 Live from Houston, Texas, it's The Cube, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Well everyone, welcome to a special presentation of Silicon Angles The Cube. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from noise. We are here live for three days of wall-to-wall coverage in Houston, Texas for the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Celebration, our third year covering the event, second with the live stage, getting bigger and bigger every year. I'm joined by Rebecca Knight, my co-host, Jeff Frick, general manager of The Cube, kicking off three days of wall-to-wall coverage and we are proud to be presenting also here at Grace Hopper, 18 reporters here on the ground as part of The Cube, Silicon Angle Media and Wikibana and our new Tech Truth Fellowship as partnership with the Ground Truth Project where we are funding fellows to go out and investigate and do deep investigation of the most important stories in technology and the first assignment is Women in Technology. Rebecca, Jeff, this event really is the capstone for kicking off that fellowship, but more importantly, it really is a seminal moment in the industry because all the emphasis of STEAM, STEM, Women in Tech, you can't ask for a better forum where every single major technology innovator is here with women presence, recruiting, evangelize and really promoting the aspect of technology, education, coding and it's not just software, it's science, so it's super exciting. 16,000 people, 1,000 are men, so we're heavily dominated here, which is great because not all tech events like that. Rebecca, your thoughts on your first impression so far? Well, just as you've been saying, it is really exciting. We have 16,000 people from 83 countries around the world and there's a real feeling of girl power, solidarity. You hear so much about the dearth of women in leadership positions in Silicon Valley and in technology in general but it doesn't feel that way right here. And what's exciting is we had the key notes, we had Ginny Romney, CEO of IBM, shared a very personal story on stage to really amplify what I thought was a really strong message to all the women in the audience and she told the story about how her father left their family and the mother had no job, no money, no house, four kids and this is back in the 60s and the mom went back to school and she remembered her walk away message was don't let anyone define you, define you as a person. And I think you're starting to see the girl power, the women really kind of changing the landscape of the industry so the younger generation are coming in and it is not women trying to be men, it's women being women with technology power. I mean as we heard Telly Whitney say today who is the head of the Anita Borg Institute who is putting Grace Hopper on, it has never been a better time to be a woman computer scientist and I think that that is true. This is a real inspiring message, one of hope, one of encouragement. Yeah, it's so much talk about kind of the softer side of all the algorithms that are running the world and with the election coming on and a lot of conversations about how are algorithms filtering the news that people see and it's a time where people are getting reinforced messages based on their behavior and the algorithms send them more messages so there isn't an opportunity to really kind of break the algorithms and add the softer side to add more intelligence. The other thing I love about this show is I look around, you know, we talk a lot about software eating the world every company is a software company. Well, you just have to come here to really see that. Macy's was mentioned in the keynote, Best Buy is here, State Farm Insurance, Deutsche Bank, Honeywell, I mean it's such a broad illustration that all these companies are all software. We got all the Google's and those ones but Capital One and the one that- Not traditional technology companies, right? Best Buy is a brick and mortar old school brick and mortar store but they are here in force hiring and talking about software. So software is eating the world and there's no better place to see that than here. And I think the other thing I see early on coming out of this is kind of a continuation of last year is this notion that the landscape of the industry workforce is changing but not just in terms of numbers of personnel. We still got problems in terms of pipelining women in tech and all kinds of whether that's the issue or not but what's going on with software is that the future of work, mobile computing, cloud computing is actually changing how we work which combined with the fact that this huge interest from a younger generation of computer scientists and technical powerful women is an opportunity to use software to create a transformation in the actual companies themselves that have nothing to do with hiring more women. It's just a complete change over on how we work, how we interact, how we behave, what news we see, how social interaction changes. So a huge opportunity for the folks here to participate not only as women but as technologists to change that future of work. To shape the future of work, to shape the future of how we shop, how we watch the news, how we participate in our government. That's exactly right. Rebecca, you write for Harvard Business Review. This is one of the areas that you talk about. What are some of your thoughts? Because you're covering this area of how people are working and whether it's from HR issues to business transformation. This is not just about women. There are real issues going on right now. What's your thoughts on the opportunity for companies to be transformed? Well, I think that it was so interesting today when they were doing the presentation of the winners of the top companies. And they said that the companies that are making real strides in getting more women into their pipelines and also retaining more women are being purposeful and deliberate about it. So they are having formal programs including diversity and inclusion programs. They are having flex time. These are things that these companies are being mindful about and not just saying something ad hoc, oh, it will work out. We're just going to work something out with your manager. No, it takes a real deliberate. Let's talk about social networks. Jeff, we talked about this last year and we had from Intuiton, we had some senior executives. And one thing that came up there, Eileen Fagan, she's my age. And we were talking, our kids played baseball together. We grew up in the same town. We're talking about the loneliness at the top for women and that there's a, I kind of generalizing, not just saying being lonely, but as you go to the top of these companies in the executive role, there's not many mentors left around. So there's like a solidarity amongst that level. But yet there's a need to mentor the younger generation. How is that dynamic changing in your mind? As you're reporting out there, whether it's for the financial times or for at Harvard-Bissview, the role of mentoring, the role of support systems, the role of encouragement. So people don't be defined as Jeannie Romney was saying from IBM, but people can put their own best foot forward. Well, I think it is so important for young women to look up to the rungs on the ladder above them and see people who look like them and say, hey, I can do that. Look, she did that. But as you were saying, that's absolutely true. In terms of the real upper layer of leadership, there are very few women. And so, I mean, I think that they are their own club of powerful women, women at the top. But there aren't enough of them. And so, hopefully as more women are here and are at their first conference of a bunch of other like-minded people who look like them, we will see those pipelines filled and then we will see more people in leadership. And hopefully that there's a cultural change and we have some of our young fellows here reporting on the vibe of the marketplace as women who are technically savvy as they step into an arena, that the vibe is good. Whether that's an anti-bullying environment or just general cultural norms that are changing. Because it has been a male dominated world. It has. And that's changing. So, we're going to explore this. We're going to explore all these things. And super excited. Again, 16,000 women here. And it's not a promotional event either. This is hardcore tech power at this event. This is super excited. No, it's everything. It's machine learning. It's autonomous vehicles. It's artificial intelligence. It is the next big wave of IT innovation that's happening here. We're excited to be here. I see all of our fellows just arrived on behind you. So, we got to get them all we want to introduce them to our audience. We're really excited about our TechTruth program. We've got the five fellows that are here along with a bunch of support staff. They're going to be out getting stories every day. We're going to get them on at the end of the day. And they'll be on silkenangle.com. They're unique. Go to silkenangle.com. There's a little banner on the right hand side that says TechTruth. You can click on that and see all the stories. Certainly all these stories are going to be syndicated all over the world. It was possibly kind of all outlets can use the content. It is free. If you want to get involved as a sponsor, go to TechTruth and contact me on Twitter. Certainly a lot of people are getting involved. It's becoming a very exciting open community where the agenda is very simple. Yes. Tell the truth. Cover the most important stories. Go deep with no agenda other than sharing, extracting that signal from the noise. So, we're super excited. Check out the TechTruth and of course theCube and the GroundTruth project working in partnership. Certainly pulling that off. Really great stuff. Okay, we're going to kick off day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage here live in Houston for the Grace Hopper, Women in Computing Celebration. I'm John Furrier with Reconite and Jeff Frick. We'll be back with more after this short break. I remember when I had such a fantastic batting practice, I walked by a couple of sports writers in that era. Hall of Famer, Reggie.