 Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and we are on the ground at Google with Cloud Now, which is a nonprofit organization for and with leading women in cloud technologies and converging technologies. We're here tonight with Cloud Now to celebrate their fifth annual Top Women in Cloud Innovations Award. In fact, this year, they had so many submissions for outstanding females that they actually expanded the winner's circle, which is fantastic. And we're very excited to be joined by one of those winners, Madura Meskasky. You are the co-founder of VP of Product at Platform 9 Systems. Welcome back to theCUBE, you've been on theCUBE before. That's right, thank you. Congratulations on your award. Thank you. Talk to us a little bit about the project that you're leading as VP of Product at Platform 9. What are some of the cloud innovations that your team is helping to deliver? Yeah, definitely. So, I'm a co-founder and VP of Product at Platform 9 Systems. And what Platform 9 does, simply put, is we take best of breed open source frameworks, such as OpenStack and Kubernetes, and we deliver them as a SaaS service. So what we did is we pioneered this really unique deployment model for these really complex, but popular and powerful open source frameworks where they're delivered as a SaaS service. So you consume them just like you consume Gmail or you consume Salesforce. And so that delivers a very differentiated experience to the end users where there's very little complexity in consuming these frameworks and going through the process of updates or upgrades through the frameworks, et cetera. Excellent, how old is Platform 9? So Platform 9 was founded in 2013, so we just became three years old about a few months ago. Okay, congratulations, happy birthday. Talk to us a little bit about the founding of that. What was it from a career perspective that was a driver or some of the drivers that led you to, with your co-founders, say, let's do this? Yeah, so I remember reaching a point in my career, I think it was around maybe 2010, 2011 or so, where I felt that I have completely stagnated, right? And it was an interesting point for me because prior to that, I had never thought that I'm gonna start a company. In fact, my father is an entrepreneur, my brother is an entrepreneur, and I had seen them go through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, and so I had realized for myself early on, or I thought I'd realized that it's not for me. But when I reached that point in my career where none of the other options really seemed interesting enough, right? I tried interviewing, I tried going for large companies or small companies, different roles, but nothing sounded challenging enough. And then I was fortunate enough to realize that my current co-founders, who were then my co-workers at VMware, they were independently going through a very similar journey, right? They were trying to figure out what is it that they want to do next. And that's really where a lot of our brainstorming over lunch sessions started, and that's kind of where platform nine also got started. So let's take a little bit of a look at your career path, how you got to be, where you are, were you always naturally inclined towards engineering computer science from the time you were small, or was it something that you discovered a little bit later? Yeah, so I remember when I picked computer science for my bachelor's major, right? I pretty much picked it because it was the most popular stream or specialization to choose and majority of students were doing that, or majority of top students were doing that. I didn't quite pick it because I had a particular inclination towards it. I didn't even have a computer in my house at that time. And so it really started, for me, it started because after starting my bachelor's program, I started taking these off-school C++ classes. And those classes were taught by this ex-professor who had since stopped teaching, but he would run this little workshop in his house garage at nighttime. I remember 9.30 or 10, my mom would almost, she almost didn't want me to go out at that time, but we went out anyways and went to these classes. And just the way he encouraged us to be almost a little competitive in terms of edging each other a little bit in understanding really the core principles of C++, I just absolutely loved his teaching style. And I realized this is something I'm really good at. So that's where my interest in programming really, I think, was awakened for me. And then that's where my journey in computer science started. Wow, fantastic. So I love that, the old garage inspiration. I think as a women in tech myself, we get inspiration from a lot of different sources, whether it's people that we know or not, and gender really doesn't matter in that. But talk to us a little bit more. You said that sort of the catalyst for you and your co-founders getting together to start Platform 9 was you were at a position or a point in your career where you felt kind of stagnant. What were you doing then? And what was it that sort of gave you that boost to go, we're gonna do this? Yeah, so we were, I was a senior engineer at VMware at that time and I was part of the tech lead or the architect team as part of various products in VMware's management portfolio suite of products. During that time, specifically, we were working on this project within VMware called BeCloud Director. And what that project really gave us was the opportunity to interface with a lot of VMware's mid to large size enterprise customers. So we got to observe a lot of their pain points and we could clearly see that the traditional model of building infrastructure software, which is the shrink wrap way of building software where someone deploys it, downloads it, and then babysits it, maintains it over the life cycle of that software. We realized that that model really cannot stand compared to the very high bar that public cloud was setting. And it was really from that experience that we realized that there's an opportunity, there's a pain point to solve here. And we realized it was big enough that we could form a company out of it. So in terms of your company, you're relatively new from a, and you're obviously a senior female leader, is that part of the corporate culture at Platform Nine? How important is helping other women to get into technology to use personally and to your company? Yeah, I mean, Platform Nine is 100% supportive of talent regardless of gender, right? So we are, I would say we are a very, what I think a very typical next gen tech startup in the Bay Area in that sense where my experience just in the tech industry in the Bay Area has been that the community is extremely encouraging and open and welcoming, right? I have myself personally never experienced any kind of bias and I've not seen my other coworkers, et cetera, experiencing that neither at Platform Nine nor at VMware as well. So I am a big believer that the tech community in the Bay Area does a really fantastic job of not introducing a gender bias. Fantastic. Well, Madura, thank you so much for joining us again on theCUBE, congratulations again on your award and being a very inspiring female tech leader. If you know other female tech leaders that you think should be featured on our show, please tweet us at theCUBE, hashtag women in tech. Thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time. Thanks.