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[MUSIC] So welcome for joining us.
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We're really excited to have you here.
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I want to let everyone know that Renee is now in her second week of fun employment, as we like to call it.
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So we just want to welcome you to that life stage we know a lot about it.
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>> [LAUGH] >> Im retired.
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>> [LAUGH] >> Temporarily.
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>> Starting there, I'm just curious, after 30 years at Intel, what was it like the morning you woke up and you knew, you were going to leave?
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>> Yeah, that's a great question.
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>> I don't know that it was one morning, and I apologize, I don't want to have my back to these people.
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I think it was a journey of a couple of things.
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I think everyone in the audience probably knows that I was a candidate to be CEO and I was not selected for co-CEO which was the proposal we made, but to become president.
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So I think that was the first.
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I actually, at the time, was thrilled.
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And I still love the company so much.
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I was so excited to serve in that capacity.
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But what I didn't realize three years ago is that I really did want to be the leader of my own company.
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And that became more clear to me through the journey of the two and a half years up to the point I decided to resign, that I really wanted to be in charge.
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And it turns out, you kind of get to this point in your career where it's like, and being in charge isn't so much about being the boss.
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It's more about setting the strategy and creating the leadership environment that you want, and making the decisions around how you're going to handle things that are more difficult in a certain way.
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And so I kind of, I think it was kind of in the background, but there were a series of events that occurred where I would've made different decisions.
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And I realized at that point that it as time for me to go.
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Because I had a different point of view about what was possible for the company and the path that I would take to get there.
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And I think everybody knows I worked for Andy forever and that he's still my mentor and he would say, if you ever get to the point where you no longer agree with the strategy, what are you doing?
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And so I said, what am I doing?
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>> [LAUGH] >> And then I quit.
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[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] And everyone says to me, that was either the bravest thing that anyone's ever done, or the stupidest.
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>> [LAUGH] >> We're still going to figure that part out.
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And you know what, I did my exit interview last Monday morning.
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And the head of human resources who's worked for me for, I don't know, 18 years, had to do the exit.
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And I told him in advance, six months ago, I said, Matt, you're going to need to get ready for this, this is going to be very emotional for you, he's like, we're going to talk about you.
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I said, no we're not, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to be okay in that meeting, it's going to be you.
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And it went exactly the way I thought.
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They all came in, and they were all upset.
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Are you still going to take our phone calls?
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>> [LAUGH] >> And I'm like geez, okay, I've gotta go because I'm retired now.
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[LAUGH] Yeah, it was hard. It's still hard, right? I love Intel.
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And I think Intel has incredible possibilities, but I would take a different journey.
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>> So, let's talk about that.
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You mentioned having a difference of opinion on the strategy for intel.
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In case the audience doesn't know, a few instances in your career, this came up prior.
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So you had the early idea of Intel housing outsource servers for small businesses well before Amazon and others were doing that.
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The bust of 2001 sort of led them to move away from that strategy.
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Later on you tried to guide Intel towards to be an early adopter of the mobile strategy.
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That again, was an initiative that was not successful.
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Talk to us about what it's like to have that vision, and some of the difficulties of shifting a behemoth like Intel towards achieving it.
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>> Yeah, I think the first, they're kind of two different situations.
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The first one was a kind of an acknowledgement about how people would want to consume technology over the horizon, and as Andy says to me, well you were absolutely 100% directionally correct just a decade too soon.
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[LAUGH] Which is the same as being wrong.
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>> [LAUGH] >> So that was his polite way of saying you blew it.
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Although he, by the way, was the one who, he and Craig, gave us way too much money for that endeavor.
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So that was a different situation.
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That was a situation of making what I would call, managerial, or more junior managerial mistakes.
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It was my first senior management job.
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I wrote a business plan that asked for a lot of money.
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$100 million is a lot of money.
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They gave me 350 million, okay?
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So when somebody gives you way more money than you've asked for, what's the first thing that you say?
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You're in this graduate school business at Stanford. So let's hear it.
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>> [INAUDIBLE] >> No thank you!
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No thank you, I don't need that much money because if you take it, they want a return.
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So you don't want to take more money than your business plan, until you actually know or hit the milestone at which you need it.
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So when people want to over finance you because they think you're a little unicorn.
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You say no thank you, I'll be back.
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And after I prove to you I've made this milestone.
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Okay, that's your little tip of the day.
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>> [LAUGH] >> So I've of course said, my gosh $350 million, that's a lot of money.
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Think of all the things I could build. Which I did.
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And then I got to lay all those people off.
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So I think that was a learning experience on two sides.
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One, I didn't know enough to stick to my plan and on the other side of it, I wasn't a senior enough manager to convince the then CEO that we should stick it out in a smaller capacity, like downscale and then stick it out through the down turn.
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He just lost faith and decided to sell it off, so that's Teradata.
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But the second one is a completely different situation.
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This is a situation where I was a senior manager at the time.
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I was Executive Vice President of the company.
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And the CEO and I disagreed. And he's the boss.
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And I think that I did the right thing for our shareholders and I think it was the right strategy for the company, and I think we'd be a very different company if we had been able to pull it off.
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And Brian and I tried, but it was four years, or maybe five, Robert, right?
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Robert's doing a case about it later.
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There's a case about this.
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And we lost too much momentum, had 2 billion units in the field and was shipping almost 2 billion a year now new.
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And at certain point, in my industry, in any industry, when you have a platform.
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Once you get a network effect going, it's just too late and I think that was the case.
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But that was a case where you had to decide what you believed, and you had to stand up for yourself at risk of political risk and I think that's very dangerous.
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And I think you have to know what's at play.
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And so I of course did what I always do.
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I went and talked to people who've advised me through my career. You need mentors.
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This mentor thing is real, you really do need mentors and I remember that Andy said to me, this is one of those situations where if it doesn't go well, you might have to leave.
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And I say yeah, and he said but you should do what you believe, if you think you're really right.
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Okay, that's not helpful.
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>> [LAUGH] >> Okay, now what?
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But, I knew mobile was right and I believed it.
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I was on the board of Vodafone. I could see the data.
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I understood Paul's position.
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We had a franchise that generates cash that people dream about, and you don't want to disrupt that and pricing coming in below that is a huge compression to your pricing.
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But it's also was consistent with the philosophy of the company which was to always be a first mover and embracing that which is going to disrupt you.
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Right, so it was a typical Christianson situation.
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Seemed pretty strategically straightforward and we couldn't execute it.
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And the why couldn't we execute it, why?
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Because people do what they think the CEO wants even if they know it's wrong. That's what I learned.
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And that's a very dangerous phenomena that people want to please and a lot of large companies, although I see it in start ups too, are very hierarchical.
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And so they're like, hey, this is what the boss wants.
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And we hear you Renee and we know you're right, and we want to do that and we would do it, and we would start with our hearts sworn in it.
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And then when we have resource allocate, it all comes down to money, right, or resources, people, money.
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Whenever resource allocation conflict, it always goes the other way because you know that's what the boss wants. >> Yeah, yeah.
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So you mentioned Andy and you mentioned mentorship.
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You started in till 28 years ago- >> I did.
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>> As a [LAUGH] technical- >> But I was a lot younger.
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>> [LAUGH] As a technical assistant to Andy Grove, who is sort of a Silicon Valley great.
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>> That wasn't my first job, but it was right at the seven year mark on my career. >> Okay. >> Yeah.
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>> And so he was famous for his confrontational nature, he like to call it constructive confrontation.
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What did you learn while you were working so closely with him and how did that inform how you decided to manage when you got to the president role and throughout the rest of your career with Intel.
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>> Well, I think Andy had a couple of pieces of advice that he didn't always follow, but that were actually very, very important.
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I mean, we don't always, all aren't self-consistent, but one of them was to watch what people do, not what they say.
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And he used to say, we'd be negotiating a partnership or I'm an employer giving a presentation and it say, yeah, you hear what they saying but what are they really doing.
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because whatever people are really doing that's actually their strategy, right. Not what they're saying.
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So I have used that technique, I can't, I mean probably almost every day,right?
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I read what people are going to say to me and then I kind of figure out what have they actually been doing, what's their real action?
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If they are consistent then you have one point of view and if they're not, you don't.
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The other one is clarity imperative.
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And this is really important.
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[LAUGH] Andy used to be ruthless and one of my first, I love this story.
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So I'm, all of, I don't know, 28 years old or something, and I go into this meeting and the guy comes in and he's got all this and he's going to pitched for a new networking business.
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We were in and out of networking probably four times at Intel.
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And he begins pitching but he's actually talking about something different.
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[LAUGH] And he's like that's not the topic of this meeting.
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And he's like, well, yeah, no.
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Yeah, [LAUGH] I've told this story before in one of your classes and he [LAUGH] goes, yeah, no, that's not what we're here to discuss.
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You're not being clear, you don't have your act together and he said, meeting is over, he got up and walked out.
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It was a room full of people, I'm like, that's kind of cool.
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So but the clarity imperative is really knowing what it is that matters and being able to write it down in five slides.
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Like the five slide test actually is hard and I think that's one of the things that he really forced.
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He forced intellectual rigor and clarity and that is something that has really been defining of my leadership style because I will tend to find the thing that somebody's either hiding or not saying and go after it. And that is so Andy.
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And I'll find it like in a millisecond, it used to take me longer but now, not so much.
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>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] And I'll go as soon as I find it, I know there's something there and there's something they're not telling me.
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And there's a reason they're not telling you.
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And whatever that is, that's what's really going on. >> Very interesting.
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I hope you guys are writing this down. >> It just happened.
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I just told you the story in the green room.
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I just joined the board of Citi, and the CFO came in and he was talking about all these things, and I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, and he skipped over something.
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In the normal course of managing corporate finance of a company of scale, Citi's about the same size as Intel.
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You would ask the following basic things, and so of course I just asked the question he glossed over, I made him go back twice and I knew there was something there.
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>> [LAUGH] So okay, in terms of talking about getting on boards and thinking about how you analyze what's there versus maybe what's being unsaid.
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You have said that you wanted to take on a CEO role somewhere? >> Yeah.
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>> What's your process for deciding what exactly you're looking for?
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>> That is a great question.
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So my process isn't very good.
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And my mentor explained to me that I really, really sucked at this.
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I made a list of the things I didn't want to do, because [LAUGH] I decided that that I could do so many things, and I was interested in so many things.
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And I really love my work at Vodafone, for example, and that's completely different from running a semiconductor company.
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And I find Citi very challenging and Finn Tech and then what's going to happen, I'm really interested in that.
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So then I said, okay, but what are the things that really I don't want to ever do again.
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The top of my list, my list right now has three maybe four things on it.
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First, no bad boards, because at the end of the day, when you're CEO, it's all about the board.
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If you have a dysfunctional board, and a board that isn't supportive, or that has their own internal dynamic and politics, life's too short for that.
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No bad boards, no bad bosses, well I actually don't really want a boss ever again, [LAUGH] that's another topic.
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And I want to do something that matters.
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because there's lots of stuff that you can do, there's lots of work in the world.
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But at this point for me, I want to do something that really contributes and changes that matters.
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There are something big changes in front of us that I think I could go work on.
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I have considered starting my own company.
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I'm a scale operator, that's what I am, I know that.
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I've voluntarily advised start ups and venture back, and I could give them advice but I'm definitely a scale operator.
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So I've thought a lot about starting my own, but that's 24/7, 365, which I've done for 28 years.
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So I decided not to make any of those decisions and to take a short break which has been one week long.
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>> [LAUGH] And so far, what do you think?
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>> I think I should get a job.
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[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] >> I woke up this morning, and I thought, thank God I have to go to Stanford today.
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At least I have a reason to get dressed.
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>> [LAUGH] >> So, I wake up at 5:30, and I read my mail, which now only takes me about 15 minutes, and then I read all the news, and now it's 6:15.
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Then I work out, and I have elementary school children.
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Yeah, that's a whole another topic.
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So I can drive them to school, which I find fascinating.
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And I also learned something important, you can make any job stressful.
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Okay, so apparently driving the carpool can be very stressful.
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>> [LAUGH] >> Not for me, but for others.
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[LAUGH] I'm like, seriously, we're not solving here ladies, let's just move it along.
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[LAUGH] >> So how is your family factoring into your decision to >> One of the reasons that I decided I should take at least more than a week off is My older son is looking at colleges so we're doing the college tour thing.
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And I'm getting him ready to go off to college or apply to college next year.
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So it's factoring in, but my kids are worried.
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They're like, mom seriously?
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You're really high energy. We [NOISE].
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>> [LAUGH] >> We don't want you around.
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So I have way too many boards.
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I have four boards right now.
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Everyone's like, are you going to be a professional director?
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I'm like I want to say no I'm not, but I think I am right now, but not forever, because I do want to stay active.
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And yeah, I'm just, most of the jobs that are for CEOs, if you're not.
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I'm an entrepreneur, but I'm a large scale entrepreneur. Are midcap.
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And midcap might not work for me because like having one product and $600 billion of revenue is like not my sweet spot, yeah.
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I'm more kind of in the 70 to 100 range.
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[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] >> Yeah because when I started looking at the balance sheet of Citi, right?
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Those numbers when they talk about things we're talking about you know multiple trillions dollars made in a day.
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And you know the billion dollars this way and that way and that's the kind of a scale of Intel it's kind of a scale of Vodafone phone.
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It's kind of a scale of Oracle.
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So that's kind of the mentality that I operate in and I think what happens Even if you shift jobs a lot you should kind of develop skills in certain areas and you have a certain kind of capability.
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>> Talking about scale on the level that you're talking about scale, and then talking about being an entrepreneur, a lot of times those things are very much at odds.
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Or actually, I think I have a quote from you right here that says, we have a tolerance for risk taking.
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We have a tolerance for taking measured risks in betting.
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It's not a tolerance for failure.
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As an entrepreneur, how do you think about that?
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How do you sort of rectify and what does that really mean?
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>> Well, I think at the scale that we take risks, or I've taken risks, and I have failed. And we do fail.
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I mean, everybody who takes risks, fails.
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Failures part of taking risks, right?
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And you do have to have a tolerance for failure, so that's probably not really accurate that.
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I said that, I was wrong.
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>> [LAUGH] >> I mean you really have to be able to fail.
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You have to be measured though and I think one of the things that I would say is that in a large entity you can take bigger risks, but you have to ring fence. What's the downside?
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And so I do tend to understand like how much are we going to really lose, how long could we really sustain this.
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You need to know those things because large entities have very low tolerance for loss, very low tolerance in general.
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And so I think that's one of the things that works against entrepreneurship.
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It's very unusual that you end up in Google, right? Or even Oracle.
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I mean, they're transforming this company to be a cloud company, at risk of a licensed business that prints money, right?
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So, but that will make them a bigger and greater company, and sustain them the next couple of decades, so It's really one of these things where you have to understand what your tolerance is. >> Mm-hm.
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>> And large companies just don't have that much tolerance.
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And that's why they start stuff and stop stuff and start stuff and stop.
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So my biggest criticism of Intel is that we always quit stuff right before we could have made it, you know? >> Yeah.
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>> You look at a company like Mellanox, a company you cannot even afford to buy.
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Many of you probably don't know this.
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It was a company that was ex Intel people who took technology that Intel quit on. Right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
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>> How are they doing that now?
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>> They're doing pretty good.
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They're doing just fine thanks.
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I mean there's tons of them.
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I mean they're all they're littered throughout tech. >> Yeah.
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>> Things that we gave up on. >> Yeah. >> Even data center. >> Yeah.
20:09
What I hear a lot of in that response is that you really knew Intel you had a 28-year career there, you had gone through different divisions.
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You were sort of a subject matter expert on Intel and its tolerance for risk-taking among many other things.
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>> And its personality in the company. >> Right.
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And its personality and its culture.
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Do you feel any insecurities about stepping into a new role where you won't have 28 years with the company and you won't be a subject matter expert in that respect.
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>> You know, I think I did for a long time. I don't now, but I did.
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And I think that kept me from ever leaving for a long time.
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I think that's why people stay at companies so long.
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They love the work, they know the situation well.
20:55
And all the things they don't like they know what they're about, right? I dont.
20:59
I don't have that fear anymore because I think one of the things that if you step back from the day to day, either there's a lot of pattern recognition in the behaviors of companies.
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Different sizes and irrespective of the content, a lot of the same challenges and opportunities exist about consolidations in the market, about whatever's going on in the competitive.
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And you can actually apply, I mean working at semiconductors has nothing to do with banking, and I've been at the bank for the last couple weeks being indoctrinated and I realized, wow pattern recognition, there are a lot of similarities.
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When you have 200,000 employees working in a whole bunch of geographies, having a whole bunch of challenges, you have a regulatory regime that overlays the competitive environment, you're like, wow, I get this.
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I understand some of the, and then actually it's been really exciting.
21:59
Like wow I could do something completely different. >> Yeah.
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>> Although I think banking's actually a tech business now. >> [LAUGH] Well. You heard it here first.
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>> No I mean everybody knows that right.
22:11
I mean the next billion people aren't going to go open bank accounts. >> Yeah. >> It's a tech business. >> Yeah.
22:18
And so that makes it more appealing to you? >> Yeah. I love it.
22:23
I think it's fascinating.
22:25
I think that entire way that economies work and the movement of money and the concept of crypto-currencies.
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And I think fintech and what's going to happen in digital economies is going to be one of the most interesting things that are going to happen in the next ten years, and that everything we've been doing.
22:46
One of the things that I realized, I've been realizing is I've been on this journey to what comes next is that everything I've been working on for the last 30 years is actually infrastructure.
22:56
Like everyone had to have computers to be able to do any of this other stuff.
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We had to actually be able to build computers at a cost that allowed them to be pervasive.
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And then all this, I mean I can not begin to tell you, unless you work in semiconductors how complicated it is to build semiconductors.
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It is so complex I mean it's mind blowingly complex and dangerous.
23:18
And we build these huge chemical buildings, and they cost us 7 billion dollars, and then we make these things that are so small no one can even see them, and they want to pay us 20 bucks for them. That kind of sucks.
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And at the end of the day, it really does. It's a hard business.
23:32
It is building the framework for everything that's built on top of it.
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And everything that's built on top of it now, computing is so powerful and so pervasive.
23:42
And mobile is so amazing, you can do like, I mean, you do not need to go in a bank anymore.
23:49
And I think security and identities, the identity thing, I'm just super excited about that.
23:55
There's so much green space of what's going to happen in identity management.
24:00
>> You mentioned wanting to do something that matters. >> Yeah.
24:04
One of our application questions that we all have to answer when we come here is, what matters most to us and why.
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What matters to you, what falls into the category of something that matters?
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>> What matters to me is making the world a safer place.
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So the things that I find myself working on, my free jobs, my volunteer jobs [LAUGH] are for the government and in cyber.
24:31
And I think the, even at Citigroup I started working on their anti-money laundering and their cyber team.
24:42
I think the ability to know what's safe and good is going to become even more and more important to people in a world that's less physical, right?
24:54
And I think that's a very important frontier because we have not made a lot of not fundamental breakthroughs.
25:01
We're really good in detection and repair.
25:04
We're not really good in prevention, and we're not really, really good in identity management. So, known good. >> Yeah. >> Right?
25:12
>> How do you think about that in terms of, you said those have been volunteer roles. >> They have.
25:17
>> And you were appointed by President Obama to help out with some of the critical infrastructure work.
25:22
How do you make the decision between what is going to be sort of a side service project, and what's going to be one of the main tenants of your career?
25:33
>> Well, I used to think people would always say this, they say this all the time.
25:38
You should follow your passion, the money will fall and I was like that's just crap, that doesn't really happened.
25:41
But it turns out it might be right, I mean maybe I was wrong by that.
25:45
Because I keep drifting towards the same kind of projects and even as I got on to the board of Citi, that was the first thing that I started to get involved in.
25:53
So, I think that that's my passion.
25:55
So I think it's going to' become the primary, right?
25:59
Because I really think it's important work and it's not getting done.
26:04
And there's a lot of small companies doing bits and pieces of it.
26:08
When the problem's in security and the problem I attempted to go after inside of Intel, maybe that was a mistake and should of done it outside of Intel, is to actually consolidate into a platform.
26:19
There's no security platform.
26:21
You know how, you guys are mostly, well not everybody's tuned into those.
26:26
But in the early days of computing right, there's all these little weird things, different applications and then Microsoft, thank the Lord, put it all together in a platform for us.
26:34
And as much as we'd like to bitch and complain about them, they changed the world.
26:37
The same way that Google did for application development in the cloud, right now Amazon's doing for services.
26:44
So those platforms are quite important, because what they do is they move the entire industry forward to a place where a whole bunch of innovation comes on top of it.
26:52
So that's what's happening in Amazon.
26:54
Amazon is the new great infrastructure, kind of like Intel was in the 80s and 90s, right, building the base infrastructure.
27:03
So I think that security, that hasn't happened.
27:07
There's no galvanizing way to think about how to put all this stuff together.
27:12
There's different point solutions.
27:13
So that's a piece of work that needs to be done.
27:16
>> So while you were at Intel, you were the head of Intel's diversity initiative.
27:21
The company pledged $300 million to recruiting and retaining more minorities and women within the company.
27:29
Was that something you drifted to or was that something you sought out?
27:34
>> That is a great question.
27:35
The answer is I did not drift to it, it reported to me and I embraced it wholeheartedly at a point in my career where I thought that by me lending myself to it, it would make it more viable.
27:53
Up until the point that I was the president of the company, I would say they had to beg me to do women's initiatives. I hate them.
28:00
I do, I think a bunch of women talking to themselves about how things are does nothing.
28:07
So I think one of the things that was my big achievement, was to get a whole bunch of men involved.
28:12
The he for she thing that's going on, Intel has kind of the version of that.
28:17
Which is internal, the men involved in having group dialogue about diversity.
28:22
And diversity is beyond women, it's everyone and we weren't doing a good job with that.
28:30
So I think we were able to do a broader job in diversity.
28:34
I was able to lend my position authority to make it really get legs inside the company and to some extent, outside the company.
28:43
And so, I was excited and passionate about that.
28:47
I have a very strong sense of justice, which is probably why I'm so attracted to the defense of cyber crime, right?
28:56
And I don't like that prior to this year, we would publish data that would say that women didn't make as much as men now.
29:04
That's been fixed, so that's a fabulous accomplishment.
29:08
We just released the data last week.
29:11
But there's so much work to be done.
29:14
I'm happy that we're having a dialogue, I'm happy to see that there's a dialogue about it at Citi, there's a dialog about it at Vodafone, there's a dialogue about it everywhere, that's great.
29:22
But it's a lot of work, it's not done in one year.
29:27
>> So, I'll give you another quote from, this time, your mentor Andy Grove.
29:33
He said, that kind of puts hair on your chest, to do that and survive.
29:39
As a woman in software, in a company that's a manufacturing company, to do that, you have to have strength.
29:46
As a woman at Intel, what was it that put hair on your chest? >> Talk.
29:51
>> [LAUGH] >> I'm trying to decide where to go with that.
29:56
>> [LAUGH] >> So many think whoop, showing up for work everyday.
30:03
When I started Intel, which was a complete fluke.
30:08
I was working at a startup, that Intel acquired.
30:12
And my family, I grew up in Silicon Valley. My dad worked at HP.
30:15
All my friend's parents worked at Intel.
30:17
I was like, yeah I am so not working at that old man company. It is not happening.
30:22
But then Intel bought us and then I was like 22 years old and I had no money and I wanted to get my master's.
30:28
So I'm like I'm going to have to work there for a while.
30:32
And I went into it with no idea, like I didn't apply to Intel and want to work for Intel and build semiconductors, and I had no idea what the semiconductor industry was like.
30:45
So I was blissfully naive for about ten years.
30:47
>> [LAUGH] >> And then one day I got this review, and you know how employees aren't supposed to talk about their pay with other employees, like that's against the rules at all companies except they all do it, right?
31:01
So then I found out that I made way less than all the guys, and I'm like, wait a minute. Woah, wait a minute.
31:07
So I went and asked my boss.
31:09
He was a legendary guy who works in this valley and I said, why am I being paid less, because I have the same amount of experience and I've got a master's degree and they don't, and I manage more people and my projects are really successful?
31:20
And he's like, you probably make as much money as you deserve to make.
31:25
Holy shit, so what did I do?
31:27
What do you do when that happens? You call your mother.
31:30
So I called my mother and I said, what do you think he's saying?
31:33
She says, I think he's saying because you're a girl you don't get to make as much.
31:36
And I said, that sounds wrong, my mother's like, it is, do something.
31:39
You know my mother, my mother was the first Santa Clara County sheriff, a woman.
31:42
>> [LAUGH] >> So I called her and my gun toting sheriff mother.
31:47
>> [LAUGH] >> And she says, this is an outcry, you should cry AFLCIO and I'm like, God.
31:52
[LAUGH] We're not unionized, Mom.
31:53
>> [LAUGH] >> So I go to HR and I say, this is typical Renee I said, I think there is something wrong with the data and they are like, no there is, we can't show you that data.
32:04
I'm like, but you have to.
32:05
You have to prove to me that I make the same amount as the men.
32:08
And see this was the beginning of a journey where I fought the system.
32:15
I fought the whole time, and I didn't realize I fought the whole time till the day I quit.
32:21
And I was sitting there, and I was thinking to myself. God I'm tired. 28 years.
32:26
because I fought the system the whole time.
32:28
A system that was resurrected in an old model that Bryan and I, and I think Bryan's doing an outstanding job here has revolutionized the culture of Intel.
32:40
I was working so hard on that.
32:42
And I give him a lot of credit for that because that was really hard.
32:46
But my God, 28 years ago can you imagine? And I was the only one.
32:52
So then I got into this habit.
32:53
This came out of this dumb review.
32:55
Every meeting for like a decade I'd write in the corner how the men to one ratio.
32:58
So it'd be like 28 to one.
33:01
25 to one, so this went on for a really long time and so I think what really made me the person I am today is I fought for equality from the day I got there.
33:10
And every single year, HR be like, God, here she comes again.
33:14
I make them show me the data.
33:15
And if anyone inked ahead of me and they didn't get as good of a review as me, that was it. That was it. I laid down the law.
33:21
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] I'm, and I never got a promotion I did not ask for.
33:25
>> Like mother, like daughter? >> Exactly.
33:29
>> Well, so you mentioned Bryan in that comment, and you guys were touted when you came on, you as president, he as CEO, management team as having complementary skill sets.
33:41
But that was a first for Intel, the dual team. Can you talk?
33:45
>> Well, as the first to appoint the dual team together but it wasn't the first dual team. >> Right, okay. Appoint them.
33:51
>> Because, well, yeah, that's right. >> Yeah.
33:53
>> Because well, I want to correct that because Gordon and Andy were a team for 17, 18 years.
33:59
Andy was president and CEO and Gordon was the CEO and chairman.
34:03
And then Andy and Craig were In the same set.
34:06
Paul did not have a partner for eight years, there was an eight year gap, and then they appointed both of us at the same time which was.
34:14
>> So how'd the board come to that decision, and what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of the co-leadership team.
34:24
>> Well, I'm a fan of co-leadership.
34:26
I still am, and even though I decided I wanted to go lead on my own, I'm a fan of co-leadership.
34:31
And I would have a co-leader.
34:35
I think it works really well at Oracle, it's working very well there.
34:38
These jobs are too big for one person.
34:42
When you have 200 plus thousand people, I mean by city has a co-leadership.
34:46
They have a CEO and they have a president.
34:49
You just need someone to be doing some of the other stuff, right?
34:52
I mean, these are just big jobs. So I'm a fan of that.
34:57
I think that when you have complementary skills, that's fabulous, right, and I do.
35:04
I think the complexity between Brian and I was that I have always been a strategist and a market facing externally, doing partnerships, building business, running PNLs.
35:18
And Brian had been very internally facing as COO, and we really were in role reversal.
35:24
And I think that was one of the more complex dynamics for us because Brian needed to learn how to develop and lead a corporate strategy.
35:33
And, that's an uncomfortable thing for the CEO to have the president be more adept at that which is the primary job of the CEO.
35:41
I do think, to be fair to Brian, he was extraordinarily, gracious and letting me settle out of the strategy and do things.
35:51
But a certain point in his tenure he needs to run the company, he is the CEO and that's the decision the board made.
35:56
That was the point at which I said look, this is your job Brian, you're the one who's going to die or live on the decisions.
36:04
If you want to go this direction go but I don't agree. But you get to decide.
36:08
You're CEO, so I shouldn't work here anymore.
36:11
And as painful as that conversation was it was the right one and I think very adult, right?
36:17
because he needed to set the strategy.
36:18
It was time for him to do that and I that was the complexity of our particular situation.
36:24
Is that I was more skilled to be a CEO in a second.
36:29
>> Is that a conversation you wish you had had earlier in your partnership?
36:34
>> No, I actually think it went exactly as it should of gone.
36:37
Because I think at the point we were at, Intel had been led by an external person.
36:42
For the first time in history the company would have hit sudden death.
36:45
Company was a huge inflection, there was a lot of unrest about what direction to do, we had to do a lot of changes that aren't really apparent to you guys, but we had to do a lot of cultural changes around comp and benefits and just a lot of stuff that hadn't been dealt with for a while.
37:04
So, I think the right thing for the company was stability.
37:07
I think the right thing for the company was continuity.
37:12
And Brian's brought a lot of change and he's on his path with what he wants to do with IOT, and I think that's fabulous.
37:22
So I think we have time now for questions.
37:25
We'll start with one question from Twitter and then we'll head out to the audience. So please. >> Twitter.
37:29
>> Please be sure to raise your hands if you have a question, and they'll find you up and down the aisles.
37:34
>> So thank you both for wonderful insights and great banter which I always a fan of.
37:38
So the first question that comes through is asking you know you've been in Silicone Valley your whole life.
37:43
If you could change one thing about it, be its culture, attitude, interest, whatever what would it be? >> Wow.
37:50
First of all I should say I love it here. I love the valley.
37:53
There's not a lot I would change except I would like it to be a little bit, I'd like the diversity discussion to be more serious, in the sense that we got more traction.
38:09
It's one thing for big public companies to do work on diversity, but the predominance of the employment around this valley is not big, huge companies anymore.
38:18
It's midcaps and entrepreneurial.
38:21
People like to move around a lot, and I still think the diversity issue plagues Silicone Valley.
38:27
I cannot tell you how much time I spent advising or spending time with really wonderful companies still largely led and financed.
38:43
>> Hi there, thanks so much for taking my question.
38:46
You mentioned briefly that you've never received a promotion that you didn't ask for.
38:51
Can you just elaborate on that a bit?
38:53
>> Well, so this is fascinating and it turns out, has been through, and I'm on a lot of compensation committees, so in addition to Intel, right, and see this over and over again.
39:08
I am, as I admitted, not the kind of big women's person.
39:13
But I'm going to sound like I am with these comments, but anyway.
39:17
Women tend to not apply for jobs unless they can hit every single criteria and they think they're perfect at it.
39:23
So what happens is in interviews, women will come in and they will tell us that 10% of the things that they are not good at so therefore they're not good enough for the job.
39:30
Their male counterparts will come in and they'll be 10% qualified of the job and they'll tell us all the reasons we should hire them anyway.
39:37
And this happens in every company that I'm involved with and they're all big multinational companies.
39:43
And so, the same thing happens with promotions.
39:47
I managed in a company of men, I managed men.
39:51
For 28 years, and some women, thankfully but not that many, and they always ask for promotion.
39:56
Every year at their review, you're not going to get promoted every year, but every year I got asked for.
40:02
And I never, women never ask for promotion.
40:05
Now I am an outlier, I just behaved like my peers.
40:08
All I did was behave like all the guys that I worked with, and it worked out really great, but I don't know what that is, it's a cultural thing.
40:17
We see it everywhere, it's in all of the diversity data.
40:20
If you read anything online, it'll tell you about this phenomena.
40:24
So, I think one of the things you just have to get comfortable with is that people ask to be promoted.
40:30
They do, and then asking to be promoted you get an idea about what their aspirations are, and you tell them what they need to do to be promoted, and then if they actually do it, you're better off as a leader in a company, because you got a whole bunch of output and then you get to promote them.
40:44
You don't get that same dialog usually so, I think that's the thing that I always did.
40:49
I'm sure I was super annoying.
40:52
I'm really sure I was, but >> Thank you Rene for taking my question.
40:57
I would like to thank you because I work for Soft Resolutions Group at Intel under your leadership. >> Thank you.
41:02
>> I came through the diversity that I just loved Intel, so thank you so much.
41:08
My question is how many more decades would the Moore's law still be true, how fast do you think it?
41:16
>> Moore's law is well alive and well and as I no longer work at Intel, I'm not in a position to comment beyond that, but I will say that it is absolutely fine, that is the least of the worries of things that.
41:29
>> Not everyone know what Moore's law is.
41:30
>> So, Moore's law is the ability to create more performance every couple of years more in a, in a smaller transistor package and, and or in a denser lithography, so people talk about going 28 nanometers to 10 nanometers or this or that, it's very technical and exciting but the fact is what it's done is it's allowed us to sequence the human genome in a few days versus a year.
42:01
And it's allowed us to find unique treatments for cancer at the Knight Cancer Institute in Oregon.
42:08
As a result of being able to build basically what it, ten years ago would have been a room full of super computers on a single chip and that's the benefit of Moore's Law and it's what fuels the entire you know kind of digital economy including self driving cars which require massive amounts of compute power and
42:31
some of the bigger breakthroughs, I mean even in cyber and personal identity and there's a lot about algorithmic profiling, so a lot of that requires just tremendous amount to compute that we didn't have available to us and the Moore's Law has delivered that to us in the last decade and will continue. And that's why I say Intel has been a fundamental infrastructure company, right?
42:47
And that's why I say Intel has been a fundamental infrastructure company, right?
42:51
because what they're doing is building kind of the blocks upon which Tesla will make a self-driving car, or Google, or whomever.
43:03
>> Hello Rene, as a former Intel employee working at LTD.
43:07
Thanks for- >> Look at all these adult people.
43:08
>> [LAUGH] Yeah, all these people.
43:11
My question will be but culture I see there in Oregon the Logic Technology Development Department for a few years and I found this hardware culture.
43:24
You know about chip manufacturing we value creativity but at same time we value more or at least equally disciplined in execution.
43:34
Do you find that culture is somehow, separated from this more of a software culture like Google, Facebook, Uber, we totally evaluate person our individual individual creativity.
43:52
Do you find that art is part of Intel's current situation?
44:00
>> So, I don't think that any company that gets to the scale of Google doesn't value discipline in execution.
44:07
I think, at a certain point in the life cycle of any company, you get to the point where it doesn't matter what you're doing, discipline and execution is critical to the results.
44:17
And so, I think Intel is not unique, I mean if you were building car batteries, you'd be in the same situation as semiconductors, right?
44:27
Very similar technology, and that discipline and execution comes from health and safety.
44:33
I find a very similar culture discipline execution over content excitement about new innovation, I'd say Vodafone.
44:42
Because health and safety kind of overrules sometimes innovation.
44:49
So you get excited about something but it might inject some kind of risk in to the health and safety, so when you build things that people die building, right?
44:57
Which when you are putting up a mobile tower, people fall off them unfortunately or they electrocute themselves.
45:04
So when you're in that kind of a business, health and safety tends to put a process regime or if you're in a highly regulated business like the bank.
45:13
It puts a process regime over innovation and I think that's a difficulty and I think as a leader you have to actually create a avenue for innovation, that's why you see so many big companies creating these innovations.
45:27
And you kind of wonder like if innovation on this side doesn't really help, so it's complicated.
45:33
You have to be able to have a process where the innovation occurs and you pull it back in, right?
45:35
, because this companies you get to certain point and you just have process.
45:45
It's unfortunate, that is part of scale. >> Hi, Rene. Thanks for joining us.
45:52
You spoke about the importance of having good mentors in your career.
45:57
For many of us, we'll be going out to the real world, again, and then hopefully- >> I'll be with you.
46:03
[LAUGH] >> Yes, so I'd like to hear from you, best practices on finding those good mentors and setting the stage such that they want to invest in you.
46:14
>> I think a mentorship is a two-way street.
46:17
So, I think finding a great mentor isn't so much about finding the person, it's also what can you add to that person as well.
46:25
And so, for a great mentor, or I'll give you an example.
46:29
One of the people that is in my Little Mentor circle is this wonderful guy who works at Google, but he is bidirectional mentorship right?
46:40
Like he's like you're I am like LinkedIn seriously?
46:45
Like I have a LinkedIn site.
46:46
He's like your LinkedIn sucks I'm redoing it.
46:49
So I mean so it's like bidirectional, I'm coaching him about you know from a career evolution perspective and he's moving into management.
46:55
He's never been a big manager, that kind of thing.
46:58
So I think it has to be bidirectional, so you have to find someone that you not only can advise you, but that you can actually help them either by bringing them forward in technology or your interests or whatever.
47:08
When they're not bi directional, they're a bummer and it's really hard.
47:11
Like the person never wants to get time with you, you'll find they're like busy always and it's like a burden, right?
47:18
Like they want to say yes to you but it's like what are they getting out of it, kind of thing.
47:24
So also, if you're an entrepreneur, a lot of people who may mentor you, sometimes would invest with you and then it get very involve in helping you be successful.
47:32
>> Well I'm going to take the last question. >> We're done.
47:37
>> And it has to do with your MBA.
47:41
Sheryl Sandberg recently put out an article saying that MBAs are not really needed in the tech industry.
47:49
I promise we will not take offense, but do you agree? >> No. >> Okay, tell us why?
47:54
>> [LAUGH] >> Well, not because I have one I mean, or that I love to go to the MBA program here that I beg just for them to put the program together for Intel people or that.
48:04
I think, that education in general and I think this undergraduate and graduate Teaches you not only frameworks but tools to think. Right?
48:17
And I think the MBA gives you an opportunity for having had some experience in the world, right?
48:24
And being out there, to then come back and get frameworks and, I talk a lot about pattern recognition, because leadership is about pattern recognition.
48:34
It's about seeing multiple patterns occurring, understanding what that competitive move might be, or recognizing that you've seen this before and what happened the last time.
48:43
And only through, I think, you know, understanding the frameworks of competitive strategy, you know, economics, those kinds of things, you need to know that.
48:53
And by the way, CEOs should be able to read a freaking balance sheet and an income statement and know the difference.
48:59
And if they can't, that's a problem. Really it is.
49:02
And there are those that the first time they ever have to deal with corporate finances when they become the CEO, and you're like, really?
49:09
because now it's complicated, because the world is flat.
49:11
And you have to deal with FX, and you have to deal with hedging.
49:15
And you might be like, what are you talking about Renee?
49:17
I'm going to run like a 100 million dollar company, or a 10 million dollar company.
49:20
Yeah, good luck with that.
49:21
I mean, the economy, you're going to sell to people all over the world. Guess what?
49:25
You're going to have to deal with tax and trade.
49:26
because you have to deal with the tax issues when you sell in all these places.
49:29
An online tax, that's super complicated. How about safe harbor?
49:33
So this is the stuff you learn when you're in an MBA program.
49:36
You learn about the kind of environment of doing business and then you have contacts and even if you don't know something, you know, I should probably call a lawyer about that, you know, right?
49:50
Or how to set up an entity in a foreign place.
49:53
So, I don't agree with that.
49:55
I think we need, we have a whole generation right now of super smart people who are at 10 year mark in their career, 10 to 12 year mark in their career, who want to be leaders, who have absolutely no skills to be leaders. Zip!
50:11
They should all come in the MBA program, because they don't know anything.
50:14
They all grow up in unicorns, and they make tons of money, and they are like, well I've done these like 5,000 projects.
50:19
And you're like, that's great, but you know nothing about all this other stuff because, see, the problem is, once you get out of running a project or being in engineering or being in sales or being in marketing, you have to actually then just do the boring stuff, which is running the corporation.
50:33
And that stuff is like a whole different level of stuff, it's not that other stuff.
50:38
It's the, gee, I wish people wouldn't sue me for anti-trust. That really sucks.
50:42
>> [LAUGH] >> Well it'd be good if you actually knew what anti-trust law was, right?
50:46
So [LAUGH] and I taught it, just at another business school, where some students didn't understand that some of the things they were proposing were against the law.
50:56
And then you learn that, right?
50:58
You're in a business school class and they say, that's great, except that there's an anti-trust law against that, right?
51:02
You can't combine with those people.
51:04
So, Cheryl and I, I guess we'll have to disagree on that.
51:07
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] >> If everyone would join me in thanking Renee James.
51:11
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you. >> [APPLAUSE] >> Thanks. [MUSIC]