 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, brought to you by Girls in Tech. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Girls in Tech Catalyst event in downtown San Francisco. About 700 people coming together, mainly women, two-day single track event where people are getting up and giving like 15, 20 minute overviews of their story, really sharing insights and how they got to where they were. Most of them had no idea that they were going to end up where they are now. So it's really a lot of great stories. And we're excited to be back for our second time. And our next guest, we're excited to have is Ladon Shoji and she is the CEO of Axosoft, John, welcome. Thank you. So what is Axosoft for people that aren't familiar? Axosoft builds tools for developers, mainly project management tool, a gate GUI, a issue tracker. Okay. And then how long have you been involved with Girls in Tech? With Girls in Tech about five years. We were the top sponsor and brought the Catalyst Conference to Phoenix when the first year they had it and this was back, I think five years ago. That's when I got involved with the board and loved the mission and couldn't stop. Awesome. I wanted to be involved in every way I could. Yeah, so we were there in Phoenix in 2016, I guess, a couple years ago. Okay, okay. So that's great. So it's such an important organization. What do you see some of the benefits? How are you guys really participating and helping take the advantages beyond just the participation in the events? So I'll go just for today, right? And some of the things that I've listened to just this morning, just talking and re-familiarizing yourself with how important culture is. If you don't create a space for females in your corporation, they don't belong. So by creating spaces where they belong, then you automatically help them have voice. And the sessions today have all talked around that and I really am excited that I brought one of my employees with me here, too. So she's definitely learning that and together we're gonna take it back to the company. And I'm just curious how old is she in terms of is she kinda young? I think she's 27. Can you start in her career? No, no, I mean, she's 27 and she's the director of her department. She's the marketing director. That's great. Yeah, it's so important to have role models and that's the other thing that keeps coming up over and over and over again is to, you know, they need to have the young girls, young women need to have like looking people, women in senior executive positions so they can envision themselves going there. Yes. So I know one of your passions is basically, obviously your business is built around development and coding, but having people have the knowledge, girls specifically get some basic overview of what is coding, what is software development. So it's not just this mysterious thing that's out there in the ether. Right. And I know that's something you've been putting a lot of time in. So here's how I view our education program right now. What we do with our kids is we put them in there and we say go and we educate them on how to become industrial workers. And the future is everything software. All companies, if they're going to stick around, somehow are going to be software. From the person you get your sandwich from at a fast food place to everywhere else. So we're sending these kids to school, they're going and learning how to become industrial workers. We never introduce them to programming at all until they hit college. And then we say, pick a career path. How do they even know that they want to go into programming if during high school or lower years they haven't touched it? Right. And as we heard one of the other speakers yesterday say, she wanted to be an actor and singer and on a whim she took a computer science class, fell in love with it. And she's the VP of engineering at Birchbox now. So, on a whim. Even though she had lots of examples to look at on the music and entertainment side. Yeah, she went into the other side. You know, she just tried one class and from there she fell in love. If you don't know what it is, if you're intimidated by it, then you don't try it. And I think that waiting until college, when it's career time, it's too late. You got to introduce kids earlier. So there's a lot of things that are trying to help that. Obviously, changing the public school system is not easy. And we were talking offline about what Brenda Darden-Wolkerson has done in Chicago. It's part of the public school district there. Getting basic CS into the program. But it's really not easy. It's not. It's very grassroots. So my company is based out of Scottsdale, Arizona. And our state is not doing very much as far as putting computer science into the schools. And which means that in 10 years, when I'm trying to look for developers, I'm not going to have enough. Not only am I not going to have enough developers, period, I'm not going to have enough diverse developers, right? Because we're not even introducing it to girls at all. So a few years ago, actually in combination with Girls in Tech, I put a campaign together called It Was Never Address. With It Was Never Address, we started a program where we took 15 to 16-year-olds, sometimes 18. And we taught them programming. And we turned them into ambassadors of anything steam. And we put them, we took 50, put them back into the public schools. And they're now actually creating their own clubs with sponsors in their own schools. And we taught them skills like how to fundraise with GoFundMe to come up with this. And they're actually working. I mean, it was very grassroots. It was very small. How old were they when you grabbed them? So our youngest was probably 12. And the way we found them was we went to the schools and we said, who's your smartest, ambitious? Who do you think is motivated? Who wants to do something different? Send them to our conference. And we took them for two days. We taught them programming, basic programming. We taught them wearable technology. And we made sure that they're in different districts. Send them back into the school system. That's great. Crass roots, right? Little guerrilla style. Right, right, right. Well, then we see that more and more. I know LinkedIn does weekend hackathons all the time. So there is kind of the grassroots corporate effort from people that are paying attention and doing the investment. But as we said, the schools are lagging way behind on the CSC. They are, they are. But I feel like if each company took a small amount of time and created little grassroots movements, we could make a pretty large impact. We're not organized, right? Because someone's doing it in San Francisco, someone's doing it in Arizona. If we kind of got together as just major corporations said, let's do this. Let's just, because tomorrow we have to hire these people and if there is enough, then we can't have the equality we want if we're not teaching girls early enough. Then maybe we can make a difference. So I'd just love to get your perspective, since you've been involved in girls and techs along. Who's trying to be one of the catalysts for that type of activity, not only across state, but across country and around the world, about the growth of this organization and how Adriana has taken it from, I mean, how big was it when you joined five years ago to where it is today? I mean, the growth in numbers, I can't tell you what those are, but I can tell you the impact is huge. Every year on part of the girls and tech events and corporate boards, seeing the impact and the feelings that it leaves for these women is amazing. You now can talk internationally to women and they know what girls and tech is and they're familiar and they're taking the hackathons, they're taking the programs that this organization offers and they're learning and they're getting jobs. And now I've been in it long enough where someone I met a couple of years ago who was just at a conference kind of dabbling took a course from girls and tech and is now in the career field and they're kind of introducing girls and tech to others. So it's amazing, it's no longer grassroots, this is actually making a difference. Right, that's great. Well, Ladan, thanks for taking a few minutes and thanks for your long-term support of the organization. Clearly, you're not the only sponsor anymore and there's a lot of people that have jumped onto the bandwagon and that's all a good thing. Thank you. You're welcome. You have a great day. Me too. All right, she's Ladan, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Girls and Tech Catalyst 2018 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching.