 Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and we are on the ground at Google with CloudNow, which is a nonprofit organization that really promotes and mentors leading women in cloud technologies and converging technologies. Tonight, we're here with CloudNow at their fifth annual Top Women in Cloud Innovations Awards. And we're very excited to be talking with an award winner tonight. Shahid Anazar, Senior Director of Engineering at GoDaddy. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa. It's great to have you here. We'd love to share with our audience a little bit about the projects for which you're being honored tonight. Tell us about that project. A little bit of background. GoDaddy was known for commercials that were unsavory. Yeah, I think I've seen a few of those. About three or four years ago, I think GoDaddy brought in the new CEO of Blaker Wing from Yahoo, and they decided to become a true mainstream technology company, built technology to shift the economy towards small businesses. A lot of the small businesses are run by women, so GoDaddy decided that we needed to promote, grow, advocate for women across both inside the company and among our customers. It was a pretty big cultural shift that was going from being quite provocative to being really focused and carried out momentum with accountability at GoDaddy. You bet, you bet. And one of the people that came in was Ella Samofi, who became the CTO of GoDaddy. And one of the decisions was also to use open source, which is open stack, is the open source technology to build our cloud technology both in, both our private cloud and our public cloud. And that's the project that I worked on and I'm here for. And you've been leading that team for about a year? Right. Tell us about that team and some of the things that your team learns from you, but also vice versa, what are some of the things that you learn or have learned about being this team leader? Absolutely. It's a team of about 12 purely working on open stack. Currently it is largely a team of amazing engineers. And what I brought to this team was engineering rigor from having been in the industry, developing production quality products with the new technologies. That's what I brought to the team and what I learned from being at GoDaddy. I was really inspired by how much, how far they've been able to go, how much business they've been able to build with relatively smaller investments in technology and how dedicated everybody was. The moment a decision was made, everybody ran off to the races to make it happen. So that dedication to execution and commitments was what I was floored by. And that ended up being a pretty good combination of good synergy between the team and me. I like that synergy. Give us a little bit of a profile into your background. Were you loving engineering and computer science from the time you were little or did you have kind of other interests and somehow got to be in this great position? What did your background look like? Fantastic. You know, I originally come from India. I grew up in India. When I was growing up back then, India is different now, but back then it was pretty common for most parents to have some kind of a vision for their children. And my parents had envisioned that I'd be a doctor or surgeon actually more specifically. And so up to about eighth grade, I grew up with this thing in my head that I was gonna be a doctor. And somewhere along the way, I started seeing pictures of computers and I was just fascinated by them and decided to switch gears and persuaded my parents to let me follow a different path. And they completely supported me in that path. And so I started shifting my focus towards math and computer science. So graduated with a computer science degree from an engineering college in India and then did master's in computer science from University of Washington. So you had support really from your parents, which must have been a tremendous inspiration for you to help kind of foster that belief in yourself. You bet, you bet. And you just put one step in front of the other and anytime there are setbacks and everybody has setbacks, you just know that you have full support in setbacks or part of life and you just keep going. That's a great message that setbacks are a part of life. In terms of maybe some of the resistance that you felt either internally or externally, did you ever feel, wow, there's math and science, I love it, but there's a lot of boys here. Was that ever an intimidation factor for you? And if so, how did you overcome that? When I went in that was not a factor, but once I was in there, I did notice that wow, I am a pretty minority in a large group of boys. Sometimes it can be an advantage in that you can stand out, it is easy to stand out. Sometimes it can be socially isolating and that was the hardest part. A little bit early in my career, I had to work to get over it. What I realized is that people or men, my male colleagues, they weren't being anti-social and I had a skill of being able to reach out and it worked out when, for both of us, and we were able to socialize and support each other. You really bring a great message of perseverance that yes, there are obstacles, but as you said, life is full of obstacles and your determination, your perseverance and also kind of recognizing, well maybe the men are being this way for a different reason, are I think really valuable lessons for girls that are maybe interested in STEM programs now or are thinking about either majoring in STEM areas or maybe even early in their tech career. So Shahid Anzar, Senior Director of Engineering for GoDaddy, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. Congratulations again on the award and now you're officially a CUBE alumna. Thank you Lisa. Appreciate it. Absolutely, we've been watching the CUBE, I'm your host Lisa Martin and I just want to ask you, you know a female that should be featured on the CUBE, filmed in our Palo Alto studios, tweet us at the CUBE with the hashtag women in tech. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.