Forbes contributor. Samantha is the editor of the New York Times anthology torn, a recognized speaker on women and work, a contributor to women at forbes, the Huffington Post and disney interactive. Please join me in welcoming Heather Cabot and sam that wall raven. Thank you so much. [applause] thank you. Wow, we really appreciate you coming out on a rainy night like this x this is a super exciting moment for us because, first of all, were in the same city, which we rarely are. I live in new york, and sam lives in San Francisco. But this really is the evening before geek girl rising comes out. So its a really special moment for us. And to kick things off, just to give you a taste of what the book is about, were going to show you a little trailer first. So lets roll the video. [laughter] 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 shes the one who hand picked me and advocates for me and pushes me beyond my leadership role currently. So many women i know might not be able to work the typical 9 to 5 job, but having this new kind of [inaudible] gives them the opportunity to work from home, to travel, to do Everything Else they want, to be mothers but also have a job. I dont think that a google should be the gatekeeper, any tech company should be the gatekeeper of who gets to sort of, you know, take advantage of the amazing opportunities that technology affords us. Angels exist because there are enough [inaudible] out there, and im in the midst of creating more women sharks. I have pitched a group of all men before, and they dont necessarily get my product. When i push to groups of all women, they automatically speak, and they see the value in it x they see the passion that i have for it. And immediately their offers are how can i help. So that is a little taste of geek girl rising, the culmination of more than five years of reporting and research and more than 250 interviews. I dont know if you want to chime in a little bit about the genesis of the project and how we met. Yeah. Yeah, so i call myself a first generation is Silicon Valley girl. So i worked in Silicon Valley 1995, which was really before, right at the beginning of the, when people started using the internet for consumer use. It was when [inaudible] was launched, Microsoft Windows 95 came out. So before that the internet was primarily used for academia. Now its becoming used by regular, normal people for business and for commerce, etc. So i worked on pc World Magazine as a tech reporter for two years. Then i got the internet bug and went to work for a Software Startup called tumble wed software. And tumble weed software. I saw the rise and the fall of the dot. Com interest. 1999 we went public, stock shot up to 10, within 120 within six months it was down to 2. I made some really lasting, wonderful friendships during that time. And for me, the inspiration was in 2013, actually, i was having lunch with a girlfriend whos been in Silicon Valley, whos a dot. Com survivor like myself x. She said, sam, ive been working if the valley now for over 15 years, and i just had a performance review. She was the head of sales for a software company. I just had my performance review, and my manager told me each though my sales team had hit the numbers out of the ballpark, he said to me ive been told by some people in your group in the company that youre a little too aggressive, and gosh, youre even abrasive. Do you mind toning it down a little bit . And by the way, your lipstick is too bright, and you wear too much jewelry. Literally, he said this to her. And she was horrified. Needless to say, she didnt stay at that company very long. But she said, sam, its unbelievable in Silicon Valley today, theres such sexism, such unconscious bias, and you need to write about it. I said before i write about it, i want to interview a couple more people. So i started reaching out to other women. Heather was working for yahoo at the time, and i said, you know, tell me your story. I want to hear about your experience. Have you really faced this kind of bias and discrimination . Is it really that bad . Id been out of the try for a little while. And heather said to me, oh, my gosh, ive been researching i was in Silicon Valley, she was in silicon alley here in new york. She said ive been researching for a similar topic. I have Amazing Stories with all these female founders, and its great. And i started to get these stories as well. You know, yes, we do face sexism. In every industry women are facing this. But let me tell you about the technology that im developing. Let me tell you about the company that im building. Let me tell you about all the positive stuff. This is a lot more positive than negative when it comes to women starting companies and working in tech. So so 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, and heather can tell her story. So i had been, as you said, an abc news correspondent and longtime reporter, and i had the wonderful opportunity to go to work for yahoo in 2007 really at the dawn of the iphone and the app store. And my job there was to cover digital lifestyles. Essentially, to hook at how the internet was changing our look at how the internet was changing our daytoday lives and put together stories that i would then present on the today show, Good Morning America and all different kinds i was kind of the onair consumer spokesperson. And it was a really eyeopening experience, because i kept meeting women who were starting companies, and i thought, these women are really bad ass. Like, why is nobody telling their story . If im featuring them this these segments, featuring 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 jenner gap gender gap in tech back in the 90s, i knew that it was a problem. So i thought this is really interesting. Theres this landscape of women who are really doing well for themselves in spite of the sexism, in spite of the fact that its a maledominated industry. And i wonder, you know, whats the secret sauce . Like, what is it about them that has made them successful, that has actually enabled them to persist . And what could we learn from them for our daughters . And sam and i both had daughters. I have 11yearold twins, a girl and a boy. Sam has four kids and two daughters, that certainly was an inspiration for trying to mine these stories and figure out what is it from their backgrounds, from their childhood, you know, from all of their experiences that gave them that resilience to keep going. And so during the time that i was with yahoo , i started curating interviews with these women. And when sam said she was interested in doing the same, you know, kind of mining the same subculture, we realized that 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 at the time, there were so many tech hubs outside of Silicon Valley that were starting to kind of bubble up. So it allowed us to really go out there and spread ourselves, you know, as far and wide as possible to be able to track these women and get out of the coasts and get into the middle of the country to find some of those stories. And so the book, just to give you you know, you saw the trailer. What we really try to do is, first of all, were writing for what i like to call the Good Morning America audience. Were writing for a main treatment audience to take them in mainstream audience to take them inside this subculture of women in tech. Really what the book strives to do is 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, the diversity gap in tech. So the book is broken out into seven chapters, and we kind of survey the landscape. We profile activists, entrepreneurs, we profile investors. We profile women and companies that are trying to reinvent the culture of work. We take you to college campuses, and then we take you inside classrooms and also inside the world of the toy industry thats also trying to solve in this problem. So we really try to, again, for a very mainstream audience that may not maybe maybe they love tech and and their iphone, but they dont necessarily understand the challenges that women and people from diverse backgrounds have faced. We try to explain that for them and, hopefully, get them interested. In being part of this digital revolution. So id like to a take a few minutes and just talk a little bit about confidence and read a little bit from the book from our confidence chapter. One of the Things Holding women back in the tech sector and in Many Industries for that matter is fear of failure. Now, has anyone here heard of the imposter syndrome . Anyone ever experience imposter syndrome . Each and every day . [laughter] what am i doing up here . The imposter syndrome is that nag feeling like im not good enough, im not smart enough. What am i doing here. Even Sheryl Sandberg says she feels it to this day after all of her accomplishments, right in so the chapter i want to read to you from is from our confidence chapter. And the woman im going to read to you about, her name is donna, and she is currently a head engineer, a lead engineer at microsoft. And she talks about fearing failure but not just fearing failure, but actually failing. She failed her first Computer Science class in college at the university of michigan and went on to become a Head Software engineer at microsoft. So if i may, ill just spend a few minutes reading from this chapter. Itll also give you a taste of the flavor of the book. And this chapters could dream it, do it, own it confidence coaches. Donna was wearing leopard and owning it. It was midnight in downtown seattle, and the renaissance woman was in her element on a giant sound stage. She was hosting the worlds first hole hack, a 48hour brainstorming session for 100 techiesing filmmakers, artists to try to make the first apps for microsofts hololens. Its a futuristic headset that enables holograms to leap from computer screens into real life where they can be manipulate with the the swipe of a finger. At 36 years old, donna is a hardware geek as well as a Fashion Designer and a novelist. And she is leading the hololens outreach program, confirming her status as a rising star at microsoft. Its hard to believe that she failed her first Computer Science class, but she did x. Her story of resilience is one she tells often as she travels the cup, inspiring young women to charge ahead in their engineering studies and hang onto their jobs in the maledominated world of tech. As a longtime developer for the windows operating system, donna likes to think of tech as the invisible fairy godmother who makes things happen. And as of june 2016, she was overseeing Microsofts Windows program which has millions of users giving feedback about data versions of updates. My biggest success is being a senior woman in one of the Biggest Software companies in the world. Microsoft is a legendary software company, and being a principallevel woman here really is a huge achievement, she says. When i was growing up in detroit, if someone had told me, hey, donna, youre going to be making a really, really, really good salary working at microsoft as a very senior person, i would have just hysterically laughed. Thats because donna didnt know anyone like the woman she would one day become. She grew up in downtown detroit where with her parents, immigrants from kathmandu, worked in the Auto Industry, ran a small dress im sorry, her grandmother, a seamstress and Fashion Designer, ran a small dress shop for 50 years. The computer lab at donnas inner City High School consisted of some ancient pcs and a clique of teenage boys who laughed her out of the room when she approached them ant joining the computer about joining the Computer Club. She had been fascinated by computers ever since she first laid eyes on the old mcintosh in the back of her fifth grade classroom. Her father encouraged donna to pursue computing as a practical career move. He felt this new industry wasnt as entrenched as banking or law and his studious young daughter might have a better shot at life if she pursued it. He scraped together the money for her to take a computer coding class, but it wasnt enough to prepare her for Computer Science 100 which crammed seven complex concepts into one semester. She felt like her male classmates most of whom she later realized had taken ap Computer Science in high school, something her school didnt offer was speaking a Foreign Language as they paired up for assignments. I would listen to them, and they would say, god, i cant believe how easy this stuff is. Who doesnt know this . And im sitting there like, me, i dont know any of this. I dont even know what this word means. What are bits . What are gates . And the teacher would start talking, and the guys would be like we already know this, yell move on. Donna failed the course because she grew too embarrassed to ask questions. She didnt want anyone to think she was an airhead and resolved to muddle through it on her own. Immediately afterwards, she thought about dropping her Computer Science major altogether, but then she started thinking about about how she had learned to ride her bike and how she would skin her knees and cry a lot and vow ill never do this again only to get back in the saddle two days later. She took it again, and this time she got a b. It was far better than i had, and i realized how much i had learned. I was suddenly validated as i just needed to be exposed to it twice, just like those guys. Its not like they got Computer Science on the first time. The message to women is you cant give up on your goal because it didnt work out the first time. Thats like saying i ran a race intending to win first place, but i came in second, so i quit running. She is really kind of the opposite of the stereotype you would think of who works in technology. I love that. She really crushes that stereotype and that was really important to us when we were meeting these different women from all different backgrounds from all over the country to see how creative and collaborative not only their jobs are but how they are in their lives. His big goal for us was to try to pick people who we felt others out of the audience would feel a connection to in some way and also to dispel again a lot of misconceptions about what it means to work intact and a lot of times people assume that its lonely, its cold and its not collaborative. These are some of the things you hear certainly from her young girls when you ask them about it but what we found was so many women that we met it was the complete opposite. They were super creative. They were artsy. They cared about fashion. They had families. They had these incredibly multifaceted lives and their jobs were very collaborative. That was a really big message for us and we want to get out in hopes of maybe Inspiring Women who maybe think twice about going into these types of careers, to see the breadth and the depth of the kinds of people who work in these jobs and how interesting they are. Has anyone here seen the hbo show Silicon Valley . Its pretty hilarious but very stereotyped. Bears the computer genius the coder guy and ceo founder of pied piper, this high company so i spent a week in Silicon Valley and menlo park, called the women start up a lab. I spent a week at a hacker house with eight female founders who were Technology Founders living in a hacker house and the thing i learned about its female entrepreneurs dont look like richard hendricks. They dont act like the programmer type that you see on tv or hear about in the media. These women were from all over the country. One women in particular her name was kerry from santa fe new mexico. She had two little kids at home. She said this is the first time ive been in a vote to actually breathe and not have my kids all over me. She calls it the air pmb of baby equipment so when you visit your parents across the country and you are traveling with kids and you have the strollers and cribs you dont have to. You can go from one state to another. So she was there. She spent the week workshopping and training. She could go out and hit investors for capital start her business. I met carey and spent a week with her in the other entrepreneurs and the interesting thing about this program it was building a network of women not yours. You hear about the loneliness and its so uncollaborative, its not. These women are working together being introduced to investors and advisers, mentors. She got back, and her husband looked at her and said oh my gosh who are you . She was so confident. She also met fran maier who is a cofounder of mass. Com and she and fran, france or her vision and she said i want to partner with you and take your vision. I want to make this into a billiondollar company. Fran maier is her cofounder and ceo and kerry is the techie one. They have spread this company into 40 markets across the country and its booming. Again going back to collaboration and the sisterhood finding the people who are going to help you not to scale your business and find investment but to build that confidence that you can do it. You are not alone and you have this network