 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm your host, John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California studio and promoting as a great guest, CUBE alumni, co-founder, technical co-founder, and she's also the VP of product at Platform 9 Systems. It's a company pioneering Kubernetes infrastructure. Been doing it for a long, long time. Met her with Ms. Katsuki. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate you, Nora, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me, always exciting. So I always, I love interviewing you for many reasons, one, you're super smart, but also you're a co-founder, technical co-founder. So entrepreneur, VP of product, it's hard to do startups. Okay, so everyone who started a company knows how hard it is. And it really is, and the rewarding too when you're successful. So I want to get your thoughts on, what's it like being an entrepreneur, women in tech, some things you've done along the way. Let's get started. How did you get into your career in tech and what made you want to start a company? Yeah, so, you know, I got into tech long, long before. I decided to start a company and back when I got in tech, I was, it was, it was very clear to me as a direction for my career that I'm never gonna start a business. I was very explicit about that because my father was an entrepreneur and I'd seen how rough the journey can be. And then my brother was also is an entrepreneur. And I think with both of them, I'd seen the ups and downs and I had decided to myself and shared with my family that I really want a very well-structured sort of job at a large company type of path for my career. I think the tech path, you know, tech was interesting to me, not because I was interested in programming, et cetera, at that time. To be honest, when I picked computer science as a major for myself, it was because most of what you would consider, I guess most of the cool students were picking that as a major, let's just say that. And it sounded very interesting and cool. A lot of people were doing it and that was sort of the top choice for people and I decided to follow along. But I did discover after I picked computer science as my major and I remember when I started learning C++, the first time when I got exposure to it, it was just like a light bulb clicking in my head. I just absolutely loved the language, the lower level nature, the power of it and what you can do with it, the algorithms. So I think it ended up being a really good fit for me. Yeah, so it clicked for you. You tried it, it was all the cool kids were doing it. I mean, I could relate, I did the same thing. Next big thing is computer science. You got to be in there, got to be smart and then you get hooked on it. Yeah, exactly. What was the next level? Did you find any blockers in your way? I see male dominated, it must have been a lot of, how many females were in your class? What was the ratio at that time? Yeah, so the ratio was pretty, pretty, I would say, bleak when it comes to women, two men. I think computer science at that time was still probably better compared to some of the other majors like mechanical engineering, where I remember I had one friend. She was the single girl in an entire class of about at least 120, 130 students or so. So the ratio was better for us. I think there were maybe 20, 25 girls in our class. There was a large class and maybe number of men were maybe three X or four X number of women. So relatively better. How about the job when you got into the structured big company? How'd that go? Yeah, so I think that was, that was a pretty smooth path, I would say, after you graduate from undergrad to grad school and then when I got into Oracle first and VMware, I think both companies had, the ratios were still pretty off and I think they still are to a very large extent in this industry. But I think this industry, in my experience, does a fantastic job of bringing everybody and kind of embracing them and treating them at the same level. That was definitely my experience. And so that makes it very easy for self-confidence, for setting up a path for yourself to thrive. So that was, Okay, so you got an undergraduate degree okay in computer science and a master's from Stanford in databases and distributed systems. That's right. Okay, so dual degrees. Did that come, was that part of your pathway or you just decided I want to go right into school or did it go right after each other? How did that work out? Yeah, so when I went into school, undergrad, there was no special major and I didn't quite know if I liked a particular subject or set of subjects or not. Even through grad school, first year, it wasn't clear to me but I think in second year, I did start realizing that in general, I was a fan of back-end systems. I was never a front-end person. The back-end distributed systems really were of interest to me because there's a lot of complex problems to solve and especially databases and large-scale distributed systems design in the context of database systems really started becoming a topic of interest for me. And I think luckily enough at Stanford, there were just fantastic professors like Mendel Rosenblum who offered operating system class there then started VMware and later on I was able to join the company and I took his class while at school and it was one of the most fantastic classes I've ever taken. So they really had and probably I think still do a fantastic curriculum when it comes to distributed systems and I think that probably helped stoke that interest. How do you talk to the younger girls out there in elementary school and through? What's the advice as they start to get into computer science which is changing and still evolving? There's back-end, there's front-end, there's AI, there's data science, there's no code, low code, there's cloud. What's your advice when they say, what's the playbook? Yeah, so I think two things I always say and I share this with anybody who's looking to get into computer science or engineering for that matter, right? I think one is that it's important to not worry about what that end specialization is going to be whether it's AI or databases or back-end or front-end it does naturally evolve and you lend yourself to a path where you will understand which systems, which aspects you like better. But it's very critical to start with getting the fundamentals well, right? Meaning all of the key coursework around algorithm, systems design, architecture, networking, operating system. I think it is just so crucial to understand those well even though at times you may question why is this, is this ever going to be relevant and useful to me later on in my career? It really does end up helping in ways beyond you can describe. It makes you a much better engineer. So I think that is the most important aspect of, I would think any engineering stream is definitely true for computer science because there's also been a trend more recently, I think, which I'm not a big fan of, of sort of limited scoped learning, which is you decide early on that you're going to be, let's say a front-end engineer, which is fine, you know, that understanding that is great. But if you, I don't think it's ideal to let that limit the scope of your learning when you're an undergrad phrase or grad school, but later on it comes back to sort of bite you in terms of you not being able to completely understand how the systems work. It's a systems kind of thinking you got to have that mindset of, especially now with cloud, you got distributed systems paradigm, going to the edge, you got 5G, Mobile World Congress was recently happened, you got now all kinds of IoT devices out there, IP of devices at the edge. Distributed computing is only getting more distributed. That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right. But the other thing is also happens, a convenience to happen in computer science is that the abstraction layers keep raising things up and up and up, where even if you're operating at a language like Java, which during some of my times of programming, there was a period when it was popular, it already abstracts you so far away from the underlying system. So it can become very easier if you're doing JavaScript or UI programming that you really have no understanding of what's happening behind the scenes. And I think that can be pretty difficult. It's easy to lean in and rely too heavily on the abstractions. I want to get your thoughts on blockers. In your career, have you had situations where it's like, oh, you're a woman, okay, seat at the table, sit in the side, or maybe people misunderstood your role, how did you deal with that? Did you have any of that? Yeah, so I think, so is there something really kind of personal to me which I like to share a few times, which I think I believe in pretty strongly and which is for me, sort of my personal growth began at a very early phase because my dad, and he passed away in 2012, but throughout the time when I was growing up, I was his special little girl and every little thing that I did could be a simple test, it's not very meaningful, but the genuine pride and pleasure that he felt out of me getting great scores in those tests, et cetera, and that I could see that in him, and then I wanted to please him, and through him, I think I built that confidence in myself that I am good at things and I can do good, and I think that just set the building blocks for me for the rest of my life, right? So my, I believe very strongly that, yes, there are occasions of unfair treatment, et cetera, but for the most part, it comes from within, and if you are able to be a confident person who is kind of level and understands and believes in your capabilities, then for the most part, the right things happen around you. So I believe very strongly in that kind of grounding and in finding a source to get that for yourself, and I think that many women suffer from the biggest challenge, which is not having enough self-confidence, and I've even, you know, with everything that I said, I've myself felt that, experienced that a few times, and then there's a methodical way to get around it. There's processes to explain to yourself that that's actually not true, that's a fake feeling. So you know, I think that is the most important aspect for women. I love that, get the confidence, find the source for the confidence. We've also been hearing about curiosity and building. You mentioned engineering earlier. Love that term, engineering something, like it, building something. Curiosity, engineering, confidence. This brings me to my next question for you. What do you think the key skills and qualities are needed to succeed in a technical role, and how do you develop to maintain those skills over time? Yeah, so I think that it is so critical that you love that technology that you are part of. It is just so important. I mean, I remember as an example, at one point with one of my buddies, before we started platform nine, one of my buddies, he's also fantastic computer scientists from VMware and he loves video games. And so he said, hey, why don't we try to, hack up a video game and see if we can take it somewhere. And so it sounded cool to me. And then so we started doing things. But something I realized very quickly is that I, as a person, I absolutely hate video games. I've never liked them. I don't think that's ever been changed. And so I was miserable. I was trying to understand what's going on, how to build these systems, what I was not enjoying it. So I'm glad that I decided to not pursue that. So it is just so important that you enjoy whatever aspect of technology that you decide to associate yourself with. I think that takes away 80, 90% of the work. And then I think it's important to inculcate a level of discipline that you are not gonna get sort of, you're not gonna get jaded or you're gonna continue with a happy path where doing the same things over and over again, but you're not necessarily challenging yourself or pushing yourself or putting yourself in uncomfortable situation. I think a combination of those typically, I think works pretty well in any technical career. That's a great advice there. I think trying things when you're younger or even just for play to understand whether you abandon that path is just as important as finding a good path because at least you know, that skews the value in favor of the choices. Kind of like math, probability. So great, great, great call out there. So I have to ask you the next question, which is how do you keep up to date? Given all the changes, you're in the middle of a world where you've seen personal change in the past 10 years from OpenStack to now. Remember those days when I first interviewed you at OpenStack, I think it was 2012 or something like that. Maybe 10 years ago, so much changed. How do you keep up with technologies in your field and resources that you rely on for personal development? Yeah, so I think when it comes to the field and what we're doing, for example, I think one of the most important aspects and I am product manager and this is something I insist that all the other product managers in our team also do is that you have to spend 50% of your time talking to prospect customers, leads and through those conversations, they do a huge favor to you in that they make you aware of the other things that they're keeping an eye on as long as you're doing the right job of asking the right questions and not just listening in. So I think that, to me, ends up being one of the biggest sources where you get tidbits of information, new things, et cetera, and then you pursue. To me, that has worked to be a very effective source. And then the second is greeting and keeping up with all of the publications. You guys create a lot of great material. You interview a lot of people, making sure you're watching those. For us, CNCF, there's a ton of activities. New projects keeps coming along every few months. So keeping up with that, listening to podcasts around those topics, all of that helps. But I think the first one I think goes in a big way in terms of being aware of what matters to your customers. Awesome. Let me ask you a question. What's the most rewarding aspect of your job right now? So I think there are many. So I think I love, I've come to realize that I love the high that you get out of being an entrepreneur independent of, in terms of success and failure, there's always ups and downs as an entrepreneur, right? But there's something really alluring about being able to define path of your products and in a way that can potentially impact number of companies that will consume your products, employees that work with you. So that is, I think to me, always been the most satisfying path and is what kept me going. I think that is probably first and foremost. And then the projects, there's always new exciting things that we're working on. Even just today, there are certain projects we're working on that I'm super excited about. So I think it's those two things. So now we didn't get into how you started. You said you didn't want to do a startup and you got the big company, your dad, your brother with entrepreneurs. How did you get into it? Yeah, so I know it's kind of surprising to me as well. But I think I reached a point of VMware after spending about eight years or so where I definitely packed hold. And I could have pushed myself by switching to a completely different company or a different organization within VMware. And I was trying all of those paths, interviewed at different companies, et cetera, but nothing felt different enough. And then I think I was very, very fortunate in that my co-founders, Shereeshwagram, Rupa Karak, Bikyuv met them. They were kind of all at the same journey in their careers independently at the same time. And so we would all eat lunch together at VMware because we were on the same team. And then we just started brainstorming on different ideas during lunchtime. And that's kind of how, and we did that almost for a year. So by the time that the year long period went by, at the end it felt like the most logical, natural next step to leave our job and to start off something together. But I think the point of that had not been for my co-founders. I had to come forward with the team, as knew each other at VMware, but you were kind of a little early. You had a vision. It's kind of playing out now. How do you feel right now as the wave is hitting? Tribute to computing, microservices, Kubernetes, I mean, stuff you guys did and were doing. I mean, it didn't play out exactly, but directionally you were right on the line there. How do you feel? Yeah. You know, I think that's kind of the challenge and the fun part with the startup journey, right? You can never predict how things are going to go when we kicked off. We thought that OpenStack is going to really take over infrastructure management space and things kind of went differently, but things are going that way now with Kubernetes and distributed infrastructure. And so I think it's been interesting and in every path that you take that does end up not being successful teaches you so much more, right? So I think it's been a very interesting journey. Yeah. Certainly AWS hit that growth right at 2013 through 17, kind of sucked all the oxygen out, but now as it reverts back to abstraction layer, essentially makes things look like private clouds, but they're just essentially DevOps. It's cloud operations, kind of the same thing. Yeah, absolutely. And then with the edge, things are becoming way more distributed where having a single large cloud provider is becoming even less relevant in that space and having kind of the central SaaS-based management model, which is what we pioneered, like you said, we were ahead of the game at that time, is becoming sort of the most obvious choice now. Now you look back at your role of Stanford distributed systems. Again, they have world-class program there, neural network, you name it. It's really, really awesome, as well as Cal, Berkeley there was in debates with each other, who's better. But well, that's a separate interview. Now you got the edge. What are some of the distributed computing challenges right now with now the distributed edge coming online, industrial, 5G, data? What do you see as some of the key areas to solve from a problem statement standpoint with edge and as cloud goes on-premises, data center, to essentially data center at the edge, apps coming over the top, AI enabled. What's your take on that? Yeah, so I think, and there's different flavors of edge and the one that we focus on is what we call thick edge, which is you have this problem of managing thousands of, as we call micro data centers, rather than managing maybe few tens or hundreds of large data centers, where the problem just completely shifts on its head, right? And I think it is still an unsolved problem today where whether you are a retailer or a telecommunications vendor, et cetera, managing your footprints of tens of thousands of stores as a retailer is solved in a very archaic way today because the tool set, the traditional management tooling that's designed to manage, let's say your data centers is not quite, it gets retrofitted to manage these environments and it's kind of square peg and round hole kind of situation. So I think the top most challenges are being able to manage this large footprint of micro data centers in the most effective way, right? Where you have latency solved, you have the issue of a small footprint of resources at thousands of locations and how do you fit in your containerized or virtualized or other workloads in the most effective way to have that solved, you need to have the security aspects around these environments. So there's a number of challenges that kind of go hand in hand, like what is the most effective storage, which can still be deployed in that compact environment and then cost becomes related. Costs are huge, because if you move data, you're going to have cost, if you move compute, it's not as much. If you have an operating system concept, is the data in state or stateless? These are huge problems. This is an operating system, don't you think? Yeah, absolutely, it's a distributed operating system and where it's multiple layers of ways of solving that problem just in the context of data, like you said, having an immediate caching layer so that you still do just in time processing at those edge locations and then send some data back. And that's where you can incorporate some AI or other technologies, et cetera. So it's just data itself is a multi-layer problem there. Well, it's great to have you on this program. Advice, final question for you for the folks watching, technical degrees. Most people are finding out in elementary school and middle school, a lot more robotics programs, a lot more tech exposure, not just in Silicon Valley, but all around. I'm starting to see that. What's your advice for young girls and people who are getting either coming into the workforce reskilled as they get enter? It's easy to enter now as they stay in and how do they stay in? What's your advice? Yeah, so I think it's the same goal. I have two little daughters and it's the same principle I try to follow with them, which is I want to give them as much exposure as possible without me having any predefined ideas about what and what they should pursue. But I think that exposure that you need to find for yourself one way or the other because you really never know. My husband landed into computer science through a very, very meandering path and then he discovered later in his career that that's the absolute calling for him. It's something he's very good at, right? But so the reason why he thinks he didn't pick that path early is because he didn't quite have that exposure. So it's that exposure to various things, even things you think that you may not be interested in is the most important aspect and when things just naturally lend themselves. Find your calling, super power, strengths. Know what you don't want to do. Yeah, exactly. That were great advice. Thank you so much for coming on and contributing to our program for International Women's Day. Great to see you in this context. We'll see you on theCUBE. We'll talk more about Platform 9 when we go to KubeCon or some other time. But thank you for sharing your personal perspective and experiences for our audience. Thank you. Fantastic. Thanks for having me, John. Always great to talk to you. This is theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier. We're talking to the leaders in the industry from developers to the boardroom and everything in between and getting the stories out there, making an impact. Thanks for watching.