 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, brought to you by Girls in Tech. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference 2018. It's a great event. We've been here before about 700 attendees, really listening in. It's a single track conference for a couple of days of women leaders telling their stories, how they got to where they are, some of the challenges that they had to overcome. There's a ton of women, some men and I think they just brought in a busload of students. So it's a really good event and we're excited to be here again because Ariana just does a terrific job with Girls in Tech and we're excited. Our next guest is Laura Messerschmitt, VP Global Customer Experience for GoDaddy. Laura, great to see you. Nice to meet you. Yeah, so we've had a ton of GoDaddy guests on at Grace Hopper. So we're very familiar with the company. So it's great to meet you, but it's funny. When we first met with August at Grace Hopper, I'm like, August, what are you doing here? You guys have like the most sexist brand, at least back in the day, of anybody. They're gonna run you out of the building, but you guys change the culture and you're a big part of that and that was your presentation. Yeah, I started with GoDaddy through an acquisition and when I came in, the only thing I knew was those Super Bowl commercials and I came in just very skeptical. Like, what is this place? Is this the right place for me? It doesn't stand for my values. But what I found was this amazing company that actually did promote women in tech and that had this big presence. And so we went to go and change it and try to make it even better for women in tech and to change the brand. And so that's what we've been doing over the last five years is working on making that change to be a premier leader for women in tech. So how hard is that when literally you're forward-facing brand to the outside world are these super-racie commercials that you can't even see the end of it, you have to jump onto the internet to finish them? So how did that get started? How does it get implemented? What are some of the lessons learned in going through that process? And I assume it's still an ongoing exercise. I think at the beginning, the hard part was that we knew we wanted to make a change and we knew that 60% of our customer base was women and so we had to make a change. It was a business imperative. But we didn't know where we were going at first and so we sort of circled for a little while where we were trying to think, how do we make this happen? What do we do? And when we started to set the vision that we were actually gonna change not just our own selves, but the industry to make it better for women, that then set us on a course for where we'd go. And then things moved pretty quickly. For example, we moved our hiring of tech women from 14% one year to 40% the next year. In one year. In one year, yeah. So what did you do to do that? That's a significant, that's not a statement. That's a lot of steps and processes. So what are some of the things that you guys did? What we found is that the small things actually really do matter and so we changed all of our job descriptions. So we took out rid of words like code ninja that women wouldn't relate to and made them gender neutral and that brought in more women and then what we did is we required each hiring manager to have at least one diverse candidate when they interviewed. And what we'd found is that when the hiring managers would go out to find diverse candidates, they would go searching and they'd find not one, but they'd find five. And so suddenly you had this huge pipeline of incoming women. We also did things like go to the Grace Hopper Conference to find more women that could come in and recruit. And that actually was what made that major change from the 14% to the 40 in one year. Wow. And again, kind of the top down vision. I'm just curious who woke up one day and said, wait, 60% of our customers are women. Maybe we should do something a little bit different. You know, I think it was a lot of people. The one I would mention in particular though is Blake Irving. He was our CEO that came in right around when we were making this change. And he had a personal story with his sister where she had unfortunately passed away, but prior to her passing, she had promoted women and he had promised her that he would also promote women in the industry that he ended up in. Right. And so once he became CEO, he was bound to determine that we were not only going to change GoDaddy but we were actually going to make an impact in the industry because he had made that promise. Right. That's great. You know, it's funny on the hiring manager story. You know, we can't help it, right? Everybody has bias whether they know it or not or admit to it. And we're also, we all like birds of a feather, right? It's just comfortable to be around and be with people that look like us and sound like us. And it's just kind of the natural state. So unless you force someone to look beyond that, they're just not going to do it as a natural course. But it's interesting that you said once they, once you forced them to look, not only did they find, but they found a whole bunch of great opportunity. And another piece of it was not putting a quota on it. So it wasn't a quota on the hiring, it was just a quota on, you have to have at least one in your interview pool. Right. And so that meant that people were okay with it. People didn't feel like they had to pick, you know, they wanted to pick the best candidate. Right. And so we were just making sure that the best candidates were actually showing up. Right. And when they did show up, a lot of times the women were the ones getting hired because they were the best candidate. So I'm curious in terms of kind of the cultural change, how did it affect at a more kind of a general level as you were successful in making this transformation, which was a top down prerogative from the CEO? Well for me as being a woman, that seeing a lot more people like me in the company and sort of in all aspects of the company. Right. So previous to this change, a lot of the technical people were all men and the sort of marketing and other functions were women. And I started to see women being hired into these other functions. And it opened up sort of a world of possibility. Right. And I also think the company is better off because of it, you know, our financial results have been great. And I think that's partially due to this huge change we made. Right. I think it actually does impact the finances because we had more diversity in our thinking and the way we made decisions. Well, I think it's been proven time and time again, right? The diversity is only the right thing to do, but it does lead to better outcomes, right? Which goes right to the bottom line. So it's certainly a huge contributor because you just get different points of view that you wouldn't have ever thought of. So a little bit about girls in tech here. Why are you here? What is this event in this organization about for you personally as well as GoDaddy? So I would say GoDaddy has been working with women tech, or sorry, yeah, for girls in tech for about five years now. And I think we believe in their mission, right? Because their mission aligns very much with ours, which is to help women in tech. But over the past five years, we've seen them transition and they've started focusing also on women founders. And given that our customers are small businesses, we care a lot about that. And so it's been very lockstep for the last five years. And just being here at the conference is great to get to talk to other women that are trying to do similar things in their companies and share notes. Right, that was great. So I guess we'll see you at pitch night later this year. All right, Laura, well, thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing your story. It's funny, when we were at Grace Hopper, most of the girls there are just fresh out of school, didn't know the old GoDaddy. So they're like, eh, we don't necessarily want to talk about it, but it's actually a really great story to be able to make that transition in such an extreme kind of from one side to the other. So, you know, best to you guys. Thanks, yeah, it's just work to do, but we're keep going. All right, keep working. All right, well, thanks again for stopping by. Thank you so much. She's Laura, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're Girls in Tech Catalyst 2018 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching.