 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It's International Women's Day 2018. There's stuff going on all around the world. We're up at the Accenture event in downtown San Francisco. 400 people at the Hotel Niko, lot of great panels, a lot of interesting conversations, a lot of good energy, really about diversity and inclusion, and not just because it's the right thing to do, but it actually drives better business outcomes. Hmm, how about that? So we're really excited to have our next guest. It's Vivian Ming. She's a founder and chair of SoCo's Labs. Vivian, welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, so what is SoCo's Labs? SoCo's Labs is a think tank. It's my fifth company because apparently I can't seem to take a hint. And we are using artificial intelligence and neuroscience and economic theory to explore the future of what it means to be human. So who do you work with? Who are some of your clients? So we partner with enormous and wonderful groups around the world. For example, we're helping the Make-A-Wish Foundation help kids make better wishes. So we preserve what's meaningful to the child but try and make it even more resonant with the community and the family that's around them. We've done wonderful work here with Accenture to look at what actually predicts the best career and life outcomes and use that to actually help their employees, not for Accenture's sake, but so that 425,000 people get to live better, richer lives. Right, right. That's interesting because that's really in line with that research that they released today. What are these factors? I think they identified 40 that have a significant impact and then a subset of 14 within three buckets. It's very analytical. It's very Accenture. I love numbers. By training, I'm a theoretical neuroscientist which is a field where we study machine learning to better understand the brain and we studied the brain to come up with better machine learning. And then I started my first company in education and to me it's always about not even just generating a bunch of numbers but figuring out what actually makes a difference. What can you do in education, in mental health, in inclusion or just on the job that will actually drive someone to a better life outcome? And one of those outcomes is they're more productive and they're more engaged on the job, more creative. A big driver behind what I do is the incredible research on how many, it's called the Lost Einstein's research. The Lost Einstein. The Lost Einstein. Okay. So a famous economist, Raj Chetty at Stanford, just to release through her paper on this, showing that kids from high wealth backgrounds are 10 times as likely as middle class peers to, for example, have patents or to have that big impact in people's lives. In our research we find the same thing but on the scales of orders of magnitude difference. What if every little kid in Oakland or in Johannesburg or in a rural village in India had the same chances I had to invent and contribute? That's the world I want to live in. It's wonderful working with a group like Accenture, the Lego Foundation, the World Bank that agree that that really matters. Right. It's just interesting. The democratization theme comes up over and over and over and it's really not that complicated of a theme, right? If you give more people access to the data, more people access to the tools and make it easier for them to manipulate the data, you're just going to get more innovation, right? It's not brain surgery. You get more people contributing to what we sometimes call the creative class which, you know, right now probably is about 1.5% of the world population. Maybe 150, 200 million people. It sounds like a big number but we're approaching 8 billion. What would the world be like? Not if all of them. Just imagine instead of 200 million people, it was 400 or it was a billion people. What would the world be like if a billion people had the chance to really drive the good in our lives? So on my panel, I had the chance to throw out this line that I was quoted as saying once. Ambitious men have been promising us rocket ships and AI and self-driving cars but if every little girl had been given the reins to her own potential, we'd already have them. And we don't talk not just about every little girl but every little kid that doesn't have the chance. You know, if even 1% of them had that chance, it would change the world. So you must be a happy camper in the world that we're entering today with all the massive compute, cloud delivering compute and store to anyone. I mean, all those resources asymptotically approaching zero cost and availability via cloud anywhere in this whole big data revolution, AI and machine learning. I love it, I mean, I wouldn't build AI which I'm a one-trick pony in some sense. I do a lot of different work but there's always machine learning under the hood from my companies and my philanthropic work. But I think there is something important as amazing a tool as it is. The connectivity, the automation, the artificial intelligence as a perhaps dominant tool of the future is still just a tool. These are messy human problems. They will only ever have messy human solutions. But now me as a scientist can say, here's a possible solution. And then me as an entrepreneur or philanthropist can say, great, now with something like AI we can actually share that solution with everybody. So give us a little bit of some surprise insights that came out of your panel. Fortunately, I was not able to attend as I had her doing interviews. So, you know, I would say the theme of our panel was about role modeling. So I was the weirdo outlier on the panel. So we had Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf. We had the CFO of the Warriors. Jennifer was great. And we talked about simply being visible and doing the work that we do in AI, in sports, in politics, that alone changes people's lives, which is a well-studied phenomenon. The number one predictor of a kid from an underrepresented population taking a scholarship, you know, believing they can be successful in politics is someone from their neighborhood went before them and showed them that it was possible. And seeing somebody that looks like them in that role. And so seeing a CFO of the Warriors one of the great sports team in the world today is, you know, this little Filipino woman to put it in the way I think other people would perceive her and realize, no, she does the numbers, she drives the company and it's not despite who she is. It's because she brought something unique to the table that no one else had plus the smarts and made a difference. To see Libby Shaff get up there with a lot of controversy right now in the bigger political context and show that you can make a difference when people marginalize you, when I went out and raised money from my first company, I had venture capitalists literally pat me on the head and treat me like a little girl. And what I learned very quickly is there are always gonna be someone that's gonna see the truth in what I can bring. Go find those people, work with them and then show the rest of the world what's possible. Right, it's pretty interesting. Robin Matlock is a CMO at VMware. We do a lot of stuff with VMware and they put in a woman in tech lunch thing a couple years ago and we were talking and it was interviewing her. She said, you know, I never really took the time to think about it. I was just working my tail off and doing my thing and you know, suddenly here I am, I'm CMO of this great company and then it kind of took her a minute and somebody kind of say, wait, you need to take advantage of that opportunity and that platform to help others that maybe weren't quite so driven or are looking for those role models to say, she looks kind of like me, maybe I want to be the CMO of a big tech company. Well part of what's amazing, you know, I get to work in education and workforce and part of what's amazing, whether you're talking about parents or the C-suite or politicians is a lot of that role modeling comes just from you being, go out, do good work in the world. But for some people, you know, there's an opportunity that doesn't exist for a lot of others. I'm a real outlier. I was not born a woman. I went through gender transition. It was a long time ago. And so for most people like me, being open about who you are means losing your job. It means not being taken seriously. And anyway, I mean, the change over the last couple of years has been astonishing. Crazy, right? But part of my life is being able to be that person. I can take it. You know, my companies have made money. My inventions I've come up with have literally saved lives. No one cares, in a sense, who I am anymore. That allows me to be visible. It allows me to just be very open about who I am and what I've experienced and been through and then say to other people, it's not about me. It's not about whether I'm happy. It's about whether I'm serving my purpose. And I believe that I am. And does anything else about me really matter in this world? It really seems as interesting kind of subtext to diversity inclusion. Not so much about your skin color or things that are easy to classify in your tax form. But it's really more just being your whole you and no longer being suppressed at the fit in a mold, not necessarily that's good or bad, but this is the way we did it. And thank you. We like you. We hired you. Here you go. Here's your big stack of regs. Here's your desk. And we expect you to wear this to work. But that to me seems like the bigger story here that it's the whole person because there's so much value in the whole versus just concentrating on a slice. You know, it's really interesting. Again, there's another area where I get to do hard numbers research. And when I do research, I'm talking looking at 122 million people and building models to explain their career outcomes and their life outcomes. And what we find here is one, everybody's biased. Everybody. I can't make an unbiased AI. There are no unbiased rats. The problem is when you refuse to acknowledge it and you refuse to do something about it. And on the other side to quote a friend of mine, everybody is covering for something. Everybody has something in their life that they feel like compromises them a little bit. So, you know, even if we're talking about, you know, the rich white straight guy, everyone's favorite punching bag. And I used to be one of them, so I try and take it easy. It is, the truth is, every one of them is covering for something also. And if we can say again, it's not about me, which amazingly actually allows you to be you. It's not about what other people think of me. It's not about whether they always agree with everything I say, or that I agree with what my boss says. It is about whether I'm making a difference in the world. And I've used that as my business strategy for the last 10 years of my life. And even when it seems like the worst strategy ever, you know, saying no to being chief scientist after, you know, fortune 50 company one after another, every time my life got better and my success grew. And it's not just an anecdote. Again, we see it in the data. So you build companies around principles like that. Who are you? Bring that person to work. And then you own the leadership challenge of, and I'm going to let that person flourish. And I'm going to let them tell me that I'm wrong. They got to prove it to me, but I'm going to let them tell it to me and give them the chance. You build a company like that. You know, what's clear to me is over the next 10 years, the defining market for global competition will be talent, creative talent. And if you can't figure out how to tap the entire global workforce, you cannot compete in that space. The whole workforce and then the whole person within that workforce. It was really interesting. Jackie from Intel was on the panel that I got to talk to see it. She talked about, you know, four really simple things, you know, have impact. Undeniable, measurable impact. Be visible. Have data to back it up. And of course, be tenacious, which is good career advice all the time. But, you know, it's now when, you know, because before a lot of people didn't have that option or they didn't feel they had the option to necessarily be purpose driven or be their whole self. It's not that they get thrown out on the street and companies weren't as free. Still not that. Not that. You get it. So it is this new opportunity, but they have to because they can't get enough people, can't get enough talent. It's really about ROI. This is not just to do the right thing. If you, even if you look at it from a selfish standpoint, there is the entire rest of the professional world competing for that traditional pipeline to get into the company. So being different, being you, it's a, I mean, forgive me for putting it this way, but it's a marketing strategy, right? This is how you stand out from everyone else. One of my companies, we built this giant database of people all over the world to predict how good people were at their job. And our goal was to take bias out of the hiring process. And when I was the chief scientist of that company, every time I gave a talk in public, 50 people would come up afterwards and say, what should I do to get a better job? And what they really meant was, what should I write on my resume? You know, how should I position myself? What's the next hot skill? And my advice, which I meant genuinely, even though I don't think they always took it as such, was do good work and share it with the world. Not just my personal experience. We see it again and again in these massive data sets. The people that have the exceptional careers are the ones that just went out there and did something because it needed to get done. Maybe they did it inside their last job. Maybe they did it personally as a side project, or they did a startup or philanthropy, whatever it was, they did it and they did it with passion. And that got noticed. So, you know, again, just sort of selfishly, why compete with the other 150 million people looking for that same, you know, desirable job when the person that you are, I know it's terrifying. It is terrifying to put yourself out there, but the person you are is what you are better at than everyone else in the world. Be that person. That is your route to the best job you can possibly get. By rule, right? You're the best you can be, but by rule you're not as good as being somebody else. Sounds like a corny line, but the science backs it up. That's great. All right, Vivian, I could go on for a very long time, but unfortunately we're going to have to leave it. There, really enjoyed the conversation, and thank you for spending a few minutes with us. All right, she's Vivian. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from the Accenture Women's Tech event in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching.