 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host here in Palo Alto, California, theCUBE's second year covering National Women's Day. It's been a great celebration of all the smart leaders in the world who are making a difference from all kinds of backgrounds, from technology to business and everything in between. Today we've got a great guest, Dominique Bastos, who's the Senior Vice President of Cloud at Persistent Systems, formerly with AWS. That's where we first met at Reinvent. Dominique, great to have you on the program here for International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John, for having me back on theCUBE. This is an honor, especially given the theme. Well, I'm excited to have you on. I consider you one of those typecast personas where you've kind of done a lot of things. You're powerful, you've got great business acumen, you're technical, and we're in a world where the world's coming fully digital. And 50% of the world is women, 51%, some say. So you've got mostly male-dominated industry, and you have a dual engineering background, and that's super impressive as well. Again, technical world, male-dominated, you're in there in the mix. What inspires you to get these engineering degrees? I think even it was more so shifted towards males when I had the inspiration to go to engineering school. I was accused as a young girl of being a tomboy and fiddling around with all my brother's toys versus focusing on my dolls and other kind of stereotypical toys that you would give a girl. I really had a curiosity for building, a curiosity for just breaking things apart and putting them back together. I was very lucky in that my, I guess you call it primary school, maybe middle school had a program for, it was like electronics, that was the class electronics. So building circuit boards and things like that. And I really enjoyed that aspect of building. I think it was more actually going into engineering school picking that as a discipline was a little bit, my mom's reaction to when I announced that I wanted to do engineering, which was no, that's for boys. And that really, I think it came from a good place in trying to protect me from what she has experienced herself in terms of how women are received in those spaces. So I kind of shrugged it off and thought, okay, well, I'm definitely now going to do this. I was told not to, you're gonna do it. Well, not to, that's all I needed to hear. And also I think my passion was to design cars. And I figured if I enroll in an industrial engineering program, I could focus on ergonomic design and ultimately have a career doing something that I'm passionate about. So yeah, so my inspiration was kind of a little bit of don't do this, a lot of curiosity. I'm also a very analytical person. I've been, and I don't know what the science is around left, right brain, to be honest, but been told that I'm a very much a logical person versus a feeler. So I don't know if that's bad. Straight shooter. What were your engineering degrees if you don't mind sharing? So I did industrial engineering. So I did a dual degree, industrial engineering and robotics. At the time it was like a manufacturing robotics program. It was very, very cool because we got to, I mean, now looking back, the evolution of robotics is just insane. But you programmed a robotic arm to pick things up. I actually crashed the civil engineering school's concrete canoe building competition where you literally have to design a concrete canoe and do all the load testing and the strength testing of the materials. And basically then you go against other universities to race the canoe in a body of water. We did that in Alabama and in Georgia. So I was lucky to experience that two times. It was a lot of fun. So you knew you deep down, you were technical, you had a nerd vibe, you were geeking out on math, tech, robotics. What happened next? I mean, what were some of the challenges you faced? How did you progress forward? Did you have any blockers and roadblocks in front of you? And how did you handle those? Yeah, I mean, I had a very eye-opening experience in my freshman year of engineering school. I kind of went in gung-ho with zero hesitation, all the confidence in the world because I was always a very big nerd academically. I hate admitting this, but myself and somebody else got most intellectual, voted by the students in high schools. Like you don't want to be voted most intellectual when you're in high school. Now it's a big deal. Yeah, and you want to be voted like popular or anything like that. No, I was a nerd. But in engineering schools, it was very humbling that whole confidence that I had. I experienced, ooh, I don't want to name the school. Everybody can Google it though. Anyway, so I had experience with some professors that actually looked at me and said, you're in the wrong program. This is difficult. And I think I've shared this before in other forums where my thermodynamic teacher basically told me cheerleading's down the hall. And it was a very shocking thing to hear. Because it really made me wonder like, what am I up against here? Is this what it's going to be like going forward? And I decided not to pay attention to that. I think at the moment when you hear something like that, you just, you absorb it and you also don't know how to react. And I decided immediately to just walk right past him and sit down front center in the class. In my head, I was cursing him, of course, because I mean, let's be real. And I was like, I'm going to show this bleep bleep. And proceeded to basically set the curve class, crushed it and was back to be the teacher's assistant. So I think that was one- So you became his teacher assistant after? Or another one? Yeah, I gave him a mini speech. I said, do not do this. You could have broken me. And if you would have done this to somebody who wasn't as steadfast in her goals or whatever, I was really focused like, I'm doing this. I would have backed out potentially and said, this isn't something I want to experience on the daily. So I think that was actually a good experience because it gave me an opportunity to understand what I was up against, but also double down in how I was going to deal with it. Nice. Nice to slay the misogynistic teachers who typecast people. Now you had a technical career, but also you had a great career at AWS on the business side. You've handled one of the big accounts, I won't say the names, but like we're talking about monster accounts on the sales. And now basically it's not really selling, you're managing a big account. It's like a big business. It's a business development thing. Technical to business transition. How do you handle that? Was that something you were natural for? Also you stared down the naysayers out of the gate and college and then in business, did that continue? And how did you drive through that? So I think even when I was coming out of university, I knew that I wanted to have a balance between the engineering program and business. A lot of my colleagues went on to do their PEs. So continue to get their masters basically in engineering or their PhDs in engineering. I didn't really have an interest for that. I did international business and finance as my MBA because I wanted to explore the ability of taking what I had learned in engineering school and applying it to building businesses. I mean, at the time I didn't have it in my head that I would want to do startups, but I definitely knew that I wanted to get a feel for what are they learning in business school that I missed out in engineering school. So I think that helped me when I transitioned. Well, when I applied, I was asked to come apply at AWS and I kind of went, no, the DNA is going to be rejected. You thought you'd be rejected for me, didn't you? I thought it'd be, yeah, because I have very much a startup, founder, kind of disruptive personality. And to me, when I first saw AWS at the stage early 2016, I saw it as a corporation. Even though from a techie standpoint, I was like, these people are insane. This is amazing what they're building. But I didn't know what the cultural vibe would feel like. I had been with GE at the beginning of my career for almost three years. So I kind of equated AWS Amazon to GE given the size because in between I had done startups. So when I went to AWS, I think initially, and I do have to kind of shout out, Todd Weatherby basically was the worldwide leader for ProServe and it was being built, he built it. And I went into ProServe to help from that standpoint. ProServe, special services. Special services, right. Yeah, making sure I'm on that side. To help these big enterprise customers. And specifically my first customer was an amazing experience in taking basically the company revolves around strategic selling, right? It's not like you take a salesperson with the conventional schooling that salespeople would have and plug them into AWS in 2016. It was very much a consultative strategic approach. And for me, having a technical background and loving to solve problems for customers, working with the team, I would say it was a dream team that I joined and also the ability to come to the table with a technical background, knowing how to interact with senior executives to help them envision where they want to go. And then to bring a team along with you to make that happen. I mean, that was like magical for me. I love that experience. So you like the culture. I mean, Andy Jackson, I've been here many times, I always talk about builders and been a builder mentality. You mentioned that earlier at the top of this interview, you're always building things, curious. And you mentioned potentially your confidence might have been shaken, so you had the confidence. So being a builder, being curious and having confidence seems to be what your superpower is. A lot of people talk about the confidence angle. How important is that? And how important is that for encouraging more women to get into tech? Because I still hear that all the time. Not that I don't have confidence, but there's so many signals that potentially could shake confidence in the industry. That's actually a really good point that you're making. A lot of signals that women get could shake their confidence. And that needs to be, I mean, it's easy to say that it should be innate. I mean, that's kind of like textbook. Oh, it has to come from within. Of course it does. But also, we need to understand that in a population where 50% of the population is women, but only 7% of the positions in tech, and I don't know the most current number, in tech leadership is women. And probably a smaller percentage in the C-suite. When you're looking at a woman who's wanting to go up the trajectory in a tech company, and then there's a subconscious understanding that there's a limit to how far you'll go, your confidence even subconsciously gets shaken a little bit because despite your best efforts, you're already seeing the cap. I would say that we need to coach girls to speak confidently, to navigate conflict versus running away from it, to own your own success and be secure in what you bring to the table. And then I think a very important thing is to celebrate each other and the wins that we see for women in tech in the industry. That's awesome. What's the, in your opinion, you look at the challenges for this next generation women and women in general, what are some of the challenges for them and that they need to overcome today? I mean, obviously the world's changed for the better, still not there. I mean, the numbers, one in four women. Rachel Thornton came on former CMO and she's at Message Bird now. They had a study where only one in four women go to the executive board level and so the still numbers are bad and then the numbers still gotta get up big time and the industry's working on that, but it's changed. But today, what are some of the challenges for this current generation and the next generation of women and how can we and the industry, we being us women in the industry, be strong role models for them? Well, I think the challenge is one of how many women are there in the pipeline and what are we doing to retain them and how are we offering up the opportunities to fill as, you know, as Rachel said and I haven't had an opportunity to see her, in how are we giving them this opportunity to take up those seeds in the C-suite, right? In these leadership roles. And I think this is a little bit exacerbated with the pandemic in that, you know, when everything shut down, when people were going back to deal with family and work at the same time, for better or for worse, the brunt of it fell on probably, you know, the maternal type caregiver within the family unit. You know, I've been, I raised my daughter alone and for me, even without the pandemic, it was a struggle constantly to balance the risk that I was willing to take to show up for those positions versus investing even more of that time, raising a child, right? Nevermind the unconscious bias or cultural kind of expectations that you get from the male counterparts where there's zero understanding of what a mom might go through at home to then show up to a meeting, you know, fully fresh and ready to kind of spit out some wisdom. It's like, you know, your kid just freaking lost their whatever and you know, so you have to sort a bunch of things out. I think the challenge that women are still facing and we'll, we have to keep working at it is making sure that there's a good pipeline, a good amount of young ladies, of people taking interest in tech. And then as they're, you know, going through the funnel that stages in their career, we're providing the mentoring. We're, we're, there's representation, right? To what they're aspiring to. We're celebrating their interest in the field. Right? And, and I think also we're doing things to retain them. Because again, the pandemic affected everybody. I think women specifically, and I don't know the statistics, but I was reading something about this. We're the ones to tend to kind of pull it back and say, well, now I need to be home with, you know, you name how many kids and pets and the aging parents, people that got sick to take on that position in addition to the career aspirations that they might have. We need to make it easier, basically. I think that's a great call out. And I appreciate you bringing that up about family and being a single mom. And by the way, you're a savage warrior to doing that. It's amazing. You got to, I know you have a daughter in computer science at Stanford. I want to get to that in a second. But that empathy, and I mentioned Rachel Thornton, who's the CMO of Messagebird, a former CMO of ADBS. Her thing right now, to your point, is mentoring and sponsorship is very key. And her company and the video that's on the site here, people should look at that and reference that. They talk a lot about that empathy of people's situation, whether it's a single mom, family life, men and women, but mainly women because they're the ones who people aren't having a lot of empathy for in that situation, as you called it out. This is huge. And I think remote work has opened up this whole aperture of everyone has to have a view into how people are coming to the table at work. So props for bringing that up. And I recommend everyone look at, check out Rachel Thornton. So how do you balance that at home life? And talk about your daughter's journey, because it sounds like she's nerding out at Stanford, because you know, Stanford's called Nerd Nation. That's their motto. So you must be proud. I am so proud. I'm so proud. And I will say, I have to admit, because I did encounter so many obstacles and so many hurdles in my journey, it's almost like I forgot that I should set that aside and not worry about my daughter. My hope for her was for her to kind of be artistic and a painter or go into something more lighthearted and fun, because I just wanted to think, I guess my mom had the same idea, right? She's always been very driven. I wanna say that I got very lucky that she picked me to be her mom, biologically I'm her mom, but I told her she was like a little star that fell from the sky and I ended up with me. I think for me balancing being a single mom and a career where I'm leading and mentoring and making big decisions that affect people's lives as well, you have to take the best of everything you get from each of those roles. And I think the best way is play to your strengths, right? So having been kind of a nerd and very organized person and all about systems for effectiveness, I mean, industrial engineering. Parenting for me was, I'm gonna make it sound super annoying and horrible, but... It's funny, you know, Dave Vellante and I, when we started SiliconANGLE on the Cube years ago, one of the things we were all like sports lovers, so we like sports. And we're like, we looked at the people in tech as tech athletes, and except there's no men and women teams, it's one team, it's all one thing. So, you know, I consider you a tech athlete, you're hard charging, strong and professional and smart and beautiful and brilliant, all those good things. Now, this game is changing, okay? And you've done startups and you've done corporate jobs, now you're in a new role. What's the current tech landscape from, you know, I won't say athletic for standpoint, but as people who are smart, you have all kinds of different skill sets, you have the startup warriors, you have the folks who like to be in the middle of the corporate world, grow up through corporate, climb the corporate ladder, you have investors, you have, you know, creatives. What have you enjoyed most and where do you see all the action? I mean, I think what I've enjoyed the most has been being able to bring all of the things that I feel I'm strong at and bring it together to apply that to whatever the problem is at hand, right? So kind of like, you know, if you look at a Renaissance man who can kind of pop in anywhere and, oh, he's good at, you know, sports and he's good at reading or she's good at this or take all of those strengths and somehow bring them together to deal with the issue at hand versus breaking up your mindset into this is textbook what I learned and this is how business should be done and I'm going to draw these hard lines between personal life and work life or between how you do selling and how you do engineering. So I think my, the thing that I loved, really loved about AWS was a lot of leaders saw something in me that I potentially didn't see, which was, yeah, you might be great at running that big account, but we need help over here doing go to market for a new product launch and boom, there you go, now I'm in a different org helping solve that problem and getting something launched. And I think if you don't box yourself in to I'm only good at this or, you know, put a label on yourself as being the rock star in that, it leaves room for opportunities to present themselves, but also it leaves room within your own mind to see yourself as somebody capable of doing anything. Right, I don't know if I answered the question. No, it's awesome. I love sharing your great, great, great share there. Question is, what do you see? What are you currently doing now? You're building a business that persists and for the cloud obviously AWS persists a leader global system integrator around the world thousands and thousands of customers from what we know and been reporting on theCUBE. What's next for you? Where do you see yourself going? I'm also going to knock this out of the park. Where do you see yourself as you kind of look at the continuing journey of your mission, personal, professional, what's on your mind? Where do you see yourself going next? Well, I think, you know, again, going back to not boxing yourself in this, this role is an amazing one where I have an opportunity to take all the pieces of my career in tech and apply them to building a business within a business. And that involves all the goodness of coaching and mentoring and strategizing. And I'm loving it. I'm loving the opportunity to work with such great leaders. Persistent itself is very, very good at providing opportunities, very diverse opportunities. We just had a huge semicolon hackathon. Some of the winners were females. The turnout was amazing. In the CTO's office, we have very strong women leading the charge for innovation. I think to answer your question about the future and where I may see myself going next, I think now that my job, well, they say the job is never done, but now that Chloe's kind of settled into Stanford and kind of doing her own thing, I have always had a passion to continue leading in a way that brings me into the fold a lot more. So maybe in a VC firm, partner or mode or another CEO role in a startup or my own startup, I mean, I don't know. Right now I'm super happy, but you never know where your drive might go. And I also want to be able to very deliberately be in a role where I can continue to mentor and support up-and-coming women in tech. Well, you got the smarts, but you got really the building mentality, the curiosity and the confidence really sets you up nicely. It's a great story, great inspiration. You're a role model for many women, young girls out there and women in tech. And celebration is a great day. And thank you for sharing. That story and all the good nuggets there. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. And it's been my pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, getting all the content, check out the other interviews, some amazing stories, lessons, learns and some funny stories and some serious stories. So have some fun and enjoy the rest of the videos here for International Women's Days. Thanks for watching.