 From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering CloudNOW's seventh annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at Facebook headquarters. We're here for the seventh annual CloudNOW Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Our third time covering this event and we're excited to welcome to theCUBE one of tonight's winners, Masha Sadova, the co-founder of Elevate Security. Masha, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa, thank you so much for having me. It's really great to be here. And congratulations on the award. Thank you, thank you. So you are a security expert. You studied, you were a STEM kid back in school, but you had this really interesting experience when you were at Salesforce a few years ago related to security where you went, I think I see one of the things people have been missing where cybersecurity is concerned. Tell us about that aha moment. Yeah, absolutely. So having grown up in the security field, there's this saying that the human is the weakest link. And I personally never believed that. I was like, there's got to be a way of turning this around. And so I stepped back and said, what would it look like if people wanted to do security instead of had to? What would it look like if people were champions for security and not because we made them do it but because each of us were invested in it? And so I took a step back for my computer science and computer security background and dove into the field of behavioral science, positive psychology and game design and started exploring how people think and how we make decisions to see if I can start applying that to security. And would you know it? There's some really amazing findings that I came across in that space. So you were saying before we went on that a pretty significant percentage of breaches are unfortunately caused by us humans. Yeah, something like 95% have something, have a human error related to it. And if you think about cyber attacks, it's a human being attacking another human being with a bunch of technology in the middle. And if we keep solving it with just technology, we're going to keep ending up making the same mistakes we do. We've been making for decades, but if we look at the human element and why we make mistakes and how we let ourselves learn from them and make better mistakes and also better choices, we can actually move the needle in a really significant way. So Elevate Security co-founded just a couple of years ago. Really impressive with your board. Tell us about your leadership team and the board before we get into the significance of the name. Yeah, absolutely. So it's co-founded by myself and my co-founder Robert Fly. So we have a diverse founding team. And from the very beginning, we believe that embracing our diversity in our hires would be a significant differentiator, not just the way we hire, but also the way we build our product because we're building products for employees of a whole bunch of companies all over the world. And so it was really important to us. And so to date we're 50% women, including our engineering team. And we have an all outside female board of directors, which is a fact I'm really excited to announce today. Excited and proud. So when you had this idea, excuse me, and clearly all of the data show like you said, if we keep throwing technology at the problem of security, we're not gonna solve it. What were the conversations like as a female co-founder going in and trying to get funding for this idea in something as hot of a topic and sensitive as cybersecurity? Yeah, you know, it was challenging, fundraising. I think if you asked any founder, you'd say it would be challenging. I would recommend anybody going to this. Know your stuff and stand up behind it. Know that you have experience and an idea or a brand that brings you to the table, brings something to the table and that you have that behind you. So just because several VCs might say no, it doesn't mean that your idea is not worth fighting for or coming to life. And so it took us a while, but we found a fantastic set of venture partners, Tobacus, who had very similar philosophies in the way. They both raised money and supported entrepreneurship and it's a really exciting, exciting time to have partnered with them. So one of the things you mentioned before we went on it was a card that your mom gave you. I think that's so inspiring and share that with our audience for those who might have a great idea like you did and say, I keep being told no. Yeah, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing. If I were to have gotten to the end of my life and I didn't try starting a company, I knew that I was always regretted and that was something I definitely couldn't live without, live with. And the card that my mom sent me, it was in late 2016 and said, a ship is safe in the harbor, but that is not what ships are built for. And I realized I had to do this. I absolutely had to start this company. I had to see where it goes. And I have a unique perspective and a unique set of experiences in the world and ideas about how this really hard problem can be solved. And I want to see it come to life and I have had the opportunity to gather an amazing team around me to help me make that vision come to life and I'm really excited to see where it goes. So in terms of where it's going, humans are sensitive people. When you're talking with companies, whether they're born in the cloud companies or legacy enterprise companies and you're saying, hey guys, it's your people, we're all human, from a cultural response. What's that conversation like? Do they understand it? And how do you help them go from those really, like we were talking about boring videos and training tutorials to actually impacting behavior? Yeah, so there's two schools of thought in security field. It's the people who believe that human element can't be solved, that humans will always make mistakes, so we need to throw as much technology at it as possible. We've been doing that for three decades and it hasn't worked. And honestly, I'm waiting for that generation to move on until we get a new set of ideas in and what I'm seeing is the up and coming set of security leadership coming and saying, you know what, let's try something new. Let's try something different. And I have invested in technology and it hasn't solved it. What if we try a different approach? And the thing is, security people aren't known for our human expertise. We're great at a lot of other things, but not human expertise. And so bringing in things like behavioral science, which is known for understanding how and why we make decisions, is a perfect combination to solve this problem that to date has been unsolvable because we really haven't been bringing in expertise outside of our field, which on the topic of diversity is exactly what we need. Exactly. So what are you looking forward to as we are just about finishing the first month of 2019? Oh yeah, so we'll be at RSA at the end of February, early March, speaking about our brand new product, Snapshot. But I'm also really excited to continue hiring out our team. We are hiring tons of engineers. So if anyone is looking, please send me... Where can they go? ElevateSecurity.com ElevateSecurity.com. Yeah, and so continuing to build out our team in San Francisco and in Montreal. Congratulations on the award on this really innovative idea bringing in behavior to security. We appreciate your time and look forward to seeing more of what you guys are about to do. Thank you so much. Congratulations. We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at Facebook. See you next time.