panel discussion on diversity in the tech industry. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the panel discussion that we're doing as a podcast for the Tech Trailblazers this evening. I'm delighted to welcome Mayor Sampat, who is the founder of CEO of Content Stack and also our joint female Tech Trailblazers of the year.
Hi, Rose. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. And Dr.
Jackie Taylor, who is the CEO of Founder of Blind Blimeway, which is a Tech Trailblazers alumni and Jackie is now one of our judges. So hi, Jackie. Hi, Rose, great to be here. Brilliant.
And last but fine, it means least, Joey Bagley, who is the CEO for the M were and also one of the tech trailblazers, Judge Kajo. So the topic that we're going to be looking at this evening on the discussion is around diversity in the tech industry. And that includes sort of obviously the wider conversation, so diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. Over the last many years, there are lots of headlines around the need for more women in technology and more diverse representation and of course, inclusion in the tech industry.
I think we have a long way. We're now seeing 20 of the top 100 influences in Silicon Valley and the bigger tech space that 20 representing, which is leaps and bounds beyond where we were five years ago, 10 years ago. And in the wider industry, I was just saying that you know, the window has also announced that it's called has reached gender equality. That's the question is, you know, the wider community is looking at these things.
So we'll bring a variety of viewpoints here and everybody's own experiences and position on them. So now as a winner of the female tech trial blazer of the year, congratulations again. Thank you. Could you just give us a little overview of who you are and your background?
Sure, absolutely. So I am a entrepreneur first and also an investor in small businesses. And I come from it for someone who's been running tech companies for most of my career. I come from an interesting background, which is probably why I find diversity such an important topic.
But I'm obviously female, but also a non technical CEO. I don't have an engineering background, but I've set all of my career in tech and most recently 20 years in Silicon Valley. So I typically come from an interesting vantage point in beating the odds, which is why diversity, tech, more importantly, quality and leveling the flight field is so important to me. My current role is CEO at Content Stack, which is a modern technology stack for managing digital content.
And we essentially work with a lot of large brands to help them do all the things that they wish they could do in a more modern way on the technology side. Brilliant. Thank you. Welcome.
And if you give us a little right friend on the set. Yes, delighted to be here and congratulations, Neha and on the award. That's fantastic. And flying by and we use a tech trial blazer alumni, we came second, which I was thrilled with because it's like we were on our journey.
And I'm now one of the top 10 global internet things innovators and two of those people on that list are female. So I think that where we've been in the digital world and been struggling with all of this, not truly in my world, I'm sure we'll talk about that rose. But I am an engineer, I'm an aerospace engineer, my co-founder is an electrical engineer. And the predominance in our company is an engineering background.
But because we fly by and really provides a part of the counterterrorism tech stack for Europe, so we're in that space. But essentially for us, our agenda is an inclusion one after teaming up with Tim Bowners Lee in 2009. We've actually built our tech stack for Jamfish and Zed, who are between ages of 27 and 17 today. And we pivoted in January 2019 to serve Jan Alpha who are 16 to 6 today.
Well, thank you Jackie. And so welcome. Could you give us a little background on yourself? Yeah, so I work for the M.A.
A large multinational global software company. I think most people have heard of us about 30,000 employees globally. We're Silicon Valley, we're Silicon Valley started, Silicon Valley headquarters still Stanford sort of born and bred for a large number of us. And I'm not going to do engineering degree, but then what does that matter?
I'm a techy engineer. When it comes to diversity, I suppose I'm the typical white, middle aged privileged male, I think is the best way to put that. But the interesting thing for me, and we'll talk about that a bit later on is the journey that I've been on at the M.A. The journey that all of us have been on at the M.A.
In understanding diversity and inclusion specifically, and the only the power of that and how to unleash that. So yeah, I'm happy to talk a lot more about that on this on this focus. Brilliant. That's fantastic.
Thank you, Joan. Welcome. So what does diversity and inclusion mean to you? Jackie, let's start with you first of all, and what are you seeing in the industry at the moment?
So for me, as I say, we've been focused on gen Z and building our tech to unleash their talents. And often, they're, they're approached to the world certainly to the online world is radically different. They're our first generation of web entrepreneurs that essentially can nothing for our, our services and our institutions and our way of doing things because they view most of them is broken. And they take quite a disruptive impact or view of our world.
And my role has been to understand how we can use technology to enable that talent as opposed to fight against it. Many of the 27,000 CXOs who I represent, I'm an industry analyst, pretty much buying that, Gen Z won't work for them. Or certainly they did when we started working together in 2016. And we've been understanding that conundrum as to not everybody's going to be an entrepreneur.
And some people can can unleash their talents and work best in a corporate environment, providing that corporate environment isn't hostile to them. So for me, it's actually about the wider talent pool than just tech, it's everything that needs to surround it as a ecosystem. I personally am visually disabled. I don't normally talk about that.
But I literally look at all the learning differences in the spectrum of 50 that we support to say, wherever you start, I think, whatever learning difference you have, there is a place for you to protect to enable that to bring your talent to the world. So for me inclusion is about that broader spectrum and gender whilst it figures, it's not a key piece for me because I think that the gender presentations are sort of mobile or always changing. And therefore, it but it's about how you learn and how tech enables the world to benefit or society to benefit from what you can do. Oh, thank you, Jackie.
And how about you, now, how are you seeing things? I mean, you're on the other side of the pond from the other three of us. What's the landscape in the tech industry where you are at the moment? And what are you seeing?
And what it means to you personally? You talk about what it means to you personally already a little bit. What's the landscape like? No, I really love how Jackie put it.
And just understanding where talent might live and how you learn and how tech might enable you. And that's something that we care about a lot of content stack and what I personally care about. And the way I've built my companies and my team is really to look for tech in places that you might not expect it. A good example of that is actually our our our idea office, which is engineering team based out of India is in a location that's pre remote compared to where most people have set up Indian operations.
And we've done this in a community that's in the outskirts of Mumbai in a town called Gita. And what's beautiful about it is that there's really not a lot of other employers there in the tech space. And what we find is that there's a lot of talent there's a lot of people it is India and it is Mumbai. But the community colleges are cultivating teams of people that are coming out of colleges, young age willing to work hard, but maybe not having access to the opportunities that they can prevail in.
And so we look for talent in places like that and help cultivate that talent. And we end up finding some of the most brilliant engineers in the world as a result of that. So I you know, I have a strong belief that talent exists everywhere. And finding opportunities and leveling the playing field for that talent to come to fruition and to really have a place that they can do the best work of their career and feel significant in how they contribute and make an impact.
That's really what makes me really excited. And what we're seeing in the US is that there's sort of this diversity of location that started to happen where everything used to be central around Silicon Valley. And there still is of course a lot of activity in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. But we're starting to see that remote distributed workforce is enabling that diversity of thought.
And I'm actually sitting in Austin, Texas today where I'm sitting at my team, kind of our second hub in the US. And I find that I have people on the team in Austin that are musicians on the side or actors or singers. And that in and of itself brings a different way of thinking to the company and to the way that we make decisions because you're kind of unleashing this inner creativity and diversity of experience and backgrounds that makes people think differently and respect each other differently and care about customers differently. And so I feel like things are changing radically and valuing diversity and valuing diversity of experience and location is actually helping us to do that our company.
Right. Well, actually one of my questions later on, so we may return to that. But Joe, from your perspective, what are you seeing within a large corporation? But obviously you do touch upon the startup world because that's part of your vnet as a CTO as well.
So what do you see? I'd like to talk touch on diversity and inclusion as the definitions to start with. And it's been really important to us on our journey as a company and as leaders. The best definition I ever heard of diversity was one of the leaders who's graduated as diversity is inviting everyone to party.
But inclusion is making everyone feel like they can get on a dance floor. And I think that was probably the sort of pivotal moment for a lot of us a few years ago, because you're all kind of like, yeah, we've been hiring lots of others. People, you know, we've been looking at the diversity targets and such, etc. But it was like, yeah, but to Jackie's point, others, they stay once they get here, they feel like they can actually contribute to the value they feel like they can be themselves and actually give what they were hired for.
So for us, the focus has been very much about developing and expanding the culture that we already had of inclusion. You know, we've run, there's almost a motto at the end, Michael, dare to be, which is all about daring to be yourself. And people encouraged to dare to be themselves and to do what they want to do and be what they want to bring their whole self to work. So for me, you know, diversity inclusion is defined by people feeling that they can they think they are included.
And diversity covers everything. You know, I think we cover that very well. And a lot of people tend to focus on gender or race, but actually, for me, diversity talks about people who may become from different backgrounds, you know, people who don't have a degree. You know, why do we have to graduate programs?
Why can't we just have intelligent and people programming have different skills? You know, who we excluding by having nine to five jobs? Are there a whole second phase of, you know, young, returning to work mothers that we're missing out on? All these categories, you know, I'm, for example, I'm deaf, I'm wearing a hearing aid right now, I'm a left ear, you know, all these different categories, how do we enable everyone to be themselves?
And so actually, at the end, we started a whole bunch of of things, but the biggest thing we've had is these things called paraffed different communities or pods. And so there's pods all around the world where it's, you know, there's a black at the end, where there's Latinos, there's pride, there's women at the end, where there's veterans at the end, where and so on and so forth. But people have differing backgrounds can get together for communal support, but also to raise awareness in others that these kinds of people exist. And you can join a pod if you don't fit into that pod, if that makes sense, it's to learn more.
So I'm a few different pods that obviously I'm not in the category for, but it's a it's a good way to learn and understand. So, you know, that was really important, you ally that with, you know, unconscious bias, which is what a lot of people talk about unconscious bias isn't just about genders, but everything 60% of our managers globally have been through unconscious bias courses and we have a whole bunch of what we call change agents, you know, there's several hundred of them over five of them, I think, those globally. So you know, it's about driving a culture of inclusion, driving a culture of change. And you know, I mentioned at the beginning, you know, privilege, white middle age male, you know, fairly well off good background, etc.
But the best and the most important thing I found going through all of this was another common in one of the sessions is if you look at most of a lot of the training that goes on in terms of diversity or unconscious bias, it tends to be shaming in some way, that's got a bunch of men in the room and shame them about how they don't understand women or let's get a bunch of white people in the room and shame them about how they treat black people. That doesn't tend to work. And I think what we're finding out is people saying, okay, privilege is fine, we should actually understand and they're not celebrate privilege, but privilege is okay, as long as you use it for the betterment of others. So it's, you know, yes, I have privilege as long as I recognize I have that privilege over others and make sure that others can benefit from that, then that's fine.
So, you know, the whole space is it's massively important to me, it's massively important to us at VMware. And you know, I'm quite proud that my colleague Duncan last night, Duncan Greenwood last night at the Everyone You Care Award, see won the Male Agent of Change Awards, and he actually runs diversity inclusion at VMware and VMware and and as a member of the inclusion council. So, you know, it's big for us. And it's not just about PR and all those kind of things or corporate social responsibility, we have had so many benefits because of it.
And I've made a lot of interesting friends and I'll give you the perfect example I was out into by recently at a conference and there are a bunch of graduates there, well, Manning the stand and actually, you know, there was all the boring old people and the boring old people wanted to go for dinner and I said, I'm going to go for dinner with the graduates and we had the most amazing time of the cheesecake factory and I learned a lot that I wouldn't have learned if I'd gone to dinner with all the boring old men that I would have done to dinner with. So that kind of activity is what's really changed us and changed VMware I think. Great. Congratulations to Duncan.
It's great. And this is, this is interesting is one of the things that I triggered me when I was at RSA last week was I went to a great conversation, great sort of inspirational talk done by little Bobby who's been at the Department of Homeland Defense and involved with a very high level cybersecurity stuff from the beginning and a number of other ladies who are also very inspirational come from a diverse number of backgrounds looking at how they can involve this cybersecurity space. But in your audience, it wasn't 90% if not more ladies. So are we thinking to acquire a little bit too much in a way you touched upon that is there a danger we can almost swim too far that that we are inadvertently in some way making people feel bad about stuff?
And how can we avoid doing that? How about you, Naomi? What do you think? Do you think we've got to be a little bit careful about this?
I know I absolutely do not feel that way. I feel like there's plenty of room for everyone to be represented when there's women at a conference, they are probably more likely to play in other minorities than the typical men conference would do. I think that men women open up the conversation to everyone. I was at a conference just yesterday in Austin.
I was the Jake Morgan Chase Power conference and there were men in attendance and they were raising their hands and saying, what can we do better? How can we help? And there's a lot of great examples of what companies are doing to help the men feel inclusive as a part of this better and greater function of reaching equality inside their workplaces and their communities and the ecosystems that they operate in. And so I actually think, no, we're not creating that silo or or at any danger.
I think we need to continue the conversation when you do you loud. We need to stream from the rooftops and it's not just about women, but it's about equity and password. Yeah, yeah, right. And how about you, Jackie?
You must invite a lot of women IT conferences, you're recognizing a number of lists as influential women in tech, both in the UK and globally. Yeah, I think for me, I've spent the last 18 months actually working at a global level initially from the Cyberpoint Review to Look at Global Corruption, which was I spoke on that Davos in 2019 and the UK has an initiative to defeat global corruption as part of its post-Brexit plan. But I've recently just back from the Middle East, having put a plan on the table for inclusion across the G20, which is 60% of the world's GDP. And if you can make a case, the why inclusion matters.
I mean, the case I made essentially is a 4.4% growth in those digital economies over the next 10 years. Everybody will listen because this stuff has real value. And it was curious for me to be able to make that case in Saudi Arabia, which given its background, its current culture, etc. One of the things I found very interesting is that 20% of all the new jobs in Saudi Arabia are taken by women as women are starting to recognise where they're where they think their role lies within a culture that's very different to us in the UK.
So for me, we've barely begun this piece because we talk a lot about this in our Western economies, our involvement in this, but actually the rest of the world and places where I work like Russia and Iran and places like that in China. And it's not a conversation that you hear very much. So I was I was thrilled to be able to make that case for the G20, to be able to set the forward motion to be an inclusion agenda. I like Joe's phrase around that.
But the one I left the G20 with was leave no one behind, which means you have to know where everybody is have to be able to look at the opportunities that you're doing and know where it sits and know who you have excluded and have specific inventions. Now, obviously, you can't do one thing for the G20, I have to do specific interventions for each of the economies, but there was a golden thread of inclusion that actually was the foundation block for all of the economies. So I think that having just done that assessment across those nations, we are a long way behind, much further behind than we know. I think we have these conversations at organizational level.
I think we have these conversations that sets a level of tech industry has always been good about that, since we were that rabbel in sure ditch in 2009, where women were poorly represented today. But what we're not doing is necessarily having a nation conversation that actually recognizes the globalization movement that tech is underpinning. So we're not understanding the dynamics of that. So for me, that was the start of a new conversation.
And I will be taking up my new position in the EU on the 16th of March, which puts that conversation on the table of inclusion, leave no one behind there. The EU is taking both seriously that new plan and plans to invest from a research and innovation point view, directly to achieve better outcomes for all of its citizens. But I think these conversations are just beginning. So for me, it's almost was a reboot for my winning tech role and thinking about how we in a globalized world have these conversations that are amplified.
And I think this podcast is one part of that three diverse people yourself as curating it rose, we need to have more joint conversations because our world is at societal level is becoming more joined up tech being enabled. Absolutely. Absolutely. So they obviously as an investor as well.
I mean, we've talked about within your company and how important, you know, the DNR conversation is, and that's part of your DNA content stack. And it's something you're clearly very passionate about. Do you see that it plays a role for the strategic process of your organization as well? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's so many stats out there that demonstrate that having a diverse team, whether it's leadership or just across the board has a positive impact on the bottom line of the company. And as a CEO, I think about that. And really focus on building a team with that diversity and different backgrounds. But even more importantly, as an investor, it's also important to think about who is the team that you're investing in and what do you expect to get from them.
And that diversity is something I look for when I invest in companies. And just to give you an example, we know that for large companies, with at least one woman on the board, there's organizations that outperform their peers. And that's usually by almost 30%. And that's not arguable, right?
We know that that's true. And so in our investments in the accelerator program, I'm launching in India, I will require that there's a female on the founding team to be considered. And those are the types of initiatives that start to move the needle towards a more level playing field. It's not so harsh that you are excluding everyone, but it makes it a little bit more inclusive and encourages everyone to start thinking about diversity as a tool to be more successful.
And again, to have that equilibrium as being the one of the key factors of getting that healthy organization, which is fit to grow. Exactly. Fantastic. Joe, okay, Russian view, which has always been my, my view that it is interesting that this, this conversation very much goes hand in handways, or often in the same, not in breath, but does it seems to be a parallel path between our attempts, I'm talking about as countries, as organizations, as an industry, to plug our skills gap, that if we can get, you know, getting enough people to be excited about being in our industry, and then including them in the conversation, so that you get this, this spread of positivity that hopefully people is that, is that, is that a key part of the solution, do you think?
Well, you know, looking across the whole workforce, at a large software company, I think that there tends to be stereotypes, without being too rude, you know, women work in HR and marketing, men work in technology and engineering, you know, it tends to be how it ends up. And I think breaking down those barriers is very important. I think what you're looking at, you know, we've talked about diversity for us, I want diversity in every team that we've got, but more importantly, we want to drive innovation, you know, as a software company is any tech company you live on your innovation and you die on your innovation. And innovation doesn't happen particularly well in homogenous groups, it happens in very diverse groups.
And for us at VMware, innovation isn't just about innovating in technology, it's about innovating in people processes, how we go to market pretty much every angle of our business innovating in HR, you know, we're innovating our recruitment in some really cool ways. So, you know, it's looking across that, but those ideas will only come from an overset of opinions or a diverse set of backgrounds. The challenge you've got, and I look, I've got two teenage girls, one 19, one 16, looking at sort of, you know, their future careers, I took them into the office and I now go back and do speeches at their school and other schools to open their eyes to what a tech company actually is, because if you go and ask a 16 17 year old person who's looking to what they're going to study at a level of college or whatever it is, and ask about tech companies, they're only talking about coding, talking about I don't know my coding and I take them into office and say, well, there's several hundred people, not one of them are developer. What are these people working for you?
Yeah, and all these people are incredibly concerned about fantastic quality of life, but none of them develop code over there, that's the legal department, they're working on contracts, these people here, their professional services, they're delivering stuff, these people over here, that's HR, this is marketing, you know, so on and so forth is education, so you name it, there's such a broad offering of ways that you can engage in a tech career without having to be a developer or write applications or work on the web or whatever it is, and I think that when we start to expose the, you know, the variety of what we call normal office jobs that aren't, you know, particularly well drilled into children, you know, you go to school and go to any careers officer and they tend to have a very blink of view of, you know, okay, what's my choice? Well, you would be a fireman, doctor, nurse, vet, you can be an accountant or you can go and work in OT, which means you need to code, you're not very coding, you'll best not do that one, et cetera, et cetera. That to me will help build a skills gap usually, you know, why do we have to have STEM degrees to come and work in IT? You don't, you don't need a STEM degree to work for a tech company.
I did a study of the people that work for work for our pre-sales in a mirror and I'm just trying to fish out as I talk to you from the top of my head. Over half of them did not have a technical degree at all, you know, we had degrees and some fantastic things, but look at it, we had over the two, 25 people had technology degrees, four people had non-technology degrees, things like PPE and International Studies and automobile product design, and 18 of our highest technical pre-nuts, pre-sales people had no degree of which eight of those had no e-levels. So, you know, it's, you want to build a skills gap, open the diversity of your recruitment and make people aware that they can get a job in the community, because they didn't even think they could. I love that, Joe.
I think that you're driving it in a great point home and that whole idea of talent existing in places where we might not be looking for it, and now we've got this technology that makes technology makes everything so much more accessible, that you can actually find that talent, give them access to what they need and help them to cultivate a career around something that they might just be good at and maybe didn't even know existed. Now, can you final thoughts on the skills gap side of things? Yeah, so I could take in with Jen Alpha, which is who we're building for now, 16 to 6. They're pretty much not interested in any of that particular conversation.
So, interestingly, what the transit and thousands of people came up with is how do they stay, Joe made that point earlier, even if they can work for us for Jen Alpha, not that they're at that space yet, but how do we make, how do we put things in place that they can stay? One of the intersections for that cohort got 6,000 of those people offline last year to deep dive on this one is an entrepreneur mindset. What they tend to have is they tend to have an entrepreneurial focus, which can be developed in an entrepreneurial way. So, that innovation space actually allowing them to self-collaborate.
A little bit, as a Google, they 20% days that we used to do, and actually allowing people to self-federate and work on things. So, I've got an initiative I'm building at the moment, which is where bringing in 3,000 offline spaces to bear and allowing them to develop and to develop and to do some teaching of the cyber safe initiative that I run for entrepreneurs and allow them to ground in that and then fit them into local communities where they can bring some of that talent to bear, but with some entrepreneurial thinking. And the CSOs love that. They love that idea, but more than anything, that Gen Z are more than capable of saying, you might love that, but you're not going to love this, but I want the chance to do that.
We've got to unfold that initiative at the moment. But what we've done for, sorry, what we've done for Gen Z doesn't actually translate to Gen Alpha. So, essentially, the talents and skills in those two cohorts are quite different. And the Gen Alpha one is that's the reason we chosen to focus it, because we don't actually understand how best to enable their talents.
And lots of the jobs that they will feel don't exist in the world. So, whilst I was out inside your area, for example, one of the things I was asked to look at was the first thing, the first artificial intelligence citizen of Saudi Arabia, how could that look when I was doing the plan for the kingdom itself? How does that integrate with this thinking? And so, you know, for Gen Alpha, that's their world, we will be looking at jobs that currently don't exist or they will create.
So, I think that one of the routes that we're taking with taking with Gen Z will transfer. But I haven't got that program live yet, which is the apprenticeship model, we've got all the way up to level seven, which is PhD for Gen Z. And they just navigate that their own way. You can't tell them anyway, they, they, it's just by an interest in a passion and a willingness to, to get involved in engagement, something, there's something similar to that, which can lead to a degree and doesn't necessarily fit within our university system in the UK.
But I've got several universities that are running these as a parallel track, and they're funded by business. So at the moment, looking at how I evolve that model from Gen Z to a Gen Alpha model, where their likelihood is the jobs that they'll do will be very different. So I think because I've got that focus for diversity and inclusion on those two cohorts, it's a lot of experimentation. But their view of it is just giving me room to explore.
It's a discovery process, mostly, but obviously the point of self organizing them offline is to get them to meet with one another virtually altogether, and also look at whether they're a particular core pieces that we can enable. So do we need an intervention from the government point of view, for example, for certain parts that sector. So some of the level five to level seven parts of the Gen Z initiative we've needed intervention, but it's actually bringing as a cohort of new nurses, for example, in our NHS. So fascinating stuff.
Jackie, because talking about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, they're all entrepreneurs, they're not all entrepreneurs. No, you know, not everyone is an entrepreneur. So I think there's this constant searching for entrepreneurs, I think is probably an entrepreneur. Yeah, entrepreneur.
No, that's what I was talking about talking about the entrepreneurs. But this particular skills gap I've been looking at is the the entrepreneur element of Gen Z and Jennifer, and how that then enables them to take any root forward, because of the way they navigate the world. I mean, it's an entrepreneur is still it's an entrepreneur, but within an organization, and not every that's my point, not everyone is like that, not everyone is that kind of person. So if we go searching just for those, I buy myself, I'm excluding a large section of society by just trying to talk to interest entrepreneurs.
You know, I had a long military career and I always used to wonder, you know, looking at why is that guy private? Yeah, he's still 20 years in the service. And it's like, well, some people just don't want to be that happy doing what they're doing. And you have to have a place for them, you have to support them, but for them, you have to enable them.
So, you know, I think there's this constantly focusing on entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs as being the future. Not everyone born off to 2010, it's going to be an entrepreneur. I agree with you. But the reason that the CSOs have found that they don't stay is that the entrepreneurs entrepreneurs that are not staying.
So there are career roots through for everybody who's not that, but they do want some of those folks within their organizations. So in order to do that, we've had to organize that because the normal culture that says, I'm not going to be an entrepreneur, I'm not going to be an entrepreneur. And that is fairly well served, but not cross the world, but we didn't come to this at here. But if you happen to be somebody like that, you pretty much you bounce in and you bounce out.
And actually, some of the innovation leaves with them. And often they've been setting up as competitors. And so the 27,000 CSOs that I'm working with are saying, I don't want that. I want that talent and that innovation within my company.
So what is it about my company that means they won't stay? So that's just not as bounced off into generation alpha who who work in a completely different way. And so I'm utilizing some of that research. What would we do for them?
The oldest person in generation alpha is 10. So we'll have fun working on that. My youngest one is five. I'm working with so and my first million I was 11 when you made his first six million.
Education and do that. I think one of the things that he does is it shows how passionate everybody is and everybody's looking at these things, both on macro level and micro level and personal level. And I think there are some key things that come out with this. You know, diversity and inclusion is a journey, you know, we're certainly not at the final destination.
I don't even know if we've got to the first station. I guess we'll be able to look back in 20 years and let everybody know about that. But we're certainly making good progress, the certainly stuff that can be done. I think one of the things that obviously is driven is what Nia is saying is about, you know, having representation at a senior level, it doesn't necessarily have to be a full equal balance.
It depends very much on the mixture that you need of the right people for the right job, but having woman involved, or diversity, is having a positive impact on the bottom line. And that's obviously going to drive the commercial side of things. And that is an element of the tech industry. I don't think any of us would argue with that.
But I think that one of the key fundamental things is around innovation. And I think we've all you have all touched on that about how important diverse teams are for being innovative. So I really like to thank you all. I think we could have probably gone on for a little while longer.
And I know you will all be back to either sort of discuss this or stuff that is also you're also passionate about. But passion is also one of the other things that is the common goal, I think, that you want to see in your organisation when you've got 30,000 people, like VMware, or you have somewhat less, you know, maybe we'll speak to an AM, you will also have 30,000. But that may be a couple. And working on it.
Exactly. Exactly. Come back. What about space?
And you will be joining us again where we'll take a bit of deep guidance to you specifically, and how you came to be one of our winners in the female tech trouble this year. So thank you, Naya. Thank you, Jackie. And thank you, Joe.
It has been a fantastic conversation. And really appreciate you all taking the time to share your views, share your experiences and share your passion for this, this particular area that's so important to all of us. Thanks, thank you. Thanks for the debate.
Joe, I can always rely on it. And that was congratulations again, Naya. Thank you. Fantastic.
Well, that's a wrap for the Donavostee and inclusion of the tech industry podcast panel. So thanks to our panelists, and we'll hopefully see you all again soon. Thank you.