 The Cube presents On the Ground. Hey, welcome back everybody. Geoffrey here with The Cube. We're on the ground in Santa Clara, California at the Anita Board of Women and Vision Awards. And we're really excited in this next segment to have one of the award winners for technology and entrepreneurship, Pooja Sankar, the founder and CEO of Piazza. Welcome. Thank you. It's great to be here. Congratulations on the award. Thank you. So tell us a little bit about Piazza. Yeah, sure. Well, Piazza really stems from my own story as one of three women studying computer science. I wished I had something that would enable me to ask classmates questions. And so 10 years fast forward as a grad student at Stanford Business School, I decided to build a platform that would connect classmates to their peers, to their instructors and enable them to ask questions about hard homework problems that they were working on and under the veil of anonymity if they needed to. And it's grown to over a million students now worldwide. A million students? Wow. So it's a real time communication vehicle. It is. I'm working on a hard problem for my need. I need some assistance right now. And your classmates log in. So a professor sets up the private Piazza for their class and students can log on. And if they're afraid that there are questions, a dumb question, they can ask anonymously. And it really brings out a lot of collaboration. Interesting. So when did you start it? How long have you been at it? Kind of basics on the company. Yeah. So I was at Stanford as a grad student in 2008 to 2010. And that's when I pretty much built the first prototype myself and then started to launch it to Stanford students, Stanford classes. It got real traction. 2011 is when we publicly launched the website. And 2011 it grew to MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, beyond Stanford, and then from there, hundreds more schools within a couple of years to now over 90 countries, 1,500 universities. Wow. And have you taken outside funding? We have. So late 2011, when Bessemer specifically saw the reach we had gotten and the word of mouth, the organic growth among professors and students for them, that was just huge to see sort of product be picked up by professors to further education. I mean, that's a very inspiring mission for many to get behind. And so late 2011, we did our Series A with Bessemer. And then 2013, we did our Series B with Coastal Ventures, who saw the potential to make this into so much more beyond learning, helping students ace the classroom. But then how do you help them think about their career? So an entire recruiting platform that now enables brands like Facebook or Google or Apple or Microsoft to really start leveraging the platform, the data, and recruit kids. Wow. As you're saying the story, I can't help but think of Facebook. That they started at Harvard, and then they went after the IVs, and they kind of grew through the academic side in the academic community. You're doing the same, but for a very different kind of objective, not just to date. But actually, share some knowledge and help me with hard problems. And then how many people are you now? We're 30 today. 30 today. So that's an interesting take on the scale that you can reach with a relatively small team. Yeah. So we were three people when we had gotten to 30,000 students, three people. And professors used to think we were 100-person company, because our product was so polished. And it was just the three of us iterating constantly, working with the professors, working with the TAs, working with the students at Stanford, making the product much, much, much better with their feedback. It was an idea came in the morning. Feedback came in the afternoon. The push was done by night. And we would just constantly do that every single day. And it made the product really polished, really mature. And I remember going out to MIT and Harvard and Berkeley. And every professor thought, we must be 100-person company, because they were not used to seeing such polished products. And I was like, nope, we're three people. One front end intern, one back end engineer. And I touch up the front end every now and then I talk to teachers and get feedback. Was it a Stanford engineering student as well? It was a Stanford intern. I love that. So I'd love to get your tape, because I think one of the great engines, I don't think it's enough pub for Silicon Valley, is Stanford and Cal and the academic institutions and just this constant flow of smart people that don't leave. And really just this culture of, yeah, sure, start another company, start another company. You know, I don't know how many people know that Sun was a Stanford University network. Has nothing to do with Sun, you know. We got to connect a couple of department computers. How do we do it? So share your perspective on that culture that really helped you kind of kicked out this idea from an idea to really a successful company. Yeah, I do think I was really lucky to be at Stanford at the time. So as a grad student in the MBA program, founders were coming every single day in entrepreneurship classes, sharing their stories. And I think for me, it really dawned on me in the class, the formation of adventures, that for really to go out and start a company, it's about finding an idea you're passionate about. And then it's just really baby steps. How do you think about the next baby step and the next one and the next one? And so for me, the next, the first baby step was okay, what will it probably turn us all over? I thought really hard. And for me, it specifically actually narrowed down to women studying technical subjects and how do I help them get a support group? And then broadened it up to realize, wow, many kids today feel isolated, they feel shy, they feel their questions down. So how can I help the broader population who's trying to learn get the best learning possible? And then it was about what does an online platform look like? And I would take mocks and just start mocking it and show it to anyone I could find who would sit down with me and listen to me and they'd give me feedback. And after a few months, I'd really polish the mocks enough to then pick up the real code. Like, let me start writing code. So I picked up a book on Ruby on Rails, taught myself how to build a web app and then wrote the first prototype of Piazza over the summer between my first and second year of business school in 10 days. And then again, it was just baby steps. Okay, well, now I have a working website. How do I find a professor and found a professor? Then how do I get the professor to enroll his or her students? And did that, then how do I get students to post their first question? And that was its own struggle and got a student to post a question and then a second question and a third question. And really, within a year and a half, I'd probably taken 500 to 1,000 baby steps and before I knew it, a year and a half later, I had real traction, real classes, using it real students, asking and answering on a daily basis. That's a terrific story. So really, to focus in on a very specific target that you can identify and deliver, we talk a lot about personas. You know, who's the persona that you're trying to deliver some value to and then just don't boil the ocean. Just take it one step at a time. Yeah, yeah. So it's a need of board. And kind of how long have you been involved and how are they really changing the game? Yeah, I mean, I was invited to speak at Grace Hopper a couple of years ago. Many, many women at the college level know Piazza. They use Piazza. They feel safe being able to post anonymously their questions on Piazza and learn, again, hard technical subjects. So I was really excited. I mean, I've been close to Utele. I've been close to Grace Hopper. I've been a speaker there. I love that they can bring together thousands of women each year and help them feel supported. I think that's very important for any minority group, honestly, but it resonates deeply with me in my own story being a woman who studied computer science at IIT in India. You know, 1% acceptance rate into IIT. One of three girls only studying computer science. It was terrifying. It was isolating. And if we really want to think about that day and age where we have 50, 50 split of men and women in a CS class, it's gonna take a lot to get there. And so whatever society can do and whatever Grace Hopper can do and whatever they are doing, these are the things that are gonna make a huge change in how to get women more embracing computer science. And whatever Piazza can do because you're operating kind of right there on the edge, right? Right when they're still in school and they're trying to help encourage them because people talk a lot. Is it a problem? I know a lot. Retention problem. You know, it's a little of everything for sure, but I will say there was a female student at Princeton who said, I was terrified of taking my first CS class. I thought I wouldn't enjoy it. And I ended up enjoying it so much more because I had Piazza as an aide. Oh, what a great piece of feedback. So what are you looking forward to this year, Grace Hopper? Well, I'm actually on a panel talking about women's STEM diversity workforce. It's a topic very close to my heart. And today when I think about it, in addition to our recruiting platform, we've got an add-on that enables companies to target women specifically. How do I find women who have taken algorithms and machine learning and data science problems and have been coding since the age of 16 or have started a company or, you know, and so it's one of the many tools that I think employers can start employing in the day and age of technology, really, to increase diversity in the workforce. And so that is a topic that I'm very, very passionate about when you think about, yeah, there's aid and support from women in college, but then there's aid and support and kind of ways for employers to connect with women to really increase the ratios then in the workplace. Right, well, again, congratulations on your award. Fantastic. Thank you. And we'll see you in Houston in October. Thank you. Absolutely. With theCUBE, we are on the ground at the Anita Board Women of Vision Awards. Thanks for watching.