 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's the Cube covering IBM Edge 2015. Brought to you by IBM. Hi everyone, I'm Sam Cahane with Stu Miniman. Welcome back to IBM Edge Day 2. We're excited to be here today with Pornima, Vise Shankar. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. She's the founder of FemmeGineer. So I understand this is your first IBM Edge. What brought you to the event? Yeah, well I was brought out by Penny Hill. She reached out to me. There's a women in tech panel that's going on this evening that I'm going to be on. I'm talking about my career trajectory as well as a recent book that I wrote, How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products, as well as what FemmeGineer does as a company. All right, so Pornima, we were talking a little bit off camera. You're a serial entrepreneur. You're based out in the valley. Your current company is Busybee. It's FemmeGineer. Oh, it is FemmeGineer. I'm sorry, Busybee was the previous company? Yes. Okay, so yeah, tell us a little bit about those companies and how did you get to become an entrepreneur? Sure. So my first startup was actually Mint.com. I started that with a friend of mine from college and that was back in 2006. So if you're not familiar with Mint, it's a personal finance website. I am familiar with Mint. Absolutely. Yeah, so then during my time at Mint, I was actually writing a blog on engineering entrepreneurship called FemmeGineer. And after the acquisition was at a crossroads of what to do next. And over the years, I've been invited to speak and teach and do a lot of events like this. And so I thought, why not an education company and decided to repurpose my blog, FemmeGineer, into that company? So over the last two and a half years, that's been my primary focus. And we do a lot of online courses in three categories, product development, entrepreneurship and leadership. That's excellent. So I'm a blogger myself and the joke always was, is there money to be in blogging? Well, I don't know, Chris Brogan took most of it. And there's a little bit of money to be paid here, but it's a huge part of what you can do. How does kind of the blogging, the social, the entrepreneurship, how does that all come together in your career? I think, you know, it's all about building an audience. And I started doing it before there were quite as many startups as there are today, quite as many, you know, women in technology and in engineering. So I think, you know, being an early adopter was really valuable and being one of the pioneers in that space. So it's helped me build an audience. It's also helped me decide what I want to focus on and pull the audience in into the things that I do, into the companies that I either build or advise. And I think it's also a great way for you to kind of freely express your thoughts. A lot of times, you know, if you are working somewhere, you don't get to necessarily say it or you have to be filtered. But when it's your own blog, when it's your personal brand, then you get to be true to who you are and get to mix that in with more technical topics and you don't have to feel hindered in any way. Yeah, it's an interesting topic because it's, you know, how much is your job, you, how much is you, you, and blogging and social media in general is a good way to do that. But it's a tough balance for a lot of people, especially, you know, it's a little easier if you run your own company, because, you know, your boss is probably going to work you hard, but they probably won't fire you, as opposed to if you're working for another company. How do you recommend, what do you talk to people about, you know, if they're working for, you know, a 400,000 person company like IBM, how do they balance that? How do they, you know, have their own brand while we're working for a big brand? Yeah, this is actually one of the one of the courses that I teach on speaking at conferences and how to do proposals and what projects to talk about. I think the first thing that I always say is find common themes, right? So you don't necessarily have to talk about IBM's new cutting edge flash technology, right? You can instead say like, hey, I have expertise in cloud storage or in flash without getting into the nitty gritty details or exposing patents or trade secrets. So you can start there. And then the second thing I think is focusing on problems that you have solved that are general, right? Most people have trouble when it comes to getting teams together, keeping them motivated, shipping products, appealing to customers like these are all general themes, but you might have some specific experiences that you're open to sharing. So that's what I encourage people to do. And then you know, start small, you don't have to start and think, Oh my gosh, I'm going to build like a billion dollar company off of this, you can start by just saying, Hey, I have some ideas that I want to share with the world. When I started, I think I was writing probably one post a month. And sometimes one post a quarter, because it was just so busy. But over time, you start to develop a position as a thought leader, people reach out to you, you have more opportunities, even internally within your company, I think people recognize the work that you're doing. And you might not always get that if you're just heads down. So for me, that's that's a great point that you bring up and I actually used to work at IBM myself and I'm a millennial. And you know, in a big company, we're always trying to differentiate ourselves and grow our brand, like you were saying, so would you recommend, you know, developing and starting a blog or creating a Twitter? Or what's your advice on that? Yeah, I think, you know, pick one medium, you don't have to do everything. I think a lot of times people feel like they've got to be on everything that you have a podcast and a show and a blog, etc. You know, pick one, pick the one that you feel most comfortable with. If you like podcasting, great, you know, have that be your medium. If you like to write like I do, then have that be your medium. But I think the key is about consistency. It's about producing content on a consistent basis. The other thing I think is it can be a great way for you to recruit for your company, and build a sense of, you know, what it's like to work there, what are some of the projects that you're working on. And that can drive people to show interest in what you're doing. So I think it's good for that. It's also good for the company overall to have their own employees be seen as thought leaders. So I think making sure that they understand what you're doing and how it's aligned with their brand, it doesn't have to be such an offshoot. I know some people prefer to have, you know, completely different entities and that's that's up to you. But I think it's really about having a consistent message, finding that sort of over time, and then being okay with sharing your experiences. They don't always have to be like, Well, here's what I did at IBM from nine to five right, it can even be just a moment in a particular quarter. It can be that product that you just released and how a customer received it. It could be maybe a difficult conversation if you're open to sharing that if the other person was. So I would I would certainly encourage people to push the boundaries, but share your experiences. It doesn't always have to be what you think people want to hear. All right, so you're in the valley and we were talking off camera, you're involved in some incubator spaces out there. What's the atmosphere like for, you know, starting up, you know, what's kind of the big opportunities and some of the biggest challenges that you see? Yeah, well, there's a lot of traffic on 101 these days. There wasn't when I moved there 10 years ago. So we're we're experiencing a boom time, which is good. And I think especially the startup community is definitely on the rise. So I in particular, I'm an entrepreneur in residence at 500 startups. We have about 30 companies every quarter that come in, we invest in them, and then we work with them for three to four months. My specific role is I advise about seven to 10 companies on everything from being their therapist to product development, customer acquisition and fundraising. And by the end of it, they do a demo day where they're presented with about 400 investors. And many of them go on to raise capital for their startups. So it's great to see the evolution like what they where they come in at where they leave. And then I've been there for about a year, a little over a year now. So I've even seen companies grow even beyond when I initially interviewed them for the accelerator. Yeah. So, you know, the Cube actually has a Palo Alto office and Jeff Frick, who's the general manager of the Cube, does a regular series on women in tech. As an entrepreneur yourself, you know, how is the environment out there for women in tech and for startups? I mean, we've interviewed, you know, women in their 20s that are starting companies. But, you know, look, it's tough to start up in general. And, you know, there's the whole women in tech issue. What's your viewpoint? Well, I think there's much more support in the valley than maybe some other places. I think a lot of it has to do with just the shared number. And also, since 2010, there has been an uptick in terms of overall support, whether it's mentorship, whether it's funding, just general education. So I think that's a positive. And I only encourage women to move to the valley and either start businesses or work for a startup or work for a big company, but get their feet wet. I certainly don't tell them to, you know, leave or do anything else, because I do strongly believe that it's going to give them what they want in terms of freedom, flexibility and to innovate and make a difference where they might not get the same kind of opportunities in other industries. So that's a great point. And I actually, I live in Boston and we're talking before this as well. A lot of my friends are interested in entrepreneurship and are considering moving to the valley. Do you think that that's a necessary move or do you think that the Boston entrepreneurial market is a good place or, you know, is there opportunity outside the valley? I think there's certainly opportunity outside the valley. I think it depends on a couple factors. I think the first is like, you know, do you want to deal with the rising cost of housing? Do you want to deal with traffic? Do you want to have sunshine? I think some of those personal issues are important. And for a lot of people they prefer to stay in the city that they're in. And I certainly seen a number of amazing companies come out of other areas. In fact, in my book I showcased one person who grew a startup in Atlanta as Pardot and they got acquired by Exact Target. And what was great is, you know, it was on the upwards of a hundred million dollar acquisition but it was not in the valley. They didn't take money. So it is possible to build outside. I think it depends on what your priorities are. You know, I'm obviously biased. I've been in the valley for ten years and I think it's a great ecosystem where there's a lot of mentorship. There's a lot of ability to raise venture capital or angel investment. And there's a, in particular concentration there, you don't get anywhere else. Yeah. So I have to defend, you know, Boston Tech, you know, the hub, the alley in New York City, you know, what's going down in Texas. There's a lot going on. Yeah. Absolutely. Look, Silicon Valley, you've got access to the VCs, the angels, more than anyone else. One of the biggest things we need back Eastmore, but, you know, we've got some pretty good universities in lots of places. Oh, yeah, yeah. I agree. So last question I have for you is, you know, your company's femgineer. Yeah. You know, do you ever get pushed back on people sometimes? Is what if we need to have femgineer? We have engineers. Can't we just have female engineers and male engineers? And, you know, do we need to be genderblind or, you know, do we have to make differences there? Sure. Well, the first thing is that femgineer actually was the name that I came up with because I knew that pointema vjshanker.com was going to be really hard to search. So it grew out of a personal brand and that's where the name came from. The second thing is actually more than 50% of our students, as well as our audience, are men. And because of that, you know, they're coming to us, one, to learn. Two, they want to be able to mentor the next set of their employees. And I think, you know, even some are fathers and so they care about generations beyond. So no, I don't think it needs to be a gender divide, which is why we don't exclusively say like only women could participate. But this was a personal brand and so the name is going to stick around for a while. Okay, Pornima, I know we're running out of time and I heard you're doing a book signing. Is that to me? I am. Yes, it is. Yeah, right after the panel. Right after the panel. Perfect. So Pornima vjshanker, thank you for joining us today. Founder of FEM engineer, great to have you. So thank you for joining us, Cube Nation, and we'll see you soon.