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technology

Equality

Technology, Women and Equity at the 2014 Grace Hopper Conference

October 11, 2014 Leave a comment

Guest post from YY Lee, my business partner and COO of FirstRain

I am proud of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (@ghc) community this week for raising important issues and grappling with uncomfortable, difficult-to-solve questions.

I appreciate FirstRain’s own Penny Herscher (@pennyherscher) for putting herself out there to moderate the Male Allies Panel, despite the concerns going-in about how to constructively include that perspective.  The fiery reaction to that session raised
the level of engagement around deep-seated systemic equity issues in
our industry in a way that would not have been achieved otherwise.  And
in Penny’s usual way — she engaged those issues head-on, in direct personal and online exchanges with the men & women, leadership & grassroots members of the community.

Satya Nadella’s wrong-headed comment the next morning  (as he has acknowledged),
underscored the complacency and problems around gender-equity issues,
even among the thoughtful and well-intentioned.  This forced the
realization that this is not an simply an issue of perception,
interpretation or over-reaction. But will require a real introspection
and major change — even from colleagues and leaders who are confident
they are already totally on-board and acting as allies for equity.
This was the near-perfect opportunity, timing and forum to
examine the truth.  It is remarkable that even given the charged
emotions around this,  the discussion started relatively politely, and
besides excessive piling on, it remained safe — this in stark contrast
to the ugly violent targeting has been simultaneously unfolding around GamerGate.  Which only further highlights the reality of the technology industry’s toxic differences in how men and women are treated.

It is too bad that before Nadella’s KarmaGate comment, he stated one of my favorite quotes of the whole conference — summing up why I’ve loved doing this work, nearly every day for over two decades: 
“[We work with] the most malleable of our resources, software… That’s the rich canvas that we get to shape… paint…”  -Satya Nadella
He nailed it.  He put his finger on that the one thing
that probably links all the men and women in that event.  This is a
deep-thinker who understands the heart of matters, which is what made
his later comment so doubly surprising and disheartening.
I am encouraged to see the after-effects like Alan Eustace trying to do things differently.
 And honest conversations with ABI executives about their awareness and
struggle with the impossible balance of growing their reach and impact
while containing the inevitable, unintended side effect of corporate
co-opting.
To all of you “good guys who do care” — Satya, Alan,
Mike Schroepfer, Blake Irving, Tayloe Stansbury — less patronizing talk
is nice, listening is refreshing, but which of you and your companies
is going to commit to results?

==> Here my question to all the “good guys” out there as well as my fellow female leaders:  Who is going to set and deliver specific targets
for ratios of women and minorities that reflect the real population —
in technical leadership by a specific date… 2016? 2017? Who is going to
hack their orgs & companies to solve this problem, rather than running feel-good, look-good “programs”?

The Grace Hopper Celebration is an inspiring, important
and high-quality gathering in an industry that is littered with mediocre
PR-flogging events.  
  • The technical and career presentations are given by
    presenters who truly care about their audience and strive to offer a
    valuable, nutritious exchanges — not just advance some commercial
    agenda.
  • The leaders remind us of how our work is linked to important broader social dynamics outside of our privileged community. The ABI exec responsible for this conference, introduced the eye-opening Male Allies Panel with a personal reminder about about how social change is about connecting across communities:

“The Asian community owes a lot to the black community. They opened a lot of doors for us [in the fight for equality].” -Barb Gee

  • From early mornings until late into the night, it was a
    surround-sound ocean of substantive discussions between old friends,
    colleagues and strangers about leading-edge technical work, honest and
    vulnerable personal experiences, deep examinations of culture,
    inclusiveness, safety, aspirations and disappointments.

  • There is a natural balance of empowering women create change
    in themselves and their environments. While calling out that real change
    is impossible without the corporations, managers and executives, and
    yes the men who make up 80% of our co-workers, to fully own making that
    change with us.

I’m not going to end this post with some rah-rah “just go get
’em girls!” trope. Because the women technologists are already out there
— delivering effort, innovation and results at 120% while receiving
70%… 80%… (to be wildly optimistic) of the recognition and reward.

I will share just one final favorite conference quote, which is how this gathering makes me feel every time I attend:

“… at #GHC14… Just not enough space to desc. Wow. Much women. So much brain” -@michelesliger

It is our industry and companies that need to be fixed, not the women in it.
I have to believe it is becoming increasingly obvious to our leaders,
managers and co-workers that under-valuing this incredibly intellectual
resource is idiotic, bad business, and just plain wrong.

– YY Lee (@thisisyy), COO of FirstRain

Leadership

Why CMOs won’t lock CIOs out of the C-suite

January 8, 2014 Leave a comment

Published in the Economist today

Money talks. It’s common knowledge that people with money tend to get what they want, and today’s business dynamics are no different. A new Accenture study shows that CMOs are claiming more of the tech budget share. Much to the chagrin of CIOs, it is coming out of the IT purse.

Regardless of how much injustice CIOs feel, the success of their companies is increasingly reliant on their teams learning to align with CMO teams whose priorities—and very nature—are incredibly different from their own.

CIOs and IT professionals are, of course, very good at evaluating and implementing complex software processes. They have been doing that for CFOs forever, which is one of the main reasons they are not going to be rolled under the marketing umbrella anytime soon.

Despite the fact that marketing professionals have tended to see IT as more of a support organization, they now need the CIO for the same reason finance always has: they need the technical expertise to help them choose the right system and then implement it. So, rather than have the CIO report to the CMO, they need to work together in a true partnership to make sure that they get the right sales support technology for their businesses.

But how will that work? Beyond the inherently differing priorities of the CIO and the CMO (case in point: protecting data vs. using data), IT people and marketers are two very different breeds. So we find ourselves with yet another example of why diversity is so important in today’s environment. Marketing, as we have already discussed, is becoming increasingly digital, so the “creative types” will need to learn to work with the more technical staff, and the “math nerds” will have to figure out how to deal with people whose main concern is responding to the capriciousness of public interest.

There is no doomsday on the horizon for CIOs. CMOs need them just as much as ever because the systems that marketers want and need are technologically sophisticated. Just because they are in the cloud doesn’t mean that creative types know how to buy them and run them. In order for a business to be successful, both teams are going to have to come to an agreement on what is important and adapt to achieve their goals—together.

My Personal Journey

The Biggest Little Industry You’ve Never Heard of Turns Fifty

October 16, 2013 Leave a comment
Posted on the HuffingtonPost earlier

Chips touch every aspect of our lives. You use chips in your car, in
your phone, in your TV, in your fridge, when you play a video game, when
you text, Skype or blog, in the bar code reader at the grocery
checkout, when you take a photo, as your luggage is routed through an
airport — any time you use electronics today you are using chips.

Now I am not talking about potato chips, I’m talking about
semiconductors — integrated circuits. Those small, intricate pieces of
silicon, doped with chemicals in factories in the U.S. and Taiwan, that
use logic and memory to take action for you. To shoot the zombie, or
control the brakes on your car. To route your phone call to your mother,
or tell the government what you just said on Facebook.

The semiconductor industry is a $300B industry, dominated by global giants like Intel, Samsung, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, and it’s an industry where the complexity of its products doubles every two years. It costs billions of dollars
to build the factories where the chips are built and millions of
dollars to make the first one of a new design, all so that the chip in
your phone or your car can be cleverer than a mainframe computer was a
few years ago, but only cost a few cents.

None of this would be possible without the computer scientists and
physicists who work in the industry that makes these complex designs
possible. That industry is Electronic Design Automation — EDA — and it
is celebrating its fiftieth birthday this week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

When the first integrated circuit was designed at TI by Kilby in 1959
design was done by hand. But once the idea was out, a new industry
emerged creating sophisticated software programs running on computers to
help humans create more and more complex designs.

Today integrated circuits are less than 1 square inch in size but are
three-dimensional and have many, many miles of metal interconnect on
them, where every line of metal carries a signal like a wire in your
house, but is thinner than a fraction of a human hair. They can perform
millions of operations per second and store the Encyclopedia Britannica
in your fingertip. And a human mind could not fathom the complexity of
these chips without software programs to control the design and
simulation of the chip before it’s built.

The EDA industry is the group of companies, and brilliant people, who
make the amazing computer brains in the devices we take for granted
every day possible. They build software to model how to turn analog
signals — like your voice — into digital bits. They build simulators
that use physics and maths to model Maxwell’s equations and predict how
electricity is going to move through different materials, at different
speeds. They simulate the memory cells that store data, they predict how
complex logic will work with the different inputs you give it. The
chips being built now have features so small that you can’t use light to
expose them any more (the process is a lot like the old photographic
process) so they use math to adjust how the light will behave and
compensate. It’s rocket science built into software.

But despite being such a profound building block of our modern
electronics, EDA is a relatively small industry. With revenue of $7B,
the industry is dominated by two California Bay Area companies: Synopsys
and Cadence, who work alongside many small, highly innovative
specialist companies to solve the hard design problems (and yes, the
small companies get bought up by the big companies over time). The
industry is small because the number of companies than can actually
afford to design chips is low even though we all use more electronics
every year. But it’s a healthy industry where the leading companies are
growing and generate strong operating margins and where new startups
emerge every year.

And it employs the brightest engineers. Graduates with EECS degrees
(electrical engineering and computer science) from colleges like
Berkeley and Stanford and MIT walk the halls. The executives are all
engineers too because the pace of change of the chip technology is so
fast you need to be able to talk with your customers about what they
need in the language of technology.

Men or women, they’re mostly a nerdy bunch. But tonight, at a banquet to raise money
for the Computer History Museum, they’ll be dressed up and celebrating
their love of one of the most fascinating technical areas you can choose
to work in. And next time your phone, or your camera, or your TV makes
you gasp in wonder think about the software nerds in California who
design the tools, that design the chips, that make your device magical.

Leadership

PR over exposure is a dangerous game

May 24, 2012 Leave a comment
Eric Jackson wrote a painful piece in Forbes this morning comparing Sheryl Sandberg to Kim Polese – and while I don’t agree with his judgement that they are alike (one is wildly successful, one less so) he throws a bright light on one of the risks that can plague female tech executives: over exposure.
The over exposure starts because when you are a fresh new female executive you are rare and a novelty. The press wants to cover you because your opinions are new grist for the mill on everything from technology, to child care, to diversity in the office. Your PR team loves it – it’s an easy way to get the press’ attention and get the ink on the company. When I was a new CEO in 1996 I ended up on the cover of the San Jose Mercury News – amusing but of no value to my company Simplex. The press I got that was useful to Simplex was tech press and then business press around our IPO, not the many panels I did on being a female CEO with two small children.

Over exposure is a deadly trap. In the end you are judged ONLY on your financial performance, and unless you think a great deal of press coverage about you is going to drive your top line results you need to tread very carefully. Kim Polese was extraordinarily over exposed. She was naive, and taken advantage of by her PR firm but she was young, pretty and articulate and so a great product for them to sell. But Marimba did not prove to have legs after the bubble burst and while there is no shame in that per se – that’s life in the Valley – it was a long way to fall for her celebrity, and was not necessary.

I put this observation into practice a few months ago at FirstRain. We were choosing a new PR agency and I had been clear with my team that while I was happy to do panels and talks on technology, or even on public board experience (I am on two public boards RMBS and JDSU), I am not willing to overload on the female tech CEO talking circuit. So imagine my irritation when one of the PR firm leads decided that the whole strategy should be to use my gender to get FirstRain in front of the press and would not shut up about it.

In Sheryl’s case the risk was lower than Kim’s because she was already a proven
executive at Google, and Facebook’s a juggernaut, so she is
also already successful there. Extensively exposing her to the press in the year
before the Facebook IPO made sense – she is then “known” to the
investment community and the retail investor and so could carry the revenue end of the IPO
roadshow. And if she has larger ambitions post Facebook (who knows…) then the positive exposure raises her name recognition at a national level.

It’s a fine balance. You can only be a role model, mentor and adviser to young women if you have a successful track record. And yet the thirst for female tech role models is so great that once you have a high profile position you get given the stage – and it’s tempting. My input to my team is never, ever lose sight of the end-in-mind which is business exposure for FirstRain (or Simplex last time). The “woman CEO” platform comes after that and in service of that purpose only — unless I am doing it on my own time.