 First of all, welcome everybody. This is the Women in Technology panel. It's a great pleasure to have you here. I'm Helge Zaitzen, I'm the SID president. But this particular event is probably one of the ones closest to my heart at this play week, mainly because a few years ago, Sri did tell me what to do. So I'm a very firm believer that a diverse boardroom is a better room, that a diverse company is a better company, and therefore that a diverse society, capital S society as in the Society for Information Display, is a better society if we have a broad, diverse representation in it. And so over the last few years on the executive board, we've made a lot of strides to push for all forms of diversity, regional growth, gender diversity, obviously, but also diversity in the sense of shifting from a hard technology focus towards inclusion of our business and product line management type of colleagues. And so three years ago, three years ago, Sri got inspired to create the Women in Tech Forum. And I immediately lent my enthusiastic support, as I do with all things, this wonderful guy does. And so here we are. We started the third Women in Tech Forum. It's now being joined by actually quite a lot of diversity-oriented events at this play week. So all day today, actually, we have the young career sequence of events and events that are another sort of underserved demographic that traditionally our society did not embrace as much as we should. And in fact, right after this, we'll have a networking reception where we'll bring all the different streams together, the early career part, the women in technology, the business-oriented programs, and so forth, so that we can all co-mingle in that. So this is an important event. I thank you all for attending. We are looking forward to a great panel. We will not introduce the panel, because that will be done in the second by Jenny, our esteemed moderator, who I do want to introduce, though, are our sponsors. Events like this benefit greatly from sponsorship, not just for what you see here and some support and so forth for the speakers, but mostly actually so we get food and booze right after at the networking reception. So that's really the key component. We just have to wait through it. I'm just apologizing, ladies. So our first sponsor is Clear Ink, where there you go. Fengyue was just going to have a quick few words, all yours. Which one, boss? Such an honor. Thank you. I'd like to start with a picture. You can see on your, this is left, it's a rosy derivative. And it was initially posted at Westinghouse factories in the early 1940s. It was produced as a nationwide effort to encourage more women to join the workforce, while American men were enlisting for the wall. It is deemed as the most iconic image for working women. And during World War II, it is estimated about 60 million women joined the workforce. Some never worked before. They become steel workers, streetcar drivers, construction crew, as well as office workers. We have made great progress today. Women dominate the professional workforce, 56%. When it comes to technology, however, the numbers can be quite different. IT jobs, 25%, helped my women. And engineers in Silicon Valley startups, 12% helped my women. And startup owned by 5% owned by women. Why is the difference? You can look at a comic that explains some of the bias that's common and still in the society. So if you're a man, you can't do math, then it's just you. If you're a woman, you can't do math, then women cannot do math. The question is, what can we do? I'd like to share a story first. I know a young girl who became very interested in science in grade school. She read extensively from science fiction to real science. And her dream was to become an astronaut. And she was a good student. She was asked to make a speech at a school gathering about my dream. And she definitely wrote a speech. And her speech is about I want to become an astronaut. In the end, she was asked to change the speech and her dream to I want to become a teacher when I grow up. Why? Because women don't become astronauts. I have to admit, I was that girl. I still read about science. I still gaze upon the star and wonder what's out there. But I conformed and I conceded. My first job was indeed in teaching. My parents were happy. I landed a safe career. I would be taking care of the rest of my life. But I was not. So when I realized I would never be happy living someone else's life and expectations, I made a choice. I started all over in business again. It took a lot of courage for me to start from scratch. And I did it because I made a choice to become true to myself, to know what I really want, and have the courage to pursue it. So as of today, employers and the society, including ClearInk, we still have to do a lot about encouraging women and support women's technology in career. But I joined ClearInk because I believe in the technology. I see a bright future. And I want to have the chance to make a difference. And also, the most important reason is I want to make sure I'm true to myself. That's why I made a choice that matters to me. And I choose to have no regrets. So we have made this far. We are going to change the technology world again. We can do it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And I'm pleased to report that up in Canada, our head of state and governor general and good friend, Julie Payette, is an astronaut, or was an astronaut becoming head of state of at least a small country. So it can be done, all aspects of it. The other sponsorship returning yet again, and thank you so much in advance for that, is Microsoft Linyu Rao. I think you were going to say a few words. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Linyu Rao. I'm from the Microsoft Surface Display Development Group. Microsoft is super excited about sponsoring this event. And for me, personally, it's such a great privilege to stand here again to share and cheer for women in tech. So I used to work in a startup company. I was the only women engineer in the entire team. It was a great team, and everybody respected me. At that time, I was responsible for all the display activities in a smaller company. The majority of the customer or the suppliers that I have worked with are male engineers. I often received emails calling me Mr. Rao. Or sometimes when we met for the first time in person, they would say, ah, sorry, I did not know that you're a woman, you're a lady. I would just smile and reply back, yes, and I am your counterpart. So I view this as a reflection of the culture in the society. And the assumption is that the STEM world is for men. And this is exactly the barrier women are facing when pursuing STEM-related career or even leadership positions. So today, I'm glad that I'm standing here because we all want to cheer and share those women in technology stories. So in this tech world today, women are vastly underrepresented. And this disparity is not an indication that women cannot do math, cannot do STEM, or cannot lead. On the opposite, there are plenty of successful women in tech, like our speakers here today, like all who are sitting here today. There is a Chinese saying, women hold up half of the sky. It's not just about population. Women can bring a diversified voice and a different perspective. Women know women better. So this is already half of the world's business. I mean real business. So again, in this world recently, there have been a lot of focus to help in this perspective and brings a lot of attention to the movement, like Me Too movement, like Time's Up movement. Despite this focus, we still hear a lot of stories like harassment or discriminations for women or female engineers, female employees. I think the problem is that the cultural is even more deep rooted than we thought. So in this case, we really need the courage and support amongst us, as well as our men, Alice, to do this together to shift this mindset. I know this is a long way to go, but we should all sign up for this. I feel grateful that the companies that I have worked for are all supporting women, supporting diversity and inclusion. I deeply believe that we need a very open society to bring this diversity to life, to embrace the unique strengths of different gender, and why we are urging for this open society to self-believe and self-confidence are the keys to success. So go feel this, women in tech. Thank you. It's actually been 11 years at Display Week or with SID, but I don't know if it's a compliment that it seems like more, or I'm not sure, but anyway. Yes, I am Jenny Donilon, and I am the Director of Marketing and Publications for Palisades Convention Management. And I'm also a technology journalist of, with many years' experience. I started out at Zip Davis. I worked for PC Magazine. I also work for Byte Magazine, if anyone remembers that publication. And Computer Graphics World, which is a magazine that enjoys a relationship with the conference and organization SIGGRAPH in sort of a way that, similar to how information display works with SID and Display Week. And then I was an editor with Information Display for about 10 years. So that brings us to today. I remember when I started coming to Display Week, there were two things that really struck me because I've been to a lot of trade shows, SIGGRAPH and CES and Comdex, which is now gone. And I noticed that Display Week was a very calm and quiet and peaceful show compared to those other shows. And I also noticed that if I went to the bathroom, I had my choice of 10 enormous bathrooms and there was never another woman in there, which, you know, that's great in a way. It's great when you need to use the bathroom, but what it indicates about the population as a whole is probably not so positive. So I think that events like this are fantastic and I'm really delighted to be part of it because I've seen all two of them leading up to this. And I did want to give a shout out to Tara Akavan, who has been the moderator, was the moderator last year. And if Shree is the brain of women in tech, then Tara Akavan is maybe its heart and soul. And she just did a fantastic job assembling panelists. And I remember leaving the panel last year and feeling very revved up and excited. So she had a baby girl about three weeks ago. So obviously cannot be here, but she is with us in spirit. So that's pretty much it for that and I'm gonna introduce our great panelists and I thank them for being here. You can come on up. I will start out with Lee Epting. She is an advisor, speaker and technology consultant. Next is Samantha Phoenix. I'm sure a lot of you know Samantha very well, also as Sam and she is vice president of R&D with Plain Our L.A. Yard Company. Did I get that right? Yeah, I've been practicing that. I've been saying it wrong all my life. And Consuelo Valverde, who is founder and managing partner of SV Latham Capital. So please give them a hand. Thank you. Well, I have introduced myself. So I would love to hear from the three of you and maybe Lee will start, will go alphabetically this way. You could give us a little bit about your background and what you're working on these days. Great, thank you for having me here today. So my career started in the Valley. I actually most notably worked, I worked for a lot of different businesses in the Valley but the most notable ones was Plum Computing and then going on to be one of the founding team members of Handspring and we worked on handheld digital devices that ultimately then came with the first integrated smartphone for the industry arguably, there were others that did do some things like Symbian and others and Scion but nonetheless had a great, great, great time with those startups but ultimately decided that I wanted to move on to bigger ground. So I took a position with Nokia in Finland and was the first executive I believe if not first woman executive in 150 years of that company to move to Finland and work as an executive in the company. I was pretty daunting. I moved from Woodside, California and a beautiful home overlooking an estuary into the dead of Finnish winter at minus 20. I had a baby that was one years old and my husband and a dog not in that order. We all went together and I had a real big curve to go up coming out of Silicon Valley. So it was brave and I learned a lot about living in Finnish culture and such and had to be successful in a company like Nokia and after that then I moved to another large telecom provider called Vodafone and I was based out of London for that role and I decided that that was a great learning ground and I had huge amount of resources to really impact things at a global level like trying to close the gender gap divide of women ownership of mobile phones. 300 million women without mobile phones in emerging markets, why? Cultural, religious and because of their sex. So how do you close that gap? So I got to work with people like Tony Blair's Wai Sheri Blair and Hillary Clinton and others on doing that. So that was a great learning ground for me but I didn't want to be at a telco because it's all about selling air and I needed something more physical. So I went to Samsung and people said, I'm gonna go to Samsung, Korean company. How are you going to do that? How's that gonna work for you? And I thought, well, it's a great opportunity again to learn about another culture and to be once again, I believe the only woman executive in Europe amongst my 90 other CEO, president level that were there that were all men and I was the only woman. So not only the bathroom was always empty for me but when we would go to Korea and have food and everyone had to lose their shoes before we went in to sit down and eat there was about 180 pairs of shoes and my Chanel shoes sitting in the middle. And I remember taking a picture of that once and saying there's something wrong with that. Nonetheless, though, I had a wonderful time there and so I decided then to leave my corporate career and come back to the US a few years ago. I'm a citizen of the UK, I'm a citizen of the US and I also do to be a Italian citizen as well because my husband's from Italy but I came back to the US so our son could go to school and get ready for his college education which is now coming this next year. So I took a break from my large corporate roles and I've been doing some tech consulting and advisory work and really enjoying that. Just sort of being able to have freedom to kind of do what I wanted to do and get interested and contribute to areas of businesses that I might not have been able to do under my former or more let's say strict corporate career roles. And that's me in a nutshell. Thank you, thank you. It's very impressive. Sam, what about you? I don't know how I could follow you. I know, I know. True girl. You can, yeah. So let's see, so I'm an immigrant. I grew up in Northern Ireland in Belfast in the 70s which was super exciting. Though I didn't know it at the time. And I have a computer science degree and after college I moved to the States. I moved to Portland, Oregon, Silicon Forest. I heard there was a lot of tech jobs there so I thought I'd give it a go. And I worked for a small company that made air traffic control and medical devices. Kind of strange mix. And we were acquired by Barco, a Belgian company, a couple of years after that. And I spent a long time there. I was probably there I think 13 years. Again, started as a software engineer. My boss who was actually a woman and a good friend went on maternity leave and they asked me to cover for her while she was gone. And she stayed away for eight years. So my management had been completely by accident and we're still friends even though she abandoned me. So I got into management. I ended up running the software team and then the all of engineering team and then I did my MBA and I actually became the general manager for the division in Oregon. And at that time I was the most senior, like the only senior leader female in tech in Barco. It's quite a male company. West Flanders is quite a male dominated part of the world. And after that I went to Dow and then Intel and wanted to exercise some of the learning that I had through my MBA program to see the other side of business. So I worked in vertical strategy and business development alliances until Jerry Purkel, who was the CEO of Planner, came calling and wanted me to come run his R&D organization. And Planner was a spin-off from TechTronics. We've got a lot of alumni here, Shree being one of them. And so I came back to the display business back to running research and development which is where my passion is. Back to displays which is where my passion is. I've actually been coming to CID for, I don't know, 20 something years at this point. And we were acquired three years ago by Liyard which is a Chinese company, the market leader in fine-pitch LED which is a display technology that CID seems to have passed by. And yeah, I think that's about it for me. Okay, well everybody has really different experience and you as a venture capitalist, probably the most different of all. So why don't you tell us about your path? Yeah, I'm also an immigrant, like Sam. I'm originally from Mexico. I moved to San Francisco 14 years ago but before that I grew up in Mexico, spent a lot of time in Florida, spent particularly Miami, my dad was Cuban. So where do Cubans go in Miami? So I loved science when I was a young girl. I asked a lot of questions. I had a dad, a father that encouraged me a lot into science and being independent. So I would spend the summers taking private physics lessons because I wanted to be ahead or something like that. And so I remember having a conversation with my dad when I was 11 years old and he was taking me to school and he told me, hey, there's a new area in science called computer science. I just read about it in the newspaper. Since you like math and physics so much, probably you should get into that. And I was like, okay, well, I'll take that into account. So when I graduated from high school, I was not even 16 years old so I had to wait a little bit and I went to college at University of Miami because we had family there and it would be easier for me to adapt. So I was gonna major in computer science but the first day when I was in school, I learned that because computer science was part of the School of Arts and Sciences, I would have to take history, English, whatever language is. And I was like, I don't like paragraphs, I just like numbers. Where do I find numbers? School of engineering, okay. So that's why I'm an electrical engineer. I did end up doing a master's in computer science and then a master's in science entrepreneurship in the UK, how to turn science into business. Then I started a PhD in genomics medicine. I really liked biology so I wish I was born probably 10 years later so I could be doing computational biology or something crazy like that. And so I dropped out from that PhD. I didn't finish. It was more as part of a strategy that I got into that that I thought I needed that experience and I have a fellowship, a Coffman fellowship in venture capital. So my career probably started as an entrepreneur moving back to Mexico. I couldn't get a job as an electrical engineer, woman, 20 year old. I looked at the newspaper, everybody was looking for a guy. At that time, they were like, okay, gender, masculine. I'm like, okay, I can do that. So I'll show up to the interviews anyway. I don't know what they were thinking. So I don't know if that's why I never got a job or what was the reason. So I created my own job. My dad had always been an entrepreneur. So I thought I will just start a PC manufacturing company. So that's what I did first. That was before NAFTA. So I was importing pieces from Taiwan and we, oh, I used to go to Convix. I went to Convix with my dad. You know, buying pieces. I might have been there. Who knows? You know, all that stuff. And I did a series of other entrepreneurship endeavors like an IT training center and then I got involved in the government. So I've also been in politics, head of innovation, science and technology. I don't like politics, but I like doing things that matter and being involved in things that have impact in the world. Fast forward when I come to the US and I had always from, well, actually from 2005 I wanted to start a VC fund based originally in Mexico and I would go to the UK as I had been there before for my masters, but I ended up here. And 2013 I start the venture fund and at the time there was probably up to two or three years ago before the Me Too movement, there was less than 4% of partners that VC firms were women. So I know from many friends that want to get into the industry, it's really hard. So again, I think I created my own job, basically. And I started, I like hard things. So I started not only a VC fund in Silicon Valley as a Mexican immigrant, but focused in science and technology. So investing in science and technology enabled startups with a focus in Latin America. This was before Latin America was hot in the valley. It was when Mexico was, let's go to Cancun. And that's it. So people will ask, oh, are there engineers in Mexico? We didn't know. We thought only in India, it's like the US. So I got those kind of questions. And so that's where I am right now. We have the connection to display week province. One of our investments is that I'm very proud of. They're here in this room, and it's ARIS materials. Two Mexican co-founders born in Mexico, did their PhDs in the US. The University of Texas in Dallas, and they're doing optical filters for display applications. Thank you. It really strikes me how important it is to have that supportive parent or somebody, that supportive somebody early on makes all the difference. Especially that it was your dad. That's great. I'd like to ask each of you, starting with you, Sam, about some advice that you might have for your younger self. Because I know as a woman, in business or in business, there are things I wish I had known when I was younger. I mean, there are things, I berate myself for things I did the week before, but I think that it's really important to share the lessons that we've learned. So maybe you could tell us the most important piece of advice you'd have for young Sam starting out. Yeah, I think one of the speakers earlier mentioned about being true to yourself, I think it's just a fact. Women are different from men. And I think we're taught that in order to be successful in business, we have to become something different. And I don't think that's necessarily true. So I think being true to yourself, listening to your inner voice, having that confidence, you already have a seat at the table. I mean, you've already succeeded, you've already passed the classes or gone to college or got a job, you're there for a reason. So take up the space that you've been given and embrace it and don't wait to be invited. You're already in. I think that's one thing. And then the other thing that really didn't exist when I was early in my career, is like there's so many opportunities to network with other women, with people in technology. There's so many online communities now where you can reach out for support. People are really willing to help if you just ask for help. I came to display week for years. I'd never talked to anyone. I just went to the symposium talks and took my notes and learned. Wow, you haven't always been this involved. I didn't talk to anyone. I would go into the talks and take all my notes and get my mind blown with some of the stuff I was learning and then I'd go back to work. No, I wouldn't have talked to anyone the whole week. So what got you started? I think when I did this vertical strategy for Dell, I'm not a great public speaker, so I'm sorry. But I had to do that a lot for that job. I was doing business development, partnerships, alliances, and so I was getting on a stage. I was going to, oh my God, networking events where I had to talk to people, which was just nerve-wracking for me, but it got me to the point where it's like, oh, they're actually just people, like every other people. Sure. It's not that scary, so. It's good. Once I started doing that, I had to for my job, then I started to do it more in places that I enjoy and people that I enjoy talking to, which this feels like coming home. I love this late week. Yeah, me too. Me too. What about you, Lee? Do you have a piece of advice for people starting out? If I think back to my younger self, I tend to think that when I had opportunities or I came to a new place of work, I had too much fear as my baggage when I would walk in because the fear of the unknown. I think everyone has that when they go into a new job. It's like drinking from a fire hose, they say, right? There's so much to consume. But I think women more than men tend to put more pressure on themselves to wanna know everything and be perfect before we act. And there's maybe higher expectations as well on us. So if I were to give my younger self some advice, I would say, try not to put so much pressure on yourself. Come in with a no fear attitude and just drink up as much as you can drink up in terms of information. The first place I always went in my jobs and I wasn't an engineer. They say I'm technical enough to be dangerous. I don't have an engineering degree, but I've worked and led large engineering organizations in very large companies. I've built software, I've designed software, I've embedded software. I'm kind of scary because I don't actually know the engineering, but I know the right questions to ask. So the first place I go when I go to a new company is I go to the engineers and I sit with the engineers and I ask them a bunch of probably what they think are really dumb questions. But for me, it's helping me piece together a puzzle about why we're building what we're building, what are we going after, what matters. But that networking piece internally is very important. So you need to build the picture of the puzzle no matter what the size of the company is, educate yourself and don't have fear. Then ask for the opportunity. Do not hold back and think I shouldn't ask because somebody else beat me to it that asked for that. Usually it's a male colleague because that's the fact in technology that you're outnumbered. So I would say don't be fearful. Go ask and get that support internally and go after new things. That's what helped me succeed in my career. I raised my hand and I said, I would like to do this. This is something I'm interested in. I think I could be good at this. And as a result, I was able to take on very new things for the businesses I work in and literally build entire business units within these large multinationals to go do new things. No, I'm struck by what you said about wanting to be perfect before you act because I think especially a lot of women, I know includes me, you want your gold star and you want to do well and it's hard. Sometimes it's better to focus on the job at hand and not on whether you're going to mess up or something. I guess I just injected my little lesson here out of turn but it's really important. If you're stuck with doing everything perfectly, you won't do anything. I see this as well if you've ever, go around kids or whatever, if you've ever taught or engaged with young children and you say, you see a kid come out of a test and you say, how do you do? And you see the girl come out and go, I just got a text from my son's ex-girlfriend. She's finishing up high school and going off to college and she had a big AP exam and she said, I think I failed my AP exam. I failed it and I said, okay. And I was thinking that if I were to get that same message from my son, he would say, I nailed it. But maybe he didn't nail it but he came out saying he nailed it and actually in the end, it doesn't matter. So I wrote her back, I said, it doesn't matter. You've been accepted to the university you want to go to. Pass or fail, keep moving. That's my message to her, keep moving because she's super smart and talented. It doesn't matter if she failed her AP exam but her first point of thought was, I failed it. I failed it and carrying that baggage. You've got to dump that baggage. Very good, very good. What about you, Consuelo? What advice would you have? Yeah, I think I will second that. I think in different episodes of my life, I have felt that I wasn't prepared for those roles. So I needed more and more and a lot of the times it was like I need another degree or I wanted to launch an innovation center in Mexico. So that's kind of what triggered the masters in science entrepreneurship in the UK. And then I wanted the Genomics Medicine Institute to be located in my hometown and the whole networking with that community. So I got involved and I ended up in that PhD program. And launching the fund, I thought, well, I'm not capable for that. I need a program. So there are no, I mean, at least five, six years ago, there wasn't a master's in venture capital or that's it. There are programs in different universities and this fellowship, the Kaufman Fellowship, so I applied and I ended up getting that. But you feel like I felt several times in my life where I'm not prepared for that. I need this expert thing or it's even to be a board member or anything. So I think I will just say that it's better just to just try it and just do it. Like one important thing is to ask and another one, if someone's not giving you that, of course you make it happen. But also don't feel like you need all these credentials and all these experience. I mean, I also see it in entrepreneurs. They're very different, you know, men and women. Guys tend to feel like, no, it went great. After meeting a woman, it's like, well, I think I should have said this thing and I think I didn't do this right. And you can see that we have, there's something. I don't know if there's something also the way our brain works and we have to be overthinking. Yeah, yeah. I went for a ski lesson fairly recently and they asked me, you know, what level are you? And I'm like, ah, close to expert. And the woman that I went out with, the instructor said after a while, she said, you're really interesting because most women underrate their ability at skiing but you have overrated your ability at skiing. But I guess it was a compliment in a way. But you're right, we tend to devalue what it is that we've accomplished. Thank you. I wanted to ask Lee about your experience with other countries and cultures because you've really been involved in some variety of cultures and as a woman especially, do you have some stories about how you got through those experiences? Sure. Well, everyone that goes to Finland, you need to get naked in sauna so you need to get over that. And if you want to bond with your Finnish colleagues, you need to get naked in sauna. I'm not kidding actually. And I remember when I first moved there, I kept getting these sort of guidance because when you show up normally, they'll have some people shouting you a bit to make sure that you're successful in the integration of hitting the minus 20 and 20 feet of snow and how you deal with it all. And they kept saying, when are you going to go up to Salon and go to the wellness? Go to sauna. And I kept saying, well, I'll get there but I've got all this business I need to do and they're like, you need to go sauna with this team up there because you've got 150 people sitting up there that now work for you and they need to be in the sauna with you. And I was like, oh, all of us together naked? And they're like, yes, don't worry about it. We Finnish are very comfortable with that. We all have a family sauna. You know, I had a sauna in my house in Finland and that's your life. That's your kind of your weekend enjoyment because you really can't go outside. It's too cold. So you have sauna with the family inside. And so that would be a big learning just as a sort of more of a message which is you need to embrace where you're going and understand the importance of certain things and why you do them. And I have a great, just a little story I'll tell you real quick because obviously there's lots of learnings even from Korea as well. Korea, it's all about you better have a good toast and you better know how to pour and drink your alcohol and do that right because there's a lot of face in that. And so having a great toast and knowing the protocol for pouring alcohol for your more senior colleagues and what to do, it's quite important. But in the Nokia example, to give you an example, I had all those colleagues up in the very north of Finland and I had people all around the globe working for me but these in particular were very important and they kept urging me to get on this train and go up to this place called Turku and I went there and I showed up and there was my picture was on a wall in a building and it had some writing in Finnish and of course I don't speak Finnish my kid ended up learning Finnish because he grew up there as a one year old so he spoke Finnish but we never learned that and I thought I wonder what that says. So they said you need to meet your team downstairs so I go downstairs for the meeting and there's about 150 people in the room and in typical Finnish nature all of them are sitting in the back of the room and the whole front of the room is empty chairs and I'm thinking oh my goodness so I walked in, I introduced myself I said well we've got the whole day together to talk about strategy and get going on all these wonderful things and there was just blank stare looking at me and I thought wow. So I said why don't you all come up because it's easier for me and I don't have to really project now and we'll have a nice intimate conversation move up, move up, no one moved. So I thought well I'll launch into my presentation and hopefully they'll come around first 20 minutes in nothing was moving so I literally thought oh I've gotta change gears here so I said could you excuse me for a minute and I ran out of the room and I went and got the lady at the front desk and I said can you give me a lots of pencils and paper and I ripped it up into pieces and I had like a box thing and I walked in and I just started handing out these shreds of paper and pencils and I said what I'd like each of you to do is ask any question you'd like to ask of me personal or professional crumble it up and throw it in this box and please don't put your name on it and I'll give you some time to do that and I left the room and about 20 minutes later I came back I had about 100 pieces of paper crumbled up in the box so I went to the front and I picked one out and it says do you sauna? Hint number one are you married? Do you have children? Am I going to get fired? You know these kinds of questions and I realized that fundamentally to be successful for the next five years of my career it was really about understanding what was really at the core of what their concerns were to end up being great team members and go off and do great things with their career and a number of them did and they live in Silicon Valley today because I put them here as part of their career growth and you know it was a wonderful and great learning experience for me and it really highlights the importance of not trying to over complicate things when you go into new cultures learn the culture but also be true to yourself and be the person who you are and for me it was about wanting to know the people that worked for me. Wow. Thank you and Consuelo you have been around the world as well in your job as a venture capitalist and I know that it hasn't been easy as you said there was you finally ran out of programs to sign up for and you had to create your own and can you tell me I think you said something like yeah you can always find reasons why something is hard and so you've gone around the world and in this role which how have you found it would have been some of the challenges for you? Yeah probably I think Sam in one of our prep calls mentioned something like me whenever I have found a difficulty when I was first raising our first bond or in previous experiences or now raising from two I don't think the first thing you know when you have a hard day and you're like having all this anxiety like oh what's gonna happen am I gonna make it do I need this thing or whatever I don't go like oh it's because I'm a woman like that's not the thought kind of like oh could I be doing can I do this other thing or should I reach out to this person or what if I have the wrong strategy am I spending my time in the right thing doing the right things am I just too busy with the things that really are not taking me to achieve that goal so I think that we can always find reasons why something is hard like I could say well raising a fund it's hard as a woman I mean it's hard for anyone 90% of people that start fundraising a fund regardless of men, women here in the US don't ever end up raising their first fund so that leaves 10% and it's of course if you're a woman I'm not gonna say it's harder if you're minority you know Latina of course harder yes but also I find kind of like I also have an advantage because many times I'm the only woman they remember you so they will remember me at least I have an advantage automatically not that will make everything oh because I'm a woman now everything's gonna happen of course not but it's like whenever you find a difficulty you can kind of justify that's why it's not happening and that's why it's hard or you can look from the other side and see how you can use that in your advantage because things are hard for men all as well and of course certain things are harder also for men than for us so there's always so I just don't like to focus like oh because I'm a woman this is like that I mean I'm sure that many times I'm not aware that many things that happen also are because you know related to my gender but like I always tend to say like I am a human being I happen to be a woman you know I'm an engineer and many other things as well you know now in venture capital but yeah okay that's that's very wise Sam so you had we've talked a little bit about conversations such as this yeah and and that while while useful and certainly display week needs more diversity more women I wanted to interject that about I looked I had some help with data for the last four years at display week and it looks like nine to ten percent women make up make up display week attendance and they're all here and they're all here yay and and and then but leadership if you were to look at leadership numbers out of that I'm sure it would be way way lower anyway and and Sam you had said that while discussions like these are great they're an echo chamber if it's all women and and maybe if it's all people who are open to this sort of thing I see plenty of men out there now yeah so that's that's awesome but what have you found like how do you how do you bridge that gap like have you had successes with getting people to look at things in new ways yeah I think so you know I'm involved with some other industry associations like I'm on the board for a VIXA which is a Navy Association that puts on info common and we'll have these women's councils and you know I'm involved in TAO which is the Technology Association for Oregon and we'll have these women's breakfasts and what I found is it's like an who shows up all the women and what do we do we talk about the fact there's no women in tech and why well we all know why because we're all women in tech and so it doesn't really help move the ball forward like it really doesn't help change the situation and yet when I have conversations with my coworkers who mostly are men about it they're often fathers, husbands, you know sons, people, there are people who who have women in their lives that they want to see be successful and you know some of them want to go into tech and they're very open as individuals into supporting that notion and having those conversations but they don't come to these kinds of events because they think they're for women and so I think there's value and we've experimented a little bit with this we have these women councils with like I said for a VIXA but we explicitly state like these are AV events that are put on by the women's council but they're not for women they're for AV people and try to encourage them to the men to come and then have these conversations because you know what you find is like there's this we all have unconscious bias even us women have unconscious bias and there's an online test you can take if you don't think that you have unconscious bias you do and so having those conversations about like things that they don't even realize that they do that block women and things that women do that block themselves like I will often just because I'm mostly a nice person I will like offer to get someone a water or a coffee if they show up at the office so I've been trying to coach my guys to be like be the you do that like it's like why am I always getting the coffee and also for women this confidence gap so like when I mentor and coach if there's a job opportunity women will not put themselves forward if it has like a list of 10 things of criteria they'll say oh well I only have nine so I'm not gonna apply and a guy will have one of them and they're like I'm gonna nail it I'm going for it and it's called the confidence gap it's well documented it's very well known so like but having the conversations as a cross functional group as a diverse group just helps with understanding and then giving people these perspectives so we can fight the unconscious bias that we all have and apparently that we are also programming into all these AI devices I don't know if you guys know about this but they stopped using AI to screen resumes because the people who wrote them were men and so they screen out women's resumes Wow even AI has unconscious bias I did not know that it's a tough world out there I mean it is wow we do not have many minutes left and we might have time for a question or two but before that I really would love it if each of you could give us an example of a book or a podcast or something that you've read because I love to have something to come away with that do that for further reading so maybe just go down the row Lee I'm gonna go back a bit and just give you one book that I use I usually buy about 20 or 30 of them when I go into new roles and keep them in my drawer it was a book back in 1990s by a doctor by the name of Spencer Johnson and it's called Who Moves My Cheese Oh yeah and some of you are shaking your head and some of you may not know about it but leadership is about managing change well and if you want to be a leader you need to know how to manage change which means you need to understand the psyche behind people who are facing change and at least in the businesses that I've operated in the last 20 plus years of my career there has been a ton of change and some people do well with it and some people don't but actually there's an opportunity to help people who don't do well with it by understanding better who they are are they one of the miser or are they one of the little people in this book so if you haven't read it you should get it and if you're leading or managing you should probably keep some copies of it and when you reach people you had people in your team that are challenged with change give them a copy because it'll help them be more self-realized around how they're behaving and what might be some of the drivers on that and that's Who Moves My Cheese Who Moves My Cheese by Spencer Johnson thank you Sam well since this is a technology event and as tech people we're not known for our emotional intelligence turns out EQ is just as important in business as IQ and so I always recommend even though my guys are like I don't want to talk about my feelings Daniel Goldman reading about emotional intelligence primary leadership is one of the books but there's a whole slew of them there's even courses that you can take but I think as engineers we do tend to focus on the data and the facts and not on emotions and feelings and in the end we are all people business is all about you do business with people that you know like and trust and how do you get to know like and trust people it's by building relationships so I think the value of EQ especially in some because it's so ignored when we go through that education path we tend to not especially for STEM we not take those liberal arts classes right it's good to round that out so yeah I strongly recommend Daniel Goldman thank you thank you Cazuella so for me probably on the tech side the hard thing about hard things from Ben Horowitz on the other side probably principles by Ray Dalio principles by Ray Dalio so he's a very successful hedge fund manager one of the top two I think something like that but it's not about the hedging it's more about the principles I also read it when it just came out I think almost like two years ago and it really made a big impact on how I look at relationships in building teams within the fund and in the startups that we invest so he has some great insights on how important principles are and wouldn't it be great to know what were Leonardo da Vinci's and Steve Jobs principles and how they make decisions in life so kind of having that clarity in life what your principles are being very transparent and open about them with your team and outside and anyone interacting with your company so I think I found it to be a great book great thank you thank you Cazuella I have not read well I've read Who Moved My Cheese but not for a long time so I will revisit it thank you we're pretty tight maybe if we have time for maybe one question does anybody have a question of the panel best thing about tech events everybody's too shy well you know what we do oh we do have a question thank you can you say who you are oh hi my name is Lee too and actually I really I'm really impressed by all the things you talk when you were like younger because I'm facing all of the caching on the first year when I was young I said yeah I didn't talk with anyone I just wrote no thank you home and this year I forced myself to talk and then make awesome cachings and also because I'm in a new project and I always feel oh there's so many hard problems and all of the things I don't know it's a lot of baggage and I always feel like I don't have enough degree that's why I got two monsters and so so actually I have the cachings I have there's a lot of people have a lot too and my caching is how you make sure like when you're in a new field and then you feel like you're learning something not about what you're doing but also about what's surrounding and then like in a strategical way because I only have this much we only have this much time but if we want to probably find a new direction for our future or like trying to know what will move us forward and then to the next level and probably we are not only just doing what we are doing and what's your message to learn the new things thank you Who wants to take it? Anyone want to go? Well I have one thing I would recommend so I'm a big believer in you within your business going and setting up some informational interviews with people in other parts of the business that you're interested in and I think what we don't do a good enough job about in our day to day is actually communicating with other parts of the business because we tend to get very siloed on what you're doing so if you want to learn something about strategy or you want to learn something about marketing or you want because you're in engineering then you need to go to the director of that group or someone there that you think is reputable and say I'd like to sit down and have a 30 minute informational discussion with you about what you're doing and ask a bunch of questions and you'll find that people love to talk about what they're doing and then at the same time as a thank you you bring a small presentation around what you're doing so that you in turn can also share and that's how you build successful businesses by creating those linkages between different areas and I've used that as a model with a number of organizations I've worked in and it's always been just wonderful and hugely successful so that's what I would suggest. Thank you. We have another question. This is less of a question but more about the sharing so thank you very much for the wonderful sharing. I really enjoy this and then especially to Sam you just mentioned that for a lot of women activities it's just the women attending it and I'm very happy to see that today it's not just the women here there are a lot of male men here and I wanna thank my team for like our team a lot of my manager like all of them are here and also I think it's very important to have this momentum and message like when organizing this women related event it's really important I think it would be really really helpful to have men involved I think with this together that would be like even more meaningful event because different genders they have different perspective then when we talk about this this is really when new idea happens so thank you very much for talking about that I appreciate it, thank you. Thank you. Okay, well thank you all very very much and thanks to our panelists so appreciate the time and I've learned a lot I want everyone to know that there is a reception next door just right next door and that will include the people from the CEO forum that took place could I just ask who was at the CEO forum as well was here before maybe a third something like that, okay just curious just interested in those kinds of things but in any case members people who were at the CEO forum and people who are here are welcome to go next door and you can talk with the panelists and ask them more questions so thank you very very much and... Thank you.