 Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation, Women in Tech, global event celebrating International Women's Day. It's an amazing showcase of great people and entrepreneurs, executives, really serious women in the industry, in the countries, all around the world, sharing their stories on International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great story here, an entrepreneur, founder and CEO, Donna Marie Ryder with Tanya AI, from New Zealand, from all the way down under. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I love your story. Let's start by just setting the table about your story, where your background's from, how you got into the business. Take us through quickly that origination story. Sure. Look, I come from a low socioeconomic area. I grew up in New Prometh, and we didn't really have a lot of money. My mother did struggle to put food and milk on the table. And so what we did do though, although we didn't have money, we had the ability to dream. And so we would, every day, I remember as a child dream about what it would be like to one day have enough milk and bread, have enough money to be able to buy a car or even catch the bus. And so what we did was we dreamed about how I could achieve that. And so what I did was I got educated because when you said if I got educated, then that would enable me to get a job and become financially independent. But one of the key things she also made me promise was that not only would I get educated and have enough money to support myself, but then once I did that, that I would then give back that knowledge and understanding so that I could strengthen others. I love the story again. Entrepreneurship is a lot like picking yourself up. Your failure is part of the process. You got to grind, you got to do the hard work. You got to have the idea, you got to make it happen. You've done that with Tanya.ai. Building the business is hard. Nevermind for doing it as a woman as well and your conditions. What a dream. You found your dream. What's it like right now? It's hard work. I'm not going to frisk it. I know that around the world everyone's excited and they say, I'm going to leave my job and I've had enough and now I'm going to stand up my own business. We've been working on Tanya.ai for almost three years now. Standing up a business and then running it successfully once you've stood it up is actually a lot harder than what people think, especially being a woman as well and a Māori, which is essentially an Indigenous person of New Zealand. It is a little bit harder to do that, especially when you choose the industry to do that and which is technology. You don't have a lot of other women. There are some women coming through from Indigenous backgrounds that are paving the way for us, but there's not a lot of us around and so it does make it a lot more trickier, but I had a dream and I had a vision that I was going to be able to give back what I had learnt about business and about money to help others, so tech was where it was going to be. Well, it's certainly an inspiration for many. I love the success story and entrepreneurship's hard enough as it is, like I said, but being a woman is even harder. What are some examples can you give when you were coming through? Because you've got to really push through and break down walls to get things done in any startup, and with the corporate world, with its biases, and there's also people's preconceived mindset of who should be in what position, what founders are, what entrepreneurship is. What was it like? Can you give some examples of situations that you broke through? Look, I think that immediately people underestimate you when you're a woman, especially an Indigenous woman, and so what I was, so basically what I would do is I didn't think about what they thought. What I focused on was what actually where I needed to go, and so although people didn't believe that I could get it done, they thought I was dreaming, I know people said at one point, they said, oh, this company looks like they're doing something similar to you, they've just raised $2 million. What makes you think that you're going to be even come close to being successful like they are? And my response to them was that they aren't me, they don't have me in their organization, and I think that's something really critical that women have to understand when they're standing up in an organization, especially one within technology. We as a woman are unique. We bring to the table a different set of values and different sets of principles that potentially others don't also bring to the table. We have a different level of work ethic, and so I actually think that through those experiences, I was able to be more resilient and follow through in terms of what I believed was possible. So it didn't matter what people thought. It didn't matter if someone was richer or had more money than we did, or they had more execs. I remember the other thing was, oh, we've got all these really high performing executives from large organizations in New Zealand, and who do you have? Again, my response was, well, they don't have me, right? And so that makes a significant difference. It's not that I'm a unicorn, but it's that I have a very strong belief system, and I have a dream that I've been following for almost 40 years and trying to make come true. So those two things are things that you can't underestimate. And sometimes they're actually a lot more productive and valuable than money or positional executives within your organizer. Yeah, that's a great, great insight. And then again, congratulations again, great inspiration. Most people worry about what everyone else is doing. Hey, look what they got. They don't focus on what they're doing, but I love the confidence, the conviction, preparation, education. These are all themes that are coming out of this International Women's Day around how to be successful, how to raise your hand, how to drive through, how to drive, control your career, control your own destiny. This is a theme. Education plays a big part of it. And obviously you're building a company. Amazon's, you're involved with Amazon. You got education now at your fingertips on the internet. Education's out there now. You can like get it instantly and you can level up with cloud and refactor and compete at any level. Yeah, absolutely. I think if you look at AWS, they gave us the opportunity to be global instantly. Without their infrastructure and their backend and for us to turn that on in any country that we wanted, we wouldn't have been able to go global. And so, I really do appreciate all of the different platforms and the technologies that we can access as a CEO of a tech organization so that it actually enables us to be a global and have a global footprint. You're a great example of what I always say about cloud computing and these platforms is, they're agnostic when it comes to talent. If you can write good code and you're talented, the world is yours. There's no real degree you can get from a pedigree college or university. If you have what it takes, just plug it on top of the cloud and you're instantly global. This is new. This wasn't like this years ago. Look, and to be honest, when I first set up Tania.ai, we chose voice. Alexa voice as one of our channels through which Tania.ai would provide financial updates to organizations. Now, no one in New Zealand or Australia even knew what an Alexa was three years ago. And so essentially, the ability to have access to people around the world to build your team and to have infrastructure like Amazon, it just enables us to achieve great things. It enables us to give back more than we ever thought possible. So I think it's being able to know where you need to plug the gap and then plugging that with infrastructure, which is strong and enables you to continue to grow can really help you go forward. So talk to me about your current situation as a tech leader, as a woman in tech now, you have a company, you're giving back, you're fulfilling your dream. You have a life, right? You got to live your life and balance your life and you're doing it all. What's it like being a tech leader and being a high-performance entrepreneur? Yeah, look, I love being able to give back and give back in an industry where it's just growing every day. The environment is changing. We have to keep up to the play with all the new technologies that are coming through all the new capabilities so that we don't get left behind. Technology enables you to become more efficient and effective. And what we were working on three years ago, that's now changed significantly in terms of what it looks like now, how fast it can go, how much reach we can achieve when we're going out to our other customers and put points across the globe. Also, I think that when you look at a woman in both a professional and a personal standpoint, I'm also a mother of four children and I'm also a wife. And so what I have to do is be able to balance running a tech organisation as well as running the house. Unfortunately, even though I'm a CEO of a technology company, it certainly doesn't enable me to turn off the mother light at the end of the night. Or at the beginning of the morning when the kids have gone to school. I might be sitting in a meeting and doing a full negotiation for a high-valued contract and in the back of my head I'm thinking I have to take out the mints later or I have to make sure that my daughter remembers to take her togs to school tomorrow. So we're quite lucky as women. We essentially running two parts of our brains. One of them is being able to continue to nurture and be the supporter of our husbands and our families and our children at home as well as run these tech companies. So we're very lucky. I also think it's interesting that the majority of funding that's made available by JVs is not two women. I don't know why that is, but if you imagine having a woman who can literally run two worlds at the same time and be successful at both, then I think that that's high productivity that you want to be a part of. Yeah, that's investable. There's more women leaders again having role models like you out there and the story is really compelling and super inspirational. I love the two worlds. It's almost having two stars at the same time. That's talented. But I love your comment also about the underdog and I know a lot of entrepreneurs and being one myself and even people who are ultra successful have the chip on the shoulder. They still have the underdog mindset. So is that true for you? Do you still feel like you're an underdog? Is that something you'll never give up even when you're super successful? Yeah, I think so. And it's not an underdog from a really vicious, uncomfortable standpoint where I'm trying to get back at anybody. What it does do is as an indigenous person coming from low poverty, the expectation of where I would end up was really low. If I wasn't pregnant or I wasn't in jail by 16, I was successful and I'd won. And so the bar has always been set really low for me. Even when I went and did a degree, the first one was well you should go and do Maori or a Bachelor of Arts at university and I said well why can't I go and do that thing over there? There's no Maori and there's not a lot of women sitting in the finance lectures. Why don't I go and do a degree in finance? And so as I've worked through my education and also my career, the expectation that I'd achieve great things just wasn't there. And so that drive does have to come from you internally. Sometimes you're not always surrounded by people who understand your value and what you can contribute to the world. And so what you do have to do is you have to have a personal belief system that enables you to actually leverage that underdog position. And so rather than letting that get you down, like oh they don't believe in me or they don't think I can do this or I can't achieve that, basically what you do is you use it as like a little stepping stone. You're like thanks for that. I'll just put that over here and all it does is just enables you to power yourself forward. It's motivational. It's also curiosity. The late Steve Jobs once said stay curious and stay foolish. Actually he said stay foolish. Amazon says be curious. That's their kind of slogan but be foolish and stay curious, whatever it is. That's kind of the mindset and again what I love about the story and I think this is a trend that we're seeing is that if you are underrepresented or you are the underdog now more than ever the ability to level up is better than ever before. Anyone can start a company. You can get, I mean cloud computing and Amazon gives education away for free. If everyone's someone stuck you can just go online courses. So there's now paths to go from here to here quickly. This is amazing. Yeah but it is hard work though right? So it doesn't come easy. And so that is one thing I think that people underestimate about the ability to stand up a business and then it becomes this Apple or Amazon or Google. And so yes my vision is that we're on a road trip to Nasdaq we're focused on being able to list on the Nasdaq in five years time with a billion dollar valuation and yes that is a vision but being able to be open-minded about what it's going to take to actually get there is really important. And so you can have conviction but you need to follow through and have action. You need to be open-minded about changing the way you thought it was going to look. I mean we've reiterated tania.ai probably three or four times since we've gone live last year. And that was because she wasn't where she needed to be. We needed to pivot her so that we could continue to ensure that we ended up with the product market fit that enabled us to meet our vision but also to achieve our financial and strategic goals. That's a great point. You got to do the work. You got to grind it out sometimes. You got to be sensitive to the customers and the market. This is the secret. Final question for you. What a great conversation. As an entrepreneur we all know it's a trials and tribulations. It's a roller coaster. A lot of emotion like a like raising a family. You don't know what you're going to get out of it. Anything is possible. How do you maintain the balance emotionally as you go in and continue to build out your business? You got to take the highs and the lows. Look in the early days of standing out tania.ai I was very naive. Not because I was a woman just because I was new to the game. I had always worked for global organizations that were already established that had big pits of money that had resources that I could call on. I'd say that first six to 12 months was really hard. There was a time there where I had to rebuild tania.ai they changed the back end infrastructure I had spoken to zero and Amazon Alexa and I had to achieve a certain I had to go through a number of different gates and what that meant is that I had to rebuild her. I think I cried initially for the first couple of days but then it was actually it took me about a month to get over myself and what I mean by that is I had this vision and this dream about how it was going to be I was going to do this and then all these steps were going to follow and everything was going to turn out how I expected and then it hit me within the first three months of trying to get accreditation that it wasn't how it wasn't going to turn out how I wanted. I didn't have the resources or the money to execute it how I wanted and therefore what I had to do was understand my why because what happened was I was able then to use my why as the basis for why I was making decisions going forward so rather than it being just the vision about where I was going to land it ended up being it doesn't matter the how the pathway we get there obviously we want to do it with integrity I don't necessarily know all the steps of how that's going to happen but I need to be open to the fact that it won't now when I get disappointed and things don't happen how I expect them now I basically just initially I cried and I sit there and I complained to my poor husband and I've been like oh my god don't let me do this or Amazon Alexa they've turned me down and I'm not allowed to do it this way and I just complained and whined but three years on basically whenever I hit a wall or I hit a road block I just step back and go right I can't go that way let's find another way and so I think you have to be really resilient around accepting that things won't always go your way but there is always another way Donna Marie great conversation building a business in tech from your dreams getting educated going out in the arena being successful again once you're successful you can write your origination story the victory the victor writes the narrative as they say so it can be disappointing sometimes when you're learning to grow it like that businesses like that so great story congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to share on theCUBE as part of our celebration of International Women's Day thank you so much okay this is theCUBE presentation tech global event celebrating International Women's Day I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE thanks for watching