 It's The Cube. Here is your host, Jeff Crick. Hi, Jeff Crick here with The Cube. We're on the ground in Santa Clara, California at the Anita Borg Institute Women's Division Awards 2015 and we're really excited for this next segment to get one of the award winners, Kamakshi Shivarama Krishnan. Did I get it? That's right. CEO and founder of Drawbridge. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm really excited to be here. As I'm going to say in my acceptance speech, I represent all achievements of women in science and technology, so it's really exciting to be here as part of this group. That's terrific. And how long have you been involved with Anita Borg? Actually, this would be my first time I get involved as a recipient of this award and I think certainly it would be incumbent upon me to contribute in ways in which I can encourage more women participation, not only in technology, but in entrepreneurship as well. Awesome. Just a little bit about off-camera, so you got your PhD in Stanford and where did you get your master's degree? Master's degree was at Boston University. I came to Stanford to get my PhD in a very mathematical field called information theory. It's essentially mathematics for electrical engineers. Typically, I would have ended up in Wall Street or in academia. I ended up in big data machine learning techniques to solve for a variety of different user modeling problems in today's world of big data and internet. Your timing on the big data thing was pretty good. Yes. Absolutely. And then you sold, that company was sold to Google and then you found a drawbridge. That's right. So actually after Stanford, I was a part of a company called AdMob, which was one of the first early companies that created a business model for marketers to reach consumers on their mobile devices. We live in times where smartphones rule the world. It's a very personal device. Each consumer has one device. Unlike other devices which are shared, smartphone is a very personal device. Starting at AdMob was a great experience in entrepreneurship. I did not fund the company, but I was able to see experience entrepreneurship from very close quarters. And I spent about seven months after the acquisition at Google and started this company, Drawbridge, to solve what I think is a very fundamental problem around anonymized digital identity. There's one sentence on why it's very fundamental and important. We live in times of unprecedented amount of proliferation of devices. There is no real notion of connected identity of consumers across these devices, and technologies like what Drawbridge is building is a real alternative and a real solution to solve for their digital identity. Because short of this, there's only one answer, i.e. Facebook. Right, right. So you track me around as I go in my Google Docs from my phone to my tablet to my whichever you know it's me. I don't know if I would necessarily say track. I say that we provide a solution for a variety of different online travelers, e-commerce agencies, content providers, publishers, et cetera, to know the identity of their consumers so that they're able to optimize experiences across devices. Okay, great. So let's shift gears a little bit back to your journey. We talked a little bit off camera, and you made an interesting observation that you said as you kind of moved through the stages of your academic career as well as your professional career, there seemed to be less and less women around. Yeah, that's really something that I feel I have lived over the course of the last 15 years or so. In going from high school to engineering, there's certainly a drop-off from engineering to advanced graduate studies. There's a drop-off. The PhD program at Stanford has less than 10% of women in the electrical engineering department. And then from there to entrepreneurship, startups, there's a further drop-off. So this is something that is certainly very close to my heart. Not only is it imperative to bring in more women into the workforce in technology, but certainly consider entrepreneurship as well, because that's the heartbed of innovation. So women should not just come into technology, but certainly consider perhaps entrepreneurship. That's interesting. It's only 10% at Stanford, because you would think being here in the heart of Silicon Valley, there's so much demand for the expertise. There's so many examples of great companies that have come directly out of that school all the way back to Sun, et cetera, that there would not be a higher percentage. That seems low to me. That's certainly very, very surprising to me, as well as I lived my years at Stanford. We all at Silicon Valley experience a cute shortage of great engineering talent, great developers, great engineers. This is not just a problem in Silicon Valley. This is a problem throughout the country. So I think it's imperative not just to bring more engineers, men or women, but certainly there's a great opportunity for women to participate in the workforce, create monumental shifts in what opportunity means for women. Right. And you've highlighted a number of times in your answers entrepreneurship and really the role of entrepreneurship and what entrepreneurship means to you. What advice do you give out to people thinking about? Do I go to the big company? Do I go to the safe company? You could have stayed at Google, I'm sure. That's a comfortable place, but you had the bug. You jumped out. You started your own company. What is it about entrepreneurship? What's the magic? And then how is it being different being an entrepreneur as a woman than one of your male counterparts? I think the bug for entrepreneurship is anyone who desires to make an impact, have a sense of ownership, and not be a spoke in the wheel to borrow from that expression. I think that certainly should be the sole motivation for entrepreneurship. Many times, most large companies kind of settle into large product roadmaps, large bigger strategies. So as a result of which the ability to innovate at the speed that we'd like can sometimes be challenging. And entrepreneurship provides that kind of path. If you have the appetite, certainly comes with risk. If you have the appetite, certainly creates an opportunity. Give us a little breakdown on Drawbridge in terms of when did you start it, how big is it, kind of the information on the company? So we are four years old. We are 85 people. We are headquartered in San Mateo, California. We have offices in New York and London. About 40% of my management team are women. And I'm still working on figuring out how is it that we get more women into the workforce in our engineering department. And venture funded? We are. We are venture funded by Kleinupark and Sincoya. So someone told me it doesn't get more blue chip than that. That's pretty blue chip. That's pretty good. Congratulations. Well, thank you very much. Obviously they didn't worry about you being a woman when they decided to fund the company. I think it was actually a premium as well. Not only is it great to have a good engineer, a good scientist with a solid technology idea, but the fact that there aren't that many of us there, I think I'm sure my investors see that as a badge of honor for them. Well, that's great. And I really respect your opening statement that you take this award as a responsibility to help others do better and to help the industry do better. That's really great. Yeah, I certainly think so. I think sometimes in the early stages of your career development, you kind of can tend to be a bit more internally focused to be able to create, pave your own path. Now that I feel that I've come a certain way in my own journey, I think it certainly is incumbent upon me to create more avenues, more instances, more examples, whereby I can elicit participation from other women and certainly help women, and for that matter, men as well, to participate in technology. This is the way to go. Very good. Well, Kamakshi, thanks for stopping by. Congratulations on your award. Congratulations with Drawbridge for years. You're off and running. Thank you very much. Absolutely. So I'm Jeff Frick. We're at the Anita Borg Institute, Women's Division Awards in Santa Clara, California. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching.