Transcript
>> Jeff: Showtime. Hey, welcome everybody, Jeff Frick coming to you from the home studio. Great to see you today. We're really excited to have a really industry luminary, really excited to meet her, recently kind of through the Athena Alliance but in digging through and looking into her background, very interesting person, a lot of experience, and I'm excited for today's conversation. So we welcome in via the magic of Zoom and the internet, Michele Bettencourt. She is the executive chairperson at Corelight. Michele, great to see you. >> Jeff, thanks for having me, it's really nice to be here.
>> Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm glad we're able to make it work out. So we met through Coco Brown at the Athena Alliance. I'm a huge fan of Coco, happened to, a circumstance, interview her. I think when she first started the Athena Alliance, and it's one of the classic overnight success, you know, six years in the making. Recently changed from being a nonprofit to a profit center. And I know you now are getting very involved with the organization. How did you hear about Athena, what attracted you to them?
>> It's a great question. I ran a company called Coverity, and my head of HR went on to another company called UserTesting. And she asked me to come in and speak, as a guest, about me, and my experiences in life, which I did, and then she introduced me to Coco. And then, in that, Coco invited me to present at a recruiting conference that Athena had partnered with. So I was part of the round table following the keynote. And I also had a separate session with my ex-head of HR. I was so happy to be there, it was kind of my coming out party if you will, as Michele, in front of tech folks.
>> Right.
>> Product group for tech folks. And then overtime, I joined the Alliance. I was honored to be invited.
>> And you wrote this very nice... Let me pull it up here. You wrote this really nice blog post. See if I can pull it up through the magic again of too much technology.
>> Yeah, Coco and I talked about this, and my wife and I had talked about this separately. I've been married for almost 28 years. And my wife made the comment, "It's kind of not fair of you "to transition and take other jobs." There's an element of that that my wife found is tasteful. And I appreciated that. So I talked to Coco about that, so I don't want to use the Athena Alliance to get a job. I don't need that.
>> Right.
>> I've been really fortunate and I still have a bunch of white privilege in me, even regardless of my current appearance. But let me help, let me be a mentor, let me teach salons 'cause I've got a lot of experience in running companies and being a board director. So we agreed that that's what I'm doing. So I do probably about at salon a quarter and take a lot of other calls from Athena Alliance members who are curious about what does it take to get on a board or become a CEO, those kinds of things.
>> Right, and then what's kind of the format of the salons? I've never been in one.
>> They're all pretty different. One was, here's how to sell a tech company. These are the steps you go through, the prescriptive steps, steps to go sell it. I'm doing one on Feb 4 and that is on how to build and manage your board. So I kind of choose topics of which I have a decent amount of experience, good and bad. And then it gives you a round table format. So I'll provide Coco with 20 talking points. She'll ask questions and I'll ref and then we make sure we have enough time as well for the audience to ask questions.
>> Right, right. So let's talk about your career a little bit. We talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on, really about going in and turning problem companies around. And you've done it multiple times, many, many, many, many times. So you're not coming in as a founder, you're coming into a situation which is not terrific. And we hear all the time that that's a great thing to do from a career point of view, right? Take the shitty jobs that nobody else wants to take. What would you attribute your success to? What was kind of your strategy going into these difficult situations? 'Cause I've seen you speak a little bit and you were tough. Do you have real data behind you or "should I throw a dart board?" I think was a line I picked up somewhere along the line. But where, kind of, what was your philosophy? You've done it a number of times. How did you turn these things around?
>> Oh, look, a lot of it was just observing. I was in a company called Verity, I was their VP of sales, and we had a shake up in the company that bothered me. I left for a while and I came back with a new team. And when I came back with that new team, we were near bankrupt and we had recorded a $5 million quarter of revenue and a $10 million loss as a public company, had about 12 million in the bank left. So we would've been down and out in 90 days, had we not got it resolved. But the team, they brought a turnaround team, called Regent Pacific and a gentleman named Gary Sbona. And like, I've always been very fortunate to work with or worked for, or work around really interesting folks that have a lot of skills that I don't have. Gary was a turnaround expert. He taught me an awful lot about how to approach a problem, how to organize people, and how to deal with going into an organization where you're not trusted.
>> Right, right.
>> And look, and I've also worked with Michael Lynch of Autonomy and I learned a lot from Mike, in terms of just things don't burn down all at once. So you can make systematic changes in companies if you make them quickly, and if you communicate. And you're not going to break everything at once. And so it was a combination of a lot of observation and then having a chance at Verity to do it on my own.
>> Right, right. And then you said you come up through the sales side so you approach everything really with a sales hat on, from a sales perspective, or revenue perspective, correct?
>> Yeah, I would say a customer-facing perspective, per se. So it's customers, it's our organization, it's investors, it's partners, it's stakeholders. And look, my career is a bit of an accident. I dropped out of college at age 21. I wanted to be a technical writer. My father was a wonderful man, manual labor, and didn't have the opportunity to go to college, and made about 17,000 a year. I'm 60 years old, so I graduated high school in 1970. My dad's best year was 17 grand that year. So I went out to Santa Clara, was ill-equipped, had terrible grades, quit going. I was just embarrassed. So I was a terrible student and ended up working for a company called Dysan, which was a disk drive manufacturer. Then went to Altos for my first real job. And when I went to Altos, I dropped out of Santa Clara. And I didn't know what I didn't know which was an advantage 'cause I was never encumbered by the lack of my own skills, if you will.
>> It's funny and a lot of the stuff that you've got published, you talk about how young you were at some of these really critical junctions. And it's funny now with the benefit of being a little older and a little grayer to look back and realize how young that really is. But to your point, in some ways, it's a huge advantage 'cause you don't know what you don't know and you're just kind of forging ahead. And clearly you didn't let the lack of a college degree, at that point in time, slow you down at all.
>> First of all, a lot of gray, not a little, a lot grayer, all gray. And look, I think I was misleading at first. I had my resume that I went to Santa Clara and I probably put dates and everything, and eventually I thought, "Why am I lying about it? "I don't have to lie."
>> Jeff: Right, right.
>> But I always had a chip on my shoulder. And one was, I had gender issues that bothered me that I could never resolve because we lived in the suburbs and in a time where I knew one person that was gay in high school, didn't know what trans was. And I dropped out of college and that was, in my mind, another failure. And then I came from a fairly poor background family-wise, and so I had three things that just put a massive chip on my shoulder, kind of gave me the impetus to work my ass off. And I figured I'll never be smarter than anyone else in the room, but I will probably be able to work harder than all of them. And that was kind of what I did.
>> Great, and you've worked hard. I mean, you're globe trotting all over the place, running all these companies, I think you have triplets, right? Triplet girls.
>> They'll be 34 this year, and I have a 24-year-old daughter, will be 25 this year. So four daughters, sometimes I blame this on them. I said, "It's because of you guys that I'm like this." They're not (background noise drowns out speaker).
>> I want to get on a couple of your business philosophies and we'll talk about some other stuff. But one of the things that came up when I was watching, I think some of the Athena stuff that they do have published, is you talked about something, and you said it over and over and over, and a number of different things about the tyranny of the urgent. And Michael Dell loves to talk about 90-day shot clock in the context of a public company, especially when he went private before he went public again. But I've never heard it described so well as the tyranny of the urgent. 'Cause the other piece he talked about in one of those sessions, was about being transactional versus strategic, and really shifting your mindset, especially as a leader, as a CEO to be way more strategic and way less transactional. Where does that come from? You know, is that one of your kind of foundational management philosophies and strategies?
>> Well, I wish I could take credit for coining the term itself, but but I can't. The gentlemen at Rockwell CMC company that I worked with, who ran marketing, he was the one who came up with that. But what I've noticed when I was running companies, you're so busy and there's so many things to do. And I like to fill my day up and I'm very transactional. Sometimes I'm less thoughtful than I should be, and what I've learned over time at my different jobs was, having the time to sit back and take a break from work, you come back to work differently. And I realized I spend so much time getting stuff done that I don't always think deeply enough about what I'm getting done, or what I should anticipate, or who I should hire next, or a number of things. And so it's kind of forced me to attempt to slow my work. It's slowed my mind down a little bit, and I get more done this way. It's counterintuitive, but when I'm less transactional, I end up getting more done 'cause what I get done is a bit more important. I always as well focus on what's important, focus on what matters the most, not the cutlery, but the fact that we have a jet engine getting us from coast to coast, not that we have plastic cutlery. So that's kind of my view.
>> Yeah. Well, the other thing, you just triggered it, as you talked about the jet engine, and one of those things is, it must've been, maybe it was your HR, your former HR, coworker, talking about the two engines of the plane in Silicon Valley which is the engineering team on one side, and the sales team on the other side, and being so laser-focused on those two groups of people to make sure that-- because that is ultimately going to be the foundation of your success.
>> Yeah. As managers of companies, we always revert back to our comfort zone. And so when pressured, I will spend a lot of time in the field with the sales organization 'cause that's where my comfort is. When cognizant, I also spend a lot of time with R&D at Imperva. We have 400 folks in Tel Aviv, and I was there a monthly basis. And I realized over time, managing a sales organization is very different from managing R&D but the same basic principles are involved. What is measured in weeks, slips in weeks, more or less. So it's the granularity and integrity of the different inspections that take place, whether you're going to ship a product on time, or make a quarter.
>> Jeff: Right, right. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the industry that you played in for so long, the security industry. I've covered RSA for a number of years before the shutdown. Well, actually in 2020, you know, 45,000 people, it's a huge show. Moscone is full of vendors. And yet, we still have things like the SolarWinds breach, the other day. It seems like most security experts will say, "You're going to get breached. "It's more about what you do "when you find out that you got breached, "versus trying to keep those walls." You were in the business. How do you kind of view security, and kind of the vendor confusion, and how should buyers think about security within a full Moscone of available options and new ones popping up all the time?
>> Yeah. So I think the basic approach to cybersecurity has been the same for about a decade and that is companies like, Imperva, like, Corelight, when a breach takes place like SolarWinds did, it's a spotlight. And it's an opportunity for all of us to talk about what we would've done differently, or how we would've done it differently. And that's kind of too bad because it's a lot of bit of fear-based selling. you kind of approach the problem, and you go talk to the CISO and say-- You don't want to be on the cover of the Wall Street Journal or the FT. And here's what we can do to help you alleviate that, that is the risk for you. These CISOs, chief security information officers, they've got a big portfolio of products already in use. And about 70% of their budget is usually taken up just for subscription fees to do what they're doing, right?
And there's different classifications of solutions. You've got perimeter firewalls, you've got email security, you've got web app firewalls, database security, you've got network security, you've got endpoints. There are all these different pieces and the technical aspects are all really different. So what I've noticed is everyone's been waiting for the next big roll up to take place. When is this going to get a roll, 10 different security companies. It's pretty difficult just because the disciplines are so specific.
>> Right.
>> And so we do is we all try to vie for the top tier. We want to be in your "must have". We want to be able to approach the CISO and say, "We want to be in your must-have list." And all these vendors fighting for visibility, all this noise. And I think it's really, really tough to be a CISO to know where to spend your time. Compounded by the fact that-- And I remember meeting years ago with the CISO of JPMorgan Chase, half a billion dollar budget for security at the time. And being told that it doesn't matter what I spend, I can't guarantee we won't be breached. In fact, he said, "We've probably been breached." So a lot of the CISOs I talk to, and a lot of the executives I talk to, in a security domain talk about saying, "You're probably breached already. "You just don't know it yet."
>> Jeff: Right.
>> But you should operate on a base that you are already breached.
>> Right.
>> Which makes it makes it tough, makes it tough.
>> Well, the other thing that segue off of that is how to manage the budget, right? Because almost by rule, there is no budget number, sort of just turning everything off, that will be safety. I always think it's kind of like an insurance problem, and you want to have insurance and you want to allocate some percentage of your budget to insurance to have some level of safety. But the reality is, you can't completely lock down, and you can't spend probably as much as you would like to spend, even though, there's huge potential risks. So when you were in your CEO hat, talking to these CISOs, how are they thinking about what is the right budget number for them to try to figure this out?
>> Well, seriously, they view, in large part, they view the security spend as a tax on their business. They have to spend the money. They are going to spend as much as they could get from the CISO, from the management, from the board, from the budget, they'll spend as much as they can. And everyone's screaming for more budget money to alleviate certain risk areas. It's a difficult thing. When we're out talking to correlate customers or I was, Imperva customers, we would talk a lot about our success and why certain customers had deployed us and had great success. And we would try to use those examples and references as the best way to help our customers, or help our prospects become customers.
>> Right, and then this other little thing, the human factors, which is, so often the breaches are caused by, "I got an email from somebody "that's doing the company newsletter, "and they need a picture for the-- "or the picnic from last week," and they get access to my machine. Or, the one that we hear a lot of times now with public cloud is, people just leave some switch in the wrong position, And it's fascinating. I've talked to the one kind of social engineering gout, and she's got 100% success rate on stage at black hat hacking, whoever she tries to hack, purely with a telephone and some background information on these people. So I'm just cu-- It must just drive you nuts. You put all this technology and processes in place. And a lot of times, it's a really simple human factors thing that opens up the flood gates.
>> And I think in general, enterprise software and security, it's a social problem. It's, can you get these users to deploy? Can you get these users to put in your chain of activities, so that you don't have a flip fault. But if you just think about the human engineering and the issues of "don't click on a phishing link", "make sure you change your passwords". If organizations were 100% good there, 85% of the risk would probably go away for security.
>> Right.
>> Because companies are having to make up for all this stuff that users do poorly. They don't pay attention, or they don't see what that real email address is. Yeah, no, it's tricky.
>> It's so funny that one of the, I think it was a Cisco executive gal, keynote of last year, and she's talking about clicking. And she's like, "We tell people not to click "but everything on the internet is clicking. "Everything we do all day long is clicking. "It's like this completely counterintuitive thing." And I'm still fascinated that SurveyMonkey still has a business. I don't know who would ever click on a SurveyMonkey link, nothing against SurveyMonkey but like you said, we're just told, "Don't click, don't click, don't click," unless it's somebody that I absolutely know where it came from. So it's just this really interesting kind of constant chasing of the tail, keeping up with the bad guys. But at the same time you have these human factors things going on which are not a technology problem at all.
>> I'll go one step further. There's a technology that's used application security where companies build code that it allows you to find security defects. And you've got the CISO of some organizations, will ask the R&D organizations to put put an AppSec product in your line of code. So as you go through the deployment, you can run the test and you'll know if there's a security defect before you deploy. That becomes a war. It be becomes, the R&D Chief, not wanting to let the IT Chief or the CISO Chief dictate what tools are used. So social problems all around, it really is. It's fascinating. If you can get rid of those social problems, it'd be a different industry probably, but it would be different industry.
>> Yeah, it's funny. I was just doing an interview with somebody else on big data projects. And basically that was the same summary that the biggest problem with big data projects is people's subverting them from the side because you didn't involve them, you didn't engage them. They don't feel part of the process has absolutely nothing to do with data silos or APIs, or anything else. It's funny. It always comes back to the human factor.
>> Yeah. If your company were just consisted of blade services, that's all you had, a whole lot easier. (laughs)
>> Let's shift gears again and talk about your journey, your adventure. You used to be A.B. and you don't look like a black wide receiver playing formerly for the Pittsburgh Steelers anymore. So that was not a great nomenclature. Now you're Michele. Tell us what happened. Give us a little bit of background for people that aren't familiar with the story.
>> Sure, so at 57 years, I was Anthony Bettencourt, I was 35 or 37 years in the Valley as A.B. And since I was small, I've been hiding something. I never understood it. And because I grew up in a certain point of time, when the internet wasn't around, I didn't know what I was. And you think the worst of it because you feel so awkward and isolated, even in public. And I was that way my entire life. I married when I married when I was 21, my wife and I were married, first time when I was married, about nine years, nine and a half years, we had children. We divorced, I married again as did she, and I had another child. So I wanted to wait until my children were grown 'till I hope they might be able to understand at least what I was trying to describe, which was difficult 'cause I didn't even know what I was describing at the time.
>> Jeff: Right.
>> My first wife didn't know, my wife of almost 20 years didn't know. It was my big secret.
>> So what was the kind of normalization thing that happened when you did say, "I'm not alone. "I see some other clues as to what's going on out here."
>> Well, it took me a while. 'Cause, look, my work life was this. I would fly into a city, as CEO of a business, and I would go to my room and I would shower, shave, and I would go to the bar, but I would go down the bar looking different. At the time I had wigs, but that was when I was working a while ago. And I'd sit and I'd work. I'd work downstairs on email, and that was my life. And I learned over time that interacting with people was happier like this, interacting with people, than I was the other way. And it wasn't a different person, but I was a whole lot more outgoing this way than I was as A.B., per se. And I got so used to it, that it became my normal. And as odd as it is to even think about now, it's what I did, and it's what I was.
And I realized over time that in certain circles, nobody cared. And I had friends in New York that had met Michele eight times, and it'd be Anthony, 'cause I'd be in town and I'd wear a suit to a meeting, and I'd take them to dinner and they were stunned, they didn't know what to say. But after time I kind of ran out of-- Living a double life is fine until it isn't. And mine was a real double life. And I ran out of runway. I didn't know what to do. And my assumption was, it was going to be a disaster. I was fresh off the heels of my father passing away. And I love my father so much and I told him toward the end and he just said, "You look kind of-- I showed him a picture, "You look kind of pretty." And it was like a month before he passed, that's all he said, and that was it. And when he passed, I thought, "Life is short," and I'm going to do this.
So I went off to New York. I bought an apartment and I started my life there. And thankfully, over a couple of years now, I'm back home here in Pleasanton with my wife and everything's fine. But it was a very messy time for me. I learned a lot but boy, I hate to think about it.
>> Yeah, I guess it probably wouldn't be so great, if you weren't tryna do double life at one time. I mean, being a tech company CEO, especially a public tech company CEO with the pressure of the 90-day shot clock, that we talked about earlier, is a really, really hard job, and super, in terms of just taking all your time, right? Especially, you know, you're running a global company. So I don't know your routine, but I know you got to get up early to do the Euro calls, and you stay up late to do the Asian calls, and you are traveling around the world. That must have just been brutal to try to keep all those balls in the air.
>> Well it was... There's a bit of game theory in it for me, but I remember I had an interview with Bloomberg television, I had to be there at 6:00 a.m. in San Francisco when I was the CEO of Imperva, and I was branded the trash talking CEO because of something I said about IBM. And I remember being out until 1:30 that morning, as I want to be, and went back to my room, showered, and got a few hours sleep and got into my suit. And I remember being there, just making sure I didn't have any mascara. And it is taxing. And my last year of working in Imperva, when I was CEO, I think I stepped down in July and I had 300,000 miles on United at that point in 2017, before I stepped down.
>> 300,000 in half a year?
>> Yep, I was traveling to Tel Aviv all the time, it was 1,200 employees. Yeah, I was always on the move. And I think I became a little bit of an adrenaline junkie because I love the activity which kind of gets back to, I was great at transactions. It was wonderful at them. I wasn't always good at the deeper thinking part.
>> Do you ever just burn out and just have to like disappear for a couple of days, and just sleep?
>> I really didn't. And which, at the time, my lifestyle was a bit messy. And so the fact that I could go a couple of days without sleep, probably wasn't a good thing. I loved work. And I loved being me and that was it. I could fly in, I'd be me at night. I'd kill it at work, I enjoy what I did. I would be 24/7 on email and stuff.
>> Jeff: Right, right.
>> And it was great for me but it did a couple of things, it fulfilled my ego to-- I love to be in charge. I like to lead if I can. And it gave me a chance to be me. And it ticked both of those boxes for me.
>> And you made a few bucks, and got to take care of the family, and held it together pretty well. So what happened when you ran out of runway? What caused the change?
>> Well, it's probably not-- I was dressing at work. If there was an event, I'd show up. I remember at one event my PR person came in and said, "Should we get an announcement about-- "Do have to announce anything? I said, "Like, what?" "You're transitioning." And she was right. I didn't realize it at the time. I didn't get it. I just thought, I didn't know what I was doing, but I thought about that last night that she was spot on. And we should have probably done that, but I didn't have the courage to tell anyone at that point. At some point it got out, I was a little bit sloppy on social media, or I didn't care. And an investor took a sizable stake in the company and knew because of the research work they did before they took their position. And he had a conversation with one of the board members and then it just unwound on me pretty quickly.
>> Yeah, yeah. Which is interesting to contrast 'cause you've shared other stories about the support that you got from people at the company, from the people that know you and have known you forever. It's interesting that they were very supportive of not your atypical behavior, you know, not typical. And yet, it was this outsider who kind of blew the whole thing up.
>> And I understand in retrospect. Look, I was upset at the time, but they were doing that because they made a sizable investment. They were watching my social media and I looked reckless. And I think that I understand that, I don't like it, but they were right. And so I went through a period of about couple of months at work where the board and I had a lot of discussions. And we had a plan to go hire a president, and I would stay in New York and be the CEO. And the more and more I thought about it, that was doing the company a disservice. If hire president, they'll need training wheels to become CEO, I don't want to be CEO forever. I want to be able to be me. And we kind of ended up bringing on a new CEO. I'll tell you where the company was brilliant is yes, it was awkward for me at first, when you all your board members are calling and saying, "Why didn't you tell us?" And I said, "Why didn't I tell you what?" "Why didn't you tell us you were trans?" I don't know how to respond to that sometimes, other than "it's not your business," but it kind of was.
And because it's public company. But no one told me to leave. In fact, everyone asked me to stay. The board, asked me to stay. It was my decision to go because I wasn't in the right frame of mind to lead the company, I was becoming a distraction for the company. And that's not a CEO's... CEOs should leave when they become distractions. They can't do that to people.
>> Right, right. So it's a fascinating story and congratulations for you. And I'm sure you're thrilled to not have to kind of lead the double life and kind of keep that under the cover. It must've been a tremendous weight off your shoulders to finally be able to (breathes out) take a breath, and not have to lead the double life. Or did you miss the adrenaline, miss the adrenaline?
>> No, I didn't at all. In fact, I look at what's with COVID. I came back to California late 2019 full-time and I kind of loved to go out. I had a great makeup person, and hair and makeup in Beverly Hills, and I would look like an Upper East Side socialite sometimes. But I was also taking 30% of my time just thinking about the schedule. How am I going to get out, where am I going to go? I wake up in the morning. I don't have to worry about it. Some days I put on makeup, sometimes I don't, it doesn't matter. I'm no longer my main event, if you will. And that's giving me-- to talk about the time transactional versus deeper thinking. I have time now to think, and I love it. I love it.
>> So now, you're out and that's great. And you're Michele, and you're helping other people as part of your own kind of career progression. You've got a really unique perspective, right? That most people don't get 'cause you can kind of see it from both sides. And I think it was one of those talks you were given at the Athena Alliance. I want to touch on two topics that come up all the time. One, is imposter syndrome, right? And we hear about imposter syndrome all the time. It's way more pervasive, I think, than anybody gives it credit. I think it's just a natural thing that we always are a little suspicious that maybe we're not in the right place, or maybe we're not as qualified as the person next to us, or across the table. So I wonder if you can share your thoughts about imposter syndrome more when you were younger. 'Cause you dropped out of Santa Clara and maybe you just didn't give a shit. Or did that give you the chip on your shoulder to really drive and excel maybe a little harder than you would have, had you not had that chip on your shoulder?
>> Oh, I think it gave me the drive. I was embarrassed. I mean, as I said, I had my gender stuff going on. We were poor and now I dropped out of college. I had true failures. And the only way to power through those failures was to prove myself wrong, if you will. So I got really fortunate at work. I made some mistakes, but by and large, I moved quickly up to the ranks, but I've always felt that someone's going to tap me on the shoulder and say, "You're not good enough," or "You shouldn't be here." Like, I feel that way now. I talk to boards of directors. I'm so critical of myself in these conversations. You know, I've always fixed myself to have been in the business between 30 million and 300 million. I know what to do in that target range. You get me outside of that, I'm probably not as effective.
>> Right, right.
>> I did this documentary which won two awards. We took it to two festivals in 2018. It's like having your worst home movie, all your failures of your worst possible year, front and center. I use that as when I'm talking to new boards, or new opportunities, all shift that after-- 'Cause every first meeting is good, right? Every first call is good. See, that's easy. But I'll follow up with the film and say, "Please watch this." If you can't stomach, how bad I look here, just tell me. I'm good with it, we'll part our ways. I don't want us to fall in love. But then in six weeks realize we've got a problem.
>> Right. So we'll come back to the movie in a minute. But the other thing I wanted to mention that again, you have a really unique perspective. And again, you talk about the Athena thing as walking into a room in a business context and how you were received as Michele versus how you were received from A.B., just another white executive from Silicon Valley. That's a pretty unique opportunity to actually be able to see it and live it, and get it viscerally, and then to be able to share and empathize with people because you've seen kind of both sides of the coin.
>> And it is very different. A.B. was kind of invisible. I kind of was, I was kind of quiet. I got stuff done, I enjoyed work. And I kind of went up and do what I had to do. This is, I come into a room and at first, there's confusion, if they don't know me at all, they'll do a search on Michele Bettencourt. Prior to my Corelight experience, there wasn't a whole lot of business in there. There was a lot of pictures of me in New York, and a lot of pictures of me out, and me my dog and stuff, fun stuff. But none of it that qualified me to be CEO. But you know, this time around, there's two things that happen, in some environments, it becomes a discussion around diversity inclusion. That's the pivot when they see me.
"Oh, let's talk about that "because that's probably what you're interested in." And I try to get people back to the kind of first principles, like I'm trans, just like I have brown eyes. And I could never hit a curveball in Little League. I mean, it's an attribute, but it's not my identity. I mean, I identify as a trans woman, but that's a piece of me, but that's not all of me. And so I try to lead with I've got four kids, married, I've a good life, normal life. I've got all this good experience in business. I've a little bit of musicianship, a little bit of movie stuff. I focus on the bigger picture, and being 57, it means, that sometimes I'm probably not a very good trans person. And what I mean by that is I will do things that younger folks won't. When I introduced myself at Corelight, I put up Michele Bettencourt pictures and talked about the fact that there's nothing in these that qualify me to be exec chairwoman here.
Then I put up Anthony pictures, and there was confusion there. And I explained, this was me, same inside, same brain, just better hair, better packaging. (chuckles)
>> And more public. Because I got to tell you in preparing for this interview as I do for all interviews, right? First thing you do is go to Google and start searching around and see what I can find. And I especially, always look for video because I just love hearing people speak in their own voice, and seeing their mannerisms, you get a much better feel for person. And A.B. does not have a lot of digital exhaust, as I like to say, out there. I mean, you were running these companies, you were successful with these companies, but these weren't big flashy companies. You weren't Yahoo, you know, breaking records on the Nasdaq, not to diminish it at all, but you didn't have a big kind of presence outside of your role as the CEO of the company. Where now, it seems like you're branching out a little bit more, you're kind of spreading your wings, in terms of reaching out and helping people. And as an artifact of that, or as a consequence of that, you now, maybe, I don't know, you know better me, you have more stuff out in the ether as Michele than A.B. ever did.
>> I do, and my wife and my kids, I mean, she says that if she didn't know me better, she would've thought I would've done this to extend my career. You can look there's changes in the Nasdaq, Israeli, California rules about board governance. So diversity is important. I stayed away from tech for a couple of years because I was positive I'd never get back in. And I get all these calls for Anthony Bettencourt, and I'd returned them and I'd say, "Hey, Anthony's no longer here, I replaced him. "Can I help you?" And you'd get crickets on the other side and that's fair. And then when Corelight called and there wasn't crickets. And they said, "Yes, we know," it just changed me. It gave me the thought that, okay I can get back in and there's a lot I could do. And look, I'm grateful for the opportunities. And I'm stunned, candidly at how good it's been for me going back to--
>> Yeah.
>> I think I straddled three areas. I was part of the, and I'm not trying to be pejorative, but the old boys network in the Valley, I was always kind of a member, but never felt like I was. But, so I am still a little bit, even like this, and I thought I wouldn't be. Athena, you know, when Coco invited me to join the organization, I was stunned. I thought, "Well you're going to let a trans woman "join your organization?" And I was so happy, and relieved, and grateful.
>> Right.
>> And then there's the LGBTQ, you know, as it's called, some call it the alphabet mafia, there's that as well. And so I straddle all three, and it's a brand new experience to be in all three at once.
>> Right. Well, the other kind of interesting thing just comes to my mind, a lot of times when I was at theCUBE, we had a women in tech feature, specifically every Wednesday, we had women in tech Wednesday we would feature a woman. And sometimes they would just pull an interview, and sometimes we would have a special interview if we didn't have have something in the can. And some women just don't want to go to the diversity side. They feel, not that it's the meaning, but they want to talk about business and they don't want to just get pigeonholed. Again, you're kind of in this unique perspective where you can kind of raise those concerns and not necessarily be concerned about not being respected as a business person 'cause you've already have a track record, you've already got ink on paper and you've rung the bell, and you've had some success. So it's kind of an interesting opportunity for you to talk more vocally about diversity, and not be concerned that people are only looking at you around the diversity card, if you will, versus, being a very talented and long-time successful executive.
>> And I enjoy those conversations and I'm learning. Again, I was in my own bubble for 57 years, and I didn't tell that many people. So I didn't understand what I was, and I had no idea what it would be when I came out the other end. So I did the diversity, so that's important. I did the movie in large part because I was convinced that we'd have a 30 year gap before you'd see any openly, not openly, but trans individuals running companies and holding significant board seats. And so when I got my first board seat, and the others are coming, I was stunned. And I thought, this is-- I want to get out, and I want to lead from the front. My wife and I are forming a foundation to help encourage fair labor practices for transgendered individuals. I mean, the work situation for most trans is untenable. You've got-- At least a quarter have been lost their jobs because of bias. And there's a large number of states, more than 20 that make it legal to fire you if you're gay or trans, it's crazy.
>> Wow, wow.
>> And then, then you have all of the open hostilities, the workforce threats that take place. If I could get out and lead from the front and help that, I'd like to do that. So I speak where I can. And again, I'm very grateful for the opportunities.
>> Again, what a really interesting, you know-- Changing your life from hiding it to now being retired from operational role. So you've got bandwidth and now you're out. So you're not hiding anything. And you can put your talents, and your skills, and you're obviously tremendously successful into these causes where before, as you said, you're in a bubble, and you probably didn't even know these things were even out there. You got to be feeling good about being in 2021 and not the-- Well, I don't know, 19, 20 was almost pretty crazy time too, maybe 51 is less good.
>> Well, I've never been so happy in my life, and it's nice to wake up and feel level and not feel like I'm hiding something, and not feel like I'm trying to gain someone, so I can get my way for an ulterior motive. I can't explain how good it is. And work's been fun. It's fun to see how people react. And I mean, it is in a good comical way. When I went into Corelight, I explained, "Look, at my pronouns are she and her," right? But, but, I have four daughters and I'm their father. And I have a wife that I'm her husband. And so you almost need a scorecard to keep track of me. And I've told all my longstanding friends, "If you'd rather call me Anthony-- Here's where I run afoul of certain organization, "You'd rather call me Anthony "'cause it feels more comfortable to you, go for it. "You want to call me A.B.? "Fine." I prefer M.B., it's one letter lift and shift, but I don't get caught up in this stuff because I'm just happy right now to be me. I'm thrilled to just at age 60, realize that life has never been so good. And I've never been so happy and fulfilled.
>> That's great, that's great, Michele. So looking down the road, thank goodness we turned the calender on 2020, and vaccines are starting to roll. So I think there is hopefully light here at the end of the rainbow. What are some of your priority things? You said you just moved back to the Bay recently. You're super active on Athena. And you just talked about some of the things, maybe I'm answering my own question, but kind of what are you looking forward to over the next year or so, and then a little bit further down the road?
>> I think that my getting back into tech is really good for me. I'm enjoying the ability to kind of share experiences with other CEOs. And that's what I tend to do in most of these situations, as I've seen a lot of things over the years, and I know a little because I've seen a lot, and I can help see around corners and help a lot of organizations maneuver things that they don't even know are going to hit them. And so I do that and that's fun. I love the boards. I do a lot of pro bono, advising of companies as well, who are smaller. Athena, I really enjoy. That's a really important thing to me. I want to stay on the salon schedule and I like taking meetings as other members ask. I've got my foundation, that as soon as we get the IRS certification that will get formally launched.
It'll just be our own family money. It'll be a lot of grant writing, giving money for grants at first for those organizations that promote fair transgender employment practices. And then we talked about the documentary briefly. I've got a scripted TV series in development with two really well known production companies, two really well known actors as the anchors, and a very famous director. And we've got a bit of work to do but I'd like to think that we'll see something hopefully out of that, a green light for a project in the next three months.
>> Jeff: That's great.
>> A lot of things going on, a lot of it's fun. I'm learning every day. And it's exciting, really is.
>> That's great, Michele. Well, you know, you got time and energy, turning around companies is not easy, and it's not always pleasant, and it takes a special skill. So to now to be able to free up those talents, to apply to these great causes is tremendous, and good for you.
>> Thank you so much, it's good. 2021 is going to be a great year. 2020 was the best year of my life. 2021, will probably be better, the way it feels.
>> All right, good. Well, hopefully we will get to meet in person at an Athena event before the end of the calendar year. I'm thinking we can meet face-to-face, hopefully before the end of this calendar year, vaccines are rolling.
>> I would love that, I really would. Thank you so much for having me, by the way. This is an honor.
>> Thank you, Michele. It's great to meet you and it's great, fascinating story. Glad it's all kind of worked out. I'm sure there was some not pleasant moments along the way but it sounds like at the end, things have really worked out well for you, so that's terrific.
>> Well, you saw the documentary, you should know what a chocolate mess I was for a while. (chuckles) Yeah, yeah. I'm much better at this and--
>> I don't know how you kept-- The whole thing, I guess, how do you keep all the balls in the air? It was amazing. But the other thing that really comes through in the documentary, is your love of people. There was a scene specifically in that show where you are speaking while you're out having cocktails with your folks. I don't remember if Memphis, or Singapore, or some place not in the US, and talking about the-- Especially time of COVID, how important that was for you, and how important it is for a leader, I think generally to show empathy, to show vulnerability, to show humility, and to be a person. And I think your direct quote from the movie is something to the effect of, a perfect day at work is when we go out, and have a drink with the team, and we start talking about not work, we talk about kids, we talk about hobbies, we talk about sports, we talk about not work.
And so, God, I just can't even imagine, the stress that you must've been under trying to kind of balance these things. You obviously are very good at it but that must've just been nuts at times. Probably make some funny movies.
>> I think work for me has always been fun. It's never been chasing money. Money's always occurred. money arrives, but it's always been about the fun and the puzzle of fix a revenue problem, or fix acquisition problem, or something of that sort. And I enjoy people. And if you have to spend 12 hours a day at work, and if you flip it, how much time do you really spend at home? You spend three hours a night where you see your family during the week. And weekends, you see them a lot of the time, but you spend more time with people at work.
>> Right.
>> At least know who they are and treat them with respect. And that becomes the glue over time that when things get tough with the business, they stick with you because they know you care, and at least you've taken steps to integrate the lives, if you will, work life and a personal life which--
>> Right, Jennifer Tejada, I don't know if you know Jennifer, she's a great lady. She speaks often of the fact that you've got these people working for you for, like you say, 12 hours a day, 15 hours a day, much more than they're with their family, much more than they'd rather be doing other things. So make it worth their while, be conscious, be empathetic, be thinking of the fact that they're doing this for you, and the company, and the board, and the shareholders, and make sure you make it worth their while try to make it worth their while, and give something back. It's not that hard to do.
>> It's not always money. Look, it's time, it's a fair appraisal, it's a compliment, it's asking good questions, it's being available. It's not always money, it's interesting.
>> Yeah. All right, Michele. Well, thank you again for checking in and it has been really fun and great to meet you. And I look forward again to meeting in person hopefully in the not-too-distant future.
>> Sounds good, Jeff. Thank you so much, have a good day.
>> Alrighty. She's Michele, I'm Jeff. You're watching Jeff Frick coming from the home studio. Great to see you and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. Check. All right.
>> Michele: Thank you. [Jeff] Thank you.
