 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of MY's here in our nation's capital, the leading cybersecurity conference. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, John Furrier. We are joined by Caroline Wong. She is the Chief Strategy Officer at Cobalt and a CUBE alum. Welcome, Caroline. Thanks for having me. And Erin Zhou. She is in the office of the CISO Senior Executive Cybersecurity Readiness at Mandion. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I'm happy to be here, thank you. So we're going to be talking about diversity in the technology industry and on boards in particular. It is improving, we are making progress, but we still have so far to go, particularly when it comes to getting more women and people from underrepresented minorities into these positions of leadership and on boards, especially in cybersecurity and in really technical fields. I want to start with you, Caroline. Tell me a little bit about what are some of the barriers of entry? What are we seeing here? So here's the thing that's so funny to me. Cybersecurity is a global problem. It's also a very difficult problem to solve. And so it might seem natural that you'd want the very best minds, people from different perspectives who can offer different solutions to work together to solve some of these problems. That turns out not to be reality. The thing is that when you think about when the internet started in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, who were the individuals studying technology? Who were the individuals starting those firms? And then you can just sort of extrapolate, you know? And it is natural for humans to bring in their own to just think, well, if this is what I do, then this person that I know have known for a long time, who may be very similar to me in a lot of ways, might be just perfect for it. I think one of the things today that's a bit of a barrier to entry is that I don't actually think we have a cybersecurity talent gap so much as employers are largely seeking very experienced cybersecurity professionals. And you cannot be a very experienced cybersecurity professional if you were not in the field 10 years ago. And so while the numbers are increasing greatly, we're still just lagging. And that's where we are today, but we're going in the right direction. Right, right. So people are recruiting people who look like them. There's unconscious bias. There's a lot of things that are going into this. So tell us a little bit, Erin, about Elevate and what it is and what it's supposed to do. Oh, thank you so much. So Elevate is an initiative that started with Mandiot, now Google Cloud Company, and the idea was to support and promote diversity in leader positions across our industry, our cybersecurity industry. Our roots were in supporting women, and it started with us recognizing that not only did Mandiot have a good number of women who were in this career field, who were excelling and successful, and we wanted to really showcase that so people could see people like themselves and aspire to be in those positions. But then also we saw that there were other amazing women leaders who were attending our conferences. And we thought, wouldn't it be great if we could get them together and have them build community and meet each other and network with each other and all those things that men have been doing for years as leaders. And so we wanted to provide a sense of community and a place for them to do that. And then now we recognize that as we're seeing all kinds of diversity are needed, that we can really extend these same principles into all kinds of diversity. You know, one of the things I want to ask you guys on various entries, also now the younger generation coming in, I've been noticing in San Francisco area the AI craze is here, I call it the summer of AI love, but it was really magical to see the multimodal aspect of the tech not just text, you got mid-journey, you got graphics. And then you see a lot more simulations happening. So that's attracting a really young demographic. Anyone in the age of 30s, they're doing startups. They're doing AI related stuff. Does that help level up the entry piece and what do you guys see there as an opportunity to talk to folks out there who are just naturally gifted in tech but might not know it or can get in and level up faster with the new tools. What's your thoughts on that? We've been riffing on theCUBE about this area for a while, I want to get the thoughts on that. Caroline, start with you. I think it changes the game entirely. In any given time period, in any given year, there are going to be skills that are highly sought after and highly marketable. Maybe 20 years ago, it wasn't cool to study computer science. I think in the year 2023, it is very cool to study artificial intelligence. And it's just going to mean that a different demographic of person is going to be attracted to developing that skill set and they're going to be extremely marketable. I think that the market in terms of talent and skill sets is shifting all the time and that's going to change it. We're going to get to a point where if you don't understand AI concepts, if you reject AI concepts, one of the things that reminds me of is doing security things or even technology things in the cloud. 20 years ago, people would have said, oh, if you're doing something important, it's got to be in an on-premise private data center. You could never give it away to someone else in the cloud. And today, folks are saying, oh no, AI is super scary, don't do that. I think that folks without an opened mindset are going to get left behind. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that there's a lot of room for us to think about not only gravitating toward those skills and bringing those skills to bear because it's needed. We know that there's a huge gap between talent and open opportunities. But I also want to put a plug in there for other types of backgrounds and experiences. I took a non-traditional route. So I was an English major, I'm an attorney by background, I was an FBI agent. I mean, there's just nothing about that that screams cybersecurity. But it really was about taking my skills and abilities all along the way, being surrounded with the threats that were happening and evolving. So we went from terrorism threats and then applying what I had learned post-911 into the cybersecurity realm and bringing what I knew and the way I knew how to operate in that environment and be successful in that environment, coupled with the others who did have the hard skills and applying myself to the effort to learn and learning what I needed to know to be able to be successful. So I just want to put a plug in there to say all kinds of backgrounds and experiences will be needed and relevant, but you do have to at least spend some time learning about the direction that the world is going. And I think that having applied myself in that way helped put me into a better position now for sustaining a career in cybersecurity. And that is the way that so many other companies have managed to recruit more women to their boards rather than looking at, oh, that we want someone with these technical skills in this industry. It's saying, what are we really looking for? We're looking for someone who knows leadership, who knows collaboration, who understands a different kind of system, looking at the skills they want to bring out and saying, actually that opens our candidate pool by quite a lot. Caroline, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into this field. So the short story is my parents are Chinese immigrants and when I was a teenager, my dad asked me what I would like to study in college. I said, dance or psychology. And he said, you're going to study engineering and you're going to do it at the best school that you can get accepted to. And so I studied electrical engineering at UC Berkeley. And when I graduated, I looked around for a job. I had had an internship in IT at eBay and there was a hiring freeze in that department. But the hiring manager said, you know, there are some entry level positions in information security. And I said, I literally don't know what that is. And he said, you know what? They're looking for a smart college grad to train up. This was the year 2005. So recent after SOCs, the first version of PCI DSS had come out the year before. The first version of the Olofs top 10 had come out a couple of years before that. And so I led security teams at eBay and Zynga. I led a product management team at Symantec. I did some management consulting in software security and I've been with Cobalt for the past seven years. You know, I want to just echo the importance of seizing opportunities, right? I mean, if you want to get into a field, just seize the opportunity. You might not have 100% of the qualifications, but you might have some that are really important. When I had an opportunity come to me that I was completely like not qualified for at all. But they did need leadership skills and they needed leadership to be able to put the very first digital system of record into a classified environment. I didn't know technology at the time, but I could communicate very complicated ideas and complex situations into digestible terms. I could get buy-in from leadership on how things were going. I could lead the team to stay on time and deliver what we needed to when we needed to. I understood conceptually what needed to happen and we were able to deliver that in about 19 months, which was record. But I say that because I want to encourage people lean into opportunities, especially if somebody is asking you, recruiting you in, because they see what they need and they see what you bring to the table. So don't shy away from those opportunities. I think Erin brings up a great point. And one of the things I want to talk about with regards to barriers to entry, people may or may not know that cybersecurity jobs are pretty sweet. They're really fun. We're pretty well paid. We get to travel the world. We get to attend conferences. We get to solve interesting problems. These are really cool jobs. And people like to kind of like hang on to those. One of the things a few years ago in 2017, the number of women in the field was significantly less than the number of women we have today. And one of the things that I was a little bit confused about was reports on the information security workforce, specifically having to do with gender diversity, talked about how women were getting bullied and harassed and paid poorly. And I thought to myself, gosh, if I'm a 12 or a 15 year old woman and I'm learning about this, I don't know if that's a field that I want to go into. And so at that time, we wrote a report called 2017 Women in Cybersecurity, a Progressive Movement. We got data from more than 300 women working in cybersecurity talking about how awesome it was. And that's just one of those things. You generally don't want to do something that you don't know exists. You certainly don't generally want to do something that you think is hard or boring or not interesting. But actually, it's really fun. And there's a lot of really positive lifestyle attributes that you're at. I agree that for me too, I think we have a lot of similar DNA, right? I have attracted to problems. I'm attracted to things that are really hard and demanding and challenging. But I do think there comes a point in leadership where it might not look attractive. It might look too demanding. It might look too unrelenting, right? Because it is, it's a really hard thing, even though it's also rewarding, especially if you're mission oriented. But I think that what we don't do well is we don't do people as servants by not talking about how you can manage it, right? You can make this a manageable job. If you want a jet set, you can do that. If you want hours that are more manageable and predictable, you can find that too. So there are things that I think we need to talk about how diverse the jobs are as much as we need a diverse workforce. I love the social media angle too about ground truth with content. And then building these networks has been key. Can you just quickly clarify for the folks watching? We talked before we came and came about Elevate. That's not just an internal thing, it's external. And the Google integration with Mandy and how does that impact? It's a quick second to explain the specifics. Sure, no, I appreciate the question. Google has a lot of programs internally. And they have all kinds of groups for all kinds of people with all kinds of interests. I mean, if you have thought of it, there's probably a group in Google that get together and are enthusiastic about it and support one another. It's amazing. But they didn't necessarily have the externally facing piece. So when Mandy became a Google Cloud company, we brought that externally facing organization and to the table. So it's a wonderful compliment to the things that Google had going on internally. And you talked about studies. Google had done a study several years ago. I'm sorry, I don't know the year. But they identified psychological safety, right? It's a number one key thing for successful teams. So that's not just for successful teams. It's for attracting talent, keeping talent, creating a workforce that's thriving, that's welcoming, that's inclusive, that's all those things that we want if we want a truly diverse workforce and to get where we can innovate. We innovate better when we have a diverse group of teammates to get us where we want to be. So when will we see the return on investment? What are you hoping to see five years from now, 10 years from now in terms of the board composition, Caroline? I want to see the most effective boards possible. Boards have specific responsibilities. And I think that the people with the ability to carry out those responsibilities can be diverse and can represent different perspectives. I think that's really important. Boards are important, boards are powerful. The board is the one that hires and fires the CEO. The board is off to the one who approves the budget. The buck stops with the board when it comes to strategic decision-making. And it would be nice if board demographics looked a little bit more like the population of the companies, whose services and products those boards are serving. Excellent, excellent. Well, both of you, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This is really fascinating and fun conversation. Thanks for having us. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of MYS coming up after this short break.