(upbeat music) >> Despite its 70 to $80 billion total available market, computer storage is like a small town, everybody knows everybody else. We say in the storage world, there are a hundred people, and 99 seats. Infinidat is a company that was founded in 2011 by storage legend, Moshe Yanai. The company is known for building products with rock solid availability, simplicity, and a passion for white glove service, and client satisfaction. Company went through a leadership change recently, in early this year, appointed industry vet, Phil Bullinger, as CEO. It's making more moves, bringing on longtime storage sales exec, Richard Bradbury, to run EMEA, and APJ Go-To-Market. And just recently appointed marketing maven, Eric Hertzog to be CMO. Hertzog has worked at numerous companies, ranging from startups that were acquired, two stints at IBM, and is SVP of product marketing and management at Storage Powerhouse, EMC, among others. Hertzog has been named CMO of the year as an OnCon Icon, and top 100 influencer in big data, AI, and also hybrid cloud, along with yours truly, if I may say so. Joining me today, is the newly minted CMO of Infinidat, Mr.Eric Hertzog. Good to see you, Eric, thanks for coming on. >> Dave, thank you very much. You know, we love being on theCUBE, and I am of course sporting my Infinidat logo wear already, even though I've only been on the job for two weeks. >> Dude, no Hawaiian shirt, okay. That's a pretty buttoned up company. >> Well, next time, I'll have a Hawaiian shirt, don't worry. >> Okay, so give us the backstory, how did this all come about? you know Phil, my 99 seat joke, but, how did it come about? Tell us that story. >> So, I have known Phil since the late 90s, when he was a VP at LSA of Engineering, and he had... I was working at a company called Milax, which was acquired by IBM. And we were doing a product for HP, and he was providing the subsystem, and we were providing the fiber to fiber, and fiber to SCSI array controllers back in the day. So I met him then, we kept in touch for years. And then when I was a senior VP at EMC, he started originally as VP of engineering for the EMC Isilon team. And then he became the general manager. So, while I didn't work for him, I worked with him, A, at LSA, and then again at EMC. So I just happened to congratulate him about some award he won, and he said "Hey Herzog, "we should talk, I have a CMO opening". So literally happened over LinkedIn discussion, where I reached out to him, and congratulate him, he said "Hey, I need a CMO, let's talk". So, the whole thing took about three weeks in all honesty. And that included interviewing with other members of his exec staff. >> That's awesome, that's right, he was running the Isilon division for awhile at the EMC. >> Right. >> You guys were there, and of course, you talk about Milax, LSA, there was a period of time where, you guys were making subsystems for everybody. So, you sort of saw the whole landscape. So, you got some serious storage history and chops. So, I want to ask you what attracted you to Infinidat. I mean, obviously they're a leader in the magic quadrant. We know about InfiniBox, and the petabyte scale, and the low latency, what are the... When you look at the market, you obviously you see it, you talk to everybody. What were the trends that were driving your decision to join Infinidat? >> Well, a couple of things. First of all, as you know, and you guys have talked about it on theCUBE, most CIOs don't know anything about storage, other than they know a guy got to spend money on it. So the Infinidat message of optimizing applications, workloads, and use cases with 100% guaranteed availability, unmatched reliability, the set and forget ease of use, which obviously AIOps is driving that, and overall IT operations management was very attractive. And then on top of that, the reality is, when you do that consolidation, which Infinidat can do, because of the performance that it has, you can dramatically free up rack, stack, power, floor, and operational manpower by literally getting rid of, tons and tons of arrays. There's one customer that they have, you actually... I found out when I got here, they took out a hundred arrays from EMC Hitachi. And that company now has 20 InfiniBoxes, and InfiniBox SSAs running the exact same workloads that used to be, well over a hundred subsystems from the other players. So, that's got a performance angle, a CapEx and OPEX angle, and then even a clean energy angle because reducing Watson slots. So, lots of different advantages there. And then I think from just a pure marketing perspective, as someone has said, they're the best kept secret to the storage industry. And so you need to, if you will, amp up the message, get it out. They've expanded the portfolio with the InfiniBox SSA, the InfiniGuard product, which is really optimized, not only as the PBA for backup perspective, and it works with all the backup vendors, but also, has an incredible play on data and cyber resilience with their capability of local logical air gapping, remote logical air gapping, and creating a clean room, if you will, a vault, so that you can then recover their review for malware ransomware before you do a full recovery. So it's got the right solutions, just that most people didn't know who they were. So, between the relationship with Phil, and the real opportunity that this company could skyrocket. In fact, we have 35 job openings right now, right now. >> Wow, okay, so yeah, I think it was Duplessy called them the best kept secret, he's not the only one. And so that brings us to you, and your mission because it's true, it is the best kept secret. You're a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant, but I mean, if you're not a leader in a Gartner magic quadrant, you're kind of nobody in storage. And so, but you got chops and block storage. You talked about the consolidation story, and I've talked to many folks in Infinidat about that. Ken Steinhardt rest his soul, Dr. Rico, good business friend, about, you know... So, that play and how you handle the whole blast radius. And that's always a great discussion, and Infinidat has proven that it can operate at very very high performance, low latency, petabyte scale. So how do you get the word out? What's your mission? >> Well, so we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to be very, very tied to the channel as you know, EMC, Dell EMC, and these are articles that have been in CRN, and other channel publications is pulling back from the channel, letting go of channel managers, and there's been a lot of conflict. So, we're going to embrace the channel. We already do well over 90% of our business within general globally. So, we're doing that. In fact, I am meeting, personally, next week with five different CEOs of channel partners. Of which, only one of them is doing business with Infinidat now. So, we want to expand our channel, and leverage the channel, take advantage of these changes in the channel. We are going to be increasing our presence in the public relations area. The work we do with all the industry analysts, not just in North America, but in Europe as well, and Asia. We're going to amp up, of course, our social media effort, both of us, of course, having been named some of the best social media guys in the world the last couple of years. So, we're going to open that up. And then, obviously, increase our demand generation activities as well. So, we're going to make sure that we leverage what we do, and deliver that message to the world. Deliver it to the partner base, so the partners can take advantage, and make good margin and revenue, but delivering products that really meet the needs of the customers while saving them dramatically on CapEx and OPEX. So, the partner wins, and the end user wins. And that's the best scenario you can do when you're leveraging the channel to help you grow your business. >> So you're not only just the marketing guy, I mean, you know product, you ran product management at very senior levels. So, you could... You're like a walking spec sheet, John Farrier says you could just rattle it off. Already impressed that how much you know about Infinidat, but when you joined EMC, it was almost like, there was too many products, right? When you joined IBM, even though it had a big portfolio, it's like it didn't have enough relevant products. And you had to sort of deal with that. How do you feel about the product portfolio at Infinidat? >> Well, for us, it's right in the perfect niche. Enterprise class, AI based software defined storage technologies that happens run on a hybrid array, an all flash array, has a variant that's really tuned towards modern data protection, including data and cyber resilience. So, with those three elements of the portfolio, which by the way, all have a common architecture. So while there are three different solutions, all common architecture. So if you know how to use the InfiniBox, you can easily use an InfiniGuard. You got an InfiniGuard, you can easily use an InfiniBox SSA. So the capability of doing that, helps reduce operational manpower and hence, of course, OPEX. So the story is strong technically, the story has a strong business tie in. So part of the thing you have to do in marketing these days. Yeah, we both been around. So you could just talk about IOPS, and latency, and bandwidth. And if the people didn't... If the CIO didn't know what that meant, so what? But the world has changed on the expenditure of infrastructure. If you don't have seamless integration with hybrid cloud, virtual environments and containers, which Infinidat can do all that, then you're not relevant from a CIO perspective. And obviously with many workloads moving to the cloud, you've got to have this infrastructure that supports core edge and cloud, the virtualization layer, and of course, the container layer across a hybrid environment. And we can do that with all three of these solutions. Yet, with a common underlying software defined storage architecture. So it makes the technical story very powerful. Then you turn that into business benefit, CapEX, OPEX, the operational manpower, unmatched availability, which is obviously a big deal these days, unmatched performance, everybody wants their SAP workload or their Oracle or Mongo Cassandra to be, instantaneous from the app perspective. Excuse me. And we can do that. And that's the kind of thing that... My job is to translate that from that technical value into the business value, that can be appreciated by the CIO, by the CSO, by the VP of software development, who then says to VP of industry, that Infinidat stuff, we actually need that for our SAP workload, or wow, for our overall corporate cybersecurity strategy, the CSO says, the key element of the storage part of that overall corporate cybersecurity strategy are those Infinidat guys with their great cyber and data resilience. And that's the kind of thing that my job, and my team's job to work on to get the market to understand and appreciate that business value that the underlying technology delivers. >> So the other thing, the interesting thing about Infinidat. This was always a source of spirited discussions over the years with business friends from Infinidat was the company figured out a way, it was formed in 2011, and at the time the strategy perfectly reasonable to say, okay, let's build a better box. And the way they approached that from a cost standpoint was you were able to get the most out of spinning disk. Everybody else was moving to flash, of course, floyers work a big flash, all flash data center, etc, etc. But Infinidat with its memory cache and its architecture, and its algorithms was able to figure out how to magically get equivalent or better performance in an all flash array out of a system that had a lot of spinning disks, which is I think unique. I mean, I know it's unique, very rare anyway. And so that was kind of interesting, but at the time it made sense, to go after a big market with a better mouse trap. Now, if I were starting a company today, I might take a different approach, I might try to build, a storage cloud or something like that. Or if I had a huge install base that I was trying to protect, and maybe go into that. But so what's the strategy? You still got huge share gain potentials for on-prem is that the vector? You mentioned hybrid cloud, what's the cloud strategy? Maybe you could summarize your thoughts on that? >> Sure, so the cloud strategy, is first of all, seamless integration to hybrid cloud environments. For example, we support Outpost as an example. Second thing, you'd be surprised at the number of cloud providers that actually use us as their backend, either for their primary storage, or for their secondary storage. So, we've got some of the largest hyperscalers in the world. For example, one of the Telcos has 150 Infiniboxes, InfiniBox SSAS and InfiniGuards. 150 running one of the largest Telcos on the planet. And a huge percentage of that is their corporate cloud effort where they're going in and saying, don't use Amazon or Azure, why don't you use us the giant Telco? So we've got that angle. We've got a ton of mid-sized cloud providers all over the world that their backup is our servers, or their primary storage that they offer is built on top of Infiniboxes or InfiniBox SSA. So, the cloud strategy is one to arm the hyperscalers, both big, medium, and small with what they need to provide the right end user services with the right outside SLAs. And the second thing is to have that hybrid cloud integration capability. For example, when I talked about InfiniGuard, we can do air gapping locally to give almost instantaneous recovery, but at the same time, if there's an earthquake in California or a tornado in Kansas City, or a tsunami in Singapore, you've got to have that remote air gapping capability, which InfiniGuard can do. Which of course, is essentially that logical air gap remote is basically a cloud strategy. So, we can do all of that. That's why it has a cloud strategy play. And again we have a number of public references in the cloud, US signal and others, where they talk about why they use the InfiniBox, and our technologies to offer their storage cloud services based on our platform. >> Okay, so I got to ask you, so you've mentioned earthquakes, a lot of earthquakes in California, dangerous place to live, US headquarters is in Waltham, we're going to pry you out of the Golden State? >> Let's see, I was born at Stanford hospital where my parents met when they were going there. I've never lived anywhere, but here. And of course, remember when I was working for EMC, I flew out every week, and I sort of lived at that Milford Courtyard Marriott. So I'll be out a lot, but I will not be moving, I'm a Silicon Valley guy, just like that old book, the Silicon Valley Guy from the old days, that's me. >> Yeah, the hotels in Waltham are a little better, but... So, what's your priority? Last question. What's the priority first 100 days? Where's your focus? >> Number one priority is team assessment and integration of the team across the other teams. One of the things I noticed about Infinidat, which is a little unusual, is there sometimes are silos and having done seven other small companies and startups, in a startup or a small company, you usually don't see that silo-ness, So we have to break down those walls. And by the way, we've been incredibly successful, even with the silos, imagine if everybody realized that business is a team sport. And so, we're going to do that, and do heavy levels of integration. We've already started to do an incredible outreach program to the press and to partners. We won a couple awards recently, we're up for two more awards in Europe, the SDC Awards, and one of the channel publications is going to give us an award next week. So yeah, we're amping up that sort of thing that we can leverage and extend. Both in the short term, but also, of course, across a longer term strategy. So, those are the things we're going to do first, and yeah, we're going to be rolling into, of course, 2022. So we've got a lot of work we're doing, as I mentioned, I'm meeting, five partners, CEOs, and only one of them is doing business with us now. So we want to get those partners to kick off January with us presenting at their sales kickoff, going "We are going with Infinidat "as one of our strong storage providers". So, we're doing all that upfront work in the first 100 days, so we can kick off Q1 with a real bang. >> Love the channel story, and you're a good guy to do that. And you mentioned the silos, correct me if I'm wrong, but Infinidat does a lot of business in overseas. A lot of business in Europe, obviously the affinity to the engineering, a lot of the engineering work that's going on in Israel, but that's by its very nature, stovepipe. Most startups start in the US, big market NFL cities, and then sort of go overseas. It's almost like Infinidat sort of simultaneously grew it's overseas business, and it's US business. >> Well, and we've got customers everywhere. We've got them in South Africa, all over Europe, Middle East. We have six very large customers in India, and a number of large customers in Japan. So we have a sales team all over the world. As you mentioned, our white glove service includes not only our field systems engineers, but we have a professional services group. We've actually written custom software for several customers. In fact, I was on the forecast meeting earlier today, and one of the comments that was made for someone who's going to give us a PO. So, the sales guy was saying, part of the reason we're getting the PO is we did some professional services work last quarter, and the CIO called and said, I can't believe it. And what CIO calls up a storage company these days, but the CIO called him and said "I can't believe the work you did. We're going to buy some more stuff this quarter". So that white glove service, our technical account managers to go along with the field sales SEs and this professional service is pretty unusual in a small company to have that level of, as you mentioned yourself, white glove service, when the company is so small. And that's been a real hidden gem for this company, and will continue to be so. >> Well, Eric, congratulations on the appointment, the new role, excited to see what you do, and how you craft the story, the strategy. And we've been following Infinidat since, sort of day zero and I really wish you the best. >> Great, well, thank you very much. Always appreciate theCUBE. And trust me, Dave, next time I will have my famous Hawaiian shirt. >> Ah, I can't wait. All right, thanks to Eric, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

>>text, you know, consumer opens up their iphone and says, oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my eyes. What's it been like being on the shark tank? You know, filming is fun, hang out, just fun and it's fun to be a celebrity at first your head gets really big and you get a good tables at restaurants who says texas has got a little possess more skin in the game today in charge of his destiny robert Hirschbeck, No stars. Here is CUBA alumni. Yeah, okay. >>Hi. I'm john Ferry, the co founder of silicon angle Media and co host of the cube. I've been in the tech business since I was 19 1st programming on many computers in a large enterprise and then worked at IBM and Hewlett Packard total of nine years in the enterprise brian's jobs from programming, Training, consulting and ultimately as an executive salesperson and then started my first company with 1997 and moved to Silicon Valley in 1999. I've been here ever since. I've always loved technology and I love covering you know, emerging technology as trained as a software developer and love business and I love the impact of software and technology to business to me creating technology that starts the company and creates value and jobs is probably the most rewarding things I've ever been involved in. And I bring that energy to the queue because the Cubans were all the ideas are and what the experts are, where the people are and I think what's most exciting about the cube is that we get to talk to people who are making things happen, entrepreneur ceo of companies, venture capitalists, people who are really on a day in and day out basis, building great companies and the technology business is just not a lot of real time live tv coverage and, and the cube is a non linear tv operation. We do everything that the T. V guys on cable don't do. We do longer interviews. We asked tougher questions, we ask sometimes some light questions. We talked about the person and what they feel about. It's not prompted and scripted. It's a conversation authentic And for shows that have the Cube coverage and makes the show buzz. That creates excitement. More importantly, it creates great content, great digital assets that can be shared instantaneously to the world. Over 31 million people have viewed the cube and that is the result. Great content, great conversations and I'm so proud to be part of you with great team. Hi, I'm john ferrier. Thanks for watching the cube. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. We are here live on the ground in the expo floor of a live event. The AWS public sector summit. I'm john for your host of the cube. We're here for the next two days. Wall to wall coverage. I'm here with Sandy carter to kick off the event. Vice president partner as partners on AWS public sector. Great to see you Sandy, >>so great to see you john live and in person, right? >>I'm excited. I'm jumping out of my chair because I did a, I did a twitter periscope yesterday and said a live event and all the comments are, oh my God, an expo floor a real events. Congratulations. >>True. Yeah. We're so excited yesterday. We had our partner day and we sold out the event. It was rock them and pack them and we had to turn people away. So what a great experience. Right, >>Well, I'm excited. People are actually happy. We tried, we tried covering mobile world congress in Barcelona. Still, people were there, people felt good here at same vibe. People are excited to be in person. You get all your partners here. You guys have had had an amazing year. Congratulations. We did a couple awards show with you guys. But I think the big story is the amazon services for the partners. Public sector has been a real game changer. I mean we talked about it before, but again, it continues to happen. What's the update? >>Yeah, well we had, so there's lots of announcements. So let me start out with some really cool growth things because I know you're a big growth guy. So we announced here at the conference yesterday that our government competency program for partners is now the number one industry in AWS for are the competency. That's a huge deal. Government is growing so fast. We saw that during the pandemic, everybody was moving to the cloud and it's just affirmation with the government competency now taking that number one position across AWS. So not across public sector across AWS and then one of our fastest growing areas as well as health care. So we now have an A. T. O. Authority to operate for HIPPA and Hi trust and that's now our fastest growing area with 85% growth. So I love that new news about the growth that we're seeing in public sector and all the energy that's going into the cloud and beyond. >>You know, one of the things that we talked about before and another Cuban of you. But I want to get your reaction now current state of the art now in the moment the pandemic has highlighted the antiquated outdated systems and highlighted help inadequate. They are cloud. You guys have done an amazing job to stand up value quickly now we're in a hybrid world. So you've got hybrid automation ai driving a complete change and it's happening pretty quick. What's the new things that you guys are seeing that's emerging? Obviously a steady state of more growth. But what's the big success programs that you're seeing right now? >>Well, there's a few new programs that we're seeing that have really taken off. So one is called proserve ready. We announced yesterday that it's now G. A. And the U. S. And a media and why that's so important is that our proserve team a lot of times when they're doing contracts, they run out of resources and so they need to tap on the shoulder some partners to come and help them. And the customers told us that they wanted them to be pro served ready so to have that badge of honor if you would that they're using the same template, the same best practices that we use as well. And so we're seeing that as a big value creator for our partners, but also for our customers because now those partners are being trained by us and really helping to be mentored on the job training as they go. Very powerful program. >>Well, one of the things that really impressed by and I've talked to some of your MSP partners on the floor here as they walk by, they see the cube, they're all doing well. They're all happy. They got a spring in their step. And the thing is that this public private partnerships is a real trend we've been talking about for a while. More people in the public sector saying, hey, I want I need a commercial relationship, not the old school, you know, we're public. We have all these rules. There's more collaboration. Can you share your thoughts on how you see that evolving? Because now the partners in the public sector are partnering closer than ever before. >>Yeah, it's really um, I think it's really fascinating because a lot of our new partners are actually commercial partners that are now choosing to add a public sector practice with them. And I think a lot of that is because of these public and private partnerships. So let me give you an example space. So we were at the space symposium our first time ever for a W. S at the space symposium and what we found was there were partners, they're like orbital insight who's bringing data from satellites, There are public sector partner, but that data is being used for insurance companies being used for agriculture being used to impact environment. So I think a lot of those public private partnerships are strengthening as we go through Covid or have like getting alec of it. And we do see a lot of push in that area. >>Talk about health care because health care is again changing radically. We talked to customers all the time. They're like, they have a lot of legacy systems but they can't just throw them away. So cloud native aligns well with health care. >>It does. And in fact, you know, if you think about health care, most health care, they don't build solutions themselves, they depend on partners to build them. So they do the customer doesn't buy and the partner does the build. So it's a great and exciting area for our partners. We just launched a new program called the mission accelerator program. It's in beta and that program is really fascinating because our healthcare partners, our government partners and more now can use these accelerators that maybe isolate a common area like um digital analytics for health care and they can reuse those. So it's pretty, I think it's really exciting today as we think about the potential health care and beyond. >>You know, one of the challenge that I always thought you had that you guys do a good job on, I'd love to get your reaction to now is there's more and more people who want to partner with you than ever before. And sometimes it hasn't always been easy in the old days like to get fed ramp certified or even deal with public sector. If you were a commercial vendor, you guys have done a lot with accelerating certifications. Where are you on that spectrum now, what's next? What's the next wave of partner onboarding or what's the partner trends around the opportunities in public sector? >>Well, one of the new things that we announced, we have tested out in the U. S. You know, that's the amazon way, right, Andy's way, you tested your experiment. If it works, you roll it out, we have a concierge program now to help a lot of those new partners get inundated into public sector. And so it's basically, I'm gonna hold your hand just like at a hotel. I would go up and say, hey, can you direct me to the right restaurant or to the right museum, we do the same thing, we hand hold people through that process. Um, if you don't want to do that, we also have a new program called navigate which is built for brand new partners. And what that enables our partners to do is to kind of be guided through that process. So you are right. We have so many partners now who want to come and grow with us that it's really essential that we provide a great partner, experienced a how to on board. >>Yeah. And the A. P. M. Was the amazon partner network also has a lot of crossover. You see a lot a lot of that going on because the cloud, it's you can do both. >>Absolutely. And I think it's really, you know, we leverage all of the ap in programs that exist today. So for example, there was just a new program that was put out for a growth rebate and that was driven by the A. P. N. And we're leveraging and using that in public sector too. So there's a lot of prosecutes going on to make it easier for our partners to do business with us. >>So I have to ask you on a personal note, I know we've talked about before, your very comfortable the virtual now hybrid space. How's your team doing? How's the structure looks like, what are your goals, what are you excited about? >>Well, I think I have the greatest team ever. So of course I'm excited about our team and we are working in this new hybrid world. So it is a change for everybody uh the other day we had some people in the office and some people calling in virtually so how to manage that, right was really quite interesting. Our goals that we align our whole team around and we talked a little bit about this yesterday are around mission which are the solution areas migration, so getting everything to the cloud and then in the cloud, we talk about modernization, are you gonna use Ai Ml or I O T? And we actually just announced a new program around that to to help out IOT partners to really build and understand that data that's coming in from I O T I D C says that that idea that IOT data has increased by four times uh in the, during the covid period. So there's so many more partners who need help. >>There's a huge shift going on and you know, we always try to explain on the cube. Dave and I talked about a lot and it's re platform with the cloud, which is not just lift and shift you kind of move and then re platform then re factoring your business and there's a nuance there between re platform in which is great. Take advantage of cloud scale. But the re factoring allows for this unique advantage of these high level services. >>That's right >>and this is where people are winning. What's your reaction to that? >>Oh, I completely agree. I think this whole area of modernizing your application, like we have a lot of folks who are doing mainframe migrations and to your point if they just lift what they had in COBOL and they move it to a W S, there's really not a lot of value there, but when they rewrite the code, when they re factor the code, that's where we're seeing tremendous breakthrough momentum with our partner community, you know, Deloitte is one of our top partners with our mainframe migration. They have both our technology and our consulting um, mainframe migration competency there to one of the other things I think you would be interested in is in our session yesterday we just completed some research with r C T O s and we talked about the next mega trends that are coming around Web three dato. And I'm sure you've been hearing a lot about web www dot right? Yeah, >>0.04.0, it's all moving too fast. I mean it's moving >>fast. And so some of the things we talked to our partners about yesterday are like the metaverse that's coming. So you talked about health care yesterday electronic caregiver announced an entire application for virtual caregivers in the metaverse. We talked about Blockchain, you know, and the rise of Blockchain yesterday, we had a whole set of meetings, everybody was talking about Blockchain because now you've got El Salvador Panama Ukraine who have all adopted Bitcoin which is built on the Blockchain. So there are some really exciting things going on in technology and public sector. >>It's a societal shift and I think the confluence of tech user experience data, new, decentralized ways of changing society. You're in the middle of it. >>We are and our partners are in the middle of it and data data, data data, that's what I would say. Everybody is using data. You and I even talked about how you guys are using data. Data is really a hot topic and we we're really trying to help our partners figure out just how to migrate the data to the cloud but also to use that analytics and machine learning on it too. Well, >>thanks for sharing the data here on our opening segment. The insights we will be getting out of the Great Sandy. Great to see you got a couple more interviews with you. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate you And thanks for all your support. You guys are doing great. Your partners are happy you're on a great wave. Congratulations. Thank you, john appreciate more coverage from the queue here. Neither is public sector summit. We'll be right back. Mhm Yeah. >>Mhm. Mhm robert Herjavec. People obviously know you from shark tank

>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Okay welcome back already Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios here. Can't believe we just turned the calendar on September the 1st of 2020. What a year, it's cruising by. And one of the big topics obviously is working from home, we're seeing more and more companies telling everybody to expect to work from home through the end of the year or into next year, some are even saying indefinitely. And we've got an expert coming on the show that we're excited to have back. It's Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski. She is the founder and CEO and author of "Virtual Distance and the Virtual Distance Company". Karen, great to see you. >> Great to see you too Jeff, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so I wanted to get you back on for a couple reasons. One is we first met at the ACGSV, Association for Corporate Growth Silicon Valley 2018 Awards, about two years ago was summer of 2018. And at that point, you introduced me to the concept and our audience, to the concept of virtual distance, which if I can summarize is basically communicating through devices versus face-to-face, like we're doing here. And the bad things that come from that and challenges and this and the other. Who knew that two years from then we would all be forced and not asked, but forced to basically go to a work-from-home environment and increase the frequency and use of using electronic devices to communicate not only for work, but also for social stuff, for school, for everything, so, oh my goodness, you happen to be in the right place at the right time for not necessarily the greatest of reasons, but wow, I mean, how amazing this transformation that we've all been forced to since the middle of March. First off, get your thoughts on that and then we'll dive into what people should be thinking about, what people should be doing about it and how they can, I want to say make the most, but it does kind of make the most of, not necessarily the greatest situation. >> Yeah, well, I could have never imagined when we were sitting out at that round table outside the room where we had dinner that we'd be here two years later, right, talking about virtual distances, you said in the context of everyone having to be isolated from each other and working from home. Obviously, like everyone on the planet, I think I would never have wanted to see this happen. But I feel fortunate in a way to have put this out there many years ago because today it's serving a lot of different organizations, corporations, schools, even government organizations to have a very steady framework that's based on 15 years of data, to understand how to make the best, as you said, of this situation and to reduce some of the negative consequences of virtual distance and actually use the framework as a way to get to know people better and really see them more as human beings in a way that helps them through not just their work life, but also through the family challenges that they're having with every kid now, sort of going back to school, many of them online, there's a lot of virtual distance that can crop up even in the house. But I guess I just, I'm glad that I discovered virtual distance, and that it's useful in this time. >> Right, right. So let's jump into it. And actually I want to skip to the end of the book before we get into the beginning of the book because you talked about leadership and when this thing first hit, we had a number of leaders from the community, talking about leading through trying times. And most great leaders know that their primary job is really communication, right? Communication to their teams, communication to their constituents, communication to their customers. COVID has really changed the communication challenges and increase them dramatically and most of the stuff we're hearing is that leaders need to communicate more frequently and in more variety, both in terms of topics as well as communication forms. How does that kind of jive with your studies on virtual distance and leadership, given the fact that there aren't a lot of other options in terms of face-to-face or a little bit more intimate things? They have to use these electronic means. So what tips do you have for leaders, as they suddenly were told everybody's working from home starting like tomorrow? >> Yeah, well, it's funny that you asked me that because we learned early on when I started looking at this phenomenon in the early 2000s. We learned early on that it actually takes a lot more work and time to lead virtually than it does in more traditional environments. And the reason is because a leader really has to bring forward a lot of context that tends to go underground or become invisible about other people when we're working virtually. So the leader already was under a lot of pressure if you will, to communicate much more than they had been in more traditional settings because a lot of the information and knowledge and intelligence if you will, about the company was available in the context of the environment and other people. So leaders were already on track to having to communicate much more in order to make make remote work and virtual work work. Well, which of course it can. >> Right. >> But what happened was, we found that when suddenly a light switch is turned off, leaders needed to communicate even more. And that is kind of standard crisis management leadership. We talked a little bit about that in the past, right? So we can look at the situation we're in as not just an acute crisis that came to bear in early January and then sort of everything locking down in March. But we can kind of look at this as a long-term leadership crisis management strategy on top of just over communicating to do better in virtual space. And in a crisis management situation you definitely want to have even more communication, but it's also an opportunity actually to develop other leaders behind you on teams that can also communicate as well, to share that responsibility, to share that leadership commitment to a lot of communication during times like this, that actually works really well. >> Right, 'cause one of the things you talked about that's super, super important, more important actually than physical distance or the virtual distance is what you called the affinity distance, and I think it ties back to another point in the book in terms of clarity of communication from the leadership. What are the goals, what is the vision? And reinforcing that at a rate and frequency much higher than they've ever done before to build that affinity so people can continue to feel like they're part of something beyond more just the tasks and the roles and the assignments that I have to do every day. >> Yeah, that's exactly right, Jeff. So again, we found early on. And it was a surprise to us at first, but then became kind of obvious that people tend to think that the real challenge with virtual work is physical distance, right, sort of the space between us in terms of a geography or a geographic separation. And what we learned early on through the statistics, as well as sort of common sense was that actually physical distance had the least impact on corporate outcomes than any of the other three factors. So the affinity distance piece is really all about, how do I gain an affinity for someone when I really don't know that much about them. And I don't know much about their context in the moment that we're talking, and I also just know less about them in general when we're virtual. >> Right. >> So affinity distance is much more important than the physical separation because it's what holds us together and allows us to build very, very deep relationships which we can count on and trust no matter what the situation is. And yeah, doing that in these times is very important. >> So it's funny, right? 'Cause so much of the problems that we have with communications are in the subtle feedback mechanisms that aren't necessarily in the overt communication and as you said, those can be lost in a lot of channels. What's kind of (chuckles) interesting that's going on with COVID is we're actually seeing a side of people that we never did see in the physical space, right. Now we're literally being invited into everyone's home. I mean, I'm in your home office, I can see your books on your bookshelf and people are bringing people into their home which they may not have done before or been comfortable. Not only that, but the spouse is there, he or she is working from home. The kids are there, they're doing their school from home, the occasional dog or pet or other thing kind of jumping through the screen. So it's this weird kind of juxtaposition. On one hand you've lost a whole lot of kind of subtle communication reinforcers. On the other hand, you're getting kind of a whole new kind of the human side aspect in terms of who these people are and what they're all about, that you never necessarily had before. So I think the blending of the whole self is probably been elevated, even though the communication challenges without having kind of all these subtle feedback loops that we really rely on, are gone. So when you think about communication and communication methods based on communication messages and what you're trying to do, how do you tell people to think about that? What types of communications should be done in which ways to make them the most effective and avoid some of the real problems that come from the wrong type of communication on the wrong type of channel? >> Yeah, so first of all, you make some great points. Because it really is when we invite people into our home via these kind of video links, people see a different side of us, a contextualized side to us that they normally wouldn't see. And that opens the door, as you said, to having other communications. I think before I get directly to your question, one thing that strikes me about what you say is that this is truly a shared experience, right? So all of us are being impacted by COVID-19, the economics of the situation, the childcare issues that are raised by the situation, the community issues that we all have in our towns or cities. And we're sharing that experience, which is a great jumping off point in terms of communications because we actually have a very similar context from which were working. In terms of which communications to use when. This is a really important question, I had a person from a very, very large tech company that people use every day to go look for things on the Internet, call me and tell me at one point early, sort of early on in the pandemic that some of his people were starting to beg him to turn off the video screens. (chuckles) And just use audio because sometimes when we're overwhelmed with a crisis the video can be helpful, but it can also sort of be overwhelming. So it's important to understand sort of when to discern, when to use audio and when to use visual, when to use email and when to use tax. And the basic tips here is that email has really never been good to explain ourselves to other people. It's been great to set up lunch dates or an appointment and things like that. So email should be used pretty sparingly. Audio is really great if we don't have video, but we also just kind of need a rest from video. And we also need to really focus on a person's voice very, very intensely. So if we're trying to solve a really critical problem that's a little bit conceptual, sometimes audio can can be more helpful. Video is obviously great because it gives us all this context and it allows people to see into our home and hear our cats kind of screaming at each other which is happening right now in my house. But it also lets us see each other's expressions and a little bit of the facial communication that we need in order to know if people are okay with what we're saying, if they're quizzical and looking like they kind of don't understand et cetera, The overarching goal of communications in a situation like this, that I talk a lot about in the book, is to mix up modes of communication as much as you can think about that, right? Because we get context as I've just explained in different ways through different modes. And so if we mix it up, if I say well, I've talked to Jeff a lot over video maybe I'll just give him a call today. Or I've been using a lot of email to talk to one of my colleagues in Norway, maybe I should really try to set up a video call that is very helpful because it gives us dimensionality to someone's personality as well as their context. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I think most people are always saying turn on the video, turn on the video, we want to see everybody's face but as this thing continues to go and go and go and it's going to go for the foreseeable future, and people are going to get fatigue, right, people are getting Zoom fatigue. That's a really interesting and simple way to I think, kind of lessen the stress a little bit by telling people, let's just turn the video off. We don't necessarily need to see each other, we know what we look like. And if you feel some reason to turn it on, you can turn it on, but having that as an option, I think that's a really insightful. And the other thing I want to focus on is it's not all negative, right? I mean, there's a lot of studies about the open office plan, which didn't necessarily work so well, and we've had conversations with a lot of people that say, just because you throw everybody in a room together doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to communicate more and there aren't necessarily the water cooler chatter that you're kind of hoping for. And in fact, you have a bunch of stats in the book here about remote workers having actually a lot of success. They have less trouble with technology, they can cope best with multiple projects. There's so many less interruptions, (chuckles) assuming the rest of the family has a place to work. But you don't get kind of the work interruptions that you would in terms of actually getting projects done. So, it's not all bad. And I think there's a lot of things that we can help people think about to really take advantage or make the most of the opportunity, to take advantage is probably the wrong word. So, vary communications, frequency in communications is certainly a good one. What are other ways that people kind of build trust? 'Cause you talk a lot about trust and feeling part of something bigger and not letting the individual tasks and the little day-to-day things that we do get in the way of still feeling like you belong to something that's important, that you care about, with your teammates that you want to move forward. >> Yeah, so the it's a great question, and again I think, obviously, amongst sort of the darkness there's always sort of opportunities to see some light. And I think one of the ways that we can see light through working this way at this time is to expand our understanding of the people that we're working with, right? And we can do that in a framework, it doesn't have to be haphazard. So when we look at affinity, what we really want to do is to bring forward the way people feel about their value systems, what's important to them about work in sort of pre-COVID or BC, right before COVID, but also what's important to them about their family life or about the situation that's happening, that's interacting with and integrating with their work life. So asking those questions in ways that are not guised, but sort of directly asking them things about what they value? How they feel that they're interdependent on other people? Why other people are important to them in their work, as well as just in their day-to-day lives? Those are the kinds of opportunities for questions around things that are not work related, are not party Friday, which are also kind of fun things right? But that get more to the core of who a person is, that whole person that you were talking about. And that allows us to see so much more deeply, ironically, into that human being. And when you talk about purpose, and really wanting to feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves, those kinds of insights that build affinity help us help other people. So, we tend to focus on task orientation and goals and deliverables and all that which is absolutely critical for business continuity, and to get through the day and focus our attention. But actually what makes people feel really good about their day as a person is often how they can help other people. And so if we draw this closer affinity, we can actually figure out ways to help other people. And that just lifts everybody up and makes the work product actually even better. >> Right, right, I've always ascribed to the theory that right, if you spend your work helping other people do their work better, easier, get roadblocks out of the way, whatever, be an enabler, then you're getting this multiplier effect because I'm doing my work and I'm helping somebody else be more efficient. And it's a very different way to kind of think about work in terms of helping everybody be more effective, more efficient, and as you said, you get this great multiplier effect, but I want to shift gears a little bit. And this sentence, just jumped out of your book. I'm actually going to read from it, that despite the fact that many leadership challenges are new, we continue to over rely on management thinking and solutions that are fundamentally designed around outdated assumptions. I mean, to me this is such a huge thing. We had Martin Mikason at the beginning of this process and his great line, and he's managed remote companies for years and multiple companies. And he said, it's so easy to fake it in the office, right? It's so easy to look busy. (Karen chuckles) Whereas when you're working from home, the only thing you have to show is your output. And that's what you're graded on, your output. And yet when this thing first hit, we saw all types of new products coming out that are basically spyware for the employees, how often are you sitting in front of your computer? How often are you on a Zoom call? How often are you, doing these things? And it's striking to me that it's such an outdated way to measure activity, versus a way to measure outcome and output and what are you trying to do? I mean, it just drives me crazy to hear those things, I just love to get your take that people still are mixed up about what they're supposed to be measuring and what the purpose of the whole task is, which is to get output done not just to be busy and sit in Zoom calls all day. >> It's so true. So there's sort of two prongs to that question. And two very important things to look at. So one is how do we measure productivity, right among knowledge workers, which has been the topic of a lot of conversation. And the other thing is, what have leadership models been built off of in the past, right? If you just take the first thing first. Productivity today, if you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, you will still see productivity defined as how many widgets can I produce in an hour. That's still today, how we measure productivity, even though (chuckles) all of our output or most of our output, right, is coming from our knowledge, our thinking, our problem solving. (clears throat) So the notion of productivity feels very heavy handed to a lot of people, because it's still rooted literally economics wise in this notion of x widgets per hour, which just doesn't fit. And that comes through the second point, which is our leadership models, right? So I talked in the book and I've been talking about this for many years, because it just jumped out at me when I started to do this research, is that if you look at most leadership models today, any one of them, pick whatever one you like, transformational leadership, transactional leadership, situational leadership or whatever it might be. Those leadership models were built mainly in the 1950s. And some of them came later in the 80s. We have a few new ones, (clears throat) excuse me that have come after the internet, but not too many. And fundamentally, if you look at the communication mode of leaders in the 50s, and the 80s, it was face-to-face or phone. I mean, just by definition, was in person or via phone. But that assumption doesn't hold true anymore and hasn't held true for a good 15 years. And yet, in every business school today, we still use those leadership models as sort of our first run at how to lead. It's not that they're not useful and helpful and don't have extremely good words of advice for leaders. But the main thing leaders do is communicate. So if the fundamental channel over which leaders are communicating has completely changed, it seems natural that we should be looking for new leadership models (chuckles) that fit our times a little bit better. Taking pieces of the best of those leadership models, but really turning them on their head and saying, what's really a better approach when fundamentally our communication mode itself, it has completely changed. >> Right right. >> And that's what we do as leaders. >> And I do just want to say a word. We're talking about working from home and knowledge workers and unfortunately, there's a whole lot of people going through COVID right now that don't have that option, right. If you're in the travel industry, if you're in the hospitality industry, if you're in a lot of services industries, if you are a plumber, you can't go virtual as a plumber, unfortunately. So just to acknowledge that, what we're talking about applies to a lot of people, but certainly not everyone and everyone doesn't have these options. So I just wanted to mention that but before we wrap, Karen, the thing that struck me, as you're talking about kind of the 50s and the organizational structure, was it was really command and control and just top down hierarchies that dictated what people did. And then you as you said, your job was to put so many widgets on the widget receiver per hour, and that's what you were graded on. Where in knowledge workers, it's a very different thing. And in fact, you shouldn't tell people how to do things, you should tell people what the objectives are, and then see what they come up with. And hopefully, they'll come up with lots of different ways to achieve the objective, most of which that management has never thought of, they're not down in the weeds, and you get all kinds of interesting and diversity of opinion and different approaches. And kind of a DevOps mentality where you try lots of things and you'll find new ways to get it done. So I want to close out on this final kind of communication piece for leadership. And this is the why. I think back in the 50s, I don't know that the why we was that important. Or maybe it was and I'm not giving it enough credit. But today the why is so important. That is such a big piece of why do I come to work every day? And why am I important to work with my colleagues and move this mission forward. And so whenever you can just share, how important the why is today, and then how important the why is in trying to build a culture and hold people together when they are now by rule distributed all over the place. Talk a little bit about the why. >> Yeah, I love that question, Jeff. Because in the book, I talk a lot about Taylorism. And Taylor was the founder of like bureaucratic management and leadership and he actually despised the worker. (chuckles) There's actually a little piece in the book where he's testifying to Congress and saying that the man who handles pig iron, a type of steel, wasn't intelligent enough to understand what pig iron really was, he got a lot of flak for that. (chuckles) So as we've evolved, right, and as we've grown as organizations into knowledge workers, and I think your point about not everyone is a quote unquote, knowledge worker, is really, really important. The bottom line is, we're trying to measure our output and the value of our work by these older standards. And so people are struggling a little bit with that sort of disconnect, and looking for why, what purpose do they have? What is their bigger purpose? How are they connected to the organization in new ways? And there's actually an excellent analogy in the Navy. Is has its traditions in the Navy, called Commander's Intent which I talk about. So if you think of ships that used to sail, right out to sea, and they had lots of goals about either taking over a certain country or whatever it was they were doing, they couldn't be together, right. So we've been working remotely for a very long time. So the commander would gather all of his lieutenants, and basically tell them what his or, there were no hers at that time, but what his intentions were. And the lieutenants, the captains of the other ships, would go out to each ship, and they wouldn't follow a blueprint tactical plan they would just have the Commander's Intent as their guide. And then they were free actually, to use whatever strategies and tactics that they thought of and that worked in their context in order to fulfill the Commander's Intent, but they weren't given a blueprint. Their goal was really to use their own smarts, their own critical thinking in order to carry forward that intent. And I think that idea is very powerful today because I think if leaders can focus on helping their workers, their employees, their ecosystem partners, supply chain partners, whatever it may be, understand what the intent of the company is, and show that they trust the employees or the partner to deliver on that intent, with whatever means and creativity and imagination, guided by the intent, can be used and selected from on their day-to-day lives, people will feel so much more empowered and still get to the same outcome or actually better, than if they're told do A, B, C and D. So this idea of leader intent, I think would serve companies really well during this time, and if I could just add one other quick thing. There's another idea that comes out of sort of the military that I used and doing some work with leadership crisis management after 9-11. Around this notion of net-centricity. Net-centricity is sort of allowing people on the ground to sort of form their own networks and push information up to leadership so that they can make certain decisions and then push those decisions down with an intention back to the ground, so that this network can operate with some freedom and flexibility. And I think corporations can put net-centricity actually into place in a structured way and they'll find themselves with a lot more flexibility, higher levels of business continuity and effectiveness, and perhaps, most importantly, giving a sense of more meaningfulness and purpose and powerfulness, or self actualization back to the worker. >> Right, right, as you're speaking the word I just can't get out of my head is trust, right? It's so much about trust. And then giving people the power, enabling people the power that you trust to go do the jobs that you've hired them to do. And then to the other point that we talked about, then as a leader, help them remove roadblocks. Give them the tools, do the things that you can do to help them do their job better, versus to your point, being super prescriptive on the road actions that you wish that they would do, and then managing to the completion of the road, actions versus the accomplishment of the bigger task. It seems so simple, it's so hard for so many people to grok. It just, it still just amazes me that so many folks are unfortunately still stuck in that old paradigm. But you can't anymore 'cause everybody's (chuckles) working from home, so you better get with the program. >> (clears throat) Yeah, I'm sorry, I have a little frog in my throat. But you can. And just to add to what you're saying. I think the best thing that leaders can do is also expand their understanding of the worker as no longer just coming to work in some kind of bubble. They're coming to work with all kinds of personal situations. And I've had clients who have sort of tried to get away from that and keep the worker in a bubble. And I think, to be successful as we get through this sort of long-term leadership crisis, I think it's important to lean in to the chaos. Lean into the complexities that COVID, the pandemic, the economic situation bring and see the corporation and their role as leaders as trying to help that whole person with the complexities of their life, as opposed to trying to divorce them from their life, because that has not worked. And what works best, and I've seen this over and over again, is that companies that lean into the crisis, embrace it, and really try to help that whole employee who's coming to work in their house, really, really works very well. >> Yeah, it's going to be interesting as we come out of the summer and go back into the fall, which is the traditional season of kids going back to school and everybody kind of going back to work, and in our world conferences, and it's kind of the ramp up of a busy activity until we get kind of to the Christmas season again coming off of summer, now knowing that isn't a temporary situation, this isn't going away anytime soon. I mean, we used to talk about the new normal in March or April and May. Well now talking about the new normal in September, October, November and into 2021 is a whole different deal. So to your point, I think that's a great tip, lean in, do the best you can, learn from the experts. You don't need to do it by yourself. There's lots of documentation out there. Darren Murph has stuff up from GitHub. Or excuse me GitLab. There's lot of good information. So you do have to kind of buy into it and embrace it, 'cause it's not it's not going away. So these are great tips Karen and I give you this, the last word before we sign off. Of all the work you've done, all the clients you've worked with, a couple of two or three really good nuggets that are really simple things that everybody should be thinking about and doing today. >> I think, there's the Waldorf Schools out by you on the west coast, right, have a motto that they use for education. And it it says in through the heart out through the mind. And I think more than ever, leadership and business can borrow that idea. I think we have to sort of look at things in through the heart. And then, distribute our directions and our leadership out through the mind. At the end of the day (chuckles) we're all human beings that are all struggling in this shared experience, something that has literally never happened on planet earth with 8 billion people, connected through technology with a global pandemic. And so if we kind of can make a shift and think about taking things in through the heart and then delivering out through the mind. I think that a lot of people will feel that compassion. And that will translate into the kind of trust that we're trying to build between all of us to get through it together. And I think when we do that, I have a lot of confidence in the human spirit that we will get through it. People will be able to look back and say, yes, this was very difficult and horrific on many levels, but at the end of the day, maybe there's a little bit of a renaissance in how we sort of look at each other and treat each other with compassion and some love and joy, even in the worst of times. I think that translates over any communication medium (chuckles) including the one we're using today. >> Well, Karen, thank you for the time and thank you for closing this with a little bit of light. Congrats again on the book, "The Power of Virtual Distance", I'm sure it's available everywhere. And again, great to see you. >> Thank you so much Jeff, you too. >> All right. >> Take care. >> She's Karen, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soothing music)

>>Trump and low park California in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 brought to you by Silicon angle media. Now here's Sonya to garden. >>Hi and welcome to the cube. I'm your host Sonia to Gary. And we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo park, California covering cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation awards. Joining us today is modest to get day, the cofounder of branch motto. Welcome to the cube. Thank you so much for having me. So you're receiving an award today for being a top female entrepreneur in cloud innovation. How does that feel? >>It feels awesome. I'm humbled to be in such amazing company with some great ladies that have started really great companies, so pretty excited to be here. >>Great. So just give us a brief overview of your background. >>Sure. Uh, my background, well, I probably don't have the regular Silicon Valley background. I was born and raised in communist Romania, uh, in a pretty small town called Barco, uh, in the Rijo Romania called Moldavia. I was very good at math. Um, and my parents, uh, pushed me to explore applying to schools in the United States, which I did. Um, and I applied to 23 colleges and the DOB, uh, getting a full scholarship from Cornell where I studied computer engineering. Um, I dreamt of working for big companies, which I did for a while, uh, until one day when I remember I was doing a master's to Stanford and one professor told me I was, I told him, I was like, I don't think I could ever start a company. And he was like, what if you don't? Like, who do you think? Well, so I was like, Oh, I never thought about it that way. Um, and that's when I think my entrepreneurial dream started. And a few years later I started, um, phone co-founders and started a few different companies that eventually ended up being branch. That's a long answer to your question. >>No, that's perfect. So what inspired you to start branch and how did you navigate getting funding? >>Um, it's a, it's an interesting story. I think we came together, my cofounders and I were in business school, Stanford, we all want to start a company and we did what all business school students do. We just started something that sounded cool but maybe it didn't have such a big market. Um, and uh, then pivoted and ended up building an app. So we worked on an app or the mobile photo printing app called kindred. We worked on the Apple for quite some time. It was, um, over a year we sold over 10,000 photo books. I've seen a lot of images of babies and pets and we reviewed manually every single book and we had a really hard time growing. So if you think about the mobile ecosystem today, and if you compare it to the web on the web, the web is a pretty democratic system. >>You, um, you have the HTTP protocol and you are able to put together a website and make sure that the website gets found through social media to research to all this other platforms. Apps are much harder to discover. Um, the app ecosystem is owned by the platforms. And we had a really hard time applying. I was coming from the web world and all the things I had done to market websites just in the work with the apps. And it was hard. Uh, you know, you could only Mark at the top and how out all the content inside the app. That's a lot more interesting than the app itself. So we, we felt that we were like really, really struggling and we would need it to kind of shut the company down. And then we realized that one of the things that we were trying to build for us to a disability to allow people to share and get to content within the app, which is in our case was photo books was actually something that everyone in the ecosystem needed. >>So we, we asked a lot of people and it seemed like this was a much bigger need. Uh, then, you know, the photo books. And, uh, we had started to already build it to solve our own problem. So we started building a linking and attribution platform, um, to help other app. And mobile companies grow and understand their user journey and help build like interesting connections for the user. So, you know, our mission is to, um, to help people discover content within apps, uh, through links that always work. Uh, and it's been a wonderful, like an F pretty exciting journey ever since. That's really inspiring and, and solving a real world problem, a real world problem. >> So it's interesting when you ask about fundraising. Uh, it was so hard to raise money for the photo book app. And we raised actually from, uh, uh, pay our ventures and they actually, even now I remember, uh, the guy patch man sat us down in a very Silicon Valley fashion at the rosewoods and was a very hot day and there was like Persian tea being served and he gave us money and he said, you know, I just want to do something. >>I am not investing in the idea. I'm investing in you as a team. Uh, and if you pivot away from photo books, you know, uh, which we did and I think we pivoted the way because we ended up finding a much, much bigger problem. And we felt that, you know, we could actually make a, an actual change into the mobile cloud ecosystem. And that's how, that's how it all started. Uh, and it wasn't actually was easier to raise money after we had a really big problem. We had a good team that had been working together for almost two years. We had product market fit. >> So, uh, so yeah. So what are some things that have influenced you in your journey to become an entrepreneur? Um, some things interesting. Um, well I would say the Stanford design school. Um, I think I came from working for Siemens, which is a giant company. >>And I started doing this project and I remember one of the projects was we built, um, an, uh, a toolbar we were supposed to where we're doing a project for, um, Firefox, which, you know, Mozilla was utilize browser, uh, which was in some ways the precursor to Chrome. And we're trying to help it grow. And we didn't know. And one of the ideas was we, we built this toolbar for eBay and eBay hadn't had a toolbar for Firefox. And we, you know, we were some students for two weeks. We build this toolbar bar and then someone bought the car to our toolbar. And I was like, wow. Like how incredible is it that you can just kind of put your thoughts on something and just get something done and make an actual impact someone's life. And I think that's when the spark of the entrepreneurial spark, it was during that time that, um, Michael Dearing course, a professor and one of my D school courses also told me the thing that if I don't do it, who will? >>And I think that's when, that's when it all started. I think the things that have helped me along the way, I mean, my cofounders, I think I've been incredibly lucky to find cofounders that are incredibly eager to be good at what they do and also very different from me. So I think if you think about why many companies implode, it's usually because of the founding team. We've been together for almost seven years now. Uh, and it's been an interesting way to find balance through so many failed companies. So many stages of growth branches over 400 people now. So you know, our roles have shifted over time and it's been like, uh, an interesting journey and I think recently more in the past few years, I think one of the things that has helped me find balance has been having a group of female founder friends. Um, it's really interesting to have a peer group that you can talk about things with and be vulnerable with. >>And I didn't have that in the first few years and I wish I did. My cofounders are amazing, but I think in some ways we are also coworkers. So having an external group has been incredibly helpful in helping me find balance in my life. So I think a lot of women feel that way. They feel that it's really difficult to navigate in this male dominated workspace. So what advice would you give to female entrepreneurs in this space? Yeah, I mean it is really hard and I think confidence is something that I've noticed with myself, my peers, the women that I've invested in. I do investing on the side. Uh, I would say believe that you can do it. Uh, believe that the only, the sky's the limit believe that, um, you can do more than you think you can do. I think sometimes, uh, you know, our, our background and the society around us, um, doesn't necessarily believe that we can do the things that we can do as women. >>So I think believing in ourselves is incredibly important. I think the second part is making sure that we build networks around us. They can tell us that they believe in us. They can push us beyond what we think is possible. And I think those networks can be peers. Like my funeral founder group, we call each other for ministers or, uh, I think investors. Um, I think it can be mentors. And I've had, I've been lucky enough to have amazing women investors, uh, women mentors. Um, and I, it's been a really incredible to see how much they helped me grow. So I think the interesting thing is when I was just getting started, I didn't look for those communities. I didn't look for a guy. I just kinda felt, Oh, I can do it. But I didn't actually realize that being part of a community, being vulnerable, asking questions can actually go help me go so much further. Um, so the advice would be to start early and find a small group of people that you can actually rely on, and that can be your advocates and your champions. So, yeah. Well, thank you so much for those words of wisdom. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being on the cube. I'm your host, Sonia to Gary. Thanks for watching the cube. Stay tuned for more.

>>from Menlo Park, California In the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now here's Sonia category. >>Hi and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California covering Cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Joining us today is Tao Johnson, who's the CEO and founder of Kaizen Technology Partners. Now welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So give us a brief overview of your background. >>Sure, I actually have a finance degree and have no idea what technology was. I started as a finance analyst at Sun Microsystems and had no idea who they were or what job awas but having the interest to be a CFO one day, our CEO in another company, I figured I'd go into sales and really understand what drives a company growth and revenue. So I was actually trained by Scott McNealy's best of the best program and was in sales class with him and his with his sister in law. And, um, I never left sales after them, >>so um So you mentioned that you have a finance background? How do you think that background has helped you to become a successful CEO versus, say, a technical background? >>And I think having the finance background is very important because your cash flow management is one of the biggest reasons companies fail. You know, before they can get their next round of funding, they run out of their overhead costs, their monthly overhead costs. The other thing is really to understand how to sell in our ally and total cost of ownership to the decision powers that be at the CFO level and CEO CIO. >>Okay, Um, so you're on the cloud now advisory board to tell us, How did you join And how was that experience? Like, I think >>it grew organically having been a participant to a few of the events with Jocelyn and then helping her. Where can I help? How can I get speakers for you or winners? And over time, just like just came to me and said, You know, you have such a network, Why don't you join our board and help us where we can? Hence we have mailing today, um, as our keynote because of our network. >>And speaking of entrepreneurs, you, um, I just want to mention that you are at this program for Harvard, for entrepreneurs. Can you talk more about that? >>Sure, it's an amazing program. I wish that there were more women who applied and were able to invest the money and time into the program. It's, ah, owners and entrepreneurs who have companies around the world. There's 41 countries represented. Unfortunately, only about 17% of women of 151 participants in class. We meet three times once a year, and we go through three weeks of intensive training to discuss marketing finance how to scale operations. But the best thing you get out of it is 1 30% of it is learning this case studies method and Harvard, the other 30% is really the network and the different industry's. You get to meet. We have film. As you know, we've talked about retail and other industries there that you can self reflect on. How does that involve with technology? Um, and then the other 30 self reflection time. A lot of entrepreneurs, especially CEOs, don't have the time to get away from their business, and it really forces you to not be the operator. Walk away and be able to self reflect on Where do you want to take the business >>today >>and speaking about networking? What's your advice on networking within the industry? What are some tips and tricks >>in my belief? You know, we have social media, but the best way to meet people is through other people. So going to events like this and really having an idea of your goals at the event when you're going there, who's going to help you get to that person? Um, and having a focus, not. I want to meet 100 80 people, and I don't know who they're going to be really being able to say, Who do I want to meet at that event who can help me get there and preparing plan as much triple the time that you're gonna be even at the event? >>Yes, the networking can be really difficult. So as an entrepreneur, what do you think makes a great entrepreneur? >>You know, entrepreneurship is very hard because you really have to touch all facets of a company and find the right people to trust to do certain areas, but then be able to understand all the different parts of the company, right, from supply chain to partnerships to sales and finance. So what, you really have to be diverse and ambidextrous, and that makes it very difficult for some people who are only analytical or only sales e to be able to run a company in scale. >>And what advice do you have for female technologists who maybe feel that so it's really difficult to navigate in this male dominated industry? I would >>say to them they're stand out, make your different standout, right? Why make it a negative? The positive is you are female and you stand out so less men get called on by you and you might have a chance to get in the door. But you better have your ideas in line and your resource is and you better be >>kick ass. But use it to your >>advantage that you are different and that they're not used to hearing from women. >>So you've been with carved out for many years now. Where do you hope to see cloud now in the future, I >>would love to see cloud now be more, uh, geographically worldwide as we're doing more work in my non profit for women Rwanda, in Afghanistan as entrepreneurs, Um and I think, you know, we've upped and stepped up so much more with Facebook bringing in investments to us to compared to what we've done before, Um, I think just the awareness and may be doing this on a, um, twice a year basis instead of only once a year to be ableto celebrate these wonderful women. >>Don, thank you so much for being on the Cube. This has been really knowledgeable. Thank you for having me. I'm Sonia Tagaris. Thank you for watching the Cube stay tuned for more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

From a little park, California in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 brought to you by Silicon angle media. Here's Sonya to garden. Hi and welcome to the cube. I'm your host Sonia to Gary. And we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo park, California covering cloud nows, top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation awards. Joining us today is Christine Heckart, CEO of scaler. Christine, welcome to the cube. Thank you. So you're receiving an award today for being one of the top women in cloud. Um, how do you feel about that? >>Oh, it's always terrible to get an award. I mean, it's awesome. I'm very honored to be here. >>Awesome. Um, so give us a little brief overview of your background. >>Oh, 30 years in tech. Um, let's same now. I'm CEO of scaler. So we're a log analytics company. We scale to over a hundred terabytes a day in the cloud at ridiculously affordable prices. And we serve some of the best tech companies in the world. We sell into engineers and developers. >>And so you've been CEO for over a year now. What's that experience been like? What challenges have you faced along the way? >>Uh, exhilarating experience if you've never been at a startup? Um, it's a great place to be. It's a phenomenal team. Challenges are all about how you grow and how you serve customers well on a limited set of resource with unlimited choice sets and opportunities. And that's hard thing to do. >>So you've been an executive for quite a while now. What's the best part about being a CEO? >>The people are the best part. Um, both the employees. We have some incredible employees, very energized about the mission, very dedicated, uh, and then absolutely amazing customers that we serve. These, you know, we serve engineers whereby accompanied by engineers for engineers and engineers innovate to change the world. And our job is to help them innovate with more confidence so they can change the world more quickly. And so you're feeding into all these incredible missions around the world with these incredible people and you're helping them do their job better. And it's just every day is different and every day is fun. >>So what are the, some of the things that have influenced you along the way or some of the people who have influenced you? >>Jeez. Um, you know, I guess I'm influenced mostly by the people who I worked with and who have worked for me. Um, even more so maybe than the people I've worked for, although they've also been fabulous. Um, I just think you learn from, you learn from all the talent around you in the way people think differently about problems and, and how that synergy, um, often creates just magical outcomes. >>So as a CEO, um, what kind of workplace culture are striving to achieve? >>Uh, we have picked just one value and there are other companies that I think are doing the same and the value and we picked us care. And so we really strive to have a culture that encourages people to care about each other and care about the company's mission, uh, care about serving customers well and, and building a very high quality product with great experience, but also care about the environment and care about the community and care about people's lives outside of the day to day work job. Um, so we try to take a really holistic view, but on one key attribute, which is care. >>Well that's, that's awesome. I think everyone wants to go to work and, and just feel like, you know, that they're not bogged down by long hours or that >>we still have long hours. There's no doubt about that, but it's carrying long hours right there. Appreciate it. Yeah. Um, so what advice would you give to women who are considering a career in tech? I love tech. I've been 30 years in tech. I go out of my way to get people into the industry. Um, I do believe in all of its facets. It's the greatest industry in the history of history. I really do believe that it's also a hard place to work. It's a demanding place to work. Um, it's still hard place to work for women. Um, and any, I think kind of minority, uh, it's not as welcoming yet as it could be, but relative to 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, we've made enormous progress. I still believe we are making enormous progress and there's work to go, but it's very encouraging. >>That's great. Um, so, um, after being in the industry for a while, have you figured out a work life balance? Is there a secret? Is it a myth? >>Um, I am not the person to ask about work life balance for sure. Uh, most people would probably say I don't have it. Um, I don't look at it as balanced so much as, um, maybe juggling, like you just prioritize what's important in the moment. Um, I do believe in that. One of the great things about tech is usually you can do your job anytime from anywhere. Um, and you know, that has good and bad. So I tend to do my job all times everywhere. But you can do your job all times, everywhere and, and sometimes that's from home. And sometimes that's from other places, you know, anywhere around the world. >>And I'm sure especially as like, you know, moms and stuff like it's, it's great to have that flexibility. Um, and um, so, okay. So as a CEO, what do you think makes you a great leader? >>Um, I think any great leader is a leader who cares about their mission and their employees, uh, as people and not just as workers, um, and their customers as people and their, their holistic careers in their lives, not just as a source of revenue. So that's one of the reasons why we picked that value care is that, you know, it's super important for any leader at any level. What do you think leaders can do to, to make that, make it more welcoming for women in tech to be part of this industry? Um, it's not, this is not a question about women or any, anybody in particular, what people value is being appreciated and being included and being heard. That's it. Like, if you, if, if you can create an environment that is inclusive, where people can be heard and can be valued for what they contribute and their ideas, then I think, you know, it's a great place to work and, and, and that's a hard thing to do. It's white. It's easy to say. It's very hard to do culturally. Um, but I, I really think it's that simple. Well, thank you so much, Christine, for being on the. It's always great to have you here. Thank you for having me again. I'm sending it to Gary. Thanks for watching the cube. Stay tuned for more.

>>from Menlo Park, California In the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now here's Sonia category. >>Hi, and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California covering Cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >>Joining us today is Get the Schmidt CEO of Human. Get that. Welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. >>So just give us a brief overview of your background and more about Humira. All right, A brief >>overview. Let's see. Um, I'll start off that I've been in the industry for some time now. Um, since ah, 97 which I used to actually work at this campus that we're here today at when it used to be Sun Microsystems. So I started out in technology in product management and marketing. Mainly, um, when java was coming out so early days and really learned a lot about what it takes to take a product or a concept out to market very exciting in those early days and sort of, you know, move towards looking at Industries and Sister focused on financial services into the lot around financial services marketing. Also it son. >>And then I moved >>to Denmark, which is sort of a surprise, But I'm married to a day and we decided we would try something different. So I moved to Denmark, working at a consulting company software consulting company based in Denmark, fairly small and Ah, and was part of sort of building out of the conference and business development business they had over there. And ah, and that was a way for us, for me to understand a completely other side of the business consulting aspects where you really build software for a customer and really understand, you know, sort of the customer solution needs that are required versus when you're working at a large enterprise company kind of are separated away from the customers. And that was there where I met the two founding team members of Humi Oh, Christian and Trust in at Tri Fork into you. Essentially, we've been working together for 10 years, and, uh, we sort of all felt like we could really come out with the world's best logging solution and, ah, this was out of some of the pain we were running into by running other solutions in the market. And so we took a leap into building our own product business. And so we did that in 2016. And so that's really what brought me here into the CEO role. So we have a three person leisure leadership or executive team, our founding team, which is to verily technical folks. So the guys that really built the product and and, uh, and keep it running and take it to the next level every single day. But what was missing was really that commercial kind of leader that was ready to take that role, and that's where I came in. So they were very supportive and and bringing me on board. So that was into 2016 where I started that >>that's awesome. So how do you think having like a business and marketing background versus a technical background has helped you become a successful CEO? Um, I >>think it's really, really hard if you don't have different profiles on your founding team to be able to run a successful tech business. So there's technology that you could have the world's greatest technology like an example would be my you know, my co founders were building an amazing product, but until they came into the room, they hadn't thought about going out and trying to get a customer to use it. And essentially, that is one of the issues there is that you can sit and build something and build the best product out there. But if you're not getting feedback really, really early in the design and the concepts of product development, then customers our search of it's not built in. And so a lot of the thought process around him. EOS We like to say customers are in our DNA. We build >>our product >>for people to use 6 to 8 hours a day, and they're in it every day. And so it keeps this feeling of a customer feedback loop. And even if you're technical, it's really exciting. You know that you build something that somebody uses every day. It looks at every day, and so that's the kind of energy that we've tried to, you know, instill. Or maybe I've tried to instill in Humi Oh, that you know, our customers really matter, and I think that's one of the ways that we've been able to move, Let's say really, really fast in building the right features the right functionality, um, and the right things for people are using it on the on the on, the on the other and essentially >>so okay. And, um so you're here to receive an award for being one of the top female entrepreneurs in cloud innovation. So congratulations and And how does it feel to win this award? Super >>exciting. I mean, I'm glad that there are organizations like Cloud now that are doing amazing things for women and and also, you know, making examples of folks that are doing interesting roles in our industry, especially around B two B software. I think that's a real area where there's not many CIOs or leaders in our space where there should be. And, uh, and I think part of it is actually kind of highlighting that. But, you know, the other side is sort of an event like this today is bringing together a lot of other profiles that are women or diverse profiles together to sort of, you know, talk about this problem and acknowledge and also take, let's say, more of an active stance around, you know, making this place not so scary. I mean, I think I remember one of my early events and I was raising our series A when I walked into a VC event where there were no other female CIOs out there. There's 100 CIOs and I was the only one. And I think one of the hard parts is I walked in there and, you know, it felt a bit uncomfortable, But there were some. There were two amazing VC partners at the company that I first started talking to, and that just really used the sort of like, you know, I guess. Uncomfortable, itty. So I think the main focus at things like today or, you know, the people that are here today. So I think we can help each other. And I think that's something that you know. That's something that I'd like to see more of, that we actively sort of create environments and communities for that to happen, and cloud now is one of them. >>So I think a lot of women have had that experience where they're the only woman in the room, you know, and it's just really hard to like. Figure out your path from there. So as the company as Julio, how do you What's your strategy for inclusion? >>Um, so, like I like to call it active inclusion. I think part of this is like having a diverse workforce, which is, you know, obviously including women and different backgrounds. Other things. But >>one of >>the big things we think about at Hume Eo is we really like to, let's say, celebrate people's differences so like that you're able to be yourself and almost eccentric is a good thing. And be able to feel safe in that environment to feel safe, that you can express your opinions, feel comfortable and safe when you're, you know, coming with a opposite viewpoint. Because the diversity of thought is really what we're trying to include in our company. So it means bringing together folks that don't look like each other where exactly, the same clothes and do the exact same hobbies and come from the same countries like we have. Ah, very, you know, global workforce. So we have folks, you know in Denmark of an office in Denmark. We have an office in the UK, and we have folks all over the U. S. We have a lot of backgrounds that have come from different cultures, and I think there's a beauty to that. There's a beauty to actually combining a lot of ways to solve problems. Everyone from a different culture has different ways of solving those. And so I think part of this is all around making that. Okay, right. So, you know, active inclusion is a way to to sort of put it into terms. So So we're definitely looking for people, Actively, that would like to join something like >>this. So I love that. Um, So if you were personally, if you were to have your own board of directors, like, who would they be? Um, it's not really >>the who. It's almost like the profiles or the people. I mean, we already have a personal board like I call it. I mean, it's something that I actively started doing. Um, once I once I started with a company board, I realized, you know, I probably need my own personal board, my own sort of support infrastructure That includes folks like my family, my sisters and my mom. It also includes you know, some younger junior folks that are actually much younger >>than me. >>But I learned so much from so um, to one of my good friend Cindy, who's who is brilliant at describing technology concepts. And and I think just some of the conversations I've had with her just opened my eyes to something that I hadn't seen before. And I think that's the area where I like to say the personal board isn't exactly you know people. It's it's profile. So along the way, as you grow, you're looking for new types of profiles. Let's say you want to learn about a new concept or a new technology or, you know, get better at running or something. So it's part of bringing those profiles in tow, learn about it and then back to this board concept. It's It's not as though it's a linked in network or it's actually sort of a group of people that you sort of rely on. And then it's a It's a two way street. So essentially, you know, there could be things that the other person could gain from knowing me, and ideally, that those were the best relationships in a personal board. So so I encourage alive women to do this because it builds a support infrastructure that is not related to your job. It's not your manager. It's not your co worker. You kind of feel some level of freedom having those discussions because those people aren't looking at your company. They're looking at helping you. So So that's That's sort of the concepts around >>the personal board idea and anything as women like having a sport system is so necessary, especially in this, like male dominated industry. Well, I think it's back >>to that whole feeling like you're the one person in the room, right? Right, so you're not the one person in the room, and I think we need to change that. And I think that's like some you know, all of our kind of roles that for all the women intact. I mean, it's sort of like something that we could help each other with right, and and if we don't do it actively, I mean, you know the numbers and we know you know the percentages of these things. If we want to change that, it does require some active interest on on our part to make that happen. And I think those are the areas where I see, like, the support infrastructures, the events like this really kind of engaging, um, us to be aware and doing something about the >>problem. Thank you so much for being on the key of love having you here. Thanks for >>having me. I really appreciate it. >>I'm Sonia to Garry. Thanks for watching the Cube. Stay tuned for more. >>Yeah, yeah.

>> From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley it's theCUBE, covering the Churchills, 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Santa Clara, California at the Churchills. It's the ninth annual awards banquet put on by the Churchills Club, and this year is all about leadership. We're excited to be joined by our next guest who knows a little bit about leadership. He's Carl Guardino, the president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. Carl, great to see you. >> Great to see you, too, Jeff. >> So what is the Silicon Valley Leadership Group all about? >> The Silicon Valley Leadership Group is an association of about 360, primarily innovation economy employers that want to make a positive, proactive difference here in the region, as well as in our state and across the United States. >> What are some of the hot topics that are on top of the plate right now? Because there is a lot of craziness kind of going on here in Silicon Valley. >> There is. But what we try to do is impact those issues that are as important to families in their living rooms as they are to CEOs in their board rooms. And here in the bay area, we call those THEE issues. An acronym, T-H-E-E. The T, traffic; H, housing affordability; E, education; and the fourth E, the economy. And we try to bring together diverse points of view for those areas that unite us, where we can actually solve some of those challenges. >> Right, and those are big, big challenges. And you work both with public as well as private groups to try to bring them together to make movement on those things. >> We're a bridge. And the first thing about a bridge is that you try to bring folks together to cross the bridge and work together. The second most important thing about a bridge is that you build them, you don't burn them down. And that's the role that we try to play with 360 highly engaged CEOs and c-suite officers. >> And it's only appropriate, because tonight you'll be sitting down in a conversation with the mayor of San Jose, Sam Liccardo, to kind of get into some of these issues. San Jose seems to be on a roll right now, a positive roll. A lot of positive news coming out of San Jose. >> Yes, and that always starts with leadership rather than luck. San Jose mayor Sam Liccardo, 10th largest city in the United States, has been able to strike that balance of being pro-innovation economy, while also caring deeply about his citizens, the residents of San Jose, 1,053,000, and how we make sure that we have a strong and vibrant economy, but also a great quality of life. >> Right. So how do you even begin to - we'll start with traffic. The T in the THEE. To address that issue, it's so multifaceted, right, it's so tied to jobs, it's tied to housing, it's tied to the growth of the economy, you know, unfortunately freeways are slow to build, public transportation's expensive, but we continue to see growth there. How do you kind of eat that elephant, one bite at a time, with something like traffic? >> Well the role of the leadership group is, again, by bringing people together to solve complex problems in a democracy with winning solutions. So we'd rather win than whine. And when it comes to traffic, one of our core competencies is actually to lead and run ballot initiatives to fund transportation improvements throughout the region and the state. In fact, in the last 30 years alone, I've had the pleasure of going on loan from the leadership group to run ballot campaigns for transportation improvements that have totaled 30 billion dollars in revenue through those measures, approved by voters to reach into our own wallets, rather than our neighbors, to build improvements that, this Christmas, in time to go into your stocking, we'll be bringing BART to San Jose, and working on the electrification of Caltrain, linking transit and better road improvements, making it better for all of us trying to travel throughout this region. >> Right. Good, we need it. >> We do. >> And on the housing, you know, because the housing is also very closely tied to traffic, and we see that the old days of single-family homes on big pieces of dirt, those are going away. They just can't support it in higher density areas like San Fransisco, San Jose, to bring those jobs next to that. So we're seeing a huge transformation in the housing space as well. >> And we need a huge transformation, both in transportation and in housing. And it's really the flip side to the same coin. T, for tails, or transportation; H, for head, or housing. And you have to make sure that you keep those linked. In fact, one of our initiatives right now is to work with all six, fixed rail transit operators throughout the nine bay area counties. What are the current and future uses of those half miles around every fixed rail transit stop that you have? How do we maximize those uses? Here's a great example. What Google wants to do in downtown San Jose, at the Diridon SAP station, is only because of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's work to bring BART to that station, electrify Caltrain, light rail is there, Amtrak, ACE, et cetera, and they want to have 20 to 25 thousand future Google employees there within the next 10 to 12 years. Why? Because it is a sustainable location that doesn't rely on you and I slogging through traffic in our single-occupant cars. >> Right. I can't wait to see what you guys do to El Camino. That's the next one that's going to - as somebody once said in one of these traffic things, it's just a bunch of old retail stores with empty parking lots, just placed by Microsoft. Or excuse me, by Amazon. So I think we'll see a big transformation with housing and jobs, you know, along that quarter, which happens to parallel the Caltrain, and is near and dear to my heart. So a lot of good opportunities I think to make improvements. >> Jeff, there is. And as hard as transportation and traffic solutions are to put into place, housing is even tougher. And while Bay Area residents think housing is the bigger crisis, the solutions are tougher to come about, because the community isn't as united on those solutions. So the role that a group of employers like ours play, is how do we bring people together around solutions that make sure that we build homes, that are good for everyone in our society. >> Well Carl, I like your positive attitude, a lot of winning and no whining, so I wish you nothing but success. And we'll be watching. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> You're welcome. He's Carl, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Churchills in Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE covering Red Hat Summit, 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Well, welcome back here in Boston. We're at the BCEC as we are starting to wrap up our coverage here of day two of the Red Hat Summit, 2019. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, and we're now joined by Ashesh Badani, who is the senior vice president of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Been a big day for you, hasn't it Mr. Badani? >> It sure has, thanks for having me back on! >> You bet! All right, so OpenShift 4, we saw the unveiling, your baby gets introduced to the world. What's the reaction been between this morning and this afternoon in terms of people, what they're asking you about, what they're most curious about, and maybe what their best reaction is. >> Yeah, so it's not necessarily a surprise for the folks who have been following OpenShift closely, we put the beta out for a little while, so that's the good news, but let me roll back just a little. >> John: Sure >> I think another part of the news that was really important for us is our announcement of a milestone that we crossed, which is a thousand customers, right? And it was at this very summit and theCUBE definitely knows this well, right, because they've been talking for a while. At this very Summit in 2015, four years ago, that we launched OpenShift Version 3. Right and so, you know you fast forward four years, right, and now the diversity of cases that we see, you know, spanning, established apps, cloud native apps, we heard Exxon talking about AIML data signs that they're putting on the platform, in a variety of different industries, is amazing. And I think the way OpenShift 4 has come along for us, is us having the opportunity to learn what have all these customers been doing well, and what else do we need to do on the platform to make that experience a better one. How do we reimagine enterprise kubernetes, to take it to the next level. And I think that's what we're introducing to the industry. >> Ashesh I think back four years ago, kubernetes was not something that was on the tip of the tongues of most people here. Congratulations on 1,000. >> Thank you. >> I hear what, 100, 150, new customers every quarter is the current rate there, but what I've really enjoyed, talked to a CIO and they're like okay, we're talking about digital transformation, we're talking about how we're modernizing all of our environments, and OpenShift is the platform that we do it. So, talk a little bit, from a customer's standpoint, the speeds, the feeds, the technical pieces, but that outcome, what is it an enabler of for your customers? >> Yeah, so excellent points Stu, we've seen whole sale complete digital transformations underway with our customers. So whether it's Deutsche Bank, who came and talked about running thousands of containers now, moving a whole bunch of workload onto the platform, which is incredible to see. Whether it's a customer like Volkswagen, who talking yesterday, if you caught that, about building an autonomous, self-driving, sets of technologies on the platform. What we're seeing is not just what we thought we would only see in the beginning which is one built, cloud native apps, and digital apps, and so on. Or, more nice existing apps, and bring them on the platform. But also, technologies that are making a fundamental difference, and I'll call one out. So I'm a judge for The Innovation Awards, we do this every year, I have been for many years, I love it, it's one of my favorite parts of the show. This year, we had one entry, which is one of the winners, which is HCA, which is a healthcare provider, talking about how they've been using the OpenShift platform as a means to make a fundamental difference in patients' lives. And when I say fundamental difference, actually saving lives. And you'll hear more about their story, but what they've done, is be able to say, look how can we detect early warning signals, faster than we have been, take some AI technology, and correlate against that, and see how we can reduce sepsis within patients. It's a very personal story for me, my mother died of sepsis. And the fact that they've been able to do this, and I think they're reporting they've already saved dozens of lives based on this. That's when you know, the things that you're doing are making a real difference, making a real transformation, not just in an actual customers' lives, but in users and people around the world. >> You were saying earlier too, Ashesh, about looking at what customers are doing and then trying to improve upon that experience, and give them a more effective experience, whatever the right adjective might be, in terms of what you're doing with 4. If you had to look at it, and say okay, these are the two or three pillars of this where I think we've made the biggest improvement or the biggest change, what would those be? >> Yes, so, one is to look at the world as it is in some sense, which is what a customer's doing. Customers weren't deployed to hybrid cloud, right? They want choice, they want independence with regard to which environments are rented on, whether it's physical, virtual, private, or any public cloud. Customers want one platform, to say I want to run these next generation, cloud native, market service based applications, along with my established stateful applications. Customers want a platform for innovation, right? So for example, we have customers that say, look, I really need a modern platform because I want to recruit the next generation of developers from colleges, if I don't give them the ability to play with Go, or Python, or new databases, they're gonna go to some Silicon Valley company, and I'm going to deplete my pool of talent that I need to compete, right? 'Cause digital transformation is about taking existing companies, and making them digitally enabled. Going forward, what we're also seeing is the ability for us to say well maybe the experience we've given existing customers can be improved. How do we for example, give them a platform, that's more autonomous in nature, more self-driving in nature, that can heal itself, based on for example, there's a critical update that's required that we can send over the air to them. How can we bring greater automation into the platform? It's all of those ideas that we've got based on how customers are using it today, is what we're bringing to bear, going forward. >> Ashesh, one of the errors we have trying to help customers parse through the language is, everybody's talking about platforms, if you look at the public clouds, everybody's all in on kubernetes, a few weeks ago, we were at the Google Cloud event, talked to Red Hat there, there's Anthos, there's OpenShift, look at Azure, we Satya Nadella up on stage, and you're like, okay they've got their own kubernetes platform, but I've got OpenShift fully integrated there. >> Ashesh: Yeah. >> Can you help is kinda understand how those fit together because it's an interesting and changing dynamic. >> Well it's a very Silicon Valley buzzword, right? Everyone wants a platform, everyone wants to build a platform, Facebook's a platform, Uber's a platform, Airbnb is, everything's seeming a platform, right? What I really want to focus on more is in regard to, we want to be able to give folks literally an abstraction level, an ability for companies to say I want to embrace digital transformation. Before we get there, someone's like what's digital transformation, I don't even understand what that means anymore. My simple definition is basically flipping the table. Typically companies spend 80% on maintenance, 20% innovation, how do we flip that? So they're spending 80% innovation, 20% maintenance. So if we're still thinking in those terms, let me give you a way to develop those applications, spend more time and energy on innovation, and then allow for you to take advantage of what I'll call a pool of resources. Compute, network, and storage. Across the environment that you have in place. Some of which you might own, some of which some third parties might provide for you, and some of which you get from public cloud. And take advantage of innovation that's being done outside. Innovative services that come from either public cloud providers, or ISPs, or separate providers, and then be able to do that innovated rapid fashion, you know, develop, deploy, iterate quickly. So to me that is really fundamentally what we're trying to provide customers, and it takes different forms, internal packaging. >> Maybe you can explain to me, the Azure OpenStack seems different than some of the other partnerships. Two years ago, when we were sitting in this building, we talked to you about AWS with OpenShift in that partnership, so what's differentiated and special about the Azure OpenStack integration. >> Yeah, so the Azure partnership, it's a good question because we've now taken our partnering with the public cloud providers to the next level, if you will. With Azure there's a few things in play, first it's a jointly offered managed service from Red Hat and Microsoft, where we're both supporting it together. So in the case of OpenShift and AWS, that's you know OpenShift directly to the ring of service, in this case, it's right out of Microsoft, working close together to make that happen. It's a native service to Azure, so if you saw in the keynote, you could use a command line to call OpenShift directly integrate into the Azure command line. It's available within the interface of Microsoft-Azure. So it feels like a native service, you can take advantages of other Azure services, and bring those to bear, so obviously increases developer experience from that perspective. We also inherit all the compliances, certifications, that Microsoft-Azure has, as well, for that service, as well as all the availability requirements that they put out there, so it's much more closely integrated together, much better developer experience, native to Azure, and then the ability for the Microsoft sales team to go out and sell it to their customers in conjunction. >> You talk a lot about different partnerships, and bringing this collaborative, open-mindset to each and every relationship, how hard is that to do? Because you have your of way of doing things and it's worked very well, and yet, you go out and you have these new partnerships or extensions of partnerships, and not everybody with whom you work does things the same way, and so, everybody's gotta be malleable to a certain extent, but just in terms of being that flexible all the time, what does that do for you? >> So, we take that for granted sometimes, the way we work. And I don't mean to say that to be boastful, or arrogant, in any fashion. I had an interview earlier today, and the reporter said why don't you put on your page, that you're 100% open source? And I said we never put that on our page because that's just how we work, we assume that, we assume everyone knows that about us, and we're going forward. And he says, well, I don't know, perhaps there's others that don't know. And he's right. The world's changing, we're expanding our opportunities in front of folks. In the same way we've only and always known, we used to collaborate with others in the community, before we fully embraced OpenStack, there were certain projects that Red Hat was investing in that were Red Hat driven, and we say maybe there wasn't as much community around it, we're gonna go down and embrace and fully parse an OpenStack community. Same's the case, for example, in kubernetes too. It's not necessarily a project that we created on our own, in conjunction with Google, and many others in the community. And so that's something that's part of our DNA, I'm not sure we're doing anything different, in engaging with communities, just how we work. >> So, Ashesh, I know your team's busy doing a lot of things. We've been hearing about what sessions are overflowing, down in the expo floor, so why don't you give us some visibility. But there was one specific one I wondered if you could start with. >> Ashesh: Sure. >> So down on the expo floor, it's a containerized environment and it has something to do with puppies, and therefor how does that connect with OpenShift 4 if we can start there. >> That's a tough one, you're gonna have to go and ask the puppies how to make a difference in the world. (laughing) >> John: So we go from kubernetes to canines, (laughing) that's what we're doing here. >> I do believe they're comfort dogs, but there was coding and some of the other stuff, so give us a little bit of the walk around, the expo flow, the breakouts and the like, in some of the hot areas, that your team's working on. >> Fair enough, fair enough. Maybe not puppies, but maybe we're trying to herd cats, close enough, right? >> John: Safer terrain. >> The amount of interest, the number of sessions, with OpenShift, or container based technologies, cloud based technologies, it's tremendous to see that. So regardless if whether you see the breakouts that are in place, the customer sessions, I think we've got over 100 customers, I think. Who are presenting on all aspects of their journey. So to me, that's remarkable. Lots of interest in our road map going forward, which is great to see, standing room only for OpenShift 4 and where we're taking that. Other technology that's interesting, the work, for example, we're doing in serverless. We announced an OpenSource collaboration with Mircrosoft, something called KEDA, the Kubernetes eventually. Our scaling project, so interesting how customers can kind of engage around that as well. And then the partner ecosystem, you can walk around and see just a plethora of ISVs, we're all looking to build operators, or have operators and are certifying operators within our ecosystem. And then it's ways for us to expose that to our joint customers. >> We're gonna cut you loose, and let you go, the floor's gonna be open for a few minutes, those puppies are just down behind Stu, we'll let you go check that out. >> Alright, thanks, I hear you can adopt them if you want to, as well. >> Before we let you go see the comfort dogs, 1,000 customers, where do you see, when we come back a year from now, where you are, where you wanna see it go, show us a little bit looking forward. >> So there's been some news around Red Hat that has probably happened over the last few months, the people are hearing this, I look at that as a great opportunity for us to expand our reach into markets, both in terms of industries perhaps we haven't necessarily gone into, that other companies have been. Perhaps we say it's manufacturing, perhaps this is the opportunity for us to cross the chasm, have a lot more trained consultants who can help get more customers on the journey, so I fully expect our reach increasing over a period time. And then you'll see, if you will, iterations of OpenShift 4 and the progress we've made against that, and hopefully many more success stories on the stage. >> Alright, looking forward to catching up next year, if not sooner. >> Ashesh: Okay, excellent. >> John: And congratulations on today, and best of luck down the road. >> Thanks again for having me. >> And good to see you! >> Ashesh: Yeah, likewise! >> Back with more on theCube, you are watching our coverage live, here from Red Hat Summit, 2019, in Boston, Massachusetts. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat techno music) >> From Mountain View California, it's the Cube covering the 15th Annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with the Cube on the ground at the Computer History Museum for the 15th annual ACG SV Awards. And in Mountain View California excited to welcome to the Cube for the first time, John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet and the co-founder of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. JOHN, it's truly a pleasure to have you on the Cube today. >> Well delighted to be here, Lisa. >> So I was doing some research on you. And I see Marc Andreessen has called you the godfather of Silicon Valley. >> Marc very generous (loughs) >> so I thought I was pretty cool I'm going to sit down with the godfather tonight. (loughs) >> I have not done that yet. So you are keynoting the 15th Annual ACG SV Awards tonight. Talk to us a little bit about the takeaways that the audience is going to hear from you tonight. >> Well, they're going to hear some things about leadership the importance of leadership, obviously the importance of innovation. We're in the middle of Silicon Valley innovation is a big thing. And the role that technology plays in our lives and how we should be thinking about that, and how do we ensure the technology is something that serves the public good. >> Definitely. So there's about I think over 230 attendees expected tonight over 100 sea levels, the ACG SV Is has been it's it's much more than a networking organization. there's a lot of opportunities for collaboration for community. Tell me a little bit about your experience with that from a collaboration standpoint? >> Well, I think collaboration is a critical ingredient. I mean, for so many years, you look at the collaboration is gone. Just take between between the universities, my own Stanford and Silicon Valley and how that collaboration has developed over time and lead the founding of great companies, but also collaboration within the valley. This is the place to be a technology person in the whole world it's the best place partly because of this collaboration, and this innovative spirit that really is a core part of what we are as a place. >> I agree. The innovative spirit is one of the things that I enjoy, about not only being in technology, but also living in Silicon Valley. You can't go to a Starbucks without hearing a conversation or many conversations about new startups or cloud technology. So the innovative spirit is pervasive here. And it's also one that I find in an in an environment like ASG SV. You just hear a lot of inspiring stories and I was doing some research on them in the last 18 months. Five CEO positions have been seated and materialized through ACG SV. Number of venture deals initiated several board positions. So a lot of opportunity in this group here tonight. >> Right, well I think that's important because so much of the leadership has got to come by recruiting new young people. And with the increase in concerned about diversity and our leadership core and our boards, I think building that network out and trying to stretch it a little bit from the from perhaps the old boys network of an earlier time in the Valley is absolutely crucial. >> Couldn't agree more. So let's now talk a little bit about the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. Tell us a little bit about it. When was it founded? >> So we are we are in our very first year, actually, this year, our first year of scholars, we founded it in 2016. The motivation was, I think, an increasing gap we perceived in terms of the need for great leadership and what was available. And it was in government. It was in the nonprofit world, it was in the for profit world. So I being a lifelong educator said, What can we do about this? Let's try to recruit and develop a core of younger people who show that they're committed to the greater good and who are excellent, who are innovative, who are creative, and prepare them for leadership roles in the future. >> So you're looking for are these undergraduate students? >> They are graduate students, so they've completed their undergraduate, it's a little hard to tell when somebody's coming out of high school, what their civic commitment is, what their ability to lead is. But coming out of coming out of undergraduate experience, and often a few years of work experience, we can tell a lot more about whether somebody has the potential to be a future leader. >> So you said, found it just in 2016. And one of the things I saw that was very interesting is projecting in the next 50 years, there's going to be 5000 Knight-Hennessy scholars at various stages of their careers and government organizations, NGOs, as you mentioned, so looking out 50 years you have a strong vision there, but really expect this organization to be able to make a lasting impact. >> That's what our goal is lasting impact over decades, because people who go into leadership positions often take a decade or two to rise to that position. But that's what our investment is our investment is in the in the future. And when I went to Phil Knight who's my co-founder and donor, might lead donor to the program, he was enthusiastic. His view was that we had a we had a major gap in leadership. And we needed to begin training, we need to do multiple things. We need to do things like we're doing tonight. But we also need to think about that next younger generation is up and coming. >> Some terms of inspiring the next generation of innovative diversity thinkers. Talk to me about some of the things that this program is aimed at, in addition to just, you know, some of the knowledge about leadership, but really helping them understand this diverse nature in which we now all find ourselves living. >> So one of the things we do is we try to bring in leaders from all different walks of life to meet and have a conversation with our scholars. This morning, we had the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in town, Michelle Bachelet, and she sat down and talked about how she thought about her role as addressing human rights, how to move things forward in very complex situations we face around the world with collapse of many governments and many human rights violations. And how do you how do you make that forward progress with a difficult problem? So that kind of exposure to leaders who are grappling with really difficult problems is a critical part of our program. >> And they're really seeing and experiencing real world situations? >> Absolutely. They're seeing them up close as they're really occurring. They see the challenges we had, we had Governor Brown and just before he went out of office here in California, to talk about criminal justice reform a major issue in California and around the country. And how do we make progress on that on that particular challenge? >> So you mentioned a couple of other leaders who the students I've had the opportunity to learn from and engage with, but you yourself are quite the established leader. You went to Stanford as a professor in 1977. You are a President Emeritus you were president of Stanford from 2000 to 2016. So these students also get the opportunity to learn from all that you have experienced as it as a professor of Computer Science, as well as in one of your current roles as chairman of Alphabet. Talk to us a little bit about just the massive changes that you have seen, not just in Silicon Valley, but in technology and innovation over the last 40 plus years. >> Well, it is simply amazing. When I arrived at Stanford, there was no internet. The ARPANET was in its young days, email was something that a bunch of engineers and scientists use to communicate, nobody else did. I still remember going and seeing the first demonstration of what would become Yahoo. Well, while David Filo and Jerry Yang had it set up in their office. And the thing that immediately convinced me Lisa was they showed me that their favorite Pizza Parlor would now allow orders to go online. And when I saw that I said, the World Wide Web is not just about a bunch of scientists and engineers exchanging information. It's going to change our lives and it did. And we've seen wave after wave that with Google and Facebook, social media rise. And now the rise of AI I mean this this is a transformative technology as big as anything I think we've ever seen. In terms of its potential impact. >> It is AI is so transformative. I was I was in Hawaii recently on vacation and Barracuda Networks was actually advertising about AI in Hawaii and I thought that's interesting that the people that are coming to to Hawaii on vacation, presumably, people have you know, many generations who now have AI as a common household word may not understand the massive implications and opportunities that it provides. But it is becoming pervasive at every event we're at at the Cube and there's a lot of opportunity there. It's it's a very exciting subject. Last question for you. You mentioned that this that the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program is really aimed towards graduate students. What is your advice to those BB stem kids in high school right now who are watching this saying, oh, John, what, what? How do you advise me to be able to eventually get into a program like this? >> Well, I think it begins by really finding your passion, finding something you're really dedicated to pushing yourself challenging yourself, showing that you can do great things with it. And then thinking about the bigger role you want to have with technology. In the after all, technology is not an end in itself. It's a tool to make human lives better and that's the sort of person we're looking for in the knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, >> Best advice you've ever gotten. >> Best advice ever gotten is remember that leadership is about service to the people in the institution you lead. >> It's fantastic not about about yourself but really about service to those. >> About service to others >> JOHN, it's been a pleasure having you on the Cube tonight we wish you the best of luck in your keynote at the 15th annual ACG SV Awards and we thank you for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. I've enjoyed it. Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube on the ground. Thanks for watching. (upbeat tech music)

(upbeat music) >> From Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th annual GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hey, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 15th annual ACG SV GROW! Awards. Can you hear the energy and all the innovation happening behind me? Well, I'm here with one of the board members of ACG SV, Ashley Tarver, big data evangelist for Cloudera. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, I'm glad to be here. >> Lot of collaboration going on behind us, right? >> It's a great networking event. >> It is. >> 'Cause so many people have showed up. >> There's over 230 people. >> Oh, easily. >> Expected tonight, over 100 of those are C-levels. Before we get into your association with ACG SV, talk to us a little bit about what's going on at Cloudera, just the Hortonworks acquisition was just completed, the merger, a couple months ago, what's going on there? >> It's very exciting. As most people might know, we just did a major collaboration merger with a company called Hortonworks. And the two companies together, we're about twice the size as we were before and for the industry and for our customers, it's been really exciting because we've been able to really create what we call the enterprise data cloud that really enables our customers to bring all their data together into one single platform and we call it an edge-to-AI solution. We're really one of the only companies right now in the world who have the ability to do that in a comprehensive manner and we can do it on the premise, we can do it in the cloud, a hybrid cloud environment, so it gives you the ultimate flexibility and the merger has allowed us to really accomplish that for our customers. >> As we and every company that's succeeding today is living in this hybrid, multi-cloud environment where the edge is proliferating, the security perimeters are morphing dramatically, companies need to be able to transform digitally in a secure way, but also enable access to data from decades ago. >> Yeah, most anybody's who's listening to the media will hear IoT is really the big play and the ability to capture all that data from multiple in-points, edge devices, and bring it all into a single data repository is a major challenge. So, having the ability to do that in a. You can do it now with the way we're doing it, the way your company wants to do it. So if you're already in the cloud, you can stay there, if you wanted to keep it on the premise. So there's a lot of options that we now bring to the table. So hopefully, it becomes a little easier for our customers. >> So when you're talking with customers that maybe have a lot of workloads, enterprise workloads, maybe legacy still on prem, and you're talking to them in your role as the big data evangelist, where does the topic of AI come up? I mean, are you talking to them about here is a massive opportunity for you to actually leverage AI, you got to go to the cloud to do it? >> Absolutely. I mean, AI is kind of a marketing term that you hear a lot about. For us, it's really about machine learning and machine learning is taking large sets of data and putting logic on top of it and so you can tease out valuable insights that you might not otherwise get. So the ability to then apply that in an AI environment becomes extremely important and the ability to do that across a large data set is what's really complicated. But if you're a real data scientist, you want to have as much data as you can so your models can run more accurately. And as soon as you can do that, you'll have the ability to really improve your models, extract better insights out of the data you do own, and provide more value to your own company and your own customers. >> Absolutely, it's a fascinating topic, but since we're low on time here, we are at the 15th annual GROW! Awards. ACG SV recognizing Arista Networks for the Outstanding Growth Award and Adesto Technologies for the Emerging Growth Award. You've been involved as a board member of ACG SV for about a year now. What makes this organization worthy of your time? >> Well, it's really exciting 'cause in Silicon Valley, it's unique 'cause it's all about collaboration. The innovation that we create out of this location of the globe is through networking with our peers and ACG opens up that window, provides a door that allows you to meet with your peers, your competitors, your friends, and as a result, you can create insights and capabilities about your own company and technology directions that's really helpful. So, it's the networking, they also put on excellent C-circle events, which is really good because if your company is looking at growing as a startup, you might be able to get some valuable insights from peers who know how to do HR, merger acquisitions, finance. And so, the ability to do networking like at an event like this, the ability to come in and learn how to do business processes more effectively, it all plays a really important role at ACG. >> Well Ashley, thank you so much for carving out some time to join us on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hey, Lisa Martin, on the ground with theCUBE at the 15th annual ACG SV Grow Awards, Association for Corporate Growth Silicon Valley, is what that stands for. Can you hear the energy and the innovation going on back here? It's amazing tonight. I'm very pleased to welcome to theCUBE, one of tonight's winners from Arista Technologies Kenneth Duda, the CTO, SVP of software engineering, and one of the founders of Arista Technologies. Kenneth, thank you so much and congratulations! >> Thank you so much, we're honored by the award. >> Well, it's been amazing. Outstanding Growth Award winner, congratulations. I was just looking at some of the recent earnings from Arista, nice Q4 earnings from FY-18. >> Thank you. >> Above the guidance, stock price rising this year. Last month Goldman Sachs added Arista to its conviction buy list. You guys are on nice trajectory, tell me about that. >> Well, it's just been a fantastic journey, you just don't get this many chances to participate in something like Arista from the ground up. Our growth has been driven in no small part thanks to the incredible growth of cloud computing. Cloud computing is changing the world and the cloud data centers need a different kind of network infrastructure. They need something that scales, meet their needs, and is customizable to integrate with all of their management systems, automation, and we've been able to provide that and be part of that journey, it's been incredibly gratifying. >> So you specifically talk with customers a lot, I was reading about one of your recent big wins in Canada, CBC Radio Canada facility in Montreal, but talk to me about what's some of the things now that you're hearing from customers especially those customers who are still in the process of transforming and transitioning workloads to the cloud. What are some of the things that surprise you about where customers are in any industry in this journey. >> Right, well, so I spend most of my time talking to the enterprise customers because there are so many of them and what we've learned there is a couple of things. One is they are very impacted by cloud. Cloud's a big deal, they're moving somewhere closer to the cloud, they're also building their own internal environments in a more cloud-like fashion and, as such, benefit from Arista's approach. But the most interesting thing I've learned is that neither of those is the most important thing. The most important thing is the network has got to work and it might sound strange, but networking gear isn't always reliable and what we've been able to achieve through our architectural approach and through our focus on automated testing has enabled us to produce a higher quality product which has been a major attractor of the enterprise customer. So you need to cover all those bases to succeed in this business. >> You're right, that network is absolutely essential. When anything goes down, whether it's a Facebook outage, it's world news. Tell me, what is the Arista advantage? >> The key advantage is the quality of our products. It's the fact that we have built an architecture that is more resilient to software and hardware errors. It's the way we test. We've made a tremendous investment in automated testing, so that our product has gone through hundreds of thousands of tests before it ever sees a customer. But actually the most important element behind quality, is the culture of your company, what do you believe? What's important to you? What gets you up in the morning? What are you thinking about and talking about to your employees? What's the most important thing, is it profitability? Is it making a deal, is it hitting a schedule? Or is it making sure the network works? We are 100% focused on that and it's been really gratifying to see the impact that's had. >> So last question, and thank you for speaking over the drum noise going on behind us, by the way, to get people into the auditorium. In terms of culture and the impact, what do you think this award means to your peers, your teams at Arista? >> Oh, it's just such an affirmation of the journey we've come through so far and the journey we still have ahead of us. We're very grateful for the award. >> So, I see so much momentum coming into 2019. What are some of the exciting things we can expect from Arista this year that you might be able to share with us? >> I think we're seeing a real transition from network designers focusing on the control plane of their network first to focusing on the management of the network first because management is actually the key to smooth operations. Our cloud vision product addresses that need. We're really excited about that transformation. >> Well, Kenneth, again, congratulations to Arista and yourself and your teams on the Outstanding Growth Award from ACG SV. We also thank you for spending some time with us on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, it was my pleasure. >> I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE. (energetic music)

>> (Announcer) From Mountain View, California it's the Cube. Covering the 15th Annual Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for the 15th Annual Grow! Awards for the Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley, ACG SV. That's a mouthful. I'm here with one of the ACG SV board members, Zac Mutrux, the District Sales Manager at Insperity. Hey, Zack, it's great to have you on the Cube. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, I'm pleased to be here. >> So before we talk about what you're doing here at the 15th Annual Grow! Awards, tell our audience about Insperity. I was reading, I love taglines. >> Yes. >> And I see on your homepage, Insperity is obsessed with delivery HR mastery. Wow. >> Oh yeah. >> Obsessed and mastery. Those two words just jumped out. Tell us a little bit about what you guys do. >> Impressive, isn't it? Well, we actually just adjusted our tagline to HR that makes a difference. And that's really what it's all about. We feel like companies that are growing, if they're going to make it from good to the best, it has everything to do with the people. Attracting the best people and keeping them, developing them over time, and that's exactly what we do with our clients. >> So Insperity has been in business since 1986, and if I think of today's modern workforce, highly mobile, distributed, there's the whole on-demand industry. You guys have seen a tremendous amount of change that now can be massively influenced, and your customers can, using technology. Give me a little bit of that historical perspective on Insperity's inception and today's workforce, and how you're helping them attract and retain the best talent. >> Oh, absolutely. Well, when the company started it was in a maybe a 200 square foot room with one telephone between the two co-founders. There's no such thing as email. So, absolutely, there's been immense technological changes and there continues to be. I think that's one of the things that has been responsible for Insperity's success is its adoption of technology. Today we are as much a technology company as we are an employee benefits company, or an HR consulting company. It's really about creating a positive experience for the employees. That's part of being a competitive employer. >> Well it has to be a positive experience, right? For your customers. Because acquiring great talent is one thing, retaining them is another. And I want to kind of pivot off the retention there for a second. As the District Sales Manager, I was asking you before we went live, tell me maybe one of your favorite stories, and you said, "Wow". One of the great things, you guys are coming off great growth and FY18 revenue growth. One of the great things that Insperity has been really successful at is customer retention. And that's hard. You're proud of this. Tell us about that statistic that you mentioned, and how it is that Insperity is evolving and innovating over the last few decades to keep that retention number as phenomenal as it is. >> Well, Insperity's been named one of the most admired corporations in the country, actually, five years in a row by Fortune magazine. And that's the kind of press that you can't buy. One of the accolades that I'm most proud of is that in the past year our own employees named us one of the top 100 companies to work for in the United States. Which is, I think, the proof that we really know what we're doing with our clients. Because there are a lot of different companies out there, various competitors, and almost none of them are on that list. So, it's living our values and expressing through our service team, our extraordinary service team, that, I think, keeps our clients coming back to us year after year. About 85% renew. That's been consistent. A high level of client retention for the past three years. Even more extraordinary is that we've been growing both top line and bottom line revenue at the same time. So there's just a testament to our leadership, to our co-founder and CEO, Paul Sarvadi, and to the best of team-- >> But it sounds like it's a lot of symbiotic relationships between the internal retention at Insperity that is maybe leading through to your customers seeing, hey, there's not a high turnover here. These people are doing, they love what they're doing. They're working for a good company. So there's probably a lot of symbiotic behaviors. >> Well, that's exactly right. I think you really hit the nail of the head. It's about culture. It's a culture that starts from the top with leadership, and it filters down throughout the organization. And we're not looking to do business with every single company. We're looking to do business with the companies that believe the things that we believe. That is, companies that have high levels of commitment, trust, communication. They do better financially then companies that don't have those things. >> And along those lines, mentioning just before we wrap here, we are at the 15th Annual ACG SV Awards tonight, where they're honoring two award winners. The Outstanding Growth Award winner is Arista Networks. And the Emerging Growth winner is Adesto Technologies. I'm excited to talk to them later. But I wanted to get a little bit of perspective on you've been involved as a board member of ACSG since last year. Tell me a little bit about what makes ACG SV worthy of your time. >> Oh, absolutely. That's a great question. It's just an extraordinary community, I think, of the top leaders in Silicon Valley come together. The monthly Key Notes add a lot of value. It's an intimate setting and there's real conversations that are taking place on topics that are relevant to today's professionals. So for me to be able to engage and hopefully add some value as a board member is privilege. >> And you can hear probably a lot of those conversations going on right behind Zac and me tonight. Zac, it's been a pleasure to have you on the Cube. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time. >> Oh, right, thank you, Lisa. >> For the Cube, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground. Thanks for watching. (pop electronic music)

>> from Mountain View, California It's the Cube covering the fifteenth annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by A C. G S V. >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with the Cube at the Computer History Museum for the fifteenth annual TGS Grow Awards. Can you hear the collaboration of the innovation going on behind me? Very excited to welcome to the Cube, one of tonight's award winners from a Jaso Technologies, Norby, Jericho B and the President and CEO of Modesto. Congratulations on the Emerging Growth Award that adjuster has been honored with tonight. >> Thank you very much. We're very honored to be here. So you've been at >> the helm of a desert for a long time. I'd like our audience to hear a little bit from you about whom destiny is what you do. What makes you different. >> Perfect. So we are at a technology company on our products are used primarily in Internet of things, applications across many, many segments. Most off our businesses within the industrial segment on our customers use our products to actually build a Iot solutions for their end markets. Our products include semiconductor chips that are used at the edge of Coyote EJ gateway devices that connects the local networks to the more broad networks on. Basically, we enable our customers to take data from the physical world and send it up into the clouds >> to you guys. Our have had a great great trajectory, obviously being recognized by the emerging growth winner from a C. G S B. Tell me a little bit about it was looking at some information from you guys and on twenty eighteen, You guys did a great job of executing on your strategic initiatives to really make twenty eighteen a transformative year couple of acquisitions to us about the last year, in particular in the group that you have seen the momento and you're bringing into twenty nineteen. >> Correct? Correct. So we started. We enter twenty eighteen as a provider up application specific memory devices for I ot however, we realize that for our customers to take true benefit off the technologies we provide, we need to be a more holistic supplier of solutions. So as a result, we went through a whole process off looking at other technologies that can complement what we have in a very similar way, with strategic focus in the markets that we were focused, and as a result, we made two acquisitions in past summer that ended up its expanding our market opportunity, broadening our reach within existing customer and significantly expanding our offering portfolio to foreign markets. >> Negroes have a really strong position with tear one customers in the industrial sector. You mentioned that expecting Don't be a little bit more than about your leadership here in what makes these large industrial cheer. One players say Augusto is for us, >> right? So before I asked her that let me talk a little bit about the difference between industrial I ot and Consumer >> Riley's Yes, >> So if you think about consumer, I ot, it's what grabs headlines. It's the fitness trackers, the latest home smart thermostats, and the smartwatch is on so forth. The's are new markets. Volumes are girl very fast, but if next year and new shiny object is created, it's easy for the consumers to replace. They basically buy the new one. Repent replaced the old. One interesting thing about industrial I ot is that industrial I ot has this fragmented legacy systems that today run in their businesses. So if you look at the building we're in Today there is a fired and safety system that runs there's H Vac system that runs the business. There's a security systems, and this could have been installed here decades ago. There are billions of connected things in that industrial network today, but the data is unable to go up into the cloud. Where come cloud providers? Aye, aye. Providers can actually take the data on provide benefits to the business owners. We understand the language of industrial I ot very well because off our roots in that space. And we also understand this universe very well because of our roots being in Silicon Valley. So for industrial customers to benefit from this transformation, it's very important to be able to understand the OT world operational technology world of old days on the IT world that we're very familiar with. So with addition off these acquisitions that we've done this summer very well, positions with the building blocks that way can put together on offer differentiated solutions to our customers? >> Well, no, but it's been a pleasure having you on the queue. But the fifteenth annual acey GSP grow words. Congratulations to adjust of your whole team for the emerging growth award. And we look forward to seeing what happens this year in the space with you. Thank >> you. Thank you very much. Thank you. >> Lisa. Martin, you're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching.

>> From the Sales Force tower in downtown San Francisco. It's the cube covering a censure Tech vision twenty nineteen brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff. Freak >> here with the cue. We're >> in the center. Innovation hub, downtown San Francisco Salesforce >> Tower. The party is just getting started and you can see >> behind us. Had a ribboned coat ribbon cutting ceremony this morning. We're excited here for the Century Technology Vision awards given later today. But we're excited of our next cast. First >> time on the Cube. Ashley Miller. She's the director of Innovation West Region for centuries, actually. Welcome. >> Thank you so much. Glad to be here. >> So all these toys are for you to play with. >> They they are there so many interesting things to play with your so many incredible people. It's an incredible place to be. >> So it's a great aggregation of kind of a bunch of satellite offices. You've got three stories of really kind of active, engaging labs. I wonder if you could say I guess she had a soft opening a little while ago. Tonight was the heart opening. What are some of the ways that customers actually come in and use this facility? >> Yeah, way actually have five floors. We have the thirty first through thirty fifth floor. Five entire floors with several of those floors dedicated solely Teo, innovating with our clients and collaborating and co creating with our clients. So this is the official launch The Big Party, opening us officially with the ribbon cutting. But Way did have a soft launch over the summer, and in fact, we've been hosting many clients >> each week. >> It's it's really incredible that demand is quite high. People are very eager to come in and explore and learn as well as define strategies and actually co create solutions here with the experts. So it's it's exciting, >> so help. So they come in small teams, big teams. They come for a day a week. What are some of, you know, kind of the standard offerings? If you will t come and learn about invasion >> all of the above. We host clients as well as, you know, partners in the community, uh, students and educational groups. People who want to come in and learn about emerging technologies and their potential impact to business to society. A cz well as multiday and multiweek sessions where we're actually rode mapping solutions, building new ideas together and actually co creating prototypes and solutions to solve those those challenges >> right. So Paul, talk bitterly about your innovation, architecture's so everybody wants to know how to innovate, especially in a big company. It's it's not necessarily easy, and you guys have a bunch of assets in play. And then, as I understand it, the hub is the location where you bring all those assets under one roof. >> That's exactly right. This hub is a flagship hub where we have every element of our innovation architecture represented. So it's center has this architecture to help both ourselves innovate as well as our clients and our partners. So clients and partners can come here and access the incredible breadth of our experts, designers, engineers, builders. So here in our flagship hub, we have teammates from our research organization that's offering points of view and helping others understand. What does the future look like? We have teammates from our labs are R and D organization that's actually looking at these cutting edge technologies, quantum computing, connected devices, artificial intelligence and understanding, and using these technologies, developing prototypes to test and learn and understand their potential value. Then we have teammates who can actually build prototypes and solutions. Both connected digital devices as well as physical devices way have teammates in our ventures group who are partnering with the ecosystem of universities as well start ups as well as big ecosystem platform partners and bringing those teammates in and using their solutions to help procreate and ninety eight new opportunities for our clients. And then, of course, within our innovation architecture, we also have our delivery centers. So once you identify really game changing opportunity on, you've tested it and you understand, and it's a viable solution. Well, then you can scale it more cost efficiently through our delivery centers, >> right? So I know it might be asking you like to pick your favorite kid, but but but share. I mean, what is a Woody one or two of your kind of favorite things? That that is here in this innovation hub, that you just think it's just cool beyond compare. >> It is asking me to pick my favorite kid. There's so many incredible things here, but I can tell you what we have on display tonight. We have Mary Hamilton, the head of our labs organization, along with Theresa Tongue is a managing director within our labs and room on Chowdhry, who leads a practice of ethical, eh? I talking about the future of human and robot interaction. What does that mean for teams when they're augmented by robots? How do you do that in a fair way and in an ethical way, so that you're using the humans potential as well as the robot's potential. We have Mike Reading the head of our ventures team. We have him here, along with some of our teammates, from research Justin hers egg. And they're They're talking about the power of Blockchain to create transparency and accountability within supply chains. A CZ well is talking about some of the power of of some of the startups we're working with, like one Cuban quantum computing start up, which we partnered with Bio Gen. The healthcare company. Toe Actually use quantum computing. Teo. Increase the speed of drug discovery. It's really incredible. It takes on average in the industry. It takes ten years and a billion dollars to bring an average drug to market, and they're hoping they can speed this up significantly with with quantum computing. So way have stations on display where you can actually go inside a quantum computer where we'll use immersive technologies. And walking inside, you can actually understand and see what are the powers of quantum mechanics that enable quantum computing? Let's >> see, we >> have way have incredible leaders. So those were those >> were just going long >> so I could keep down. >> I love it. And we keep hearing about the incredible technologists that you have here that something like, I don't remember fifteen hundred out of the six thousand patents you've you've had are coming out of the people that work in this facility. >> It's it's unparalleled the talent that is in this building. Um, sometimes when I walk around, I can almost see the, you know, quantum physics coming out of their brains. They're just incredible. The talent that is here and the talent that we have accessible to our partners about TTO learn from a CZ Wells to partner with and build because these teammates, they're they're working on cutting edge things. And they're looking for partners to explore the validity of these new concepts. So a lot of times we're partnering with clients were both putting some skin in the game to test these ideas on DH. It's It's a really exciting place to be at the intersection of business and technology ideation and building solutions. >> Right? And you're not just doing it just for your clients to he had city and county San Francisco represented this morning at the ribbon cutting and really she talked about and John talked about earlier, you know, being an active participant in the community, and that's a really important piece of the >> puzzle. It is an important piece of the puzzle, and we're really passionate about being a part of the San Francisco community and helping to give back in our community as well as globally. So globally, we run a tech for good program. Where were you applying these emerging technologies to help benefit societies using things like Blockchain to make logistics distribution better and more trustworthy For companies that are delivering food? Teo indeed Populations things like using artificial intelligence built on top of Microsoft cognitive services help the blind to see doing these things. They're actually giving back to the world's population as well as our local population. Just in the last week, we hosted a group of young elementary school students coming in tow learn coding basics we're hosting. Last week we hosted one hundred students from an MBA program abroad. So we're often hosting students, clients, partners, startups. A few weeks back, we hosted a large healthtech challenge, which was really exciting. We had sea levels from some of our health companies. Come in tow, actually judge start ups from the Bay Area and to explore how those startups could tweak and refine their value statement and then explore opportunities to use those startups within the judge's organizations. So So it's a really exciting way that we're finding that being professionally generous, it pays it, tees up opportunities for centuries for our partners, way learn, they learn. And this hub is a powerful place of collaboration, >> right? What a great asset that you have to bring to bear. It's a It's a terrific story. Well, actually, thank you for taking a few minutes of your time. His party is a big part for you in the team, so I will let you get back to it. And again, Thanks for sitting down. Thank you so much. Alright, she's >> asking. Jeff, if you're watching the Cube, we're downtown San Francisco. Salesforce Tower at Thehe Century Innovation Hub. Grand opening. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

(electronic music) >> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering, CloudNOW's 7th Annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, on the ground at Facebook headquarters. We're here for the 7th Annual CloudNOW Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Our third time covering this event, and we're excited to welcome to theCube, one of tonight's winners, Masha Sedova, the co-founder of Elevate Security. Masha, welcome to theCUBE! >> Lisa, thank you so much for having me, it's really great to be here. >> And congratulations on the award. >> Thank you, thank you. >> So you are a security expert, you studied, you were a STEM kid back in school, but you had this really interesting experience when you were at Salesforce a few years ago, related to security, where you went, I think I see one of the things people have been missing where cyber security is concerned. Tell us about that aha moment. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, having grown up in the security field, there's this saying that, the human is the weakest link. And I personally never believed that, and I was like, there's got to be a way of turning this around and so, I stepped back and said, What it would look like if people wanted to do security instead of had to? What it would look like if people were champions for security, and not because we made them do it, but because each of us were invested in it? And so, I took a step back from my Computer science and computer security background, and dove into the field of behavioral science, positive psychology, and game design. And started exploring how people think, and how we make decisions, to see if I can start applying that to security. And, would you know it, there's some really amazing findings that I came across in that space. >> So you were saying, before we went on that, a pretty significant percentage of breaches are, unfortunately, caused by us humans. >> Yeah, something like 95% have a human error related to it. And if you think about cyber attacks, it's a human being attacking another human being with a bunch of technology in the middle. And if we keep solving it with just technology we're going to keep ending up making the same mistakes we have been making for decades. But if we look at the human element, and why we make mistakes, and how we let ourselves learn from them and make better mistakes and also better choices, we can actually move the needle in a really significant way. >> So, Elevate Security co-founded just a couple of years ago. Really impressive with your board. Tell us about your leadership team and the board before we get into the significance of the name. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, it's co-founded by myself and my co-founder Robert Fly. So, we have a diverse founding team. And from the very beginning we believed that embracing our diversity, in our hires would be of significant differentiator and not just the way we hire, but also the way we build our product. Because we're building products for employees of a whole bunch of companies all over the world and so it was really important to us. And so, to date we're 50% women including our engineering team and we have an all outside female board, board of directors which is a fact I'm really excited to announce today. >> Excited and proud. So when you had this idea, (clears throat) excuse me, and clearly all of the data show that, like you said if we keep throwing technology at the problem with security we're not going to solve it. >> Yeah >> What were the conversations like as a female co-founder, going in and trying to get funding for this idea in something as, hot of a topic and sensitive as cyber security? >> Yeah, you know, it was challenging. Fundraising, I think if you ask any founder you'd say, it would be challenging. I would recommend anybody going into this know your stuff, and stand up behind it, know that you have experience and an idea or a brand, that brings you to the table, brings something to the table and that you have that behind you. So, just because several VCs might say no it doesn't mean that your idea's not worth fighting for or coming to life. And so, it took us a while but we found a fantastic set of venture partners to back us who had very similar philosophies in the way they both raise money and supported entrepreneurship and it's really exciting, exciting time to be have partnered with them. >> So, one of the things you mentioned before went on was the card that your mom gave you. >> Yeah. >> I think that's so inspiring and share that with our audience for those who might have a great idea like you did but say, I keep being told no. >> Yeah, just 'cause it's hard, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. If I, were to have gotten to the end of my life and I didn't try starting a company, I knew that I was always regret it. And, that is something I definitely couldn't live with. And, the card that my mom sent me, it was in late in 2016 it said, "A ship is safe in the harbor "but that is not what ships are built for." And I realized, I had to do this. I absolutely had to start this company, I had to see where it goes and I have a unique perspective and a unique set of experiences in the world. And ideas about how this really hard problem can be solved and I want to see it come to life. And I have had the opportunity to gather an amazing team around me to help me make that vision come to life and I'm really excited to see where it goes. >> So in terms of where it's going, humans are sensitive people. >> (chuckles) Yeah. >> When you're talking with companies, >> Yeah. >> Whether they're born in the cloud companies or legacy enterprise companies and you're saying, Hey, guys it's your people, we're all human. >> Yeah. >> From a cultural response. >> Yeah. >> What's that conversation like do they understand it? And how do you help them go from those really, like we were talking about boring-- >> Yeah. >> Videos and training tutorials to actually, impacting behavior? >> Mm hmm Yeah, so there's two schools of thought in security field. It's the people who believe that human element can't be solved, that humans will always make mistakes, so we need to throw as much technology at it as possible. We've been doing that for three decades and it hasn't worked. And honestly I'm waiting for that generation to move on until we get a new set of ideas in. And what I'm seeing is the up and coming, set of security leadership coming in saying, You know what? Let's try something new, let's try something different. And, you know, I have invested in technology and it hasn't solved it. What if we try a different approach? And, the thing is, security people aren't known for our human expertise. We're good at a lot of other things, but not human expertise, and so bringing in things like behavioral science which is known for understanding how and why we make decisions is a perfect combination to solve this problem that, to date has been unsolvable. Because we really haven't been bringing in expertise outside of our field which on the topic of diversity, is exactly what we need. >> Exactly. So what are you looking forward to as we are just about in the finishing the first month of 2019? >> Oh yeah so, we'll be at RSA at the end of February, early March speaking about our brand new product Snapshot. But I'm also really excited to continue hiring out our team. We are hiring tons of engineers, so if anyone is looking please-- >> Where can they go? >> Elevatesecurity.com. >> Elevatesecurity.com. >> Mm Hmm, yeah, and so continuing to build out our team in San Francisco and in Montreal. >> Well Masha, congratulations on the award, on this really innovative idea bringing in, behavior to security. We appreciate your time and look forward to seeing more of what you guys are about to do. >> Thank you so much. >> Congratulations. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at Facebook. See you next time. 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