 From Menlo Park, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Cloud Now Awards 2020, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Now, here's Sonya Tagare. Hi, and welcome to theCUBE. I'm your host, Sonya Tagare, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, covering Cloud Now's top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation awards. Joining us today is Malin Yen, founder and partner of Operator Collective. Malin, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. So tell us a little bit about your background. So, Operator Collective is actually my fourth organization that I've been a part of starting. And all of them have had an aspect of it that had a strong community to it. And so, that was one of the reasons why, as you hear about in a second, I could put together this kind of crazy idea for a fund that looks like no other. So what inspired you to start this company and how did you navigate getting funding? Sure, so like I said, Operator Collective is my fourth company. The first one was actually a nonprofit. The second one was a venture-back company that we took from zero to 100 million in public in less than three years. And the third one was something called Saster, which is the world's largest B2B community for SaaS software as a service. The company that was a venture-back startup that we took from zero to 100 million in public in less than three years, even though I helped launch it, I didn't actually officially join as an employee until about 18 months in. And by that time, I was employee 65. And I noticed a number of things, which is there were largely a homogenous group of people who were there before me, all really great people, but you tend to know people like you and the hyper-growth stages of startups, you tend to turn around and say, who can I get? And so you turn to the people that you know. And so you end up with companies that look like yourself. And so I spent a lot of time looking at what was going on in the venture world, which is that in the area that I focus on, which is enterprise and enterprise software, it is over 90% male in terms of VCs as well as founders. And the world revolves around, and the venture world revolves around VCs and founders. And so I looked around and said, well, where are the operators? The people who build and grow and scale up these companies, they're largely not, they're not efficiently and effectively part of this ecosystem. And then second, were the women and people of color. And so, but as I started to dig in more and talk to people, what I realized was that the VCs and founders actually wanted to bring in the operators. They wanted to bring in the people with different backgrounds, but the networks didn't naturally overlap. And so I thought there's got to be a way to bring them in because I know the operators and the operators also want to participate, but the system isn't optimized to make it efficient or friendly or comfortable for them to be able to participate. So that's why I decided to put operator collective together. Wow. So you are keynoting today for Cloud Now. What has this experience been like and what is the main message you want to give to the award winners and to the Cloud Now community? So it's incredibly inspiring to be with all the women who are being honored tonight, as well as frankly the organizers, the organization itself, Cloud Now is incredibly impactful. And so one of the reasons I was so excited to be asked is a number of the women who are being honored I either know or have heard of. And the recognition is something that is very important because we need to tell the stories and recognize these people who are not maybe the usual suspects, the ones who maybe not are everyday names. And so I was super excited to be here. So you were talking about how it's about 90% male in the VC and founder community. In one of your articles, which are amazing by the way, you said, don't let the excuse of cultural fit be a vehicle for perpetuating sameness. And I thought that was so profound. So are you still seeing this notion of cultural fit being a huge issue? And if so, what can be done to mitigate it? Yeah, I think that there's more awareness now of the fact that if you hire for cultural fit, you'll end up with 65 people who are exactly like you. And that's not optimizing for a successful company because there are studies that show that diverse teams outperform, out-innovate homogenous teams. But what's also interesting is the same study says that but homogenous teams are more certain that they've gotten to the right answer, even if they've gotten to the answer less often than the diverse teams. And so when you have people who are just like you, then, and everyone agrees with each other, then you don't realize that maybe there's another way of looking at something. And so cultural fit is a warning sign, I think, to say that, okay, well, they're just like me, I'm very comfortable. Sometimes being uncomfortable is good. Yeah, that's a great message. I think it's really hard to say like, oh, I'm okay with being comfortable. So in one of your other articles, you bring up this idea of don't check all the boxes, but rather fill in the gaps. So can you explain more about that? Yeah, so the idea behind that is if you look for only the typical candidates, the ones who maybe think of a startup founder, went to Stanford, where's a hoodie, right? Did computer science, then that's fine. There are plenty of those people who have been successful but you're ignoring all the people who didn't. And so in fact, I'm the beneficiary of people who were willing to not just check all the boxes because I didn't check any of the boxes. If you look at my background, I should not have been able to raise as a first-time fund and a first-time fund manager to be able to raise a $50 million fund because I'm a, let's see, I'm a solo GP, right, solo general partner who hasn't been a VC before with a first-time fund. I don't have his traditional venture background. My previous background was I was an intellectual property attorney then helped start a company as a result of that. And then also when you check the boxes, 40% of VCs went to Stanford or Harvard. And when you look at the numbers, I didn't check all the boxes but precisely because I didn't check all the boxes, I was able to actually look at this differently and say, hey, that's not the model that I wanna build. And frankly, if I tried to build the same model that everyone else did, my background so doesn't look like anything I wouldn't have been successful. And by taking it and saying, look, I'm gonna build a model that's totally different from the ground up, that allowed me to build a platform in a community that looked like no one else's. As a result of that was able to raise money from institutional investors, for instance, which very rarely back first-time funds. And so by not checking all the boxes, I was able to build a model, but by other people also saying, look, she doesn't check any of our typical boxes but we like this idea because it's so different than everyone else's, we are now part of the fund. And sometimes different is good and it's what's needed. Absolutely. So speaking of that, in terms of operator collective, what workplace environment are you trying to strive for? So what we say is we seek to back founders from all backgrounds who believe, who share our belief that culture, diversity and operational excellence are a key part of building truly great companies. So we strive to be inclusive. We strive to have a variety of backgrounds. We use a lot of the tools because we focus only on enterprise and B2B software and technology and infrastructure. And so we also try to use a lot of those tools. So we are a mostly women team and we are a distributed team. We largely work out of our homes and we work a lot on Zoom. And a lot of us have kids too. And so what we do is we adjust the schedule so we can do drop off in the morning. We work like crazy, right? We work long hours, but we also do it so that people can take their kids to doctor's appointments or pick up their kids at the end of the day. But what was important to me was that we created an environment that worked with our busy lives. And it wasn't that we were trying to take these incredibly talented women and make it fit into just the corporate norm because you can have an incredibly successful work relationship. I mean, you can have an incredibly successful career if you don't have to sacrifice everything else in your life for it. Right, right. And that balance is so important. So what advice would you give to aspiring female entrepreneurs who maybe have a not so technical background or who are struggling to navigate in this male dominated industry? So one of the things I talked about in my keynote today was the you never get us, right? You're never gonna raise a fund if you do this. You're never gonna raise a fund. And so when you're starting a company, you will go and you talk to a lot of people as you should because you will get lots of great information. A lot of people are gonna say, well, you're never gonna be able to start a company if you don't have a technical co-founder. You're never gonna start a company if you're gonna try to do X. And so while some might say, well, you should just ignore those people. I actually say don't ignore those people because they are saying that other people are gonna think that too, but think of a way to counter that. And that actually helped make the operator collective business model stronger because we said, okay, we know that's gonna be the mindset. Let's turn it around and actually make this a strength. And so for female founders or any founders, what I would say is listen to a lot of people, talk to a lot of people, hear what they have to say, ultimately trust your instinct, trust your gut. And because you know what's best for the company that you're trying to build. Great words of advice. Malin, thank you so much for being on theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. I'm Sonia Tagare. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Stay tuned for more.