 From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering CloudNOW's seventh annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Lisa Martin on the ground with theCUBE. At Facebook headquarters, we are at the seventh annual CloudNOW Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards event joined by one of the 2016 winners, welcoming back to theCUBE, Shamla Banla. You are now at Facebook, the director of production engineering. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa. So we are at Facebook headquarters and we were talking with Jocelyn DeGance Graham a little bit ago. He's the founder of CloudNOW. There's seventh annual event, first time at Facebook, and you, a past winner, are largely responsible for getting Facebook to say yes. Tell us a little bit about how you are paying it forward as a winner and enabling this year's awards to have such a boost up. Yeah. So I attended the CloudNOW event at the Google Campus in 2016 and when I walked out of the event, just not being the award recipient, but just meeting the other award winners as well as the speakers, I was completely pumped up and charged. When I joined Facebook last year, I saw how much deeply Facebook actually cares about diversity and inclusion. And I know that cloud computing and conversion technologies is an area where women are underrepresented. So when I pitched to my leadership team that when we care so much about we should be hosting this year's event and they jumped on board immediately. So it was an easy sell, but something also that's pretty remarkable that you should know about is that this year, one of the keynote speakers is the COO of Facebook, Cheryl Sandberg. And again, Shama, you were instrumental in securing Cheryl who has a crazy busy schedule. That's huge for everybody here and the groundswell of women in technology. Tell us a little bit about that coup. So when we decided finally to host it and as we were planning and all the lineup of great lineup of speakers and the winners, we couldn't have thought about anybody else to do the opening remarks than Cheryl Sandberg. I know she had a very, very tough schedule, but my leadership team and I, we were persistent and it's an honor to have her here to do the opening remark. It absolutely is. So talk to us a little bit about your tenure here at Facebook. You mentioned joining about eight or nine months or so ago and being a culture that fosters diversity, gender diversity, thought diversity. Tell us a little bit about your team in production engineering and how that culture, how are you helping to grow that? That's a great question. So definitely I'll be very honest. We have a lot more to do. Production engineering predominantly in the industry is male dominated. But just this year, just in the teams around me, we have hired quite a bit of female managers as well as individual contributors. And the support we get from our peers, the open thoughts, you know, the collaboration, it's just great to be in an environment where we can foster that culture. And one of the things to tell me about your background is your education background in a STEM field, your engineering background? Yes. Yes. So talk to us about one of the things that's also challenging that we're all very familiar with with women in technical roles is the under representation. But it's also being able to retain women. You are establishing a great tech career yourself. What's your advice for inspiring your generation and maybe the younger generation that you're helping to hire here at Facebook to stay in technology? So cloud computing or technology, I mean, we all have to pay it forward. I think we as women who are in influential positions and can make an impact on the younger generation, I think need to absolutely do a lot more to pay it forward. It is not only with awareness, but also wherever, whenever you get opportunities, try to mentor students. Early on in their career, encourage them to believe in themselves, to reach out for mentors and sponsors, do networking, which I think in general, girls and women, they shy away from it. I would say networking, meeting with people in the industry, they would be learning a lot more in the early on in their career. Great advice. One of the things that's also fantastic and a first for the seventh annual cloud now event is it's, not only is it sold out, there's expecting over 300 attendees here tonight, both men and women, but also there was no advertising for the selling of tickets. So this was all word of mouth from the sponsors, Facebook, Google, Intel, past winners like yourself. So Jocelyn talked about that groundswell, that momentum that we're all feeling. What are your expectations for the event tonight? First of all, we are super thrilled and excited. Like when I look at the list of the guest list, when I look at the speakers, when I look at the winners, I mean, it was just the word of mouth as we started, you know, telling who will be the speakers and we will have a VC panel and the winners. I think the word of mouth really paid it forward and we're super thrilled to have about close to 300 people attending the event tonight. And there's a really nice diverse set of winners you mentioned. I was chatting with Jocelyn earlier and this is the first year that they've been able to recognize female technical founders who are venture backed and there's a variety of technologies. We're going to be speaking with all the winners tonight from the smart homes, the smart apartments technology to blockchain intelligence on blockchain. So the diversity there in not just the technologies, but also the background of some of these entrepreneurs who, one of them is a lawyer who was practicing attorney for 17 years, founding Digitory Legal, just really interesting backgrounds and we have thoughts on that. So I think when we looked, we had more than 100 nominees. It was very, very hard and we were all, I was also part of the committee as we were going through the winner, you know, choosing the winners, it was very hard. But one of the things we really wanted to make sure was we have a diverse set of winners, not only from their backgrounds, but also the technology domain they were representing, which is very, very important. And as we were going through the planning, you know, deck and looking at the presentations, I can't wait to hear what they have to present. It is so thrilling to see the accomplishments and what they have achieved in their respective fields. We're excited as well. Shama, thanks for taking time to stop by and join us on the program tonight and it was good to see you again. Thank you so much, Lisa. It's been a pleasure being here. Excellent. We want to thank you for watching Lisa Martin on the ground at Facebook for theCUBE. Thanks for watching.