From Academia to Tech Leadership: Empowering Women and Revolutionizing Open Source – Tech.Strong.Women. EP 36

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, and 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 techron. Join us on Thursday, July 10th for Cloud Native Con, now 2024. com.

And be sure to tune in every day to Textron TV for great shows and interviews. Hey, Tracy, what's on your mind today? Well, thank you, Jody.

And you know, I'm gonna put a plug out there for Textron game too, because we did have some really great conversations and sometimes they go sideways, and I love that. We Started a new, we started a new thing on Textron TV with our, our team here and Tracy and some other guys called Textron Gang. And you can see that on Textron TV every day and in, and it's just news of the day, topical stuff.

And yeah, it can go sideways. It's news of the day, which I think is really important because right now news is going pretty fast, right? Yeah.

Technology is changing. There's a lot of, uh, you know, there's a lot of buyouts, there's a lot of companies that are merging. So it's, it's, it's A really good time.

Legislation. Something else. Just popped up 10 today Fast.

Yes. Legislation. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about the government's involvement right now in solving security problems.

So this past week, or maybe it was, maybe it was a little bit, probably sometime in May, um, nist, uh, which is the National Institute of Standards and Technology. They have, they have committed, and they have spent some money to try to catch up on the back load of CVEs coming across, which is great because, you know, everything that we do, we have to fi, you know, it's not that that NIST is the only CV there, there's a lot of places where CVEs are found, but there is a big backlog. Uh, I think that they said that there were, in 2023, we were looking at about 33,000 CVEs up from probably around 22, 20 5,000 in 2022.

So what's 2024 gonna look like? And the, the backlog just kept getting bigger and bigger. So I'm super happy to see that while the government is starting to put pressure on, uh, you know, private organizations, private enterprise to solve this problem, they're gonna step up and spend some money to get rid of the backlog.

Now, I don't know if they'll be able to, because the more we, the better we get at scanning, and the better we get at, um, understanding vulnerabilities and how to find them, the more we find. But we do need to have remediation steps. We do need to understand scoring.

Scoring is so important in CVEs. 'cause there could be CVEs floating around out there that nobody understands has got a high score because they haven't scored 'em yet. So, thank goodness, right.

The government is sipping in to help us out on this battle of getting rid of vulnerabilities, because we have seen some whoppers over the course of the last few years, and there are probably whoppers that are still out there, and we need that help. So thank you, thank you to the, to NIST and whoever funded that. I'm assuming it went up the chain, but we got some funding to help with CVEs and building out our, our CVE, uh, databases and understanding risk to these new ones that are coming across every day.

Cool. Great. Thanks, trace.

All right. Well, I'm excited to introduce our guest today. Her name is Ka, Karima Kaur.

Karima, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you're doing, what you're excited about. So, my name is Karima Kaur. Uh, oh, sorry.

Usually mistake it for Karima. That's completely fair and fine, as long as I know you're calling me and writing me the right Jack. I don mind.

Awesome. So, um, yeah, I'm one of the founders at, uh, uh, men io. And previous to that I was doing, um, angel investing in the startups.

I mean, being in bay, you really cannot escape the world of startups. And, uh, prior to that, I was, uh, in academics. I have a PhD in, uh, finance and economics.

So, uh, it has been quite a transition coming from academic world, um, to the world of startups. It has been super exciting and energizing, to say the least. And, uh, yeah, so that's a little about me.

Well, that doesn't, you know, we have so many of the women who, um, show up on our tech strong, uh, women started in some kind of math at university, some kind of math. Nice, nice. Um, economics tends to be a very common one, huh?

Yeah, I was, I was an econ major, and then I realized I was better at programming than I was econ. Yeah. You know, it is quite amazing because I grew up in India, and somehow engineering and computer side was, it never even crossed my mind that I wanted to be, uh, in that major, or, I don't know.

It just never presented itself as an option for me because my parents wanted me to become, um, a doctor, because that's the course. Yeah. And then, because I did not want to listen to my parents, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to be, I'm going to do economics just to rebel against.

That was my, so, Well, I think you chose the better option. Not that, you know, I, I respect everybody who goes into medicine, but man, uh, the industry you're in right now is super moving, super fast. So the question I have for you, you know, how do, how did you go from, I get the transition from econ into angel investment.

Obviously your background in finance is what startups are, look, are angels are looking for. How did you make the jump from Angel investor to A CEO? I think he started maybe probably as a CFO, but as in a, a startup and a very techy industry.

I mean, an object store database is about the most obscure thing you could possibly try to talk about. And to try to think about, you know, it's all about disruption, right? Object stored versus a database.

It's completely a different model. So how did you make that leap? That is a humongous leap.

I'm really interested in hearing that story. I think the leap was towards entrepreneurship. I think not so much in, uh, you know, actually solving the problem.

I think the biggest leap that, uh, I made personally was making a decision that, uh, I needed to do something of my own. And, you know, when you're part of the startup world, you're surrounded by all things latest and greatest lot of energy, a lot of good ideas. And, uh, there was always a craving in me that if I did not build something off my own, I will just be forever unhappy.

And I just made it very clear, and I just thought that was the right time for me to make that leap happen. So I think that leap was very instrumental, uh, for me. And then, you know, once you make a decision about something, then everything starts falling in place little by little by little.

And, but the first step is the most important step I always say. And, uh, you mentioned about my journey from, uh, COO to CEO. Um, you know, in startups, titles are just titles.

I always say that. Um, and as a founder, I think that's the biggest responsibility that you have because as a founder, you are building something, you're seeing a vision, or you're seeing something that doesn't exist now, right? You're seeing five years ahead, you're seeing 10 years ahead, and you are actually building a world around that will look like that in 10 years as per your vision.

So I think being a founder is a lot more important than any title can give you. But of course, as you know, things build up the startup, uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, you know, start scaling at a certain stage, then that's where the things really start to streamline. You bring in more people, and that's where the rules also try to streamline a little bit more.

So that's the reason why, uh, you know, from title wise, from C-F-O-C-O-O and CEO, now I get that. I've had many titles. I have several cards depending on where I'm headed.

But why an object store? What, what, what kind of piqued your interest in this particular area, um, and, you know, who helped you build this, you know, this model? Yeah.

Give us a little bit of insight about what you struggled with, and I really wanna hear about what you went through when it came to raising funds. Were you the front person or did you put somebody else as the front person, original, you know, as you began to raise funds? Yeah.

Yeah. So I'll answer the first part of the question. So, you know, once I took the decision that I needed to do something of my own, I did not know what problem we are going to try and solve.

And of course, you know, when in, when anyone wants to be like a first time founder, storage is the last thing they'll think about picking it up. Like it's the most uns sexiest topic out there. Yeah.

With the grandiose plans, It's pretty geeky, let's say it is about the geeky issues you can get. Yeah. So we were experimenting with the, uh, multiple, uh, uh, problems, you know, trying to figure out what should be our, uh, next step.

And as part of the process, you know, uh, as we were discovering different, different problem statements, the underlying, uh, uh, the bigger challenge was always around data, right? Always right. You know, in terms of devices, in terms of, uh, at one point of time we were trying to build a bionic device that can lessen everything around you.

So that was pretty cool. But again, it came down to data. And, uh, uh, you know, as we went more and more further in our discovery phase, and, you know, every founder goes through that soul searching phase, it became very apparent that data is a problem that is going to be relevant, uh, now, and it is going to be relevant, uh, or even more relevant, uh, 10 years from now.

So that was a simple thing. And once we kind of condensed on that, uh, understanding, then when it comes to data, there are only a couple of things that, uh, you can do. And I'm giving a very high level view, right?

You can either approach it from a compute standpoint where you want to derive analytics on top of the data that is sitting, or whether you want to get intelligence out of it. And the second phase is either you can store massive amount of data at scale. These are the only two approaches I feel like, in a data world that you can take at a super high level.

And, uh, for us, it was important that we take, uh, the control of the data because we know that if data sitting on our platform, then anything we build on top of it to extract more value on it will be only more meaningful, and it'll only deliver a lot more value to our users, to our customers, and so on. So that's how we condensed on, and, you know, one step at a time came to the, uh, came, uh, to the understanding that, okay, this is what we want to go after. And then in terms of why object storage, uh, it was the right time because AWS, you know, had convinced the world that, uh, object storage is the right kind of technology to build, uh, to bring all or bulk of your unstructured data on, or bulk of your semi-structured data on.

And that's the data that grew, that was growing rapidly. So we thought, okay, AWS S3 will only be restricted within AWS we'll will just free it up and bring it to rest of the world. So that was why we selected, um, object storage.

And, um, in terms of my journey, right? So I, I'm not a, uh, engineer, so I needed someone to help me build the product. And, uh, once we decided that this is what we wanted to do, um, then, you know, I had to convince, uh, my husband to join because, uh, he's the engineer and he did a successful startup in the past as well.

So, you know, uh, he's also part of the entire startup world. So, you know, then we kind of formulated, because I know that whatever he does, he'll, it'll be a piece of art. I know how he approaches the problem.

I know how he builds the product so I can blindly trust him to build something that is going to resonate to the customers. And once, you know, you have that kind of foundation, you cango wrong. So that was the journey of, uh, uh, you know, starting of manaya.

And in terms of fundraising, you know, it's quite interesting. I didn't have much experience in terms of fundraising. So a lot of the fundraising and AB was the CEO at the time.

AB is, uh, the co-founder, uh, uh, at Manaya. He's also my husband. So he, he was needing that, quite honestly, I was supporting him in terms of putting a com business proposal, you know, at, at an early stage.

You can do so much on the business proposal side because you don't have those validation points from customers or, uh, uh, whatnot. But in that was the journey in terms of fundraising. And because of the successful past, also because of how I have been connected in the startup world, people kind of knew and had a trust in us as well.

So funding was not necessarily the biggest challenge for eo. We had, uh, our first check the DB incorporated. So it was, it was very, uh, it was relatively a smoother journey.

And then once you raise the money, of course, then it becomes a different, uh, you know, ballgame altogether. So then you're on a clock to deliver, to build the product. All those good stuff happens.

So, you know, at a, as an angel investor, mm-Hmm. How many companies were you involved with, where a woman was leading the charge and the CEO and doing the, the, the presentation and, you know, a and, and did you see a lot of women, uh, in that role? No, I didn't.

See, I don't, I, and I'm just, as you were talking, I was trying to think about the investments that I've done. I don't, I don't think so. I came across, yeah, Isn't that fascinating?

It is unbelievable. And even now, and I brought this up, I think just, uh, yesterday or day before yesterday to, uh, some of my colleagues, you know, there'll be like big meetings happening, and I would be the only woman who would be present or big dinners, customer dinners, and I would be the only woman present and, uh, or someone from my team would be present, uh, uh, you know, uh, to take the chance. So it's, it's quite amazing that in 2024, we still have this kind of, uh, you know, Tracy, do we not hear this every single interview?

I was just waiting. We do, I was waiting for it. The, I was the only woman in the room statement.

Literally happens almost every, we've done 40 of these. Yeah. And it's, it's just such a theme and it's so frustrating.

It is frustrating. It's very frustrating because the problem becomes, uh, I believe, uh, there is a stereotype for who will be a successful company, right? Based on previous experience.

And not enough women are in the room to prove that they can create successful companies. So, you know, I I really do feel like a lot of women are almost immediately discounted, Uh, hun 110%. I mean, I would not even yeah, challenged that statement in any shape or form.

And then, uh, I think the only caveat being is that if you've proven your worth in the past through your pedigree or through your, you know, work that you have delivered, then you do bring that credibility when you are walking into the room and there's a little bit of a different conversation. But if you're just coming right of the boat, then, you know, it's, it's very easy to dismiss. They won't even give you shot to talk about what you want to do or the vision that you have, or it, it might be the most amazing thing, but you won't even have a seat at the table.

So I think, um, the way investment, uh, usually works is not based on the trust lot based because it's early stage. And I'm talking from my, uh, uh, personal experience, right? Where angel investment, or even VC investment, uh, uh, they come at a super early stage where sometimes even the product is not there.

You know, you don't, you, uh, there's a vision that, okay, this is what we are going to build. This is the problem that we are going to solve. And depending on the gravity of the problem and the trust in the founders, that they can deliver a solution to address the problem.

A lot of the funding just happens on that. And your ability to build the team, those are the three critical things on which the, uh, uh, funding happens. Now, being a woman, if you don't have that 20, 30 years of experience backing you, it's, it's, you are just dismissed in me.

I can tell you from experience I have that 20, 30 years of experience backing me and getting in the door to talk to 'em is, is, you know, almost impossibility. Literally, I mean, open makes software is, has been around for 30 years and is still making money for 30 years. How many, so tools, could we say that, right?

And we never had to raise a single penny of money. Lovely. But That doesn't give me any, any, um, access, uh, at all.

It really doesn't. So I'm fascinated by this problem, and I hope that we can continue hammering on it because it's a, a real issue. Because if we can't bring women at the higher levels, like you, were able to come in and bring, get up to the CEO level, we can bring in women at the startup level when tho those women are the women who are gonna hire other women to come in and be the c the CTOs and the c the CFOs and the directors, uh, and the strategy people.

But if we don't find that, if we don't solve that problem, I don't know if we'll ever solve the problem in women in tech, to be honest. I completely agree with you. And one of the main reasons why we were able to attract women early on, uh, as part of startup was because I was there quite simply just me being present there helped so much.

Because, uh, especially in engineering, things can get very, uh, if you're a female engineer and you worked in bigger organizations, and I'm not going to name drop them, but you can figure that's okay. But, um, there is a very toxic work culture that happens, uh, in engineering. It gets very, very toxic.

And a lot of the women have gotten burned, uh, in their past, and they don't want to take a shortage. You know, it's, it's not worth it at the end of the day. So for, uh, me, it was very important as we were setting up the organization, that we have the right culture.

And thankfully because I was there, we were able to attract good women engineer, uh, from technology space, who, uh, were excited and thrilled to work, uh, work with us alongside. And I think, you know, women are so less political than men. It's insane.

And, uh, I always tell that approach that if you get more women in the organization, your culture will just automatically be super healthy. It just doesn't even, you don't even have, it's very straightforward conversation when it happens with women as it, you know, happens, uh, when you're dealing with a similar, uh, male counterpart. So I, you know, uh, and I, we've been lucky in terms of having good women presence, but it's not enough.

Like even on the business side, if I need to hire, uh, uh, someone to drive business, it is. And I made it mandatory to get me at least a couple of resumes for women to look at. And it was just a challenge, uh, to even find those high powered women.

And, uh, as a startup, you do need to move fast and hire the right people for the job. But, but I think you do need to invest some time and be meaningful in terms of your approach and make sure that you're putting that effort, or at least asking the questions, okay, there are no women coming to interview, come on, what's going on? So Yeah, you have to go, you gotta go find them, right?

You gotta do some work. And I have, I, I keep saying, you know, discrimination got us into this mess is probably gonna get us out of this mess. You have to go and find the women.

You have to look for them very specifically and recruit on that. It's hard 'cause I've, I've ran into the same thing just yeah. In our open source community.

Now, this is another area I think is fascinating about your approach. Um, I I'm doing the same thing. So you have both a open source core and then a commercial license.

Yes. Correct. Yeah.

Yes. And I believe that, um, I think that MIN io has pretty much been adopted by a lot of, you know, yeah. Fortune, the 1000 companies.

Yeah. Based on that open source core. Yes.

How important was that to building the company and building adoption and getting recognition? Extremely important. Um, and it comes from the fact that, uh, I truly believe in open source as a philosophy.

Like otherwise, you cannot build a product that is open source. You really, truly need to believe that open source is the right way in terms of building the technology, in terms of, uh, making things happen at a faster pace. And, uh, it's a very different approach than someone who's coming in from a proprietary world.

They will never understand the dynamics in terms of managing the community or, uh, interacting with the community. Even. So, anytime someone asks me this question about open source, I just tell them that you really, truly need to believe in open source.

Because what will happen is that, uh, as you start fundraising, there will be so many pressures along the way, uh, that, and you will be forced to take some decisions, uh, uh, you know, in terms of whether now is the time open source work till it work. Now you need to make changes from the product or change the licenses and whatnot. So unless you really believe in it, you will end up giving into those pressures.

And that not, might be, that might not even be the best thing for the company, for, uh, because you, as a founder, you have the foresight, you have the vision, and you know what works for the company. Investors are coming and meeting you, you know, once a quarter. Of course, they're seeing the patterns.

They're only there to give you advice. But don't take all those advice to your heart and implement it right away. That, that would be my only guidance.

So open source has been very foundational. It is who we are as a company, and, uh, it is, uh, you know, because of open source, we have been able to disrupt this market. And open source overall has disrupted the cloud market, right?

Cloud would not exist without open source AI would not exist without open source, right? For that matter. So I think not none of that tech stack right now is untouched without open source.

And I think that is very foundational and companies are recognizing it. I mean, Microsoft, uh, how three, I mean, for a company like Microsoft to wholeheartedly embrace open source, that's a win for the open source community overall, I would say. I mean, that's a Huge, I, yes.

Have you felt any, uh, pushback over the course of the last year because of concerns about, um, open source security? So in terms of open source security as such? No, but you know, the thing is that, um, and I'll just take a step back a little bit more, uh, because this is a very important topic in terms of concerns about open source overall, the customers, uh, or the users of open source, they need to realize, uh, that they're getting a lot more value by using something open source.

So just to even step back a little bit further, if you are a user, you have two options. You know, there's a proprietary product, same features, capability, there's an open source product, same features, capability. As a user, you should be paying an open source product a lot more than a proprietary product because open source is giving you freedom.

Freedom in terms of using it the way you want to use, right? Technically, that's the value that is getting delivered. But users don't understand that, and they just take the free part quite literally.

And so me, it is always something fascinating when someone in a enterprise world just downloads something from internet, they run into troubles. Whether the security related vulnerabilities or whether it is any kind of, in our case story, you know, uh, the, for, because of the wrongful configuration leading to some issues and whatnot, and then coming and blaming open source for it, that's not open source, uh, uh, responsibility. You as a user are either expected to contribute back or either expected to get the right commercial licenses so that you have the right support in place so that you don't run into these issues.

As far as the CDs, you know, open SSLI think is a quite, uh, big, uh, open book. And an example where a project was not funded, uh, correctly, and the users were just like using it till, of course there was a huge security vulnerability, and then everyone took it, you know, took notice of it and started investing it in more. So, you know, open source is an ecosystem.

It is not just my responsibility, it is a responsibility of the entire ecosystem. It's responsibility of customers, it is responsibility of users, investors, of course, they come with a different mindset. They're, they're putting money in a company that is built on open source that allows a company to build a lot more open source products.

So they are doing their best, but I think everyone needs to come together and not just point fingers to just open source. Hey, open source, there is more security vulnerability there. Come on, how do I buy to that?

I kalima you and I would be fast friends if we lived near each other, because you are speaking to the choir here. Um, I have said that so many times. You know, I'm part of the, uh, I'm pretty involved in the Linux Foundation.

I'm on the board of the, I was on the board of the open SSF for a while. I'm on the board of the CD foundation. I'm still on in their TOC and Jenkins is, you know, it has trouble being supported financially.

Yeah, I'm sure. And Jenkins is used by almost 50% of the world's high top companies. Yep.

Right? And they can't, we can't get a hundred thousand dollars a year to keep a, keep it running, right? So far.

So there, it's an equal responsibility, right? Yep. Open.

I, I think anybody using a product, um, like yours or like Jenkins should have at least one developer dedicated to be on the open source project and working it. Absolutely. Even if it is not a developer.

So, you know, there are multiple ways to support it as yes, uh, ecosystem you can bring what you can do, right? Right. If not back commercial license by the right kind of implementation, you know, it's, it's, you need, you know, it's quite, I think just because of the word free in it, customers just run with it and, you know, try to negotiate you down.

It's, it's on the daily routine that you come across it. And because of that, and not to blame, uh, you know, uh, uh, customers per se, but they use open source and mechanism to bring down the cost and not so much in terms of building out the value. That's what, uh, uh, you know, at least based on the community interaction that I have seen.

So the responsibility lies everywhere, I think. And, uh, uh, if everyone, in an ideal world, if everyone was doing their bit, we would not be running into those kind, these kind of discussions. But well, we are here, We are here.

And I, you know, I know that, um, from what I hear, there are a lot more concerns about using open source, but I don't really believe that enterprises today can move away from it. Were they gonna get rid of Linux? Yeah.

Kubernetes, you Know, unbelievable, right? No, And, and the farther we go into ai, the more open source out there that we're starting to use. So, uh, to your, to your point, this, it's gotta be a community.

This is a community effort. And you know, for our open source project, I have that those c committers and those people who volunteer on that project keep me going. Yeah, They really do.

It's, It's quite amazing. I mean, uh, it's quite amazing. Even we have, and for our infrastructure and storage, like I said, it's not the sexiest project out there, there, uh, you know, it, it, you won't, uh, expect that much community interaction.

But with us, we have like around 30,000 Slack members who are just hacking on it. And it all comes to, uh, down to how you engage with the community, the kind of trust that you build with the community, because storage is a very sticky part of anyone's tech stack. And last thing you want to, uh, uh, do is, you know, hold them hostage with license keys.

At the end of the day, what, as a company, uh, right, I do have responsibility towards my investors, towards my team, even, right? To make sure that the company's healthy, it is thriving and growing at a good rate. What I have a responsibility to communicate the value that we are bringing to the table and what kind of, uh, uh, uh, you know, value we are delivering to the customer, because that then only a transaction happens without delivering a value.

There is no transaction at the end of the day. And I think that's what we all need to understand, and that's the reason why we have, uh, a GPL, uh, V three point, uh, o license because it does protect the organizations in, uh, in a way of format so that at least the freedom comes back, uh, uh, you know, to the project if someone wants to use it. And that, that way, or if enterprises wants to be free of the obligations, they can buy the commercial license.

So I, I have a preference for now popular licenses far more than the permissive licenses that, uh, some of my peers have been flying, but yeah. Yeah, I was on the Eclipse Foundation and we spent the por a good portion of two year, two years writing the Eclipse license. So I did that.

It's a, it's can be detailed, uh, and yes, the license you're running, uh, under is probably the, the most favorable to having a open source core, right? Uh, yeah, and I don't, uh, uh, uh, yes. So for us, we created, uh, you know, the downstream of Minai just on March 12th.

Uh, uh, uh, it's a very recent release. And in terms, like I said, deliver a lot more value and customers, the behavior of the customers is such that, like I said, you know, initially in an ideal world, if there's a proprietary versus an open source product for same experiences, customers should be paying for open source more because of the additional freedom that they get. But they don't, they always, they will be in their mind because they're getting something physical or tangible or some keys.

They value that in a proprietary product. It's quite strange way of looking at things. So for that reason alone, we wanted to build a lot more of value in what we deliver to our commercial customers.

And that's the reason why we ended up with the downstream release of mania upstream. And that's not to say that open source, we are abandoning open source. It's going to be very alive and kicking.

Everything will be pushed to upstream first. But for the commercial customers who are using, uh, uh, using us in mission critical workloads and production environments for them, they do want to have that hardened release in which s have been hardened, stabilized, and then brought into the release because they have their own release cycles, uh, that they have in place for, uh, you know, their, their stack. So that's one thing.

Then we added couple of capabilities more that will enable them to run, uh, any environment at scale or in a production way, you know, whether it is throttling of QOS, uh, uh, you know, bandwidth optimization, ability to manage multiple, uh, clusters of min IO from one central unit. So we added those capabilities as part of the downstream, but upstream, uh, uh, is, uh, pretty healthy, pretty thriving. Like I said, we have now around, I think we have lost, we have lost track of counting the GitHub stars, but 45 to 50,000 of GitHub stars and, uh, 3000 Slack members, and also the other community is pretty active and, uh, thriving.

So, uh, no. Well, that is an amazing, amazing success story for an open source project. It really is.

And it's up there. That is something that you should be so proud of, uh, because, you know, and there, there is a heart to open source, right? Yes.

There is a heart to managing the community, and there's a lot of work to be done around that. Absolutely. And as you said, it's a disruptive model, right?

So how do you position yourself, how do your customers see you against like a, a wasabi or a Google Cloud storage? You know, do you actually have competitive, uh, moments with them? Are you like, yeah, So What's and shootout matches with them?

Long shootout matches are welcome, but, But, uh, but, uh, so wasabi plays in a different tier. Cheap and deep hosting compete directly against a w as their pricing is dirt cheap. We don't play in that market for, uh, for us.

Um, and the way we have built the product is to be someone who's looking for AWS S3, but outside of that environment, very simple. If someone is looking to build a cloud native architecture, they will need something like Mia to run their application stack on. And that's where we really shine and deliver our value.

So what we are seeing from industry is that on one side, the customers are moving away from the legacy world of appliances. Everything is becoming storage defined. So whether it is Dell, ECS of the world, or whether it is, uh, NetApps of the world, we are replacing those at CP pr.

We are replacing all those on the field. That's on the one side. On another side, uh, uh, quite interestingly, what we are seeing is that there are a company that, that were born in public cloud or that, that actively invested in AWS very early on in terms of moving there.

And now they are, uh, kind of under pressure of optimizing on their operating margins because cloud is not the cheapest. It is. It was definitely, it is definitely useful and therefore a purpose in terms of agility and building your apps and whatnot.

But once you have, uh, once you want to take those apps in production, if those are very consistent workloads, very needy workloads, you would want to run it in your own environment. Otherwise, the public cloud bills can add up pretty fast. So we are seeing that reverse trend coming in place of, uh, customers moving away from their, uh, public cloud and building hybrid environment, or in certain cases completely moving out of it and standardizing on Minai, because we are the closest thing out there when, in terms of cloud storage outside of, uh, uh, public cloud.

So we see both the trends, customers moving away from legacy and customers coming back or building a hybrid environment from a public cloud. Well, again, it's a really fascinating story. Um, so, you know, you've raised about, what about a hundred million, which really isn't a lot of money for what you've done.

Um, are you looking at, are you, are you looking at brazing more or what's the, what's the path forward? Yeah, and it's quite interesting because you mentioned it's really not more, I'll give you a nice story there. Uh, so when we were doing series B and, uh, that time we were just 40 people.

And, uh, we had only raised, I believe that time till that time, our series A was 20 million and, uh, c it was three, so 23 million by that time. And we were at series B asking for, you know, this is the valuation that we want, we will wait for it, but this is what we deserve because of the impact that we have made in the industry. And investors were very fascinated that you are only 40 member team.

What will you do with so much of money? And our question is always like that, we should be rewarded for delivering so much value with such little team. Our team should be rewarded.

We want this. And, uh, so that was an interesting conversation. And of course, you know, uh, we are surrounded by really good investors who, uh, who gave us the, uh, funding and whatnot.

So in terms of, uh, uh, the new fund raise, we have not touched a single dollar that we raised in CDP, which was in 20, we closed in Jan 2022. If my time, if my, uh, you know, numbers are right. So we are a profitable company.

We have large scale deployments of man io. Uh, I always say customer money is the best money. And, uh, we are, uh, growing aggressively, we are hiring people, but we have still not touched the a hundred million that we have.

So only from the C drought and from Series A, we have gotten company to this stage, series B money still sitting. So we are not in a rush to do any kind of fundraising. My only thing is that, uh, everything needs to be meaningful just because the entire industry just is in a mode of race, race, race.

We don't want to be in the track race. We want to do things right. We want to set the right fundamentals of the company, because then only you will be able to survive the ebbs and the flows, right?

Otherwise, uh, if you're doing things for short term trends, it is going to bite you no matter what. It might look really good in short term, maybe a year or two, but it is going to come back to you. So for, uh, me, it is very important to do things correctly, do things in the right way, always have your eye on the fundamentals.

And because I'm from finance background, uh, I just am all also coming from that background. I, I do want to make sure that company's healthy and it is growing, uh, at a, at an accelerated pace. So that's the focus.

But yeah, we are not in a rush to raise because of our growth. So I want all those investors out there who have never believed that women should be running a tech company to hear this story over and over again, to understand that women probably are more, uh, averse to risk and more budget focused than some of their male CEO counterparts. We can do a lot.

It's amazing what a small company can do with that much, with a hundred million dollars. And it's amazing. You haven't spent the second, this, this series BI.

Yeah, and just to correct that, I think, uh, uh, investors should not think of women as risk averse or budget focused because that's not the right, uh, narrative. Uh, uh, you know, the right narrative is for investors to see that a woman run company can be as aggressive in growing with the right fundamentals as there any counterparts in the industry. So I think that is, that is something said percent just Wanted to, hundred percent.

I think that's a good way to put it. Yeah. Because it, because of working with the investors and, uh, me coming from, I know how that, that certain things trigger certain things in them.

So I just wanted to make sure, uh, uh, we correct that narrative. That is a great, uh, you know, that's great insight on your part. Since you have been an angel investor, you, you, you, you know their mindset.

So what do they, you know, is there an issue with you not spending that series B? Do they feel like, well, if, if, if that money was out on the table, it would, they would be more aggressive on the market? I don't, I don't think so.

We've been growing cover revenue, uh, two x over two x. So, uh, the point is not about spending. The point is in terms of investment, where can we invest more to see grow maybe three X or maybe four x, five x, right?

Those are the decisions that we need to take as a company. What are the right investments that we need to take? It's not about spending a particular dollar amount.

It's seeing where can we invest to have the maximum impact. And I think that is, uh, uh, where we are even investing, whether it is hiring the right kind of people in the team and, uh, building the right kind of culture of the company, building the right kind of foundations of, uh, what is the value that we are delivering to the customer. So everything needs to become super repeatable because that's when the thing starts scaling, and then anything that you put on top of it, it's only going to, uh, build and accelerate your motion.

So that's where we are as a company. Uh, uh, like I said, we are growing pretty healthy. Uh, it's all about what we can do more to grow, uh, to grow more at this at this point.

Yes. So you're a very busy lady, I would guess. Yeah.

What do you do in your, in your, in your kind of your downtime, what is your, you know, what, how do you, how do you keep from being too focused on the business and, and keep a life balance? I, uh, okay, I'll answer this question like I tell my other team members as well. Balance what balance, Um, not so much about, uh, work life balance.

And I get this question and I get questions from, uh, sometimes I'll be interviewing, uh, you know, uh, for hiring. And I'm, uh, and some of the candidates to ask that. And my answer is always this thing that in our modern world, especially, you know, post covid, uh, uh, with, with covid, with work from home, the lines have blurred just so much.

There is one, one thing, and you just need to prioritize as simple as that. If my kids need me at the school, they need me at the school as simple as that, the team understands that. Customers understand that, you know, okay, but if customers need me, my, my family also understands that.

So I think it's all about prioritizing and seeing the where you want to invest your time in and what is most valuable to you. There is nothing called a work-life balance. If someone is looking for that, okay, I'll only work from eight to five or nine to six, whatever, they're not ready for any kind of startup world.

I mean that, it just doesn't work, right? You're a founder yourself, you know, how crazy and maddening it can get. So No, I think that's one good thing that came out of Covid is people, people's idea of what work-life balance looks like is very different, right?

When you people understand you're gonna go do stuff with your kids or you're gonna, there's things you've gotta take care of and, and people get it. Absolutely. I think it's, it's, it's a one good, one of the few good things that came out of Covid is that I think that whole thing has shifted Yeah.

Of what that looks like. I completely agree with you. And I think people have become a lot more understanding of that flexibility.

Uh, and also I think the communication because of the work from home, and I never believed in work from home to be quite honest. I'm like, I need to be in office at this time. I need to be on my task and working, and maybe it comes from me being a woman.

I just need to be there and, you know, uh, or a personality, right? So multiple things. Uh, but Covid did transition, uh, my thinking in a way if work from home, because there was no other option and team adapted productivity was high, they were able to take care of the family better.

And we have, were a lot of young people with young families. And because I sacrificed a lot, I started the company when my younger son was 1-year-old. Wow.

And I still kind of, you know, feel that I missed out on those early years. Uh, uh, and that's, I don't want my team to go through that. So I want to make sure that they have a good environment because only when they are happy, their families are happy, they'll be able to deliver more for you.

As simple as that, it's even from very, uh, you know, capitalist point of view. If you think about all those things, it just works out, uh, uh, better in all shapes of format. So, yeah.

Well, I Have to point out that all three of us work with our husbands for our job. Yes. Which isn't Tracy and her husband.

That would be nice. My husband is the CTO of our company. I have something I wanna build.

I go to Steve and say, we need to build this, we need to pivot here. I've had to build management all the time. We need to drive out collecting data.

You know, I got interested in the data about four years ago. It was like, we don't collect DevOps data. We don't con we don't think about configuration data at all.

Yeah. We need to start collecting that. And of course I went to him and said, can you build this?

Thanks. But you know, the sad part about this, if we kind of go back to our earlier discussion, um, is that I really thought that remote work would bring more women back into technology. It's, there's not a better place, especially for programmers, right?

Yep. 'cause if you wanna work at two in the morning Yeah. Because that's when the house was quiet.

Exactly. And you can get a lot done. You could do that.

Yep. So, I'm sorry it didn't, but I do believe that it has a much to do with how many men are sitting in the boardrooms in at upper level management positions and they're not thinking like you are, that we need to do a little more, make a little more effort to bring women back into the, the tech workforce we had. Um, she was fascinating to listen to, and I'm sorry I don't remember her name, but she used to be, uh, she used to run Manpower and she talked to us about the fact that women took a huge hit during Covid.

Huge. Oh, she said most of them were ended up being the caregivers per kid. The, the kids and being teachers become school teachers.

Yeah, Absolutely. I mean, absolutely. And I think that's why a lot of women don't prefer work from home or remote, uh, because then your duties get doubled.

Nobody understands. And I went through the same thing and I had to set real boundaries, uh, in my home that when with my kids, uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, and I had to tell them, look, when mama is working, mama is working right. Do not come and disturb me.

If you want food, you can ask your dad as well. There is an option there. It's like, I'm only person at home.

So it's the conditioning also. Right. And for women though, I, I felt the pain early on because it was just everything was on your shoulders.

You have to do work, you have to manage kids, you have to manage. And then if there is no food, then I used to feel bad just out of guilt for no reason at all, because I felt that's my job as a mom to at least provide food for my kids. But, uh, but I just had to just let go of the guilt and set up boundaries.

I think that really helped. But I, I do agree. Actually the women suffered a lot, like, lot of pressure was, and it was just, it was very mentally challenging.

Uh, if you, if someone was not very proactive in terms of taking control of things, because Yeah. And, and in a lot of households you don't have that flexibility to be honest. Right.

So to each their own at the point of time, you need to see what's important to them. Absolutely. So ladies, as usual, Well we have one more question we have to Minutes.

Okay. Wait, one more question. We always ask those Questions.

Always ask one question here, What you know if you know, I'd love to read. Um, and I've gotten really good book recommendation from this. If you had one book that I, that we should, and the, the book that my favorite so far recommendation was The Logic of Failure.

If you haven't read it, you must read it. It's amazing, amazing book. What would be the book?

What do you have a favorite book? Fiction, nonfiction, you know, tech non-tech that, that you really love that we should read? Turn it into the Techstrong Women Book Club.

Oh, I would love to do that. Are you kidding? I think I'm forgetting the name of this book and I'm going to send, send It Out to you.

It's a book about culture, um, across the world and very specific about how people behave culturally and how that actually impacts their business. I'm, I'm just blanking out on the name of the book and I'm going to send it to you, uh, after our call, once I dig into my Kindle. Okay.

You know, I think somebody else actually may have recommended that book 'cause it was a book on the cultures and how the different cultures affect your business. Yes, Yes, yes. It, yeah.

And that book was very insightful for me and it actually helped me think through certain things as well because it was just, uh, uh, coming from a different culture and background, some things might look off for me, but it might look, it might be very normal way of them speaking or talking or putting their points across. So for me that was very, very helpful. But yeah.

Alright, Well we'll find that out and we will, um, Yes, we'll Put it in the, was it called the culture map? The culture map? Yeah, it's the culture map.

Is it The culture map? Yay. The culture map.

So everybody, your book assignment Saving, it's the culture map. And if you haven't read the Logic of Failure, get that under your belt because it is a really amazing, it, it explains so much, let's just say that. Well, thank you so much for being here.

This was, this was amazing. Um, what a great conversation. Really appreciate that you carved out time in your, we know, super busy schedule and so quickly I was, uh, your team and Ed did a great job of how making this happen.

So I really appreciate it and I know Tracy does too. It's been great. Karima, thank you.

Likewise. I enjoyed my conversation, uh, completely. And like you said, we can be friends and, and I really feel like We would be, if we were close, we would do fasts.

Spread me the lot in common. I think so too. Yeah.

Alright, well thank you everybody. Um, this was another great episode of Techstrong Women. Stay tuned on Techstrong tv.

There's a whole lot of good shows coming up and we will see you next time on Techstrong Women. Thanks and have a great day.