>> Lisa: I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE.
We're on the ground at Google
for the 6th Annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards.
Very excited to be joined by award winner
and CUBE alumni Erica Windisch,
founder and CTO of Iopipe.
Welcome back to theCUBE, Erica.
>> Erica: Thank you.
Great to have you here,
and congratulations on being one of the top women in Cloud.
>> Yeah, of course.
>> Tell me, when you heard about that you
were being recognized,
what did that mean to you and where you are in your career?
>> Well, oh gosh, I mean it really meant,
it was really big for me.
I actually wasn't really expecting it.
I think I was nominated and I totally forgot.
I think somebody had mentioned to me
that they were nominating me and I had no idea about it.
I totally forgot about it.
But I mean, for me it's just so validating
because as much as I've, well one,
because I've done a lot of
interesting things in Cloud and in tech,
but I've never really gotten a lot of recognition for that.
And also, just recognition,
I mean to be quite honest,
I'm transgender.
So the fact that I was recognized
as a woman,
Top Ten Women in Cloud Computing,
was extra important and special for me.
>> Oh, that's awesome.
So tell me about your path to being where you are now.
Were you always interested in computers and technology,
or is that something that you kind of zigzagged your way to?
>> Yeah, well, it was one of these things
I guess I had some interest.
When I was a child,
we had BASIC exercises
printed in our math books
but our teachers never went over it.
So I got kind of interested
and I would read through those
like those little appendums in my math books,
and I would start teaching myself BASIC.
And I picked up a Commodore 64 and it didn't work
and I taught myself BASIC, more BASIC with those manuals.
And I just had these little tiny introductions to technology
and just self-taught myself everything.
Eventually using a high school job
to buy myself books
and just teaching myself from those books.
Managed to grab Linux on some floppy disks,
installed it and tried to figure out how to use it.
But I didn't really have lot of mentors or anything
that I could really follow.
At best there were other kids at school
who were into computers and I just wanted
to try and do what they were doing
or do better than they were doing.
>> I love that, self-taught, you knew you liked this
and you were not afraid to try, "Hey, let me teach myself."
That's really inspiring, Erica.
>> Yeah.
>> So, speaking of inspiring,
tell me about the Iopipes story.
So you're a TechSource company,
tell us a little bit about TechSource,
what that investment in IOpipe means.
>> Yeah, so,
I started,
I guess I first started IOpipe two years ago.
And I found the co-founder Adam Johnson, who joined me.
And we applied for Techstars, got in,
and that was like the first validation that we had
from outside of ourselves
and maybe one angel investor at that time.
And that was a really big deal
because it really helped accelerate us,
give us validation, allow us to make the first hire,
and they also taught us a lot
about how to refine our elevator pitch,
and how to raise money effectively.
And then we ended up raising money, of course.
So with the end of Techstars we had a lot of visibility,
and that helped us raise
two and a half million dollars seed round.
>> Wow, so a really good launching pad for you.
>> Yes, yeah. >> That's fantastic.
So tell us a little bit more about the technology,
I know that there's AWS Lambda,
we just got back from re:Invent last week,
so tell us a little bit more about exactly what you guys do.
>> Oh yeah, so what we do is we provide a service
that allows developers to get better insights
into their application, they get observability
into the application running a Lambda,
as well as debugging and profiling tools.
So you can actually get profiling data out of your Lambda
and load that into Google DevTools and get Flame Graphs
and dig in deep into which function called
which function inside of each function call,
so every Lambda invocation
you can really dig down and see what's happening.
We have things like custom metrics and alerts for that.
So you can, for instance, we built this bot.
I built it in two days.
It's a Slack bot that,
if you put an image in a Slack,
it will run it through Amazon Rekognition
and tell you, describe the objects in it, and describe it.
So, for instance, if you have visually impaired members
of your team, they can find out what was in the images
that people pasted.
I built it in only two days, and I could use our tool,
let's say to extract
how many objects were found in that image,
whether or not a specific object was found in that image,
and then we can create alerts around those,
and do searches based on those,
and get statistics out of our product
on the data that was extracted from those images.
So that was really cool, and we actually announced
that feature, the profiling feature,
at Midnight Madness at re:Invent
so it was like the opening ceremony for re:Invent.
It was just us, Andy Jassy and Shaquille O'Neal.
>> Lisa: What?
>> Yeah, and we launched our product,
and we did the demo of this Slack bot,
and it was a lot of fun.
>> Wow! So you were there last week, then?
>> I was there, we were there last week,
and we were actually the first,
myself, my co-founder
and one of our engineers were up there
and we were the first non-AWS speakers at the entire arena,
it was really amazing.
>> Wow, amazing.
Congratulations. >> Thank you.
>> So with all the cool announcements that came out last week
on Lambda, Serverless, even new features that were announced
for recognition, how does that either change the game
or maybe kind of ignite the fire under you guys
even a little bit more?
>> Well I think one of the biggest announcements
relative to us was Cloud9.
And we knew that this was going to happen,
Amazon acquired them a year ago, a year and a half ago,
but they finally launched it.
And they really doubled down on providing a much better
experience for developers of Lambda
to make it easier for developers to really build and ship
and run that code on Lambda,
which provides a much tighter experience for them
so that they can on-board into things
like IOpipe more easily.
So that was really exciting, because I think
that's really going to help with the adoption of Lambda.
And some of the other features like Alexa for work
is really interesting.
It will probably just again, a lot of Alexa apps
are built on top of Lambda,
so all of these are going to provide value to my own company
because we can tell you things like,
"Well, how are your users interacting
"with those Alexa skills?"
But I think it's just generally exciting
because there's just so many really cool,
I mean, I don't know how many things they announced
at this re:Invent that were just really amazing.
Another one I really loved was Fargate,
because I mean I came from Docker,
I used to be a maintainer of the Docker engine
and something that I was pushing for at that time
in OpenStack and other projects,
was the idea of just containers completely as a service
without the VM management side of things,
because with like ECS, you had to manage virtual machines,
and I was like, "Well that is a little, like,
"I don't want to manage virtual machines,
"I just want Amazon to give me containers."
So I was really excited that they finally launched Fargate
to offer that.
>> So the last question in our last couple of minutes here,
tell me about the culture
and your team that you lead
at IOpipe.
You were saying before, you know, when you were a kid
you were really self-taught and very inspired
by your own desire to learn,
but tell me a little bit about the people
that work for you and how you help inspire them.
>> Oh gosh, well I think first of all,
we are, right now we're nine people.
I would say about four or five of us
are under-represented minorities in tech
in one way or another.
It's really been fantastic that we've been able to have
that level of diversity and inclusion.
I think part of that is that we started very diverse.
You know, a lot of companies will say, well,
one of their problems with not having enough diversity
is that they hire within their networks,
well we hire within our networks,
but we started very diverse in the first place.
So that organic growth was very natural
and very diverse for us,
whereas that organic pairing growth
can be problematic if you don't start
in a very diverse place.
So I think that's been really great, and I think that
the fact that we have that level of diversity and inclusion
with our employees is kind of inspiring,
because a lot of workplaces just aren't like that in tech.
It's really hard to find,
and granted we're only nine right now.
I would really hope that we can keep that up
and I would like to actually make our workforce
even more diverse than it is today.
But yeah, I don't know, I just think it's fantastic
and I want what we're doing to be a role model
and an inspiration to other companies
and say, "Yes, you can do this."
And also the work people in the workforce,
yes, you can be a woman in tech,
yes, you can be trans in tech,
yes, you can be non-binary in tech.
I am binary, but we have non-binary people in staff.
And, I don't know, I hope that's inspiring to people
and also myself being a transgender founder,
I maybe know one or two other people
who are transgender founders, it's very uncommon.
And I hope that also is an inspiration for people.
>> Well I think so, speaking for myself
I find you very inspiring.
You seem to be someone that's really known
for thinking, "I'm not afraid of anything.
"I'm just going to try it.
"Starting a company, I'm going to try it."
And it sounds like you guys are very purposefully building
a culture that's very inclusive,
and so I think that, as well as your recognition
as one of the Top Women in Cloud, be proud of that, Erica.
That's awesome.
>> Thank you.
>> And you got to meet Shaquille O'Neal?
>> I got to meet Shaquille O'Neal, yeah.
>> I've got to see the photo. (laughs)
>> Yeah.
>> Well thank you so much Erica
for joining us back on theCUBE.
Congratulations on the award, and we look forward to seeing
exciting things that you do in the future.
>> Okay great, thank you.
>> I'm Lisa Martin on the ground with theCUBE at Google
for the CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards.
Thanks for watching, bye for now.