 Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco. It's International Women's Day. Stuff going on all around the world. Check social media. It's pretty exciting. It's definitely a movement. But we decided to come down to the Accenture event. 400 people here at the Hotel Niko. A lot of panels, a lot of great content and we're excited to have our next guest. We have Paul Chapman. He's the CIO of Box. Paul, great to see you. And JD Sassman, Senior Workshop Manager at Autodesk for the Peer 9 Tech Center. So before we jump in, I have to ask JD, what is the Peer 9 Tech Center? Yeah, it's a fantastic place right here in downtown San Francisco. We have a wood shop, metal shop, robot arms, digital fabrication, rapid prototyping. It's literally a physical place to fabricate, prototype, iterate and research within Autodesk. It's so cool. I don't think most people think of Autodesk because you think of it as a software company, but not necessarily that you can touch and shave and drill and play with toys. Absolutely, it's where the rubber hits the road. You can design all day, but if you can't make it, and if we can't test what the customers are doing with the software to validate that we're making software that drives that thing getting built in the world, then we're missing something. So that's where these centers, they help Autodesk be authentically in touch with what our clients are doing. So part of today's topic was, since you put out this report, there's 40 kind of factors that influence people's businesses and culture and diversity. And one of the big three buckets is about culture and leadership, the bold leadership. And it's pretty interesting in your panel, you talked about box and being at kind of a millennial-led company, a lot of millennials compared to HP and some of the older companies. And you had a quote, I wrote it down. You talked about a maniacal focus on culture fit. So Paul, I wonder if you can dive into a little bit about why that's important and how does it manifest itself in the day-to-day operations at box? And so what's really important as part of that is when you're hiring people into the company, they also have to fit the culture of the company. As we know, one of the hardest things to hold onto when you grow and scale a company is the culture. And so we not only hire for sort of experience and capability, but also for the cultural fit. And we maniacally do focus on that. Now it can slow down our hiring process, but ultimately it's about preserving that culture. And the culture of people first is very much about inclusion. It's very much about our employee resource groups. It's very much about the way we recruit, the way we hire, where we hire from as well. You know, I think that millennial, you mentioned heavy driven millennial culture, millennials will actually interview the company for their values, for their views, for, you know, inclusion would be one of those things as well. I think it's going to become part of our companies to even recruit in the future, if they don't have diversity inclusion as not as a site project, not as something that happens on the site, but as something that's baked into the company's culture. But it's kind of this ying and yang, right? Because like you said, it probably slows down your hiring process and there's a lot of pressure to hire people. No one can get all the talent they want. But at the other time, you want retention and you want people that are going to be around for a while. What you do hire will be good contributors to the company for a long, long time. So I imagine short term loss, long term gain when you can really stick to that. That's absolutely right. Who you work with and who you work for is very, very important. And we have a very open social collaborative culture. And I think generally what that does, and I've worked in a number of organizations, is it creates for a very motivated workforce and very productive workforce. JD, I want to ask you kind of about the growth of purpose driven. You know, we've seen it and again, I'll give a lot of credit to the younger kids coming up in terms of purpose being much higher on their rank of priorities and how they make their decisions. I wonder if you could talk, have you seen that in Autodesk with some of your new hires and is it changing the way you guys do things? Yeah, sure. And I think even more visibly for us, we have such a churn of residents who come and do work and research and prototyping at the shop that we see a bigger volume there than I do in hiring. And what I really see is a similar, they want to know that we have a commitment to a culture of collaboration. That innovation isn't just a buzzword, but is really going to be facilitated by putting people in the place with the machines, with the technical capabilities, but also with other people who are going to think about their problem differently. And I think, you know, we back that up with physical practices. We do a lot as the technical team that supports all of those residents by creating spaces to be curious and to learn. And irregardless of how much technical expertise you have coming in, we want to learn from you and you want to learn from us. And when the team that's supporting that space really embodies that, people feel it. And they know that it's real. And they know this is a place I can come and ask questions I don't know the answers to and not feel dumb about it, but go on the journey with you to find the answers. And that's really what we're facilitating is people coming in with good questions and making the space where you could possibly find an answer you don't expect. And that comes from that culture. So we see that with the churn of people coming through the space that they need to get it. And they need to know this is a place that they can really push the limits of where they've been before. And then how are you seeing the kind of the top down push for that culture in terms of supporting it, evolving it over time from the very top levels? That's interesting. I'll take a run. Even just go to our company values. And everybody has an employee badge. And we have our company values on the back of every single badge. And one of our company values that a couple of actually we have 10 values in there. I think they're all great values. One of them is make mom proud. Okay. It's about, I know before you make any decision before you do anything, is this a decision that would make your mom proud? The next one that is I think also goes to the culture of our company is bring your blank self to work. And you can fill in blank with whatever you want to fill it in with. So these are values that have been thought through from the top of the company that permeate all the way through the organization. And as you know in organizations, your values and your mission are very, very important to that culture. So we even just reworked our recruitment philosophy based upon hiring on diversity and inclusion as well. So these are things that are absolutely supported from the top down inside our organization. How has that manifested to people? Quote the values in reference to company awards, to people, how does it actually go from just the back of your badge to implementation in the everyday world? We have them in performance reviews. When people sort of do their performance reviews. And part of that is, how is this person upholding our values? And so we've installed this deep understanding of the values of the company because that's what effectively holds us together from a cultural standpoint as well. Yeah, it's interesting I think with Pier 9 we've seen a real chicken and egg. Pier 9 was an experiment when it started five years ago. And I think that what's happened is the experiment went well. And that leadership started to see this kind of experiment is bringing in a value that as a software company, we hadn't been able to reach before, which is having people in the space innovating and collaborating, building community in that way. So it's been interesting to see it sort of trickle up. And I'd say it's been really grassroots. And what I see is that now, when they're recruiting at Autodesk, they bring people to Pier 9 because it's an employee benefit. So, and we see how the videos at Pier 9 are getting made from the marketing department and has influenced how the videos are getting made and what we talk about all throughout the company. So it's been very interesting. They started the experiment that they thought would be valuable and now the company has found out more and more of what that value is and now they're looking at how do we expand that with our network of technology centers? How do we reach more people? And what else does this feed back to the larger corporation? Yeah. The other thing and you just touched on it with your be the underscore person is even diversity within the regular, just the regular hires that may be, just the regular white guy from 10 years ago before would be fit in a box, right? We hired you, now fit in a box and it was amazing to me the impact of clothing. We talked about it earlier in your interview. You're a great person, you do all this stuff, now we've hired you, we'll put you in a box. As opposed to now this kind of whole person concept which is even diverse inside of the attributes that you're leveraging from the individual employees to get more value. Seems to be just a really significant trend that then is going to drive that innovation because of that whole athlete. I'll even add that, as I mentioned earlier, employee resource groups, right? Heavy support for creating employee resource groups. In fact, we just created a new one for belong. This is for people that are maybe immigrants into the country that are now under fear and concern with what's going on with sort of immigration policies and rules and so on. And we have Box Women's Network, Box Women's Technology Network, we have Black Excellence Network, we have all these various different employee resource groups. But also what's happening is that these groups are also helping people to get connected with other people across the organization. And as companies grow and you add thousands of employees, how do you get connected with other people across the organization that are in a similar situation as yourself? And we're finding it's helping to build relations, helping to build connections. I think our cognitive thought, our problem solving and so on is actually significantly improved because of this. All right, so we're getting the wrap sign, it's a busy day. I want to give you the last word before we cut off. If we sit down a year from now at International Women's Day, what are you working on? What are your priorities? Both kind of individually as well as, you know, from a company point of view for the next 12 months. JD, I'll start with you. Yeah, I'm actually launching an organization right now called the Workbench Alliance. It's a professional organization for women, gender non-binary folks, trans women, super inclusive, working at the intersection of craft, technology and design. It's a lot of what we facilitate at Peer 9 and I'm looking at how can we build a professional network to promote, create visibility and really more and more community around these sort of converging industries, support each other and, you know, kind of an employee resource group outside of the corporation, which I think is going to benefit, you know, certainly benefit Autodesk, but benefit everybody. Right, right. You know, I'll go on one topic and that's machine learning. I think that we're at a point, it's almost the tip of an iceberg, but we have over the last few years created more and more and more data and now we're mining that data for intelligence. Machine learning is getting smarter and smarter and smarter. So not only are we looking to leverage that ourselves at Box to add more value to the, you know, to the content that our customers store with us, but also I think it's an opportunity to do things around hiring on diversity. You know, I think there's a lot of learning we can do to weed out unconscious bias, how we screen the screening process, the finding process, the recruitment process. So I'm a big believer in machine learning, helping us in a lot of different ways. All right. Well, JD, Paul, thanks for taking a minute of your day and really enjoying the conversation. All right, thank you. All right, I'm Jeff Frick. We are at the International Women's Day, the Ascension Event in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. Catch you next time.