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Women make up just 20% of the tech industry workforce, according to CBRE’s 2025 Scoring Tech Talent report. Hispanic and Latino Americans, roughly 20% of the U.S. population and its fastest-growing demographic group, account for just 10.8% of certified public accountants nationally.
Those numbers are the backdrop against which Hispanic Heritage Month begins today. But at Serverfarm, we’re marking it with a story that says more about representation than any statistic could, even though the statistics are exactly why the story matters.
It’s the story of Claudia Vazquez, a first-generation college student who walked into our office intimidated and found her footing through two mentors who happened to look like her, sound like her, and remember exactly what it felt like to be in her position.
“My first day at Serverfarm, I was very nervous,” Claudia says. “I thought it was very corporate kind of aesthetic, if that makes sense? I didn’t really know how to communicate or who to talk to, what networking kind of looked like in a corporate office.”
Then she noticed the snacks. “You can have whatever you want,” someone told her. “I was like, oh my god, this is great.”
It sounds small. It wasn’t. For a first-generation student, walking into any corporate office for the first time comes with a hidden syllabus nobody hands you on how to talk to senior leadership, what to ask for, or whether you belong in the room at all. Claudia didn’t have that playbook walking in. She built it here, one relationship at a time, starting with two people: Jovana and Liliana.
Jovana became Claudia’s day-to-day mentor on the work itself, walking her through a forecasting project across Serverfarm’s entire client portfolio, projecting revenue property by property, and looping her into contracts, amendments, and legal questions. “I worked alongside legal to ask any questions,” Claudia says. “It was a lot of words, but I got through it.”
Liliana’s mentorship started somewhere else entirely. Claudia met her when Jovana brought her in to teach an Excel skill and the connection was immediate. “I also really noticed that she spoke Spanish to me,” Claudia recalls, “and that was the moment that I instantly clicked with her. I knew, okay, I’m safe in a way. There’s someone I can relate to.”
Liliana saw it too. “I saw a little, I saw me in her, right?” she says. “And I knew that she was going to have a place at Serverfarm, or anywhere, with that kind of eagerness and determination.”
What followed wasn’t a mentorship program on a calendar. It was a standing weekly meeting, built because Liliana chose to build it. “First generation students walk into an unknown,” Liliana says. “I’ve mentioned to her how important it is to speak up and ask questions. There are no stupid questions. If there’s something you don’t understand, keep asking.”
For Claudia, meeting Liliana meant something specific: seeing a Hispanic woman already established in a field where that’s rare. “In the accounting field, you don’t really see a lot of women, if I’m being honest — it’s a very male-dominated field,” Claudia says. “And on top of it, you don’t really see a lot of Hispanic women. So when I first saw her, I was kind of shocked. There’s a Hispanic woman in a position I’d want to be in one day.”
Those opening numbers explain why that moment landed the way it did. Liliana wasn’t just a mentor. She was proof of concept.
That’s also, by Liliana’s own account, exactly why she said yes to mentoring in the first place. “She stepped up as part of our first official internship program here at Serverfarm,” a colleague notes. “She understands how incredibly important interns are to the business, but she also loves to give back.”
Liliana didn’t sugarcoat what it would take. “She told me: nothing is going to be handed to me. If I have a question, ask it. If I want to get an answer, go look for it,” Claudia says. “Those words really stuck with me. Not to scare me, but to mentally prepare me, if you want to grow in this field, put your foot in those doors, get yourself a chair at those tables.”
Claudia already knew something about doors that don’t open easily. She’s the first in her family to graduate college, working toward a degree at California State University, Dominguez Hills, after starting at community college to make the cost work. “Every book, every gallon of gas, every train ticket, I have paid myself to get here,” she says.
As the daughter of immigrants, the stakes of that effort were never abstract. “They have given everything to be here. They have given everything for me to be here,” she says. “I was not going to disappoint them.” So she applied to everything — paid, unpaid, it didn’t matter. “I’m going to apply to anything and everything to get a little bit of experience to move my way up. And it worked out for me.”
When Serverfarm offered Claudia a full-time role, the relief was immediate and specific, she still had a summer session and a fall semester of tuition ahead of her. “I just felt like a weight off of my shoulders,” she says.
But she didn’t sign right away. A competing offer came in, and instead of walking, Claudia went back to her manager, Chris, Serverfarm’s controller, and asked to talk. What followed wasn’t a counteroffer negotiation – it was a conversation. “He sat with me and talked to me like a mentor, not like someone trying to influence me,” Claudia says. “He asked what I wanted my career to look like. He talked to me like a person, not a number.”
That’s what kept her here. She signed, called her mom, and took her out to celebrate. “I was like, Mommy, whatever you want, it’s on me.”
Claudia works full-time in accounts payable today, with a training plan already in motion toward a staff accountant role. “What excites me most is being trained by my own team,” she says. “I can ask questions that maybe aren’t so dumb, and I don’t feel judged.”
Her advice to any student weighing a path like hers is the same thing Liliana told her: “Get your foot in the door. Do what you need to do to get here. Work hard, know you deserve to be here, and don’t disappoint.”
What stands out across both Claudia’s and Liliana’s accounts isn’t a program or a policy – it’s a pattern of people choosing to show up for each other without being asked to. “It says a lot about our culture,” one colleague notes, “because when I got here, that’s really what motivated me to come to Serverfarm, that everyone’s willing to help each other out, even if they’re not in your department.”
That’s the thread running through this Hispanic Heritage Month at Serverfarm: not a single campaign or a single hire, but a mentor who spoke Spanish to a nervous intern on day one, and a company that gave that relationship room to grow into a career.
Claudia Vazquez is part of Serverfarm’s ongoing internship-to-full-time pipeline. To learn more about the 2026 Serverfarm Internship Program, visit serverfarmllc.com/blog/serverfarm-2026-internship-program or follow along on LinkedIn.
