 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Open World 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Welcome back, Kevin. We are here live at Oracle Open World in San Francisco on the ground floor of Oracle World 2016. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Peter Burris. Our next guest is Sharon Weinbar, who is a fabulous person, top-notch VC, but no now, the CEO of Hack Bright Academy, still involved with Scale VP. Great to see you, good friend, been a while. Number one in rowing. Tell us about your rowing status. I want to get that out first, because that's super impressive. Thank you, yeah. So I'm a master's rower. I'll be rowing ahead of the Charles next week. And right now on the concept too, that's the Rowing Machine Manufacturer Global Rankings. I'm number one in my age class for the 5K. That's awesome, congratulations. Well, you've been an amazing investor, been following your venture capital career for over 10 years. At Scale VP, you've done some amazing investments. But you took a step out of the meat grinder, or the venture capital world as a leader of the firm, although you're still involved, to get involved with Hack Bright and its mission, which has then got sold to a public company, fully funded and scaling up, unintended Scale VP. But what motivated you to leave the ivory tower, the VC were all to get down and dirty. Down and dirty in a bootstrap startup, mission driven startup. So there were a couple of things that came together, kind of all at once. Big picture was I was on the verge of being an empty nester when I first met Hack Bright, which I'll tell you about in a second. And so I sort of started the year before my daughter, my youngest daughter left for college thinking, embrace change. I was afraid of being an empty nester, and I wanted to lean in to thinking about doing something different. I had been a partner at Scale VP for 14 years. I started as a venture capitalist when my kids started school because I wanted to be more in control of my schedule and not have as much international business trouble as I had. So I had an open mind. And then I was researching women in engineering for a big article I wrote for TechCrunch about how to hire women engineers. And I looked into how many women engineers were being graduated in traditional computer science programs in colleges. And the numbers, the percentages are increasing, but the actual absolute number is vanishingly small. So top 20 computer science programs graduated 500 women in computer science. So if Google hired all of them, it would change their ratio by one and a half percentage points. The whole rest of the industry would get scratched. And I wasn't- A flip in the radar basically is a rounding error for the stats. Right, I wasn't willing to buy into, it's a pipeline problem, right? That's what a lot of men suppose. There just aren't women who are interested in. So I went looking for alternative sources of high quality engineering candidates. I reached out to Hackbrite on Twitter. They invited me to come in for a coffee meeting. It was supposed to be a half an hour. And I spent three hours with the founder who was a young fellow. And we just had a mind meld and I fell in love with the concept. As an investor, I had thousands and thousands of meetings with startups. Occasionally, every couple of times a year, I'd have a meeting with a startup and walk out of the meeting and think, I want to invest in that company. I want to be involved with this company, but be involved like chicken, right? Yeah. I walked out of that first meeting with Hackbrite and thought, I want to be involved like the pig. I want to be committed here. I want to work here. And it was a really weird feeling because in all those years of enter capital, I never thought, oh, I want to actually go back to being a line manager. So I called the founder, David, that night and said, I just want to be part of this. And what Hackbrite does is teach early and mid-career professional women computer science fundamentals and professional software development skills and get her ready for a new career as a software engineer. So she has a bachelor's degree, 20% of our students have advanced degrees. She's got work experience, but somehow in the great sorting hat of life, she ended up in the wrong spot in a job that wasn't intellectually challenging. She didn't push that. And she's decided she wants to move into being a software engineer. So we help her make that pivot. So this isn't getting down into the trenches on age generational, like lower. No, this is converting working women into open, you know, into software engineers and helping her get jobs in open recs. There's the conference board just published stats. There are 535,000 open positions in software engineering right now. When you think about- And we got a stat from on the CUBE interview last week that 1.4 million underfunded jobs available for security engineering, computer science, data analytics and whatnot. 1.4 million open positions. Right. So that's when you think of, so this is the Hackbrite spoke both to my heart because of the mission, but also to my head as a venture capitalist because the market opportunity, the big social mission is actually part of the big market opportunity that gave the company a lot of room to scale. And that's where I felt comfortable coming in and helping the company scale up. So when you think about that quote from Marc-André's software is eating the world, what that means is every company has to become a software company. So it's not just venture funded startups here in Silicon Valley or big software companies like Oracle that are hiring software engineers. Every retailer financial services travel company has already become a software company, right? Because you're doing everything on your phone. I just joined the board of a large diversified industrial manufacturer on the East Coast called Colfax Corporations Public, $4 billion company. They asked me to join the board because they wanted a Silicon Valley digital native to help them think through their software strategy. And we're the world's market leader in well-digested. So they want to do the digital transformation, digitize their business. So that's what's driving this requirement for so many software engineers across a lot of different disciplines. Is there a makeup for the women that are in transition here? Because it does, I like that sorting hat now because I can see that people end up, who would have thought I'd be hosting the queue out of computer science theory? I love this job. But it just happens, people end up in a spot. You become what you're known for and sometimes you get stuck and it's hard to move. Is it a migration? Is it a issue? Is it more, what are some of the- There's so many different ways that people end up in jobs that don't float their phone for some reason, right? You either, you don't know that computer science exists as a discipline. Someone in your universe told you it wasn't for you. We have a woman, a young woman who works for us right now who grew up on the Arizona, Mexico border. In her high school, she had to fight to even go to college because the high school counselor told her, oh no, you don't go to college, you get married and have babies, right? When she was 17 in America. So she had to fight even to go to college and then she has a liberal arts degree, worked as a counselor, but has a significant other who was an engineer and she got exposed to software engineering through him. And what a lot of our students have the experience is they have a friend, significant other, sibling. So it's an exposure issue mainly too, right? Kind of get the bug, kind of- And they see that and think, I could do that. And our women tend to be makers. So, you know, it takes a special set of attributes, not just educational background, to be an engineer. You want to have to build them. So our students are often makers. They are cooks, they build things, they make their own honey, they make their own makeup. They have, you know, they have created energy. Inatability, you can see the natural ability. Right, and they, well, they have a vision for how something should be and they can find the path to that. Okay, how does it work? Okay, so just take us through the process. I want to make sure people can understand this. Is there a filter? Is there an application? How does it work? Do they do it remote? Also the internet is an abler for you. Possibly, take us through the workflow. So, first of all, we're based here in San Francisco. Right now we have a campus here in downtown San Francisco. About 20% of our students come from outside the Bay Area and they apply and get in and come. And the majority of our students are from this region. And they commute in or is it? The students who are coming from all over the country are living in Airbnb, hacker hostels, Craigslist. So they're roughing it. Yes, yes. We're getting apartments. Yeah, it's a scrappy group of people. You know, they're willing to quit their job, pay a nearly $17,000 tuition, invest in themselves to transition their career. We have a competitive application process. So you have to fill out a form, write an essay, we're looking for, can you think like an engineer? Can you describe something, the big picture, break it down into its component elements and tell us how they work together? It can be any topic, but that's what we're looking for. It's almost like a whiteboard session, like code that or something, get a feel for it. There's an interview where we're looking for a combination of grit. So will you be able to stick with it? And can you work in teams, right? Because as you're here, our business model really requires our graduates to go on and be successfully placed as software engineers. And there's a code challenge. So we're looking for people to come in who have done some self-study. They're online with Code Academy or Coursera, where they've taken a community college class, they've worked their way through a couple books. So they do a code challenge as part of the interview. So we're not teaching them what is shell script, what is a procedure. Some basic fundamentals and familiarity. So after that application process, we select a cohort, we teach on a calendar quarter system. It's 12 weeks, intensive, full-time, immersive, onsite at Hackbrite, 683 Sutter Street in San Francisco. So every day, class is a mixture of lecture and lab. So there's a lecture for an hour or an hour and a half. It's followed up immediately by hands on lab work. All of the lab work is pair programming. So two women sitting side by side, talking about their code design, talking about how they decided to structure it that way. Why did they pick this data structure? All of that pair programming is meant both to reinforce the learning. So as you have to describe to somebody why you did something and explain it, it reinforces your own learning. But it also trains you to be an engineer. In the real world, you have to talk about your code to your colleagues. And women tend to be shy and introverted in putting themselves out there in the workplace. I'm not making generalizations about women's personalities in general. So we... But you've taken that discipline of communication with the coding, not making it a separate siloed course. Right, exactly. So from the first day, you're talking about code. We want you to be really comfortable being an engineer or talking about code. So that's the structure of the program is lecture lab, lecture lab. The contents are a mix of computer science fundamental. So data structures and algorithms, the same kind of information you'd be getting at Cal or Stanford or any other TOG CS program. But then a mixture of also professional software development skills. So what does it mean to work on an agile methodology? How do you design and test? What does it mean to build a distributed application? So a lot of computer science programs teach a very structured and traditional format of computer science. And they don't teach you APIs from Twilio and deployment on AWS. And our students are going to learn all of that in the program. Four weeks toward the end are dedicated to building a project. So each student builds her own full staff web application from ideation to specification to MVP to work in code. The build, that's the thesis. It's like your big project. You are hands on building code, deploying it on GitHub. So then when you go to apply for a job, the engineering manager can see your code, kind of walk through and do a code review with you. And you've practiced talking about code. So, and that's unlike most of the other code schools that have either a group project or refactoring of an existing website. Really, we really want women to own the decision about the architecture of her application and all of the implementation. And then the other big differentiator for Hackbrite is lots and lots of career services, right? You think about the boot camp, there's two purposes. You're coming to learn a new skill that's intellectually really challenging and you're coming to get a new job. So we're there to support you in both endeavors. So our business model is two-sided. Women pay tuition to come to Hackbrite, but then also companies pay to recruit for us. We have a unique pipeline of talent that's not picked over on LinkedIn and indeed, these are net new engineers, all women, all trained curriculum that's been vetted by our partners. So they've bought into what we're teaching and why and they've bought into the quality of the students we admit and they're paying us a placement fee to hire for us. And then we in turn rebate a portion of that so the women to give them an incentive and this is a great phenomenal work. Congratulations on this. I'm so excited for you personally as well as the passion and it's the right thing, it's so awesome. I guess that my final question for you would be talk to the audience out there and other women, young women who see this as an inspirational opportunity for you doing, what can they learn from this? What can someone in high school who's maybe a sophomore at Palo Alto Public School or someone who's not even in a technical track or someone in college saying, hey I thought I might be in the wrong major as junior year, what advice would you have for those people? Can I add one little thing to that? As you do so, observe what types of new problems these tools and tactics and techniques and skills are going to be applied to. Because I think a big part of the issue is women may not see that the problems that are important to them tie back to these skills. Right, so first big picture to go to your point. There's such an important need for diverse engineering teams because technologies we talked about earlier, it's the layer through which we experience almost every kind of product now, right? Our car is a software product. Our home appliances are software products. And when you have a monoculture engineering team making the design and future trade-offs for those things you often leaving out large parts of the market. And diverse teams just make better decisions, period. So it's really important to have a diverse engineering workforce in every sector in America. I have a young, one of my daughters, the one who I mentioned went away to college who is a liberal arts major. She, I could never get her interested in code and then coming up on her senior year, she asked me, could she take a computer science class? And I said, sir, but why? Why, you know, what changed your mind? And she said, it's like baking. It's a life skill everyone should have at this point in American history because of that fact that software is everywhere, right? Yeah, in fact, we use terms, it's baking in the oven. It's baking, yes. The code's not baked. Yes, so I think the percentage of women in computer science went down precipitously starting in the 1980s with the rise of the personal computer and also the gaming console. And it became, coding as a culture became synonymous with gamers. And even my kids, who grew up steeped in the software business, thought of coders as guys in sweats in the basement in front of the Xbox. And that is just not true. So software is being used by lots and lots and built by lots of different kinds of people. So girls, young women, women should think there is a place for you in software. It's not you, you know, you can belong in this environment. I think that, you know, many of us have the impression that there's no ambient sense of belonging. The programmer kind of thing. And so there's lots of ways to try it. And I would say try it and see if you like it. Whether it means, you know, joining a club at school, joining girls, you know, girls who code, or there are numerous coding clubs for girls in middle school and high school. Well, and the important thing is it's a life skill as you pointed out. And women can be cured. My daughter's curious. She's in pre-med. She's studying. Now she's starting to ask me the same question. Maybe I should take a Python class. I'm like, why Python? Why not Swift? So like, I love that conversation. Python, we teach Python. It's the most prevalently taught in computer science programs. It's the most prevalently used in enterprise. And data science, too. Yes, so it's, you know, you can take free classes on Codecademy or Coursera. You just don't know what you're going to like. And I think. So taste as much as you can. Right. And also the ability to think like an engineer is useful even if you don't choose to go into engineering. I mean, honestly, I have two engineering degrees. I never practiced engineering professionally. But I guarantee you that that skill set of being able to decompose a problem, find the drivers and articulate what, you know, what the methodology is to get an outcome is incredibly useful across multiple domains. Sharon, you're so impressive and so inspirational. Congratulations on your new mission. A lot of passion, mission-based venture. It's scaling now. Congratulations. Hackbright Academy, Sharon Winebar, CEO and still a venture partner at Scale VP. You're watching theCUBE live at Oracle Open World of San Francisco and we're constructing the Siblin noise. We'll be right back with more CUBE coverage after this.