 It's The Cube, here is your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here. We're on the ground at the SAP Silicon Valley campus here in Palo Alto, California, and we came out for a special event. It's the Makers Women Who Make America Women in Business event, and they basically, it's a documentary series on women contributing to America. There's a women's version. So we came to SAP. We watched the movie. We had a great panel and we had a discussion. So we're joined here by Renee Colonin, who's had a great company called Let's Stop Meeting Like This. What is Stop Meeting Like? First off, welcome. And what is Stop Meeting Like This? Well, it's great to be here. Thanks, Jeff. Stop Meeting Like This is both a movement and a company. So it's a company in that we teach companies to elevate the quality of their dialogue to get better performance. It's a movement because we think most people are spending all their time in meetings and having it be a soul-crushing experience as opposed to an energizing experience. I love soul-crushing. Soul-crushing. It is. And yet, they're necessary. They're necessary to get coordinated, to get ideas to flourish, to get decisions made. So it's not a matter of doing away with them. It's about doing them well. And that's a personal commitment because it's one of the few places where it's truly going to benefit the company and the individual. Right. And I imagine ROI is probably pretty quick turns. Huge. Both in terms of productivity and engagement and innovation and speed and agility across the board. Okay. So we could probably have a whole day's of panel on this and talk about Intel's meeting culture and a lot of stuff that's going on, but we won't do that. But I do think what's an interesting perspective that you have, you've been at big companies, you've been at little companies, you started your own company, and now you work with companies big and small. So in the context of the conversation today and women advancing in Silicon Valley engineering culture, what do you see as kind of the difference between big companies and little companies? What do you see out in the field with your clients? Well, big companies have different challenges for sure. So they've got bigger coordination problems. They've got bigger alignment issues. You can't move until so many people say you can move as opposed to small companies that can move on a dime and innovate and change their business model overnight. And what I think is exciting is to see the both coming together because big companies also have scale. They've got global distribution. They've got global partner networks. And when you can bring, whether it's an intrapreneur, so somebody being an entrepreneur inside a company or small companies partnering with big companies, you get the best of both. And I think that's the future. Yeah. Well, and I think we all have to now reinvent ourselves so frequently, which we're probably an advantage in Silicon Valley because we see it all around us, companies reinvent, the valley reinvents from chips to software to media to this and that. But now we have to do it as individuals. And I thought another really interesting point that you brought up was you have to be yourself. And I think you gave an example of a trial lawyer that you know who put the mask on, not being herself. And he said it took her out of the workforce for like a year? For a year, yeah. She literally had a breakdown. And I think that's what they call it, women 2.0. I think that's the thing. So women 1.0 was if we're going to play in a man's world, we're going to play by men's rules. And you put on the power suit with the big, do you remember the 80s? Yeah, absolutely. The shoulder pads. And you try to win that way. And the bow tie was very good luck. But it wasn't authentic. It wasn't real. You had to do it, but it took a huge toll on women. Psychically, it took women's friendships down because women felt like they were competing with each other. I truly believe we are entering a new era where you can design a career that is both authentic to you and creates value in the marketplace. And that women can design their own careers in their own lives, whether it's as an entrepreneur like what I've done or within companies to carve their own path in a way that's both authentic and adds to the bottom line at the top line of a company. And I think it's a wide open field and we've just begun to explore that. Yeah, and even though you want more efficient meetings, unless you're on a line, there aren't a lot of reasons to be in a particular place at a particular time within a given workday, right? We're all on our computers. We're on the internet. We have access everywhere. In fact, a friend of mine said, for the first time in history, we are going to decouple where we live and where we work. And that is a very powerful idea. I work from home a lot. So I'm in my backyard with the birds chirping in my yoga pants. But we're doing really important work for the biggest, most successful companies in the whole world. And I think that's the future. And when that happens, a whole new possibility for designing your life emerges. So the other thing that came up is about negotiation. And you gave a great example of two candidates that came in for a job, same salary, the guy negotiated, got a better deal, and the woman took the paper. So what did you learn from that? What did you take away from that? What should we do in a situation like that? You know, it's so amazing because I didn't realize until after they were both hired that this had happened. So they both were hired, offered them the same package. He negotiated a higher starting point. She did not. A year in, she was outperforming him. So come bonus time, we're giving him, let's say, a 10% bonus. We're giving her, let's say, a 15%. And she said to me, you're actually giving him more because he started out higher. So on a percentage basis, he's still earning more. And that was a huge wake up call to me because she was a rock star. And he was, eh. And I thought, wow. And she kind of explained the economics for me in a way that I hadn't heard before, really seen before. We upleveled her, we got it right. But it was a real lesson to me as a woman to help other women not make that same mistake, not just take what you've been given, but ask for what you deserve. But also that if it starts that way, the inequality grows over time. And so we've got to solve these gender differences at the root in kids and education and in women just starting their careers because it just amplifies from there. Right, right, right. All right, great. Well, Renee, thanks for stopping by. Great panel. I'm going to learn more about your company and figure out how we can have more efficient meetings, Dave. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're at SAP Silicon Valley Headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.