 From Menlo Park, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE! Covering Cloud Now Awards 2020, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Now, here's Sonya Tagare. Hi, and welcome to the CUBE. I'm your host Sonya Tagare, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, covering Cloud Now's top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation awards. Joining us today is Shemla Bunla, who is the director of production engineering at Facebook. Shemla, welcome to the CUBE. Thank you Sonya. So, can you tell us a little bit about your background? Absolutely. I grew up in India, and it was in 2001 I moved to United States. I joined a company in financial sector fidelity investment. That was my first job in U.S. It was a very important team I was working on, which was responsible for mission critical applications in trading floors. If you know a little bit about stocks, you can think about the sense of urgency. That's where I learned early on in my career. While I was working there, I also did my part-time master's at Harvard University. That time was very crucial in my growth because it taught me resilience, doing two things at the same time. 2005 was a life-changing event where, for personal reasons, I relocated to Bay Area from East Coast, and I joined a startup. Going from a big company to a small company again put me in a situation which I was never used to. The startup taught me again being very resilient, moving fast, which got acquired by Dell. That's when I switched to management. I sat on the decision for three months when my director asked me, you should be in management, and it wasn't, I wasn't afraid. I was too naive to step away from individual, contributed tech role to step into management. They were persistent, and I took on the management role and there was never turning back because what I was giving back to the company, to the team, and also seeing more women join my team, that was something I was truly enjoying. Then I did a couple of small companies transforming their business from an on-prem business to Cloud. That was again growing the team from ground up, and building a team in like two years was very, very motivating. It was about a year and a half ago when I joined Facebook where opportunity came knocking. I really wanted to work at this scale, and six months into the role I was supporting Facebook's monitoring ecosystem. Then last year my role changed. I started supporting Facebook's revenue generating platforms, which is ads, marketplace, commerce, and payments. I'm absolutely loving it. That's very inspiring. Thank you. So you were a past winner of Cloud Now, and now you're on the Cloud Now advisory board. Tell us a little bit about that journey and what's the experience been like? Absolutely. I still remember it was about four years ago. The founder of Cloud Now, Jocelyn, had reached out to me that you should absolutely put the nomination. I had self-doubts, but then I thought, okay, I have done three transformations. Let me give it a shot. I attended the event on Google campus, and the most important thing I took away from that evening was the amazing inspiring speakers and the other peer winners. From that, there was never looking back. It's just not being the award recipient. I think it boosted my confidence that what I have done and then also put more responsibility on me that how can I see more women leaders grow and get more women in the tech. Then last year, when I pitched to my management team that we should host Cloud Now event on Facebook campus, I got immense support from them. We did it. And this is when I felt that giving back to the community, this is what it means. At the same time, after the event, Jocelyn said, I think you should be on the advisory board because we can get more women join this mission and we can accelerate the mission's goal, which is getting more and more women in tech. We have a lot of work still to do. And so today, you hosted the welcome and the scholarship presentation. So how was that experience and tell us a little bit more about Cloud Now's STEM scholarship fund opportunity? It was a great experience. I think Holboton School and Shanti Bhawan, I mean, when I look at the backgrounds of some of the scholars, it's just amazing. I mean, we all are privileged. I feel I'm privileged. Whether it's education or from the families, I think our parents took really good care of ourselves. But when I look at some of the fascinating stories of the scholars, some of them like absolute poverty, homelessness, there was one story which was like a person was homeless and the socioeconomic statuses they come from, you wouldn't even think like how can they even like turn into like great software engineers at some amazing top companies. When I look back, the whole Philanthropy mission of, you know, Cloud Now is on this international STEM scholarship. It is making sure these underprivileged scholars have a fair chance because they didn't start at the same place where I feel I have started, you know, being a kid, you know, going to a school. And it's amazing that we are able to contribute to this mission. Well, that's great. And you're giving them an opportunity to share their skills with the world. Absolutely. So what impact do you hope Cloud Now will have in the future? I think we still have a long way to go. I mean, if I just look at around me, it's amazing that Facebook is very much into seeing more and more diversity and inclusion. And I know the numbers are changing even in other companies, but they're not changing at the rate where we want. Cloud Now has gotten into a place in eight years, very well connected with the winners. All of them, all the winners I look at past eight years are in very prominent positions. We have a privilege at the same time, we also have a huge responsibility. If in whatever field, whatever domain, whatever roles we are in, if we can influence and change the equation where we are making it a fair ground, I think we can see more and more women in tech. And what advice would you give to women who want to be in tech but maybe feel a little intimidated by the male-dominated industry? I think sometimes we are our own enemies. It's easier said than done. I think believing in yourself. So when I was put in roles, absolutely there were moments I was not comfortable at all. And I started doing things, not worrying about the outcome, whatever I felt was right at that time. I never thought this problem is some other team's problem and I'll wait for it. I just went ahead and whatever I could do in my capacity and that was seen and I think women are really, really good in collaboration and soft skills. I would say use your strengths and use it well because that's what the companies need today. And are you personally seeing a rise in women in tech like in your team or at Facebook? Are you seeing that there are more women? Absolutely. When I joined the production engineering monetization team last year, we had 13 women. We have 26 women in the team now. So that's, my team is about 100 plus, so about 26% is great. I had no women managers in the team. I can proudly say I have two women managers in the team. As I say, we still have a long way to go. My hope is in the organization I am in, if we can see more women in production engineering, then I would say like, yes, it's getting there. And last question. There are a lot of shifts in the tech industry, new companies, new emerging tech. What's the opportunity now for women? I think AI is machine learning and AI is on the top because it's not just associated with one domain. AI can be applied anywhere. I feel women, like whether it's healthcare, whether it's in technology, it's going to be applied everywhere. The other is cloud computing. Again, with the public and private clouds on the rise, more and more companies moving into hybrid cloud model. I feel for women, going into these fields will just open up more opportunities for them. Shemla, thank you so much. This is really inspiring. And thank you for being part of Cloud Now. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm Sonia. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Stay tuned for more.