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