 From Phoenix, Arizona, theCUBE at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are on the ground in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Really excited to return to Phoenix. Ironically, it was two years ago, about the same time. We went to our first Grace Hopper Conference that was here in Phoenix. And I don't know what it is with Phoenix, but it seems to be a great place for women in tech conferences. So we're back and we wanted to come down and talk to some of the people here that are giving keynotes, presentations, give you a flavor for what's going on. So if you got an opportunity to go next year, it'll be back in the Bay Area. You certainly want to sign up for that. So we're really excited. Our first guest, Yvonne Wasner, the CIO of New Relic, welcome. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. I love theCUBE. Oh, thank you very much. That's right, you're a VM world, or VMware, I always say world, not where, for years, and we've been doing, I think the VM World Show for something like six years or seven years. Yeah, super long time. And I watch you guys, it reinvents in a lot of other places. Oh, great, well thank you for watching. So now you're at New Relic, so for the people that aren't familiar with New Relic, why don't you give them the quick four-on-one? Yeah, so New Relic is a software analytics company. And in the simplest terms, you don't bank in your retail branch, you bank on your phone. What matters is how your software is performing, both from an application perspective and a business perspective. So we help you understand what's going on. We're the best first place to look to understand your digital business. It's really interesting because we've got a premise that we're, it's all about really your digital engagement model. And you think about banking, how many times do you go into the bank and actually interact with a teller? It's really moved to this electronic interface in terms of your relationship. It's not how warm the coffee is or how long the teller line is, it's how performant is your application and do you have the right feature functionality? Okay, so you're here, you had a keynote earlier in the week, this is the third day of the conference. So first of all, give us kind of what's the vibe been here for the last three days? It's phenomenal. And what I love about the Girl in Tech conference is that it brings together women of all types. I was speaking yesterday to a student at Stanford who's here who has her own nonprofit who's getting her degree to go out and change the world as an entrepreneur to very, very seasoned executives who sit on boards and everybody's here to understand what's the change going on and how do I drive relevancy? And it's just phenomenal. Excellent. So your keynote was on how to stay relevant and how to avoid extinction. I wonder if you could give us some of the, I'm sure that was a well received one. Yeah. Well, what's interesting is change is the new constant and it's actually riskier to not do something to do something today. But what do you do? And everybody says, oh, go out and be bold. Being bold is great, but fundamentally it's hard. And it's easy to say it's hard to do in practice. And so what my talk was really on is how do you address the unconscious fears? How do you say, yeah, those bad things could happen, but you know what? If nothing bad happens, here's how I could change the world and then just go after that vision, free yourself from those kind of unconscious constraints and really go after it wholeheartedly. And so is it more of a willingness to fail? Is it more of a willingness to look silly if you fail? I mean, what are some of these kind of unconscious fears that if you consciously just address them, that will help you kind of overcome them and be more proactive in your experimentation? So for me, it was very personal. It was some challenges that I had in my childhood that really made me risk averse in ways that I didn't understand. And it's one of the things that they say, hey, women should lean in more. And I actually believe the reason that women don't lean in is that they're trying to aim for a level of perfection and don't realize it's a numbers game. Failure is not a reflection on you personally. Failure is a step towards your future successes. And so really it's a mindset change. Right, right. And I fundamentally feel too, as we try to innovate on theCUBE and do things differently, if we're not failing sometimes, we're not really pushing the envelope enough, right? That's everything shouldn't be successful. It's like the old economics newsboy model, right? If you come home with no newspapers, that means you could have sold a couple more probably. So it's not about perfection. It's about trying and not being afraid to let that work out. You're spot on and I led a workshop yesterday as well on increasing your return on investment. And I literally told the women, I said, if you are not failing, if everybody on your team is performing perfectly, you're a failed leader. You have to stumble. It's like skiing. If you don't fall when you're skiing, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. You're not really doing it. So you need to let your team members fall. You have to fall yourself. And that's how you know you're pushing the boundaries. So how is the reception then of that message that you're trying to convey? Is it, you know, I know it, I just can't do it. Is it, I just, you know, there's just so many hurdles in the way. How do you get over the, you know, here's this unconscious thing that you need to be thinking about. Okay, now it's conscious, but to actually start to change behavior. What are some of the little behavioral changes and tips and tricks you give people? Because at the end of the day, a lot of times it's do the behavior, not think about it too much. Exactly. I'd say it's a couple of things. First off, you need role models that can help prove to you in your subconscious that my gosh, if those five amazingly successful people did this, and they're telling me very specifically the failures they had, and they're still that successful, maybe they're not lying. The other thing is I try to give really specific tips. So one of my favorites is, look at, you know, I'm an ex-consultant, so two by two, what's the business impact? What's your unique value? Throw all the things you're working on in there. You should have one to two that are high impact that you're uniquely skilled to do. Hit those balls out of the park. You don't, you can get, you know, 20 guys to third base. Doesn't matter. You gotta get one person home. Gotta get them home. That's great. Well, it's curious, because you spent a long time at Accenture before you kind of jumped into the tech company world. So you probably saw a lot of different companies. What's your perspective kind of at a macro view of how this environment has changed over the years? I mean, do you see positive change? I know we have a long way to go, but what's your perspective from some of those early Accenture days? You know, it's never been a more exciting time. I mean, in some regards, I wish I was that Stanford student just starting my career, because there's a technology is changing how we do everything in absolutely amazing ways. But we need to bring the right level of social consciousness to how we apply it. And we need to figure out new engagement models. And I think those engagement models actually play to the strength of a lot of women we have in the room. You have to figure out how to fuse across different industries. So, you know, the Apple Watch, it's designer, it's technology. Like how do you bring those competencies together? You get better stuff done with partners than all internally. VCs are the new R&D innovation engine. So I think the change is really exciting, but you have to be open to new operating models and new engagement styles to take advantage of it. Right. Okay, I want to shift gears a little bit because our audience might not know, but you're actually a very rare breed. You're a woman on boards. And we hear over and over, I'm teasing you, because we hear over and over, there's just not near enough representation of women on corporate boards. You're on a couple of boards. So I'd like to get your perspective on, you know, how did you get on the boards? How do we get more women on the boards? There's always a conversation, is it a pipeline problem? You know, are they just not enough? Are they dropping out, you know, kind of mid-career? What are some of the things that you can see from your seat on a couple of boards? Yeah, so I'm on three boards. I'm on the board of Harvey Mudd. I'm on the board of Bidium, which is a Series B startup. And I'm on the board of the Athena Alliance. And the Athena Alliance is actually an organization that's non-profit focused on getting more women on boards, because I fundamentally believe it is not a pipeline problem. And I say that because there's many senior executive level women like myself who just, you know, are waiting to check off the 10 things on the list they think they need to be on a board. And it's studied time and time again, women set really high bars for themselves. So I don't think enough women are putting themselves forward. And I don't think that they're known well enough. We're not unicorns. We're really not. Like there are valleys where we all congregate. And so what we need to do is really help the men who I think have amazing intention and want to have greater diversity on their boards understand how to make the connections and find the right women with the right profiles to round out the organizations. So you really think it's more of a matching issue. The desire is there. They're really just kind of making the match when the timing is right and it's a good fit. Yeah, exactly. All right, so I'm going to shift gears on you one more time and talk about education and specifically Harvey Mudd, because as I mentioned two years ago, we were here interviewing Maria Clave, still one of my all-time favorite interviews. She's got such phenomenal energy. She's the president at Harvey Mudd College who are the Athenas. I don't know if you knew the Harvey Mudd. Gals teams are the Athenas. Boys are the stags. But talk about kind of education and what Maria has done. I mean, her thing in our interview is she wants the intro CS to be the best class you've ever taken. Bar none, not the best computer science class, not the best science class, the best class ever. And I can tell you, my sons at Claremont is a really hard class to get into. Your perspective on kind of education and what somebody like Maria with her kind of energy point of view enthusiasm does to expanding kind of computer science breadth in women specifically. Oh, it's phenomenal. I actually had the opportunity to sit in the intro CS class and there's a couple of really key things they've done. First off is they've expanded and energized the CS team with new amazing talent, many women, but not just women, other diversity to just round out perspective. So keeping it fresh. The second thing they've done is they've realized that CS theory is interesting to some but not to all. And a lot of women tend to be more purpose driven. And so they've created classes like CS biology. Same core concepts but now solving the problems in a field where they have questions. So they learn the same thing but in a way that's more interesting. And the final thing is they've restructured how they run the class. So they don't say, hey, here's a question. Everybody goes, oh, I'll get that. They say, here's a question I want you to think about. And talk to your partners, scribble some notes and in a minute let's discuss what you've come up with. And that allows people of all types to be more thoughtful and to get better, well-rounded answers coming out. So they've changed it on all dimensions and it's just, it's an amazing place just to go and be and see the energy and really see transformation in work in our education system because that's where it all starts. That's really interesting the way you say it, to phrase the questions so people are forced to think a minute. Because I have two daughters, they went to all girls middle schools and that's one of the classic plugs for going to all girls. Because the boys, they don't wait, right? Yeah, pick me, I love the teacher. You pick me, I win. Right, and then I'll figure it out versus people that want to think about it a little bit and contemplate and noodle and maybe try to get the right answer before they raise their hands. So great strategy. So before we let you go, unfortunately we're out of time. How do people get involved with the Athena Foundation? What are you up to in terms of priorities for the next six months? Yeah, so it's theathenialiance.org we're on the web, we're just starting. DLA Piper is one of our sponsors getting our 501C3 status. There's information there in terms of membership, who we're working to connect with. If any of you listening have board seats and you want women, come to us. If you're a qualified woman and you're looking to get on a board, reach out. We'd love to hear you. We know you're there and we know that men want to put you on board. So let's make it happen. What a great service really doing that matching game because it's always about the matching game. Well Yvonne, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day and we look forward to seeing you again sometime in the Bay Area. Great, thank you so much for your stuff. Jeff Frick here at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. We'll be back in just after this short break. Thanks for watching.