 Hey everyone, welcome to the AWS partner showcase, Women in Tech. I'm Lisa Martin from theCUBE and today we're going to be looking into the exciting evolution of women in the tech industry. I'm going to be joined by Danielle Grashok, the ISB PSA director at AWS. And we have the privilege of speaking with some wicked smart women from Teradata, NetApp, JFI, a 10th revolution group company and honeycomb.io. We're going to look into some of the challenges and biases that women face in the tech industry, especially in leadership roles. We're also going to be exploring how are these tech companies addressing diversity, equity and inclusion across their organizations? How can we get more young girls into STEM earlier in their careers? So many questions. So let's go ahead and get started. This is the AWS partner showcase, Women in Tech. Hey everyone, welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three. And I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two great guests here with me to talk about women in tech. Hilary Ashton joins us, the chief product officer at Teradata and Danielle Grashok is back with us. The ISB PSA director at AWS. Ladies, it's great to have you on the program talking through such an important topic. Hilary, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us a little bit of an intro into your background and a little bit about Teradata. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Hilary Ashton. I head up the products organization. So that's our engineering product management office of the CTO team at Teradata. I've been with Teradata for just about three years and really have spent the last several decades, if I can say that, in the data and analytics space. I spent time really focused on the value of analytics at scale. And I'm super excited to be here at Teradata. I'm also a mom of two teenage boys. And so as we talk about women in tech, I think there's lots of different dimensions and angles of that at Teradata. We are partnered very deeply with AWS and happy to talk a little bit more about that throughout this discussion as well. Excellent, a busy mom of two teen boys. My goodness, I don't know how you do it. Let's now look at Teradata's views of diversity, equity and inclusion. It's a topic that's important to everyone, but give us a snapshot into some of the initiatives that Teradata has there. Yeah, I have to say, I am super proud to be working at Teradata. We have gone through a series of transformations, but I think it starts with culture and we are deeply committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. It's really more than just a statement here, it's just how we live our lives and we use data to back that up. In fact, we were named one of the world's most ethical companies for the 13th year in a row. And all of our executive leadership team has taken an oath around DENI, that's available on LinkedIn as well. So in fact, our leadership team reporting into the CEO is just about 50, 50 men and women, which is the first time I've worked in a company where that has been the case. And I think as individuals, we can probably appreciate what a huge difference that makes in terms of not just being a representative, but truly being on a diverse and equitable team. And I think it really improves the behaviors that we can bring to our office. There's so much value in that. It's impressive to see about a 50, 50 at the leadership level. That's not something that we see very often. Tell me how you, Hillary, how did you get into tech? Were you an engineering person by computer science or did you have more of a zigzaggy path to where you are now? I'm gonna pick door number two and say more zigzaggy. I started off thinking that I started off as a political science major or a government major. And I was probably destined to go into the law field, but actually took a summer course at Harvard. I did not go to Harvard, but I took a summer course there and learned a lot about multimedia and some programming. And that really set me on a trajectory of how data and analytics can truly provide value and outcomes to our customers. And I have been living that life ever since I graduated from college. So I was very excited and privileged in my early career to work in a company where I found after my first year that I was managing kids, people who had graduated from Harvard Business School and from MIT Sloan School. And that was super crazy because I did not go to either of those schools, but I sort of have always had a natural knack for how do you take technology and the really cool things that technology can do, but because I'm not a programmer by training, I'm really focused on the value that I'm able to help organizations really extract value from the technology that we can create, which I think is fantastic. I think there's so much value in having a zigzag path into tech. You bring, Danielle, you and I have talked about this many times, you bring such breadth and such a wide perspective that really is such a value add to teams. Danielle, talk to us from AWS's perspective about what can be done to encourage more young women to get and underrepresented groups as well to get into STEM and stay. Yeah, and this is definitely a challenge as we're trying to grow our organization and kind of shift the numbers. And the reality is especially with the more senior folks in our organization, unless you bring folks with a zigzag path, the likelihood is you won't be able to change the numbers that you have. But for me, it's really been about looking at that the folks who are just graduating college, maybe in other roles where they are adjacent to technology and to try to spark their interest and show that, yes, they can do it because oftentimes it's really about believing in themselves and realizing that we need folks with all sorts of different perspectives to kind of come in to be able to help really provide both products and services and solutions for all types of people inside of technology which requires all sorts of perspectives. Yeah, the diverse perspectives. There's so much value in this. A lot of data that demonstrates how much value, revenue impact organizations can make by having diversity, especially at the leadership level. Clarie, let's go back to you. We talked about your career path. You talked about some of the importance of the focus on DE&I at Territana. But what do you think can be done to encourage, sorry, to recruit more young women and underrepresented groups into tech? Any carrots there that you think are really important that we need to be dangling more of? Yeah, absolutely. And I'll build on what Danielle just said. I think the bringing in diverse understandings of customer outcomes. I mean, we've really moved from technology for technology sake. And I know AWS and Territana have had a lot of conversations on how do we drive customer outcomes that are differentiated in the market and really being customer centric. And technology is wonderful. You can do wonderful things with it. You can do not so wonderful things with it as well. But unless you're really focused on the outcomes and what customers are seeking, technology is not hugely valuable. And so I think bringing in people who understand voice of customer, who understand those outcomes, and those are not necessarily the folks who are PhD in mathematics or statistics. Those can be people who understand a day in the life of a data scientist or a day in the life of a citizen data scientist. And so really working to bridge the high impact technology with the practical kind of usability, usefulness of data and analytics in our cases, I think is something that we need more of in tech and sort of demystifying tech and freeing technology so that everybody can use it and having a really wide range of people who understand not just the bits and bytes and how to program, but also the value and outcomes that technology through data and analytics can drive. Yeah, you know, we often talk about the hard skills but their soft skills are equally, if not more important, even just being curious, being willing to ask questions, being not afraid to be vulnerable, being able to show those sides of your personality. I think those are important for young women and underrepresented groups to understand that those are just as important as some of the harder technical skills that can be taught. That's right. What do you think about from a bias perspective? Hillary, what have you seen in a tech industry and how do you think we can leverage culture as you talked about to help dial down some of the biases that are going on? Yeah, I mean, I think first of all, and there's some interesting data out there that says that 90% of the population, which includes a lot of women, have some inherent bias in their day behaviors when it comes to women in particular, but I'm sure that that is true across all kinds of diverse and underrepresented folks in the world. And so I think acknowledging that we have bias and actually really learning what that can look like, how that can show up. We might be sitting here thinking, oh, of course, I don't have any bias. And then you realize that as you learn more about different types of bias that actually you do need to kind of account for that and change behaviors. And so I think learning is sort of a fundamental grounding for all of us to really know what bias looks like, know how it shows up in each of us. If we're leaders, know how it shows up in our teams and make sure that we are constantly getting better, we're not gonna be perfect anytime soon, but I think being on a path to improvement to overcoming bias is really critical. And part of that is really starting the dialogue, having the conversations, holding ourselves and each other accountable when things aren't going in a copaesthetic way and being able to talk openly about that felt like maybe there was some bias in that interaction and how do we make good on that? How do we change our behavior fundamentally? Of course, data and analytics can have some bias in it as well. And so I think as we look at the technology aspect of bias, looking at ethical AI, I think is a really important additional area. And I'm sure we could spend another 20 minutes talking about that, but I would be remiss if I didn't talk more about sort of the bias and the opportunity to overcome bias in data and analytics as well. Yeah, the opportunity to overcome it is definitely there. You bring up a couple of really good points, Hillary. It starts with awareness. We need to be aware that there are inherent biases in data, in thoughts, and also to your other point, hold people accountable, ourselves, our teammates. That's critical to being able to dial that back down. Danielle, I want to get your perspective on your view of women in leadership roles. Do you think that we have good representation or we still have work to do in there? I definitely think in both technical and product roles, we definitely have some work to do. And when I think about our partnership with Teradata, part of the reason why it's so important is, Teradata solution is really the brains of a lot of companies, what they differentiate on, how they figure out insights into their business. And it's all about the product itself and the data. And the same is true at AWS. And we really could do some work to have some more women in these technical roles, as well as shaping the products, just for all the reasons that we just kind of talked about over the last 10 minutes, in order to move bias out of our solutions and also to just build better products and have better outcomes for customers. So I think there's a bit of work to do still. I agree. There's definitely a bit of work to do that's all about delivering those better outcomes for customers at the end of the day. We need to figure out what the right ways are of doing that and working together in a community. We've had obviously a lot of change in the last couple of years. Hilary, what have you seen in terms of the impact that the pandemic has had on the status of women in tech? Has it been a pro, a silver lining, the opposite? What are you seeing? Yeah, I mean, certainly there's data out there that tells us factually that it has been very difficult for women during COVID-19. Women have dropped out of the workforce for a wide range of reasons. And that I think is going to set us back, all of us, the royal us or the royal we back, years and years. And it's very unfortunate because I think we were at a time when we're making great progress. And now to see COVID setting us back in such a powerful way, I think there's work to be done to understand how do we bring people back into the workforce? How do we do that? Understanding work-life balance, better understanding virtual and remote working, better I think in the technology sector, we've really embraced hybrid virtual work and are empowering people to bring their whole selves to work. And I think if anything, these Zoom calls have both for the men and the women on my team. In fact, I would say much more so for the men on my team. I was seeing more kids in the background, more kind of split childcare duties, more ability to start talking about other responsibilities that maybe they had, especially in the early days of COVID where maybe daycares were shut down and maybe a parent was sick. And so we saw quite a lot of people bringing their whole selves to the office, which I think was really wonderful. Even our CEO saw some of that and I think that that really changes the dialogue, right? It changes it to maybe scheduling meetings at a time when people can do it after daycare drop-off and really allowing that both for men and for women makes it better for women overall. So I would like to think that this hybrid working environment and that this whole view into somebody's life that COVID has really provided for white collar workers, if I'm being honest, for people who are at a better point of privilege, they don't necessarily have to go into the office every day. I would like to think that tech can lead the way in coming out of the old COVID, I don't know if we have a new COVID coming, but the old COVID and really leading the way for women and for people to transform how we do work, leveraging data and analytics, but also overcoming some of the disparities that exist for women in particular in the workforce. Yeah, I think there's, like we say, there's a lot of opportunity there and I like your point of hopefully tech can be that guiding light that shows us this can be done. We're all humans at the end of the day and ultimately we're able to have some sort of work-life balance, everything benefits. Our work, we're more productive, higher performing teams, impacts customers, right? There's so much value that can be gleaned from that hybrid model and embracing for humans, we need to be able to work when we can. We've learned that you don't have to be in an office 24-7 commuting crazy hours flying all around the world. We can get a lot of things done in ways that fit people's lives rather than taking command over it. I wanna get your advice, Hillary. If you were to talk to your younger self, what would be some of the key pieces of advice you would say? And Danielle and I have talked about this before and sometimes we would both agree on like, ask more questions, don't be afraid to raise your hand, but what advice would you give your younger self and that younger generation in terms of being inspired to get into tech? Oh, inspired and being in tech. You know, I think looking at technology as, in some ways I feel like we do a disservice to inclusion when we talk about STEM. Cause I think STEM can be kind of daunting. It can be a little scary for people, for younger people. When I go and talk to folks at schools, I think STEM is like, oh, all the super smart kids are over there. They're all like, maybe they're all men. And so it's a little intimidating. And STEM is actually, you know, especially for people joining the workforce today, it's actually how you've been living your life since you were born. I mean, you know STEM inside and out because you walk around with a phone and you know how to get your internet working. And like that is technology, right? Fundamentally. And so demystifying STEM as something that is around how we actually make our lives useful and how we can change outcomes through technology, I think is maybe a different lens to put on it. So, and there's absolutely for hard scientists, there's absolutely a great place in the world for folks who wanna pursue that. And men and women can do that. So I don't want to be setting the wrong expectations. But I think STEM is very holistic in the change that's happening globally for us today across economies, across global warming, across all kinds of impactful issues. And so I think everybody who's interested in some of that world change can participate in STEM. It just may be through a different lens than how we classically talk about STEM. So I think there's great opportunity to demystify STEM. I think also what I would tell my younger self is choose your bosses wisely. And that sounds really funny. That sounds like inside out almost, but I think choose the person that you're gonna work for in your first five to seven years and it may be more than one person, but be selective, maybe be a little less selective about the exact company or the exact title. I think picking somebody that, we talk about mentors and we talk about sponsors and those are important, but the person you're gonna spend in your early career a lot of your day with, who's gonna influence a lot of the outcomes for you, that is the person that you, I think want to be more selective about. Because that person can set you up for success and give you opportunities and set you on course to be a standout or that person can hold you back and that person can put you in the corner and not invite you to the meetings and not give you those opportunities. And so we're in an economy today where you actually can be a little bit picky about who you go and work for. And I would encourage my younger self, I actually, I just lucked out actually, but I think that my first boss really set me up for success, gave me a lot of feedback and coaching. And some of it was really hard to hear, but it really set me up for the path that I've been on ever since. So that would be my advice. I love that advice. It's brilliant. I didn't think it, choose your bosses wisely isn't something that we primarily think about. I think a lot of people think about the big name companies that they want to go after and put on a resume, but you bring up a great point. And Danielle and I have talked about this with other guests about mentors and sponsors. I think that is brilliant advice and also more work to do to demystify stand. But luckily we have great family leaders like the two of you helping us to do that. Ladies, I wanna thank you so much for joining me on the program today and talking through what you're seeing and DE and I, what your companies are doing and the opportunities that we have to move the needle. Appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Great to see you Danielle. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS Partner Showcase at season one, episode three. Hey everyone, welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode three with a focus on women in tech. On your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Pereschetti, the EVP of Global, AWS Strategic Alliances at Jefferson Frank, a 10th revolution group company. And Danielle Graschoff, one of our CUBE alumni joins us, ISV PSA director. Ladies, it's great to have you on the program talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart at women in tech. Thank you, Lisa. So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank. What does the company do and about the partnership with AWS? Sure. So let's just start. Jefferson Frank is a 10th revolution group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners, and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called Revolent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem, usually underrepresented groups, over half of them are women. And then we also have a company called Rubira, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the 10th revolution group organization. Got it. Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS's perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. Yes, I mean, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years as we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed, we wanna have an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right? And we know that we need to keep paced with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, giving them paths to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that, of course, I benefited from it, but also I try to bring that into my organization as well and it's super important. Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. I just think that I've been able to get a seat at the table, I think that I feel as though I have folks supporting me very deeply and wanna see me succeed. And also they put me forth as a representative to bring more women into the organization as well. And I think they give me a platform in order to do that like this, but also many other spots as well. And I'm happy to do it because I feel that you always wanna feel that you're making a difference in your job and that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative to bring more women into benefiting from having careers in technology which there's a lot of value there. A lot of value, absolutely. Sue, back over to you. What are some of the trends that you were seeing from a gender night diversity perspective in tech? We know that the numbers of women in technical positions, there's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping out. But what are some of the trends that you're seeing? So that's a really interesting question. And Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you, but just two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco with AWS at the summit and we were talking about this, we were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about the challenges that women have and how hard to believe but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years, which was really, really something that shocked everyone when we were talking about it because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance, working from home, better pay, more flexibility, better maternity leave, seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they couldn't be, you can't be what you can't see. So because we feel collectively women, people who identify as women, just don't see enough women in leadership. They don't see enough mentors. I think I've had great mentors, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have a president of our company, the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson Frank really quickly, we put out a hiring, a salary and hiring guide, a career and hiring guide every year. And the data points, and that's about 65 pages long. No one else does it. It gives an abundance of information around everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. But there is, what I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, being that we have such a very big global platform is to get more women to respond to that survey. So we can get as much information and take action. So. Absolutely, only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS's focus on women in tech. I was watching, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn the TED Talk that the CEO and founder of Girls in Code did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a survey that HP did some years back that showed that 60%, that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less. We've all been in that imposter syndrome conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS's specific focus here to get these numbers up. I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about, how I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and those types of things, but then also more flexible working arrangements. But then also early, how can we actually impact early career women and actually women who are still in school? And our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get more girls exposed to AWS, to technology and make it a less intimidating place. And have them look at employees from AWS and say like, oh, I can see myself in those people and kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think we're limited with the viable pool of candidates when you're talking about mid to late career, but how can we help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after having a child? And how can we help with military women who want to or underrepresented minorities who wanna move into AWS? We have a great military program, but then also just that early high school career, getting them in that trajectory. Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is getting those younger girls before they start to feel there's something wrong with me. I don't get this. Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. Let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that summit that we did. We had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. What, cause that's the goal, right? To make sure that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal. So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs from a very young age. Some people said high school, but then we said even earlier, goes back to you can't be what you can't see. So getting mentoring programs established. We also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And so there was a teachable moment for me there actually. It was really wonderful because an African-American woman said to me, Sue, and I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. And what she said was, Sue, it's really different for me as an African-American woman or she identified as non-binary, but she was relating to African-American women. She said, you're a white woman. Your journey was very different than my journey. And I thought, this is how we're going to learn. I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that. Those are the things that we need to educate people on those moments where we think we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson Frank, we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this. Mentoring, we have a mentor and me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. We have a women's group, a women's leadership group, so much that we do and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far regarding some of the trends and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? Well, I mean, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders on how... It used to be a couple of years back, I would feel like sometimes the solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, oh, this is, Danielle is gonna solve this. And I think a lot of folks now realize, oh, this is something that we all need to solve for. And a lot of my colleagues who maybe a couple of years ago didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics in their organizations, now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with companies like Susan's, work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data and actually make good decisions and feel as though, you know, they often, these are not lived experiences for these folks, so they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data and providing awareness and providing tooling and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned things around in a very positive way. And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective, what is Jefferson Frank doing to get those data points up to get more women of all, well, really underrepresented minorities to be able to provide that feedback so that you can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives. Right. So when I go back to that career in hiring God, that is my focus today really because the more data that we have, I mean, and the data takes, you know, we need people to participate in order to accurately get a hold of that data. So that's why we're asking, we're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world. But if people don't take action, then we can't get the right, the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the world to participate on our website, jeffersonfrank.com, the high in the survey. So we can learn as much as we can. 7% is such a, you know, Daniela and I, we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute some of the other things that we're doing, we're partnering as I mentioned more of these events, we're doing around the summits, we're gonna be having more ED&I events and collecting more information from women. Like I said, internally we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are out there that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, listen, you know, we really are trying to get these numbers up. We wanna attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this hiring guide and offering your own information? So we've got to get that 7% up. We've got to keep talking. We've got to keep getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned women in leadership. The number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've got to get that number up as well because I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or her peers, it inspires me and I feel like, I just wanna give back, make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. Absolutely, we need it. I love that metaphor. I do too. But to your point, to get those numbers up, not just at AWS, but everywhere else, we need, it's a help me, help you situation. So ladies, underrepresented minorities, if you're watching, go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey, help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important cause. Thank you for having me, Lisa. Thank you. My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Partner Showcase. Thanks for your time. Hey everyone, welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase, season one, episode three, women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We've got two female rock stars here with me next. Stephanie Curry joins us, the worldwide head of sales and go-to-market strategy for AWS at NetApp. And Danielle Breschock is back, one of our CUBE alum, ISV PSA director at AWS. Looking forward to a great conversation, ladies, about a great topic. Stephanie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of your story, how you got into tech and what inspired you. Thanks so much, Lisa and Danielle. It's great to be on the show with you. Thank you for that. My name is Stephanie Curry, as Lisa mentioned, I'm the worldwide head of sales for AWS at NetApp and run a global team of sales people that sell all things AWS. Going back 25 years now, when I first started my career in tech, it was kind of by accident. I'd come from a different background, I have a business background and a technical background from school, but I'd been in a different career and I had an opportunity to try something new. I had an ally really that reached out to me and said, hey, you'd be great for this role. And I thought I'd take a chance. I was curious. And it turned out to be a 25 year career that I'm really, really excited about and really thankful for that person for introducing me to the industry. 25 years and counting, I'm sure. Danielle, we've talked about your background before, so what I want to focus on with you is the importance of diversity for high performance. I know what a machine AWS is and Stephanie, I'll come back to you with the same question, but talk about that, Danielle, from your perspective, that importance for diversity to drive the performance. Yeah, I truly believe that in order to have high performing teams, that you have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. And we do find that oftentimes being field facing, if we're not reflecting our customers and connecting with them deeply on the levels that they're at, we end up missing them. And so for us, it's very important to bring people of lots of different technical backgrounds, experiences and of course, both men, women and underrepresented minorities and put that forth to our customers in order to make that connection and to end up with better outcomes, so. Definitely, it's all about outcomes. Stephanie, your perspective and NetApp's perspective on diversity for creating highly performing teams and organizations. I'm really aligned with Danielle in the comments she made and in addition to that, just from building teams in my career, we've had three times as many women on my team since we started a year ago and our results are really showing in that as well. We find the teams are stronger, they're more collaborative and to Danielle's point, really reflective of not only our partners but our customers themselves. So this really creates connections which are really, really important to scale our businesses and really meet the customer where they're at as well. So huge proponent of that ourselves and really finding that we have to be intentional in our hiring and intentional on how we attract diversity to our teams. So Stephanie, let's stay with you. So a three X increase in women on the team in a year, especially the kind of last year that we've had is really incredible. I like your thoughts on there needs to be, there needs to be focus and thought in how teams are hired. Let's talk about attracting and retaining those women now. Especially in sales roles, we all know the number, the percentages of women in technical roles but what are some of the things that you do, Stephanie, that NetApp does to attract and retain women in those sales roles? The attracting part is really interesting and we find that you read the stats and I'd say in my experience, they're also true in the fact that a lot of women would look at a job description and say, I can't do 100% of that so I'm not even going to apply. With the women that we've attracted to our team, we've actually intentionally reached out and targeted those people in a good way to say, hey, we think you've got what it takes. Some of the feedback I've got from those women are, gosh, I didn't think I could ever get this role. I didn't think I had the skills to do that and they've been hired and they are doing a phenomenal job. In addition to that, I think a lot of the feedback I've got from these hires are, hey, it's an aggressive, sales is aggressive, sales is competitive. It's not an environment that I think I can be successful in and what we show them is bring those softer skills around collaboration, around connection, around building teams and they do bring a lot of that to the team. Then they see others like them there and they know they can be successful because they see others like them on the team. The whole concept of we can't be what we can't see but we can be what we can see is so important. You said a couple of things, Stephanie, that really stuck with me and one of them was an interview on theCUBE I was doing I think a couple of weeks ago about women in tech and the stat that we talked about was that women will apply, will not apply for a job unless they need 100% of the skills and the requirements that it's listed but men will if they only meet 60 and that just shocked me that I thought, you know, I can understand that imposter syndrome is real, it's a huge challenge but the softer skills as you mentioned especially in the last two years plus the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate are incredibly important to drive that performance of any team, of any business. Absolutely. Danielle, talk to me about your perspective in AWS as well for attracting and retaining talent and particularly in some of those challenging roles like sales and as Stephanie said can be known as aggressive. Yeah, for sure. I mean, my team is focused on the technical aspect of the field and we definitely have an uphill battle for sure, two things we are focused on first and foremost is looking at early career women and that how can we bring them into this role whether they're in support functions, answering the phone for support calls, et cetera and how can we bring them into this organization which is a bit more strategic, more proactive and then the other thing that as far as retention goes sometimes there will be women who they're on a team and there are no other women on that team and for me it's about building community inside of AWS and being part of, we have women at solution architecture organizations, we have, I just personally connect people as well and like, oh, you should meet this person or you should talk to that person because again, sometimes they can't see someone on their team like them and they just need to feel anchored, especially as we've all been kind of stuck at home during the pandemic just being able to make those connections with women like them has been super important and just being a long tenure at Amazonian that's definitely one thing I'm able to bring to the table as well. That's so important and impactful and spreads across organizations in a good way. Danielle, let's stick with you, let's talk about some of the allies that you've had sponsors, mentors that have really made a difference and I said that in past tense but I also mean in present tense who are some of those folks now that really inspire you? Yeah, I mean, I definitely would say that one of my mentors and someone who has been a sponsor of my career has Matt Yanchishin who is one of our control tower GMs. He has really sponsored my career and definitely been a supporter of mine and pushed me in positive ways which has been super helpful. And then other of my business partners you know, Sabina Joseph who's a CUBE alum as well she definitely has been, was a fabulous partner to work with and you know, between the two of us for a period of time we definitely felt like we could, you know conquer the world, it's very great to go in with another strong woman, you know and get things done inside of an organization like AWS. Absolutely, and Sabina I've interviewed her several times. So Stephanie, same question for you. You talked a little bit about your kind of one of your original early allies in the tech industry. But talk to me about allies, sponsors, mentors who have and continue to make a difference in your life. Yeah, I think it's a great differentiation as well, right? Because I think that mentors teach us, sponsors show us the way and allies make room for us at the table. And that is really, really key difference. I think also as women leaders we need to make room for others at the table too and not forget those softer skills that we bring to the table. Some of the things that Danielle mentioned as well about making those connections for others, right and making room for them at the table. Some of my allies, a lot of them are men. Brian Abig was my first mentor. He actually was in the distribution, was in distribution with Abnet tech data no longer there. Corey Hutchinson who's now at Hashi Corp he's also another ally of mine and remains an ally of mine even though we're not at the same company any longer. So a lot of these people transcend careers and transcend different positions that I've held as well and make room for us. And I think that's just really critical when we're looking for allies and when allies are looking for us. I love how you described allies, mentors and sponsors, Stephanie and the difference. I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a couple of years ago. Do you talk with some of those younger females on your team so that when they come into the organization and maybe they're fresh out of college or maybe they've transitioned into tech so that they can also learn from you and understand the importance and the difference between the allies and the sponsors and the mentors? Absolutely. And I think that's really interesting because I do take an extra approach and extra time to really reach out to the women that have joined the team. One I want to make sure they stay, right? I don't want them feeling, hey, I'm alone here and I need to go do something else. And they are located around the world on my team. They're also different age groups so early in career as well as more senior people and really reaching out, making sure they know that I'm there but also as Danielle had mentioned connecting them to other people in the community that they can reach out to for those same opportunities and making room for them. Make room at the table. It's so important and you never know what a massive difference and impact you can make on someone's life. And I bet there's probably a lot of mentors and sponsors and allies of mine that would be surprised to know the massive influence they've had. Danielle, back over to you. Let's talk about some of the techniques that you employ that AWS employs to make the work environment a great place for women to really thrive and be retained as Stephanie was saying, of course that's so important. Yeah, I mean, definitely I think that the community building as well as we have a bit more programmatic mentorship we're trying to get to the point of having a more programmatic sponsorship as well. But I think just making sure that both everything from recruit to onboard to everboarding that they're the women who come into the organization whether it's they're coming in on the software engineering side or the field side or the sales side that they feel as though they have someone working with them to help them drive their career. Those are the key things that I think from an organizational perspective are happening across the board. For me personally, when I run my organization I'm really trying to make sure that people feel that they can come to me at any time, open door policy, make sure that they're surfacing any times in which they are feeling excluded or anything like that, any challenges whether it be with a customer, a partner or with a colleague. And then also of course just making sure that I'm being a good sponsor to people on my team. That is key. You can talk about it but you have to start with yourself as well. That's a great point. You've got to start with yourself and really reflect on that. And look am I embodying what it is that I need and not that I know they need that focused thoughtful intention on that is so important. So let's talk about some of the techniques that you use that NetApp uses to make the work environment a great place for those women are marginalized communities to really thrive. Yeah, and I appreciate it. Much like Danielle and much like AWS we have some of those more structured programs, right? Around sponsorship and around mentorship probably some growth opportunities for allies because I think that's more of a newer concept in really an informal structure around the allies but something that we're growing into at NetApp. On my team personally I think leading by example is really key and unfortunately a lot of the life stuff still lands on the women. Whether we like it or not I have a very active husband in our household but I still carry when it push comes to shove it's on me. And I wanna make sure that my team knows it's okay to take some time and do the things you need to do with your family. I show off as myself authentically and I encourage them to do the same. So it's okay to say, hey, I need to take a personal day. I need to focus on some stuff that's happening in my personal life this week. Now obviously make sure your job's covered but just allowing some of that softer vulnerability to come into the team as well. So that others, men and women can feel they can do the same thing and that it's okay to say I need to balance my life and I need to do some other things alongside. So it's the formal programs making sure people have awareness on them. I think it's also softly calling people out on biases and saying, hey, I'm not sure if you know this landed that way but I just wanted to make you aware. And usually the feedback is, oh my gosh, I didn't know and could you coach me on something that I could do better next time? So all of this is driven through our NetApp formal programs but then it's also how you manifest it on the teams that we're meeting. Absolutely and sometimes having that mirror to reflect into can be really eye-opening and allow you to see things in a completely different light, which is great. You both talked about kind of being what you can see and I know both companies are customer obsessed in a good way. Talk to me a little bit, Danielle, I'll go back over to you about the AWS NetApp partnership, some of that maybe alignment on performance on, obviously you guys are very well aligned in terms of that but also it sounds like you're quite aligned on diversity and inclusion. Well, we definitely do, we have the best partnerships with companies in which we have these value alignments. So I think that is a positive thing of course but just from a partnership perspective, from my five now plus years of being a part of the APN this is one of the most significant years with our launch of FSX for NetApp with that key service which we're making available natively on AWS. I can't think of a better testament to the partnership than that and that's doing incredibly well and it really resonates with our customers and of course it started with customers and their need for NetApp. So that is a reflection, I think of the success that we're having together. And Stephanie talk to about the partnership from your perspective, NetApp, AWS what you guys are doing together, cultural alignment but also your alignment on really bringing diversity into drive performance. Yeah, I think it's a great question and I have to say it's just been a phenomenal year. Our relationship has started before our first party service with FSXN but definitely just the trajectory between the two companies since the announcement about nine months ago has just taken off to a new level. We feel like an extended part of the family. We work together seamlessly. A lot of the people on my team often say we feel like Amazonians and we're really part of this transformation at NetApp from being that storage hardware company into being an ISV in a cloud company. And we could not do this without the partnership with AWS and without the first party service of FSXN that we've recently released. I think that those joint values that Danielle referred to are critical to our success starting with customer obsession and always making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer. We coach our teams all the time on if you are doing the right thing for the customers you cannot do anything wrong. Just always put the customer in the center of your decisions. And I think that there is a lot of best practice sharing and collaboration as we go through this change. And I think a lot of it is led by the diverse backgrounds that are on the team, female, male, race and so forth and just to really have different perspectives and different experiences about how we approach this change. So we definitely feel like part of the family. We are absolutely loving working with the AWS team and our team knows that we are the right place, the right time with the right people. I love that. Last question for each of you and I wanna stick with you, Stephanie. Advice to your younger self, think back 25 years. What advice would you, seeing what you've accomplished and maybe the turns and serendipitous route that you've taken along the way what would you advise your younger Stephanie self? I would say keep being curious, right? Keep being curious, keep asking questions. And sometimes when you get a no, it's not a bad thing. It just means not right now. And find out why and try to get feedback as to why maybe that wasn't the right opportunity for you. But just go for what you want, continue to be curious, continue to ask questions and find a support network of people around you that wanna help you because they are there and they wanna see you be successful too. So never be shy about that stuff. Absolutely. And I always say, failure does not have to be a bad effort. A no can be the beginning of something amazing. Danielle, same question for you, thinking back to when you first started in your career, what advice would you give your younger self? Yeah, I think the advice I'd give my younger self would be don't be afraid to put yourself out there. It's certainly, coming from an engineering background, maybe you wanna stay behind the scenes, not do a presentation, not do a public speaking event, those types of things. But back to what the community really needs, I genuinely now took me a while to realize it, but I realized I needed to put myself out there in order to allow younger women to see what they could be. So that would be the advice I would give. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. Absolutely. That advice that you both gave is so fantastic, so important, and so applicable to everybody. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there, ask questions, don't be afraid of a no, that it's all gonna happen at some point or many points along the way, but can also be good. So thank you, ladies. You inspired me. I appreciate you sharing what AWS and NetApp are doing together to strengthen diversity, to strengthen performance, and the advice that you both shared for your younger selves was brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS Partner Showcase. See you next time. Hey, everyone, welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase, season one, episode three, Women in Tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me next. Vera Reynolds is here, engineering manager telemetry at Honeycomb. And one of our Cube alumni, Danielle Gregshawk, ISV PSA director at AWS, joins us as well. Ladies, it's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background in tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years, but yeah, I started tech in 2012. I was an engineer for most of that time and just recently as of March, switched to engineering management here at Honeycomb. And throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right? And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different companies and products and I've done things from web development, mobile to platforms. It would be apt to call me a generalist. And in the more recent years, I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me, that came in the form of Cloud Foundry, CircleCI, and now Honeycomb. I actually had my eye on Honeycomb for a while before joining. I came across a blog post by Charity Majors, who's one of our founders, and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right for your career. And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her. Found the company. They were pretty small at the time, so I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand, they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their code in production and answering questions about what is happening, what are users seeing, and I felt that pain. I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from an amazing woman, which I haven't seen before. So I came across Charity Majors again, Christine Nien, who's our other founder, and then Liz Funk-Jones, who's our principal developer advocate, and that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. Yeah, Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at Honeycomb. Yeah, you know, historically, we have tried not to overindex on that because there was this maybe fear or rariness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shifts recently because we believe that with great responsibility, with great power comes great responsibility. And we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. So I would say that for me, it was a choice between a few offers, right? And that was a selling point for sure, because again, I've never experienced it. And I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Even me being here and me moving into management, I think we're both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so it's been a great ride. Excellent, sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership, I do want to have you there, talk to the audience a little bit about Honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators? Yeah, absolutely. So Honeycomb is an observability tool that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguard, Slack, HelloFresh, just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain and you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we're different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. What I mean by rich data is something that has a lot of attributes. So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which region they were in, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. As a kind of rich data contextual data, we refer to this having high granularity and high dimensionality, which are big words, but at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using Honeycomb to understand and observe their system and they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. They can go into Honeycomb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app and they operated their app last week that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out on your data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right? Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong and we can do that even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay, you're not actually getting paid from it but your customers are telling you that something's wrong and we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. Excellent, it sounds like that's where you really shine that real-time visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, I wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the Honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. Yeah, so, excuse me, observability is obviously a very important segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS because a lot of all of our customers as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so Honeycomb is an advanced technology partner. They've been working with us for quite some time and their solution is listed on the marketplace. Definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers and they have many integrations which we've seen is key to success, being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS, things in that area as well. And so very important partner in the observability market that we have. Vera, back to you. Let's kind of unpack the partnership of significance that Honeycomb is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. Yeah, absolutely. I know that this predates me to some extent but I know for a long time AWS and Honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together and I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There's kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side there is our own infrastructure. So Honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does so in a pretty unorthodox way. So we've had a long standing conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use this to college you in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. That also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. And then that way we can be sort of the guinea pigs and try things out in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance but also allows again other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both Honeycomb users and AWS users because as you imagine quite a big overlap and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to Honeycomb. So for example, last year we built a tool based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambos to get that telemetry data out of their applications into Honeycomb and it then was with Nguyen. Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective. You're sticking with you and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how Honeycomb supports DE&I across its organization and how was that synergistic with AWS's approach, Vera? Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to overindex on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we're recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives and we also noticed that we can do better and we should do better. And to that, and we're doing a few things differently that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Some examples would be AfroTech, Hue, Loutinas and Tech among a number of others. And another initiative is DEI Head Start. That's something that is an internal practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for Honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech. And the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is will lead to more diverse hires in the longterm. That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the Honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for DEI is really significant. I'm packed that a little bit for us. Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it with the companies that we work with, but also in terms of what we want to be able to do. Excuse me, it's very important for us to build products that reflect the customers that we have. And I think working with a company like Honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space by bringing in the experiences of many different types of people, I genuinely believe and I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives that we're able to then build better products for our customers. And it's one of our leadership principles is rooted in this, our right a lot. It asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives. And you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our DEI thought process is rooted. And companies like Honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them to do what they need to do in their unique environments is super important, so. The importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that can be pivotal to organizations and it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies. Vera, I wanna go back to you for a second. I think you mentioned this, the DEI Head Start Program. That's an internal program at Honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand and how it works is we try to make sure to preload our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities and that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network and make sure that we give those applicants a Head Start, so to speak. Excellent, I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of your background. We've got Vera's background in tech. She's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer back actually in the late 90s during the first dot com bubble and have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS as a customer-facing solutions architect. I do think spending a lot of time hands-on definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome issues that folks suffer from, not to say I don't at all, but it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teams at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change as far as their composition and I'm grateful to be part of it. It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better. Last question for each of you and we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice or your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual contributor positions and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? Definitely for the individual contributors, tech is a great career direction and you will always be able to find women like you. You have to maybe just work a little bit harder to have community in that. But then as a leader, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead. Take the lead, let that be your same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me the advice would be if you're starting out don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there and I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that if you're a more senior IC or in the leadership role also being able to model just saying I don't know how this works and going and figuring out amateurs together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. I totally agree, I've been in that same situation where just to ask the question because I'm guaranteed there's a million out of people in the room probably has to have the same question and because of impasto syndrome don't want to admit I don't understand that, can we back up? But I agree with you, I think that is one of the best things, raise your hand and ask a question. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me talking about Honeycomb and AWS what you're doing together from my technology perspective and the focused efforts that each company has on DE and I we appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for having us. Great talking to you. My pleasure. Likewise for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the AWS partner showcase Women in Tech. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one episode three and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Grashok the ISV PSA director at AWS and the sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle it's great to see you and talk about such an important topic. Yes, and I will tell you all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do and I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of so. I agree and we're going to get to that because advice is one of the main things that our audience is going to hear. We have Hilary Ashton you'll see from Teradata Vera Reynolds joins us from Honeycomb Stephanie Curry from NetApp and Sue Periscetti from Jefferson Frank and the topics that we dig into are first and foremost diversity, equity and inclusion. That is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things Danielle that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw from a thematic perspective over and over was that like Vera Reynolds was talking about the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with DE&I initiatives. And that intention was a common thing that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that that we heard about being intentional, working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where DE&I is concerned. What are your, what were some of the things that stuck out to you? Absolutely, I think each one of us is working inside of organizations where in the last five to 10 years there's been a strong push in this direction mostly because we've really seen first and foremost by being intentional that you can change the way your organization looks but also just that without being intentional there was just a lot of outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for a healthy and productive environment, working environment. And so a lot of these companies have made a big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in. And so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about especially as these are all partnerships that we have how these align with our values, so. Yeah, that value alignment that you bring up is another thing that we heard consistently with each of the partners. There's a cultural alignment, there's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS. There's a DENI alignment that they have. And I think everybody also kind of agreed. Stephanie Curry talked about, it's really important for diversity on impacting performance, highly-performant teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in this. Absolutely, and I definitely even feel that there are studies out there that tell you that you make better products if you have all of the right input and you're getting many different perspectives, but not just that, but I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also the teams that I work alongside. Arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities. Tech is a little bit behind, but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well in technical roles. But you can just see the difference in the outcomes. At least I personally can just in the adjacent teams of mine. That's awesome. We talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented groups and retaining them, that retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? Yeah, I think especially speaking with Hillary and hearing how Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work, work for everybody. I think that is definitely, when I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first concerns that they have, like am I going to be able to, go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus or am I going to be able to be at my kid's conference or even just have enough work-life balance that I can do the things that I wanna do outside of work beyond children and family. So these are all very important and questions that especially women come and ask, but also it kind of is a bell-weather for, is this gonna be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work and then I'm also gonna be able to have that balance that I need. So I think that was something that is changing a lot and many people are thinking about work a lot differently. Absolutely, the pandemic not only changed how we think about work. You know, initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work? And that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period, but we're seeing the hybrid model, we're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance, which at the end of the day, it's so much better for product development, for the customers as you talked about it, it's a win-win. Absolutely. And you know, definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation to be able to put up boundaries. But I think at least I personally have been able to find the way to do it. And I hope that, you know, everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up to effectively have a harmonious, you know, work life where you can still be at home most of the time, but also, you know, have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that from a work-life balance perspective leads into one of the next topics that we covered in detail with, and that's mentors and sponsors, the differences between them, recommendations from the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that Hilary said that I thought was fantastic advice where mentors and sponsors are concerned is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially young people, not necessarily young people, I shouldn't say that, that are attracted to a company. It's brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way. But I thought that was really poignant advice that Hilary provided, something that I'm gonna take into consideration myself. Yeah, and I honestly hadn't thought about that, but as I reflect through my own career, I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me with my career. But if you don't have the ability to do that, or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to find a mentor for a period of time, or just enable for you to be able to get from say a point A to point B, just for a temporary period, just so you can grow into your next role, have a particular outcome that you wanna drive, have a particular goal in mind, find that person who's been there and done that, and they can really help you get through. If you don't have the luxury of picking your manager, at least be able to pick a mentor who can help you get to the next step. Exactly, I thought that advice was brilliant and something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several other women about imposter syndrome. You know, that's something that everybody, I think regardless of gender, of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real. This is how it happened to me. This is how I navigated around or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. Absolutely, and I think the key there is just acknowledging it, but also just hearing all the different techniques on how folks have dealt with it because everybody does. You know, even some of the smartest, most confident men I've met in industry still talk to me about how they have it. And I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but it is very common. And hopefully we talk about some good techniques to deal with that. I think we do, you know, one of the things that when we were asking our audience, our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves? What would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in STEM and in tech? And everybody sort of agreed on me, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader. I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives. And that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know how many people have the same question sitting in the room. Well, and also, you know, for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that, you know, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you're always going to have new things to learn. And you can spend, you know, back to we talked about the zicking and zagging through careers where, you know, we'll have different experiences. All of that kind of comes through just, you know, being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So, yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, I don't know all the answers, but I want to learn is a key thing, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well. Definitely, I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too that we also talked about is, the word no doesn't always mean a dead end. It can often mean not right now, or maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is going to learn, is that, you know, failure is not necessarily a bad F word if you turn it into opportunity. No, isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door. And I thought that was a really positive message that our guests had to share with the audience. Yeah, totally. I can say I had a mentor of mine, a very strong woman who told me, you know, your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows and that's natural. And, you know, that when you say that not right now, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes when you can. Exactly. Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hilary Vera, Stephanie Sue, and you, so much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this partner showcase, season one, episode three, Danielle, thanks so much for helping us with this. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a blast. I really appreciate it. All right. Audience, we want to thank you. Enjoy this, enjoy the episode.