Transcripts For CSPAN2 Geek Girl Rising 20170701

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to barnes noble tribeca. Have the pleasure of introducing Heather Cabot and samantha wall ravens has the discuss their new book, geek girl rising. Heather is a form abc news correspondent, angel investor, adjunct professor at columbia university, and a woman at forbes contributor. Samantha walrevens, contributor forbes, and Huffington Post and disney interactive. So join me in walking can welcoming them. This is a superexciting moment for us because, first of all, were in the same city, which we rarely are because i him new york and sam lives in san francisco, but this is the evening before geek girl rising comes out. So its a special moment for us and to kick things off just to give you a taste of the book well show you a book trailer. Lets roll the video. I think that women now understand, we are not going to get ahead unless we help each other to get ahead. I have a female manager and she is the one who handpicked me and advocates for me and pushed me beyond my leadership roles currently. So many i know might not be able to work the typical nine to five job but having this new kind of tech pack gives them the opportunity to work at home, travel, and do everything they want. A mother and also have a job. Dont think that google would be the case take advantage of the amazing opportunities that technology affords us. A enough white guy sharks out there and need more women sharks. I pitcheds to groups before and they dont get it. When i township women they automatically see the value in and see the passion i have for it, and immediately their offers are, how can i help . [music] that is a little taste of geek girl rising a culmination of more than five years of reporting and research and more than 250 interviews. If you want to chime in about the genesis of the project and how we met. Yes, i call myself a first generation Silicon Valley girl. I worked in sill von cale from 1995, which is before right at the beginning of the when people started using the internet for consumer use, when netscape was on, Microsoft Windows 95 came out. Before that the internet was used for academia and now its becoming used by regular, normal people for business and for commerce, et cetera. So, i worked at pc World Magazine as a tech recorder and then get to the internet bug and went to work for a Silicon Valley software star up, tumbleweed software, and i saw the rise and the fall of the dot dotcom industry. Six months it was dune to two, so we were all really rich and then really poor. So i made some lasting and wonderful friendships during the time. For me the inspiration was in 2013 i was having lunch with a girlfriend who has been in Silicon Valley, dotcom survivor like dismiss she said i have been working for over 15 years in the valley, and i just had a Performance Review. Head of sales for a Software Company said i just had a Performance Review and my manager told me that even though the males seem hit the number out therefore the ballpark, he said to me ive been told by some people in your group and the company that youre a little too aggressive and even abrasive. Mind toning it down a little bit . And by the way, your lipstick is too bright and you wear too much julie. Literally said this to her shipment was horrified and needless to say didnt stay at the company very long but said to me, sam, its unbelievable that women are facing Silicon Valley today, the sexism, such unconscious bias, and you need to write about it. Said before i write about it want to interview a couple more people. So i started reaching tout other women who worked in tech. Heather was working for yahoo at the time and i said tell me your story. Want to hear about your experience. Have you faced this kind of bias and discrimination . Is it really that bad . I id been out for a little while. And healther said, ive been researching i was in Silicon Valley, and she said sam ive been working a similar topic for yahoo and she can tell you her story but i have an amazing story of female found experts its great and if started talking to some female founders got the stories as well question. Do face sexism and it does in every industry women are facing this, but let me tell you about at the Technology Im developing, the company im building, all the positive stuff. A plot more positive than negative when it comes to win starting companies and working in tech. Thats the story we decided to tell. Heather was a contributor to my first book torn which looks at women and work life balance, and so we came together in 2013. Heather can tell her story. So i had been in abc news correspondent and then longtime reporter, and i had the wonderful opportunity to go to work for yahoo in 2002, at the dawn of the iphone and the app store and my job there was to cover digital lifestyles, essentially to look at how the internet was changing our daytoday lives, and to put together stories that i would then present on the today shows and Good Morning America and it was a really eyeopening experience because i kept meeting women who were start companies, and i thought, these women are really badass. Why is nobody telling their stories . Im featuring them and their products but i thought it was so interesting that they were so successful and they were so fearless, and i knew that because i had worked on a documentary right out of grad school about the gender gap and tech back in the 90s. Knew it was problem and i thought, this is really interesting. Theres this landscape of women who are doing well for themselves in spite of the sexism, in spite of the fact its a maildominated industry, and i wonder what is the secret about them that has made them successful, that has actually enabled them to persist. And what can we learn from them for our daughters . We both had daughters. If have 11yearold twins, a girl and a boy. Sam has four kid, two daughters, and it was an inspiration to figure out what from their backgrounds, from their childhood, their experiences that gave them that resilience to keep going. So, during the time i was i with yahoo i started curating interviewed with these women and when sam said she was interested in doing the kind of mining the same subculture we realized we could cover so much more ground if we were working on two coasts, and what we were able to do, which is so cool, is at the time there were so many tech hubs out of Silicon Valley start took bubble up and so it allowed to us really go out theres spread ourselves as far and wide as possible to be automobile to track these women and be able to crack these women and get out of the coast and get into the middle of the country. So the book, just to give you you saw the trailer. What we really tried to do, were writing for what i like to call the captain america the winter Good Morning America audience to take them until the subculture and were trying to connect the dots and take the audience to the frontlines where women are working at the Grassroots Level to close the gender gap and at the diversity gap in tender. The book is seven chapters and we survey the landscape. We profile activists and entrepreneurs and investors. We profile women and companies that are trying to reinvent the culture of work. We take you to College Campuses and then take you inside classrooms and also inside the world of the toy industry, that is trying to solve the problem. For a very mainstream audience that may not maybe they love tech and love their iphone but dont necessarily know a lot about the industry or understand the challenges that women and people from die door diverse backgrounds face women try to explain that to them and hopefully get them interested in being part of the digital revolution. I would like to talk about the confidence and read about the confidence chapter. One of the Things Holding women back in the tech sector and Many Industries for that matter is fear of failure. Now, has anyone hear herd of the imposter syndrome . Experience imposter syndrome . Each and every day. The impottseest syndrome is the nagging feeling like im not good enough, not smart enough. What aim doing sneer and even Cheryl Sandberg feels is to this day even of her accomplishments. The chapter is from our confidence chapter, and the woman im going read you about, her name is donna and she is a head engineer, lead engineer at microsoft. And she talks about fearing failure but not just fearing failure but actually failing. She failed her first commuter science class in college at the university of michigan and went on to become a Head Software engineer at microsoft. Sory read from this chapter. Also give you a taste of what the book is the flavor of the book and its a chapter called dream it, do is, open, confidence coaches. Don in was wearing leopard and owning it. Was midnight in downtown seattle and the renaissance woman was in the element on in her element on a giant sound stage. She was hosting the worlds first hole low hack, a brain storming session for 100 techy us, filmmakers, 3d artists and sound inning engineer to try to make the first app for microsoft augmented real device. A head asset that enables 3d images called holograms to leave from computer screens into life and being manipulated with the swipe of a finger. She is is a Software Geek and Fashion Designer and a novellest and is reading the outreach program, confirming her status as a rising star at microsoft. Its hard to believe she failed her first Computer Scienceclass but the did and her store of resilience is one she tells often when the travels the country, inspiring young women to charge ahead in engineering studies and hanging on to their jobs in male dominated job of tech. As a longtime developer for the windows operating sim city likes to think of tex as the invisible fairly godmother who makes things happen in 2016 she was overseeing the Microsoft Program with millions of users giving feed back of beta versions of updates mitchell biggest skises being a serb worn in a big company. Microsoft is a legendary Software Company and being a principle is a huge achievement. When i was growing up in detroit, if somebody told me youre going to make a really, really good salary working at microsoft as a senior person i would have history hysterically laughed. She didnt know anybody like she would become. Her parents were immigrants and worked in the tight industry in detroit, ran a small dress dr. Her grandmother ran a small dress shop 50 years. The computer lab another her high school consisted of ancient pcs and a clique of boys who laughed her out of the room when she talked to them about joining the computer club. Her father, who read the wall street wall street journal encouraged don no to follow computer. He didnt think it was entrenched as legacy tracts as banking and law, and she might have a better shot at life if sher per sued it. He scraped together at the money to sign her up for a coding class when she was in high school but not enough to prepare for their Computer Science 100 this intro programming class at the university of michigan which crammed seven complex concepts into one semester. Her mail male classmates, who had taken ap computer in high school, was speaking a foreign language. I listened to them and they would save i cant believe how easy this stuff is. Who doesnt know this . And im like, me. I dont know any of this. I dope know it at all. Dont know what this word means. What areby ytes and. Donna failed the course because she was too embarrassed to ask questions. Didnt want anything to to think she was an airhead and would muddle through on her own. Immediately afterward shed thought about dropping her Computer Science major and then started thinking about how she had learned to ride her bike and would skin her knees, and she would cry a lot and vow, ill never do this again, only to get back in the sad poll days later. She took the Computer Science class again and this time she got a b. Its not the best course but far better than what i had and i realized how much i learned, i could actually do the projects. Just needed to be exposed to it twice, like the guy its. Its not like they got Computer Science the first time. The message she wants to send to women is you cant give up on your goals because it didnt work out the first time. Thats like saying, i ran in a race intending to win first place and i name second so i quit running. Its so funny, the concept is weird. People against do for things unless theyre guaranteed success. You get 50 of the way or 75 of the way, thats far Better Success than zero percent of the way. [applause] love her. Love donna. She is amazing. Thank you for reading that passage. Its important to point out, people ask us why did you choose certain people to be in the book . One thing that we have said as is the fact there are really countless numbers of stories. So many women who we could have put in the book and run reason why he launched ore digital platform was to highlight more of the stories. That truly is a visibility gap in tech. One reasons why we chose donna is because not only does she have the super compelling story about failure and then getting up and becoming incredibly successful and she is is also a Fashion Designer and also a writer, maker. She is really kind of the opposite of the stereotype you think of who works in technology, and i love that. Think we both love that about her. She just really kind of crushes that stereotyped and that was important to us as we were meeting women from all different backgrounds, all over the country to see how creative and collaborative not only their jobs are but how they are in their lives, and a big goal for us was to try to choose people we felt others out in our audience would hopefully feel a connection to in some way. And also to disspell a lot of the misconceptions about what it means to work in tech and often times people assume its lonely, that its cold, its not collaborative, these are some of the things you hear from young girls when you ask them. What we found was so many of these women we met is that was the complete opposite. They were super creative. Artsy, they cared about fashion, they had families, they had these incredibly multifaceted lives and their jobs are very collaborative. So that was a really big opinion for news terms of the message we wanted to get out and hopes of Inspiring Women to maybe think twice about going into these types of careers us is to see see breadth and depth of people who work in these jobs and how interesting they are. Anyone here ever seen the hbo show Silicon Valley . Pretty hilarious but very, very stereotyped. Theres a hacker house, theres the computer genius, the coder guy, Richard Hendricks, the ceo and founder of pied piper, the tech company. So i spent a week in Silicon Valley in menlo park, at a accelerator called the womens startup lab. Spent a week at a hacker house with eight female founders, who were technology founders, livering in a hacker house, and the really interesting thing learned about researching this book was that the female trip to entrepreneurers in ten dont look like Richard Hendricks and arent the programmer type you see in the media. They were from all over country. One woman, kerry, from santa fe, new mexico, two little kids at home. Says this is the first time ive been able to actually breath and not have my kid all over mere. Starting a Company Called benny heirs, which is a baby rental Equipment Company she wouldnt be the airbnb of baby equipment. When you visit your parents and traveling with kids and have all the strollers and cribs and all the toys to carry you dont have. To you can go from one state to another and rent equipment. So the was theres could focus on her company with seven other entrepreneurs spent the week workshopping and training and learning, building her pitch deck so she can go out and pitch investors for capital to scale her business. So i met kerry and spent the week with her and the other entrepreneurs. And the other interesting about the program is it was bill building a network of women entrepreneurers. Heather talked about the lonely iness, and these people are working together, being bro reduced to investors, advisers, mentors. She got back home and her husband said, who are you . Where is the old kerry. She was so confident and she also met fran meier, a founder, cofounder of mash. Com, an adviser at the womens startup lab, and fran saw her vision and said i want to partner with you, take your vision, scale it, make it into a billion dollar company. Now fran meier is her cofounder and ceo and actually kerry, who is the techy one, the cto, and they spread this company now into 40 different markets across the country, and its booming. So, again, going bag to at the collaboration, the sisterhood of finding people to help you not just scale your business and find investment but to build that confidence that you can do it. Youre not alone and you have this network of support. And certainly one of the things we address in the book, we devote whole tap at the entrepreneurs and invest years and Women Founder were trying to Scale Companies and having ha hard time raising money. One thing we look at is how female investors are now starting to come into play, whether its through seed now, angel investing and we profile some handful of female Venture Capitalists and we actually were able to get inside their world and meet them and get a sense of what its like to be one of the rare general partners in a Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm, and the network is really a key point here because men have always had the boys club, and what these women are trying to do is not only trying to start a company, which is the hardest thing ever, but theyre trying to break into the boys club, and so what in terms of raising money. So what we found, going back to the network, was the value there in how they were able to help each other meet their right person to make their introduction. So we extort of the first chapter talk about the underground secreted handshake societies that have been bubbling up, whether its on left serve or meetups. Women are coming together and saying, if were not going to be able to get in the traditional way well make our own way and that was a major theme of the book and also why we wanted to focus on what was happening at the Grassroots Level. It was story that had nonbeing told yet had not been told, and the focus 0 the mainstream immediate a ya has been on the entrenched sex jim in the Tech Industry, which needs to change, butter we felt like theres some hope there when you look at the strides a lot of the women have made on their own by creating are their own network, its pretty impressive and i think its really inspiring. One of my favorite stories is an continue trip to initialed shana named shana, and she nissan francisco and talks belt the boys club and never felt like she was part of it. Was an entrepreneur, went to carnegiemellon and she started already company, 3d Gaming Platform that built tools to help other gamers build games. She sold the toy auto desk in 2012 very young. A rock star. Incredible and she went to work for goggle ventures and was the first time she realize it what a boys club Silicon Valley was, she was so heads done building her product, getting money, getting financing, and launching her company, so when she got to Google Ventures she realize it theres few women coming to pitch their companies for investment. Whats going on sneer this is bad going on here . The is bad. She started a Second Company and working on which is a super cool 3d Virtual Reality environment where you can actually walk around a room and its for home designs. You can take basically take four pictures of your favorite living room, from four corners of the room, send into it their company, they make a 3d model of your room that actually looks like your room and give you different design concepts. No longer do you have to pull samples brick them back, put the rug down, bring the furniture, in dont like it. You can do this immersesively Walking Around like ran avatar on your computer has raid 11 million but started this project, talk about girls club. She said, theres so many interesting founders and investors she met along the way. I want to invite everybody to park city, utah, every year they have this festival called the thin air innovation festival, and takes place in april so its sunny, on the slopes in park city, and she brought a group of investor friends and entrepreneur friends and other advisers for this boondoggle fourday trip to park city where the skied and had fun and networks and another entrepreneur, joanne, who we know was a friend of hers, she said at one point, i really feel guilty. Should be home with the kids or working on my okay and shana said this what the guy do they play golf, go on boondoggle city trip ski trips and she said, come on, and does that every year to build her network and the stuff that happens, a lot of business happens over beers after work or happens on the slopes or the golf course, and so she is actually doing her own grassroots girls club and that is what we sue through the book and our journey interviews 250 women, they were making their paving their own path. Creating opportunities where even beyond networking but to actually establish authentic relationships with other each that could turn into the relationships. Shelly called the girls lounge which is essentially salon, popup salon at these maledominated tech conferences and business conferences around the world now, but it was most famous for the first one which was at ces, and basically what she does is she creates a comfortable place for women to come and hang out when theyre at these business events and theyre the only ones there and its an amazing place to see these women not only bonding but actually doing business as well. And her belief is that women need more opportunities to be able to collaborate. She believes that women have been socialized to be competitive and she is really trying to disspell that notion and in fact i spent time with her at one of her conferences in germany last fall, and she did an entire panel devoted to something called the shine theory which is if you surround yourself with women who are successful, you will be successful as well. Like if i shine, you shine and thats her mantra. We saw that throughout. Wherever we were, whether it was in chattanooga, tennessee, pittsburgh, seattle, los angeles, seemed to by this mandate for women to lift each other up. I remember specifically when we went to the conference, win we sold the book proposal we went to houston and we spend a few days at the grace hopper celebration of women and computing, the largest gather offering female technologists in the world, and so for all these women, who are used to being the only one in the room, suddenly theyre there with this dish think there war 15,000 women from all over the world together, and the year we were there every program was about how to help each other. It literally was how to get this don, whether its mentoring, champions, finding internships. One reason why we went is we were interested in also find Something College students. We knew we wanted to do a chapter around College Women and what was happening, and in 2015 there was a big report that came out called solving the equation that was Research Compiled by the American Association of university women, the aauw and one of the first times that researchers had actually highlighted things that were actually working to retain women in Computer Science programs and College Campuses. To not just enough that they express an interest in Computer Science. Their big issue is persist through the major and actually graduating weapon went to grace hopper because harvey mudd knowledge is a school that actually pays for freshman women to go to grace hopper, and ohey do that its a very small school but do that so that these women get connected to other network, and so that they can see the there are other women like them and they get to meet professionals in field so they can say, okay, they actually get role model that are relatable to them and thats something we heard a lot. Young women were craving opportunity they see Cheryl Sandberg and meg whitman but theyre not it feels like thats so far away. The need the chance to actually meet real women that are in the field, entry level, midcareer. One for senior women as well but need to have access to women who are more close in age to them. The hopper conference is a fantastic example of that and how thats working. Thats why we were there we had the most amazing turns when we went back to the campuses. I spend time at stanford, and i you go there you can do whatever you want to do. Theres a group of stanford called c plus plus, Computer Programming language that basically thats how you start your compute are science studies. The interesting thing was not only this group of College Students its own network that included not just Computer Scientist but engineers and some of then women with double majoring in english and Computer Science or Information Science and associatingology, very diverse sociology, very Diverse Group of women and they were there to support each other but more so they had the prom called c plus plus ambassador program. They were paying it forward. We saw this a lot in our rear search. They wanted to inspire the next generation in tech. They went to different communities and find Young High School girls or High School Girls who are interesting in engineering or stem or Technology Stem is science, technology, engineering and math to girls interested in stem, and they say i want you start a program in your local community that encourages or inspires other kids to get involved in stem. So i have two daughters, we live in northern california, right north of san francisco, and one of the girls i met actual at c plus plus, she started a Robotics Program after school in tiburon, my little town, my Little Library in tiburon, california, and my girls go to this program and she there is with a a couple other mentor High School Girls, right from the Close High School to us in mill valley and work with young girls and its free, and its on sundays and these girls come and theyre learning how to build a robot. These communities, networks of women there are to pay it forward, to inspire young girls, to get involved in this amazing revolution that is happening. Changing the wail we live and interact with each other. How can women not be involved in this. I think theyre really vested in inspiring the next generation, and we certainly saw that across the country. When we spend time at carnegie melon Carnegie Mellon we had a chance to meet girls who were mentoring and teaching them skoals in not just Computer Science but stem . General and i think the big thing we took away is this is the way they bond, too. They had this bond, they were vested in helping the next generation but at the same time they were also solidifying their friendships and relationships so as they graduate and good on to the first job they still have ties to the students they left behind, theyre classmates they left behind and as the move on, those relationships become incredibly helpful because of the network. Comes down to having the network and thats why we called the book inside the sisterhood, shaking up tech. Were happy to take some questions if anybody has any questions. Pass the mic around. Cspan is here so just wait from the microphone before you ask your question so they can get it on tape. What was the most interesting thing that you learned in your five years of writing the book . Thats a great question. Thank you. I think one of the biggest ive learned so much. To the whole thing has been a learning process. One thing i thought was interesting is Silicon Valley i am, silver is in silicon ealy in new york Silicon Valley is growing up. All of to the somethings who started Technology Companies in the past ten years are now in their 30s and theyre having kids and theyre trading in pingpong tables for paid leave and work life policies that accommodate this working parents and employees who are caring for aging pins. So one of our entrepreneurs we profile, jewella, who started her company with her husband in 2006 with the intention, very intentionally, creating a Workplace Culture that values the whole person. Might have issues outside of the house, have children, may need to take care of your own health and they offer what they call the take the time you need policy. So basically paid leave whenever you need it. You can take the time you need. So, that was a big change from when i was working in silicon xray had babies and was the only bathroom we had for pumping when my baby i was pumping milk for any newborn was a cold bathroom, an outdoor bathroom. Its freezing cold and i was there with my pump and it wag howeverring and the engineers would knock on the door. Everything okay in there . What that noise. Now you go to events and they have nursing rooms and massage rooms and they really care about the whole person and thats something that i hadnt seen before and was just relieved and happy to see. I mean, an event bright is certain lay shining example that is hopefully seth an example for other companies. I was just going to say, the biggest takeaway for me that i actually applied and i have tried apply to my own life in having access to these amazing people. One thing i noticed about all of them is when neighbor had an idea, they went for it, and they so often you have an idea in the back of your head and youre like, maybe ill work on that and then forget bit or might write i down. Or you worry that its not fully formed or you worry that, i dont im not ready to this isnt ready for primetime yet and then you dont do anything with it. Think for me, certainly in the process of working on this book, was the lesson of, sometimes just have to get it down and put it out there. If you dont put it out there youre never going to do it, and time and time again we saw that with these different women, that whether theyre worked on it on the side had a fulltime job and it was a side hustle and at night they would work on it, or they found a group of friends and would talk about and it find people who have an expertise they didnt have to help them kind of get smart on the topic they wanted to cover, the topic they wanted to built but didnt let the fact they didnt have all the answers stop them from moving forward, and i think that is such an important life lesson for anybody. Regardless of whether youre starting a company or writing a book or youre starting a nonprofit or a neighborhood group, whatever it is, if you have the desire to do something, dont let the fact that its not fully formed or its not perfect or you dont have everything figured out, dont let that hold you back because youll regret it later. Thats what i took away film chance to meet all these amazing people. Also, you dont have to feel alone if youre a women in technology or any industry, where its male dominated. If you cant identified your posse or your tribe, build your own. No reason to feel youre on your on in this world. Yes . Where were the other places you visit through the country in everybody things thinks of Silicon Valley but other places you exhibit do you think places outside of the normal spots for tech are easier for women to brick out in or is one becoming more dominant as we in the future. I think my personal opinion, have heard people say the emphasis is shifting from Silicon Valley in tumors of the entrepreneurial activity. Number is just such a great example because while Silicon Valley is very engineering centric, places like new york you have founder from wall street, from media, from fashion, with realin credible expertise, and theres not a bias against them for not having an engineering degree for Computer Science degree, whereas often times when you hear about the valley, when people are certainly pitching Venture Capitalists, thats a question. Do you have a technical background or a technical cofounder . When we talk to entrepreneurs it does feel like outside of the valley theres little bit more of an openness towards other types of expertise if youre building a company you need all kinds of expertise. You need the Technical Expertise but a you hire a cto or recruit a technical cofounder later. So certainly i think we see that here. I had the opportunity spend time in chattanooga, tennessee but it is absolute lay hotbeds of startup activity and feminism, and which is really unexpected and fun, and that is when youre in a sort of a place that is a new tech hub, like chattanooga, you can write our own story that and cool. Thats why you are seeing places like detroit and cleveland and pittsburgh and albuquerque and these other kansas city, tech hubs popping up around the country where there are more women who and more diverse founders working in these places because theyre an openness to their background. Anywhere not immediately dismissed because they dont have the technical degree or the fancy degree, frankly. That bias against people who didnt graduate from stanford or the ivy league. Dont necessarily have that in other parts of the country. Its really more about ideas and execution, frankly. Two realun usual places, one is in south l. A. So cassy is an entrepreneur who started a actually a Fashion Designer and she started a company that connects designers with manufacturers. So if you have a design and dont nowhere to get your product made she makes that connection online. Sheet starting accelerator prom called made in south l. A. And she is trying to help give life, put some life into her economy because this i the jobs a very poor area so she is starting this accelerator program. The other place that is interesting is detroit. Another entrepreneur, tara reed, who is from detroit, calls herself the antimark zuckerberg, africanamerican female with no technical background and start aid called Apps Without Code and says in detroit theres all this activity around entrepreneurism because theyre engineers. She used to work in the Auto Industry and are now without jobs. So programs are popping up to try to get some of this talent into the Tech Industry and get them to work in tech and to start tech jobs. Are you seeing more and more women who are going into this industry from other industries, who dont have those typical backgrounds . Certainly among entrepreneurs. I think that is and theres a lot of ropes for that but definitely when you talk about consumer facing tech, youre seeing women that are not necessarily technical, who are starting these company, and one reason for that susan line, the founder of bbg ven tiers, built by girls venture, an aol venture she talks less about the fact that when the app store came online x and when you had this opportunity for people to be able you use open source tools to build an mvb, most viable product to build a prototype of their idea south having to raise millions of dollars or be affiliate with a university, suddenly that opened the gates to anybody who had an idea. Didnt take millions of dollars to build the first version of something to test on the market. Build it for a couple thousand dollars. So once the costs started coming down and democratized the ability for anybody to be able to get into this world, and opened the gates for people come ought of Business School or peopling from media or wall street oar industries that had a business idea but didnt necessarily have to have that engineering background. So, thats a really interesting shift. That only helped post iphone. I think many of the founders we spoke to didnt have technical backgrounds but they refined would find an Engineering Team or a cto. I spoke to sam, starting a company which is a recovery tool a Recovery Platform for addicts whether theyre drug addicts or alcohol addiction, and she came basically she has no technical background but has saw this problem that aa programs didnt work for all alcoholics, and she tried aa herself and didnt work for her. She said she didnt feel that Spiritual Connection and said i want to create a platform where people can find different kinds of meetings and theyening find they can find connection with other people who are in recovery and its artificially intelligence based. So theyre coming from automatic different backgrounds and industries them common theme is they have passion, and they theres a problem theyre trying to solve and theyre so passionate about solveing the problem theyll good to any means to solve the problem. Had the chance last week to sit down with alex, the chief operating officer of the muse, which is the fastest going career resource platform today, really like going head to head with linkedin and she was saying if you dont love what youre doing, if you absolutely dont believe that youre put on this earth to solve this problem, you will never succeed because it is so hard. It is so hard to be an entrepreneur, threequarters of the startups fail and she was giving advice to a younger woman who was standing with us and saying dont start a company just to start a company. Start company because you really care about this problem youre trying to solve, because you really believe in it. The ups and downs are so extreme, and the sacrifices are so extreme when youre first starting a company, that if you dont have that passion, you are not going to be successful. Michelle, one of the cofounder offed cloud flair, which is a Cyber Security company, web Authentication Company in san francisco, she had a great quote. She said entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster ride, but people pay to get on rollercoasters. One more . Sure. Having synthesized and read all these stories about women, what would you say stand out as the pieces of advice you can share with us. Well, definitely just start. Get out of our own way. Thats a big one. If you have an idea go for it. Dont let being a woman or a nontraditional founder stand in your way either. I think thats a big one. And then this idea of perfection and real iowaing that tech inherently is about iteration, it is about testing and trial and error and seeing what works these big companies, theyll ship products with bugs in them and then they work on them gem and ship another version and another version. Thats baked into the culture and so i think its really important to realize that. That is part of the process. That if you stumble, get rejected, the first version isnt what you thought it would be, dont give up. Its like what sam started with the original story with donna, from microsoft, its like you have to keep going. Would say that is a common theme among all this im, they were entrepreneurs, investors, activists, technologists, all of them had hat squall they can live with themselves that quality they can live with themself if theyve make a mistake our stumble because they believe in themselves and kept going. Its universal kind of takeaway. Somethinged i world, the founder or girls who code, which teaches girls to program, computer code, and she said something that was really great. She said if we raise our boys as parents to be brave and fearless, we raise our girls to be perfect, and compliant and well liked, and she says, thats bull caap. We have to keep our girl bows fearless, okay, its okay to be messy good yet your hand dirty, okay to try and fail. Boys raise their hand and have no answer anywhere head and they dont girl. Girls have to be so prepare to raise their hand and have to have the answer and as we raise the next generation its important to think about. What is the message were giving our girls about trying and failing and getting your hand dirty and making mistakes, it rating, learn can from mistakes and moving forward and that was a huge message for me as a recovering perfectionist. Its okay. Im not perfect. Move on. Learn from your mistakes and move forward. Grit. Its grit. We have the last question right here. I dont know is this on . Okay. That reminds me of the book the curse of the good girl rachel simmons. It sounds like this book is sort of like the part two of that book. And so answers about how to get around it. I wonder, like, where does the some much of what you said about getting last out thereof computer clutch as a kid, totally real estate nate. Video games as well. It was just an incredibly gendered experience. Didnt have the language for calling it that but where does that idea start . Why do we think of tech as male . Is it as simple as role modeled . Story were taling or Something Else going on . I just say we both have the opportunity during this process to interview engineers from other countries, and it is really talk to somebody from russia, for example, or israel. Not the same stigma attached it to. Its very much a western thing. Think it does have to do with the media. Do. I think that in our country these gender norms are so entrenched and have been, and it comes out of the 1950s and its really hard get to away from that, and unfortunately, movie, tv, perpetuate the stereotypes and thats one of the reason outside have so few women that are wanting to pursue Computer Science and engineering. What interesting, everybody talks about stem. The reality is that there are women going into science and women going into these other women going into math. Its engineering and computer pickly where specifically where you have this gap. In our research we found those the media plays a huge role and also the fact these companies were marketing personal computers to men, and gaming to men. The first video games that were out were they were all of these kind of shoot em up. Not game that hey didnt have a story. Issue in remember carman san diego . About the only ones i played. That was one of the only games i worked on the documentary. We profiled the people who created that game. One of the first games that actually had a narrative and that is why girls liked it. There was a story it to. Central female figure, too. But goldilocks, that west the vision for goldy blocks to make the connection between building and a narrative and realizing that girls girls and we are different and we learn differently and interested in Different Things and its okay to appeal to news different ways, but i feel that these it is very hard to overcome these societal expectations of what were supposed to be. I cant wait to see what have its intent to 15 years from now i hope we get there and thats why we wrote the book. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. Thank you. Cspan where history unfolds a daily. In 1979, cspan was created as a Public Service by americas cabletelevision company and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. [inaudible conversations]