 Hi, welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin and we are on the ground at Google with Cloud Now, which is a nonprofit organization that supports and is for leading women in cloud tech technologies and converging technologies. And we are here tonight at their fifth annual top women in cloud innovations awards ceremony. We're very excited to be talking to a CUBE alumna, Erika Brescher, who is the COO of Bitnami, also an award winner tonight. Erika, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely, tell us a little bit about Bitnami. You are one of the founding members. What do you guys do? What are you focused on? Where's your expertise in cloud? So Bitnami has been focused for over 10 years now actually on making software incredibly easy to install and deploy anywhere. And we've had a major focus on cloud computing recently, obviously with how popular it is. We're the top provider of packaged applications on every major cloud platform. So we package over 150 different applications like Drupal and WordPress, as well as development stacks, like Nail, Rails, excuse me, and Node and Meen, and make it incredibly easy for users of all technical abilities to get an application or a development environment up and running on the cloud in a secure and optimized way right out of the box. Fantastic. So as a senior C-level female leader in technology, give us a little bit of insight into your career path. How did you get to be a COO? I probably have an unusual path. I actually studied investment finance when I went to school, did not study engineering. If I could do it again, I might do it differently. But I went into sales briefly while I was still in college and a little bit after college. And then I joined my co-founder to start the company. So I was 23, so I can't say I had a huge career path, but I've been at it for almost 12 years now. So it's been a lot of work, but we're doing great. We're 75 people and bootstrapped, which I suppose is a little unusual in Silicon Valley. So obviously I don't have kind of the traditional, well, I went and I did this, and then I went and did that, and then I started this company. Although I did, like I said, I ran some sales teams previously to this, but I've certainly learned a lot along the way. Bootstrapping a company, we started with a really small, great business, but wanted to find a way to scale. So it's almost like going through two startups in one. And learning as we go, I've had a lot of great people support me along the way and have built a lot of great connections over time, a lot of women, but also, I'll be honest with you, a lot of men have supported me along the way because with infrastructure software and cloud, they're just, especially when I started in this in 2005, there just weren't a lot of women. So I've been fortunate to have a lot of supportive men help and coach us along the way as we built out the business. So I'd say building the company has almost been my career path, if you could say that. So many inspiring things just came out of what you said. One of them being that, and I'm very similar in terms of having mentors that were both male and female, that people that were just inspiring whether it was specifically to get from science to technology or just from a competence perspective. I think that's one of the, we look at a lot of the statistics, right, in women and technology and we know them. I think one of the biggest barriers that might not be talked about as much or studies as much, is that social influence and maybe that psychological kind of confidence barrier, but you've clearly had confidence in yourself, you had a diverse background, which I actually think is a huge benefit. And I want to ask you, looking at that diverse background and where you are now, would you really go back and change your career course or your study course? I think I would have probably done a double major is what I would have done. I mean, I do think, I work in an incredibly technical space, we're working with Kubernetes and containers and all of the very, very cutting edge. And the more you understand about the technology, I do believe it's easier. I've had this conversation actually with a lot of women in the space who say, don't worry about it at your level, it doesn't really matter, but I'm one of those people that really likes to understand the details. And it does take me a little bit longer to get my head around new technologies because I haven't been coding for a decade or two. So I think that there's value in understanding the technical side. I mean, I wouldn't go back and be an engineer necessarily. I mean, just based on my skills and my personality and where I think I can add the most value, I don't think it would be as a coder, just because we all have to recognize our individual talents and I don't think that that's really the right path for me. But I do think having that technical understanding would be helpful. And I actually was in speaking to some high school students recently about what they should do and how they should be thinking about their careers. And one of the things that I said is, we're so lucky right now to live in a time when we have access to so much information and training and there's so many free courses online, you can go, I mean, these kids don't have jobs yet, right? I said, this is before the summer actually. I said, the summer is coming up, get online, even MIT and Stanford put incredible content online and there's a Khan Academy, go learn. Even if you don't want to pursue tech as a career, I think having an understanding of technology is going to become increasingly important in everyone's career moving forward. I agree with you, because every company these days is a tech company. Exactly, even if you're in marketing, you need to understand marketing automation platforms and a lot of the growth hacking, whether or not you agree with the term, is about understanding numbers and statistics and technology and so it touches everything really. Absolutely, it does. So looking at statistics, a quarter of or less of people in technology are females. Talk to us about Bitnami from a women in tech perspective, what's that kind of culture like? It's a fairly young company, was that culture obviously with you as one of the leaders sort of built around, none of that should matter, it should really be a meritocracy? Yeah, I mean, honestly, until pretty recently when there's been this big push around women in tech, I didn't think about the fact that I was a woman much and I didn't think about whether or not the people that we were hiring or women or not. I'm proud to say we have some incredible women that work for us, not as many as we'd like to be honest and I've spent some time talking to people recently about how we can try to just bring women into the recruiting pipeline because the problem is they just don't apply and as a small company, we're 75 people, I don't have the recruiting team that Google or Intel or some of these companies that are really proactively going out and trying to find women and bring them into the fold. It's harder to do that as a small company so I'm trying to think of ways that we can go out and find more women and bring them in but we don't think about that a lot at Bitnami and I'm sure part of it is because I'm one of the leaders of the company, I've been around the whole time, people are used to listening to me and I'm involved in all the strategic conversations and everything else and it's never been about women versus men, it's sad to me to see some of those statistics and I'm trying to think about things that I can do personally to try and help at least talk about my story and I like the fact that you honored my diverse background there and share with women that you don't have to be an engineer also to have a great career in technology. Exactly, I think that's an important point there is wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to think about it? Exactly. I agree with you there but hopefully platforms like being on theCUBE are just one way that you can share your story and help to get that message out there that they don't have to necessarily go to the big guns to your point that have more resources to recruit but this is a company that wants to recognize you and help you succeed as a person, as a human. Yep and one thing I'd say is I think the statistics are sometimes disappointing but I actually think it's a fantastically good time to be a woman in technology. There are so many companies and people that are really focused on this issue and I think it's through the work of organizations like CloudNow that are kind of elevating the message and the cause and getting the word out and people, even me, I'm thinking a lot more about women in technology than I did even three or four years ago and I know I've spoken with a lot of other women founders who are in the same position and people are actively seeking board members. I was just appointed to the board of the Linux Foundation because they're looking for a more diverse set of opinions. Fantastic. I mean, that's just one example but I think there really are a lot more opportunities for women and people's eyes are really being open and folks are understanding a lot better the problem and also what they can do whether or not they're a man or a woman to help resolve it. Exactly. Well, you heard it here from Erica Brash, COO of Bitnami. Never been a better time to get into technology. Erica, congratulations on your award. Thanks for coming back to theCUBE and we wish you a great night. Thank you so much. You've been watching theCUBE and if you like Erica, I think it's a great time to honor women in technology, tweet us at theCUBE with the hashtag women in tech. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.