 I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, we're on the ground at Google for the sixth annual Cloud Now Top Women in Cloud Awards. They are excited to be joined by award winner and CUBE alumni, Erica Windish, founder and CTO of IOPype. Welcome back to theCUBE Erica. Thank you. Great to have you here and congratulations on being one of the top women in cloud. Yeah, of course. Tell me, when you heard about that you were being recognized, what did that mean to you where you are in your career? Well, oh gosh, I mean, it really meant like it was really big for me. I actually wasn't really expecting it. I think, you know, I was nominated and like I totally forgot. I think somebody even mentioned to me that they were nominating me and I had no idea about it. Like I totally forgot about it. And, but I mean, it's just for me, it's just so validating because as much as I've, well, one, because I've done a lot of interesting things in cloud and in tech, but I've never really gotten a lot of recognition for that. And also just recognition, I mean, to be quite honest, I'm transgender. So like the fact that I was recognized as a woman, you know, top 10 women in cloud computing was like extra important and special for me. That's awesome. So tell me about your path to being where you are now. Were you always interested in computers and technology or is that something that you kind of zigzagged your way to? Yeah, well, it was one of these things I guess I had some interest. When I was a child, we had like basic exercises printed in our math books, but our teachers never went over it. So I got kind of interested and I would read through those chap, like those little appendems in my math books and I would start teaching myself basic. And I picked up a Commodore 64 and it didn't work and I taught myself basic, like more basic with those manuals. And I just like had like these little tiny introductions to technology and just self taught myself everything. Eventually, you know, using like a high school job to buy myself books and just teaching myself from those books. Managed to grab Linux on some floppy disks, installed it and tried to figure out how to use it. But I didn't really have a lot of like mentors or anything that I could really follow. At best, there were other kids of school who were into computers and I just wanted to try and like do what they were doing or do better than they were doing. I love that. Self taught, you knew you liked this and you were not afraid to try, hey, let me teach myself. That's really inspiring Erika. So speaking of inspiring, tell me about the IO pipe story. So you're a tech stars company. Tell us a little bit about tech stars. What that investment in IO pipe means. Yeah. So I started, I guess I first started IO pipe two years ago and I found the co-founder Adam Johnson who joined me and we applied for tech stars, got in and that was like the first validation that we had from outside of ourselves and maybe one angel investor at that time. And I mean, that was a really big deal because it really helped us celebrate us, give us validation, allow us to make our first hire and they also taught us a lot about how to refine our elevator pitch and how to raise money effectively. And then we ended up raising money of course. So with the end of tech stars, we had a lot of visibility and that helped us raise a $2.5 million seed round. Wow, so a really good launching pad for you. Yes. That's fantastic. So tell us a little bit more about the technology. I know that there's AWS Lambda, we just got back from re-event last week. So tell us a little bit more about exactly what you guys do. Oh yeah. So what we do is we provide a service that allows developers to get better insights into their application to get observability into the application running on Lambda as well as debugging and profiling tools. So you can actually get profile data, profiling data out of your Lambda and load that into like Google Dev tools and get flame graphs and like dig in deep into which function called which function inside of each function call. So every Lambda invocation, you can really dig down and see what's happening. We have things like custom metrics and alerts for that. So you can like, for instance, we built this bot. I built it in two days. It's a Slack bot that does, if you put an image in a Slack, it will run it through Amazon recognition and tell you describe the objects in it and describe it. So for instance, if you have like visually impaired members of your team, they can find out what was in images that people paced it. I built it in only two days and I could use our tool, let's say, to extract, well, how many images were, or how many objects were found in that image, whether or not a specific object was found in that image and then we can create alerts around those and do searches based on those and get statistics out of our product on the data that was extracted from those images. So that was really cool and we actually announced that feature, the profiling feature for midnight madness of reInvent. So it was like the opening ceremony for reInvent. It was just us, Andy Jassy and Shaquille O'Neal. And we launched our product and we did the demo of this Slack bot and it was a lot of fun. Wow, so you were there last week then? I was there, we were there last week and we were actually the first, myself, my co-founder, one of our engineers were up there and we were the first non-AWS speakers at the entire reInvent, it was really amazing. Wow, amazing, congratulations. Thank you. With all the cool announcements that came out last week on Lambda serverless, even new features that were announced for recognition, how does that either change the game or maybe kind of ignite the fire under you guys even a little bit more? Well, I think one of the biggest announcements relevant to us was Cod 9. And we knew that this was gonna happen. Amazon acquired them a year ago, year and a half ago and but they finally launched it and they really doubled down on providing a much better experience for developers of Lambda to make it easier for developers to really build and ship and run that code on Lambda, which provides a much tighter experience for them so that they can onboard into things like IOPyte more easily. So that was really exciting because I think that's really gonna help with the adoption of Lambda. And some of the other features, like Alexa for work is really interesting. It will probably just, again, a lot of Lambda Alexa apps are built on top of Lambda. So all of these things are going to just provide of course value to my own company because we can tell you things like, well, how are users interacting with those Alexa skills? But I think this is generally exciting because there's so many really cool, I mean, honestly, I don't know how many things they announced at this re-invent. They were just really amazing. Another one that I really loved was Fargate and because I mean, I came from Docker, I used to be a maintainer of the Docker engine and something that I was pushing for at that time in OpenStack and in other projects was the idea of just containers completely as a service without the VM management side of the things, right? Because with ECS, you had to manage virtual machines and I was like, well, that is little, like I don't want to manage virtual machines, I just want Amazon to give me containers. So I was really excited that they finally launched Fargate to offer that. So last question in our last couple of minutes here. Tell me about the culture and your team that you lead at IOPype. You were saying before when you were kid, you were really self-taught and very inspired by your own desire to learn, but tell me a little bit about the people that work for you and how you help inspire them. Oh, gosh, well, I think first of all, we are, right now we're nine people. I would say about four or five of us are underrepresented minorities in tech in one way or another. It's really been fantastic that we've been able to have that level of diversity and inclusion. I think part of that is that we started very diverse. So a lot of companies will say, well, one of the problems with not having enough diversity is that they hire within their networks. Well, we hire within our networks, but we started very diverse in the first place. So that organic growth was very natural and very diverse for us, whereas that organic hiring growth can be problematic if you don't start in a very diverse place. So I think that's been really great. I think that the fact that we have that level of diversity and inclusion with our employees is kind of inspiring because a lot of workplaces just aren't like that in tech. It's really hard to find and granted, we're only nine right now. I would really hope that we can keep that up and I would like to actually make our workforce even more diverse than it is today. But we, yeah, I think it's, I don't know, I just think it's fantastic. And I want what we're doing to be a role model and an inspiration to other companies that say, yes, you can do this. And also to work people in the workforce like, yes, you can be a woman in tech. Yes, you can be trans in tech. Yes, you can be non-binary tech, which I am binary, but we have non-binary people and staff. And I don't know, I just, I hope that's inspiring to people. And also like myself being a transgender founder. Like I maybe know of one or two other people who are transgender founders, it's very uncommon. And I hope that also is an inspiration for people. Well, I think so. Speaking from myself, I find you very inspiring. And you seem to be someone that's really known from thinking I'm not afraid of anything. I'm interested, I'm gonna try it. Starting a company, I'm gonna try it. And it sounds like you guys are very purposefully building a culture that's very inclusive. And so I think that as well as your recognition as one of the top women in cloud, be proud of that, Erica, that's awesome. Thank you. And you got to meet Shaquille O'Neal? I got to meet Shaquille O'Neal, yeah. I can see the photo. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Erica, for joining us back on theCUBE. Congratulations on the award. And we look forward to seeing exciting things that you do in the future. Okay, great, thank you. I'm Lisa Martin on the ground with theCUBE at Google for the Cloud Now Top Women in Cloud Awards. Thanks for watching. Bye for now.