budget to this nonprofit called 1% for peace, which conveniently was going to be set up by ben and he was on the board of directors. so people were saying, we're going to be seen as criticizing a government program, unpatriotic, we're going to be seen as -- people are going to boycott the product. they are -- whatever. and ben as the entrepreneur and founder -- all you guys out there, entrepreneurs and founders, you ready for this -- he shoved it down the company's throat. [laughter] mr. greenfield: he said, we are going to do this. and we did it and nothing bad happened. nobody boycotted the company. sales were fine. even people who did not agree with the position, respected

that ben & jerry's was willing to take a stand on an issue that was not in its own financial self-interest. it was for the common good. that was the big difference. business is always taking political stance. business is a very political animal. it is always lobbying to not raise the minimum wage. business is always lobbying to not add any more environmental regulation. business is always looking out for its financial self-interest. but when business takes a stand for the common good, people stand up and take notice. this is something that is different. that really set ben & jerry's on the path to being a different kind of company. and as ben said, soon there after the cold war ended, so it was very successful.

[laughter] host: i must say, there are most days i have to say i love my job, and today is one day i especially love my job. i got to have this amazing conversation and on behalf of all of us that put this together, we have something for you. [applause] host: thank you so much. mr. greenfield: thank you. host: and look -- mr. greenfield: i have got to show my -- this is where it's at. [applause] host: where do we find ice cream? back in the hallway? head down the hallway, ben & jerry's ice cream is waiting for you. mr. greenfield: i will be hanging out, happy to chat. host: thank you so much. mr. greenfield: thank you. >> i am looking forward to the next flavor. >> it is called the 1%, 99%

vanilla -- [chatter] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] this holiday weekend on c-span, these are our featured programs. look at farewell speeches and tributes for outgoing members of congress on the white house. eastern at 12:30 p.m. with barbara mikulski and tribute and speeches for vice president joe biden. at 8 p.m., christmas at the white house join michelle obama . as she received the official white house christmas tree. two or the white house and see this year's decorations. make crafting products with children of military families and finally, the tree lighting ceremony. at hear from former house 8:40 p.m., speaker john boehner

on the trump presidency and his time in the congress and that 9:40, attend the portrait unveiling of outgoing minority leader harry reid, democrat of nevada. speakers include hillary clinton joe biden and charles schumer. on sunday, we hear from retiring member of congress, representative charles rangel of new york. at 2:10 p.m., from the shakespeare theater in capitol hill we take you to the romeo , and juliet wrongful death smock trial where supreme court associate justice samuel alito serves as trust us. -- as presiding judge. then a look at the career of mike pence and his new role as my -- as vice president. watch on c-span.org and listen on the free c-span radio app. >> >> >> we will have a live

discussion on the presidency of barack obama and we will take your phone calls and tweets and facebook questions. the panel includes a white house , a princeton university professor. and a pulitzer prize-winning author. watch in-depth live from noon until 3 p.m. eastern on sunday on book tv on c-span two. >> next, women entrepreneurs provide advice to a mostly female audience about innovation, ideas and a look at diversity in silicon valley. speakers include the founder of cloud flair. it is from the science museum in mountain view california. >> now for tonight's program, the history of computing is a history of much of an error,

-- of entrepreneurship especially in silicon valley. we are so connected that it is often hard to tell them apart. we are living through a transformational time. some have said the most transformational time in history and that transformation is being led by remarkable people. tonight, we begin to highlight the works at our center in the transformational area. the name exponential evokes the change at the heart of the story. our new center is undertaking to document and explain some of that work to you tonight and the people who are doing it. we have two great guests. we will take you through their conversations tonight with the executive director marguerite gong hancock. she has been working in the field of entrepreneurship for more than two decades. first at the stanford graduate school of business and for us at

the computer history museum. we are delighted to introduce you to her right now. join me in welcoming marguerite hancock. >> [applause] marguerite: thank you, john. welcome to the inaugural event kicking off our exponential series featuring founders and visionaries. silicon valley is home to pioneers of the possible from bill hewlett and david packard to mark zuckerberg. history and pop culture frequently shaped the transformational stories of silicon valley. but what about women? today, they are starting to actively support rising female stars. entrepreneurs often go unheralded. female founders raising serious capital jumped in 2015 but still, they are too rare.

we have two remarkable women here with us tonight. what can we learn from them who forged their own paths? these entrepreneurs are noteworthy for their innovation and impact by any measure. they also both happen to be women. let me share five numbers with you. she is a venture capitalist, stanford lecturer and entrepreneurship, and self-proclaimed recovering entrepreneur. >> [laughter] marguerite: in 1983 she cofounded software company tea maker 14 years as cofounder of ceo. she served at apple and became a venture capitalist. 820 million is the number of dollars for investments she serves as operating partner.

she is also sought after as an advisor. 37 private companies that she has served as board member at, including five currently. everything from dm gt to six public companies. she has been named to numerous top lists including top 50 women in tech by corporate board member. she is taking the education of the next generation of hundred hours. -- entrepreneurs. she received her undergraduate and mba degrees and on a personal note there are two other significant numbers she shared with me. two plus two. that is the number of kids and rescue dogs in her life. [laughter] join me in welcoming the remarkable heidi roizen. >> [applause] heidi: thank you.

marguerite: for our next featured speaker, she is a serial entrepreneur, young global leader and cofounder of a leading web performance company. educated in chemistry at mcgill university, she worked with google and toshiba. three under an oriole ventures -- three entrepreneurial ventures founded. 5 million internet properties with 12,000 added daily. eight to 10% of all internet traffic uses cloud flair, selected by wall street journal for two years in a row as most innovative technology company. others include her company in the elite club of unicorns, $1 billion plus a dollar for every private that you founded. -- that she founded. 2012 is the year she was selected as one of the top 15

women to watch. we are pleased she is an alum of our board at the history museum and she mentioned to me that 36 and five are the number of months old of her two children. join me in welcoming to the stage the amazing michel zatlyn. >> [applause] >> thank you. marguerite: i am so excited to have you here to kick off this series. you are remarkable in so many ways. i wanted to start with the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey and ask, was there a moment, a person, or an experience that catalyzed you wanting to be announced whenever? -- to be an entrepreneur? >> my father was one. i was really lucky. he wasn't successful but he was

a happy one. i remember i said i should get a job doing something, he said, why would you do that? for him the idea was that if you could create your own opportunities you could control your life. and you could contribute in ways that were meaningful to you. in ways you couldn't do as part of a company. i was very fortunate to have somebody who believed in that and also believed in me even though i was his female child. he actually used to say to my brothers, much to their dismay, she is going to be the one like me. and i was. marguerite: how that for you? -- how about for you? michel: i grew up in the middle of canada in a province called discussed -- called saskatchewan, north of north

dakota. people are not in their head to know where it is, which is quite amazing. good job on geography. i only seen 32,000 people. to 35,000.e grown i was definitely a child who participated in a lot of sports teams, did piano, my parents were big believers in getting involved. when i went to to high school my mom told me about this program called junior achievement. nobody else was doing it but i went and ended up falling in love with it. it was an exposure to entrepreneurship. we were all from different schools. we spoke with a business idea and execute on it and we ended up choosing, making -- we literally sawed wooden pieces

-- horse racing games. -- we literally sawed wooden pieces and made these horse race games and ended up selling them around the city. we ended up winning the award for this and it was amazing. i love being part of a team, i loved coming up with different ideas. i love the idea of selling it to people who wanted it. that was my first exposure to both business and entrepreneurship and i loved it. >> horse racing? michel: in saskatchewan. that's why saskatchewan was really important. we played a lot of cards and a lot of boardgames. it is very cold in the winter. marguerite: such an important part of the museum is educating the next generation and you two have both had special education experiences. can you tell a little bit about how school has impacted your career?

michel: my dad is here tonight. he is visiting from canada. my parents were very strict on -- they really believed in education and they said that you can do anything in life what you have to do well at school so they were very strict on that. so i did well at school so i could do anything i wanted which was great. i remember that, again, when i grew up a lot of people stayed within the province. it was very common to go to the university of saskatchewan. i got scholarships to go there and i remember my parents saying you can go anywhere but you cannot stay here. they worked really hard to say the world is much bigger than where we were from. and i was lucky that i had parents who pushed all of us. i had two sisters and we all moved outside of saskatchewan which means my parents travel on airplanes a lot.

i was lucky that i had parents who pushed me to do that. i got into mcgill, a great skill -- a great school in canada. it is a very good school and i many say it is the harvard of the north. it is a very good school and i remembered telling all my -- i was part of a lease sports teams -- i said i was going to mcgill and studying science. the most common reaction, it was so strange that people would leave the province. did they have a science program? for the budding entrepreneurs in the room, the idea of going against the grain, in a way i have always had to go against the grain because i've had to do things that are different from a lot of people around me. kind of in the way of being ridiculed for it. i ended up studying science. i ended up working for many years and i originally thought i

was going to go to med school but when i realized it didn't want to i fell in love with business. i have a science degree but i was working in business. a lot of the foundations.

>> my parents moved here from montreal. i had a very different background. my dad got the job in the 19th it these, and he used to say, i have been all over the world and ird picked the best place to live. you don't have to do that because we are already here. you think about it in the 50's, and that was an innovative company. i get a kick out of driving down sign isseeing the neon still there, a national landmark now. i get a kick out of that. that was a very entrepreneurial adventure backed company in its .ay in the 1950's i was super lucky, pretty driven and in some ways, driven by the fact that i did not want -- my mother was working at a minimum

wage job at the cafeteria when i was in high school and i did not want that in my life and needed today. i gotten to stamford and went there. had to pay my own way, and then it got my first job -- of course i was here in the birth of the -- the computer revolution. i got my first job in 1979, i get out of school, and my major is creative writing. let me explain something. the idea of what you do after school was not really big in my mind. it was sort of, i love to write, i would be a creative writing person, and then i had to find a job and it turned out like in the want ads the highly sought creative writing major was no one ever. [laughter]

interestingly i got this job as the editor of the company newspaper for tandem computers. before it went public. i ended up going to tandem and my job was to write about all the people at tandem who were doing interesting things. after a year of that i said i don't want to write about other people doing interesting things, i want to do the interesting things. this is not going to motivate me. i looked around and i said everybody is getting ahead, and was either an mba or an engineer and i felt like it was too late for me to be an engineer. there was a business school down the street so i applied and i joked that i was a diversity candidate which i truly was. there were not a lot at the business school. then i just had the amazing fortune to have a computer science -- they didn't call them that back then -- a programmer who was my older sibling. i started a company with him second year in business school. i was very fortunate. he said "i want to start this company with you in spite of the fact that you are getting an mba."

so much for that degree. [laughter] marguerite: apologies to those associated with the business schools of stanford or harvard. heidi: michel: michel: my michel: my brother didn't value -- michel: my brother didn't value it but i did. >> let's go forward to silicon valley. is there many opportunities that both of you had that could have stayed on the east coast or returned? why come here? >> i was at business school and we started work on what is now clout flare as a school project. i graduated in 2009 and it was a school project. i was still working at linkedin. which in june of 2009 would have been a great job. it was 300 people. it has grown tremendously. it would have been a perfectly wonderful company but we have this business idea that kept gaining a lot of steam and it was just an idea and we had a lot of conviction around it.

when we decided that we were going to keep working on it, a lot of people in boston said you should stay here or go to atlanta because there is a huge security community in atlanta. we said we had to be in the bay area. when people said, why? first, we knew if you have a business that requires mental -- requires venture capital this is the place to be. we needed a lot of capital to start our company and since then we have raised $182 million. that original assumption turned out to be true. the second reason we wanted to be here was that we run a large distributor network and we help make the internet faster and safer for a to 10% of the internet traffic today. when you work at that scale you

need people who have seen internet scale and everyone who has seen internet scale works here. we knew that the talent either already lives here or were very motivated to come to the area because it was known as mecca. that is why we ended up coming here. that is why we started our company here and if i look back, it was absolutely the right choice. the question going forward, that is a different question but back then -- in 2009 -- it was absolutely the choice for us and wonderful. [laughter] back then. >> when i walked uphill to school both ways. in the snow. >> [applause] >> 2009, oh my god. [laughter] >> i didn't want to say the year that i started. >> it is very funny. to your point on is this the

right place to start a company today, i know i am preaching to the choir but if you look at the statistics of the national venture capital association that collects information like this, last year there was $54 billion of venture capital invested in the united states. 27 billion of that went into the bay area. are we in the right place? yes. to me, in 1982 -- the funny thing is i was here but my brother was not here. [laughter] he was working for the world bank and he was a programmer and he found -- my brother is this brilliant guy and people would come to him all the time with data they wanted to crunch. he would sit there and write programs to crunch the data. he realized -- and i am sure some of you are going to say, really? but he had this brilliant idea to abstract the calculations from the data.

once he wrote the calculations -- because he was working for the world bank and if you were doing something for zimbabwe and you need to do it for some other country, it was probably going to be some of the same formulas -- so he said i'm going to abstract these and i thought i could do this on a personal computer so he wrote this thing called t maker, short for table maker. program.spreadsheet he wrote this in 1979 and so, he wanted to be the ceo and he wanted me to be the vp of everything else. [laughter] he wanted to program and then he wanted me to do everything else. i had an interesting experience because for the first couple of years we started the company out here and i ran it out here and he was in washington, d.c. doing the programming. we had a really interesting thing which i'm going to talk about because for women i hope this is an empowering story.

i told somebody that i was working with tandem and i was going to leave and start this company to start a business with my brother. she said what is your title going to be? i said i was going to be the vp and she said, "you should be the ceo." thought my brother wrote the program, cannot with idea, why should i be the ceo? -- my brother came up with the idea. why should i get to be the ceo? she said, first of all, your brother wants to code and you are the person out there selling, meeting with people, trying to get contracts and distribution. people always want to talk to the highest level person when they are buying so if you carried the title of ceo that is way more powerful. second of all, in silicon valley, let's tell the number of ceos there are and we stopped at sandy cursing. there was one or maybe two and

she said, we have no mining for -- money for marketing but if you are a woman ceo that will get attention. i thought those were interesting ideas so i would run this by my brother. i sat my brother down and said i need you to ceo -- i need to be the ceo. my brother said that is a great reason. ok. that is how i became the ceo of the company so it was really this amazing thing and it turned out those were valid reasons so i remained the ceo through 14 years. it was interesting that he agreed with me. thanks to my brother peter. for agreeing with me. [laughter] marguerite: great advice and kudos for your brother. thank you for telling the stories of the founding of clout flair and t maker. there are always highs and lows in those early years. can you pick out one high and one low for the earliest year

after founding? there is that euphoria and the roller coaster that goes down. >> that was hour-by-hour. [laughter] if you are an entrepreneur that just started or you are thinking about starting, the first couple years, the highs and lows are so compressed. it is physically demanding. you just come home at the end of the day and you are exhausted because this amazing thing happens followed by a terrible thing and about five more times during the day, six years later, we are about to turn six next week, there are still highs and lows but they get much more stretched out. if i think about some examples early on, when you are really small and no one knows who you are, -- we knew we were when we moved out here -- we really had nobody who knew who we were.

that is the beauty of the valley. you can come here without knowing anybody and it is definitely the best place to do that. we are here, working on an idea and you have to hire people. but no one knew who we were. we reached out to people on linkedin and we found somebody that had a systems engineer background. he was a sea level programmer but was employed at a web developer. we messaged him back in late 2009 and said we would meet with him. the reason he had been employed as a web developer was basically for visa reasons. he was a french developer. he ended up joining, first employee. somebody we did not know decided that they wanted to come work for us. he believed in the vision.

>> he believed you? >> he believed in it and he was so excited. he was a founding team member and the fact that some of -- somebody we didn't know wanted to come join us, was such a validating sort of thing that we gave each other high-fives for. the founder was like, awesome. we are not crazy. we found another crazy person to join us. that was definitely a very high point. i have had many low points. i will show you one so you can learn and no one really starts a business thinking they are going to be huge. you are solving a problem or doing something you care about and it turns out that if you are huge, things can happen. we registered everything to my business partner, matthew's house.

we used his address. a big mistake. ultimately, we decided to do on our filing because we didn't want to pay for a po box which really isn't very expensive. it is $400 a year. but when you are a startup with no money, that is $400 a year. some hackers used his address and his social security number online in russia and i promise you all of your numbers can be bought in russia as well. he actually ended up getting seriously hacked and the company got seriously hacked. that was really a very bad day. now, a security flaw in at&t systems and google email systems -- which we were unfortunate to discover and had to deal with it and pass them and we have since moved on -- but it is very stressful when someone hacks into our corporate email because we originally used his home address and that was a very low point.

i never -- somebody can go to my website for the fan club, which i have no affiliation with. [laughter] it is really hard to buy back that domain. thankfully they haven't done anything crazy but they could have and that would be very sad and it causes me great stress. if you are thinking about starting something, by your own personal domain name and don't use your personal address for anything. [laughter] >> good advice. michel: highs and lows, -- heidi: in 14 years of being a ceo, there are so many everyday. there is drama and trauma. to characterize them, for me, the highs were product related.

shipping a product and seeing it -- i remember walking down a street in paris where you put stuff in boxes and shipped it around the world, being in hong kong and seeing our packaging at computer retailers, that looked super exciting. we won some awards and saw user numbers go up. we would get grateful customers who would send us things. the personal computer back in the was very personal. 1980's people would name them and love them and there were not that many products. if your product ended up doing something great, they would ship them, for example, this avocado farmer sent us boxes of avocados as a thank you. for me, the highs were thinking that we had made people's lives better with this thing we invented.

i would say the lows -- there were two forms of low. one was running out of money. that sucks. running out of money and doing anything to keep that company alive -- that company is more important than anything and you would be willing to borrow from everyone and sleep on couches and go without pay. my cofounder went without pay for six months. it was just that we had to. that pressure to get to the next level and be able to fund ourselves, we always survived those things, thankfully, but those were one of the lows. the other low had to do with people. it really had to do with when things are not working and when people can't get along with each other. some of the greatest things were people. two years ago, we had the 20th anniversary of the sale of our company. at the time, we had i think 100 employees. i had a barbecue at my house and

32 people came who had been employees and so many people were pouring out. many of us are keeping a very constant touch. the idea that we formed these close relationships, like family, to me, that is really one of the highest -- one of the highs. i think because you go through those incredibly tough times, going through incredibly tough times is the strongest way to forge a relationship with somebody. those people remain some of my closest friends. marguerite: to talk about now is technology and innovation, both involved with software and web security and innovation is really the lifeblood of technology companies. i would love to hear a story that gives a window into how you

are able to have the first innovative idea or process and the next one. what has been behind being able to sustain innovation? >> we are about to turn six years old, but the group of us worked on it for 7.5 years before we started it. i am 7.5 years in so this is not an overnight success. during those years i have seen so many people leave their companies. i have watched people change jobs. and i often get asked how do you do it. this is just my personal perspective. heidi might have a different one. there are a lot of people who want to start coming in just because they want to be a founder and i think that is the worst reason to start a company. being employee 500 and facebook would have been a wonderful

choice. because look at where facebook has gone. they need smart people to make that happen. we had to scratch the surface and get people to come and execute. everybody was entrepreneurial. they feel like they want to be the founder, and being a founder of a company that does nothing or doesn't have impact really sucks. i have seen people who say it really sucks to build a company that nobody uses. you get stuck in what they call the rut. the questions you should ask yourself are are you solving a meaningful problem? and can you, in some way, get a group of people to execute that idea? more people are solving problems

that are not meaningful. or they are not doing things to attract what they need to execute. you either he or people who are big egos who can't execute or you have people working on things that actually don't matter. so what we think about all the time is are we solving a real problem? is this going to see the job quota? what are you going to do to make a dent in the universe? we are trying to rebuild the way internetworks. people laughed at us. but we are doing that and we are on our way and it is a big, audacious, almost crazy idea but it was a really big idea. it would really impact a lot. that is what we think about a lot. if you are an entrepreneur, really easy questions to ask yourself, you should be honest with yourself. if you think you can't or that

idea isn't that big, you should go do something else or go work at one of these companies that have big ideas because you will learn a lot and made a lot of amazing people and that will be another opportunity. marguerite: great advice, looking at that double yes. heidi: i think it is a next and owns perspective. solve a problem. most of the great entrepreneurs that i have had the pleasure to work with have been people who recognize a problem and go out to solve it. one of the reasons our company survive for 14 years is because obviously we started as a spreadsheet company so we wouldn't have survived if that was all we did but we went from spreadsheets in an early prerelease version of the mac, and we ended up being the fifth product to ship for the macintosh. when the mac was in the future anymore the future with the internet, so we started working on ideas for what we could do

with the internet. we came up with this idea for remote ordering and printing and ultimately sold the company. we went through many iterations. we were looking for problems to solve. we started with a problem that my brother was solving over and over again for customers but we also had the advantage of being here. the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed. one of the advantages was being in the valley so we got to see the distribution and see things like prerelease versions of things. we got to understand and live in the world where people are walking around with ever more powerful devices and internet conductivity. except if you live in would five, that always confuses me. cell coverage and internet sex there. coverage sucks there.

we really get to understand what is coming down the line. i think the creativity is what problems can we solve knowing where this technology is going to be? and being able to time it against that? one difference that i will beg to differ with is, you know, i actually worked for a firm whose motto was "think big." one of the things about venture capital is venture capital is a funding mechanism to fund big things. if you want to learn all about that, there is a book by jason mendelson called venture deals. it is a great book and for anyone who wants to raise venture, by that book and read it. i couldn't cover it all. anyway, venture is not for everyone. the vast majority of companies should not be venture backed companies because they are not intending to have multi-hundred million dollar outcomes in the ipo. that said, there are

tremendously fantastic numbers of companies that are solving what some people might say is a small problem. i can't tell you how many people go out and say "i have a problem, i am going to create an app for my problem, other people might use it too." it might be a niche problem but if you are an entrepreneur and you do that, and you write an app and you can sell 250,000 of those apps a year and charge for it, you are going to have an amazing life. if you raised a million dollars to do that your life is going to suck. i don't think that just because your idea isn't the biggest dent in the universe that it makes it a bad idea. are you passionate about it? is it worthy of your time? is it another entrepreneur --

another under an order that i just adore, mike maples, says "is it an important enough thing that it is worthy of all your time to do it." if it is not worthy of all your time don't do it but it might be worthy of all your time even if it isn't going to make venture capitalists a bunch of money. it might solve problems for an important set of people that you care about including maybe your own problems. that is worthy. but understand what it is and why you are doing it and therefore, how big is the market opportunity? how much money can you put in? are you suitable for venture investing? don't have unrealistic expectations. if it is a venture backed double company, i feel like in silicon valley it is almost a disease. the first thing you do is print the t-shirts and get the logo

and then good to sandhill because god forbid you can start a company with venture capitalists. my brother and i bootstrapped our company before we took in venture and we were profitable at a $3 million run rate. now yes, it took us years to get there. ancient times. sometimes i would say to an entrepreneur, let's imagine venture didn't exist. how would you get this company going? that is how most of the world starts companies. i sound like the anti-venture capitalist but it really is. [laughter] >> my favorite kind of funding is customer funding. here is why. it is non-diluted. you can sell stuff to customers and still own 100% of your company. it is validating. product market fit. we talked about trying to find product market fit.

the best way is make a product and convince someone to pay you for it. that is product market fit. for me, this idea of finding customers willing to work with you and pay for the product is the purest form of venture financing and i strongly encourage everyone to think about that as your first way to make money, not your last way to make money. marguerite: thought-provoking. good. innovation is not for the faint of heart and we often celebrate success but maybe don't often enough talk about failures. we both talked a little bit about lows but could you give us an example of a time when things didn't go as planned and where if you had stopped at that moment, it would have been a failure. how did you recover? either with t maker or being an advisor for other companies.

hi d: in venture, not all businesses succeed. surprise. actually, the statistics used to be that more than half of venture would never return the capital invested. the outliers make up for the difference. which is our people keep investing in venture. unfortunately, that means that on average half of the other maneuvers who get venture capital will not have a successful outcome. i think that for me, a lot of it is understanding the risks of the game. knowing that you have to work your ass off and it is not easy and you will be 24/7 on it. for people who have families and spouses and all that, i didn't have any of those until way late in my entrepreneurial career. it is hard to find the balance. i don't know how people do that.

it is hard to do. it doesn't mean you can do it but it is hard to do. i think that you have to have tenacity. since we have a lot of women in the audience i would generally say that there is subtle gender bias. you will have more doors slammed in your face. it is honest truth and you are not going to change who you are and i believe that being a woman can be an advantage in many situations but if somebody slams slams the door in your face, you have to be willing to wipe the blood off your nose and go knock on the next door. people who don't have that drive to not fail and not take it personally will just be beaten into submission. for me, that tenacity -- which is my word, i love the word tenacity because i really believe that those days are really dark -- you have to get up the next day and say "i am going to make it through."

my life as a venture capitalist is when things don't always work out, the thing that i think is really important to do is recognize reality. and redefine what success is in that reality. for example, there are a lot of companies in silicon valley -- here's my joke. i will meet an entrepreneur and say the great news is you built that $10 million company. the bad news is you blew through 50 million doing it. [laughter] there are those, trust me, they are out there. the reality is the vps are unhappy because they are not making money on that deal and the ceo is coming into work every day and they know they have this overhang that they are not going to be able to overcome but there is still money in the bank and customers are buying the products so let's pretend that is not a problem until the money runs out. the good news is if you are

profitable, you can live forever. if you are not the money will run out eventually and it will be bad. one of the things i've tried to do in situations like this is redefine what success looks like. maybe we don't get all her money back but eventually we get half our money back. let's think about employees and customers and stakeholders and try to figure out if there is a wind we can affect even if it isn't the wind we would all hope it would be. some people are believed to be talking about that. sometimes there isn't a win. sometimes it just can't happen for whatever reason. the structures are in place. it crushes under the weight of its own structure. every situation is different but fundamentally, i would advise all of you at the end of the day, structure and money and all that aside, we are all people

and we are all -- this sounds like a hallmark card -- but we all come in with our goals and aspirations. if you can just peel the onion in a problem situation and get to the root of it, i find very often you can find a solution. you have to give up your fantasy that you are going to be that person on the forbes list or something. unfortunately, that is hard fantasy for people to give up. >> thank you. >> failure. the thing that everybody loves to talk about. >> we run this large network and our job is to make internet faster and safer around the world. a lot of customers and internet properties are there for that.

and back in 2012, one of our customers had a large attack and our network engineer went to fix the attack, and there was a bug in our vendor software. it took our whole network off-line which meant for 45 minutes at 2:00 in the morning on a saturday night from 2:15 to 3:00 a.m., all of our customers were off-line, which is the exact opposite. they were not accessible. that was a really not fun time. very stressful. the network engineer immediately realized something was wrong. and called for help. [applause] [laughter] [laughter] -- [laughter] so what happened? the network engineer realized something was wrong and called for help through arbitration .ervice, and team jumped on

impurities --nd the support team got a flood of inquiries. twitter blew up. again, a million websites is a lot of sites. people who live close to the office, a call in to answer the phones. one person said i was on the ski trip and i was on minded support from the database in the morning until six or clock a.m. awake to demand rallied. 545rayer minutes later, -- minutes later, around four hours later, i was not sure what we were doing but it would never happen again. it was a stressful situation. is how much do you share?

we were very transparent. we showed them the exact rule we had pushed to the router. it was a jenniffer software -- a juniper software that had a bug in it. we were putting in safeguards to keep it from happening again and we refunded a lot of are paying customers and really did the right thing. and yes, we definitely lost customers but we gained more because of the way we handled it. so this is one of those things where that is just one of many examples. where you are a leader, you are making these decisions. at the end of the day your customers and employees are people. we didn't throw anyone under the bus. they were trying to do the right thing and asked for help right

away. it was a whole team effort. make sure it doesn't happen again. if you are getting better, that is a good spot. that is how we think about it here. marguerite: great story. thank you. i would like to read a quote from president obama who spot at the global entrepreneurship summit. he said saudia business is not easy. meetave to access capital, the right people, have mentors and i have a difficult -- and that can be difficult for women and young people and minorities. and others who have not always have access to the same networks and opportunities. you deserve the same chance to succeed as everyone else. make sure that everyone has a fair shot to reach their potential. you can't leave more than half the team on the bench. reactions? comments? heidi: that is a pretty true statement. [laughter]

michel: better might be of warren buffett who says it is silly to ignore women because you give up half of the brain trust. then he says, actually, it is more than half of the brain trust. i do think -- i think things are changing. i think rooms like this are helping that happen and evidence that it is happening. we are seeing more and more female entrepreneurs. we have more women on ventures side. i think where evening that. it isn't just women. it is women and people of color and diversity at every level. i fundamentally believe in diversity. it creates stronger my allergies. it creates stronger system. i'm a big believer in it. silicon valley has been a machine that kicks out certain types of companies enough maneuvers and they tend to come from, as i call it, from central casting.

i have my undergrad from m.i.t. and then i worked at google as an engineer and then got my mba on stanford or harvard, there are five or so that you go to, and then you come back and you go become a product manager and you start your company. we need to break that mold. part of that is -- i think it is one of the things that has been very powerful about the valley -- a lot of the entrepreneurship was building the infrastructure. it was building the guts on which all of these great consumer facing apps get to live. most people who get on a website every day don't know that you exist. and nor do you want them to. they only know when the ronco gets pushed and they can't get on their gaming site or shopping site or whatever it is. so i think one of the amazing things -- i think that there is a reason why technology and entrepreneurship was dominated by a particular class of a

certain kind of education and jobs trajectory. if you look at it today, that is because of, actually, things like what you built. there are many entrepreneurs who don't have to know how the technology works in order to start really interesting companies that do really interesting things. because they can rely on aws and they can rely on various levels of abstraction, which takes the technology farther and farther away from the application usage. you have people with brilliant ideas. i had people say "i don't know how to build a car to use a car." i can sit in one. even if i don't have a drivers license.

i think about entrepreneurship today and we are seeing people say "i can use this technology to solve a problem but i don't have to be the technologist." that is why we are seeing more diversity because nobody has a lock on great problems to solve. i think we all can think of great problems we need to solve. and so, i do see the tide shifting. it is going to take a while but i definitely see a shift. marguerite: thank you for being part of that tonight. michelle? -- michel? michel: if i can do it, so can you. [laughter]

for a long time, i really did not want to participate in the women in technology conversation because i didn't want to get put into a box of, oh, you are a woman founder. i really wouldn't acknowledge it. i wouldn't do anything about it. this is a big topic back in 2012. i really didn't want to be part of the conversation. my personal opinion has changed a little bit. having a voice and having an opinion, i do think the next generation of women coming up, i want them to see lots of different paths for careers. i think technology is a great industry if you are at all interested. you get paid very well, you get to work with smart people and you get to work on problems that impact people around the world. that is pretty awesome.

i want the next generation of boys and girls, to say this is great, i want to be part of this. diversity is critically important to making it work what it is not just technology. finance, there are lots of different industries that need it. if you are a woman you should stay in the workforce and take the path you want to do and if you are a man you should make sure that you are encouraging women around you to take chances because part of the reason why i get to where i am is because i have a business partner who thinks of me as michel and couldn't be happier about who he picked. the fact that he believes in me so much means i can do a good job at work. we raise a lot of venture capitalists and our investors -- our investors think i'm a huge asset to the company and now because you have done so well, they think, i need to find

more michel's in some of my other companies. i am just one data point. it is just another point of, you can also do this, but it is lots of different sorts of things. i absolutely think that diversity is keys to be a strong founding team. you get a better outcome as long as you share a lot of prep and sustained vision. denver city -- diversity is very powerful. marguerite: time has gone quickly but i want to close with asking you for advice. we have a lot of people who are mentors to entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs and i would ask each of you to choose a word or a couple of words for advice. let's see what you have. >> heidi, you have already -- tell us your word and give us a short explanation why.

heidi: tenacity. we wrote an event here many months ago. i really do believe, when people say to me, if there is a word that you can apply to entrepreneurs, what is that word? the thing i love about this word -- anybody can develop this. i don't think you are actually necessarily born with tenacity. i do believe that anybody can actually teach themselves to have tenacity. for me, it means what i said earlier. that idea that somebody tells you you are a dumbass or doesn't want to fund you, i have had so many meetings with venture capitalists. part of the reason was nobody gave money. [laughter] it was a blessing in disguise because if they had given us a money they would have fired me in the first year for being inexperienced. but i got to learn, for six years, and then they actually liked me. you have to learn to keep

getting back up and getting back up again, and if you do that, one of those times, somebody actually won't keep pushing you down. that is the word. marguerite: good word. are you ready for the reveal? michel: mine is "sweat the details." often, when you are building a company, use things that are not scalable up front so they can be scalable tomorrow. trying to get to the first hundred customers was so hard. i had a board and i would color it in everyday. if we get a hundred people i would take everyone to vegas. there were five of us. [laughter] for people i did skype calls every time somebody signed up, what did they learn? how did they -- what did they like about it -- today we are not doing skype calls all the

time. early on we did it for a long time. surveys are not the same as physically talking to somebody. today, our marketing team was trying to look at it and i look at a list of customers. 12,000 of them is not many. you can spot the patterns. you have to sweat the details and do unscalable things. you do things that are unprofitable and make them profitable. cannot write programs for abstract them if to get to the details. for a long time, i did customer support and i don't anymore, but i do chime into the support channel because it is like you there in the details. i think that is what i love most about my job, sweat the details.

it matters. marguerite: thank you. let's get the audience into the conversation. a terrific group of question. being apeople ask about female entrepreneur. what specific areas do think the female entrepreneur has been an advantage or disadvantage and how do women overcome those disadvantages together? michel: advantages? different thanok other people on our management team. we have a couple of women, and i think we bring in different point of views, approach problems differently, more collaborative. all of these generalizations and i think when they are meeting, they end up better when i'm around them when i am not acause maybe it is facilitator or whatnot. i play up the strengths and i love doing the sorts of things. early on, people said silly things to me like women don't

leave and infrastructure. good.that did not feel so it makes you want to hide behind a rock and threw a rock at them. [laughter] i [indiscernible] quote that great says -- i don't walk around all day thinking i am a woman, girls otherwise, i would never get my job done. that is exactly right. i am running a business of an operator. i think it is good to make sure you're surrounded by good people. when people don't treat me well, if i am a position to stand up for myself, i do. sometimes, i just been less time with that person. focus on winning and people you want to spend time with because it is much healthier and way more fun than talking about all the things i wish were different. that is kind of how i think about it. there are great people out there and find them.

eidi: i would bleed on that and underscore it. in my life, i found the easiest thing to do was be myself because it is easier to remember, right? [laughter] if you go in and try to be someone else, the amount of cycles be spent doing that, it is really hard. that is what i can to learn. i think it is a peanut thing. women in particular want to be liked. if you spend all day trying to make everyone like you coming won't be very effective. in leadership roles, i would like people to like me, but more than that, to respect me for being thoughtful, honest and making good decisions, the decisive and moving on with those decisions. that doesn't always make you popular, but i believe it does make you respected. that for me, especially in the early days, i would go to a meeting with 100 people in the room and out be the only woman.

got really used to it because i was the only woman lots of times. i do not think of myself as being different. aat joke about if you look at sea of people and do it only different, you just think you are the same, which is on my dog thinks she is a human. [laughter] here, i cane around sit on the sofa, too. i do believe on the one hand, i did not think of myself as being different. on the other hand, the game make some advantages. i was different. i went to stanford business school in the early computer revolution days. steve jobs, bill gates would speak to our class. be 20 and, there would students asking a question and i was the only woman. i always got to ask my question. [laughter] that was good. also in the early days, hiring because i was gender blind, because i was one of those women

, we were 60% female at one point in my company career. we were probably the only tech company that was 60% company -- 60% women. such a funny story, we were at demosld and we were doing and at some point, two guys were standing there and one said, i am just too because this is the booth with all the babes or women and we immediately bristled. then we looked around and they were nine of us in the booth and we were all women. oh, my god, we do not realize we were entirely female at that moment. they thought we had done it as a ploy, not that we were the women who worked for the company. [laughter] i do think you can use it to your advantage, but trust your gut. if you are in an environment where you think you're not being supported, you probably are not.

if you feel that way, it is probably true. you need to find environments are you are supported. luckily, there are lots of those today. say cultures are hard to change and there are certain cultures that are not evolved in this way. if i were a woman today and went to work for one of those cultures and fell to come i would find another culture because i think there are other cultures that realize it and empower women. those companies are just going to do better. if you are already the company that understands that, you will do better anyway, so if you are voting with your precious time to go work somewhere, go work somewhere that has figured it out because there will be more success. marguerite: asked question, what is the most exciting thing that you are working on right now? heidi: [laughter] well, gosh.

when you work with about one dozen companies come you cannot pick one to be a favorite. that is like naming your favorite child. and your daughter is here. my daughter is here. joke.e a long-running i have two children. i will not go into that. answer i am not going to with a specific company. i will answer with what i love, what i am most excited about about my work. ae clipping about being venture capitalist, you don't have to have any good ideas. just have to know it when you see it. and you have to get people with really good ideas come want to come to talk to you about them. both the beauty -- you saw that number, we have two funds were we have $800 million -- isn't that phenomenal? guess what? on sand hill road, that is like table stakes.

the problem is lots of people have the kind of money in silicon valley. money is the commodity. would we have to do is get entrepreneurs want to come to us because of our reputation as and thoughtful people entrepreneur really friendly, company builders and people willing to be helpful. what i love is that the stuff i really love to do. i have a partnership where we left to do that. tammy, the most exciting thing is every day i get to meet with people who are genuinely trying to change the world. sometimes they get to work with those awesome people, some who are in the room tonight. that just makes you want to get up early every day. t.g.i.m. michel: thank goodness it is monday. heidi: i am saying that to a person who works all weekend. -- el: i love what i do, so

[laughter] marguerite: how about you? saidl: earlier, marguerite 18% uses our company, the reason it is important is to get to patch the internet in real time. things that you see hard, we make easy. whole threads is if i give you lots of examples, let's say there is a new exploit that comes out. i've been up your member back when [indiscernible] we can patch that in real time for customers and then they can go to update their servers. we basically act like a shield in the interim. we do this all the time. some of the things we have been working on this week is traffic that goes over encryption traffic. huge trend. only .5 percent went over it.

that is nothing, half a percent. we helped to make that easier and less expensive. they used to be hard and expensive. you make it simpler and cheaper. today, not the only reason, but 10% of internet goes over encrypted traffic. if you remember back to the apple, fbi, iphone involvement encryption -- it is a hot topic. more and more traffic will go over encryption. there are a lot of very smart people, people part of the , where there is a lot of the underlying math and science that makes sure all of the standards behind making sure encryption works are up this stats. there is a new standard and it doesn't matter if you know what it is or not, but it is the next standard. we have made that available to all customers and we are the first from the market to do

that. now every single customer, if you [indiscernible] secure,over the most to ensure that you can be high confidence around this. it is pretty amazing that we are the first to market it. are a startup in san francisco that must have not heard up and we were able to go to market to make it successful. we are patching this in real-time. that is that,o and we have other things coming over the next couple of weeks, but these examples of we are pushing your standards, things you see so hard and we make it so simple and we are patching it in real-time. those of the things i'm most excited about. marguerite: congratulations. next question about talent. we start with you, michel. what to look for in qualities when you hire and when you invest? maybe due to. -- do tow.

ch -- do two. michel: we are changing all the time, so people who read the blog and call and say what are you working on? i love that. people are very curious. the second, i would say start, middle and end. people who get things done. getting something to 80%, to 98% and is useless in a high-growth company. you have to get over the finish line. that is a skill. not everyone can do it. you have this starter project and how long did it take you? some people love the environment and some people don't. it is start, middle and end. just momentum. those of the two qualities we look for. marguerite: fantastic. eidi: i wish there was a

perfect answer for qualities. it doesn't work that way. everyone is different, but i entrepreneurs wengs that gravitate toward and the ones that have been successful is this voracious willingness to learn, curiosity. they listen to your comments and they come back the next day with more questions and they will challenge you if they do not agree, but they will be thoughtful about it. people who are constantly in learning mode. one thing about entrepreneurship is very often you are making something out of nothing and making something new, that means there is not a playbook for what you are doing so you have to be a voracious learner. the other thing is in some cases it is awesome to have subject matter experts. in some fields -- most things are built on the shoulders of the things that came before them. the kind of entrepreneur who

both has this curiosity and is willing to try and start a company and also has deep domain expertise in the field they are trying to disrupt, it is really powerful and what is interesting is it is not always that way. i say this and right away i can think of 100 examples where that is not true. that is why entrepreneurship is a team sport. there is no -- with rare exception, there is no single entrepreneur. you are always looking at at least two or three people. team dynamic is one of the most important things and team risk is one of the most important problems. for us it is not just looking at the individual, but when you are -- entrepreneurs in a meeting and you are pitching us, we are watching the dynamic. we are watching if you are finishing each other's sentences or talking over each other. we are watching how the

interplay goes and how the dynamic goes. one of the reasons why entry capitalists meet with people over a period of time, i remember when i was an entrepreneur i would be like here is my plan, give me the check. you view venture capitalists as the ogre on the bridge and a pile of money is on the other side of the bridge and if you say the secret word. from a venture capitalist perspective, we are thinking, can i spend the next 7-10 years of my life with you. by the way, i am not driving the bus, you will be driving and i am sitting in the back of the bus. i have the trust you because i am a minority owner, you are the founder, the ceo. that is what we are thinking and so a lot of times the reason we want to have multiple meetings is we are trying to figure out can i work with you for many years and i find that entrepreneurs that come in -- it is very self-serving. entrepreneurs that come in also understanding that it is going

to be a pressure filled multiyear relationship, that is what it is about, it is not just about saying the secret word to get the money. [laughter] >> next question. can you each talk a bit about how you built your networks and how allies aid you in your journey. what about advice for new art doors -- entrepreneurs who have not established? how do you start? >> i came here with no network. it is possible. there is a couple things. early on, it is so much easier to get information than it used to be. following people on twitter, all these folks are blogging about their experience. you can feel like you know people without ever meeting them and in a way it is, i consumed all of that. a big part of my job, every night every day i am reading

tech news, tech blogs, tech everything because that is part of my job. there are people who have gone out and tried and made mistakes and are out blogging about it. it is my job to be consuming this. you can basically build a network without meeting anybody. as you start to make progress, i think people are very open and willing to introduce you to people in the valley. even if you do not live here, come out for a week and you have one meeting. you will meet people at the coffee shop, you will run into somebody at the caltrans. even just being physically here, as long as you can communicate, you will start to meet people and it is up to you to nurture that. whether you follow up with those people or add them on linkedin. just say i was thinking about you do you want to do this or th?