 Welcome to theCUBE's special program series, Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome our next guest, Sheri Karamdashji, Sales Director at AWS Startups. Sheri, welcome for the program. It's great to have you today. Thanks for having me, Lisa. Tell me a little bit about you, a little bit about your role at AWS Startups. Great, yes. I run the startup sales in the US for AWS. I've joined AWS really early in the cloud journey. There's been 2013 from almost 10 years there, all in sales leadership. So been able to work with really amazing customers, mostly startups in the beginning because those were predominantly original customers. And now obviously going to, the business has grown to other enterprises and really have seen some great things in my 10-year journey. So you're almost a 10-year Amazonian. Congratulations on your impending anniversary. Talk to me a little bit about your career path. Did you always know you wanted to be in tech? Did you get into tech from a different field? What does that look like? Yeah, yes. I was always interested in technology. I was an electrical engineer in my undergrad and I pretty much quickly realized I didn't want to write code or design integrated circuits. There really wasn't an internet back then. I think the engineering students had emails but we emailed each other, nobody else had them. And I just got into a program actually at Intel and it was a technical sales program. And so they recruited folks, engineering students, put us through some rotations and various groups and then we rolled out to the field and I became a technical sales person. Got it. So you were a double E from the start, kind of always knew you wanted to be in tech. But then now as a sales leader, talk to me a little bit about that path and what are some of your recommendations for people that might be starting out in tech or interested and don't really know how to navigate their career? Yeah, I think for me, I was a little bit of luck and timing and some intelligence of picking the right path. And I think really just around your skill sets, right? And I had a technical background. I was a people person, relationships and connections were something that were important to me. And really just figuring out kind of how to match your skill sets to what you actually enjoy doing. Again, I wasn't looking for a career in sales leadership but it was definitely something I quickly embraced. I enjoy developing people, working with our customers to help them solve their challenges and various technology companies that work for it. And as far as navigating, I think having, I always tell people, do the best job you can in your current role and be looking at what you want next. Because I have a lot of people that come to me and say, I wanna do this next. And I'm like, well, you have to really be doing excellent in what you're doing today so that you get to have supporters and allies to help sponsor you and other things. Absolutely, mentors and sponsors are so critical. Often when I ask people this question, they talk about things like, raise your hand, ask a question. Let me pay attention to your point about the things that you're interested in and start navigating a pathway that way. But also the importance of having mentors, having sponsors, who you can share your ideas with, share your dreams with is also something that I think is quite helpful for those that are navigating maybe early in their tech careers, or maybe they're midway through and there's a change they wanna make that they just aren't aware of. What else is out there? Yep, absolutely. And I think I've been really lucky to have some great allies and mentors that align the way. So you've had some great successes. I wanna now kind of pivot to understanding some of the successes that you've had, where you've helped customers internally, externally solve problems where it's related to cloud. Yeah, I mean, yeah, so for 10 years I've been doing that. Early in my career, like I thought it was most of our customers were startups and it was really a great place to be because AWS at the time, very early helped democratize access to the cloud, right? And so there were these startups who didn't have a lot of capital or people. And so it helped bring that flexibility and agility to startups that maybe most enterprises have the resources to do. And throughout my career, I've worked with really interesting companies. Right now I've just met with the CEO, Jill Seltbox at Pinsara who really outlined why AWS is great and what it's helped, how it had helped them achieve things. And it's really, her thing is that AWS really helps them build and deploy at scale so that they're able to reach their customer no more broadly. And it really helps them with the backend functions like deploying products, maintaining that security and these user controls that become part of the AWS solution so they don't have to worry about it. And I've had interesting startups that are embracing machine learning in various ways, right? They had an autonomous vehicle startup that uses the advanced driving, the assisted driving system to predict and whether it's changing lanes or helping automate those things. And they wanna make sure that they provide reliability to their car manufacturers. And there's many, many others in the healthcare industry that we've helped bring really ultimately helping them deploy and so that they can innovate and bring products to market faster. That's what it's all about. Innovation, being able to bring products to market faster, being able to pivot quickly when change happens. I literally just today saw that interview that Jill did from Pinsara on AWS and the relationship there. I've got a number of friends who've just started their new jobs at Pinsara. So it's so great to see just the tech ecosystem being so intertwined and interconnected. I love that so much. I wanna understand now from your perspective, switching gears about talking about diversity, thought diversity, diversity of people. What, we talk about this Sherry so often in tech, DE and I, it's a very prominent topic of conversation but there's still some challenges there. Talk to me about some of the things that you've seen with respect to diversity that are still challenges present and what are some of your recommendations for organizations to employ to get some of those challenges swept out of the way. Yeah, I mean, I was an engineer and in the early 90s, engineering student in the early 90s. So I was one of 10 females in my school, in my degree area. So being underrepresented was nothing new. And I wish that we weren't here talking about that, right? It's like it doesn't matter if I'm a female tech leader, I'm just a tech leader, but we're not quite there yet, right? And I think maybe in the next generation can have that luxury and that we have to do, make that investment and effort today so that we are helping the path. Now I tell people, you have to, it takes time, right? You can't just go and say, I'm gonna hire a tech sales leader, right? I started very early and developed my career there. So you have to invest and give yourself time to help develop underrepresented folks. And ultimately, I think you have to be intentional and you have to focus on maybe looking or having different criteria that maybe you haven't typically had to bring that diverse perspective. Because if you're always looking for the same thing, that's what you'll get. And so I encourage my leaders that they're hiring and recruiting to really look at one, developing the pipeline of candidates, right? To bring on board, but also be open to the profile or the skill sets and things that they're looking for. You hit on three things that Sherry, in all the interviews for this series that I've done, I'm hearing consistently where it comes to diversity. It's the investment that organizations need to make. It's the intention that organizations and leaders need to have in finding that talent. And it's the ability to be open-minded to looking for different thoughts, different skills, maybe going outside of the comfort zone to bring in diverse perspectives. So I love what you just said. It very much aligns with all the female leaders that we've been talking to in terms of, this is what's needed next to make diversity, to actually bring diversity to life throughout organizations and not just have it as a talking point on agenda. Yep, absolutely. And yeah, honestly, my team is, I take pride in having a very diverse team. I have a very gender diverse team. And I would say it was intentional, but sometimes it's not. So- No, that's true. Right? And sometimes it's, you know, people gravitate towards, you know, female leaders so they want to come work for me. But also really it's just, we have to create an environment where different people want to come in and feel like they can, you know, have a voice and contribute and grow, you know, in their career. Absolutely. People need to see what they can be, be able to feel that I'm going to be included in this conversation. I can raise my hand, I can ask a question. That's not a stupid question. It's probably a question that many other people in the room on the virtual meeting have as well. So that ability to bring that diversity and that inclusion into roles, whether it's, we're talking about AI, machine learning, cloud is so important. And it really will impact the direction that we go in. For example, impact the direction that cloud goes in in terms of how cloud's going to evolve, how your role is going to evolve. What are some of the things that you see there in terms of the next steps in cloud and in your role? Yeah, I think really, you know, in my role in dealing with various customers, I think succeeding with data in today's world really requires taking an end-to-end view for organization today. People are drowning in their data and don't know how to use it to make decisions. And we are seeing an intersection of data and machine learning and analytics and databases. So I think we all have to get smart about it and help our customers work the way through this journey. It is a journey. And every company these days has to be a data company. They've got to be a tech company, they have to be a software company. However you want to describe it, but data is gold to an organization. And I always think it's whether it's my grocery store or a retailer or a manufacturer or an automotive company, they have to be able to glean insights from data as quickly as possible to make business decisions that push their businesses forward. So that's one of the things that I love is that every company these days has to be a data company, but they have to have the right tools, the right people, the right processes in place to be able to extract that value so that they can jump ahead of their competition. Exactly, and it is a competitive need. I think that's our job. That's our next big role, is to help our customers align that journey. Absolutely, and be successful. Last question for you is if you look back over the last three to five years, what are some of the biggest changes in the tech workforce that you've seen and innovation and what excites you about the direction that we're going in? Yeah, I meet with startup founders and you read their backgrounds or you get to know them and there are some engineering students at XYZ and are like, why if I were an engineer five years ago, what could I have accomplished? So I am seeing this evolution of things or problems that smart people are solving, whether it's machine learning, like you said, whether it's biosciences. And so I'm really seeing things coming out of universities, like research things that are really coming to light and solving real world problems. So that's a big trend, right? When I was in the years ago, I know you couldn't do much with satellite or telecommunications like you can with some of the topics that are coming out of schools now. I'm also seeing investment in early talent. So companies that, like you said, you're finding really great experienced smart people. So AWS and on the sales and solution architect team, we are investing in early talent, early career talent. So I'm there accomplishing great things. So I'm seeing companies like AWS embrace that a lot more. I love that investing early in talent is gonna be so beneficial to companies in every industry. I'm excited as are you to see what happens in the future with that. So much potential, so much potential. Sherry, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about what your role is, what you're doing, how you've been helping organizations succeed with cloud, what you see coming down the road and your recommendations for organizations to be more diverse. We so appreciate your time and your insights. It was my pleasure, thank you. Excellent. For Sherry Karem-Dashti, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's special program series, Women of the Cloud brought to you by AWS. Thanks for watching.