 Hi everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. As part of International Women's Day, we're featuring some of the leading women in business technology from developer to all types of titles and to the executive level. And one topic that's really important is called getting a seat at the table, board makeup, having representation at corporate boards, private and public companies. It's been a big push and former technology operating executive and corporate board member. She's a board machine, super Samian, formerly with HPE and Lula Packard. So great to see you, CUBE alumni, distinguished CUBE alumni. Thanks for coming. Yes, I'm very proud of my CUBE alumni title. I'm sure it opens a lot of doors for you. We're psyched to have you on. This is a really important topic and I want to get into the whole as women advance up and they're sitting on the boards they can implement policy and there's governance. Obviously public companies have very strict oversight and strict but like formal. Private boards have to operate, be nimble, they don't have to share all their results. But still boards play an important role in the success of scaled up companies. So super important that representation there is key. I want to get into that. But first, before we get started, how did you get into tech? How did it all start for you? Yeah, long time ago, I was an electrical engineering major, came out in 1981, when opportunities for engineering, if you were, I went to Kansas State as an undergrad. And basically in those days, you went to Texas and did semiconductors. You went to Atlanta and did communication satellites. You went to Boston or you went to Silicon Valley. And for me, that wasn't too hard a choice. I ended up going West and really I guess embarked on a 40 year career in Silicon Valley and absolutely loved it. Largely software, but sometime on the hardware side, started out in networking, but largely software. And then four years ago, transitioned to my next chapter, which is the corporate board director. And again, focused on technology, software and cybersecurity boards. For the folks watching, we'll cut through another segment we could probably do about your operating career, but you rose to the ranks, we came in, seen your operating executive at the biggest companies in the world. You look back at enterprise, and you look back at you look at enterprise and others. Very great career, okay? And so now you're kind of like put that on pause and you're moving on to the next chapter, which is being a board director. What inspired you to be a board director for multiple public companies and multiple private companies? Well, how many companies are you on? What's the inspiration? What's the inspiration? First, tell me how many board ships you're on, board seats you're on. And then what inspires you to become a board director? Yeah, so I'm on three public, and you are limited in terms of the number of publics that you can do to four. So I'm on three public and I'm on four private from a tech perspective. And those range from $4 billion in revenue, public company, down to a 35-person private company. So I've got the whole range. So you're like freelancing. I mean, what is it like? It's a full-time job. Obviously, there's a lot of work involved. Yeah, it's... Why are you doing it? Yeah, well, you know, so I retired from being an operating executive after 37 years, and but I loved, I mean, it's tough, right? It's tough these days, particularly with all the pressures out there in the market, not to mention the pandemic, et cetera, but I loved it. I loved working. I loved having a career, and I was ready to back off on, I would say the stresses of quarterly results and the stresses of international travel, so much of it, but I wasn't ready to back off from being involved and engaged and continuing to learn new things. I think that's why you come to tech. And for me, why I went to the valley to begin with was really that energy and that excitement and it's like it's constantly reinventing itself. And I felt like that wasn't over for me. And I thought, because I hadn't done boards before I retired from operating roles, I thought that would fill the bill. And it's honestly, it has exceeded expectations. In a good way, you feel good about where you're at and what you went in, what was the expectation going in and what surprised you? And were there people along the way that kind of gave you some pointers or don't do this, stay away from this? Take us through some of the experiences. Yeah, honestly, there is an amazing network of technology board directors in the US and specifically in the Valley. And we are all incredibly supportive. We have groups where we get together as board directors and we talk about topics and we share best practices and stories. And so I underestimated that, right? I thought I was going to, I thought I was gonna enter this chapter where I would be largely giving back after 37 years, you've learned a little bit, right? What I underestimated was just the power of continuing to learn and being surrounded by so many amazing people. When you do multiple boards, your learnings are just multiplied, right? Because you see not just one model, but you see many models. You see not just one problem, but many problems, not just one opportunity, but many opportunities. And I underestimated how how great that would be for me from a learning perspective. And then your ability to share from one board to the other board, because all of my boards are companies who are also quite close to each other, the executives collaborate. So that has turned out to be really exciting for me. So you had the stressful job, you rise to the top of the ranks, quarterly shot clock earnings, and it's hard charging. It's like being an athlete, as we say, tech athlete, you're a tech athlete. Now you're taking that to the next level, which is now you're juggling multiple operational kind of things, but not with the super pressure. But there's still a lot of responsibility. I know it's one board, you've got compensation committee. I mean, there's work involved. It's not like you're flipping coupons and having pizza. No, it's real work, believe me, it's real work. But I don't know how long it took me to not, to stop waking up and looking at my phone and thinking somebody was gonna be dropping their forecast. Just that pressure of the number. And as a board member, obviously, you are there to support and help guide the company and you feel, you feel the pressure and the responsibility of what that role entails, but it's not the same as the frontline pressure every quarter, it's different. And so I did the first type. I loved it, you know, I'm loving the second type. You know, the retirement, it's always cliche these days, but it's not really like what people think it is. It's not like getting a boat, going fishing or whatever. It's doing whatever you want to do. That's what retirement is. And you've chose to stay active, your brain's being tested and you're working it, having fun without all the stress. But it's enough, it's like going to the gym. It's not hardcore workout, you're working out with the brain. Yeah, no, for sure. It's just a different model. But the level of conversations, the level of decisions, all of that is quite high, which again, I like. Yeah. And you really can't talk about some of the fun questions I want to ask, like, what's the valuations like? How's the market? Is there headwinds? Is there tailwinds? Yes, yes, I guess to get, it's an amazing market right now with, as you know, counter indicators everywhere, right? Something's up, something's down. Consumer spending's up, therefore interest rates go up and employment's down. And so our unemployment's down. And so it's hard. Actually, I really empathize with and have a great deal of respect for the CEOs and leadership teams of my board companies because, you know, I kind of retired from operating role and then everybody else had to deal with running a company during a pandemic and then running a company through the great resignation and then running a company through a downturn. You know, those are all tough things. And I have a ton of respect for any operating executive who's navigating through this and leading a company right now. I'd love to get your take on the board conversations at the end, if we have more time, what the mood is. But I want to ask you about one more thing real quick before we go to the next topic is your entire operating executive, you have multiple boards, so you get your hands full. I noticed there's a lot of amazing leaders to other female tech athletes joining boards, but they also have full-time jobs. And so what's your advice? Because I know there's a lot of networking, a lot of sharing going on. There's kind of a balance between how much you can contribute on the board versus doing the day job, but there's real need for more women on board so yet there's a lot going on boards. What's the current state of the union, if you will, state of the market relative to people in their careers and the stresses, because you left one and jumped in all in there. Some can't do that. They can't be on five boards, but they are on a few. What's the- Well, and if you're an operating executive, you wouldn't be on five boards, right? You would be on one or two. And so I spent a lot of time now bringing along the next wave of women and helping them both in their career, but also to get a seat at the table on a board. And I'm very vocal about telling people not to do it the way I do it. There's no reason for it to be sequential. I thought I was so busy and was traveling all the time. And yes, all of that was true, but and maybe I should say you can still fit in a board. And so what I see now is that your learnings are so exponential with outside perspective that I believe I would have been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. I know I would have been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. And so my advice is don't do it the way I did it. It's worked out fine for me, but hindsight's 20-20. If you can go back and do it, if you can go back and do a mulligan or a redo, what would you do? Yeah, I would get on a board earlier, full stop. Board, singular, plural? Well, I really, I don't think as an operating executive you can do one, maybe two. I wouldn't go beyond that. And I think that's fine. Yeah, totally makes sense. Okay, I got to ask you about your career. Technical, you came in at that time in the market. I remember when I broke into the business, very well male dominated. And then now it's much better. When you went through the ranks as a technical person, I know you had some blockers and definitely some, probably some people like, well, we've seen that. How did you handle that? What were some of the key pivot points in your journey? And we've had a lot of women tell their stories here on theCUBE, candidly like, hey, I was going to tell that professor, I'm going to sit in the front row. I'm getting two degrees, robotics and aerospace. But they were challenged even with the aspiration to do tech. I'm not saying that was something you had, but have you had experience like that that you overcome? What were those key points and how did you handle them? And how does that help people today? Yeah, I have to say, and not discounting that obviously this has been a journey for women and there are a lot of things to overcome both in the workforce and also just balancing life, honestly. And they're all real. There's also a story of incredible support. And I'm the type of person where if somebody blocked me or didn't like me, I tended to just think it was me and like work harder and get around them. And I'm sure that some of that was potentially gender related. I didn't interpret it that way at the time. And I was lucky to have amazing mentors, many, many, many of whom were men, because they were in the positions of power and they made a huge difference on my career, huge. And I also had amazing female mentors, Meg Whitman and Livermore at HPE who you know well. So I had both, but when I look back on the people who made a difference, there are as many men on the list as there are women. Yeah, and that's a learning that it's create those coalitions, not just one or the other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Well, I got to ask you about the, you brought up the pandemic. This has come up in some interviews this year, a little bit last year on the International Women's Day, but this year it's resonating. And I would never ask an interview, I saw an interview once where a host asked the woman, how do you balance it all? And I was just like, no one asked men that. And so it's like, but with remote work, it's come up now, the word empathy around people knowing each other's personal situation. In other words, when remote work happened, everybody went home. So we all got a glimpse of the backdrop. You can see what their personal life is on Facebook. We were just commenting before we came on camera about that. So remote work really kind of opened up this personal side of everybody, men and women. So I think this brings this new empathy kind of vibe or authentic sell, people call it. Is remote work an opportunity or a threat for advancement in women in tech? It's a much debated topic. I look at it as an opportunity for many of the reasons that you just said. First of all, let me say that when I was an operating executive and would try to create an environment on my team that was family supportive, I would do that equally for young or early to mid-career women as I did for early to mid-career men. And the reason is, I needed those men, chances are they had a working spouse at home, right? I needed them to be able to share the load. It's just as important to the women that companies give the partner, male or female, the partner support and the ability to share the load. So to me, it's not just a woman thing. It's women and men. And I always tried to create the environment where it was okay to go to your soccer game. I knew you would be online later in the evening when the kids were in bed and that was fine. And I think the pandemic has democratized that and made that kind of an everyday occurrence. The baby walks in, they're in the Zoom call, the dog comes in, the leaf blower going on the outside of the window, I've seen it all in the community. Yeah, and people don't try to pretend anymore that the house is clean, the dogs behaved. I mean, it's just real and it's authentic and I think that's healthy. I do, I also love the office. And I've got a 31-year-old and assumed to be 27-year-old daughter, two daughters and they love going into the office. And I think about when I was their age, how just charged up I would get from being in the office. I also see how great it is for them to have a couple of days a week at home because you can get a few things done in between Zoom calls that you don't have to end up piling onto the weekend. And so I think it's a really healthy mix now. Most tech companies are not mandating five days in. Most tech companies are two to three days in. I think that's a really good combination. It's interesting how people are changing their culture to get together more as groups and even events. I mean, while I got here, might as well ask you, what's the board conversations around, the old conferences before the pandemic, every company had like a user conference. Now it's like, well, do we really need to have that? I mean, we do smaller and we do digital. Have you seen how companies are handling the in-person? Because there's where the relationships and the, are really forming face to face. But not everyone's going to be going by now. It's clearly back to face to face. We're seeing that with theCUBE, as you know. But the numbers aren't, it's coming back and the numbers aren't high, but the stakeholders and the numbers are actually higher if you count digital. Yeah, absolutely. But also on digital, there's fatigue from 100% digital. It's a hybrid. People don't want to be 100% digital anymore. But they also don't want to go back to the days when everybody got on a plane for every meeting, every call, every sales call. I'm seeing a mix on user conferences, I would say two thirds of my companies are back, but not at the expense level that they were on user conferences. We spent a lot of time getting updates on, because nobody has put, interestingly enough, nobody has put T&E, travel and expense back to pre-pandemic levels, nobody. So everybody's pulled back on number of trips. You know, marketing events are being very scrutinized, but I think very effective. We're doing a lot of, you know, these were part of the old model as well, like some things just recycle. But, you know, there's a lot of CIO and customer roundtables in regional cities. You know, those are quite effective right now because people want some face-to-face, but they don't necessarily want to get on a plane and go to Las Vegas in order to do it. I mean, some of them are, you know, there are a lot of things back in Las Vegas. You think about the meetings that when you were an operating executive, yeah, you go to the sales kickoff, you got to go to this, you got to go to that. There were mandatory face-to-faces that you had to go to, but there was a lot of travel that you probably could have done on Zoom. And then the productivity to the family impact too. Again, think about, again, we're talking about the family and people's personal lives, right? So, you know, got to meet a customer. All right, salesperson wants you to get in front of a customer. Got to fly to New York, take her red-eye, come on back. Like, I mean, that's gone. Yeah, and oh, by the way, the customer doesn't necessarily want to be in the office that day. So, you know, they may or may not be happy about that. So again, it's and not or, right? It's a mix. And I think it's great to see people back to some face-to-face. It's great to see marketing and events back to some face-to-face. It's also great to see that it hasn't gone back to the level it was. I think that's a really healthy dynamic. Well, I'll tell you that from our experience, while we're on the top of a move back to the International Women's Day, is that the productivity of digital, this program we're doing is going to be streaming. We couldn't do this face-to-face because we had everyone fly into an event. We're going to do hundreds of stories that we couldn't have done. We're doing it remote. Because it's better to get the content than not have it. I mean, it's offline. But it's not about getting people to the event and watch the screen for seven hours. It's pick your interview and then engage. So it's a self-service. So we're seeing a lot of the new user experience kind of direct to consumer. And so I think there's going to be a digital first-class citizen with events. So that matches up with the kind of experience but the offline version. Face-to-face optimized for relationships. And that's where the recruiting gets done. That's where people can build these relationships with each other. Yeah, and it can be asynchronous. I think that's a real value proposition. It's a great point. Okay, I want to get into the technology side of the education and re-skilling and those things. I remember in the 80s, computer science was software engineering. You learned like nine languages. You took some doubly courses, one or two, and all the other kind of gut classes in school. Engineering, you had the four-class disciplines and some offshoots of specialization. Now it's incredible the diversity of tracks in all engineering programs and computer science and outside of those departments. Can you speak to the importance of the STEM and the diversity and the technology industry and how this brings opportunity to lower the bar to get in and how people can stay in and grow and keep leveling up? Yeah. Well, look, we're constantly working on how to help the incoming funnel, but then at a university level, I'm on the Foundation Board of Kansas State where I got my engineering degree. I was also chairman of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which was all about diversity in STEM and how do you keep that pipeline going? Because honestly, the US needs more tech resources than we have, and if you don't tap into the diversity of our entire workforce, we won't be able to fill that need. And so we focus a lot on both the funnel, right? That starts the middle school level, particularly for girls, getting them in the situation of hands-on comfort level with coding, with robot building, whatever gives them that confidence. And then keeping that going all the way into university program and making sure that they don't betray outright. And so there's a number of initiatives, whether it's mentoring and support groups and financial aid to make sure that underrepresented minorities, women and other minorities, get through the funnel and stay in. Got it. Though let me ask you, I have two daughters, you have a family of girls too. Is there a vibe difference between the new generation and what's the trends that you're seeing in this next early wave? I mean, not as long as, I don't have it in the middle school, but as people start getting into their adult lives, college and beyond. Is, what's the current point of view posture, makeup of the talent coming in? Yeah. The different orientations, do you see any patterns? What's your observation? Yeah, it's interesting. So if I look at electrical engineering, my major, and if I look at Kansas State, which spends a lot of time on this and I think does a great job, but the diversity of that as a major has not changed dramatically since I was there in the early 80s, where it has changed very significantly is computer science. There are many, many university and college programs around the country where it's 50-50 in computer science from a gender mix perspective, which is huge progress, huge progress. And so, and to me, that's, I think CS is a fantastic degree for tech, regardless of what function you actually end up doing in these companies. I mean, I was an electrical engineer. I never did core electrical engineering work. I went right into sales and marketing and general management roles. So I think a bunch of diverse CS graduates is a really, really good sign. And we need to continue to push on that, but progress has been made. I think the, you know, kind of goes back to the thing we were just talking about, which is the attrition of those, let's just talk about women, right? The attrition of those women, once they got past early career and into mid-career, then was a concern, right? And that goes back to, you know, just the inability to, you know, get it all done. And that I am hopeful is going to be better served now. Well, so it's great to have you on. I know you're super busy. I appreciate you taking the time and contributing to our program on corporate board membership and some of your story and observations and opinions and analysis. Always great to have you and I'll call you contributor for theCUBE. Can jump on one more board, be one of our board contributors for our analysts. I'm at capacity. Final word, what's the big, I see that the table issue that's going well and areas that need to be improved. So I'll speak for my boards because they have made great progress in efficiency, you know, obviously with interest rates going up and the mix between growth and profitability changing in terms of what investors are looking for, many, many companies have had to do a hard pivot from grow at all costs to a healthy balance of growth and profit. And I'm very pleased with how my companies have made that pivot. And I think that is going to make much better companies as a result. I think diversity is something that has not been solved at the corporate level and we need to keep working it. Awesome, thank you for coming on theCUBE. CUBE alumni now contributor on multiple boards, full-time job, love the new challenge and chapter you're on soon will be following. And we'll check in for more updates. And thank you for being a contributor on this program this year and this episode. We're going to be doing more of these quarterly. So we're going to move beyond once a year. So thank you. It's always good to see you John. Thank you. Thanks very much. Talk to you later. This is the CUBE coverage of IWD, National Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.