 Live from Houston, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Houston, Texas at the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Celebration. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. This is our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal for noise mic co-host, Rebecca Knight, here with our guest, Anna Peterson, vice president of engineering with Google winner of the award today. Welcome to theCUBE. Hi, thank you. Anna, congratulations on the award. One of the things you had mentioned during your talk is that you had your mom and your daughter with you, but you've also had the poll tax from your great-grandmother. Yes. So talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so I guess back when women first got the votes, some voters were disenfranchised because you actually needed to pay a poll tax in order to be able to vote. And it doesn't look like much. It's $2.00. But in today's money, it's about $30. So it's not nothing. It's not like a quarter or something. So it was meaningful. To have these multiple generations of women with you, figuratively. Another thing that you mentioned during your talk was the importance of trust. And how you manage that with your employees, that you trust them, maybe even a little more than you actually do trust them. Can you talk a little bit about your approach, your philosophy to managing a team? Yeah, I'd say there's always a moment where you wind up having kind of more work than your current managers can handle. And so you either look further in the stack or you look to develop a new person. And I think in Ginny Romady's talk, she talked about her boss saying, hey, you're ready because I'm moving on. I often will look around and take somebody who maybe has never managed before at that level and really kind of let them know a little bit ahead of time. But I'm thinking about this for them and I'd like to give them a new assignment and really see what shines and how they can grow into it. And do they often rise to the occasion too because they feel that you believe in them? Yeah, I would say like a true scientist, I would say it's about 85% successful. So it's usually successful. I mean, sometimes people will, I let people get stuck. So they'll take up the task or they'll take up the new management challenge and instead of just pushing them over the hump or taking it away from them, I kind of let them get stuck and watch to see how they get out of it. And then usually people kind of fully blossom at that point. But certainly the defining moment for someone who's smart to figure out, oh my God, they feel out of control. And then Jeannie Romney mentioned on her keynote, growth and comfort don't go hand in hand. And one of my friends, Margaret Stewart, ex-Googler, now at Facebook wrote a post that went viral about a conversation with her boss and said, what's going off the rails? And this is kind of a Google technique. And she was nervous because she's a perfectionist. And what she learned about herself was it's okay to let stuff go off the rails because that means you're pushing things. Let's talk about this new changing because this is where the innovation spark comes from. How do people handle that? Like how do you advise people, people that are watching? So there are a lot of young talents here. How do they get through that? So usually I tell people, which is well known, nobody knows everything. And so sometimes they're coming against a challenge and I say, well, it might be a knowledge gap, right? So I tell them to study at night. I say, what do you need to know? What don't you know? Be humble, ask the engineers if you don't know. Consult books inside Google. We have a thing called Code Labs. And so if you don't know about a new technology but now you're managing in that area, go ahead. Check out the code, write it, learn about it. Sit down with engineers often right out of school and have them tutor you. It's amazing what you'll learn about not only the technology but about the organization. It is not always to your point. It's not always comfortable. Yeah. Talk about the younger generation because that's a great point. Being mentoring is a bi-directional situation. Yes. Are the young coders faster? Do they use VI? How do they do the editing? No, are they faster? What's the young generation like, male and female? So they do use, instead of using VI and make files, they do use like full kind of coding environments. So you can imagine that you have, if you use VI, you can imagine your VI window but now links where you say hash includes standard IO or something. You can click that and it'll automatically open that for you. You don't have to say, oh yeah, standard IO, I think that's in Libs or, you know, you don't have to navigate the UNIX hierarchy in order to find that file and read it. It's really a click away. Yeah, so it's more smarter in there. Okay, so what's the coolest thing you're working on right now? So, I mean, one of the challenges that we have, I mean, we deal with a lot of text and in the context of working on search, I dealt with a lot of text. I think one of the next AI complete problems is how to read and understand language and how to create that language. So I think, you know, some of my teams are working on, you know, intelligent summarization and you've seen some work in something that you might like automatically replying to your mail. Yeah, some automation. So how can you draft something? Yeah, how can you draft something in your tone? Yeah. So I want to ask you kind of a philosophical, philosophical question. Google really, you know, from the day one, remember when I met Larry and Sergey, they just really nailed organic search. They made things really, really easy and fast. You got what you were looking for, you discovered, you navigated out of there. And then I used to find myself clicking on multiple pages of Google search results, really having an immersive experience. Now there's so much discovery challenges out there. Horizontally scalable apps, you got mobile, social data. How is the discovery of information change? Because, you know, it's kind of an AI kind of thinking problem, like, okay, how do I find stuff now? Yeah. I got communities that are public, I got communities that are maybe paywall or login based. Yeah. Gesture data. Yeah, I think a lot of that is going to be, you know, unified and you can see one place where we're trying to answer what's next in all those contexts is you can see Google now. It kind of goes out and searches for you and it does that with your paywall data because you're often logged in from your phone to lots of your data. And so, you know, it brings up contextually relevant things. Yeah, my flight, I know, my flight information from my Gmail. Right. So that's the integration. Yes. And the phone's getting great reviews, by the way. So pixels getting some interesting. How does the back end of feed into that? Because now you have a device endpoint. Yeah. That's Google Google. Yeah. But search is still search. Is that kind of that thinking? Is that things you integrate in that way? I mean, search knows a lot about the data out there. Your phone knows a lot about your location and does prediction for you. And those things are really coming together in the future. So I talked to a lot of young folks last night and certainly the theme always comes back. I want to work for a cool company. Well, we'll see if I would cool is. And then you say, but it comes back down to, I want to work on some really cool stuff. Proud problems. I don't want to go work for a boring company. You guys have like 22 recruiting booths out there. I think you guys in Apple and Facebook are like on the top three interest areas. So what are some of the things that some people can think about that's cool projects to get their teeth around and get their hands around? What are you guys offering some of the students out here? What do you entice them with? What's the tech candy? What's the problems? Well, here at Grace Hopper, you'll notice the target audience would be towards women. And women often say, not only do I want a big impact but how can I help people? And one of the things I've noticed is that Android phones, there's a billion phones that are active every day. A lot of these phones are in developing regions. And so if you want to make a big impact to people where their phone might be their only point of contact with information from the outside world, I mean, working on both the information side and Android is really the future of helping people because probably a hundred million people use the phone. It's their dial tone. Yes. For the world. They use it as their primary care physician, right? They want, before they take the big trip, they need the information. So changing with software, how that moves from being a computer that makes phone calls to just being a complete life embedded tool. And a life helper that you keep in your pocket. I mean, as you said, how do I help people? And there are some interesting apps that turn on your flash and you scan your arm with it and it gives you some notion of whether your arm is broken. You know, I wouldn't advise it against going into a hospital. Not a replacement for a doctor. But if you are out backpacking, you know, it's a good idea to check. And talk about the changes in the industry. Obviously you've done a startup that was acquired by Google on an intellectual property deal, search engine. But you know, you've seen how startups were built. So two questions, the makeup of female founders. One, how's that going in your mind? And two, how has the cloud computing revolution changed the development framework now to getting going and doing the startup? Yeah. It's, I mean, some things are just so, so much easier, right? Getting a startup together that was compute intensive meant that you had to, you know, find your own space. You had to buy your own machines. You didn't actually have enough, you know, purchasing power. You need cash. Yeah, you needed cash, but you didn't have, and so you couldn't get good discounts because you're only putting in, you know, 10, 15. You had to get a racket, layer 42. Yes, you had to get a racket, layer 42. Which by the way, layer 42 in Mountain View has like great power, but some other places, we wound up noticing that, you know, power varies place to place and dirty power is hard on machines. So there's all these kind of things that as an entrepreneur, you don't want to find out by yourself. And it's costly. Yes. Hidden costs. Yes, well not so hidden because you have to buy them. So about the female entrepreneurship culture, obviously that is something that I'm super interested in. I have two daughters that have entrepreneurial kind of tendencies, but I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's good. Yeah. What's the entrepreneurship culture like now? What are you seeing out there? Can you share any insights? Yeah, I'd say a lot of women ask me, so Harvard Business School did a review of the top 10 women who've raised the most money and I'm in that list, so I'm pretty honored. And so women ask me, you know, how do I get ready to pitch? What do I have to do? In a male-dominated future capital world. And actually entrepreneurs are, you know, people who take risks. I'd say one of the biggest things I tell people to get ready to do that is to actually give talks. So if you're out giving a talk and especially if it's a scientific talk, that I joked around today, that when you're a logician, only 12 people come, it's true, but they're a tough audience, right? If you write, you know, I, and it should be I prime, oh, they're going to let you know it. So you're kind of used to getting, you know, pretty critical feedback, pretty honest feedback. You know it's right or wrong, so you know, oh, they're not, you know, sometimes people think, oh, they're just being extra hard on you. Actually, if people are being hard on you, they think you're competent. And it's good practice. Exactly. What feedback would you give folks? Is it, you know, not necessarily applies to Google, because Google's very diverse. A male-dominated engineer, obviously we saw the whole GitHub thing last year, it was when super viral. There's just some cultures that are just dominated by male engineers and coders. And they do stupid stuff, right? Most of the time. So how do female engineers manage to be successful in that environment, besides recruiting their own? What's your advice? I think mostly people see themselves kind of living in the world of the mind and living in the world of ideas. And so they're actually trying to solve a problem. And you think about yourself as an engineer first, and as a woman, I'm not even sure second. Mostly like an engineer, a problem solver, a worker, and then a woman. I guess at Grace Hopper, people are really celebrating that they're women in engineering. But most of the days, people just are engineers. And then they just do their thing. Absolutely. And you are a leader, you won the award for being a technical leader. Can you talk about some of the specific things you do to champion women in your company? I mean, can you talk about some of these specific strategies you use? So we have a volunteer organization called Women at Google, and it's 9,000 Volunteers Strong. And when I started as the co-chair, we have a chair on the business side, which is Margot Georgiatis, and I'm the chair on the tech side. And we only had 1,500 women who were involved in Women at Google, and now we have 4,500, so that tech women are at parity with the business and finance side of the house. So we have three pillars, communication, connection, and development. And on the connection piece, women are happier at work, women and men, are happier at work when the more connections they have. Because then the more people kind of outside their day-to-day scope, they have to just double check, hey, I have this situation, a sounding board, yeah, a sounding board outside your scope of work. And so the connection piece is important, and then development is for internal development. Like it could be giving public talks, it could be on technical writing, it could be on something really transactional, like writing your promotion packet. How do you advocate for yourself? And then we also do some work with the community. So we try to give back and get everybody involved in Girls Who Code. Great, so what's the vibe here at the show and what's your plans for the next day or so? You're going to mingle around, interview some candidates. Do you get the short list of the best of the best? What's your plans and what's the vibe here? Yeah, so I think one of the things that's great is because I gave the talk on the first day already, tons of people have come up to me to want to talk and want to meet later. And so really I'm going to meet, I'm going to meet with candidates and tomorrow I'm giving two talks. I'm on a senior leadership panel tomorrow and I'm giving my award presentation, but it's going to be very interactive. I'm hoping to hear from the audience. There's a young woman out there who says, I want to be you in 10 years. What's your top piece of advice? Take risks, yeah. I agree with you're not growing unless you're uncomfortable, but also in a way if you know what you're doing, you're not taking enough risks. So you need to actually be pushing yourself and enjoy the process, enjoy learning. Off the rails means growth and get control of it. Ana, thanks so much for sharing your perspective. We'd love to get you connected with some of our fellows that are doing a special report here with the Tech Truth Fellowship that we have. So thanks for coming on. It was nice to meet you. You're watching theCUBE live. I'm John Furrier, Rebecca Knight here at Grace Hopper at Houston Live for three days of wall-to-wall coverage as part of our Tech Truth Fellowship and of course theCUBE bringing all the action, all the events right back after this short break.