Cloudera Celebrates San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade 2016
Over the last three years, one of the most important changes I’ve seen at Cloudera has been the growing focus on the importance of creating a welcoming environment for all. As any company grows to 1,200+ employees in eight years, important values like inclusion can, at times, be accidentally overlooked (not for a lack of importance, but rather because there’s no concrete formula for creating a safe space for all the wonderful kinds of people in this world — we all have different needs). When I started at Cloudera in 2013, it was a third of the size it is now, but leadership’s laser focus on inclusion has fostered an environment that makes this place feel like the small startup I joined in 2013; the same family I became a part of while I was still in my 20’s.
Last month, it became more apparent to me than ever before that Cloudera is consciously taking the steps needed to make us all feel like we have family here. I’ve never been more proud of my family than I was this year around the time of San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade, the last weekend in June. Let me tell you why:
In the big data industry, Cloudera has carved a name for itself for a lot of reasons, but one thing in particular we’ve been known to do is produce cheeky, nerdy (a.k.a. cool) t-shirts that usually make a pun on a trendy phrase (think bacon, for example), and then relate it to big data/Apache Hadoop at the same time. With San Francisco Pride approaching, it dawned on me at the end of May that we could probably come up with some clever Pride themed t-shirts, but who was going to do it?
I proposed the t-shirt idea to some of our leaders. I had assumed that getting branded t-shirts made was a request reserved for special events by special people, but at the same time, I felt like Pride could easily be one of those special events (especially given the Orlando nightclub mass shooting two weekends before). To make a long story short, the request was approved and various teams pulled together and we decided on a design, rushed an order, and got two hundred shirts printed and delivered on the Friday before the event. When I displayed the t-shirts in our office, they disappeared in less fifteen minutes. I was shocked. I also received ninety-one personal requests for more.
Never did I expect the shirts to disappear so quickly and with such high demand, a.k.a., I had no idea just how many allies I’d been working with for the last three years. I’d always felt welcome as my authentic self at Cloudera, of course, but this was a whole new level of visible support because I know that the majority of people who grabbed a shirt were not a part of the LGBTQ community. It was truly remarkable to see how much enthusiasm was in the office that day to show support for my community.
That Sunday, Clouderans attending Pride wore their shirts in the streets of downtown San Francisco; an army of allies and members of the LGBTQ community marching for equality, donning a rainbow “Query” on the front, and “Cloudera” on the back. This is what being proud feels like. This is what progress looks like. This is what has reinforced the certainty that Cloudera is the right place for me to be.
