 From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here at Mayfield Fund on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park as part of Mayfield's People First Network co-creation with Sylvan Angle in theCUBE and Mayfield. Next guest, Beth Devin, managing director of Innovation Network and Emerging Technology City Ventures, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Hey, thanks for coming in. We're here for the Mayfield 50th anniversary where they're featuring luminaries like yourself and we're talking about conversations around how the world's changing and the opportunities and the challenges can be met and how you can share some of your best practice to talk about what your role is at City Ventures when your focus is. Sure, sure, and boy howdy has it been changing, huh? It's hard to keep up with. I've been at City Ventures about two years and one of the reasons I joined was to stand up in emerging technology practice. City Ventures does a lot of work in corporate venture investing. We tend to be strategic investors for startup companies that are aligned with the strategy of City as well as our clients. We serve probably 80% of the Fortune 500 companies in the world, but we also are a really important part of the innovation ecosystem at City, which is looking at how to drive culture change, broaden mindset, and really enlist our employees to be part of the innovation process. So we have an internal incubator, we have a shark tank-like process we call Discover 10x, and what I really bring to the table with my team is monitoring and learning about and digesting technology that's not quite ready for commercialization, but we think it might be disruptive in a good or a challenging way for the bank or our clients. We try to educate and provide content that's helpful to our executives as just the employee body at large. I want to get into a LinkedIn post you wrote called The Tech Whisperer, which I love. We'll get into that in a second. Thank you. But you're there to identify new things and help people understand what that is, but that's not what you've done. You've actually implemented technology, so you've been on the other side of the coin. So in your career, talk about some of the things you've done in your career because you've been a practitioner. Yeah. Now you're identifying trends and technologies before you were on the other side of the table. That's right. And sometimes I'll tell you, I have that itch. I miss the operator role sometimes. Yeah, you know, I feel so fortunate I sort of stumbled on computer science early when I was going to school. And the first, I'd say 20 years of my career, we're working in enterprise IT, which at that time, I couldn't even have made that distinction, like why do you have to say enterprise IT? I was a software developer and I was then a DBA and I even did assembler language programming. So way back when, I think I was so fortunate to fall into software engineering because it's like problem solving or puzzle making and you with your own brain and sort of typing can figure out these problems. Then over the years, I became more of a manager and a leader and sort of got a reputation for being somebody that you could put on any hard problem and I'd figure a way out. Tell me where we're trying to go. It looks naughty. It looks like not a fun project and I would tackle that. And then I'd say I had some experience working in lots of different industries which really gave me an appreciation for at the end of the day, we can all debate the role the technology plays in companies but industries whether it's healthcare or media or financial services there's a lot of the same challenges that we have. So I worked at Turner Broadcasting before it was acquired by Time Warner and AOL and I learned about media. And then I had a fantastic time working at Charles Schwab. That was my first big financial services role when it came back to the Bay Area. I had, I worked at art.com where it was an e-commerce company. The first company I worked at where I was in charge of all the technology and we had no brick and mortar and if the technology wasn't working we weren't earning revenue. In fact, not only that we were really making customers angry. And I also had a role at a startup where I was the third person to join the company and we had a great CEO at a vision but it was on paper. And we had to really figure out how to build this and I was very proud to assemble a team get an office and have a product launched in a year. So you're a builder, you're a doer when you've done assembler, decoding hexadecimal core dumps back in the day. Way back when. We didn't even have monitors I'll tell you it was a long time ago. Glory days. Yeah. Back when we didn't have shoes on, you know. Technology, but what a change. I mean, you're, you know. Huge change. The variety of backgrounds you had and again the Charles Schwab I think was during the growth years. And the downturn. And you had to kind of, both sides. Both sides of that coin but again the technologies were evolving. Yes. To serve that kind of high frequency customer base. That's right. With databases changing. Internet getting faster. APIs. More people getting online. We were early adopters and I'll tell you, I still will tell people Charles Schwab is one of the best experiences I have even though at the end I was part of the layoff process I was there almost seven years and I watched, we had crazy times in the internet boom going in 98, 99, 2000. I can't even tell you some of the experiences we had even we weren't a digital native. But we were one of the first companies to put trading online and to build APIs so we could have our customers could self-service and they could do that all online. We did mobile trading. Now remember we had to test our software on like 20 different phone sets. Today it's actually so much easier. It's only three. Yeah. Two or one of one. That's right, that's right. It's depending on how you look at it. That's right. And we couldn't even test on all the phone sets that were out then. But that was such a great experience and I still, that Schwab network is still people I'm in touch with today. And we've all sort of sprinkled out to different places but I think, I don't know, there was something special about that company in terms of the, what we learned and what we are able to accomplish. Well you have a fantastic background again. The ways of innovation that you've lived through have been part of tackling hard problems, taking it head on, great ethos, great management discipline. Now more than ever it seems to be needed because we're living in an age of massive change. Yes. The databases are changing, the networks changing, the coding, paradigms changing, you got DevOps, you got the role of data, obviously mobile's clearly proliferated. And now the business models are evolving. So you got business model, action, technical changes, cultural people changes, all those theaters are exploding with opportunity but also challenges. What's your take on that as you look at that world? You know, I'm a change drunkie I think. So I love when things are changing, I love when organizations are changing and companies are coming apart and coming together. So for me, I feel like I've been again, so fortunate I'm in the perfect place. But one of the things that I really prided myself on early in my career is being what I call the bridge or the translator between the different lines of business folks that I work with, whether it was head of marketing or somebody in a sales or customer relationship or service organization and the technology teams that I built and led. And I think I've had a natural curiosity about what makes a business tick and not so much over indexing on the technology itself. So technology is gonna come and go, there's gonna be different flavors, but actually how to really take advantage of that technology to better engage your customers, which as you said, their needs and their demands are changing, their expectations are so high, they really set the pace now. Who would have thought that 10 years ago, we live in an environment where industries and businesses are changing because consumers have sort of set the bar on the way that we all wanna interact, engage, communicate, buy, pay. So that has huge impact on organizations. And I have a lot of empathy for large established enterprises that are challenged to make it through this transformation, this change that somehow they have to make. And I'm always, I always try to pay attention on which companies have done it. And I call out Microsoft, for example, as example. I can still remember several years ago, being at a conference, I think it was Jeffrey Moore was speaking and he had on one slide, here's all the companies in technology that have had really large success leading up to the internet boom days. There'd be a recipe for the four companies that would come together. I think it was Sun and Oracle and Microsoft. And then he said, now here's the companies of today and most young people coming out of college or getting computer science degrees won't use any of these old technology companies. But Microsoft proved us all wrong, but they did it focused on people, culture, being willing to say where they screwed up and where they're not gonna focus anymore and part ways with those parts of their business and really focus on who are their customers, what are their customer needs. I think there's something to be learned from those changes they made. And I think back to the tech whisperer, there's no excuse for an executive today not to at least understand the fundamentals of technology. So many decisions have to be made around investment, capital, hiring, investment in your people that without that understanding you're sort of operating blind. And this is the thing of what I was impressed by the tech whisperer article, a play on the horse whisperer of the movie, that you're kind of whispering in the ears of leaders who won't admit that they're scared, but they're all scared, they're all scared. And so they need to get maybe as cognitive dissonance around decision-making or they might not trust their leader, they don't know what they're talking about. So this certainly is there, I would agree with that. But there's dynamics that play and I want to get your thoughts on this. I think this plays into the tech whisperer. The trend we're seeing is the old days was the engineers are out coding away, hey, they're out there coding away, let them get them coding away, now with cloud they're in the front lines. They're getting closer to the customer. The apps are in charge, they're dictating to the infrastructure what can be done. With data, almost every solution can be customized. There's no more general purpose. And these are things that we talk about, but this changes the personnel equation. Now you've got engineering and product people talking to sales and marketing people, business people. And customers. They traditionally weren't going well. Now they have to work well, engineers want to work with the customers. This is kind of a new business practice. Now I'm a scared executive, Beth, what do I do? What's your thoughts on that dynamic? You know, I'm not sure I would have had insight in that if I hadn't had that opportunity to work at this little startup, which we were a digital native. And it was the first time I worked in an environment where we did true extreme programming, pair programming. We had really strong product leads and engineers. So we didn't have project managers, business analysts. A lot of the things that I think Enterprise IT tends to have because the folks, you know, historically in an enterprise, the folks that are specifying the need, the business need are folks in the lines of business. And they're not product managers. And even product managers, I say in banking for example, they aren't software product managers. And so that change, if you really do want to embrace these new methods and DevOps and a lot of the automation that's available to engineering and software development organizations today, you'd really do have to make that change. Otherwise it's just going to be a clumsy version of what you used to do with a new name on it. The other thing though that I would say that is, I don't want to discount for large enterprises is partnerships with startup companies or other tech partners. You don't need to build everything. Like there's so much great technology out there. You brought up the cloud. You know, look at how rich these cloud stacks are getting. It's not just now, can you provision me some compute and some storage and help me connect to the internet. There's some pretty sophisticated capabilities in there around AI and machine learning and data management and analysis. And so I think over time we'll see richer and richer cloud stacks that enables every company to benefit from the technology innovation that's going on right now. Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services always says whenever I've interviewed him and he always talks publicly now about it, is two pizza teams and automate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. And tech, we all know what that is. The boring, mundane, patching, provisioning, and deploying more creative resources. So okay, I believe that. I'm a big believer of that philosophy. But it opens up the role, question of the roles of the people. That lonely DBA that you once were and did some DBAing work myself. System admin, storage administrator. These were roles, network administrator, the sacred God of the network. They ran everything. They're evolving to be much more coding oriented, software driven. Changes. It's huge change. And you know, one thing I think is sad is I run into folks often that are, I'll just say, technology professionals, just say writ large, who are out of work. You know, who sort of hang their head. You know, they're not valued or maybe there's some ageism involved or I think they get marked as, oh, that's old school. You know, they're not gonna change. So I really do believe we're at a point where there's not enough resources out there. And so how we invest in talent that's available today and help people through this change, not everybody's gonna make it, right? Not everybody, you start with you, right? Knowing yourself and how open-minded you are. Are you willing to learn? You know, are you willing to put some effort forth and sort of figuring out some of these new operating models because that's just essential if you want to be part of the future. And I'll tell you, it's hard and it's exhausting. So I don't say this lightly. You know, when I just think about my career, how many changes and twists and turns there have been, sometimes you're just like, okay, I'm ready. I'm ready to just go hiking. Yeah. It can be, there's a lot of institutional baggage associated with the role you had. I've heard that before, old guard, old school. We don't do that. You're way too old for that. We need more women, so let's get women in. And so like there's a big dynamic around that. And I want to get your thoughts on this because you mentioned ageism. And also women in tech has also grown. There's a need for that. So there's more opportunities now than ever. I mean, you go to cybersecurity job boards, there are more jobs for cybersecurity experts than any- Oh, I'll tell you, yesterday we held an event at our office in partnership with some different startups because that's one of the things you do when you're in a corporate venture group. And it was all on the future of authentication. So it was really targeted at an audience of information security professionals and chief information security officers. And it was 20 men and one woman. And I thought, wow. I'm used to that from having been a CIO that a lot of the infrastructure roles in particular, like as you were saying, the rack and stack and the storage management and the network folks just tend to be more male dominated than I think the product managers, designers, even software engineers to some extent. But here, how many times can you go online and see how many openings there are for that type of role? So I personally am not pursuing that type of role. So I don't know what all the steps would need to be to get educated, get certified, but boy is there a need and that need to not going to go away. As more, if everything is digitized and everything is online, then security is going to be a constant concern and sort of a dynamic space. Well, we interview a lot of women in tech and great to have you on, you're a great leader. We also interview a lot of people that are older. I totally believe that there's an ageism issue out there. I've seen it first hand, maybe because I'm over 50, but and also women in tech is more coming in, not enough in the numbers speak for themselves. But there's also an opportunity, if you look at the leveling up, I mean, I talked to a person who was a network engineer, kind of same hanging his head, him hanging his head down and I said, do you realize that networking paradigm is very similar to how cyber works? So a lot of the old is coming back. So if you look at like what was in the computer science programs in the 80s, it was a systems thinking. The systems thinking is coming back. So I see that as a great opportunity, but also the aperture of the field of computer science is changing. So it's not, there are some areas that frankly women are better than men at. In my opinion, my good, some crap for that, but the point, I do believe that. And there are different roles. So I think there's not just, there's so much more here. Oh, that's what I tried to tell people. It's not just coding, right? There's so many different types of roles. And unfortunately, I think we, I don't know, we don't market ourselves well. And so I encourage everyone out there that knows somebody who's looking for a fun career. If someone was provisioning, if someone was doing Sun Microsystem Mini Computers or workstations, probably has a systems background that could be a cloud administrator or cloud architect. It's the same concepts. So I want to give you thoughts on women in tech since you're here. What's your thoughts on the industry? How's it going? Things that you advise other folks, men and women, that they could do differently? Any good signs? What's your thoughts in general? Yeah, so first of all, I'm just a big advocate for women in general and young girls and young women just getting into the workforce and always have been, I have to say, again, very fortunate early in my career working for a company is like the phone company and Schwab. We had so many amazing female leaders and I don't even think we had a program. You know, it was just sort of part of the DNA of the company. And it's really only in the last couple of years that I really see we have a big problem, whether it's reading about some of the cultures of some of the big tech companies or even spending more time in the Valley. And I think there's no one answer. It's multifaceted, it's education, it's families, it's, you know, each one of us could make a difference in how we hire, how, you know, sort of checking in on what our unintended biases are. I know at Citi right now there's a huge program around diversity and inclusion, gender and otherwise. And, you know, one of the ways that I think it's gonna be impactful is they've set targets, I know that are controversial, but it holds people accountable to make decisions and invest in developing people and making sure there's a pipeline, a talent that can step up into even bigger roles with a more diverse leadership team. It will take time though. It will take time. But mind shares are critical. It absolutely is, self-awareness, community awareness. Yeah, very much so. What could men do differently? It's always about women in tech, what can men do? I think it's a great question and I would say women can do this too. Like this, I hate when I see like a group together and it's all women working on the women issue. And shame on us for not inviting men into the organization. And then I think it's similar to the tech whisper. Don't be nervous, don't be worried, like just step in. Because, you know, men are fathers, right? Men are leaders, men are colleagues. They're brothers, they're uncles. Like, we have to work on this together. I had a great guest, a friend that I was interviewing and she was amazing and she says, John, it's not diversity and inclusion. It's inclusion and diversity. It's IND, not DNI. Like, what's DNI? Like, my point exactly. Inclusion is not just a diversity piece. Inclusion first is inclusive in general. That's right. Diversity is a difference. So, you know, people tend to blend them. Yes, they do. That's your point, that's what you're saying. Or even forget the inclusion part. Yeah, inclusive. Final question, since you're a change junkie, which I love that phrase, I'm kind of one myself. Change junkies are always chasing that next wave. Yeah, yeah. And you love waves. Pat Gelsinger at BMWare, wave junkie, I always love talking with him. And he's a great wave spotter. He sees them early. There's a big set of waves coming in now. Pretty clear, cloud's done its thing. It's only going to change and get bigger, hybrid, private, multi-cloud. That's right. Data, AI, 20-year cycle coming. What waves are you most excited about? What's out there? What waves are obvious? What waves aren't that you see? Yeah, oh, that's a tough one, because we try to track what those waves are. I think one of the things that I'm seeing is, as we all get, and I don't just mean people, I mean things, everything is connected. And everything has some kind of smarts, some kind of small CPU sensor. There's no way that our existing sort of network infrastructure and the way we connect and talk can support all of that. And so I think we're going to see some kind of discontinuous change where new models are going to absolutely be required because we'll sort of hit the limit of how much traffic can go over the internet and how many devices can we manage and how much automation can the people in an enterprise sort of oversee and monitor and secure and protect. That's the thing that I feel like it's a tsunami about to hit us. And it's going to be one of these perfect storms. And luckily, I think there is innovation going on around 5G and edge computing and different ways to think about securing the enterprise that will help, but it couldn't come soon enough. And model also meaning not just technical business, operating model, people model. Machine to machine. Like whose identity is on there that's taken in action on your behalf or the company's behalf? And we see that already with RPA, these software robots, who's making sure that they're doing what they're supposed to do? And they're so easy to create. Now you have thousands of them. In my mind, it's just more software to manage. I had a great question to Carl Escherbach, former VMware CEO now at Sequoia. He's on the board of UiPath. They're on the front page of Forbes. Do they talk about bots? Yes, yes, yes. I heard them speak. This is an issue. Like, is there a verification? Is there a fake bots coming? Yeah. There's big news. Fake bots are probably going to come too, to your point. Absolutely they will. This is a reality. No, and we're putting them in the hands of non-engineers to build these bots, which they're good and bad, right? Regulation and policy are two different things and they could work together. This is going to be probably a seminal issue for our industry is, understand societal impact, tech for good, shaping the technologies. This is what a tech whisperer has to do. You have a tough job ahead of you. But I love it. Beth, thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me. I'm John Furrier for the People First Network here at Sand Hill Road at Mayfield as part of theCUBE and SiliconANGLES, co-creation with Mayfield Fund. Thanks for watching.