 Live from Palo Alto, it's theCUBE. Covering Women Transforming Technology 2017, brought to you by VMware. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Women Transforming Technology Conference held at VMware here in beautiful Palo Alto, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Yan Bin Li, who is the Senior Vice President and General Manager for Storage and Availability here at VMware. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me, Rebecca. I'm so excited to meet you, actually. I've done quite a few QVs. You're a QV veteran, yes, I know. You're the first female host I got to talk to, so I'm really excited meeting you. Well, it's a pleasure, the pleasure is all mine. So Business Insider calls you one of the most powerful women engineers in the world in Silicon Valley. It's exciting to be talking to you. VMware is committed to diversity and inclusion. We're here at a Women Transforming Technology Conference. You're hosting the conference. Talk a little bit about your experience and what you're involved in in terms of that emphasis on diversity and inclusion here. Yes, certainly, being part of VMware and certainly being a female engineering leader myself, this is very near and dear to my heart. My experience, actually, involvement in women leadership initiatives started many years ago when I was actually based in China. My career at VMware, I've been here for nine years. You led the Chinese operation for a while. Yeah, I was leading the China engineering operation in China for a few years. And when I was based in China, I started a series of women technology conference in Beijing. So we started in 2011 and that quickly turned into an industry event, kind of very similar to what's going on here at Women Transforming Technology. So this has been certainly close to my heart and I've been involved in starting the initiative in China. And when I moved back to Palo Alto, I have been part of the Women Initiative. I was part of a dialogue circle. And this year, we expanded the initiative, all right, since last year, from just the women focus to now a much broader diversity focus and certainly being Chinese myself, I'm also representing the Chinese community at VMware. We have a Chinese VMware circle that create that community feeding for all the Chinese and Chinese Americans working at VMware. Can you talk a little bit about what you've observed with the women in China and the women here in Silicon Valley? Are the issues the same? Is the culture similar? What are your experience? I think there is a lot more similarity than differences. China, there has been a stronger emphasis of women contributing to the society for the past 50, 60 years. So you see a higher percentage of women working. You see a slightly higher percentage of women in tech. But the issue are still the same, how we deal with stereotype of women, especially how we overcome unconscious bias and how we overcome the lack of women in technology and lack of women in leadership. I think these issues definitely transcend culture and community. It was interesting, we hosted an APJ discussion on diversity in Sydney. So this was part of our APJ initiative. And there were tables of people from different countries talking about the women issue, the gender issue. And the simple question was, oh, is there a glass ceiling in your country? And I guess every country's answer was yes, except for the table of Japan. Because their answer was they didn't have a glass ceiling, they had a steel ceiling. But you get the point is, yeah, this is an issue that's everywhere. And did you find your Chinese colleagues in China were as mobilized to work on them and to make changes? Yeah, I think definitely you see that coming down from the leadership level. I think when you have initiatives like this, often sometimes you have grassroots initiatives, but it's much more important to up-level that to a business focus. And I think that is what VMware is doing by starting VMware women several years ago and now extending that to VM inclusion. At VMware, the leadership team definitely see this as a business imperative, rather than just something we want to do good to the society. So there is a balance of trying to do good, but also trying to do smart. How we move the needle from a business outcome point of view. We've been very open about our diversity data. We've been tracking them as part of leadership MBOs. So I'm excited to see the levels of investment and emphasis that we as a company is putting on. As a leader, you are a senior vice president here. How do you make sure that you are, you're a woman, you're a Chinese woman, but we also know that we are not immune just because we're women to subtle biases, to discrimination. How do you work on yourself and your day-to-day practice as a leader and a manager? Yeah, I think it's along our career, we've seen a lot of things like sexism or how people apply unconscious bias toward women and certain stereotype view of women. I think we've all experienced that. And I can think of lots of example on a daily basis, I was having dinner with a male co-worker, which is a very important way for us to build a strong relationship. And as we were eating, we were mistaken as on a date. All these subtle things that remind you somehow, people see women, not necessarily, even if you're having a business setting, they tend to not assume the same. So I think that's happening all the time. So my approach toward this has been recognizing that it happens and have a good way to diffuse it. And because most people are doing it in a very unconscious way, and when you have a way to diffuse it, you help have a positive impact on that person. To give you an example, I think for women, we're constantly introduced as a women's something. One year I was speaking at an event and when we were doing the rehearsal, the senior leader was introducing me as a women engineering leader. So I just generally said, hey, look, people can tell I'm a woman. You don't have to say it. The dress gives it away. Yeah, and that made him become aware. Yeah, the merit you're standing on, is not because of your gender, or shouldn't be limited by your gender, rather than because of the message or the business or the technology that you're bringing to the audience. But that's not always easy for people to do, to use humor to diffuse the situation. We just heard from Kara Swisher, the founder of Recode, and one of her pieces of advice was to be authentic, be genuine, be original. Your Twitter handle is why be high heeled. I love it. Thank you. But it is this mix of professionalism and femininity. Right. Is that hard to do? Is it hard to pull off? It is hard, and I have debated over and over. You know, where I got my Twitter handle, actually, one of my co-workers, my team members, for many years ago said to me, you're the high tech girl in high heels. And I kind of liked it. It felt like very me. But there's been lots of people telling me, oh, is that really good? Is that insulting? Or is that demeaning of the levels of the position, the type of job you have? And I actually felt otherwise. First of all, it is fairly authentic of me. And if people who, you know, I remember when I was leaving one job and my male boss was commenting, saying, Yan Bing, you didn't leave very big shoes to feel. You live very high shoes to feel. So I'm known to like high heels. And people, and I've also learned that once you establish your competence, this does not become something that is negative. And I've seen increasingly your colleagues or co-workers, people around you, want to embrace who you are rather than penalize for who you are. As long as you're confident about who you are. And so I find that, yeah, I'm having lots of fun with my Twitter handle. Right, right, right. But as you said, as a woman, you have to also prove to yourself and that you are smart. And just because you wear high heels and you like high shoes, you also can get the job done. Yeah, and it's not just high shoes or whatever shoes of choice that people have, I think is, yeah. And we are most comfortable and most successful where we are truly authentic to ourselves. Being who you are at work, at home, in your private life. So talk a little bit. The last time you were on the show, you talked about the hyperconverged world. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of what's going on in the software space and what you're working on now? Yeah, it's a very exciting time. Certainly as part of the storage business unit, a key initiative that we're working on is VSAN, this is VMware's leading product in hyperconverged infrastructure. And what we're seeing certainly is this fundamental disruption that's going on in storage and data centers infrastructure in general. And if you think about what is one of the highest gross market segment that's happening in data center and infrastructure today is actually hyperconverged. You know, as a market, this is quickly disrupting the traditional way of delivering storage and it's growing as 60% cager for the next few years. And we as a business has been growing triple digit. Last year we almost tripled our, the size of the business and we're seeing tremendous customer momentum and tremendous customer adoption and seeing hyperconverged is really becoming a mainstream way of delivering infrastructure to our customers. So very exciting time. It is exciting. And yet it's hard to think beyond hyperconverged because if everything then becomes one, what's next? I mean, what do you see down the pipeline two, three years from now in terms of how businesses deal with their storage? Yeah, so certainly, VMware being a leading infrastructure software vendor, we're going through a fundamental transformations of providing not just the best in class software for your data center, how we modernize it, how we provide higher levels of automation and in the private cloud, but increasingly there is a shift towards service-based consumption and cloud-based delivery of infrastructure. So, and I think the same thing is happening in the storage space. Certainly with a hyperconverged infrastructure, not only we see a highly high degrees of integration automation, but we're also seeing the same architecture is extending into the cloud. And as we look at the cloud, we also constantly think about, how do we take the value prop of just building the best infrastructure, the best storage, take that infrastructure play now to an application play or a data play. And certainly from a storage side, we're increasingly focusing on how we make data better managed, better governed, how we provide more insights through data. So taking that storage levels of innovation to focus on data. Which I'll do. Yeah. Understanding what the data is telling you and making that data work for customers. What are you hearing from customers in terms of what is keeping them up at night? So, you know, the keeping our customers are all facing the challenge of how they keep up with their business demand. You know, as we look at it, every company is now being transformed into a digital business. And suddenly the role of IT become so much more interesting and exciting and it's really about enabling business. And so that put demand on, you know, how you deliver things in a much more agile fashion. You know, how you keep costs down so that you can invest for really where the business value at is. And how you can ready yourself to, you know, adopt a new way of building your application for the future. So these are the typical challenges that we hear from our customer is really to keep up with their business demand. And we are certainly excited to see, you know, VMR is playing a very vital role in helping solving our customers' digital transformation challenges. Yeah. So the role of Silicon Valley looms large in our business world. And also just in our imagination, what do you think the media get wrong about Silicon Valley? And just what do you think is the line out there that you wish you could dispel in the sense of this is not right, this is not the way it happens? Yeah, so, you know, I have lived in Silicon Valley for the past 20 years, except for a few years where I was back in Beijing. You know, I decided to move back because I just feel for being someone in tech, this is really just an amazing place to live in. And it's definitely the epicenter. You know, I have three children and then I just see, you know, how privileged they're growing up, being exposed in this very dynamic, innovative, vibrant environment. So this is what I absolutely love about Silicon Valley. But on the other hand, you know, when you go outside the world, I do think it feels like, it's almost like a little ivory tower. You know, there is so much technology, so much access, so much wealth being created here. Sometime we tend to forget life is different outside Silicon Valley. And so I think having that perspective is very, very important. In terms of, you mentioned you're a mom. And what do you wish for your children? I don't even know if you've got daughters or sons. But in terms of, you know, just getting back to why we're here, breaking barriers is the theme of this year's conference, Women Transforming Technology. What barriers do you want to see broken for your kids, for the next generation? Right, I'm excited. My kids certainly being part of Silicon Valley and being in this very dynamic environment right now. I think there is incredible levels of awareness in them about what's going on in the world. It was funny, I was just talking to my son. He's got a new shirt. And he's 13 years old and I didn't know where the shirt come from because I didn't buy it. That turned out it's the first shirt he bought using his own money and he bought a pink shirt. And he told me that he wanted to get a pink shirt because he wanted to break the gender stereotype. And I certainly wasn't thinking anything like that when I was 13 years old. And this is just being exposed to certainly what's going on in Silicon Valley, being exposed to working parents and being exposed to what's happening in the political arena. That led him to make a very interesting choice. And I have two 11-year-old girls and I wish they can grow up. They love technology to begin with. Their Christmas wish was to build all of their Christmas card using some online language. And so we all got all these electronic, animated things from my girls and they want to write video games. And so I wish they grow up in an environment feeding when they have that social awareness. Being female does not create a barrier for them to pursue what they love because they genuinely are excited and interested in technology. And I'm hoping that's the environment we're going to help create for them. But I'm also very excited to see at a very young age, they have demonstrated a levels of awareness that I certainly didn't experience when I was young. And just speaking about that level of awareness and you brought up politics and sort of what's happening on the national stage. So much about this administration really does go against what our core values of Silicon Valley and particularly in terms of immigration, in terms of gender issues, transgender rights, gay rights. Do you feel that Silicon Valley will take a leadership stance on these things and stand up and... I think we should. We should, because Silicon Valley has benefited tremendously from the success of our technology and success of our businesses. And so with that, we have incredible power, incredible platform that's been created out of Silicon Valley. I think, yeah, we should play a role in advocating for what we believe in, just like VMware and other partner companies are taking a leadership position to advocating women transforming technology, the role women play in Silicon Valley and in technology at large. I wish all of the companies here have the willingness to really stand up for what we believe in. So given the power that we have and given the influence that we have, not just in this country, but all over the world. Yeah, and then Lee, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Rebecca. I'm so glad to have spoken to you. Thank you for having me back at theCUBE. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll be back with the CUBE's coverage of women transforming technology here in Palo Alto.