 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by LaFawn Davis. She is the Global Head of Culture and Inclusion at Twilio. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So let's start by telling our viewers what you do at Twilio. What does the Global Head of Culture and Inclusion do? That's a great question. It's kind of a newer title. So the culture piece is around our environment, our workspace, how employees feel, and it also incorporates employee experience. So we want to make sure that all the great talent we get in, we actually keep and develop and grow. And then there's the inclusion piece, the DNI piece, and that's the piece that people typically understand. So that is attracting, recruiting, retaining and developing top talent. It's making sure that we're looking at all of the diverse workforce that we want to have in the company that we're serving our employees in the right way. And so it's nice that it's kind of have both sides of that. So it's not just purely about recruiting. It's not purely about numbers. It really is about how employees feel and whether or not they feel included, but also belong. So how do you do that? I mean, that's what every company wants is to make companies, make employees feel happy about coming to work every morning. How do you do it? You have to ask. Okay, okay. So it's really important that we have values that we can stand upon every day. So we have what we call nine things and they're really our values. Things like draw the owl, which is like you have to start somewhere. Draw the owl? Draw the owl. It comes from an old internet meme that's around, the way you draw an owl is you start with two circles and then you draw the rest of the owl. Right, right. So you have to start somewhere. We have another one that's be humble, no shenanigans. That one you hear a lot. Like if you're in a meeting and people are kind of thinking of doing things a different way. There are a few tech companies that could have benefited from the shenanigans. But yeah. People call each other out. I mean you'll hear it around the office. Do they though? No, absolutely. They absolutely will. They'll say, it sounds a little shenanigans. Okay. Or we're not supposed to be doing shenanigans here. So let's really figure out how to do the right thing. Okay. And I think when you have values that are that specific, you can stand on them, you can count on them and you can call each other out. Shenanigans, I love it. Okay. So let's be honest and let's do what's right. But at the same time, I understand how that can become the sort of safe word and it's almost funny to say, hey, what are you doing here? But how do you make those employees feel empowered enough to be able to call someone out? Particularly if that person is a manager or a white guy that just has more bluster. I mean, what? Yeah, it starts from the top down. I mean, even before I got to Twilio, so I've only been to Twilio for six months, but I've been in this space for well over a decade. And what Twilio has is a top down and a bottoms up. So they were doing diversity inclusion and had employee resource groups before I got there, three years before I got there. And the CEO is fantastic, but it really starts from that messaging. You can tell the CEO he's being shenanigans. He expects you to. So we're hiring in people that expels our values. We're looking for that. We're making sure that people come in with that understanding of we don't want shenanigans here. We want you to be humble here. We want you to draw the out. We want you to really acquire knowledge and thirst after it. Those are the things we look for. And so if you keep hiring people like that, that already lend to your values, you're going to continue to have that culture. And it's not really about, I want to say this in front of a C-suite executive or in front of a leader, it's expected of you that you live those values no matter who you are. So as you said, you've been in this space for a while. You worked for PayPal, Google, Yahoo. Yeah. What have been the biggest changes you've seen over the course of your career? Yeah. So it's really a journey, right? I think the diversity journey, especially 10 years ago, started with diversity, numbers, demographics. And it was really just gender globally in ethnicity US. And that's it. And that's what people talked about. And those were the efforts that people made. It was really about recruiting. And now it's gone into more of the inclusions face and making sure people feel like they have a voice that can be heard or they have a seat at the table. But honestly, right now where we're at is the belonging space, right? Inclusion is really about making sure other people feel included and that you're hearing other perspectives. Belonging is a personal feeling. I feel like I belong here. And I'll tell you a funny story. When I first started at Tulio about probably about two weeks in, I sat on the people team, which is next to the legal team. And the legal team's having this discussion and I'm like, wait a minute. Oh my gosh, are you all conspiracy theorists? And they're like, yeah. And I go, oh, you're my people. I'm the one with the whiteboard and the red string and the football hat. And I immediately felt a sense of you're my people. I feel like I'm supposed to be here. Everyone wants that feeling. And so the belonging space is really where companies are starting to focus. It's not just about having a seat at the table. Do you want to be here? Do teams work well together? Are we working on something that's important to you? Do we have a vision that's inspiring to you? And that's more around belonging. I think the next step in this journey is equality and we're a long way from that. And what do you make of that? I mean, you have been in this space for a while now at some of the biggest, most respected tech names in the industry and some of their names have been dragged through the mud around these issues. So I mean, are you discouraged? Are you hopeful? What's your feeling now? I'm hopeful. I don't think I would still be doing it this long if I wasn't hopeful and yes, I get tired. Yeah, but we're still talking about it. Definitely get fatigued but I'm very passionate about it and that's how I ended up in this career. I started off in operations when I was at Google and I'm one of the founding members of the Black Googlers Network which is an employee resource group and I just got really passionate about being strategic. It wasn't just about building a sense of community, it was, no, let's figure out how to attract, recruit and retain and develop talent. Let's figure out what the company needs and how we can plug in. And that just, I mean, lit a fire in me. And so I did lots of different roles within the DNI space. And so every time I think I'm going to step out, I get sucked back in, right? Just when I thought, yeah. And so I think there's so much work to do. I think people inherently want to do the right thing. There's some bad apples that have been dragged through the mud lately, absolutely. But I think for the most part, people are coming from a good place. They may not know what to do. I think we have to change the conversation because if we continue to do the same things over and over again and they're not working, that should say something, right? So these, in terms of your past companies, Yahoo, Google, PayPal, they're much bigger than Twilio. Twilio is less than 1,000 people. How would you describe the biggest differences in terms of trying to affect change? Yeah. So I think the nice thing is that this is the first company where I don't feel like I have to talk about the business case for diversity. Right? They already get it. They already get it. It's already got. My CEO will tell the story that when he started this company, he's like, you know, I'm trying to build a company and people are like, you know, diversity, diversity. I'm trying to build a company. And then he really thought about it and said, well, when is the right time to think about diversity? Is it when I have 1,000 white male engineers? Right? At that point, you're fixing a problem as opposed to just starting with it and hiring people around that. And so it's the first company where I feel like that was already there, which is wonderful because now I can focus on the things that make the greatest impact instead of starting from scratch. And so a smaller company, especially with more of a startup mentality, they just went public last year. I think it's almost easier, in a way, to make more progress because of that. And just in terms of what your CEO said about having to fix the problem, how do you think Twilio's products, how can you, how would a customer be able to tell that this was made by a diverse group of people? And it wasn't just a bunch of white guys in a room wearing hoodies, developing the Twilio suite. I mean, yeah. The whole goal of the Twilio platform is to power communications, right? That's the entire goal. And so I think as we're out and about, I mean, we have this really cool role, and it may exist elsewhere, I just don't know it, and they're called Developer Evangelists, which I would love to be if I actually coded a little bit more. And they actually are the kind of the middle of coding and evangelizing kind of what Twilio does, so a little bit of sales, too. And so they're actually touching the communities. We have community developers, so it's not just people sitting at a desk in a room talking about what's best for people. It's, we get out into the community, we understand what developers need, and we're constantly trying to figure out how do we create more doers? That's what we call people who create things. How do we create more doers? We have Twilio.org, which is our foundation, working with nonprofits, and there are social justice apps built on the platform. There are lifesaving apps built on the platform, and we're funding these organizations so they can continue to build more and more on our platform to change people's lives. And so I think that, in those examples, actually help people understand it's not just 400 white guys sitting in a room creating something for them. We're actually getting out and understanding what people need. And the research around diversity shows that diverse teams that may take them a little slower to get the work done, but the work is better, because it has taken in multiple perspectives. It has, there's been more sort of fighting, and I don't mean to say fighting in the majority of sense, but just getting to the right answer. Yeah, debate, exactly, to get to the right answer. I mean, would you say that's the experience, and I know you're not on the technical side, but what are you hearing from your... Well, I would challenge that. Okay, all right. Every employee is encouraged to build something on the Twilio platform when they start no matter what role they're in, and I am not in a technical role, but I know a little bit of coding there. But yes, absolutely, healthy debate is absolutely encouraged. How else are you going to build something for other people? It's really easy to just say, I think we need to do this feature, right? But if that's not what people need, or you're not getting other perspectives, then you're building an inferior product. And so, absolutely, you have to have that healthy debate. It's encouraged, and I see it, but it's not in a disrespectful way. So I have, being a part of the tech industry for a long time, I have seen some conversations that weren't so great, and people not treating each other well, thinking that that's how you... A little shenanigan-y. A very shenanigan-y, right? Or calling each other names because they think that's how you get your point across. And I just don't feel that way at Twilio. It's much more respectful. I'm not saying that they don't get into it, but I think you have to, in order to really innovate. Great. Lafon, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a really, really a lot of fun talking to you. Thank you so much, you too. We will have more from Grace Hopper, just after this.