 Hi, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at Google for the six annual Cloud Now Top Women in Cloud Awards. They were very excited to be joined by one of the winners this year, Caroline Wong, the Vice President of Security Strategy at Cobalt IO. Welcome to theCUBE, Caroline. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you here for many reasons, and we know that we're both dog lovers, and they're not going to let us talk about dogs for the whole time, but I love that. So you have previously been at eBay, Zynga, Symantec. Were you a STEM kid from the grade school and always interested in IT, or is this something that you sort of zigzagged career-wise and made this career that you have now? So when I was 16 years old, my dad asked me what I wanted to study in college, and I told him dance or psychology. Wow. That's a different from computer science. And he said, it's different because I was like, well, what do I like? What do I enjoy doing? And he said, you're going to study engineering, and you're going to do it at the best school that you can get into. And I studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. I really struggled with the curriculum, but I'm so glad that I do have a formal background in technology. I ended up in cybersecurity pretty randomly, to be honest. I did an IT project management internship at eBay, and when I graduated, I asked my manager if I could work for them full-time, and they said there was a hiring freeze in IT, but they had an open position in information security, which at the time, I didn't know what that even meant. The night before my interview, I looked up information security on Wikipedia, and I memorized the definition. You know, that just speaks to, and look what you're doing now, that you didn't know, and there's probably many other people who are in the same situation, whether they're 16 and wanting to major in dance or whatnot. I love that, that you were confident enough in yourself, probably in your education, to let me try that out. When you were studying, though, at UC Berkeley, you said there were some challenges there. This brings me back to my own days of studying physics, which I wasn't good at. What were some of the things that surprised you for the good? Sure, so I'll tell you a story about one of my electrical engineering lab courses. Of course, I make friends with the one other student in the class who's not quite sure what's going on, and we have teams of three, and so we have to find someone who really knows how to do it. So what happens is one of my colleagues fetches the materials for our lab assignment. My other colleague does the lab, and I write the report. And at the time, I'm a little bit embarrassed that I can't do all three. But after all, it is about teamwork, and it turns out what has helped me tremendously in my career has been my ability to write and to work well with others and to communicate both verbally and in written form what's going on technically. That's outstanding. Just great advice again for others that it's not just about understanding engineering. There's other components that are really critical and will help you be successful. So in addition to the award that you're getting today from Cloud Now, you've been recognized as an influencer by women in IT security and as a one to watch women of influence. You've also had a lot of publications. So I'm curious, what inspires you to be involved in the community and share your expertise, not just your education and engineering and what you're doing with cybersecurity, but also your path to success. Yeah, so for me, I'll contrast it with my sister. She's a Kaiser pediatrician and she's known for her whole life that she wanted to be a doctor and she just went for it. And she was like, here's my target and I'm just gonna make it. I have always been very sort of go with the flow, like what's right in front of me and what's an interesting problem to solve and how can I just put my whole self into it and apply what I know and try and learn something new. And I've approached my entire career that way, not really knowing what was going to happen next but sort of looking around, trying to see, okay, what does the industry need right now and how can I apply my skills to try and add value? I love that, that's great. My brother was the same way. I wanted to be a pilot from the time he was probably eight and there's me, you know, zig-zagging along. But I think that's also, it speaks to, if you have enough confidence in yourself and try things, you can be successful. So I love that. So tell us about your role at cobalt.io and app security and what are you doing there? Yeah, so cobalt, we provide application security services for cloud companies. Specifically we provide on-demand manual penetration testing for web apps, mobile apps, and APIs. So we're really trying to help organizations to secure their applications, you know, as a consumer of cloud applications, as a person who works for a company that works with so many different cloud companies, it's critical that security be in place because right now it's not like any organization, certainly no technology organization works in a vacuum. Just like a car sources parts from many different organizations, every software, every cloud company sources from many different places and at each step along that supply chain, you want to make sure that security has been built in. Outstanding. Tell me a little bit about your team there and some of the key elements to you from managing a diverse team of folks at cobalt. Yep, so we started four years ago, we actually have four Danish founders and so it's really interesting to be in Silicon Valley but have a little bit of a different culture. As a mom of a toddler and expecting in May, it was really important to me to find a job where I really liked the people and I really respected them, where they like and respected me and where I felt I could make a big impact and what's great about working with this team is I feel like all of the people I work with actually have a life outside of work. I feel like in Silicon Valley, so many people work for companies and it's like that's all they do and I respect that. If you're super passionate about something and you want to make your whole life about it, fantastic but my colleagues are extremely brilliant and great at what they do and then they do other stuff as well. That's, it's refreshing to hear that because being in Silicon Valley can take so much time and effort but to be able to have a little bit of balance there, I think you probably see an impact in productivity. Oh definitely, I mean people come into our office and they're like, wow people are happy. People seem well rested, people seem really focused and like they're hardworking and they're excited about what they do but they're not so stressed out, they're not burning out, people aren't needing to take emergency medical leave because of severe anxiety. So these are just things that I think really benefits the company and also our customers. Oh definitely from a customer perspective. So tell us a little bit about what winning this Top Women in Cloud Award means to you. So I'm just thrilled and totally surprised for me to have an opportunity to share my story and to also attend an event like this and be inspired by other women's stories. I mean I think the mission of Cloud Know is so incredibly important. I don't think there's anything so special about any of the women that won awards tonight and what I mean by that is we're not extraordinary. We didn't necessarily overcome any crazy challenges or barriers. I want young women and people of all types to know that this is possible and I think by sharing our stories and how different we are and how we came from all sorts of different places I think that can really be inspiring for the next generation and that's exactly what technology needs. We need a strong and diverse pipeline if we're gonna continue innovating and continue creating. That's brilliant advice and I couldn't agree more I think that some of the stories that we're gonna hear from some of the fellow winners such as yourselves show that some really doing groundbreaking work but others who just persevered who had an interest in something and followed through with it and learned along the way, made mistakes, had the opportunity to fail, learn from that and continue going forward. I personally find that very inspiring. So Caroline, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE and sharing your story. Best of luck with your new addition. And your dogs as well as congratulations again on the award. Thank you so much. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at Google for the Cloud Now Top Women in Cloud Awards event. Bye for now.