 From Phoenix, Arizona, theCUBE at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hey, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. About 400 people, the fourth year of the conference, really getting together, talking about women in tech issues. Something in the water here in Phoenix. We're here two years ago at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing, also just down the road. So we're happy to be here and really get a feel and bring to you some of the leaders here that are making things happen. We're really excited by our next guest, Coco Brown, the founder and CEO of the Alina Alliance, or Athena Alliance, excuse me, welcome. Thank you. So the Athena Alliance, what's it all about? Well, so the Athena Alliance is an organization of executive women who've achieved great success in their careers, and they have a vision collectively of women operating at their highest level of impact. And within the context of a business leadership realm, that highest level really is the boardroom. And so our mission is to help women obtain board seats and be successful in the role. So there's a lot of conversations about board. It seems to be kind of the new kind of hot button topic about inequality. There's certainly a ton of conversations about inequality and pay highlighted recently by the women's national soccer team, which got a lot of buzz. And I think everyone kind of knows that conversation that's been going on for a while. But the boardroom conversation is kind of new. It's kind of bubbling up, or at least that's my sense of it, that barely have cracked the surface in terms of historical numbers and getting women representation on boards. Why does that continue to be a problem? Is it a pipeline issue? Is it a matchmaking issue? Is it a networking issue? Is it just, I just don't know. What is the issue? It's not a pipeline issue. And so what's happened in this discussion is there were some sort of pretty notable examples of situations where women raised their hands and said, hey, where are the women on these boards? And the response was, well, where are the women? Which kind of created this energy around the topic a lot more strongly more recently, which is to say there are a lot of qualified women out there who would be great board directors. And yet the positions of board director are gate kept by largely men. This is just the circumstance. Men are the ones who back companies, they're their VCs, they're the founders, they're the CEOs, and within their networks they don't have a lot of women, executive women. Likewise, executive women tend to sort of seek each other out too. So we're sort of not in each other's realms. So a lot of the conversation has been around raising awareness to the issue. There's been great tracking of exactly where is the issue and how are we making progress. And then there's been a lot of great organizations that have been helping women get ready for board positions, training them. And thirdly, there's a lot of great organizations out there who are essentially identifying qualified women and cataloging them, putting them in databases and saying, hey, no excuses, here they are. Right, right. But the key missing element and my feeling as to why the problem continues to persist, part of it's just time, it's just gonna take time. But part of it is also really networking, what you said, it is about networking. It is that the women who want these positions and who are qualified for these positions need to know the men who are looking for board directors. And when you actually make those two connections happen, you get incredible success, and we're seeing it already. Here's the age rule adage, right? It's not who you know, but who knows you. Yes. It used to always be the other way around, but it's really who knows you. And we live in such a time of kind of personal branding and kind of external communication via LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, medium, however you choose to kind of externalize your professional position and it kind of gets intermingled with your personal position. There really is not much excuse at least to make the attempt to kind of get yourself out there. Exactly, it's why, so there's 16 of the speakers here at this conference, our Athena Alliance Women. And part of the reason we're here, we're here because this is such a noble and important and fantastic event for us to participate in. The other reason we're here is because this is a part of our way of getting known too, right? Of becoming more visible, of making our brand, personal brand known. So this is one of those key things about who knows you that we should and need to be doing. So how many Athena Foundation women are in executive boards now? So Athena Alliance is relatively new, so we're just getting started. About 50% of, 47% of the women associated with Athena Alliance are already on boards. Largely those- That's pretty good, 47%. Yes, largely those are non-profit boards. They also are on a fair number of advisory boards and they're now looking for the private boards and corporate boards and they're looking for public boards as well. And do you see that as kind of the logical stepping stone between an advisory board, a non-profit board, potentially a private company board, a VC back company and then to a larger public entity? Is that kind of? Yeah, I see it in two ways. On the one hand it's stepping stones and on the other we have a variety of careers, right? So let's take me for example. I ran and was an owner of a privately held company. We reached about $50 million in revenue before I sold my ownership, moved on. I'm qualified for a certain kind of a board, right? I'm qualified for a private board of a certain type of growth, sort of trajectory or stage. Others like Yvonne, who you spoke with, she's qualified for public boards of a different size. So some of it is just what we're qualified for and what we can really contribute to and some of it is stepping stone. So for example, advisory boards are a great stepping stone. You get absolutely zero board credit for being on an advisory board because it doesn't have a due share responsibility. But it's incredible network experience. It's a great way to get to know CEOs, to get to know VCs, to make yourself sort of known as a candidate for other aspects of that company. And where do you see kind of the natural networking opportunities? Because clearly there's networks that exist around where you went to school, there's networks around increasingly kind of alumni groups within companies, especially a big company like an Intel or an HP where you've got these huge alumni groups because they've been around for so long. Where are some of the other kind of natural alumni groups that then cross over that are going to allow kind of rubbing of shoulders with the old school guide board members with some of these women that are trying to kind of break through? Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I think that is a really good opportunity space because I do see that mostly the networking pods if you will are within school alumni groups or corporate alumni groups or organizations that women belong to, right? But that are largely then just women organizations or maybe some industry organizations. And industry boards are a great way to kind of make that connection point. But I don't think that women do have opportunities of overlap with men in those organizations and those networking communities. So the way it has to happen is I think we have to make it happen. So it's almost like creating mixers. You know, we need some mixers, right? Male VCs mixed with Athena Alliance women. Let's get together. We actually have an event coming up like that where you can have some men and women in the same room. They get to get a sense of each other. Those, you do start seeing more of that going on. Because you really need that, right? I mean, they are networks. Yeah. And everything going on today is all about networks whether it's IoT or social media or whatever, right? It's networks and they're all kind of naturally bound by something. But how do you get that overlap from one network to the other when there's not enough overlap to really make the activity that you're seeking? Of course, there's always CUBE alumni which is a terrific network. So we'll use that as a founding point. Absolutely. Well, Dan Shulnic, who is a general partner with Trinity, he's on a number of boards. He's speaking at an event for the Athena Alliance on a panel coming up. And he's got board openings in the variety of boards that he's on. Those are the kinds of connections. Make opportunities for Dan to be in the same room as a number of these great women. I think we just have to create it. Yeah. It's interesting because it is all about the connection, right? You gotta know people and you gotta put the word out. Nobody ever got a board seat sending out a resume, right? Exactly. How many come from executive headhunters? I never got a job from an executive headhunter. It's really more about who you know. And executive recruiters only actually fill about one to 2% of board seats. Is that right? It's only the top companies with the deepest pockets or the greatest pressure that can do that. Okay, so what are your kind of priorities for the next six months, nine months? What are your top things you guys are working on at the Alliance? So we're relatively new. So big priority for us is funding. We're also scaling. So scaling is one of the important things. In other words, scaling our relationships with those VCs, with CEOs and starting to create greater linkages through these networking events. All right, well, Coco, thank you for taking a few minutes. Thank you. Absolutely, and good luck with the Alliance. It sounds like you guys are on your way. We see increasingly we did a show at SAP in conjunction with Makers, and they've got a great movie about some of the women who just kind of broke down barriers in advertising, fashion, finance, tech, et cetera, Meg Whitman among many women highlighted there. And it's tough to break down that door, but when the first one gets through, hopefully they leave a little space for somebody else to scooch in behind them. Yeah, absolutely. All right, Jeff Frick here with Coco Brown. We are at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, Phoenix, Arizona. You're watching theCUBE. See you next time.