 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Maureen Fan. She is the CEO and co-founder of Baobab Studio, which is the industry's leading VR animation studio. So welcome, welcome Maureen. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, so I'm excited to talk to you because you just won an Emmy, congratulations. Thank you. This is, you just won an Emmy for Invasion. So tell us a little bit about Invasion. It was our first piece ever, and it was just an experiment to see if we could even create VR. And it's a story about these adorable little bunnies, and you are actually a bunny too. You look down, you have a furry little bunny body. And these aliens that come to try to take over the earth with their advanced technology, and you and your bunny friend end up saving the entire earth. And it's starring Ethan Hawke. And it just came out, yeah, last year. And we're really excited because it became the number one top downloaded VR experience across all the headsets. And it's getting turned into a Hollywood feature film. Very cool, very cool. And you have another film coming out too. And this is Rainbow Crow. Tell our viewers a little bit about Rainbow. So Rainbow Crow is based off of a Native American legend about how the crow used to have beautiful rainbow feathers and a beautiful singing voice. And it's John Legend in our piece. And how he decides to sacrifice himself by flying into the sun to bring warmth and fire back to the earth. And in the process loses all his beautiful feathers, becomes black and burnt, and his voice becomes like the crow's voice. But it's about how beauty is within. And there's also huge themes about diversity and how if you learn to accept yourself and your differences, that's when you can accept others. And that's why we specifically cast minorities and women. So we have John Legend, Constance Wu from Fresh Off the Boat as a stunt character, Diego Luna from Rogue One for the Moth character, as well as Randy Edmonds as a Native American elder narrator. And we have a whole bunch of other stars to announce soon. Well, we cannot wait to hear. I mean, that's already an amazing lineup. Thank you. So when you're thinking about Rainbow Crow and particularly because it's VR, which is relatively new, still experimental. I mean, the messages of diversity is it, does it lend itself to VR better than say, just a standard animation film? Absolutely because if you think about stories that you just watch passively, the reason why we need stories in humanity in general is to experience characters and stories beyond those we can experience in our real lives. And we think, oh, how would I feel if I was in the position of that character? What would I do? But in VR, because you are actually playing a character in a role, you actually have to decide at that point what would I do? So it's not just the experience that I just see. It's one where I'm actively experiencing it. So I create a memory and remember afterwards. And there's all these research studies at Stanford by Jeremy Bellison, who's head of the Stanford VR lab, that shows if you are made a homeless person inside a VR experience and you have to go through a day in the life of a homeless person or you look in the mirror and you see that you're a black woman, that you, when you get out of the headset, you act completely differently. You have so much more empathy for these people than you would normally. And so it gets you to care about these characters in a way that you don't normally. And in VR, because you're doing it in a real time game engine, these characters can act and react to what you do. So you can turn that empathy into action and actually act upon your caring, which we call compassion. So it really changes you in a way that normal traditional storytelling doesn't. So I think having voices and characters that are different in front of the screen and also behind the screen are really important to create role models and different perspectives for all the people out in the world. And these are movies that are targeted at kids, children. But do you see a future in which where there is more targeted at adults for VR? Absolutely. The funny thing is, in the beginning, the VR distributors didn't think that people would want our VR animation because they're like, oh, it's just going to be these hardcore boys that just love to play games and are they going to want this animation? And it's VR's targeted towards adults. That's why they were surprised, and we were surprised when Invasion became the number one downloaded VR experience. It shows that the audience for our content is from little kids to grandmas and everyone in between, and that's probably why it became the top downloaded experience is because it's universally appealing and has themes that are appealing to just every single generation. So, absolutely. But for VR to become mainstream, there needs to be more universally appealing content. Right now, the content tends to be for games, like hardcore games, as well as documentaries, which are two amazing pieces of content for this medium, but for it to become mainstream, we need more universally appealing content, and I'm excited about, right now it's a new industry, this is one minorities and women in particular can enter the space and help shape the voices and the direction of the issue. That is exactly where I wanted to go next. So, let's talk a little bit about Baobab Studio. It's not that old, and VR is not that old. And so, why are there more opportunities, would you say, for women and minorities? Well, if you look at traditional animation and the traditional entertainment fields, that's a very mature industry, and to break into that industry, you have to either have lots and lots of money or unfair distribution advantage. But VR, there's technological disruption, which means nobody has an advantage at all, means it's a level playing field and everybody can come in and start something. So, this is a perfect opportunity when there's low barriers to entry of coming in for women and minorities, anyone who wants their voice heard to start companies or to make experiences, and we could set the groundwork because there's no one telling us what we can and can't do because no one actually knows what we can and can't do yet. Right, right, but yet you are still of a female Asian figurehead of a studio that will hopefully someday be a major studio. You're working on it, but do you find that people take you as seriously in Hollywood? I mean, what are you coming up against? Well, it's really interesting because I heard for even fundraising is one of the hardest parts of starting a company, and there was a Stanford research study that showed that if you took a deck, a pitch deck for a company and you had a male voiceover versus a female voiceover, the male voiceover was, I don't remember what it was, like 50% more likely to get funded than the woman with the same exact pitch deck. So I knew from that and they also showed that if you are married and wear a ring, you're taken more seriously or if you're less attracted, also you're taken more seriously. And my hypothesis and some of the hypotheses out there is it takes away the whole entire female attraction thing, like what does it mean to be attractive female? So I had to go into the meetings knowing this. I even considered wearing a ring. I considered wearing a paper bag over your head. Exactly, exactly. But at the same time I felt that I need to be myself and the best thing to, there's a correlation between perceived leadership and confidence that I need to just go in there and be confident in myself. So I knew that that could work against me, but I just needed to be myself, but I had to make sure that I was really confident and really believed in what I said. And honestly, besides being confident and aggressive, I also felt comfortable because a lot of the people I talked to, I knew from my network and I had many of my male friends and female friends who knew these VCs do the initial introduction, so I felt more comfortable going in for them already knowing that I had somebody else saying that I was awesome. Yeah, and you've had many mentors and sponsors along the way too. Absolutely, I would say it's one of the most important things for my career from the very beginning. When I graduated from business school, I actually emailed my mentors and said, here are the things I care about for finding a job. I didn't have to go find any jobs. They actually found all these jobs for me, set up informational interviews for me, and I just went in and did all the informational interviews, got the offers, and just chose one of them that I wanted to be in. But even for starting my company, my co-founder, Eric Darnell, was the writer and director of all Formatagascar films. And I got introduced to him through my mentor, Glen Entus, who's the co-founder of PDI DreamWorks Animation, and he was my mentor through Zynga. And then Glen Entus introduced me to Alvie Ray Smith, who's the co-founder of Pixar, who also became our advisor. Alvie Ray Smith then introduced us to Glen Keane, who was the animator for Lil Mermaid and Latin. The power of networks. They all, it was all through the network and through my mentors that I found a lot of the opportunities that I have. And they also helped me through my personal life and how to navigate being an entrepreneur. And I rely on them so much. So beyond finding the right mentor and sponsor, what else would you give your parting words to the young Marine fans out there? I think there's a tendency for society to pressure you to conform to money, fame, beauty. And you don't need to listen to that and you don't need to be bucketed. I designed my own major at Stanford. Within eBay, I took four different roles. I just kept on creating my own roles and refusing to be bucketed as a creative or a suit. And you can be who you are and create a category onto yourself. And so don't feel pressure to listen to what society is telling you. The other thing is, if you are faced with pushback for being promoted and you feel like it's maybe because you're a woman, we have a tendency as women to start blaming ourselves and thinking that there's something wrong with us versus research shows men are more likely to blame the system. Don't let it affect you and bring you down because you need to actually be confident and believe in yourself in order to rise above. Great. Great advice, Maureen. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks so much and best of luck to you. Thank you so much. Hope you win another Emmy. Come back and talk to us again. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more from Grace Hopper just after this.