 Live on the ground from Galvanize, San Francisco. It's theCUBE covering Amplify Women's Pitch Night. Now, here's Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Girls in Tech Amplify. It's female founders Pitch Night and they have 10 entrepreneurs pitching their ideas to some local folks here that they're going to win some money and then also there's VCs in the room as well so hopefully they'll get more money. So it's at Galvanize downtown San Francisco. We're happy to be here and joined by a many time CUBE alumni, face you recognize for sure. Sandy Carter used to be with IBM, which is why we first got to know each other and we're recently now as the chairman of the board of Girls in Tech. That's right. And also the CEO and founder of your new venture, Silicon Blitz. So great to see you. I think last I saw you was in Phoenix, like February, seems like forever ago. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. So how do you like San Francisco? So you moved to San Francisco, you jumped into the startup scene. Yeah, I've been working with startups now for the last five years, but a year and a half actually here in Silicon Valley. I love Silicon Valley because it's kind of like the Mecca startups from all overcome. Yesterday I hosted a group of startups from Israel. Last week a group of startups from Africa. So everybody wants to come here. There's so much energy and excitement and so much to learn. Right, right. And then there's the whole kind of girls in tech angle. So now you're the chairman of the board. So for the folks that aren't familiar with your organization, give them a little background. What's the mission and kind of how big is it? What are some of the activities that you guys do? Yeah, so girls in tech was founded by Adriana and she's done a great job because she's really honed in on things that are required for women and girls in technology and beyond. So we host things like hackathons. We did one here with ESPN and the National Football League around the Super Bowl. We do things like entrepreneur events like we're having downstairs. So we had 160 different women who pitched their ideas culminating in the top 10 who are presenting downstairs right now. We do events to educate, to facilitate connections and just to make sure that we're getting the awareness of what's happening with female founders and their impact. So you may have just seen the McKinsey report that said that just in the United States alone if we really put a concerted effort around female founders, we could increase the GDP by $30 billion. So this is such an important mission, not just a nice mission, but a mission that can have a real impact on the country that we're doing. And tell us about Silicon Blitz, your newest adventure. Yeah, so Silicon Blitz is really focused in on innovation. So it's helping with corporate innovation, looking at cognitive diversity. So how do you get diversity of thought, whether it's on a board for a startup or whether it's inside of a corporation, building ecosystems and how you do that because nobody is successful today all by themselves. And then the impact of technology. So I just was keynoting at the IOT Emerge Conference out in Chicago on IOT's impact on marketing and beyond. So it's really awesome. We were just at the GE mines and machines with Beth Comstock, you know, it's clearly one of the great female leaders in technology as well. And they're doing a lot of interesting, 130 year old startup. Yeah, that's right. They're investing themselves all around disruption and cognitive and IOT. Very exciting. So tonight's event, any fun surprises, any favorite stories so far? Or is it like picking your favorite child? You know, I, there's a couple of things I thought were really interesting. We had the lead investor in Salesforce was a woman and she went through the five lessons learned on Salesforce. And I thought one of the most interesting ones was startups today tend to focus a lot on funding. You know, people go around and say, I raised 10 million, I raised 20 million. But the real secret of success is how many customers do you have? Because your success will be measured on your customer base, not your funding base. So I thought that was really awesome. A couple of the presentations I've liked so far because we've got several more to go. One woman invented an IOT sensor. And with that IOT sensor, you could put inside your purse and then on your phone, you can tell if somebody's taking your purse. And she has application for musicians who have, you know, their guitars potentially being stolen in retirement communities or assisted living where elderly need to remember certain things or forget where certain things are. So I thought that was pretty interesting. And then one other company, it was called Give in Kind. So she lost her baby and she said, people were reaching out to her trying to figure out what should I do? So she decided to start a business from that. And now she offers suggestions like if you lost your house, you lost a child. You know, you had some tragedy making suggestions about what would be appropriate. Giving a meal or, you know, she was just telling us that someone broke a hip and they were able to give free dog walking service for a week, those kind of things. It was really an awesome idea and also so helpful for so many people. And what are some of the lessons that you share from your experience at IBM and a big company when you're trying to help people in little companies that they should think about, either approaching large companies as customers or investors or just kind of lessons learned when you have resources that you don't necessarily have as a small company. So there's a couple things. One, you know, one of my big reasons for advocacy is for big companies to partner with small companies. So figure out as a small company how you can do that partnership. So many companies today have innovation outpost. So I was just down, the Swiss actually just set up an entire space and Nestle is there and you as a startup can go there and access the resources of a country, Switzerland and a major great company, Nestle. And Nestle was doing some really cool things. They're doing crowdsourcing of the next generation of food and they're seeking input from startups. So that's one great way to do it. The other is a lot of big companies today are hosting hackathons, pitch competitions. And when they do that, they're looking for companies that can help them grow. So if you always thought, wow, what I'm doing, you know, a big company really should be doing, get involved in that. For instance, Sephora, I was just talking to Sephora down on Market Street, they have an innovation hub and they're accelerating companies, especially female founders who are creating products for their beauty store. So there's a lot of great ways that you can connect. And then I also revealed downstairs some of the research that we've just done on the female founder study. Would you be interested in some of that as well? Sure. So we partnered with Carnegie Mellon. You know, they have the Institute of Innovation down in the Valley. And system. And a lot of Fritz and Pittsburgh, by the way. That's right, and yeah, great and smart people. And they put a team of students with us to study female founders and to see how we can improve what's happening. You may or may not know that female founders are 15% more profitable than their male counterparts, but they're 40% less likely to get funding. So think about that. 15% more profitable, 40% less likely to get funded. And so we kicked off the world's largest study for female founders to try to sort through what's really going on and how can we help female founders bridge that gap. So some of the things we talked about downstairs from the survey so far, and it times out in December, female founders start about a decade later, which says the runway is not as long and you don't get as many lessons learned. They tend to be less technical or at least claim they're less technical, less familiar with sales, right? Some of them think sales is a dirty word. And they really tend to hone in and focus on a domain problem, which is great, but really maybe doesn't understand the marketing pieces or the business pieces as well. So from that data, we're hoping to take that and create some digital services, create awareness. So for instance, I just published an article on the top 25 female founders in Internet of Things. Like this company I just told you about, Stella, and how can we help promote them and create energy around these great companies? My next article out will be the top 25 female founders in AI, and then I've been working with Harvard Business School, top 25 female founders that came from Harvard Business School and the list goes on. Just to get some visibility around these great female founders who are doing some incredible things. Well, I don't know what took you so long to get out here, Sandy. This is your natural habitat, so I can't believe a year and a half has passed already. But again, welcome to the Bay Area. This is where you should be. I agree. It sounds like you hit the ground running like we expect you to do. So awesome, so thanks for stopping by and good luck for the rest of the night. I'm sure there's some more great stories to be told out there. Okay, great. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Sandy Carter, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE with the Girls in Tech Female Founder Pitch Night. Thanks for watching.