 Live from San Francisco, it's the Q. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with the Q. We are on the ground at Pier 48 in San Francisco at the Top Coder Open 2014. The event's going on for about 14 years, getting hackers and people together to solve hard problems. It's really kind of a hackathon type of environment. That's all interesting and well, but we're here because they had a special extension to the program this year about really helping girls and STEM. High school girls specifically, they invited 200 high schoolers from about a dozen high schools to come and listen to women in the tech industry, talk about their story, really provide some mentorship and some leadership and some, just really basic. Let me tell you my story and ask questions. And so we're really excited here to be joined by Glenn Weinstein from Aperio. Aperio, thank you. The sponsor of this event, and he actually sat on the panel. I did. And you know, because it's great because you got to have guys involved too, right? We got to help the cause. So first off, welcome. Thank you. And thanks for inviting us up. Thanks, Jeff. So talk about, you know, we heard earlier you've been doing this program for 14 years. Yes. Why suddenly this extension? Yeah. Well, the Top Coder Open has always had some interesting side lights. The main event is the competitions. We're here to provide sort of an athletic competition environment for programmers. It's really the super bowl of programming. But this year, because we're the ESPN of tech, you knew that. Perfect. We come together. But we've always had various side lights and we thought it was important this year to highlight the issue of girls in STEM. We want more women in our industry. We need a better gender balance in this industry. And the place to start with that is to encourage girls who have an interest in technology to pursue that interest. Right. And that was the main idea of today's event. So how did you pick kind of the age, the format, the schools? How did it all kind of come together? Right. Well, we have a female executive who sponsored this event. She took this tiger by the tail. She organized it. And she laid out her ideas, which we all thought were fantastic, which were to invite local high schools, girls from local schools to see what's happening here, to see the competition, to see the idea that your technology skills can become a career for you. And in fact, a good career that is fun and is a well-paid job. So we wanted them to be exposed to that environment. We also wanted to expose them specifically to female role models. People in the industry, in the technology industry, that they could learn from and look up to. And not necessarily the CEO level of females. Right. Not just to Cheryl Sandberg. Right. We wanted them to see women in what you might call, quote, unquote, normal positions in technology companies. And that was the nature of the panel that we put together today. And great representation. We talked about earlier from San Francisco, the peninsula of San Jose, Oakland, the East Bay, a Girl Scout troop, really great representation. When we opened up this event to local high schools, we were overwhelmed with the response. We had to cut off the invitations fairly quickly. We did fill a capacity of 200. I think the event went so well this year that this may become a regular occurrence because it was a lot of fun for everybody involved. The girls in particular, I thought were, you could just tell, they were very engaged. They were listening. They were asking great questions. For whatever reason, this definitely seemed to resonate with them. Yeah. I think, again, I think you can't overstate the importance of having kind of, quote, unquote, normal role models that they could see themselves in that place. And I thought as evidenced by the questions being really kind of simple and really basic. Like, what do you wear to work? Really showed a trust and an engagement that they were there. They're listening. Right. We wanted it to be relatable. Women that these girls could see themselves as in five or ten years. Not an impossible dream, but actually a very, very possible dream. They ask questions like, how long does it take to get training? There's not a lot of knowledge. I mean, you put yourself in a high school student's shoes. Is this like medical school or law school? How do you become a professional at Google or Salesforce.com or Imperial? So we're just solving some very basic questions for them and making it seem as real and as achievable as possible. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting too because in the job market, you know, today there's a lot of jobs at the low end and there's jobs at the high end. But I don't know that some of these schools, if people really think about, can I get a job at Google? You know, is that really a real thing? Or is that just an application of my computer? So to get some women here that have that job, work that Facebook, you know, kind of connect the dots with the brands and real applications that they use every day with real people that have a job. That's right. We covered that on the panel. Each of the female panelists talked about, you know, what did they think they were going to do at Google and how did they get into technology? How did they stay with it? And how did their careers develop? And you also heard one of the questions from the girls was, what college did you all go to? We were all deciding about college. What college did you go to? So you can already see them starting to make the mental connections to, I can do that. Yes, I can get a job at Google. And here's how I get started on that. Yeah. And the other question which we've talked about in some of the prior interviews, but I really think it's insightful, was there was so much talk about passion and one girl asked about, well, I'm passionate about cars. And really, she, I'm guessing, never really put two and two together that a car is just a rolling technology platform. There's a lot of good technology going on in cars today and tomorrow. Right. My takeaway from that is that I think there's as much natural interest in technology among girls as there is in boys. For whatever reason, for various reasons, girls end up hitting some discouragements along the way. We're just here to remove that discouragement. We want to provide encouragement. We want to tell them, continue to pursue this path. There are great careers out there. There's a lot of support for you there. The trends are moving in the right direction and women are starting to take their rightful place. Yeah. And that was another big theme, right? It was having a support group, having, you know, people that are helping you in a mentorship base. And we've heard from some of the other guests, you know, there's a number of organizations that they can get involved in. That's exactly right. Now, you know, from my perspective as a period, I mean, we sponsor this event because we're sort of on the other end of this. We want to see more. First of all, we want to see more candidates, period. It's hard to fill technology jobs in this country right now. We're missing out on a good percentage of half the population. So very selfishly, a period is in this for the long term. We would love to see more girls major in computer science, major in technology fields, go to college, continue with that interest. And we want them ultimately to apply for jobs at a period. But that's our, and, you know, other technology companies. That's our long-term objective. So where do you go now? Huge success, oversubscribed. Oh my gosh, what do we, what do we start, right? I mean, can you take it to the next level? Is this something you're going to repeat? Do you have any ideas? You got to go back to the barn and think about it. Do you already have some stuff? We do have some ideas. So, a period's foundation is called the Silver Lining. That's our charitable foundation. Silver lining events have always been focused on kids, sort of by coincidence. That's always been the chosen area. And we have some events lined up next month that are specifically going to be focused on technology for girls that may not be in a position to get exposure to this at their high schools or whatever their environment is at home. We want to just try to broaden that exposure to technology and we'll be doing it through various regional Silver Lining events. And I think we'll be back here next year at TopCoder Open as well. Well, it's a great cause, Glenn. Thank you for taking the time out of your show, out of your space to set this up. I think it's a really worthwhile cause, obviously. Very important for us as well. So, and thanks for having us up to take a look. Thanks for coming. Our pleasure. So again, Jeff Frick here on the ground with the Cube at the TopCoder Open 2014, talking all about girls and STEM. Thanks for watching the Cube.