 The Cube presents On The Ground. Hey, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are really excited to be on the ground at the Santa Clara Convention Center at the Anita Board Women's Division Awards, our second year, and love to come back. It's a great event. 600 people really celebrating some very special award recipients. And we're excited to have our next guest, Jody Mahoney, the Senior Vice President of Business Development for Anita Board. Welcome. Thank you. Lovely to be here. Absolutely, so another great event. What is this event really all about? Oh, I think this event is really about showcasing individual women, women who have really changed the face of technology. So you look at some of the people that have been honored, Susan Landau, Helen Greiner, for whom we can thank for the Roomba. I mean, the degree of technology and the women that have created technology, these are serious hardcore technical women that have made huge contributions to the United States globally. And I think it's so wonderful for me to have seen this history. When I think of the Anita Borg Institute for myself, what I think about the most are the extraordinary women that I have met. I mean, Mary Lou Jebson, who is brilliant. You just, you see them, you see the work that they've done, and you realize that they have kind of changed and altered the landscape of technology for all of us, and the Anita Borg Institute has brought them to a larger audience. So you see at the conclusion of the remarks and the end of the event, streams of students and people waiting in line to come up and ask questions and talk virtually every single woman that has been honored stays and answers until the last question is asked. And so it is both the transfer of knowledge, it is the honoring of women technologists, all of what women of vision is about. And that's the women of vision awards. Then of course the showcase event for Anita Borg is the Grace Hopper celebration of women and computing, not only the best name in tech events, but certainly one of the most positive vibes of any show that we've covered and we cover a lot of shows. And that thing just continues to grow by leaps and bounds. 15,000 people this year. So you look at that and you look at the array of people that come to us now because what Hopper is, it's a platform for many kinds of organizations, for academic organizations, for industry organizations to recruit, to present. And so the panels are just, they're off the charts and we have had so many requests for scholarships and we get so many submissions for panels and workshops. And we only have three days of time and every second is packed. And I think for many people, it's just to walk into whatever venue it is and look around and face after face after face as a woman, computer scientist, a woman, software engineer and all of the conversations in the corners and all the conversations around the panels and workshops is what it's all about. And then just the extraordinary role models. You'll get someone like Manuel Ovaloso who spoke last year and talks about this intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics. In that, I think what I love the most about the Anita Bork Institute is how it has informed my life. And so I've gone on and read as many articles as I can about this marriage of robotics and artificial intelligence. And so that's, so you're exposed to people like Maria Clavé, you're exposed to all of these extraordinary speakers and role models in addition to all of these other people that you can ask questions to. And that's really amazing. We were at Grace Hopper last year, the access to these really big names and they hang out and they walk around. And as you said, and then you've got this whole kind of college student piece which adds this kind of young, kind of younger vibe, younger energy and the connection between the two is pretty magical. It really is. And you look at that and that is magic is a wonderful term for it because you do you see someone here who's 30 or 40 years into their career and is now a noted computer scientist that is doing remarkable things. And you see someone here and I have seen conversations, I've witnessed this where someone will come in who's an undergraduate or a master's level student and say, I don't know, I don't wanna. And I've seen people convince them to stay in and they've gone on and I meet up with them in ABI partner companies. They'll have stayed in, they've gone on, they've gotten their master's degree, their doctor, their computer scientist, they're working out for a particular company and they'll come back and say, I met you at Grace Hopper. There's a panel right now going on at Millennials and there's a particular woman engineer from PayPal who came through Grace Hopper. So you see it and it's that continuum that's so wonderful. The time keeps moving, right? So you guys have to continue to morph, you need to continue to evolve, you need to kind of not only change with the times, but to offer new things. So as you look forward now, what are some of the new things Anita Borg Institute's working on? What are some of the new kind of programs, outreach ways that you guys are kind of taking your influence out into the marketplace? Well, I think there's a couple of ways that we are doing it. The first is this notion of Grace Hopper while it's a wonderful thing and it's a once a year event. So what can you do to build local communities? And so we have a program called ABI Local. We've launched in a number of cities. We started with ABI New York. We've now launched in ABI Washington DC, ABI Austin, ABI Houston. We're launching ABI London, ABI Tokyo and these are smaller groups of local women in computing or technical women that get together, they do local events, they do meetups, they do networking receptions. We just did a wonderful program in Harlem for women entrepreneurs and that way you've got now these local communities of women in computing and you have almost an exchange. So you can develop content for those local areas. You can exchange it with content for Grace Hopper. So now you're not doing a once in a year or once a year experience, you're doing a small local community and we're piloting them all over, international as well as domestic, in order to build these communities that will then be part of our larger community. Because if you look at what the Anita Bort Institute is about at its heart, it is about this community of women and technical women. But you can only fit so many people and get a picture of something right now. At Grace Hopper, we're already limited to the number of venues. Houston has 19,000 hotel rooms. So there aren't that many places we can go once we grow to 25,000 and I could see that happening. So this notion of the smaller communities and what we have piloted, we call them GHC-1. So if you think of the Ted and Ted X model, this is Grace Hopper and Grace Hopper-1. These are one or one and a half day events. So we've got them planned for, we're doing one in Africa, we're doing one in London in June, we did one in New York, we're doing another one in New York and these are based on the Grace Hopper. There's a call for participation or a hackathon or some technical event. They pull people of that community together and then hopefully there can be content exchange. So we get so many panels and workshops for Grace Hopper that we are not able to accept and they're all brilliant. So we can bring them to the Grace Hopper-1. So a lot of it is about taking this community and building it and making it stronger and making it more global. The other thing that Anna touched on when we were talking a few minutes ago is how now too the tech is expanding outside of just pure engineering and as other disciplines become more technology focused, whether it's marketing or sales and automation, you know, and of course then there's other things where technology is against such everything. How are you guys kind of adapting to kind of the expanding role of tech beyond kind of the classic, I guess tech engineering type of roles? Well, we have a program called the Top Company for Women Technologists and so we actually have a definition of what we believe individual women technologists are. So the companies that come to us and the organizations that position themselves as technical companies, we can say, okay, we need to see this is our definition for our particular work and how does it work? How does it match what your company looks like? And so I think that that's really important. It is expanding everywhere because I am responsible for ABI's industry partners. Companies come to me all the time and say, we're a technology company now. We might be a railroad, we might be an insurance company, we might be a media company, but someone was telling me a stat right now for an insurance company, they have four or 5,000 developers because it's all being done through mobile now. So, you know, I just, so for us, I think it's easy because our definition of a woman technologist is pretty clear and so now the companies and organizations can work within the framework of what we have, but it's broad enough. Well, Jodi, you guys are doing great work, expanding your footprint and a lot of opportunities still down the road. Great, well, thank you so much. All right. It's been a pleasure to spend time with you. All right, Jodi Mahoney, I'm Jeff Frick. We're at the Anita Borg Institute, Women of Vision Awards. You're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching.