 Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech International Women's Day 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Clauda Bittorini joins me next, business developer for the startups team in Brazil at AWS. Clauda, it's lovely to have you on the program. Hi Lisa, thank you for having me. I want to mention a couple accolades that you got just in 2021. You were one of the top 20 most influential women for open innovation in Brazil in 2021, and you were a finalist for Women in Tech Brazil Awards in the category of Ally in Tech 2021. Congratulations. Thank you so much. It was awesome here. And it's always important to be acknowledged for what you're doing in the market, right? Absolutely. Everyone wants to be appreciated every now and then. Tell me a little bit about your role and your background. Of course. So I am living in Brazil, as you said, but actually I'm Italian. So I've been living abroad for the last, I will say 16 years. So I've been living in Portugal. I've been living in Switzerland and now in Brazil for the last 10, I will say 11 years. I'm a social entrepreneur and a strategic designer. I've been working with corporate venture since 2014. And now I'm corporate venture manager for startups at Amazon Web Services. I've supported throughout 10 years enterprises, startups, public sector with corporate acceleration programs and open innovation initiatives within their customer throughout Latin America. What's the female representation like in the startup environment? Well, it depends a lot, right? We have different trends globally speaking. If we look at, for example, global trends, we see that and that includes United States, for example, we see that the number of unicorns that, for example, are led by female is much lower than the number of total unicorns that you see. So if we talk about United States, for example, that has the highest number of unicorns, we see that between 2013 and 2021, the number of female unicorns is only 60 against 500, which is the total number of it. So we see that actually the percentage is 12% only. So we need much more representative in the female startup ecosystem. But numbers are changing, right? So this is promising. That is good. It is promising and to see the numbers ticking up. What is, in terms of positioning of women in leadership roles, what's the role that you see kind of commonly across startups or maybe it varies by country? It varies by country, you're right. But definitely when we look at the trends and when we look at the data that we receive from national startup association and startup organization in the different geos, you can see that startups that are funded by female leaders are, I will say, as a proxy from 4% to 12% in some countries against to 18% of the total number of startups in that country. So it's still a low number. But what we see, which is interesting, is that much more startups that are led by both female and male co-founders are rising more and more. For example, in Brazil, it represents 28%, which is almost 30% against the 12% of female only. Funded startup and the 51% of the male funded startups. So I think it's promising to look at this mix of genders when we look at the foundations of startups, because they're also getting, I will say, from 5% to 6% more investment than female funded startups. What does it mean? It means that we need to find, I think, more allies, work in allyship with men in order to have more investment in startups that are led by women. But it also means that unicorns and the biggest startup, the scale-up startups, are now starting, for example, to hire women in the leadership. So maybe we don't have so many startups that are funded by women, but we have more and more scale-ups and unicorns that are led by leaders which are women. So this is an interesting change if we compare 2022 with 2013, for example. That's good that we've seen so much progress in that amount of time and something that I've seen, too, are looking at stats. We know that the number of females in technical roles is still pretty low below 25%, but there's a lot of data that show that companies with even 30% of the executive leadership team being female are more performant and more profitable. So the data is there. Is that one of the reasons that you think that you're seeing a lot of these kind of co-CEO's female male counterparts in the startup community? Well, we already know that diversity and diverse teams are much more performative than, I will say, non-inclusive ones. So it's always a matter of how you can thrive to success in every kind of environment you're working in. So this is true for startups, but this is also true for corporations. So it's just a matter of time, I think, for the startup environment to start to be working faster with diversity and inclusion than, I will say, the traditional corporate world. Many of the startups in Brazil, I mean, in these tests, are saying we want to work with inclusion. We want to have more equity throughout the journey, not only in the leadership, they just need more resources. And this is something that is interesting for startups because resources is what a startup normally doesn't have. So we need to be really smart on where they put the resources and how we help them throughout this journey so that they can be as diverse as they can and therefore gain more profit, right? One of the things that we often say when we're talking about women in tech, and here we are, International Women's Day, is that we can't be what we can't see. And I think that's so important to have those female role models. It's also important to have male role models. Talk to me a little bit about your mentors and sponsors and how they've helped get you to where you are today. Okay, this is interesting because I just had a nice conversation with some friends of mine and today we're going to launch a project which I'm very fond of, which is called Desha Coelas in Portuguese, is Living with Them, them being a positive reinforce to women. And today we have launched the first episode, which is amazing. And we were talking about mentors, so how important are they? And we were discussing the fact that until now, if we have to count the number of male mentors that we had, of course, it's much bigger than the number of female mentors. But from now on, what about having more female role models for everybody in the startup ecosystem? This is not a motion where women are becoming mentors for other women. Women can be mentors for everybody. And the fact that we are empowering more female founders and female leaders in the ecosystem is just bringing, again, more diversity and therefore more performance to the entire ecosystem. I had many different mentors from different worlds. So I will tell a little bit more about myself, originally I'm an architect and I've been working with building and houses and hospitals and library during the first part of my career. And that world was a male world, actually. And I had many great mentors that helped me out throughout my journey when I changed my career into service design and started working with systems and holistic approach for strategy. Again, I found many male mentors, especially in Switzerland, especially in Brazil. But when I started this startup ecosystem journey, I started meeting women that actually changed my career. So I'm talking about investors, I'm talking about co-founders, I'm talking about leaders. I'm talking about leaders in the community because we don't have to forget that we need always to rely on the personas that are working in the startup ecosystem, such as accelerators, incubators, universities. And I could just tell you so many stories about my mentors, but I don't want to say here that we only need to focus on finding female mentors. We need to find the most meaningful relationship that we can and learn from them. It could be a woman, it could be a man, but we need to encourage more and more women to have the strength and the courage to be a mentor, to speak up. I agree. You don't have to have mentors that are only female. I have many back in my day that were male that got me to where I am today that I just really looked up to and that sponsored me. And that's important for women to know that you need to have your own personal board of directors of mentors and sponsors. But I'd love to know a little bit more. You really pivoted in your career. Talk to me about how you got the courage to say, you know what, I'm going to make a change here. I'm going to go in a different direction. Oh, Lisa, that's such a question. Thank you so much about asking me about this. So I've always have been this, I will say, status quo challenger. And at some point when I entered architecture, I ended up making a master in complexity and using creativity to solve complex problem. So there was already a flag of me not working in architecture anymore in the future, but I didn't know this at the time. So this idea of working with complexity and using creativity to work out complex problems in society brought me to start working more with design and then using design as a management approach to solve those problems. So I was pivoting but step by step from architecture to design, from design to branding to strategy. At a certain point I was working with open innovation already. So I was solving big challenges for big corporation. I was designing innovation planning and the step from here to join the startup ecosystem world is just really small. So from that moment on, I understood that business was the place where I was working and creating an understanding value proposition was actually the thing that was you know, putting me on stage and letting me be more myself in terms of having more connections, be an agent of transformation in this ecosystem. And actually being the challenger and the status quo challenger every day. So that's the way I pivoted. But it took a lot of courage and it also took a lot of curiosity. And this is something that I'm always telling the startups to have. You need to look at everything with the eyes of a tourist. You need to be curious about everything. That's also the reason why I've been changing in countries. I love to learn about new cultures. I love to learn new expressions. I love to understand how other people think. And this is putting other people and other reality in the center of your attention. And this is what business is about. Building stuff that is interesting for people, for your customers, for your user. This is the center of building a value proposition. Right. You bring up several good points there and one, the breadth of knowledge and experience that you have. There's so much value there and having that breadth, being courageous enough to be curious. But you also bring up a point about some other skills like soft skills, for example, that are so valuable that you don't necessarily learn in school. For example, I think communication, relationship building, those are so important for women and men to have, to really bring that breadth to what it is that they're doing so that they can do whatever it is that they want. Exactly. You're so right. So many of these soft skills for women, I think, have been censored throughout the years by society behaviors. So let's say negotiating or talking about finance or let's try to create something new and having the courage to say, I'm going to fail several times before I will bring my business to success. So all of these aspects that I'm trying to describe here were kind of silence throughout the century for women. And now we have the possibility not only to test those situations, but also to speak up, to share this knowledge and to be mindful with other women that can help us to be courageous enough to fail, to fail so many times that we need in order for us to be successful. This is something that I've learned from my colleagues in the startup ecosystem, both male and female funders. This is so important to fail. How much failing fast is important. And this is something that actually for women is contradictory, right? We are taught to be perfect. We are taught to be multitasking. We are taught to be everything that is not showing our vulnerabilities and learning from our mistakes. So these are the soft skills that I think are more important. And also, sorry, I was forgetting, one of the most important, which is resilience, definitely. Resilience is critical. But I always say that failure is not necessarily a bad F word. And you bring up a good point. But if you think of the theme of International Women's Day this year, which is hashtag breaking the bias, where do you think we are with that in the startup entrepreneurial world? That's a good question. Lisa, I think we are in the middle of a big change. Many of the things that happened throughout the last two years, all over the world, brought society to rethink on what we want as a future. The pandemic, the killings of innocent people in the United States, in Brazil. What is happening right now in Ukraine? I mean, we are working together throughout the new future. And we had to rethink to change completely the way we were controlling our life, our daily life, when the pandemic started, right? So I think we are in the midst of a new change. In the startup ecosystem, more and more women are claiming their right to be mothers, to be workers, to be leaders, to be in the startup ecosystem stages like pitching and selling their businesses to investors or corporates. And at the same time, to be part of a family and also our men. So I think we are at a point in which we are kind of looking, looking at each other in the eyes and saying, okay, we need to compromise that we need to have a more a better quality of life. And we need to compromise in being more, more responsible of what we want to achieve in terms of business. And this is something that is happening in the startup ecosystem world as well. So it's impacting corporates and startups as well. So I think it was a consequence of the last two, three years of events throughout the world. But also, we see more investors that are female investors. And this is important because they're breaking the bias. If we have more female investors investing in more women, we can definitely have those entrepreneurs having raised more money or the same amount of money as men in less time. Now, as we are talking, women just, it takes longer for women to raise less money than men. So we need to break the bias in this sense. And I think it's happening already. We do need to break the bias. And thank you for your insights and the work that you're doing to help that along the way. Clara, it was lovely to chat with you today. Thanks for sharing your background. Thank you again, Liz. It was wonderful to be here with you. And I just want to, you know, make a call to action for all the women and the men that are listening to us to be closer to the other gender and to try to be an active listener of what's happening in the other gender's life. Because at the end of the day, we are co-sharing this word together. Thank you very much. Wise words, Clara. Thank you again. For Clara Bitterini, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching Women in Tech, International Women's Day 2022.