 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to Las Vegas. We are here at Dell EMC World. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Paul Gillan. This is going to be a great segment. I'm so excited to have you both on the program. We're here welcoming Carolyn Rods. She is the founder of Circular Board, and Elizabeth Gore, who is an entrepreneur in residence here at Dell. Welcome both to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So this week, you unveiled Alice. This is the first AI-based virtual advisor for women entrepreneurs. I want to get to talking about Alice, meeting Alice, but first I want to just ask you, Elizabeth, you're an entrepreneur in residence at Dell. Explain to us how that program works. Sure, so it's my great pleasure to have worked the last almost three years now with Dell and now Dell Technologies. Every couple of years, Michael Dell and his leadership team choose an individual who have a very specific focus to support ecosystems for entrepreneurs. So we use all the muscle we have across Dell Technologies to support policy for entrepreneurs in the 180 countries that we live and work. Also, one of the best ecosystems and platforms that help entrepreneurs scale. And one of them is the Circular Board, and we've been really proud to partner with them for the last two years because they use a digital platform that is very scalable and women are only getting 3% of venture capital in the US. So access to capital, mentorship, networks is really critical. And so we're really excited to partner with what you'll hear about Alice to help solve that problem. So Carolyn, Elizabeth just laid out the problem that women are just not getting a lot of VC dollars. There's not a lot of support, not a lot of encouragement. There's just a lack of community. So talk about Alice and how she fills this gap. Yeah, so we hear a lot about the problem and realize it was time to find a solution. And that's what Alice is all about. So Alice was started as really the answer to what I wish I would have had when I started my first company years ago and what we saw over and over again with women everywhere. And that was integration into the existing startup ecosystem and connectivity to resources like events, experts, content and tools to help their companies grow. And that's exactly what Alice does is connect them based on their unique company profile and their real-time needs. I do go to HelloAlice.com and you can start using it right away. So what does it do? I mean, how does it work? Yeah, so a founder enters in their profile based on their industry, stage of growth and their location, Alice curates needs based on what they're looking for today. So if they're looking for a technology solution to a problem that they're having, it will connect her to the right resources for her company to grow. If she needs an attorney to help her, who is the right attorney based on where she is and the industry that she's in? So for every person, the answers are different. And as Alice populates, she gets smarter and smarter about a founder's needs and starts to use predictive learning to make smarter responses for her. How do you ensure that Alice will be used only by women? I mean, can't anybody access this resource? Yeah, she's open to everybody. She was really coated with gender in mind. And so from the start, we looked at what were the unique needs of women? How did they learn and absorb information best? And that was where we started to create the platform. But certainly she's open to everybody, the more the merrier. So give us some use cases. I mean, I know that you just unveiled her yesterday, a big deal. But talk about how you see an entrepreneur in say a small town somewhere in America using Alice and finding success. Well, when you look at what's happening today, it's a very fragmented ecosystem. And so there are great events, there are wonderful accelerators and programs around the world happening. But if you're in a place that doesn't have these resources, you're certainly removed from the ecosystem. And even if you are in a city that has great resources, lots of times when you're starting a company, you aren't familiar with what exists. And so it's learning, it's a huge learning curve to just start to navigate that space. And that's where Alice comes in, is how to help founders navigate the ecosystem and also connect with expertise that may not be in their own location. So if you're in, you know, New York and working on a technology platform, there are great resources available in Silicon Valley that you're missing out on. And our goal is to bridge that gap. You mentioned Carolyn, that Alice is something you wish you had when you were starting your business. As entrepreneurs, can you talk about some of the biggest challenges that you've faced? Sure, you know, one of the things that when you're launching a company is there are, as Carolyn said, a lot of resources out there, but your time for is an entrepreneur. Your heads are down, you're just trying to get profitable, make sure your product is correct. So what is really critical is that this is curated exactly for that moment in the life cycle of a business. So am I just getting started? Am I raising my Series A? Or am I pre-IPO entrepreneur? I want the resources in that moment that are right for me. And what has not worked, Dell has really focused on a lot of platforms, but you can't just take an existing platform and turn it pink for women. That just doesn't work. So we actually were really proud that Pivotal, one of our family of companies within Dell, did thousands of hours of user testing with the circular board team and actually looked at how do women access information? How do they access capital? Why aren't so many of them integrating into existing systems? So all the way down to the code, they've been really thinking about how to integrate women into these existing systems. So they will raise that capital, get the mentorship, tap into supply diversity programs, and that's why we think helloallice.com is going to be a huge change agent. I think we can agree the venture capital world, particularly in Silicon Valley, is very male dominated. There's an old boys network there. Have you sense that there is a willingness to change, that that attitude is changing at last? Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's certainly some unconscious bias, but women are starting companies now twice as fast as their male counterparts. So anyone who's really into. Where did that number come from? So the Chamber of Commerce announced that last year. Now unfortunately their fail rates are still unusually high and only 2% are making over a million dollars. However, for an enterprise company like Dell or for a venture capital firm, I want to see those companies that are coming out rapidly and have the best products. So yes, they're starting to really understand and look at how do we interact with women and their companies. However, what Alice will do is provide a great pipeline for the best companies to those venture firms. And you've already thought about that a lot. Yeah, we've also seen, you know, there's a huge desire from all of these resources to get more women involved in their programs. I mean, there's a huge desire from the women to get more involved. And what we're trying to do is filter down to who are the right women for the right programs at the right time and make those connections. So tell me more, when you look ahead and at what Alice could possibly do for a generation and future generations of female entrepreneurs, what's your greatest hope? What's your greatest wish? Rewriting the statistics around women entrepreneurs, ultimately, in boosting economies, creating jobs and solving the big problems of the world. What's exciting is, you know, you think about the process right now where you turn to experts for advice and imagine being able to scale that expertise not only to the people who know that person or where those personal relationships exist, but being able to provide access to every entrepreneur, whether they reside in a rural community in Africa or in the middle of Silicon Valley. Where does the data come from? What are you plugging in on the back end, plugging into on the back end? We relied heavily on partnerships and experts to find the best of the best. We're not, it isn't a numbers game in terms of quantity of content, but really looking for the very best answers to specific problems that founders have. So we've partnered with organizations like the Kauffman Foundation and Case Foundation and Small Business Administration and Department of Commerce and companies like Dell who have been really supportive in terms of getting us really quality content to help solve these problems. Dell, as you started talking about how Michael Dell, this is a big believer in this and obviously he's an entrepreneur himself, but can you tell us a little bit more about what Dell has, what skin Dell has in this game? Sure, absolutely. So we both, we look at this as a business case for us, a business imperative, as well as a social and economic comparative. So it is important to us to be the end to end solutions provider now that we have a suite of companies that can do that from the day I buy my first laptop and try to launch my company all the way up to commercial and enterprise solutions. So if we are really going to be that, we have to be in front of these entrepreneurs. So Alice is a way for us to get in front of fast growth entrepreneurs, provide the technology, the resources, and the knowledge we have to be in front of them. So for us, that's a really important business. For the social and economic case, women put 90% of their income back into their communities and families. And so for us, Michael and I have always believed that entrepreneurs are the ones solving the major social problems out there with solutions that are even more sustainable sometimes in government, or most time, frankly. So for us, it's also a social imperative and women just happen to be the ones that are getting stuff done, both for their communities, their family, and their business. So there's the doing good element to this all about. Sure, absolutely. Yes, great. You both talked to a lot of entrepreneurs. And there's so much startup activity. Everybody's an entrepreneur these days. What are the characteristics of the successful ones? What do you look for, Elizabeth? So I'm a very founder-first person. I see a lot of great ideas, but that founder has to have the drive, the know-how, and the make-it-happen attitude. I also think that founders, it's really important that they understand technology. Every company is a technology company now. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. So first, do they have that drive? Do they have that how-to attitude? Do they surround themselves with people that are going to help their company scale because every founder has weaknesses? Do they understand the technology ecosystem? So those are part of the things that I look for. I'm sure you might have different. Yeah, those certainly, and I think the persistence, it is really hard to be heard among a very cluttered ecosystem. And where we see the greatest success of those founders that continue to plug forward and keep asking the questions and keep enlisting the help that they need to find the solutions that they're looking for. What's your last, before we let you go, what's your piece of advice for a woman out there who's starting your business, maybe struggling a bit beyond hookup with Alice? What's your best advice for her? Build the right team. Find a co-founder and list the right investors to help provide the capital that you need. Get the right partners on board and really look beyond just your employees as your team but really look who is the circle that you're enlisting behind your business to make it happen. And I would say it's really important to put purpose into profit. So really understand while you're going after that profitability, why did you start in the first place? What is the purpose that your company is going after? On those hard days, put that back into your focus. So put purpose into profit. Let's be sure to tell people how they get in touch, how they find Hello Alice, Twitter, a website and all. Visit helloalice.com to register and participate in Alice and want to welcome everybody, not just entrepreneurs but also experts and investors and advisors as well. And then online you can follow us at Alice Connects on Twitter and Facebook. Caroline, Elizabeth, thanks so much. Pleasure, thank you all. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Gillan. We will have more from Dell EMC World just after this.