 Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and we are on the ground at Google in Mountain View, California with the CloudNow organization. Tonight is their fifth annual top women in cloud innovation award event. And we're so excited to be here with one of the award winners tonight, Tara Hernandez. Tara, welcome to theCUBE. Hi. It's great to have you here. Tara, talk to us about what you're doing here at the CloudNow event tonight. What's the big driver for you to be here and talk to us about what this award means to you? Well, first of all, it was a complete shock when I found out about it. I got an email from the organizer saying I had been nominated from someone I had done an interview with many years ago. And so it was very startling. And then I looked in more to the organization and was like, wow, this is really cool. I'm a big fan of cloud as a technology. I think it's unbelievably enabling for a variety of reasons. And so it's very exciting to be part of an organization now where we're using cloud as a means to advance women in technology. Fantastic. Talk to us about the project for which you were nominated and how is that really, how are you seeing that help advance not just your own career, but those colleagues of yours? Well, I was nominated for two reasons. One, I'm for a long time, I've been involved with continuous delivery and integration and deployment, infrastructure engineering as a general rule. And my interview was based around that. And so it's, I've done a lot of open source advocacy. The cloud really has advanced open source in a lot of ways because the cost of entry to spending a few bucks in AWS versus having to go down to fries and maxing out your credit card to buy a server. There's a big difference there, right? And then combined with, I've been very blessed in my career with a lot of great support and mentors. And I feel like I need to get back to the industry and I've done a lot of advocacy in the last couple of years for women in technology in particular. And the same thing, if you're coming out of school or a bootcamp and you need some servers to work on your projects or you want to do some developing some entrepreneurial opportunities, there's, you can spend a few bucks in AWS and get a lot farther on your own without having to go through a lot of cost expenditure or having to go through the VCs before you're ready, any of that stuff. So the barrier of entry gets lower, which means more people, including women have an opportunity to get started. Speaking of barriers, we're all familiar with the statistics of only a quarter of the tech industry is made up of women. Only 16% in technical roles. I actually had to look that up not too long ago. Okay, interesting, that's very interesting, which is quite low. I'd love to understand, yes, there are barriers, there's, you mentioned VCs. It's extremely challenging for female CEOs to not just get funding from a VC, but to even get a meeting with VCs. So we understand some of those obvious barriers, but one of the things I'd love to understand is your career path. How did you get to be an award winner today? Where did you start? Were you a, as a kid, this is what I want to do? I love computer science, or did you take maybe a more non-linear path? Oh heck no. When I went to college, I was fully intending to be a double major in history and English literature. Wow. I had no interest in the sciences and my parents said, we want you to get a job when you graduate and to them that meant a math or a science degree. My alma mater, UC Santa Cruz, so, go slugs. They had what they called at the time the open access computing model. Anybody who wanted an email account could get one, which was unusual at the time. I met a whole bunch of other people who also had email accounts, and when I went to figure out, do I want to do for a major? I'm like, well, I'll do computer science because I've met some people and they're nice. That is literally how I got into computers. Wow, interesting. I had no other background. Did you just fall in love with it immediately? No. Okay, so talk to us about that path, and who were your influences? Both female influences and male influences when you were at UCSC. So I really struggled. I didn't have the background. I felt that I was always going to be behind all of my classmates who clearly had done more leading up into the program. I had a couple of professors in particular that were really supportive. One was Daryl Long. They're still there. Daryl Long, it was one, and he was very famous for, if you fell asleep in his class, he was unerring in his ability to get chalk in your mouth. Wow. It was great for that. And then the other one who was really inspirational to me was Professor Tracy Larabee. I went to her office hours so many times just ready to quit and she just simply would not let me. And so I started to get better about figuring out, like, don't have to study by yourself. Get a study buddy, work in project teams, collaboration, and that really led me into a lot of great success in my career because I realized you can't do it by yourself. And let's just face it. Women do better in groups, I think, on average. And that's really interesting that you had this non-linear path, which I think is such an important topic for girls, whether they're pursuing STEM in middle school or high school or not, to understand that you don't have to have everything figured out. You mentioned a couple of mentors, male and female, who still probably, you probably still hear their voices, you know, in the back of your head. Oh heck, I still exchange emails and Facebook messages with a lot of them. Fantastic. And I'm sure they're very proud of you for this award tonight. You mentioned advocacy is very important to you. Talk to us about what you're doing for advocacy for women in technology, maybe other minority groups. So I'm primarily related to Women Who Code, which is a 503C headed by Elena Percival, who's this amazing powerhouse of a woman. I've also done some work with Chick-Tek, which is targeted at getting high school age girls, and maybe middle school too, engaged in STEM curriculum. I also have been doing some work, and I hope to expand more with an organization called Code 2040, which is aiming at Latino and African American students and getting them into high tech. So it's, you know, try to be very open-minded about who I talk to, and look for opportunities in a variety of ways. My current boss and company, Lyndon Lab, have been really supportive. We've had conversations about, you know, unconscious bias, interviewing and job descriptions, and other things that make that process more likely to include more diverse candidates and hires. You know, there's been a whole discussions around just language, you know, and the type of products that we have also lend itself to that. We're trying to be a product that anybody can use, literally, and so the more diverse our company is, the more diverse we feel we'll be able to reach out to those consumers. Speaking of your product, can you tell us a little bit more about it, and how you are leveraging it to expand diversity? So Lyndon Lab is primarily known for a product called Second Life, which is a virtual radio platform. It's been around for a really long time. We have a new product that's gonna be coming out next year called Project Sansar. And what it is, is a place for anybody to go do whatever they want to do, virtually. And we try to support that creativity with monetization, so if you're an artist, you could create, you know, a new building or artwork or clothing or an avatar, and you can sell it and make some money off of it. And there are people who do quite lucrative things in there, we hope to replicate that in Sansar. The biggest difference with Sansar, of course, is it's more modern graphics system, there's a heavy emphasis in virtual reality. But I think the biggest thing is that Second Life and Sansar will allow you to be whoever you wanna be. Whoever you are in the real world has nothing to do with who you choose to be in a virtual platform. And I've heard some very powerful stories about people who realize that they were gay or trans, or there was some belief that they really had no way of expressing, and they met other people like them, and it really gave them a very powerful community to get strength from. There's downsides as well, you can take that same opportunity, there was this last election, there were Trump supporters and Bernie Sanders supporters in Second Life having full-on warfare. It was fantastic, I was like, wow, who knew? So yeah, but it's kind of like real world, but better. So in terms of kind of like next steps here, you talked about the project that you're working on, we wanna congratulate you again on being one of the top women recognized by Cloud Now for your achievements in cloud technology. We wish you the very best of luck in the future, in your career, and as being an influencer to other girls in tech. We thank you so much for joining theCUBE. Thanks very much. Thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm your host Lisa Martin at Google headquarters with Cloud Now's event, we'll be right back.