Driving Open Source Success: Insights on Innovation, Inclusive Leadership, and Culture in Tech – Tech.Strong.Women. EP40

Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Techstrong Women, where we feature amazing women doing amazing things in tech. I'm Jody Ashley, executive producer here at Techstrong.

I'm here with my co-host, Tracy Reagan, creator, and CEO of Deploy Hub. Before I introduce today's guest, I wanna give you a quick update about what's happening here at Techstrong. ai.

Be sure to go out and check that out. We have some virtual events coming up towards the end of the year that you'll wanna check out. com.

We're always looking for speakers and sponsors, so check that out and see if there's an opportunity for you to participate. And as always, you wanna go to Textron tv every day, five days a week now for great shows and interviews. Hey, Tracy, what's on your mind today?

Hey, Jody. Um, so, you know, I always have, um, many things on my mind. I thought of many things to talk about today, um, but I, I wanna talk about, um, first of all, what, what the Biden administration and like CISA and NIST have been trying to do to warn developers of problems.

So, here's a, this is an interesting one, and I, this is kind of a complaint to the bigger companies. Why are they not listening? Why are they not taking this stuff serious?

So many of you may know, but back in March, cis a, um, kind of urged developers to start weeding out SQL injection vulnerabilities. They really kind of pushed it, there was a lot of buzz around it. There was a lot of talk about SQL injection issues and V vulnerabilities, and then it sort of went quiet until, uh, just a few short months later.

This happened at the end of June. Facebook ex, uh, uh, uh, had an issue and it was with what they call Presta Shop or PK Facebook, um, which has to do with credit card scanning. Um, and, and e-commerce sites.

Well, they had a, a SQL injection issue, and it involved about 300,000 online stores worldwide, which exposed credit card information, um, to anybody who, who could, who knew about that SQL injection issue. So I guess my point is, when the government says, Hey, folks, this is a problem. I wish that the big companies are taken more serious.

I don't know right now, because AI is so, it has so much attention. I feel like we have pushed back the security problem. Um, and by pushing back that security problem and kind of not making it as sexy, nobody's, we're, we're not being as serious as we need to.

So, hey, everybody out there, when, when you get the government saying, Hey, you know, s OMS might be a good idea. Look, weed out your SQL injection vulnerabilities. Maybe you need to make a focus on it because these things can happen and it's not right.

Uh, exposing 300,000 credit cards from Facebook is, is a terrible problem, is a terrible problem. And it's, it's worse than that problem needs to be fixed before we do anything in ai. So, I'm just kind of disting AI today and saying security is really important, folks, As always, AI is somewhat of the bane of our existence right now.

Right? How do we deal with ai? All right, well, thanks Tracy.

I am so excited to introduce our guest today. I have Liz Warner and Ann Schlemmer, and, um, I'm gonna let them introduce themselves. Liz, you wanna get started?

Yeah, happy to. So, li Liz Warner, as you said. Um, I am CTO at Perona.

Um, so Perona creates, uh, solutions for, um, centered around open source databases and has been doing so for a very long time. Um, I'm pretty new at Percona. I just joined in April.

Um, before that I was CTO at a company called WeWorks. So if you've used EKS Cuddle and, um, or if you ever used the, you heard the term GI Ops does both, both originated at WeWorks. 2 women on the executive leadership team.

So, uh, they, they got onto my short list very quickly, and I'm delighted to say I, I managed to land there. Um, I I, I can do a slide, I can slowly go into background or, uh, if, if that's all right. Yeah, absolutely.

Um, So yeah, I started my career as a software engineer. I'm in the UK now. I'm originally from California.

com boom. So it was a sort of a startup, CTO, right? Right OUTTA school.

And then had to backtrack and learn some tech fundamentals. Spent a lot of time in the kind of what's now called the platform space or platform engineering space, as well as doing, uh, you know, software. So, and you can't be there without open source, right?

How do you, you know, if you're thinking about your data store, you're thinking about your operating system, you are not doing that, and it's very, very rare to be doing that in a purely proprietary way. So, you know, being able to move to the commercial side of, of, of the open source ecosystem was something I had been keen to do and was delighted to do. Awesome.

Alright. And you're up six. Well, Thanks for having us.

Let's start with that. It's delightful to be here, and I'm thrilled to have Liz on the team, as you all mentioned at me and sch Schlimmer. I am the CEO of Perona.

I took over that role from our founder back in October of 2022. I've been with Perona for over 11 years now. Uh, different path.

I say I fell into open source back into 2008. Um, I actually had taken a, a career break for eight years, which some people find unusual. Um, and when I went back into the workforce, I had the good fortune of, um, getting a job with the, my SQL, which is again, open source database, my SQL professional services team.

Um, at that point, they had just gotten integrated with Sun Microsystems, so I worked for Sun, then I got to work for Oracle, and then I am now here at Per Kona. And yeah, delighted, delighted with the learnings and the awesomeness of open source. Yeah, So, you know, we've had discussions about open source in the past on this call.

Oh, yeah, just a couple. Just a couple. Um, but I think that over the course of the last two years, we, uh, there seemed to be a, when some of the, I think log four J and I started this, this, this discussion out around security and open source security is an issue right now.

It continues to be, and we, you know, the open source community has to embrace it, but of course, as I point out, so does the corporate world, right? We're not the only ones that have, um, have issues. But let's just talk a little bit about where open source is.

I really thought it was going to be on a decline, but recently, companies like Apple have started open sourcing, like seven B language, you know, large language models, uh, with, you know, 7 billion parameters, uh, probably looking to do an upgrade, a paid upgrade to, you know, double that. But what is your opinion on open source? And do you think companies, as Liz pointed out, it's hard to go without it, but what are, what are companies doing right now?

Are they still feeling open source and do they still feel the love Again? Ah, I'll jump in and then we'll, then we'll, like, do Liz's take, where is open source? Um, in my work, in talking to customers and prospects, what's one of the appeals of open source has always been, is when used appropriately and correctly, you can innovate more quickly, and you have that opportunity of doing it out in the open.

So you mentioned Tracy about the concerns of security. There's something to be said of being able to do that out in the open and have more eyes looking at it to make sure that it is se secure by design. A major thing with open source, as should be with any technology, is trust.

And I believe that there is that trust inherent with an open source because of the name open being out there. And so what we're seeing with customers is that some of their push into using and being more consumers of open source is a total cost of ownership. We know you said in the past two years, there's some and some interesting economics going on in the world, and everybody's looking at costs as they have before.

But then really when you get into it and learning about that trust factor, that collaboration, being able to do that out in the open and being able to innovate is, is really important, um, opportunity. So that's, that's my short take on it, Liz. I mean, I, I, I don't think any of us would disagree that it's a tumultuous time, right?

We're seeing big announcements, we're seeing big companies that said, we'll always be open source, steadily changing the rules and, and, you know, naming, you know, market pressure. So I think it'll, we're, we're in interesting times using that phrase intentionally. Um, but I honestly think that, you know, largely in part due to organizations like Linux Foundation, like CNCF, that that, you know, the majority of players large and small in the open source space will come out stronger.

Um, and, and security's a huge part of it, right? You know, we, we got, we all right, before I joined Perona, there was a big, you know, big, big scandalous, um, CBE that was discovered. Someone who had in infiltrated a project over the course of years.

Um, well, yeah, that was a scandal and we all had to run around fixing things, but how many of those have happened in closed source? And we'll never ever know, right? It was a scandal and we all got to react, um, and we all got to, got to make, um, to make things stronger as a result.

Um, but yeah, I do think that some of the models will change. Um, some of the business models will change in terms of like, what do you, um, vocabulary we use or can sometimes we revolve around what are we famous for and what are we selling, right? What are we providing, what value we're providing, and what are we best known for?

Um, so you, you know, open core is an attempt to resolve that, that tense, that eternal tension. There's other models that can resolve that tension. So I think, um, I'm, I'm interested in watching and being part of that, of that evolution.

So how do we keep giving back and being famous for great stuff while also being successful businesses, Right? So, Percona, what you guys do, um, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you support open source databases by adding, um, tooling and services around that. Do you also provide some level of, um, like certification on the safety and the security, uh, and the sort of the, the security posture of these tools Anyway?

Yeah, sometimes we have, do you have one correction in terms of or addition into Yes. What, what we do, we also build on upstream and we put out enterprise features in our, in what would be a community version. But for pro going, it's just our, our distribution, um, for, for that.

So we're giving more than just the tooling and, and the services around it. We, we talk about it as solutions on the security side. We stand by our software as people do, right?

And careful with the indemnification and all of that. And we back up if there's, if there's an issues and that there's security vulnerabilities, we look, we look to in, um, correct them as quickly as possible, um, as we can do. But it all starts at the very beginning.

And the principles of our software development is, one of the principles we say is do no harm secure by design. But the, but we believe in do no harm. So what is, what does that look like?

Doing our best to test, test, test. And also we appreciate that customers or users of our software are gonna push the limits of everything we want. You, you know, the AI discussion, I, I mean, always innovating.

People are pushing and trying to see what they're doing. So it's something that we take very seriously and look at. So I think that your model, um, your business model is one that, uh, should be kind of looked at by companies who are, are, are potentially building, uh, software companies around open source.

Um, we, we, we have an open source project that's incubating at the, at the Linux Foundation. And I can't tell you how many people randomly will say, why are you building an open source company? Isn't that, you know, how is that financially, um, you know, reasonable to do so?

And having a commercial company who's able to sit on top of open source, kind of lock it down, um, add services, add additional features, and as you call it, upstream features, we would call it pro features, is a very, a very solid business model that companies have pursued for the last 20 years. So I'm hoping that we get more interest in, in this business model. So, Liz, give us a little idea of, of what that looks like and how you drive that business model forward, supporting these open source tools and building on top of it.

So, so the, the, the innovation we do is, is was also something I was really excited about when I joined and I stay excited about. So we're not, um, we, we are picking up as we, as we call it, upstream. So we're picking up, you know, the, the, the best known open source, you know, um, distribution and adding capabilities, tooling around it.

Um, we also have standalone innovation. So we have a product called Perona, Everest Open Source Project, which is also a product, although it's fully open source and Everest lets you, um, it works with Perona operators, basically gives you a GUI to manage your data on Kubernetes, right? Which is still, you know, that that's a hallway conversation to end all hallway conversations at conferences, right?

Should you even have your data on Kubernetes, or we're finding more and more people say yes, actually, especially, you know, when my needs are very dynamic. So, and there's no, there's no upstream for Everest, there's no upstream for Percona's operators. That's, that's our, that's our play on, on data, on, on Kubernetes, um, where it's something like Postgres, which is very near to our hearts.

Um, we're looking at, okay, how do we add value? How do we add, you know, um, transparent data encryption, right? There's no full end-to-end data encryption available in, in community Postgres right now.

And that's something a a lot of folks want. So we, we look at like, how do we, how do we take what's there and, and continue to, to give back, which is great for the community and great for the people who wanna engage with us commercially. Yeah, I think giving back is a, is one of the keys there, but so is adoption, uh, you know, an easy on-ramp and easy adoption is super, super critical at open source.

Like, it is the essential bite, right? If it's not easy to adopt, developers oftentimes will walk away fairly quickly. How much time, um, does your team, and I'll let, I'll send this over to Anne, spin on making sure adoption is out there and you have a strong devereux, um, activity around it, You know, that, uh, the, it's a theme interesting that you pick up on that too, Tracy.

It's been a theme in our, in our conversations, uh, for sure. And what's that healthy tension between adoption versus conversion and paying customers? But it is something that we pay a lot of attention to and we talk about, and within Liz's teams as well, I, you know, I mentioned our, some of our principles on software of do no harm, secure by design, but we also really focus on, um, ease of use and, and experience.

Because at the end of the day, we're providing value for our users. And I'm always very, Liz just mentioned, careful with the words that we use. I'm careful with saying customers and distinguishing between our users and our subscribers in an open source.

That's a big deal. Your community is, should be made up of both, right? It should be made up of both.

But adoption, adoption is huge. And I would say you mentioned like LF we're part of the project, the VALKI project, which those who may not be familiar with it, it's the, um, open source project that came about when Redis changed their license and the early discussions. I mean, this started in the late March.

The main discussions we're talking about right now is adoption. Just to your point, like, is not going to be a successful project if it's not widely adopted. And what, what are those features?

What are those aspects of the project that will incline people to adopt and ease of use, um, is is really paramount there. And also then awareness of it is another one. Liz, do you have anything to add to that?

'cause I know, and it's an expense to put time and effort into, you know, outreach and pushing, adoption and making sure, not that you just have these great features, but the features themselves are easy to access and onboard. When, when a developer sits down and downloads some software, it's gotta work almost immediately. Otherwise their attention span is a TikTok, It's attention span.

Exactly. Yeah, it's huge for us. So we are, our, our teams are measured on adoption, um, and continually, uh, you know, continually review, uh, feedback from, you know, is this install installation easy?

So, you know, uh, every new joiner, uh, um, needs to, or, uh, with a, with a, a new, every new joiner who's anywhere adjacent to to technology, um, has to, in their first 30 days, install every single percona product and feedback on it, right? So that was, that's the thing I was doing in my second week. And I said, oh, I found two things that were slightly awkward and like, boom, the team was on it, right?

That's it. That's because just as you say, if you, you try, you try a distro, you try a new tool you can't use, it doesn't install, it's a pain, you bounce. Um, so making it easy and making that, you know, we have an entire team to making for devoted to making our documentation as gorgeous and clear as we can make it.

Um, and, and, um, and a team of people who, you know, who are our face at conferences and webinars and, you know, videos and all the rest, we just, one of our folks just released, released a great, it's a little tiny tangent, um, a great video on how to open your first poll request if you wanna make a documentation change for an open source project. And I love that. 'cause there was a time in my life where I didn't know how, and it was scary, right?

So I want someone to go, oh, you, this is like, just like this is a less than three minute video or around three minute video. So someone could say, actually, I wanna make a tiny change to this documentation. Now I can do that.

So that, that kind of lifecycle all the way through is super important to us. Well, thank you for all those, um, tidbits I wanna highlight here, here we have two women who are extremely technical in this area. I'm so, I'm really so happy to meet you both.

We, I don't think I have seen a company in quite some time that has both a CT a two high level C women, CEO and CTO. We did for at Puppet for a time, had both a, a female CEO and a female CTO. I would love to hear the story of how that happened.

Is I, I'm assuming Ann, were you the CTO and then Liz, you came on? How did that, how did that happen? How can we repeat it in other companies?

Well, for, to be fair, a Plug a little plug. Our CFO is also female, um, as well. So, so there, there, there's that.

Um, how did, how did it come about? I think it's just a matter of the oppor opportunity, right? So it started within Perona, it started just with the opportunities that I have been given in my tenure here.

Um, and, and working closely with our founders. Um, I mentioned our, our, our former CEO, Peter Sev is our founder, and he and I just worked closely together as I tell the story where any, any assessment that is done that, and Peter and I have done, uh, a fair few in our day where he's high, I'm low or I'm high, he's low. And so we just had that, that building of, uh, mutual respect and trust, um, over time.

So as he started to step away and I stepped into that role, it's, it's been on me, right? So what's that leadership team that I want or in need for, for the company? And so it's just a matter of, again, if you think about open source, one of the things I love about Open, open Source is, is really this concept of Acceptance and equality.

And everybody's welcome. Like truly everybody is welcome. So in every world that we do, it's okay.

Who's the right person in the right seat? And I also have, am a student of management, if you will. I do an awful lot of reading and learn from others.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm gonna come up with a new way to run a business. Um, data as shown doesn't even suggest data shows that, um, in executive positions, if you have have a better balance of male and female, you tend to have better outcomes. Um, I've seen that to be true throughout my career.

In my former life, I was a banker and the areas that I was at was heavily male, um, dominated. Okay. One of the few females in the room.

It's just, I'm a, it's just me. I'm accustomed to it. So then as we tech similar, but it's like, okay, let's look for that talent and also know that I do want diversity of thought and mind.

And, and in this case it's um, yeah, fi finding, finding that role. So that's my, that's my take on it and how we, how, how I got here. And then, you know, bringing on Liz and, um, Eileen duty as our CFO, she's been with us for, um, quite a bit of time as well.

So. So Anne, I think you had just described a culture that allowed the, um, growth and, um, I I guess elevation of women. It sounds like your co-founder has a very open mind and wasn't looking at look, is looking at talent as opposed to building a, a good old boys club, right?

Which is sometimes a habit, and I've seen it over and over and over and in some of these open source foundations, it's a bad one, but I feel like culture is really the culture of the company, it sounds like from the very beginning was very diverse and had, you know, had a DNI program built in automatically, right? You didn't have to talk about it, it was already there. And maybe that's why, you know, the door was open for Liz, because Liz was, you know, being fairly evaluated based on her, on her background, her skills, and what she could bring to the table.

Yeah, I, I Would say, You know, one of the couple founding principles that, um, Peter with his co-founder, Vadim Chenko did is w admittedly, so we modeled off of Mayas QLAB, where we've always been fully remote. Well, that's a couple pronged reasons. One cost, right?

Finding talent. But Tru truly under that was we didn't want geography to restrict where we find talent. S similarly, what's, you know, what's that culture of a very, use some words of a fair and balanced culture has been something that's key for Peter always in terms of, uh, of that e that idea of equity and who's welcome and, and best person, best person for the job.

Um, and we also, in our culture, we literally, we, Liz talked about folks joining. We, one of the books we recommend people read is called the Culture Map, so that you really understand differences. I'm sure there's some others that we could be adding.

I have young adult children who have harassed me all the time. I'm various things that I need to up my game on. But see, I feel that, I feel That for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm getting a lot of education on neurodivergence versus neurotypical and what does that look like?

And, uh, just the whole gamut, right? The whole gamut of, of learning. And again, I think, you know, to your point, Tracy culture, open source culture at its best is really democratizing access, uh, for every, truly everyone.

We, in our state, in our mission, we talk about, um, innovation and open source for everyone everywhere. And we really, we, we really mean that. I use that mean that I use that term as well, democratizing, um, democratizing tech, really.

And I, and you know, when during Covid I felt like the, the virtual events did the same because so many people who were outside of the US could attend events. And I feel like there was more learning and sharing during those times, even though we went back to in-person. I feel like we've missed something in that.

So, Liz, tell us about what your experience was then and, um, coming on board to, uh, Perona, um, as a female, uh, CEO. Um, yeah, so, so yeah. As, so joining as CTO, uh, as I said, when I was interviewing around seeing that, um, Anne and Eileen were already part of the executive leadership team was, you know, I went immediately, went and told, told my partner, like, all right, there are two women on the exec date.

This is so exciting, right? So were already, they shot to the top of the, I'm like, on my short list, in addition to the other reasons I mentioned earlier. Um, and where you find women in any company, you will find more women.

It's just how it works, right? Because as you say, that's an, that's an indicator of culture. That's, um, one reason, you know, I've always, and I know and is the same, I've always pushed myself to be visible.

Because if you ask someone to close your eyes and picture a CTO, you know, do you picture my face? Well, no, most people usually don't. And I wanna shift that, right?

Um, and I wanna make sure that I'm boosting women with a ton of potential. 'cause we know they're everywhere. So, so joining Perona and seeing that that was something that was baked in, you know, there's a, there's a program for internal talks for internal, internal mentoring and boosting that was part of the culture.

That's huge, right? It's important to do it kind of as a individual in an ad hoc way, but joining somewhere where that's, that's actually, you know, structurally part of the company. That's that so much better.

Well, Anne, I wanna congratulate you on your longtime work with, uh, Perona and ending up at the top of the, of the, of the chart being CEO and building a, you know, having part in building a, a real, um, solid cultural experience for women, allowing you to bring Liz in as the CTO. You know, you guys are different. You are, are, you're not normal.

Um, uh, you're, you are very different. Now that being said, you know, women have always been, you're Not normal. That's what everybody wants to hear.

Tracy, you're not normal. You're not normal. You should tell people they're not normal.

They are, they're exceptional. They're exceptional. Um, but, and I really do, I think it's amazing that what, what you've done, um, with the company, and it's awesome to see that you've been there for so long and that the, you know, bringing in, uh, Liz to, you know, help with, you know, building on spending money on adoption, how many CTOs are even willing to consider that?

To be honest, I, I talk to him often and they're like, you know, we wanna build features. We don't wanna spend time on adoption, but an open source project, it is the most critical piece. And put a budget together that says we've, we're gonna do that and put teams under Devereux.

I even hear recently that pe that companies are spending less on outreach in Devereux. So all of this concerns me when it comes to open source. Um, but I, you know, I wanna just show to our audience what a real open source business model looks like ran by two women.

Thank you for the, thank you for the acknowledgement and compliments. Appreciate it. And Jody, I know you have questions you wanna ask them.

I'm gonna, if I don't know. I mean, they're, they're answering my questions before. I mean, the whole idea of the, the way you approach hiring, and so many companies are, uh, trying to shove people back into buildings, which obviously that's some of, in some cases are driven by local, right?

Local environments where there was a giant presence in the middle of a city like San Francisco or LA and, and all these businesses are struggling because those people aren't coming back and having lunch and buying coffee and all that. But the world's clearly going to evolve past covid and into this more remote environment. And I've also struggled myself with an environment where it's like, just bring people in from a local city where they're cheap and don't think about the talent and don't bring people in to invest in and don't men mentoring drives me crazy.

I see that all the time where it's like, if someone's complaining about an employee, if someone would just step up and be like, they're super talented, they're super smart, why don't we mentor them and teach them? I'm like, we were men. I mean, I was mentored when I was in big, you know, normal corporate America and the big companies I worked for in the past, and I just don't see that, right?

I don't see people stopping and saying, this, this younger person, you know, 30 something, 20 something, they're being thrown into a virtual working world. They're not getting the one-on-one face-to-face. What did we used to say?

Standing around the water cooler conversations. So we need to make that effort to reach out and say, Hey, you do a really good job, but you know, maybe when you're on a Zoom call, you should turn your camera on and you should look like you're engaged. Little things that we could help the younger generation to, to do better.

And instead we complain about 'em being millennials or whatever. And, and a lot of that is stuff that we teach them. You know, you teach them that there's people around them that know more than they do, and that they'll earn more when they learn more, right?

So I just, I just love the whole dynamic that you guys have created there, because I just, I just think it's so important and so hard in a more virtual working environment. But I think the virtual working environment is, you know, the future. I just think that's, oh, it's A hundred percent.

I do too. Nobody Wants to go back into an Office and commute for 45 minutes a day. And, And Anne, I wanna a ask you, you ca you said you came out of the banking, um, world.

You went from banking to tech. Um, how long did it fit? Did, did you go through a phase where you really felt like you had to tech up to run a company like Perona?

Sorry. Well, I am sure you've heard what's the, if you're going to be successful in leadership, it's that you surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and have that expertise. So yes, I, I joke that I play tech on TV and look, you're putting me on TV again to let me do that some more.

Um, yeah, my, I joke, I joke like my banking was a former life. Like I said, I took eight years off when I started a family. I was completely out of the workforce.

So when I, when I joined, um, with my S-Q-L-A-B because of the group that I was with, I'd say there's tech by osmosis, just just listening to folks. But, but truly what I have done over the years is just my colleagues and the people that I've worked with, I go to them and I've, I've always had a couple, few people that is, okay, let me repeat back to you how I understand this, right? And, and am I speaking about this correctly?

And they'll say, yep. And here's an additional part, or Nope, you missed, you missed on that one. Nope.

You don't quite have that. Right? So that's, um, yeah, how have I teched up?

That's how I've done it, really, is just by the people that I work with. And then also knowing what I'm bringing to the table versus what I need to have other people bring, bring to the table. And I will admit, right, there's times I get really intimidated, right?

You all ladies come and you're gonna start throwing out some things. And I'm like, okay, I think I know that acronym, but do not have me go too deep on that one, right? For sure.

Yeah. Well now, now you got, Liz has got your back too, so It's exactly right. That's, that's like I'm telling you, just you, you gotta round out, you gotta round out that group for sure.

Yeah. And Liz, what's your been your journey into, um, into technology? You know, we often hear these hear stories about, there might have been a person in your life that said, no, you really should go into this area as a technologist.

How did you, how did you kind of, um, dig in into this area? Oh, um, I was a freelance writer. And, um, um, and, uh, I was, someone told me that I shouldn't worry my pretty little head about scripting and I couldn't do it, um, at the, and I was that, right.

So I got involved, I started coding more and more. I actually went back to school and got my degree, um, and was a technologist. Did anybody encourage you to do that?

Or you just said, well, if I can write, I can code? Um, not, no, I, I quite the opposite. So I, I, I was playing around with scripting and got told, um, by folks, no, no, you, you shouldn't do that.

You couldn't do that. Um, and I got pretty stubborn as I could Challenge accepted. That's how I am.

Tell me I can't do something and then watch. That's absolutely. That's awesome.

That, You know, and I think, I think that that those I would for you, Liz. I wish you had more of an encouragement, the, the, to say, I just remember I went to an all girls high school and my calculus teacher, our senior year in high school said, you're gonna go to college. You're gonna be, I think she said, boys that are going to be intimidated because of your, your math or science or whatever.

And I was like, that's not gonna happen. Sure enough, it happened in my calculus class. Like I had that, but I had that foundation of, you belong, right?

You can do this. And obviously Liz, you had enough self-confidence in yourself that you're like, don't tell me I can't do that. Right?

Of course I can. And you're watching Step aside, here I come. Right?

This is great. So Everybody In confidence, Everybody you see in action right now, how Anne is addressing this question here, how the culture of a company is so important. And unfortunately, I mean, I, I hate to say this, but I'm going to, I have worked, some of the worst managers I've ever had in my life have been women.

Hmm. Um, women I have in my background, in my history, I have my, I have experienced women who are very competitive and feel like there's a zero game, you know, um, a zero sum game here when it comes to women in a business. So you always have to be over, you always have to, you always have to be better.

And there's always a competition. And I see that even today in a lot of companies. Hmm.

But Ann, you're showing us the a different way because you just ex we just experienced your, you know, your encouragement of Liz, you know, so thank you for that. And maybe it's because you went to an all girls school. I, I was a competitive gymnast and spent most of my time with other girls and rooting them on, right?

Mm-Hmm. So when I was young, that's how I was taught to treat other women. And maybe going to an all, all girls school, you learn something different.

Do you think there's anything in that? You know, it's interesting. Last year at, at a LF conference, I did a talk that I got prodded by my kiddos, right?

Like, you know, what wa what was my journey? And I really took time to reflect. And I think back to, yes, I went to an all girls high school, but even before that, similar to you, Tracy, I did team sports where like, I was never a gymnast, but there's that component of the individual and the team.

And I really credit that with being socialized as our male colleagues are socialized a lot of them, not all of them, not, I mean, it's a, it's a gross stereotype to think that all people like sports, right? But to really understand how I'm competitive, but I always am competitive with myself and then how to know to be part of the team. So yes, you knew that.

What did that, what did a all girls high school teach me right there? There was nothing that we were limited on, right? It was a college prep school.

So we had AP courses, we had, you know, obviously the sciences, we didn't have to be, we weren't competing with, um, with men. That same calculus teacher, she had us read a book and I always misquote it. I think it's Smart girls, brilliant Women or something.

That was a study that was done. And that was really impactful for me because in that book that they, the, the researcher or a research subject, she was panicked to go to the reunion. 'cause they were started in grade school and she'd lost track with people from high school and she only had two PhDs.

She's like, I was so worried I only had two PhDs. She goes to this reunion one, she was the most educated out of the whole group. There were a couple that had only finished high school, right?

Some that had dropped outta college, and that's that. I read that as a 17-year-old in high school. And I was like, whoa, that's really impactful.

And studies have come out. Single set education really benefits females, not males, like during middle school. Um, I got to do that, right?

High school on that. And just, just the impact of be your best self and not have maybe some social pressures that we've in the United States. I can't speak to other cultures in the United States, what those, what those pressures are.

So yeah, just super fortunate to those, that upbringing. Right? So yeah, the high school helped.

I think it also helped that my mother used to always, you know, I was that kid who said, everybody else is doing blah, blah, blah, and I got my full name back at me at the time. Mm-Hmm, well you're not everybody else, you're Aunt Elizabeth O'Neill. I'm like, I, I joked with my mom that bit her a little bit as I got older, like, well mom, I'm not everybody else.

I'm me, so I'm gonna go do this. Right? But yeah, so I, I just think it's a culmination of all those experiences that I was, uh, fortunate to have.

Yeah. I wonder how the world would be different from, for women if, let's say seventh, eighth, ninth grade were separated boys and girls, just to give girls those three very formative years, puberty years, some space to really understand who they are as a, as a, as a female or as a, a, a young woman and be, have comradery with other young women. I wonder if that would change our culture and make a culture in companies more like Cocos.

Well, and I also think the whole idea, I I was a professional athlete for the first 25 years of my life. And I grew up in a small town where there was nothing to do. I grew up in the mountains in Colorado and evergreen, and there was nothing to do, but sports and a lot of the sports were co-ed because there wasn't enough girls and boys to make separate soccer teams and separate, you know, teams for everything.

And, um, now kids, all that, all that competitiveness has been taken totally out of our school systems. Like I played sports. Like we had sports for everything in, in, we called it junior high, now it's middle school in seventh, eighth and ninth grade.

We had a track team, a football team, cheerleaders every sport, gymnastics, swimming. And as they've taken all that away, people have to, you know, they send their kids out, right? And hey, um, enormous amount of money.

So there's a hierarchy of kids getting those, you know, girls being able to play sports with girls and, you know, all that kind of stuff has been kind of washed away from the, the school system in this country that we started with on, on just not sports, like everything arts and, and music and you know, I think a lot of that when what that we got as kids made us, you know, stronger individuals and, and more competitive and more sure of ourselves and what we're capable of. So I think we've drummed a lot of that out by the lack of funding in our school systems and kids not getting access to a lot of stuff we had as kids. I just see how different it is now.

Like I have, um, I got remarried and so I ended up with grandkids way earlier than I planned that were already born. And they both are starting high. Well, one's in high school, the other one's started and it's just so different.

The, the exposure and the things they do and the things they wanna participate in, it's so, so different now than it was when we were kids. So I think it's great, But let's hope we can keep it that way. And hey, we had the first Olympics where it was 50, 50 minute women.

That is amazing. Mm-Hmm. Yeah, I am.

That was, that was a fun thing to participate in. So Tracy always likes, I'm gonna jump on her. You said the culture map, that's something I wanna look up.

Are there any other books we always like to ask for a box? Liz, you have any book ideas? Um, Anything you're reading that, that you would recommend?

So Oldies with goodies that I always a fan of Simon Sinek's books. So Leaders Eat Last is one of 'em. Um, uh, I, I like the, uh, I I I've got all these, my goodies I come, go back to.

So the five Dysfunctions of a Team is one that I'll tend to reread on, on in every, joining a new leadership team, not 'cause I'm scanning for dysfunction, because that's a good reminder on what's important, what to prioritize, right? She's not scanning Good to no, The, the takeaway being that relationships matter, right? That trust and relationships are, are so important.

So that, that I'm putting my energy into building that, those relationships and that trust. So yeah, if you haven't read the book, you might not know the takeaway, so Well, I have a good recommendation for you since you both are readers of books, and this came from another one of our guests. It's called the, the, the Logic of Failure.

Um, it is fascinating when I read it, it was like, holy Toledo, we're watching this in real time in politics right now, particularly around the Republican Party, the logic of failure, and there is a very specific logic of failure and it, it, it opened my eyes and she, you know, she said she'd read it more than once. I understand why. So that's, that's one I have to buy.

'cause like I, right now I have a library book right here, right? Just the good stuff, right? So in our world of short attention spans, this is really concise and, you know, grabbing that.

But sometimes I, I also, you can't see, but to my left, I have a whole bookshelf, a book, so it's like, okay, which ones are worthy because I'm gonna pull 'em out again versus which ones do I read and Just retain? Yeah, that's great. Yeah.

You always know it's good when you pull it out again, for sure. That's right. Yeah.

Well thank you guys so much as usual with 45 minutes blew right by. Um, we are so excited to have you here and to be able to speak with you today. I just, you know, so much great, great stuff, um, that we talked about and I think our audience is really gonna love it.

Trace, you've got anything you wanna say? No, just thank you for showing us how, I mean really Ann, um, I think that, uh, your work in building a this culture is pretty amazing and I look forward to seeing what Liz has got up her sleeves for Percona in the next year or so. Thanks for having us and for the work that you two do, it's important.

We appreciate that. Wow. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thanks to our audience for tuning into another, um, awesome episode. If I do say so myself and I do of Techstrong Women, um, please be sure to join us for our next episode.

And again, tune into Techstrong TV every day for so much great content. And, um, check out all of our sites and, and, uh, we'll keep you up posted on what's going on out there in the tech world. Thanks again for being here.

Have a good day.