people as you can, and tell your story and share their stories while you’re here tonight with all these amazing people.

Chloe Condon: I am going to welcome our very, very special guest for tonight, Charlotte. Come on down. We are so excited to welcome Charlotte Yarkoni to the SF Reactor. Here you go.

Corporate Vice President, Cloud + AI Division, Charlotte Yarkoni gives a warm welcome at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Charlotte Yarkoni: Thank you. I need to start out and tell you guys, I’m sick. I really, really apologize for my voice. I’ve been told I don’t look as bad as I sound, so I thought it’d still be okay to show up, but hopefully you’ll manage to go with me this evening. It was important for me to come. So again, I hope you can work with me on the sound quality. But my problem is as I’m watching everybody on stage, I wanted one of these mics so I can put it down, cough, and anywhere I go I’m going to … somebody’s in my blast radius. So, if I come over here and stand by the post, please don’t be offended.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Anyways, good to be here tonight. Thank you guys all for coming. I thought what I would do is first share with you a little bit about my journey of being a woman in tech and what that’s meant to me in my career. I do need a clicker. My telepathic PowerPoint clicking slides are not on today due to the head cold. So, I actually go talk a lot to universities. I go to some high schools. I love talking to young girls about STEM, but I always kind of have to ground in. Let me tell you what tech looked like when I was in middle school and high school.

Charlotte Yarkoni: This was it, by the way. There were no smartphones, there were no tablets, there were no laptops. I remember when Asteroids came out and me and my brothers thought it was amazing. Right? So that’s kind of where we were. Then this was our social network. There was no Twitter, there was no WeChat, there was no Snapchat. It was pretty much a bonfire in somebody’s field when their parents were out of town in the town I grew up in. So, that’s kind of where I come from.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I actually, I grew up in South Carolina. I was super fortunate to get a scholarship to come to UC Berkeley. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person from South Carolina to ever go to Berkeley. I was actually part of an inaugural program at the time called Electrical Engineering or Computer Science, or EECS as it was known. This is what code looked like when I was coding. Has anybody ever written in Lisp? Anyone? Did anyone? Yeah. Kicking it old school. All right. So, that was sort of my education, if you will, and my real foray into tech.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Then, I got out of college and started working and figuring out how to use technology as an applied science, not just in an academic sense, and this was kind of the world I was in. Actually cell phones came out and yes, that’s what they looked like for those of you that weren’t born then, because I know there’s a few of you here. Windows 95 was all the rage, right? You remember that? Then we get to today and it’s just a very, very different world.

Charlotte Yarkoni: One of the things that I love about technology is the fact that it has actually opened up all of our worlds, in so many ways that we can have so much more impact. We can instantly connect to people that we could never connect to 30, 40, 50 years ago. I’m not that old, I’m just framing my comments. But you think about that and it’s not just connecting to those people, it’s the access to information that you also have immediately at your fingertips. It’s amazing. It’s amazing that what you can harness with that kind of resources at your fingertips.

Charlotte Yarkoni: The challenge is, though, it comes with a responsibility, and I will tell you, at Microsoft, and GitHub, and LinkedIn, we spend a lot of time on that. In fact, it’s not just about innovating, it’s about innovating with purpose, and really making sure that you’re actually leaving the world in a better place than you found it before you introduced your solutions. So it’s those unintended consequences that you have to be very thoughtful about. As we continue to get more and more technology at our disposal, how do we use it for good? That kind of brings me to really, what’s my role.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Today in my role is, at Microsoft, I run a group called Commerce and Ecosystems. You can tell I’m not a marketing person, so there you go. But I’m really here. I focus on answering three questions. The first is, how do people actually discover who we are and what we do in our products and services? And Microsoft’s a very big company, it’s a global landscape. We offer lots of different products and services across our portfolio, but there are a lot of ecosystems and communities that actually don’t know who we are and what we do.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Five years ago it was a lot about open source, and I remember I actually went to … I started at Microsoft about three years ago and I went to an open source conference. By the way, I grew up in open source, so my background actually started out in Unix and moved to Linux. I never wrote a piece of code in .NET. Would probably look and feel a little bit like Lisp to me, honestly, if I tried to do it now. So when I came to Microsoft, I went to a familiar conference, and people were like, “Why are you here, man? Azure doesn’t run Linux.” I’m like, “What are you talking about? Yeah, it does.” People need to know, right? So we had to go fix that.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Second thing I focus on is after you discover us, how do you engage with us in a way that’s meaningful to you? And most of that is online. People don’t always want to have to go somewhere to learn how to do something. They will now have to sign up for a week long course, right? Necessarily to know how to build a solution using the technology that they have. So we spend a lot of time and energy focused on that and what’s the set of tooling or resources that we can offer.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Then the final point is, how do we just get easier to do business with our customers and partners? That’s where the commerce piece comes in and it’s all about what are some of the new business models we need to create to actually, how do we run all those capabilities across all our products and all our channels today? So there is a good bit of engineering that comes in each one of these aspects, but there’s also a lot of business work that I have to focus on. And again, it comes with that overarching layer of responsibility, is to how do we think about continuing to make progress in a positive way so we can have a positive impact on the communities we serve.

Charlotte Yarkoni: So that’s kind of who I am, and I think what we’re going to do at this stage is a little bit of like an AMA, and I’m really hoping you guys don’t ask me too many questions because the more I talk I think the worse I sound, but I will try to answer everything for sure. I was going to have Chloe join me, and I was going to have Shaloo Garg join me. So, just as a reminder of both, Chloe and Shaloo are part of my team and they’re part of the drive discovery effort. So I’ll let you guys, you guys will talk a little bit more about yourselves, I’m sure, but I’m going to turn it over to our master of ceremonies. Kick us off. Do you want that mic or you want–

Chloe Condon: Sure. Mics all round here.

Charlotte Yarkoni: This one may be contaminated.

Chloe Condon: All right. I wouldn’t want to catch the virus, the Charlotte virus. Amazing. So, I figure we’ll have a seat. Have a seat wherever. We had a bunch of people submit questions earlier in our fishbowl, thank you so much for all of the questions that we got earlier. So, what I figured I would do is we would start with an introduction with Shaloo. Would you like to tell everyone who you are, what you do?

Microsoft girl geeks: Senior Cloud Developer Advocate Chloe Condon, Corporate Vice President for Cloud + AI Charlotte Yarkoni, and Managing Director of Silicon Valley’s Microsoft for Startups Shaloo Garg answer audience questions with candor at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Shaloo Garg: Yeah. Absolutely. Firstly, thank you guys so much for coming here today. It means a lot. My name is Shaloo Garg and I lead the startup business growth for Silicon Valley for Microsoft, and entire California as well. It’s an exciting space to be in, and part of Charlotte’s team and part of what we do is not only engage with founders and CTOs and CIOs here of startups, but also drive meaningful partnerships, which is … this is Silicon Valley, there are a lot of partners here, how do we work with them to drive awareness of how Microsoft can help entrepreneurs there? So good to be here.

Chloe Condon: Amazing. Thank you so much. I have these randomly selected questions here.

Shaloo Garg: Those are a lot of questions.

Chloe Condon: It’s a lot of questions. I don’t know if we’re going to get through all of them. We may do kind of a rapid inside the actor’s studio type of lightning round at the end here. But I love this first one. I chose this one first and this is for Charlotte. It says, “What’s it like being an executive at one of the top companies? Do you have a life?” Great phrasing, whoever wrote this.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I’d like to think I have a life. Yes, I do have a life. I have two children, both girls, one–

Chloe Condon: Great. Are they coding already?

Charlotte Yarkoni: One is 23, just graduated. She went to Reed College, and by the way, back to Berkeley, I thought when I went to Berkeley from South Carolina, I was an enlightened liberal. And when I dropped my daughter off at Reed College, I felt like I was the most conservative person on the planet. I was a little worried about my life choices at that point. But she graduated there in linguistics and she actually is starting school this week, getting her master’s at University of Washington.

Charlotte Yarkoni: She would be very offended if I called her a developer or an engineer, yet she spends a lot of time writing programs and are doing statistical analysis on languages because she focuses on Russian, Japanese, Spanish language and language heritage.

Chloe Condon: Wow.

Charlotte Yarkoni: So, that’s my oldest. My youngest is 13, and a prolific gamer and developer. Python is her language of choice. She has lots of opinions about every other language.

Chloe Condon: As she should.

Charlotte Yarkoni: It kind of takes me longer these days to set up an environment for her to code in than it does for her to whip out a new game that she’s thinking about. So, I’m pretty sure she’s going to end up somewhere in the engineer community as a professional at one point. I also have three horses. I ride. I grew up three day eventing, for those of you who know what that is. Now that I’m older and have kids, I wondered what my parents were thinking when they let me do that. But I still ride and I still compete. Then I do my day job.

Chloe Condon: That is a fun fact.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I think the thing about today’s technology is, the good and the bad is it allows you to be accessible all the time. So, you can actually, you have to know how to be at the right place at the right time, which is usually the conflict that occurs, but you are able to go do what you need to do personally and do things professionally as you go. So that’s something I’m really, I feel privileged by who I work for in the industry I’m in and the technologies that we’ll be bringing for all the working moms out there.

Chloe Condon: Wow. That’s actually a great segue into the next question, which I’ll direct to Shaloo first, which is, how do you relax and unwind? Like with how long and tough your day jobs are, how do you get to chill?

Shaloo Garg: So, best is tennis. I love playing tennis and that’s how I unwind, and when I go out and play tennis, I try not to take my cell phone with me or my kids. So I have a 13-year-old daughter too, and a nine-year-old son who quite a handful.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Do you have any Serena moments on the court?

Shaloo Garg: I do. But that’s how I unwind, which is just completely unplug, just a moment of Zen and just go out there and hit it.

Chloe Condon: I’m very similar. I craft. I like to do like things with my hands and not look at a screen and just build something fun, like a costume or something that lights up. And you’re riding horses.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Yeah, but I could not build a costume. So, we each have our strengths.

Chloe Condon: Hit me up for Halloween. We’ll get you guys–

Charlotte Yarkoni: I’m going to hit you up for Halloween. Okay.

Chloe Condon: This one says, “What would be your advice for your past self coming straight out of college?” I love that question.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Who you asking?

Chloe Condon: Anyone can jump in. Yeah.

Shaloo Garg: I think coming out of college, I wish I was more aware of getting a coach or a mentor, which I was not aware. And during my career I sort of looked upon women leaders and requested them to be mentors and coaches. So what I try to do now is go out and coach and mentor women or young girls myself. So, I realize that they may be in the same situation as I was in, which is, “Hey, I can ask a woman leader to say, ‘Would you mind spending 30 minutes with me?'” But they don’t ask. Right? So I preemptively do that in schools, colleges here in Silicon Valley. Actually right up our Market Street office, that’s another office of ours, every month, I host open office hours for young women who are out there, budding entrepreneurs. It doesn’t have to do anything with Microsoft. So, as soon as you walk in the door, it doesn’t have to be, “Hey, you have to sign up to work with us,” but it’s just coaching, and I love it. So, wish I had that, but a part of me is just giving back, just making sure that someone out there is benefiting.

Chloe Condon: Yeah, that’s great advice. Charlotte.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I think, for me, one of the things that it’s taken me a long time to appreciate and I really, I encourage everybody to have some thought about this for their own journey, both personally and professionally, resilience is such an important thing. When I look back on my career, I feel, again, very privileged to have worked in all the places and spaces that I have. But the successes I had weren’t one success right after the other. It was a success built off of quite frankly, a mountain of failures and trials to get there. It was about taking those learnings and applying and getting better. I think a lot of what we do as an industry is about solving a problem, solving an opportunity, and getting better as we go, and iterating, and it’s really hard to do that as a person.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I’m going to go out on a limb and assume all you people here are somewhat overachievers. So every time that you have a failure, you want to prosecute the failure and you want to prosecute yourself, and that’s okay as long as you make it a constructive thing and learn from it, and the older you get and the more experienced you get, the more you start to really embrace and almost be proud of those failures for what they taught you, because you wouldn’t be wherever you are without it. That’s just a fact. I don’t know that I appreciated that in my younger age. I was certainly an overachiever and thought I knew a lot more than I knew at the time. I know that’s shocking, but it’s true. But as I went through my career, it was a process for me to understand how to really get value in the mistakes, how to really give value in the failures, and use them to move forward.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I just would encourage everybody, get out there and try. That’s step one and step two, is make sure you learn and embrace the mistakes, right? And it is about that of resilience that will just make you so much of a better person whatever you decide to do, however you decide to do it.

Chloe Condon: My advice would be, I don’t think I knew right when I graduated what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wish I had taken a little time to travel or maybe to explore different industries and fields that maybe I wanted to dip my toe in. Because I think what the wonderful thing about working in tech is you don’t have to commit to doing the same thing for your entire life. You can always change and learn a completely new technology or … There was a tweet that I think I retweeted this morning, which was, “Your job that you have in five years may not even exist. So try not to plan out your life too strategically,” and I think that’s really wonderful advice because technology is growing at a rapid rate and we may be working for something we don’t even know exists yet. The new, I don’t know, a new iPhone. Who knows?

Chloe Condon: Great. Next question that I have is, I love this one, “What’s the best book you’ve read this year?” Does anyone have one? I know mine. I can go first while people think.

Shaloo Garg: Go, go for it.

Chloe Condon: I read a book. Oh no, you go first because I want to make sure I get her name right, the author’s name right.

Shaloo Garg: So I think the life-changing moment for me was the book that I read by Eckhart Tolle. It’s called The Power of Now, and it teaches you a lot about what Charlotte talked about, failure. It also teaches you how to stay engaged but not attached, which is you’re really passionate about something that you’re doing. Keep that passion, but don’t get so emotionally sucked into it that you break down. So it also teaches you mindfulness and awareness. And then how to be an A player, which is you’re mindful, you’re aware of what you’re doing, but guess what? You got to go and get it. So I thought that was completely life-changing for me because I learned quite a bit in terms of just being strong, being very passionate about what I do, but not emotional, and then just chasing it, chasing the ball and just chasing the heck out of it.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Mine’s an oldie but a goodie, because my youngest was doing a book report on this one, the Life of Pi.

Chloe Condon: That’s a good one.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I just loved that. I haven’t read it in many years and so she brought it home and I brought out my copy so we could read it together. It is just an amazing book.

Chloe Condon: That is on my list. You said yours was The Power of Now?

Shaloo Garg: Power of Now.

Chloe Condon: Okay. Write that one down, everyone. I recently read Just the Funny Parts by Nell Scovell, she’s a female comedy writer, and I found … it’s an autobiographical piece. She used to write for Saturday Night Live, David Letterman, and it’s a completely male dominated field. It was the first time I had read about an industry other than tech that was similarly structured and formatted and it talked about, she’s a comedy writer, so it comes from this place of empathy and humor, and I would highly recommend it. She helped write Sheryl Sandberg’s book. She also wrote a lot of Obama’s jokes, I found out in that book. So, a lot of the things that made us chuckle from Obama came from her.

Chloe Condon: So, next one is, “Who has influenced you most in your life and why?”

Charlotte Yarkoni: That one’s actually really hard. I will tell you both my parents passed away in the last year. They were quite older. I’m the youngest of a large family. Pretty sure I was an accident, so, it’s okay. But you spend a lot of time reflecting on your nuclear family when those kinds of things happen, and they happen inevitably to everyone. So I definitely think my parents had a large influence on my life. I think my teachers had a large influence on my life. I’m the proud product of the public education system of South Carolina, which I think at the time I was growing up was like 49th in the country. But I went from there to UC Berkeley, which was an amazing school. And I had some amazing teachers to help me learn how to learn, is what I got from that.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I’ve been super fortunate to have some great mentors and what I would call guidance counselors throughout my career, that I still do lunch with and dinners with and catch up with. So, I feel like I’ve had a lot of influences and I do think for the last 20 plus years, though, my kids have probably taught me more humility and patience and resilience and all the other virtues we speak so highly of. They’ve probably been the biggest forcing function in my life in recent years.

Chloe Condon: What about the horses?

Charlotte Yarkoni: The horses are my sanity. I will tell you, we moved to Australia for a couple of years and I couldn’t take my horses with me and I was, my husband will tell you, I was a miserable person for the time I was gone.

Chloe Condon: I’m picturing you writing postcards back to your horses at home.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I came home. I came home every two months to see them.

Chloe Condon: Aww. How about you, Shaloo?

Shaloo Garg: So, parents, but I think my mom. So I lost my parents at a very young age. I remember when thinking back growing up, so I was born in India, but I grew up in Middle East, and I grew up in a community where there was lot of domestic violence and girls were not allowed to go to school. And so there were a lot of changes that were happening around me. In fact, while growing up, I went to 14 different schools between elementary, middle, and high school. So you can imagine moving from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, to Kuwait during the war zone time. But I remember going through all this, my mom always taught me and my sister is that, if there’s ever a problem in life and there is a simpler solution, and there is a hard solution, guess what? Pick the hardest one, because it’s going to make you go through that process, whereas a simpler one, you’re just going to take it and just sit with it and you’re not going to learn anything. So I do look back and I think that she’s had an amazing influence on me.

Shaloo Garg: And as Charlotte said, my kids, I keep learning from them every single day. They teach me so many things in terms of if I get upset about something, they’ll just say, “Hey mom, just relax. This is just a small thing, just move on.” I think that’s how I keep learning more and more. And of course, amazing coaches and mentors and some really amazing female leaders who I look upon to.

Chloe Condon: I would have to agree. My mother passed away when I was 16, but she was a costume designer, graphic designer, creative arts person, and I try to bring my creative arts training and background into all the technology that I do and create. So I think that was probably the biggest influence on me, would have to be my mom as well.

Chloe Condon: What is the biggest challenge we are facing in tech currently? A tough one.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I actually think our biggest challenge as a society is climate change. I think technology can be a solution for that. So, that’s an indirect answer to a direct question, but I would say that is the thing that I would love to see all of us, I don’t care what you’re doing, where you’re working, but to start having serious thoughts about how we can go reverse decades of adverse effect on the planet. It helps everybody, and I do think the real accelerants are going to lie not just in changing our behavior and our consumption, but also in having technology help us. I don’t think we’ve really gone there yet as a society at large. So for me, it’s something I’m kind of anxious to push along however I can in whatever small way that I can. I think that’s how I think about it.

Charlotte Yarkoni: With technology, you have things like quantum, which is just amazing. The beauty of working somewhere like Microsoft is we are spending a ton of research and we have really crazy people, crazy smart people working on this, and every now and then if I have to go give a talk and I need to give my five minutes of quantum computing update for the cloud, I always ask, “Are there any theoretical physicists in the audience? Because if there are, I’m not going to do this because you know way more than me,” kind of thing.

Chloe Condon: Come on up.

Charlotte Yarkoni: But it’s amazing, and in essence you take what sits in a data center the size of a football field today and you can run it in what’s in the size of a refrigerator in your house. But, the cooling you need to do that is extraordinarily more than the power we’re consuming today, and the impact that will have, by the way, if it’s not done right, either we’re not producing it correctly and/or we’re not cooling it correctly, can have a devastating effect. So how do we think about things like that, these new trends with this aspect of sustainability around the climate, I think is super important. So I apologize, I kind of rambled on that answer, but I actually think this one’s a really important one.

Chloe Condon: I agree. I actually met someone at Open Source Summit recently who works on our IOT team here at Microsoft in Redmond, and his job on the IOT team is to help offset our carbon emissions from our server center. So I thought, “That’s such an important, important way for us to help make the environment a better place with Microsoft.” So, yeah.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Absolutely, and the lady who runs our data centers, her name is Noelle, she’s a peer of mine. I love her dearly. She’s just an amazing woman. She actually grew up as a chemical engineer.

Chloe Condon: Wow.

Charlotte Yarkoni: A lot of her time on how do we run our data centers is spent in areas that you and I wouldn’t know how to go solve, because it is about how do you think about power? How do you think about new sources like geothermal and things like that. I think it’s great. I think it’s great we’re thinking that way, but we got to do more.

Chloe Condon: Yeah.

Shaloo Garg: I think the biggest challenge is the knowledge or the lack of awareness behind power of technology. So, I often see this, I keep bringing up edtech as a very common example, and in fact, here in the Valley, edtech is right now the hottest topic in the social impact circle. I can guarantee you, when I throw the word school out here and I ask you to just close your eyes and think of, tell me what you think of. You’re going to think of a building. You’re going to think of kids running, a blackboard, and a teacher. But that’s not what education is only. Education can be a seven-year-old girl sitting in Uganda who’s not allowed to go to school, but she can sit at home and do schooling at home using an iPad, right? Just because she’s a girl, she’s not allowed to go to school.

Shaloo Garg: That is the power of technology, and it kills me every single day when I read about places like Somalia and Syria, and so many other places, where easily companies, and Microsoft does amazing job, that’s one thing I’m really proud to be, which is be part of this company. We do amazing work globally in enabling this. I think we need to continue to talk about the power of technology, which we do in our jobs and outside our jobs, but we need more and more people to go out there and coach people and say, “Hey guys, education is just not about textbooks. It can be digital education powered by technology.” I think that to me is the biggest challenge right now, which is lack of awareness.

Chloe Condon: Yeah, accessibility and access to that is so important.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Can I interrupt this broadcast? Do we have any recruiters in the audience? Because I think we have our newest recruit. She did an awesome walk-in by the way.

Chloe Condon: Love the pants. Great pants. This is a very fun question. What emoji do you use most often?

Charlotte Yarkoni: I don’t use them correctly, as my children … I always send them stuff–

Chloe Condon: It’s the horse one, right?

Charlotte Yarkoni: … and they’re like, “Why did you send me this? Do you know what this means?” I’m like, “No. No.”

Chloe Condon: I think that’s part of your job as a mom, right?

Charlotte Yarkoni: Well, I have gotten in this habit of sending random ones just to freak my kids out.

Chloe Condon: Love it.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I usually am pretty clean at work with the okay and the goofball face, and the smiley face, but it cracks me up because we were just having this discussion the other day, because I sent something that apparently I shouldn’t have sent as a parent.

Chloe Condon: It’s like a secret hidden emoji language.

Charlotte Yarkoni: It really is.

Chloe Condon: Yeah.

Charlotte Yarkoni: And you, what do you use?

Chloe Condon: I would say it’s a tie between the sobbing emoji and the laugh crying emoji, because I don’t have any other two emotions other than those two extremes. There’s no in between for me. I’m either hysterically laughing or hysterically crying.

Charlotte Yarkoni: What do you use, Shaloo?

Shaloo Garg: Smile and laughter, and that’s it. For the kids, with the kids, I’ll just use hearts, and sometimes my daughter says, “Mom, just stop using those… You’re embarrassing me, mom.”

Chloe Condon: Yeah. What are the most important decisions you face every day? Or what is the most important decision you face every day?

Shaloo Garg: How to make founders successful, and especially in a market like this. I just love it. It’s an upstream market, constantly challenging ourselves. What else can we do? What else can we do in this market? I absolutely love it. It is challenging. It’s extremely challenging.

Chloe Condon: It’s a huge question.

Shaloo Garg: It’s a huge question. I’ve been with the company for eight months and when I joined initially, I was a bit nervous. I was like, “Great, I’m so excited about this job,” and when I went out there, talked to founders, everyone was like, everyone gave me a standard response, “Well, yeah, okay.” But now slowly and slowly we’ve started building it as part of the narrative that we haven’t only the meetings, which is how do we help the founders, and if we switched that, our jobs become much more easier, which is, “I’m here to help you and this is how I can help you.” So I think that to me is absolutely the most fun part.

Chloe Condon: Yeah.

Charlotte Yarkoni: By the way, as part of my team, that’s a great answer for these little startups. I think my job is really making the set of decisions that best serve our customers, our partners, best serve the team. It’s always a balance, right? We have so much we’ve got to get done. We love innovating, we love getting new capabilities out there, making sure that we’re doing that with the right sense of urgency and the right balance for the teams delivering them. Most of my day, in any one of my teams that I look at, is just making the right calls to make sure that we’re doing right by the community, as both our community that’s working on it and the communities we’re trying to serve.

Chloe Condon: Yeah. I would say for me it’s how to get people excited to learn, and what is going to get them having fun. Because I think we work all day, we work like an eight-hour plus day sometimes in front of machines using technology, and what are fun creative ways to get people excited about that and to build really cool, amazing things together that can solve these big questions and problems like the environment and getting accessibility to folks who don’t have the access to this technology. So, it’s always fun to enable that power to people.

Chloe Condon: How much time do we have? Do we want to do maybe one or two more questions? One more question. Okay, cool. Let’s see. I think this is a really good … Actually, I would love to end with your advice to all of our amazing women in this audience, and men in the audience. What would be your advice to someone who’s looking to move up in their career and have a successful career as a person in tech?

Charlotte Yarkoni: I think being you is the most important part. Whatever that means, right? Just be your most authentic self. It’s a hard thing to do. It’s a hard thing in our industry. It’s a hard thing in super competitive environments like here in San Francisco. Seattle is very similar in that regard. I have found people get the most reward and have the most success when they’re actually themselves, whatever that means. I also think being the authentic you will not just make you better, it will actually make whatever team you’re on better. It will make whatever company you’re at better, it will make whatever product or service you’re working on better. Just be you and be proud to be you.

Chloe Condon: I love that.

Shaloo Garg: So, I would say do what you’re passionate about because when you’re passionate, you bring your best. Do not be afraid to take risk, and I know this sounds like a cliche, but really challenge yourself. If there is a risk, if you want to do something and it looks very risky, just go ahead and do it. Maximum, you’re going to fail, but you’ll learn something from it. If you come out victorious, that’s great. Then the last thing I would say is just trust yourself and just believe in your instinct that you’re doing good for the business, you’re doing good for the company, you’re also doing good for those startups or customers or whoever your stakeholders are, and just go chase it. If you keep it straight and if you keep what I call the compass straight, there’s going to be lots of amazing learning in the process.

Chloe Condon: My advice is actually a great segue into our mingling and happy hour section. Mine would be to talk to as many people as you can in this industry. If you have the opportunity to get coffee with someone you really idolize or a mentor, or someone who’s doing what you want to be doing in this industry, having conversations, I think, is so wonderful and you are all about to use that LinkedIn feature that I just taught you, and meet some really amazing people. So make connections and network and yeah, have the most amazing time.

Chloe Condon: I want to thank both of our…

Shaloo Garg: Thank you.

Chloe Condon: … panelists today. Round of applause for Shaloo and Charlotte.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Thank you for hosting.

Chloe Condon: Of course. Thank you to to Kitty. Thank you to Priyanka. Thank you to everyone, to Kaitlyn who’s not here, but oh my gosh, that amazing, amazing musical performance we had to start off the evening. Please, enjoy yourselves. I think we still have some beverages and snacks here, so have a wonderful time. Make sure you get some swag and stickers and we will be around to chat. All right. Thanks everyone.

Microsoft girl geeks and allies: Thank you to all the Redmond, San Francisco and Silicon Valley teams who worked together to make this happen!   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Microsoft Garage Manager Kitty Yeung is a creative technologist with a skirt that lights up when she spins.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Principal Program Manager Lead Jane Fang and SF Academy Head of Marketing Jo Ryall demo “Mix Reality” to a girl geek  at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

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