 From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering CloudNow's seventh annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at Facebook headquarters. We're here for the seventh annual CloudNow Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation event. Welcoming one of the award winners tonight to the program. We've got Say Pyke, the founder and CEO of IOTUS. Say it's so great to have you here and congratulations on your award. Thank you so much, Lisa. So IOTUS, cool software, tell us about that. This is for the smart apartment. These days we're so used to being able to talk to any device and have it control things. Smart cities are a big thing, smart everything. Tell us about IOTUS, what you guys do and the impetus for the technology. Sure, I really believe that the future of smart home is actually something that is not just four walls and a roof, but actually something that is aware of you. It's aware of you and knows your preferences and settings and actually knows everything about you and wants to actually be an ally to you and actually can differentiate between you and your family and friends and potentially an intruder. And so the only way you're going to get there is to actually work with early adopters of technology. And this is when we start identifying the real estate industry with multifamily where all the early adopters were living, right? Because only 30% of millennials own homes. And so we thought about this and said, okay, well, how are we going to actually get to those millennials? And then a real estate developer actually approached us saying, hey, I want a technology differentiation for my building that I'm creating, 200 units in Portland, Oregon, which is where I'm from, and said, I want to have something different. And that's when I was like, oh, this is the opportunity to actually work with the real estate industry to put it into the fabric of the buildings. And that's when I got really excited when we could actually make a true smart home that has all the lights, all the outlets, all the locks, voice, as you mentioned, and everything that is an experience versus just on, off. That's so interesting. I looked at your website and saw the demo and how it's talking about something that you mentioned, this awareness and learning the individuals and being able to have the intelligence to distinguish. Is it called Stories on the website? There are Stories, so those are the automations. So you can have a good night story, good morning, welcome home. So everything just works for people who are moving into our apartment. So they download the app within 30 seconds. They can see everything that they can control, but they can see also all the pre-programmed automations as well. But the other notion of what we are creating is something called a living profile. And this is really relevant from a cloud now perspective, is that the living profile travels with you from place to place to place. So we are not only doing smart apartments, but we're also working in student housing, military housing, senior living, and starting to go into single family home as well. So for us, the notion is that these smart homes, all your settings, preferences, your routines, your habits travel with you from place to place to place, eventually to hotels, to cars, working spaces, hotels, short-term vacation rentals and such. Wow, that's phenomenal. So this is an interesting kind of collaboration between the real estate industry and some technologist. I love that you were approached by a real estate developer who said, I want to have a differentiation for my business. Because that's sort of a surprise to you, thinking you understand tech, you have a really cool background in anthropology, as well as electronic arts. But that must have been sort of an interesting opportunity, going, whoa, there's a huge opportunity in the market here that we can help tech really kick the doors wide open on real estate. Exactly. So my previous company, Citizen, which I sold to Ernst & Young, is known for connected technologies. So we were developing connected technologies in cars, in healthcare, in fintech. And we were looking at smart homes for single family home. And so for us, when that real estate developer approached us, looked at the market, saw that the market is huge. It's $500 billion to a trillion dollars, just for multi-family home alone. Absolutely large market. And then realized that this was truly an opportunity to scale smart home and IoT devices in a meaningful way, because you're not just selling one device, one home, but you're selling, and not even one building, but you're selling entire portfolios of companies like Prudential, JP Morgan, all the funds that you hear about, they're all real estate funds, right? And they're changing hands, 40% of the fund is changing hands every year. That means they're buying and selling, and as they're buying and selling, they're adding technology into these buildings. Wow, that's so interesting. So I want to kind of pivot a little bit into your background. I mentioned anthropology degree and electronic arts, and you have, I was asking you before we went live, I love stories like that where there's a, hey, I wasn't a STEM kid, but you have some really cool influences that your anthropology background has delivered to not just your career, but also the technology that you guys are delivering. Tell us a little bit about that. Sure, so anthropology is a study in human behavior, there's physical anthropology and cultural anthropology. Physical anthropologies now considered almost like evolutionary psychology. And so that actually allowed me, because I've always been curious about human nature, why people do things, and that actually led my career into this interesting path of user experience design. And electronic arts actually taught me how to code as well as design on the computer. And when I graduated from college in the late 90s, moved to Silicon Valley, everybody's like, I need somebody who could code and design all these internet sites. So I ended up actually designing the first GM e-commerce sites, the first HPs e-commerce sites, and that actually was not a direct path. I never thought I'd be making websites or working in an internet, but it was an interesting path to get there. So you're right, it doesn't have to be this straight, and like you gotta be in computer science. There's so many different avenues to think about how technology needs a different point of view, right? From an art background or an anthropology background. And I think that's where there's an opportunity to bring in women or girls in a different way that still goes into STEM. So STEAM is a huge portion of what I support. Yes, well, and you talk about, it's just different points of view, it's thought diversity even. Tell us a little bit about the culture that you're building at IOTUS and where maybe even some of the softer skills are key to enabling you guys to do market expansion and accomplish some pretty big goals. Yeah, I mean, culturally, I love my team. I think one of the things that we always strive for though is the ability to always give back to the community as well. So we have events as well as once a month everyone has a give back Wednesday, right? So they can go and volunteer and do other things that is outside of just their work life, right? And so that's just one of the things that we do and that allows them to just step away from their daily activity of being driven by just the startup mentality or the startup life and just go build something and we do this a lot of habitats for humanities, right? We go build homes, real homes. And we always think we should offer these homes with smart home technology. But those are the things that I think really impact who we are. The other thought I had was I travel a lot and I had this moment where I was getting on a plane, I was looking at the pilots going, oh gosh, you know, so much of my life is dependent on white men. And unfortunately, like my investors, my board members, my all my executive staff, my husband, and I was thinking I need to change something, right? I will keep the husband. But we recently added a female board member who has a cybersecurity background. I'm recruiting for a female CFO and COO as well and I'm trying to change up my executive staffs, change up my investors, change up my board. So this is not something that you think about coming from my generation, which is a little bit older. Like you just need to do what you need to do to get it done. You don't think about yourself as a female entrepreneur. I thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I think of myself as a CEO. I don't have this like, I'm a female entrepreneur. And so you sometimes forget to support other diversity in this environment. And that's kind of this moment of realization as I was getting on the plane, I got to change something, right? And so our staff is more than 40% female. I'm trying to change that a little bit more. So that's one of the key things that I think is a strength of having just representation. And maybe one of these days, say to your point, it won't matter. You will just be able to be a CEO. Exactly. An entrepreneur. One more thing, since you're recruiting, working people to go to find out more information about the opportunities. Sure, so they can come to our site, reach out at contact at iotosome.com. And that would be the best way to reach us. Excellent. Well, say congratulations on the award. Thank you. And for what you're doing to help revolutionize the real estate tech industry. It's such interesting technology to make it aware and personal. Thanks for your time. Thank you so much, Lisa. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin at Facebook headquarters. Thanks for watching.