>> Announcer: From the heart of Silicon Valley,
it's theCUBE covering CloudNOW's 7th annual
Top Women Entrepreneurs
in Cloud Innovation Awards.
(lively music)
>> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground
at Facebook Headquarters.
We're here with the CloudNOW
Top Women Entrepreneurs
in Cloud Innovation Awards, their seventh annual.
We're here with one of the award winners,
Katherine Kostereva, the founder
and CEO of bpm'online.
Katherine, it's great to have you here.
>> It's honor to be here.
Thank you very much, Lisa.
>> Congratulations on the CloudNOW award,
but also you are no stranger to awards.
Even in 2018, you were named one
of the Top 50 SaaS CEOs for 2018.
Not just female CEOs, CEOs.
That's a pretty big honor as well.
>> Katherine: Thank you.
>> So bpm'online I want folks to understand
not just your career path,
but also that you're pretty persistent and bold.
Bpm'online is a very successful and well-known
business in Europe.
>> Katherine: Right.
>> Founded in 2002 with five people.
>> 16 years ago.
>> Bootstrapped.
>> Bootstrapped by yourself, and here you are
recently moved to the US
and you're basically kind of start-up in the US.
>> Exactly.
>> Tell us a little bit about that story.
What you grew as a female leader in Europe,
and the impetus to say we can do more
and bring the business to the United States.
>> Absolutely, would love to tell you this story.
So 16 years ago we built this company.
Bootstrapped it, no investors,
no friends and family money.
Just from zero, from scratch,
and have successfully grown the business
until we started to hear from our customers
who were large, global organizations
using our software in Europe.
We started to hear, "Hey guys,
"why we don't know you in the United States?
"Why our headquarters doesn't know your name?"
And then we started to talk to Gartner
and Forrester, and they said exactly the same.
Your technology is so amazing,
and, right now, we are included
in five Gartner Magic Quadrants
and five Forrester Waves.
And technology is amazing,
but why you are not here in the United States?
So, eventually, I moved to the United States
with some of my peers, and we started
to build our office in Boston.
It happened three years ago.
So right now we feel ourselves
like a start-up here in Boston.
While back like several years ago
in Europe, and right now actually in Europe,
this is a strong, mature company
with 500 people in the company,
working in the company in six offices.
>> And business process automation,
CRM, well-known in Europe,
tell us about why did you select Boston
and not come out here to Silicon Valley
when you decided to move out here?
>> (laughs) That's a great question,
and I have a very easy answer to this question.
As we have so many customers, partners
and actually team members in Europe,
we just wanted to find something
with a shortest time-zone
like time difference, right.
So the difference between Europe and Boston
is five to seven hours
while here's it's additional plus three hours.
So my day usually starts with Europe,
so, when I start working around 7 a.m.
in the morning, I work work with Europe,
then I work with the United States,
and then in the evening I start working
with APAC with Asia, with Australia
because we have our office in Australia as well.
So we have our customers and people working
in Australia, so this is my evening hours.
>> Oh my goodness, so here you are being
recognized tonight as a female entrepreneur.
Tell us about your inspiration,
and what has kept you persistent.
Being a female in technology is challenging,
and we all know that and, for many reasons.
Hopefully one day it won't matter,
gender, but it does.
What are some of your recommendations
for not only founding a company,
and really kind of harnessing that persistence
but also growing a culture
that supports diversity.
That understands and embraces change.
>> This is a great question.
Honestly, for me those are my customers,
and that what I would recommend all women
and female and male entrepreneurs
to talk more to their customers
because when you and your customers
have the same vision about how to develop
the company, how to develop the product,
it inspires you.
You just, you move on.
You want to develop.
You want to develop more,
and just to give you an example
both our customers and our team we believe
that organization just can't have excellent
customer relations without very holistic
business processes beneath.
So we believe that organization,
if we're talking about mid-sized
and large organization, they need
to have holistic processes first,
and then, based on this process,
they going to have great customer relations.
So this is kind of our vision and our mission,
and that's what our customers share with us
and that what has inspires me to move on and on
and develop new products for our customers.
>> Well, Katherine congratulations
on the CloudNOW Award win.
>> Thank you.
>> Thanks so much for joining us on the program,
and we hope you have a great night.
>> Thank you so much for your time.
Honor to be here.
Thank you >> Our pleasure.
We want to thank you for watching.
I'm Lisa Martin for theCUBE
at Facebook Headquarters.
We'll see you next time.
(lively, airy music)