 Hello and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got great two remote guests coming in to our Palo Alto studios, some tech athletes as we say. People have been in the trenches and years of experience. Lena Smart, CISO at MongoDB, CUBE alumni and Tara Hernandez VP of developer productivity at MongoDB as well. Thanks for coming in to this program and supporting our efforts today. Thanks so much. Thanks for having us. Yeah, everyone talks about the journey in tech. We're all started before we get there. Talk about what you guys are doing at MongoDB specifically. MongoDB is kind of gone the next level as a platform. You have your own ecosystem, a lot of developers, very technical crowd, but it's changing the business transformation. What do you guys do at Mongo? We'll start with you, Lena. So I'm the CISO. So all security goes through me. That I like to say, well, I don't like to say, I'm described as the one's throat to choke. So anything to do with security easily starts and ends with me. We do have a fantastic cloud engineering security team and a product security team and they don't report directly to me, but obviously we have very close relationships. I like to keep that kind of church and state separate and I've spoken about that before. And I just recently set up a physical security team with an amazing gentleman who left the FBI and he came to join us after 26 years with the agency. So really starting to look at the physical aspects of what we offer as well. I interviewed a CISO the other day and she said, every day is day zero for me. Kind of goofing on the Amazon day one thing, but Tara, go ahead. What's your role there developer productivity? What are you focusing on? Our developer productivity is kind of the latest description for things that we've described over the years as DevOps oriented engineering or platform engineering or build and release engineering development infrastructure. It's all part and parcel, which is how do we actually get our code from developer to customer and all the mechanics that go into that? It's been something I discovered from my first job way back in the early 90s at Borland and the art has just evolved enormously ever since, so. Yeah, this is a very great conversation, both of you guys right in the middle of all the action if data infrastructure is changing, exploding and evolving big time AI and data, tsunami and security never stops. Well, let's get into, we'll talk about that later, but let's get into what motivated you guys to pursue a career in tech and what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way? Well, first, the fact of the matter was that I intended to be a double major in history and literature when I went off to university, but I was informed that I had to do a math or a science degree else the university would not be paid for. At the time, UC Santa Cruz had a policy that called open access computing. This is, you know, the late 80s early 90s and anybody at the university could get an email account. And that was unusual at the time. If you were, those of us who remember you used to have to pay for that computer or AOL or whether there's another one, I forget what it was called, but if a student Santa Cruz could have an email account and because of that email account, I met people who were computer science majors and I'm like, okay, I'll try that, that seems good. And it was a little bit of a struggle for me. I won't buy, but I can't complain with how it ended up. And certainly once I found my niche, which was development infrastructure, I found my true love and I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. Awesome, great story. Can't wait to ask a few questions on that. We'll go back to that late 80s early 90s. Lena, your journey, how you got into it? So I had a slightly different start. I did not go to university. I had to leave school when I was 16, got a job had to help support my family. Worked a bunch of various jobs till I was about 21 and then computers became more prolific. I wouldn't say they were ubiquitous, but they were certainly out there. And I'd also been saving up every penny I could earn to buy my own computer and I bought a 16 and Amstrad 1640. When I make hard drive, it rocked. And kind of took that apart, put it back together again and thought, hmm, there could be money in this. And so basically just teaching myself about computers, any job that I got, because most of my jobs were like clerical work and secretary at that point, but any job that had a computer in front of that, I would make it my business to go find the guy who did computing, because it was always a guy. And I would say, I want to learn how these work, let you know, show me. And I would take my lunch hour and after work and anytime I could with these people and they were very kind with their time. And I just kept learning. So yeah. Those early days remind me of the inflection point we're going through now. A major sea change coming back then. If you had a computer, you had to kind of be your own internal engineer to fix things. Member back on the systems revolution late 80s, Tara, when your career started, those were major inflection points. Now we're seeing a similar wave right now, security, infrastructure. It feels like it's going to a whole another level. At Mongo, you guys certainly see this as well. With this AI surge coming in, a lot more action is coming in. So there's a lot of parallels between these inflection points. How do you guys see this next wave of change? Obviously the AI stuff's blowing everyone away. The new user interface, it's been called the browser moment, the mobile iPhone moment kind of for this generation. There's a lot of people out there who are watching that are young in their careers. What's your take on this? How would you talk to those folks around how important this wave is? You know, it's funny. I've been having this conversation quite a bit recently in part because to me, AI in a lot of ways is very similar to back in the 90s when we were talking about bringing the worldwide web to the forefront of the world, right? And we tended to think in terms of all the optimistic benefits that would come of it, free passing of information availability to anyone anywhere. You just needed an internet connection, which back then of course meant a modem. Not our own head though. Remember from that time. Exactly, but what we found in the subsequent years is that human beings are what they are and we bring ourselves to whatever platforms that are there, right? And so, you know, as much as it was amazing to have this freely available HTML based internet experience, it also meant that the negatives came to the forefront quite quickly. And there were ramifications of that. And so to me, when I look at AI, we're already seeing the ramifications to that. Yes, are there these amazing, optimistic, wonderful things that can be done? Yes, but we're also human and the bad stuff's gonna come out too. And how do we as an industry, as a community, you know, understand and mitigate those ramifications so that we can benefit more from the positive than the negative. So it is interesting that it comes kind of full circle in really interesting ways. Yeah, the underbelly takes place first, gets it in the early adopter mode, normally the industry's with, you know, money involved, arbitrage, no standards. But we've seen this movie before, is there hope, Lena, that we can have a more secure environment? I would hope so. Although, impressingly, we've been in this, well, for 30 years now and we're at the end of the day still telling people not to click links on emails. So yeah, that kind of still keeps me awake a wee bit. And the whole thing about AI, I mean, obviously I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in AI. I did read Mo Goddatz book recently about AI and that was kind of interesting. And I'm just trying to teach myself as much as I can about it, to the extent of even buying the dummies guide to AI, just because it's actually not a dummies guide, it's actually fairly interesting. But I'm always thinking about it from a security standpoint. So it's kind of my worst nightmare and the best thing that could ever happen in the same dream. You know, you've got this technology where I can ask a question and, you know, it spits out generally a reasonable answer. And my team are working on with Mark Porter or CTO and his team on almost like an incubation of AI. Like what would it look like for Mo Goddatz? What's the legal ramifications? Because there will be legal ramifications, even though it's the wild west. Just now, I think regulations going to catch up to us pretty quickly, I would think. And so I think, you know, as long as companies have a seat at the table and governments perhaps don't become too dictatorial over this, then hopefully we'll be in a good place. But we'll see. I think it's a really interesting, there's that curse me, you live in interesting times. I think that's where we are. It's interesting just to stay on this tech trend for a minute is the standards bodies are different now. Back in the old days, there were, you know, I triple E standard, I T F standards. T3C. Developers are the new standard. I mean, now you see open source completely different where it was in the nineties to here beginning. That was gen one. Some say gen two, but I say gen one. Now we're exploding with open source. You have kind of developers setting the standards. If developers like it in droves then it becomes de facto, which then kind of rolls into implementation. Yeah, I mean, I think if you don't have developer input and this is why I love working with Tara and her team so much, it's because they get it. If we don't have input from developers, it's not going to get used. There's going to be ways of working around it, especially when it comes to security. If they don't, you know, if you're a developer and you're sat at your screen and you don't want to do that particular thing, then you're going to find a way that you're a smart person. Yeah, developers are on the front lines now versus even back in the nineties. They're like, okay, get set up, the developers got a QA team. Everything was waterfall. Now it's cloud and developers are on the front lines of everything, Tara. I mean, this is where the standards are being met. What's your reaction to that? Well, I think it's outstanding. I mean, you know, like I was at Netscape and part of the crowd that released the browser as open source and we found in Mozilla.org, right? And that was, you know, in many ways kind of the birth of the modern open source movement beyond what we used to have, where it was basically free software foundation was sort of the only game in town. And I think it is so incredibly valuable. I want to emphasize, you know, and pile onto what Lena was saying, is it's not that just that the developers are having input on a sort of company by company basis. Open source to me is like a checks and balance where it allows us as a broader community to be able to agree on and enforce certain standards in order to try and keep the technology platforms as accessible as possible. I think Kubernetes is a great example of that, right? If we didn't have Kubernetes that would have really changed the nature of how we think about container orchestration. But even before that, Linux, right? Linux allowed us as an industry to end the Unix Wars. And as someone who was on the front lines of that as well and having to support 42 different operating systems with our product, you know, that was a huge win. And it allowed us to stop arguing about operating systems and start arguing about software or not arguing, but developing it in positive ways. So, you know, with Kubernetes, with container orchestration, we all agree, okay, that's just how we're gonna orchestrate. Now we can build up this huge ecosystem. Everybody gets taken along, right? And now it's, it changes the game for what we're defining as business differentials, right? And so when we talk about crypto, that's a little bit harder, but certainly with AI, right? You know, what are the checks and balances that as an industry and as the developers around this that we can, you know, enforce to make sure that no one company or no one body is able to overly control how these things are managed, how it's defined. And I think that is only for the benefit in the industry as a whole. And particularly when we think about the only other option is it gets regulated in ways that do not involve the people who actually know the details of what they're talking about. Regulated and or thrown away or bankrupted by a company. What was driven under ground, it would even work, actually. Yeah, that's a really interesting that checks and balances, I love that call out. And I was just talking with another interview part of the series around women being represented in the 51% ratio, software is for everybody. So that we believe that open source movement around the collective intelligence of the participants in the industry, in gender, independent of gender. This is going to be the next wave. You're starting to see these videos really have impact because there are a lot more leaders now at the table in companies developing software systems and with AI, the aperture increases for applications. And this is the new dynamic. What's your guys view on this dynamic? How does this go forward in a positive way? Is there a certain trajectory you see for women in the industry? I mean, I think some of the states are trying to, again, from the government angle, some of the states are trying to force women into the boardroom, for example, California, which can be no bad thing, but I don't know. Sometimes I feel a bit a fear about all this kind of forced, you know, making, I don't even know how to say it properly, so you can cut this part of the interview. Well, and I think that they're... I'll say, it's not organic. And I think they're already pulling it out, right? That's all, it's already been challenged in the process. Well, this is open source angle, Tara. You are getting at it. The change agent is open, right? So to me, the history of the proven model is openness drives transparency, drives progress. If you believe that to be true, this could have another impact. Yeah, it's so interesting, right? Because if you look at McKinsey consulting or Boston consulting or some of the other, blocking on all of the names, there has been a decade or more of research that shows that a non-homogeneous employee base, be it gender or ethnicity or whatever, generates more revenue, right? There's dollar signs that can be attached to this, but it's not enough for all companies to wanna invest in that way. And it's not enough for all venture firms or investment firms to grant that seed money or do those seed rounds. I think it's getting better very slowly, but socialization is a much harder thing to overcome over time. Particularly, we're not just talking about one country like the United States in our case, but around the world, tech centers now exist all over the world, including places that even 10 years ago, we might not have expected like Nairobi, right? Which I think is amazing, but you have to factor in the cultural implications of that as well, right? So yes, the openness is important and it's important that we have those voices, but I don't think it's a panacea solution, right? It's just one more piece. I think honestly that one of the most important opportunities has been with cloud computing and cloud's been around for a while, so why would I say that? It's because if you think about like everybody holds up the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak back in the 70s or Sergey and Larry for Google, you had to have access to enough credit card limit to go to fries and buy your servers and then access to somebody like a Susan Wojcicki to borrow the garage or whatever, but there was still a certain amount of upfrontness that you had to be able to commit to whereas now, and we've I think seen really good evidence of this, being able to lease server resources by the second and have development platforms that you can do on your phone. I mean, for a while I think Africa, that the majority of development happened on mobile devices because there wasn't a sufficient supply chain of laptops yet. That's no longer true now, as far as I know, but like the power that that enables where people who would otherwise be underrepresented in our industry instantly opens it up, right? And so to me, that's I think probably the biggest opportunity that we've seen from an industry on how to make more availability in underrepresented representation for entrepreneurship. It's something like AI, I think that's actually gonna take us backwards if we're not careful because of reinforcing that socialization. Well, also the bias, let people comment on the biases of the large language was inherently built in are also a problem. You know, I want you to weigh on this too because I think the skills question comes up here and I've been advocating that you don't need the pedigree, college pedigree to get into a certain jobs, mentioned cloud computing, and it's been around for you think a long time, but not really, really think about it. The ability to level up, okay, if you're going to join something new and half the jobs in cybersecurity are created in the past year, right? So you have this, what used to be a barrier, your degree, your pedigree, your certification would take years, would be a blocker. Now that's gone. Yeah, it's like policy in fact, that's impacts of psychology. I think so, but the people who I buy in large, who I interview for jobs, they have I think security people and also I work with our compliance folks and I can't forget them, but let's talk about security just now. There's a, I've always been a particular kind of mindset with security folks. We're very curious, not very good at following rules a lot of the time and we'd love to teach others. I mean, that's one of the big things to see them from the start of my career. People were always interested in teaching and I was interested in learning, so it was perfect. And I think also having strong women leaders at MongoDB allows other underrepresented groups to actually apply to the company because they see that we're kind of talking the talk and that's been important. I think it's really important, you've got Tara and I on here today, there's obviously other senior women at MongoDB that you can talk to as well. There's a bunch of us, there's not a whole ton of us, but there's a bunch of us and it's good. It's definitely growing. I've been there for four years now and I've seen a growth in women in senior leadership positions. And I think having that kind of track record of getting really good quality underrepresented candidates to not just interview, become and join us is seen and it's seen in the industry and people take notice and they're like, okay, well, if that person's working, if Tara Hernandez is working there, I'm gonna apply for that. Yeah, and that in itself, I think can really reap the rewards, but it's getting started. It's like, how do you get your first strong female into that position or your first strong underrepresented person into that position is hard. I get it. If it was easy, we would have sold already. It's like anything. I want to see people like me and my friends in there. I'm not going to be alone. I'm going to be of a group. It's a group psychology. Why wouldn't, so getting it out there is key. Is there skills that you think that people should pay attention to? One's come up, it's curiosity, learning. What are some of the best practices for folks trying to get into the tech field or that's in the tech field and advancing through? What advice are you guys giving? What I say to my team is within my budget, we try and give every at least one training course a year and there's so much free stuff out there as well, but keep learning. And even if it's not right in your wheelhouse, don't be myopic about it. Don't take a look at what else could be out there that could interest you and then go for it. What does it take you? Few minutes each night to read a book on something that might change your entire career. Be enthusiastic about the opportunities out there and there's so many opportunities and security, just so many. Tara, what's your advice folks out there? Tons of stuff to taste, taste test, try things. Absolutely. I mean, I always say my primary qualifications for people are smart and motivated, right? Because the industry changes so quickly what we're doing now versus what we did even last year versus five years ago, is completely different. Though themes are certainly the same, we still have to code and we still have to compile that code or package the code and ship the code. So, how well can we adapt to these new things instead of creating floppy disks, which was my first job? Five and a quarters even. Five and a quarter, that's old school, oh gee. There it is. Well done. And now it's containers, golden image containers. And so, I've gotten a lot of really great success hiring boot campers, career transitioners because they bring along experience in addition to the technical skills. I think the most important thing is to experiment and figuring out what do you like because maybe you are really into security or maybe you're really into like deep level coding and you wanna go back, try to go to school to get a degree where you would actually want that level of learning or maybe you're a front-end engineer. You wanna be full stack. There's so many different things. Data science, right? Maybe you wanna go learn R, right? I think it's like, figure out what you like because once you find that, that in turn is gonna energize you because you're gonna feel motivated. I think the worst thing you could do is try to force yourself to learn something that you really could not care less about. That's just the worst. You're going in handicapped. And the choices now versus when we were breaking into the business, it was like, okay, you software engineer, they call it software engineering. That's all it was. You were that or you were in sales. Like some sort of systems engineer sales. And now- I've never heard of my job when I was in school, right? I didn't even know it was a possibility that there's so many different types of technical roles. Absolutely. It's so exciting. I wish I was young again. Me too. I don't, I like the age I am. So one of the things that I did to kind of harness that curiosity is we've set up a security champions program. It's about 120, I guess, volunteers globally. And these are people from all different backgrounds and all genders, diversity groups and the represented groups, we feel are now represented within this champions program. And people basically give up about an hour or two of their time each week with their supervisors permission. And we basically teach them different things about security. And we've now had seven full-time people move from different areas within MongoDB into my team as a result of that program. So, you know, monetarily and time, yeah, saved us both. But also we're showing people that there is a path. You know, if you start off in Tara's team, for example, doing X, you join the champions program, you're like, you know, I'd really like to get into red teaming. That would be so cool. If it fits, then we make that happen. And that has been really important for me, especially to give, you know, the women in the underrepresented groups within MongoDB just a window into something they might never have seen otherwise. That's a great comment, fit matters. Also, getting access to what you fit is also access to either mentoring or sponsorship or some sort of, at least some navigation, like what's out there. And not being afraid to like, you know, just ask. Yeah, we just actually kicked off our big mentor part program last week. So I'm the executive sponsor of that. I know Tara is part of it, which is fantastic. We'll put a plug in for her. Go ahead. Yeah, it's, no, it's amazing. There's that, gosh, I don't even know the numbers anymore, but there's a lot of people involved in this. And so much so that we've had to set up mentoring groups rather than one-on-one. And I think it was 45% of the mentors are actually male, which is quite incredible for a program called Mentor Heart. And then what we want to do in the future is actually create a program called Mentor BEM so that it's not, you know, not just on the female and so that we can have other groups represented and, you know, kind of break down those groups a wee bit more and have some more granularity in the authoring. Tara, talk about mentoring and sponsorship. Open Source has been there for a long time. People help each other. It's community-oriented. What's your view of how to work with mentors and sponsors if someone's moving through the ranks? You know, one of the things that was really interesting, unfortunately, in some of the earliest Open Source communities is there was a lot of pervasive misogyny, to be perfectly honest. And one of the important adaptations that we made as an Open Source community was the idea and introduction of code of conducts. And so when I'm talking to women who are thinking about expanding their skills, I encourage them to join Open Source communities to have opportunity, even if they're not getting paid for it, you know, to develop their skills to work with people to get those code reviews, right? And I'm like, if whatever you join, make sure they have a code of conduct and a good leadership team, it's very important. And there are plenty, right? And then that idea has come into, you know, conferences now. So now conferences have codes of contact if they're any good, and maybe not all of them, but most of them, right? And the ideas of expanding that idea of intentional, healthy culture as a business goal and business differentiator. I mean, I won't lie, when I was recruited to come to MongoDB, the culture that I was able to discern through talking to people, in addition to seeing that there was actually women in senior leadership roles, like Lena, like Kailin Nelson, that was a huge win. And so it just builds on momentum. And so now, you know, we're those of us who are now representing. And so that kind of reinforces, but it's all ties together, right? And in the open source, as the open source world goes, particularly for a company like MongoDB, which has an open source product in our community builds, you know, it's a good, it's a good mind, a good thing to be mindful of for us how we interact with the community. And, you know, because that could also become an opportunity for recruiting, right? So we, in addition to people who might become advocates on Mongo's behalf in their own company as a solution for themselves, so. You guys had a great successful company and great leadership there. I mean, I can't tell you how many times someone's told me, MongoDB doesn't scale, it's gonna be dead next year. I mean, I was going back 10 years. It's like, just keeps getting better and better. You guys do a great job. So it's so fun to see the success of developers. Really appreciate you guys coming on the program. Final question, what are you guys excited about to end the segment? I'll give you guys the last word. Lena will start with you and Tara, you can wrap us up. What do you guys excited about? I'm excited to see what this year brings. I think with the chat GPT and it's copycats. I think it'll be a very interesting year when it comes to AI and always on the lookout for the authentic deepfakes that we see coming out. So just trying to make people aware that this is a real thing. It's not just pretend. Kind of of course our old friend runs somewhere. Let's see where that's gonna go. Let's see where we get to and just genuine hygiene and housekeeping when it comes to security. Excellent, Tara. Ah, well, for us, we're always constantly trying to up our game from a security perspective in the software development lifecycle. But also, what can we do? One interesting application of AI that maybe Google doesn't like to talk about is it is really cool as an addendum to search and how we might incorporate that as far as our learning environment and developer productivity and how can we enable our developers to be more efficient, productive in their day-to-day work. So I don't know, there's all kinds of opportunities that we're looking at for how we might improve that process here at MongoDB and then maybe be able to share it with the world. One of the things I love about working at MongoDB is we get to use our own products. And so being able to have this interesting document database in order to put information and then maybe apply some sort of AI to get it out again is something that we may well be looking at, if not to share them, certainly in the coming year. Awesome. Lena Smart, the Chief Information Security Officer, Tara Hernandez, Vice President, Developer Productivity from MongoDB. Thank you so much for sharing here on International Women's Day. We're going to do this quarterly every year. We're going to do it, and then we're going to do quarterly updates. Thank you so much for being part of this program. Thank you. Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.