 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Hotel Nico. It's International Women's Day, March 8th. A lot of stuff happening all over the world. We came here today because the Center's got a great program put together about 400 people, a number of panels on a number of topics. We're excited that they invited us to cover it. And we've got some really exciting guests. And our next guest is Sabine Ali. She's the founder and CEO of Angel Hacks. Sabine, welcome. Thank you so much. And she's joined by Ellen McGirt, the senior editor of Fortune. Welcome. Thank you. So I think we all know what Fortune is. We do. We don't probably all know what Angel Hacks is. So Sabine, what is Angel Hacks? Give us kind of the overview. Yeah, I'll give you the second elevator pitch. We are an international hackathon organizing company. We travel the world and organize hackathons all over the world. And we basically create a bridge between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world to bring entrepreneurs here and give them the same opportunities that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have. So do you do independent hackathons or do you like contract it? Because every conference we go to, we do like 100 conferences a year. We always have some hackathon component. Do you help other people put on it? Hackathons or you just do your own kind of independent? We do both, actually. So we organize a 50 city global hackathon series, which is our own. And then we also work with corporate partners such as Accenture and HPE and others to organize hackathons for their brand. And is it thematic, is there a special thing about the hackathons that you guys do and why you think that that's an interesting way to either develop talent, deliver a message, deliver solutions, what's special about hackathons? Yeah, well, what I can tell you is what's special about hackathons is that it's a community space where people feel comfortable exploring themselves and exploring their talents, working with new individuals and really giving them an opportunity to learn new things and try new things. What's very different about AngelHack is we're actually the world's largest and most diverse developer ecosystem. So we actually have a wide range of diverse backgrounds and genders that come to our events and we personally think that that's really where innovation happens when we bring a variety of different backgrounds and minds together to get together and solve problems using technology. Can I just brag on you for a second because we just got off stage together where she just wowed the crowd with stories of these hackathons from around the world and it's not just that there's diversity and it's not just that they're giving them the tools to succeed, she's going to cobble, she's going to San Diego, she's bringing people who ordinarily never get the attention, although plenty of people in San Diego get attention, I didn't name all the right cities, and she's bringing them together and then she's fine traveling them fine tune and then she's bringing them to the attention of people of power. It is extraordinary. Thank you. This is the sign of the times, the innovation of the world, that things are starting to happen and markets are opening up and Sabine is one of the people who's absolutely making it happen and that's what Fortune does best. We brag on the people that we write about. That's great. Why do you think Ellen, why are things changing now? It definitely feels like they are. It does. But the cynic would say, yeah, we've heard all this before and pick your favorite time up. I know. It's not really different, this tool will pass. Why is it different now? We're talking about this and I actually wish I knew and I'm a cynic too, depending on where I am in my deadline cycle, so sometimes I'm super optimistic and sometimes I think it's just crazy, but I think it's the confluence of many, many things. We've had a lot of stories about injustice and lack of access from every possible sphere and race and age and country and religion, all of it and we have the very same tools, social media tools that are spreading things that are false, are spreading things that are true and people are legitimately finding each other and people are legitimately finding a tribe for lack of a better term and it's kind of exciting. So when you hear about things like Angel Hack, which I always are looking for these in my daily column, it can resonate with people who are not part of the ecosystem and they can absorb the lessons of inclusion and optimism and bring it to the rest of their lives and plus everything's crazy right now in the world. I think it's really important to also point out that in America, our political climate and certain personalities that are in power right now, there's certain topics and subject matters that are becoming everyday topics. People are becoming a lot more comfortable talking about sexual harassment and talking about women in the workplace and it's not like a lot of the stories that women are telling are things that just happened yesterday. This is stuff that's happened in the past that's now unlocked in their memories or they're feeling a lot more comfortable talking about it because we're actually creating an environment where people can talk about it and we're actually creating a language that people can use to express their experiences and their emotions about it. You're absolutely right. So many places we could go. But it was interesting, we're in kind of this rough middle ground where we haven't made this transition to where we're hoping to go. And it was an interesting comment on one of the other panels, you probably weren't in it, you're in your panel about, the Me Too is actually scared some men away from being mentors and somebody said there's less and we cover the Grace Hopper celebration and some of the numbers of women coming out of engineering programs, computer science specifically, are actually not going in the direction that you would think. And so we're still kind of in these choppy waters but I'm just wondering when you set up your hackathon, have you ever set up just not diverse teams to show that the output with the diverse team of opinions, points of view, backgrounds, race, sex, pick your favorite variable, actually deliver better results? Well, you know, there's a ton of scientific research that actually shows that diverse groups and a diverse set of backgrounds delivers better results. So group think it's been proven to be very detrimental. At our events, we don't form the teams. We let the community self-organize and we've seen time and time again that we can actually never predict who the winning team is going to be and what the makeup of that team is going to look like. Yes, you have to try this on time. You got to put them all in a little pile. I don't even know, it doesn't even matter which single group you choose. You just know, as you said, the evidence is pretty clear. They're not going to perform as well as different types of programs. Oh, and you're shaking your head. I know, I just sort of thought about like the sad little homogenous group who was sort of like set up to fail. And that maybe there's a kinder way to make the case. I don't like getting gummy bears or something. So with all you've done at Angel Hack, where are you going next? What do you see as you look down there? And I still can't believe it was 2018 or almost a quarter of the way through this calendar year. What are some of your priorities if we come together a year from now? What will you have to work on? Yeah, hopefully a year from now we would have expanded into more than 92 cities, into more remote regions than we have now. And also we're doubling down on our accelerator. We want to make sure that our winning teams have an opportunity to really come to Silicon Valley or get access to funding that's available in Silicon Valley so that they can have funding and they can be successful for many years to come. And do you see within some of the groups that don't have access obviously to the money and the locations of Silicon Valley that people realize kind of what a powerful world changer technology can be and that you can actually write some code and deliver it to the entire world that people actually use your code to do something different? Yeah, absolutely. That's what we're advocating for. That's really honestly what a lot of our topics discuss that technology doesn't discriminate. It's really when people take a look at it and in fact GitHub did some research that they put a code that was written by men versus code that was written by women and then they had people rate it and immediately people were rating the code that was written by men higher and then they didn't put what gender wrote it and then the code that was written by women was higher. So I think the research is starting and people are starting to realize to put technology first and gender maybe doesn't even belong in the judging criteria here. And do you think part of that's maybe just because we need more people? I mean, there's, you know, on one hand, autonomous everything is going to knock out all the jobs. On the other hand, check the job listing. We need a lot more people. We do, we do and you're right. We're losing what 25% of jobs with new technology coming in but we are also going to bring all kinds of people online who do not have access to even modern services. We're going to need some very basic things and they're going to need access to markets and then they're going to become more responsible consumers and they in turn will then propose ideas that will make everybody's lives better because one of the things that we talked about is that innovation tends to happen in a bubble and people are solving problems that they themselves are happening with. So whole world will be improved by new levels of thinking and that would also create more jobs. And they're new jobs, right? There wasn't such a thing as a software developer 20 years ago and if you're a buggy whip guy it's probably not a great time to be a business today. So while there are many jobs that are going to get wiped out, there's new jobs, you know, social media manager, I mean that didn't exist what, five years ago at most companies, now it's a huge part of a lot of corporations. So it's this constant evolution in ying and yang. Constant evolution. What are you looking forward to in 2018 is you've got kind of a broad view of the landscape. I do and I write a daily column about race and culture so that's just how we got a chance to meet. Diversity and inclusion has been sort of the thing I've been studying for the last two years and as difficult as the world is and as crazy as it is, I really do see an opening that's happening when people are becoming more open to the idea of thinking different ways and embracing people who are different from themselves and not feeling threatened. We're still in choppy waters though, you're absolutely right. Well, and the other thing too, right? I always say, you know, if you're a hundred miles from a coast in the United States I won't speak for other countries because I don't know it as well. You know, there's a point of view and if you're more than a hundred miles from the coast maybe with Chicago as an island or Denver there's a little bit of a difference. Are you seeing kind of it getting beyond, beyond those kind of short borders? Because obviously, as you said, a lot of social stuff going on right now there's a lot of diametrically opposed views and I blame actually technology for a lot of it because thanks to the recommendation engines we tend to get served up things that we've read in the past. So unlike where you had kind of one newspaper in town everybody had to read it so it had to be kind of down the middle now the silly algorithms will keep delivering stuff that supports my point of view and other people will get delivered with their point of view and I think the surprise after the election illustrated more than anything that people didn't know anything about the other side. The shock, so are we getting past that? Do you see kind of what you take on that? I'll start and then you jump in. I think that when we invest in communities that are under invested in wherever they are I live in St. Louis, you will see innovations and maybe you won't always see the innovations that you're hoping for that will knit society together. But investment will flow and new product ideas will flow and most importantly to your point and understanding of how the world actually works will flow. I'll go the reason why to study software and code engineers maybe you don't want to be that maybe you want to be an opera singer but it will make you a better more informed citizen. It will make you better to understand what's real and what's not real. I mean I'm a big fan of liberal arts education in technology because it helps you understand how people actually behave and what markets actually need. So I think that as people have the tools and use the tools, investments will follow, lifestyle will follow. So I guess I'm just outing myself as an optimist here. Good, that's good. Sabine, what do you think? And I have to be optimistic as well. Again, being at the forefront of emerging technology I know that there's people looking to solve that very problem and they're coming from a diverse group of engineers and I really feel like that we're gonna come up with a lot of tech solutions that are gonna make a lot more diversity inclusion easier to facilitate and easier to implement in corporations as well. Well keep up your good work. I mean at the end of the day it's about democratization. It's giving more people more access to the tools and you're gonna get better solutions, more solutions, more diverse solutions. So great job and thanks for taking a few minutes. Thank you so much. All right, I'm Jeff Rick. We're at the Ascension International Women's Day celebration. Thanks for watching.