Transcripts For CSPAN2 Geek Girl Rising 20170604 : vimarsana

Discuss their book geek girl rising. Heather is a woman at forbes contributor. Samantha walraven is a recognized speaker on women and works, a contributor to women at forbes, huffington post. Thank you. Thank you. Well, we really appreciate you coming out on a rainy night like this. Thats superexciting moment for us because first of all were in the same city, which we rarely are because i live in new york and sam live inside san francisco, but this really is the evening before pea geek girl rising colorado. Outside. So its a special moment for us and to tick things off, we are show you a book trailer first. 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 anded a vow caughts for me and pushes me beyond my leadership role currently. So women i know may not be able to work the typical nine to five job but this gives them an opportunity to work at home, travel to do Everything Else they want, as mother and also has a job. I dont think that be the gatekeeper of taking advantage of the amazing opportunities that technology affords. There are a enough white guy sharks and we need more women sharks. I have spoken to groups of all men and they dont necessary by get any problem. When i pitch to groups of all women, they allly see the value in and they see the passion i have for and it immediately their offered are, how ick help . The genesis of the project and how we met. I call myself a first generation Silicon Valley girl. So i worked in Silicon Valley in 1995, which is really before it right at the beginning of the when people started to use the internet for consumer use. When netscape was on, Microsoft Windows. And internet was primarily used for academia then and now used by regular, normal people for business and commerce, et cetera. So, i worked at pc World Magazine as a tech reporter and then i got the internet bug and went to work for a Silicon Valley safetyway startup, and i saw the rise and the fall of the. Com industry. In 1999 we went public. Stock shot up to 120. Within six months down to 2. So we were all ay and if then really poor. It was fin. I made some lasting, wonderful friendships during the time, and for me the inspiration was in 2013 i was having lunch with a girlfriend who has been in Silicon Valley, dot calm century dom come survivor by myself and the had been work neglect valley for 15 years and she is head of sales for a Software Company. She said i had a Performance Review and my manager told me even though my sales team hit the numbers out of the ballpark said ive been told by some people in your group and the company youre too aggressive and youre even abrasive. Mine toning it down a little bit . And by the way, your lipstick is too right and you wear too much julie. She was howeverred and didnt stay company very long. She said its unbelievable what women face in Silicon Valley. Such sexism and unconscious bias and you need to write about it. Said i wanted to interview a couple more people. So i started reaching out 0 too women in tech. Heather was working for yahoo and i said tell in the your story, have you faced this bias and discrimination . Has it been that bad . Id been out of the industry for a while. Heather says, ive been researching i was in Silicon Valley. She in new york she said she had been searching a similar topic for yahoo but it have Amazing Stories from female founders and i started to talk to people and got the stories as well, we do face sexism and theres in every industry women are facing this, but let me tell you about the Technology Im developing. The company that im building. Let me tell you about the positive stuff. A lot more positives than negative when it comes to women starting companies and working in tech. So thats the story we decided to tell. Heather was contributor to my first book torn which looked at women and work life intestinal we came together in 2013. Heather can tell her story. So, i had been in an abc news correspondent and then longtime reporter, and i had the wonderful opportunity to go to work for yahoo in 2007 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 show and Good Morning America and i was the onair consumer spokesperson. Was an eyeopening experience, i kept meeting women who were starting companies and i thought to these women are really bad sass. Why is nobody telling their story . They were 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 in tech back in the 90s. I enough it was a problem, and so i thought this is really interesting. Theres this landscape of women who are really doing well for themselves in spite hoff the sexism the fact its a mail dominated industry, and i wonder what is the secret sauce . What is it about them that has made them successful, hat actually enabled them to persist and what can we learn from them for our daughters. I have 11yearold girls, girl and a by, and sam has children. So i wanted to figure out from their backgrounds and their child their their childhood that kept them going and i started getting interviews who ben sam was interested the doing the same 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 was so cool, which was at the time there were so many tech hubs outside of Silicon Valley bubbling it and it allowed to us good out there and spread ourselves as despair wide as possible to track these women and get out of the coast and get into the middle of the country to find the stories, and so the book is to give you you saw the trailer. What we tried to do is first of all were writing for what i like to call the Good Morning America audience, mainstream audience and take them inside the subculture or women and tech. The book strives to connect the dots across the tech ecosystem, to take the audience to the front lines, where women are working at the Grassroots Level to close the gender gap in tech, and frankly to close the diversity gap in tech. The brock is in seven chapters and we profile activityis, entrepreneurs, investors, we profile women in companies that are trying to reinvent the culture of work. We take you to College Campuses and then inside classrooms and also inside the world of the toy industry, also trying to solve this problem. So we try to kind of, again, for a very mainstream audience that maybe they love tech and love their iphone but dont necessarily know about the industry or understand the challenges that women and people from diverse backgrounds face. We try to explain that for them and hopefully get them interested in being part of the digital revolution. I like to take a few minutes and talk about confidence and read at from the book from our confidence chapter. One Thing Holding women back in the tech sector and Many Industries is fear of failure. Now, has anyone here heard of the impostor syndrome . Any experience impost for syndrome and each and every day. That is the until aing feeling like im not good enough, im not smart enough. Everyone in the room is smarter. What am i doing here. Even Cheryl Sandberg feels that to this de, after all her accomplishments. The chapter is the confidence chapter, and the woman im going to read to you about her name is don that and she is currently a head engineer at microsoft, and she talks about fearing failure but not just fearing failure but actually failing shift failed her first Computer Scienceclass in college at the university of michigan and went on to become a Head Software engineer at microsoft. So, if i may ill read from the chapter. Give you a flavor of the book. Its call dream it, do it, own, it confidence coaches. Donna was wearing leopard and opening it. Was midnight in joined seattle and the renaissance woman was in the element on her page. She was hosting the worlds first holoharc a 48 hour brainstorming session for techies, artists and sound engineers to try to make the first app for microsofts augmented reality device that allows hollow grandmothers to leap from clutter screens into real life and be manipulated with the swipe of a finger. At 36 years old donna is a hardware geek and Fashion Designer and a novellest. She is a rising star at microsoft. Its hard to believe that she failed her first Computer Science class. But she did. And her story of resilience is one she tells often as she travels the country, inspiring young women to charge ahead in their engineering studies and hang on the their job in the mail dominated job of tech. As a longtime developer for the windows operating system she likes to think of tech as the invisible fairly godmother who makes things happen and in june 2016 she was oversawing Microsoft Windows insider problem which gives feedback. She microsoft is a legendary Software Company and being a principle level woman here really is a huge eye achievement. She says. When i was growing up in detroit, if someone told me youre going to make a really, really, really good salary working as microsoft at senior person i would have just hysterically laughed. She didnt know anyone like the woman she would become. She grew up in downtown detroit, where her parents worked in the auto industry, ran a small dress shop im are so her grandmother, seem stress, and Fashion Designer, ran a small dress shop for 50 years. The computer lab at donnas inner City High School consist overred ancient pcs and and a clique of teenage boys who laughed her out of the room when she approached them about joining the Computer Club if has been fascinated by computers ever since she laid eyes to the old macinatin her classroom. Her father followed all of the news of the Tech Industry and encouraged donna to pursue computing and thought the new industry was not a entrenched at bank and law and his daughter might have a better shot at life. She signed up for a coding tequilas at a Community College while the was in high school but was not enough to prepare for for Computer Science 100. The intro class at university of michigan which crams seven complex concepts into the first semester. Her classmates took ap science in high school, were speaking a Foreign Language as they paired up for assignmented. Would listen to them all the time and they would say god i cant believe how easy this stuff is and im like, me issue dont know any of is. I dont know it at all. Dont even know what this word means. What arebits. What are gates . And the teach were talk and the guys are like, we already know this, move on. Donna failed the course because she was too embarrassed to ask questions. She didnt want anyone to think she was an airhead and resolved to mettle through it on her own. She started thinking about dropping her Computer Science major and then started thinking how she learned to ride her bike and would skin her knees, and she would cry a lot and view never to do it again only to get back in the saddle. She went to a kite science class again and got a b. She said it was better and i realizes i learned could i do. It was suddenly validated. Just needed to be exposed to it twice, just like the guy. If they only got Computer Science on the first time. This message is you cant give up or your goals because it didnt work out the first time. Thats like saying, i ran in a race intending to win first place but came in second so i quit running. Its so funny. The conceptes so weird. People dont go for things unless theyre guaranteed success. I believe if you get 50 of the way, thats far Better Success than zero percent of the way. Love her. [applause] love donna. Amazing. Thank you for reading that passage. I think its really important to point out people have asked us, why did you choose certain people to be in the book. One thing that we have said as we have interviewed there are countless numbers of stories. So many women who we could have put in the book and reason why we launched or digital platform was to launch the stories. Thats a visibility gap in tech. One reason we chose donna is not only does she have a super compelling story about failure and then becoming incredibly successful but also a Fashion Designer, a writer, she is a maker. She is really kind of the opposite of the stereo type that you think of who works in technology and i love that about her, she just really kind of crushes that stereo type, and that was really important to us as we were meeting different women from all different backgrounds. From all over the country so 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 that we felt others out in our audience would hopefully feel a connection to ins in some way and disspell the misconception of working in tech and often times people assume its lonely, cold, not collaborative. These are things you hear from young girls but what we found was so many of these women that we met is that was they complete opposite. They were super creative, arties, they care about fashion. They had families. They have these incredibly multifaceted lives and their jobs very collaborative. That was a big point for news term offed the message we wanted to get out in hope offed maybe Inspiring Women to maybe think twice about going into these types of careers. To see the breath and depth of the kind of people who work in these jobs, and how interesting they are. Has anyone here ever seen the hbo show Silicon Valley . Its hilarious but very, very stereotyped. Theres a hacker house, the computer genius, the coder guy, richard help trix, the ceo and founder of pied piper. The tech company. So i spent a week in Silicon Valley, in menlo park at aning a set railer called the womens startup lab. I spent a week at a hacker house with eight female founders who were technology founders, living in a headquarters house, and the real using the hacker house and the interesting thing learned researching the book is that female entrepreneurers in tech dope look like Richard Hendricks and adopted look like the programmer type you hear about in the media. They were from all over the country, one woman in particular was named kerry from santa fe, new mexico and has who kid at home and she said this is the first time ive been able to breath wrought any children all over. She wants to start the airbnb of baby equipment. So when you visit your parents Cross Country and you traveling and you have the strollers and cribs and toy to car you dent have. To you can go from one state to the other and rent the equipment. She okayed it was the first time could i breathe and focus on my company with seven a entrepreneurs and she spent the work workshopping and training and learning basically building her pitch deck to go out and pitch investors for capital to scale her business. So i met kerry and spent the week with her and other entrepreneurs and its about building a network. You hear about the loneliness. Its not. These women wore working together, interesting introduced to investors and mentors. Shot got home and her husband said, who are you . Where is the old kerry . This is the new kerry. So confidence and also met fran meier, a founder of match. Com, one of the adviserred at the womans startup lab, and she and frap frap saw her vision and said, kerry, 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, the techy one, the cpo, and they have pred he company now interest 40 different markets in the country, and its booming. So, again, going back to the collaboration, the sisterhood of finding people to help you not to just scale your business but to build that confidence that you can do it. Youre not alone or have this network of support. Certainly one of the things we address in the book, we devote a whole chapter to entrepreneurs and also to investors, is the fact that women founders who are trying to Scale Companies have a hard time raising money so one thing that we look at is how female investors are now starting to come into play, whether its threw seed money, angel investing and also we profile some theres a handful of female Venture Capitalists and we actually were able to get inside the world and neat 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 to try to start a company, which is the hardest thing ever, but theyre trying to break into the boys club and so 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 the right person, make the right introduction. In the first chapter we talk about underground secret handshake societies bubbling up, whet