>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of BTC company. We're live today really live TV, which is the heritage of the Cuban. Now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Fribourg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, so this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yes. As you said, the Bio Hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers in by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched five years ago. It >>was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operations in the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined um, so this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things >>take time. It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow from the beginning. I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem p off his building and MP labs. And very quickly we had something running about from anything. Eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now, with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work, um, very being of the pandemic In March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project. Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down, we could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the road, 150,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which, at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created a testing system that will serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down, >>right? Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe you describe a little bit more about silver side detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part. Thio Keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by a port border crossing Places like that they can help make sure that people aren't smuggling, shall we say, very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you can do things like but a detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's It's much more than you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge, or I kind of i o t application for what you guys do. >>You do both Zito shares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville city schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, Um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering. And, um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outside was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building up a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more more students in stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John her stock and integrate Grayson about this is do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or, you know, diverse base and And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career. And sometimes that that funnels kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO. We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible, and we've definitely seen the fruits of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club That eventually is what led our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also are a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line, and we should I mean, Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids and or the program and be successful, >>that's phenomenal. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd. And they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, So there are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do Onda. We also have ah lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing, um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication then would have been done previous technologies. Mhm. You know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston. But another one that was held, uh, of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than there would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the forced march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow Raphael one. If you could describe the process that you used to better understand diseases and what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um, in a way that foster So the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology how the human body functions and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create teachers in the body. Um, and then it has the set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology. Read it. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientists on. We have a genomics platform. That is all about sequencing DNA in our DNA. Um, and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and the little technologies to marry computation on microscope. So, um, the scientists said the agenda and the platforms we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on. I have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O, for example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins, and it's being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus on Dwyer, sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. So some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, God s o mat. I mean, you gotta be listening to this in thinking about, Okay? Some. Someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like Like like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people that just have I don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than, you know, the financial angles and that z e I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order We nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering is about making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so, um do Yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like Day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining eventually you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line By Jeff Hammond Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. E. I think we're really generally generationally finally, at the point where you know young students and engineering and really you know it passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that, but I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. But very quickly my engineers started loving it. Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed, and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Um, now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes that something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic. Especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings, eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody remembers, what they are, the person left and now nobody knows which version is the right one m s with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home. And they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a personal account on shape. And then, magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way, that is absolutely fantastic. >>Rafael, what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know, some of the traditional cloud stuff and I'm curious as to how How whether any of those act manifested were they really that you had to manage? What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team? to learn to use the system like it and buy into it because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some serving on site, but that that's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift. But very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive like I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape? Right is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, their concern was the learning curve right is like how is he will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed and there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on. They were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Phillip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey with on shape? >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped Silver Side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so and we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks? Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design, have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new. How we congrats modules from things that we already have. Put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing. And I really don't want to design in any other platform after after getting on Lee a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I will have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how e used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that day, timer, I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google Maps. Eso did we get anywhere? I don't know, but, uh, but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, um, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month It's through the roof in. But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of k 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that that was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um, and so one of my dreams and it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and, you know, march in, um, you said the forced march the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing. Cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school shoot chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of the cat. And there's so much about it, E >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer. I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, but but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software. And so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud >>Philip or Rafael anything. Your dad, >>I think I mean yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three D printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think there's a dream for kids Thio to be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino and all of these electronic things that live. Kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip Way >>had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development and support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a That's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based. It's an important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see See what your students are gonna be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do. Building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because yeah, I think that project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on. And I think he will give the kids a much better flavor What engineering is really about. Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept, and they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that. Hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform and I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in a modern era. And so that's, you know, it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is, and, like, platform agnostic abilities the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, that's super exciting as far as things that it to go from there, Um, I don't know. >>Other than price, >>you can't say I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on a PTC s that worked with us. Really well, so I'm not complaining. There. You there? >>Yeah. Yeah. No Gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Um, something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes, and now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where we're making those changes anyway, when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you. >>I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with comics necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like to. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I'm being spoiled, >>you know. That's good. I've been doing this a long time and I like toe Ask that question of practitioners and to me, it it's a signal like when you're nit picking and that you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product. And And I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture, But are things like alternative processors? You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe a helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now, then would maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics. Obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good can be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. But who wants toe start >>not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics education is the case If you wanna if you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think stem is key to that. I mean, all of the, ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries, thanks to science and technology, right, improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything they had? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody doing ableto pull together instead of pulling, pulling separately and to be able to spur the idea is onwards. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work? Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shaped and is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them. Andi, that's amazing. Right? To have somebody you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine. Right? Because, um, you know, they have a three d printer. You can you just give them the design and say, like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also so super important, I think, for any of these efforts to improve, um, some of the hardest part was in the world from climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, that point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. Uh, the answer is education and public policy. That really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we can. If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. What can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely. Like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can, to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope to look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful, and I we don't do this. But I have read quite a bit about how certain places air, using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off. A person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink earlier strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular, >>yet another, uh, advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at or like Raphael said. I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is aws re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know, Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software products by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these are the anomalies you need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that air going to result in, uh in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans, air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. You're welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back

>>Yeah, yeah. Welcome back to the third session in our building, A vibrant data ecosystem track. This session is unleash the power of your cloud data warehouse. So what comes after you've moved your data to the cloud in this session will explore White Enterprise Analytics is finally ready for the cloud, and we'll discuss how you can consume Enterprise Analytics in the very same way he would cloud services. We'll also explore where analytics meets cloud and see firsthand how thought spot is open for everyone. Let's get going. I'm happy to say we'll be hearing from two folks from thought spot today, Michael said Cassie, VP of strategic partnerships, and Vika Valentina, senior product marketing manager. And I'm very excited to welcome from our partner at AWS Gal Bar MIA, product engineering manager with Red Shift. We'll also be sharing a live demo of thought spot for BTC Marketing Analytics directly on Red Shift data. Gal, please kick us off. >>Thank you, Military. And thanks. The talks about team and everyone attending today for joining us. When we talk about data driven organizations, we hear that 85% of businesses want to be data driven. However, on Lee. 37% have been successful in We ask ourselves, Why is that and believe it or not, Ah, lot of customers tell us that they struggled with live in defining what being data driven it even means, and in particular aligning that definition between the business and the technology stakeholders. Let's talk a little bit. Let's look at our own definition. A data driven organization is an organization that harnesses data is an asset. The drive sustained innovation and create actionable insights. The super charge, the experience of their customers so they demand more. Let's focus on a few things here. One is data is an asset. Data is very much like a product needs to evolve sustained innovation. It's not just innovation innovation, it's sustained. We need to continuously innovate when it comes to data actionable insights. It's not just interesting insights these air actionable that the business can take and act upon, and obviously the actual experience we. Whether whether the customers are internal or external, we want them to request Mawr insights and as such, drive mawr innovation, and we call this the for the flywheel. We use the flywheel metaphor here where we created that data set. Okay, Our first product. Any focused on a specific use case? We build an initial NDP around that we provided with that with our customers, internal or external. They provide feedback, the request, more features. They want mawr insights that enables us to learn bringing more data and reach that actual data. And again we create MAWR insights. And as the flywheel spins faster, we improve on operational efficiencies, supporting greater data richness, and we reduce the cost of experimentation and legacy environments were never built for this kind of agility. In many cases, customers have struggled to keep momentum in their fleet, flywheel in particular around operational efficiency and experimentation. This is where Richie fits in and helps customer make the transition to a true data driven organization. Red Shift is the most widely used data warehouse with tens of thousands of customers. It allows you to analyze all your data. It is the only cloud data warehouse that sits, allows you to analyze data that sits in your data lake on Amazon, a street with no loading duplication or CTL required. It is also allows you to scale with the business with its hybrid architectures it also accelerates performance. It's a shared storage that provides the ability to scale toe unlimited concurrency. While the UN instant storage provides low late and say access to data it also provides three. Key asks that customers consistently tell us that matter the most when it comes to cost. One is usage based pricing Instead of license based pricing. Great value as you scale your data warehouse using, for example, reserved instances they can save up to 75% compared to on the mind demand prices. And as your data grows, infrequently accessed data can be stored. Cost effectively in S three encouraged through Amazon spectrum, and the third aspect is predictable. Month to month spend with no hitting charges and surprises. Unlike and unlike other cloud data warehouses, where you need premium versions for additional enterprise capabilities. Wretched spicing include building security compression and data transfer. >>Great Thanks. Scout um, eso. As you can see, everybody wins with the cloud data warehouses. Um, there's this evolution of movement of users and data and organizations to get value with these cloud data warehouses. And the key is the data has to be accessible by the users, and this data and the ability to make business decisions on the data. It ranges from users on the front line all the way up to the boardroom. So while we've seen this evolution to the Cloud Data Warehouse, as you can see from the statistic from Forrester, we're still struggling with how much of that data actually gets used for analytics. And so what is holding us back? One of the main reasons is old technology really trying to work with today's modern cloud data warehouses? They weren't built for it. So you run into issues of trying to do data replication, getting the data out of the cloud data warehouse. You can do analysis and then maintaining these middle layers of data so that you can access it quickly and get the answers you need. Another issue that's holding us back is this idea that you have to have your data in perfect shape with the perfect pipeline based on the exact dashboard unique. Um, this isn't true. Now, with Cloud data warehouse and the speed of important business data getting into those cloud data warehouses, you need a solution that allows you to access it right away without having everything to be perfect from the start, and I think this is a great opportunity for GAL and I have a little further discussion on what we're seeing in the marketplace. Um, one of the primary ones is like, What are the limiting factors, your Siegel of legacy technologies in the market when it comes to this cloud transformation we're talking about >>here? It's a great question, Michael and the variety of aspect when it comes to legacy, the other warehouses that are slowing down innovation for companies and businesses. I'll focus on 21 is performance right? We want faster insights. Companies want the ability to analyze MAWR data faster. And when it comes to on prem or legacy data warehouses, that's hard to achieve because the second aspect comes into display, which is the lack of flexibility, right. If you want to increase your capacity of your warehouse, you need to ensure request someone needs to go and bring an actual machine and install it and expand your data warehouse. When it comes to the cloud, it's literally a click of a button, which allows you to increase the capacity of your data warehouse and enable your internal and external users to perform analytics at scale and much faster. >>It falls right into the explanation you provided there, right as the speed of the data warehouses and the data gets faster and faster as it scales, older solutions aren't built toe leverage that, um, you know, they're either they're having to make technical, you know, technical cuts there, either looking at smaller amounts of data so that they can get to the data quicker. Um, or it's taking longer to get to the data when the data warehouse is ready, when it could just be live career to get the answers you need. And that's definitely an issue that we're seeing in the marketplace. I think the other one that you're looking at is things like governance, lineage, regulatory requirements. How is the cloud you know, making it easier? >>That's That's again an area where I think the cloud shines. Because AWS AWS scale allows significantly more investment in securing security policies and compliance, it allows customers. So, for example, Amazon redshift comes by default with suck 1 to 3 p. C. I. Aiso fared rampant HIPPA compliance, all of them out of the box and at our scale. We have the capacity to implement those by default for all of our customers and allow them to focus. Their very expensive, valuable ICTY resource is on actual applications that differentiate their business and transform the customer experience. >>That's a great point, gal. So we've talked about the, you know, limiting factors. Technology wise, we've mentioned things like governance. But what about the cultural aspect? Right? So what do you see? What do you see in team struggling in meeting? You know, their cloud data warehouse strategy today. >>And and that's true. One of the biggest challenges for large large organizations when they moved to the cloud is not about the technology. It's about people, process and culture, and we see differences between organizations that talk about moving to the cloud and ones that actually do it. And first of all, you wanna have senior leadership, drive and be aligned and committed to making the move to the cloud. But it's not just that you want. We see organizations sometimes Carol get paralyzed. If they can't figure out how to move each and every last work clothes, there's no need to boil the ocean, so we often work with organizations to find that iterative motion that relative process off identifying the use cases are date identifying workloads in migrating them one at a time and and through that allowed organization to grow its knowledge from a cloud perspective as well as adopt its tooling and learn about the new capabilities. >>And from an analytics perspective, we see the same right. You don't need a pixel perfect dashboard every single time to get value from your data. You don't need to wait until the data warehouse is perfect or the pipeline to the data warehouse is perfect. With today's technology, you should be able to look at the data in your cloud data warehouse immediately and get value from it. And that's the you know, that's that change that we're pushing and starting to see today. Thanks. God, that was That was really interesting. Um, you know, as we look through that, you know, this transformation we're seeing in analytics, um, isn't really that old? 20 years ago, data warehouses were primarily on Prem and the applications the B I tools used for analytics around them were on premise well, and so you saw things like applications like Salesforce. That live in the cloud. You start having to pull data from the cloud on Prem in order to do analytics with it. Um, you know, then we saw the shift about 10 years ago in the explosion of Cloud Data Warehouse Because of their scale, cost reduced, reduce shin reduction and speed. You know, we're seeing cloud data. Warehouses like Amazon Red Shift really take place, take hold of the marketplace and are the predominant ways of storing data moving forward. What we haven't seen is the B I tools catch up. And so when you have this new cloud data warehouse technology, you really need tools that were custom built for it to take advantage of it, to be able to query the cloud data warehouse directly and get results very quickly without having to worry about creating, you know, a middle layer of data or pipelines in order to manage it. And, you know, one company captures that really Well, um, chick fil A. I'm sure everybody has heard of is one of the largest food chains in America. And, you know, they made a huge investment in red shift and one of the purposes of that investment is they wanted to get access to the data mawr quickly, and they really wanted to give their business users, um, the ability to do some ad hoc analysis on the data that they were capturing. They found that with their older tools, the problems that they were finding was that all the data when they're trying to do this analysis was staying at the analyst level. So somebody needed to create a dashboard in order to share that data with a user. And if the user's requirements changed, the analysts were starting to become burdened with requests for changes and the time it took to reflect those changes. So they wanted to move to fought spot with embrace to connect to Red Shift so they could start giving business users that capability. Query the database right away. And with this, um, they were able to find, you know, very common things in in the supply chain analysis around the ability to figure out what store should get, what product that was selling better. The other part was they didn't have to wait for the data to get settled into some sort of repository or second level database. They were able to query it quickly. And then with that, they're able to make changes right in the red shift database that were then reflected to customers and the business users right away. So what they found from this is by adopting thought spot, they were actually able to arm business users with the ability to make decisions very quickly. And they cleared up the backlog that they were having and the delay with their analysts. And they're also putting their analysts toe work on different projects where they could get better value from. So when you look at the way we work with a cloud data warehouse, um, you have to think of thoughts about embrace as the tool that access that layer. The perfect analytic partner for the Cloud Data Warehouse. We will do the live query for the business user. You don't need to know how to script and sequel, um Thio access, you know, red shift. You can type the question that you want the answer to and thought spot will take care of that query. We will do the indexing so that the results come back faster for you and we will also do the analysis on. This is one of the things I wanted to cover, which is our spot i. Q. This is new for our ability to use this with embrace and our partners at Red Shift is now. We can give you the ability to do auto analysis to look at things like leading indicators, trends and anomalies. So to put this in perspective amount imagine somebody was doing forecasting for you know Q three in the western region. And they looked at how their stores were doing. And they saw that, you know, one store was performing well, Spot like, you might be able to look at that analysis and see if there's a leading product that is underperforming based on perhaps the last few quarters of data. And bring that up to the business user for analysis right away. They don't need to have to figure that out. And, um, you know, slice and dice to find that issue on their own. And then finally, all the work you do in data management and governance in your cloud data warehouse gets reflected in the results in embrace right away. So I've done a lot of talking about embrace, and I could do more, but I think it would be far better toe. Have Vika actually show you how the product works, Vika. >>Thanks, Michael. We learned a lot today about the power of leveraging your red shift data and thought spot. But now let me show you how it works. The coronavirus pandemic has presented extraordinary challenges for many businesses, and some industries have fared better than others. One industry that seems to weather the storm pretty well actually is streaming media. So companies like Netflix and who Lou. And in this demo, we're going to be looking at data from B to C marketing efforts. First streaming media company in 2020 lately, we've been running campaigns for comedy, drama, kids and family and reality content. Each of our campaigns last four weeks, and they're staggered on a weekly basis. Therefore, we always have four campaigns running, and we can focus on one campaign launch per >>week, >>and today we'll be digging into how our campaigns are performing. We'll be looking at things like impressions, conversions and users demographic data. So let's go ahead and look at that data. We'll see what we can learn from what's happened this year so far, and how we can apply those learnings to future decision making. As you can already see on the thoughts about homepage, I've created a few pin boards that I use for reporting purposes. The homepage also includes what others on my team and I have been looking at most recently. Now, before we dive into a search, will first take a look at how to make a direct connection to the customer database and red shift to save time. I've already pre built the connection Red Shift, but I'll show you how easy it is to make that connection in just three steps. So first we give the connection name and we select our connection type and was on red Shift. Then we enter our red shift credentials, and finally, we select the tables that we want to use Great now ready to start searching. So let's start in this data to get a better idea of how our marketing efforts have been affected either positively or negatively by this really challenging situation. When we think of ad based online marketing campaigns, we think of impressions, clicks and conversions. Let's >>look at those >>on a daily basis for our purposes. So all this data is available to us in Thought spot, and we can easily you search to create a nice line chart like this that shows US trends over the last few months and based on experience. We understand that we're going to have more clicks than impressions and more impressions and conversions. If we started the chart for a minute, we could see that while impressions appear to be pretty steady over the course of the year, clicks and especially conversions both get a nice boost in mid to late March, right around the time that pandemic related policies were being implemented. So right off the bat, we found something interesting, and we can come back to this now. There are few metrics that we're gonna focus on as we analyze our marketing data. Our overall goal is obviously to drive conversions, meaning that we bring new users into our streaming service. And in order to get a visitor to sign up in the first place, we need them to get into our sign up page. A compelling campaign is going to generate clicks, so if someone is interested in our ad, they're more likely to click on it, so we'll search for Click through Rape 5% and we'll look this up by campaign name. Now even compare all the campaigns that we've launched this year to see which have been most effective and bring visitors star site. And I mentioned earlier that we have four different types of campaign content, each one aligned with one of our most popular genres. So by adding campaign content, yeah, >>and I >>just want to see the top 10. I could limit my church. Just these top 10 campaigns automatically sorted by click through rate and assigned a color for each category so we could see right away that comedy and drama each of three of the top 10 campaigns by click through rate reality is, too, including the top spot and kids and family makes one appearance as well. Without spot. We know that any non technical user can ask a question and get an answer. They can explore the answer and ask another question. When you get an answer that you want to share, keep an eye on moving forward, you pin the answer to pin board. So the BBC Marketing Campaign Statistics PIN board gives us a solid overview of our campaign related activities and metrics throughout 2020. The visuals here keep us up to date on click through rate and cost per click, but also another really important metrics that conversions or cost proposition. Now it's important to our business that we evaluate the effectiveness of our spending. Let's do another search. We're going to look at how many new customers were getting so conversions and the price cost per acquisition that we're spending to get each of these by the campaign contact category. So >>this is a >>really telling chart. We can basically see how much each new users costing us, based on the content that they see prior to signing up to the service. Drama and reality users are actually relatively expensive compared to those who joined based on comedy and kids and family content that they saw. And if all the genres kids and family is actually giving us the best bang for our marketing >>buck. >>And that's good news because the genres providing the best value are also providing the most customers. We mentioned earlier that we actually saw a sizable uptick in conversions as stay at home policies were implemented across much of the country. So we're gonna remove cost per acquisition, and we're gonna take a daily look how our campaign content has trended over the years so far. Eso By doing this now, we can see a comparison of the different genres daily. Some campaigns have been more successful than others. Obviously, for example, kids and family contact has always fared pretty well Azaz comedy. But as we moved into the stay at home area of the line chart, we really saw these two genres begin to separate from the rest. And even here in June, as some states started to reopen, we're seeing that they're still trending up, and we're also seeing reality start to catch up around that time. And while the first pin board that we looked at included all sorts of campaign metrics, this is another PIN board that we've created so solely to focus on conversions. So not only can we see which campaigns drug significant conversions, we could also dig into the demographics of new users, like which campaigns and what content brought users from different parts of the country or from different age groups. And all this is just a quick search away without spot search directly on a red shift. Data Mhm. All right, Thank you. And back to you, Michael. >>Great. Thanks, Vika. That was excellent. Um, so as you can see, you can very quickly go from zero to search with thought Spot, um, connected to any cloud data warehouse. And I think it's important to understand that we mentioned it before. Not everything has to be perfect. In your doubt, in your cloud data warehouse, um, you can use thought spot as your initial for your initial tool. It's for investigatory purposes, A Z you can see here with star, Gento, imax and anthem. And a lot of these cases we were looking at billions of rows of data within minutes. And as you as your data warehouse maturity grows, you can start to add more and more thoughts about users to leverage the data and get better analysis from it. So we hope that you've enjoyed what you see today and take the step to either do one of two things. We have a free trial of thoughts about cloud. If you go to the website that you see below and register, we can get you access the thought spots so you can start searching today. Another option, by contacting our team, is to do a zero to search workshop where 90 minutes will work with you to connect your data source and start to build some insights and exactly what you're trying to find for your business. Um thanks, everybody. I would especially like to thank golf from AWS for joining us on this today. We appreciate your participation, and I hope everybody enjoyed what they saw. I think we have a few questions now. >>Thank you, Vika, Gal and Michael. It's always exciting to see a live demo. I know that I'm one of those comedy numbers. We have just a few minutes left, but I would love to ask a couple of last questions Before we go. Michael will give you the first question. Do I need to have all of my data cleaned and ready in my cloud data warehouse before I begin with thought spot? >>That's a great question, Mallory. No, you don't. You can really start using thought spot for search right away and start getting analysis and start understanding the data through the automatic search analysis and the way that we query the data and we've seen customers do that. Chick fil a example that we talked about earlier is where they were able to use thoughts bought to notice an anomaly in the Cloud Data Warehouse linking between product and store. They were able to fix that very quickly. Then that gets reflected across all of the users because our product queries the Cloud Data Warehouse directly so you can get started right away without it having to be perfect. And >>that's awesome. And gal will leave a fun one for you. What can we look forward to from Amazon Red Shift next year? >>That's a great question. And you know, the team has been innovating extremely fast. We released more than 200 features in the last year and a half, and we continue innovating. Um, one thing that stands out is aqua, which is a innovative new technology. Um, in fact, lovely stands for Advanced Square Accelerator, and it allows customers to achieve performance that up to 10 times faster, uh, than what they've seen really outstanding and and the way we've achieved that is through a shift in paradigm in the actual technological implementation section. Uh, aqua is a new distributed and hardware accelerated processing layer, which effectively allows us to push down operations analytics operations like compression, encryption, filtering and aggregations to the storage there layer and allow the aqua nodes that are built with custom. AWS designed analytics processors to perform these operations faster than traditional soup use. And we no longer need to bring, you know, scan the data and bring it all the way to the computational notes were able to apply these these predicates filtering and encourage encryption and compression and aggregations at the storage level. And likewise is going to be available for every are a three, um, customer out of the box with no changes to come. So I apologize for being getting out a little bit, but this is really exciting. >>No, that's why we invited you. Call. Thank you on. Thank you. Also to Michael and Vika. That was excellent. We really appreciate it. For all of you tuning in at home. The final session of this track is coming up shortly. You aren't gonna want to miss it. We're gonna end strong, come back and hear directly from our customer a T mobile on how T Mobile is building a data driven organization with thought spot in which >>pro, It's >>up next, see you then.

>>Yeah, it's the queue covering the virtual vertical Big Data Conference 2020 Brought to You by vertical. >>Welcome back, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching the Cube's coverage of the verdict of Virtual Big Data conference. The Cube has been at every BTC, and it's our pleasure in these difficult times to be covering BBC as a virtual event. This digital program really excited to have Joy King joining us. Joy is the vice president of product and go to market strategy in particular. And if that weren't enough, he also runs marketing and education curve for him. So, Joe, you're a multi tool players. You've got the technical side and the marketing gene, So welcome to the Cube. You're always a great guest. Love to have you on. >>Thank you so much, David. The pleasure, it really is. >>So I want to get in. You know, we'll have some time. We've been talking about the conference and the virtual event, but I really want to dig in to the product stuff. It's a big day for you guys. You announced 10.0. But before we get into the announcements, step back a little bit you know, you guys are riding the waves. I've said to ah, number of our guests that that brick has always been good. It riding the wave not only the initial MPP, but you you embraced, embraced HD fs. You embrace data science and analytics and in the cloud. So one of the trends that you see the big waves that you're writing >>Well, you're absolutely right, Dave. I mean, what what I think is most interesting and important is because verdict is, at its core a true engineering culture founded by, well, a pretty famous guy, right, Dr Stone Breaker, who embedded that very technical vertical engineering culture. It means that we don't pretend to know everything that's coming, but we are committed to embracing the tech. An ology trends, the innovations, things like that. We don't pretend to know it all. We just do it all. So right now, I think I see three big imminent trends that we are addressing. And matters had we have been for a while, but that are particularly relevant right now. The first is a combination of, I guess, a disappointment in what Hadoop was able to deliver. I always feel a little guilty because she's a very reasonably capable elephant. She was designed to be HD fs highly distributed file store, but she cant be an entire zoo, so there's a lot of disappointment in the market, but a lot of data. In HD FM, you combine that with some of the well, not some the explosion of cloud object storage. You're talking about even more data, but even more data silos. So data growth and and data silos is Trend one. Then what I would say Trend, too, is the cloud Reality Cloud brings so many events. There are so many opportunities that public cloud computing delivers. But I think we've learned enough now to know that there's also some reality. The cloud providers themselves. Dave. Don't talk about it well, because not, is it more agile? Can you do things without having to manage your own data center? Of course you can. That the reality is it's a little more pricey than we expected. There are some security and privacy concerns. There's some workloads that can go to the cloud, so hybrid and also multi cloud deployments are the next trend that are mandatory. And then maybe the one that is the most exciting in terms of changing the world we could use. A little change right now is operationalize in machine learning. There's so much potential in the technology, but it's somehow has been stuck for the most part in science projects and data science lab, and the time is now to operationalize it. Those are the three big trends that vertical is focusing on right now. >>That's great. I wonder if I could ask you a couple questions about that. I mean, I like you have a soft spot in my heart for the and the thing about the Hadoop that that was, I think, profound was it got people thinking about, you know, bringing compute to the data and leaving data in place, and it really got people thinking about data driven cultures. It didn't solve all the problems, but it collected a lot of data that we can now take your third trend and apply machine intelligence on top of that data. And then the cloud is really the ability to scale, and it gives you that agility and that it's not really that cloud experience. It's not not just the cloud itself, it's bringing the cloud experience to wherever the data lives. And I think that's what I'm hearing from you. Those are the three big super powers of innovation today. >>That's exactly right. So, you know, I have to say I think we all know that Data Analytics machine learning none of that delivers real value unless the volume of data is there to be able to truly predict and influence the future. So the last 7 to 10 years has been correctly about collecting the data, getting the data into a common location, and H DFS was well designed for that. But we live in a capitalist world, and some companies stepped in and tried to make HD Fs and the broader Hadoop ecosystem be the single solution to big data. It's not true. So now that the key is, how do we take advantage of all of that data? And now that's exactly what verdict is focusing on. So as you know, we began our journey with vertical back in the day in 2007 with our first release, and we saw the growth of the dupe. So we announced many years ago verdict a sequel on that. The idea to be able to deploy vertical on Hadoop nodes and query the data in Hadoop. We wanted to help. Now with Verdict A 10. We are also introducing vertical in eon mode, and we can talk more about that. But Verdict and Ian Mode for HDs, This is a way to apply it and see sequel database management platform to H DFS infrastructure and data in each DFS file storage. And that is a great way to leverage the investment that so many companies have made in HD Fs. And I think it's fair to the elephant to treat >>her well. Okay, let's get into the hard news and auto. Um, she's got, but you got a mature stack, but one of the highlights of append auto. And then we can drill into some of the technologies >>Absolutely so in well in 2018 vertical announced vertical in Deon mode is the separation of compute from storage. Now this is a great example of vertical embracing innovation. Vertical was designed for on premises, data centers and bare metal servers, tightly coupled storage de l three eighties from Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Dell, etcetera. But we saw that cloud computing was changing fundamentally data center architectures, and it made sense to separate compute from storage. So you add compute when you need compute. You add storage when you need storage. That's exactly what the cloud's introduced, but it was only available on the club. So first thing we did was architect vertical and EON mode, which is not a new product. Eight. This is really important. It's a deployment option. And in 2018 our customers had the opportunity to deploy their vertical licenses in EON mode on AWS in September of 2019. We then broke an important record. We brought cloud architecture down to earth and we announced vertical in eon mode so vertical with communal or shared storage, leveraging pure storage flash blade that gave us all the advantages of separating compute from storage. All of the workload, isolation, the scale up scale down the ability to manage clusters. And we did that with on Premise Data Center. And now, with vertical 10 we are announcing verdict in eon mode on HD fs and vertically on mode on Google Cloud. So what we've got here, in summary, is vertical Andy on mode, multi cloud and multiple on premise data that storage, and that gives us the opportunity to help our customers both with the hybrid and multi cloud strategies they have and unifying their data silos. But America 10 goes farther. >>Well, let me stop you there, because I just wanna I want to mention So we talked to Joe Gonzalez and past Mutual, who essentially, he was brought in. And one of this task was the lead into eon mode. Why? Because I'm asking. You still had three separate data silos and they wanted to bring those together. They're investing heavily in technology. Joe is an expert, though that really put data at their core and beyond Mode was a key part of that because they're using S three and s o. So that was Ah, very important step for those guys carry on. What else do we need to know about? >>So one of the reasons, for example, that Mass Mutual is so excited about John Mode is because of the operational advantages. You think about exactly what Joe told you about multiple clusters serving must multiple use cases and maybe multiple divisions. And look, let's be clear. Marketing doesn't always get along with finance and finance doesn't necessarily get along with up, and I t is often caught the middle. Erica and Dion mode allows workload, isolation, meaning allocating the compute resource is that different use cases need without allowing them to interfere with other use cases and allowing everybody to access the data. So it's a great way to bring the corporate world together but still protect them from each other. And that's one of the things that Mass Mutual is going to benefit from, as well, so many of >>our other customers I also want to mention. So when I saw you, ah, last last year at the Pure Storage Accelerate conference just today we are the only company that separates you from storage that that runs on Prem and in the cloud. And I was like I had to think about it. I've researched. I still can't find anybody anybody else who doesn't know. I want to mention you beat actually a number of the cloud players with that capability. So good job and I think is a differentiator, assuming that you're giving me that cloud experience and the licensing and the pricing capability. So I want to talk about that a little >>bit. Well, you're absolutely right. So let's be clear. There is no question that the public cloud public clouds introduced the separation of compute storage and these advantages that they do not have the ability or the interest to replicate that on premise for vertical. We were born to be software only. We make no money on underlying infrastructure. We don't charge as a package for the hardware underneath, so we are totally motivated to be independent of that and also to continuously optimize the software to be as efficient as possible. And we do the exact same thing to your question about life. Cloud providers charge for note indignance. That's how they charge for their underlying infrastructure. Well, in some cases, if you're being, if you're talking about a use case where you have a whole lot of data, but you don't necessarily have a lot of compute for that workload, it may make sense to pay her note. Then it's unlimited data. But what if you have a huge compute need on a relatively small data set that's not so good? Vertical offers per node and four terabyte for our customers, depending on their use case, we also offer perpetual licenses for customers who want capital. But we also offer subscription for companies that they Nope, I have to have opt in. And while this can certainly cause some complexity for our field organization, we know that it's all about choice, that everybody in today's world wants it personalized just for me. And that's exactly what we're doing with our pricing in life. >>So just to clarify, you're saying I can pay by the drink if I want to. You're not going to force me necessarily into a term or Aiken choose to have, you know, more predictable pricing. Is that, Is that correct? >>Well, so it's partially correct. The first verdict, a subscription licensing is a fixed amount for the period of the subscription. We do that so many of our customers cannot, and I'm one of them, by the way, cannot tell finance what the budgets forecast is going to be for the quarter after I spent you say what it's gonna be before, So our subscription facing is a fixed amount for a period of time. However, we do respect the fact that some companies do want usage based pricing. So on AWS, you can use verdict up by the hour and you pay by the hour. We are about to launch the very same thing on Google Cloud. So for us, it's about what do you need? And we make it happen natively directly with us or through AWS and Google Cloud. >>So I want to send so the the fixed isn't some floor. And then if you want a surge above that, you can allow usage pricing. If you're on the cloud, correct. >>Well, you actually license your cluster vertical by the hour on AWS and you run your cluster there. Or you can buy a license from vertical or a fixed capacity or a fixed number of nodes and deploy it on the cloud. And then, if you want to add more nodes or add more capacity, you can. It's not usage based for the license that you bring to the cloud. But if you purchase through the cloud provider, it is usage. >>Yeah, okay. And you guys are in the marketplace. Is that right? So, again, if I want up X, I can do that. I can choose to do that. >>That's awesome. Next usage through the AWS marketplace or yeah, directly from vertical >>because every small business who then goes to a salesforce management system knows this. Okay, great. I can pay by the month. Well, yeah, Well, not really. Here's our three year term in it, right? And it's very frustrating. >>Well, and even in the public cloud you can pay for by the hour by the minute or whatever, but it becomes pretty obvious that you're better off if you have reserved instance types or committed amounts in that by vertical offers subscription. That says, Hey, you want to have 100 terabytes for the next year? Here's what it will cost you. We do interval billing. You want to do monthly orderly bi annual will do that. But we won't charge you for usage that you didn't even know you were using until after you get the bill. And frankly, that's something my finance team does not like. >>Yeah, I think you know, I know this is kind of a wonky discussion, but so many people gloss over the licensing and the pricing, and I think my take away here is Optionality. You know, pricing your way of That's great. Thank you for that clarification. Okay, so you got Google Cloud? I want to talk about storage. Optionality. If I found him up, I got history. I got I'm presuming Google now of you you're pure >>is an s three compatible storage yet So your story >>Google object store >>like Google object store Amazon s three object store HD fs pure storage flash blade, which is an object store on prim. And we are continuing on this theft because ultimately we know that our customers need the option of having next generation data center architecture, which is sort of shared or communal storage. So all the data is in one place. Workloads can be managed independently on that data, and that's exactly what we're doing. But what we already have in two public clouds and to on premise deployment options today. And as you said, I did challenge you back when we saw each other at the conference. Today, vertical is the only analytic data warehouse platform that offers that option on premise and in multiple public clouds. >>Okay, let's talk about the ah, go back through the innovation cocktail. I'll call it So it's It's the data applying machine intelligence to that data. And we've talked about scaling at Cloud and some of the other advantages of Let's Talk About the Machine Intelligence, the machine learning piece of it. What's your story there? Give us any updates on your embracing of tooling and and the like. >>Well, quite a few years ago, we began building some in database native in database machine learning algorithms into vertical, and the reason we did that was we knew that the architecture of MPP Columbia execution would dramatically improve performance. We also knew that a lot of people speak sequel, but at the time, not so many people spoke R or even Python. And so what if we could give act us to machine learning in the database via sequel and deliver that kind of performance? So that's the journey we started out. And then we realized that actually, machine learning is a lot more as everybody knows and just algorithms. So we then built in the full end to end machine learning functions from data preparation to model training, model scoring and evaluation all the way through to fold the point and all of this again sequel accessible. You speak sequel. You speak to the data and the other advantage of this approach was we realized that accuracy was compromised if you down sample. If you moved a portion of the data from a database to a specialty machine learning platform, you you were challenged by accuracy and also what the industry is calling replica ability. And that means if a model makes a decision like, let's say, credit scoring and that decision isn't anyway challenged, well, you have to be able to replicate it to prove that you made the decision correctly. And there was a bit of, ah, you know, blow up in the media not too long ago about a credit scoring decision that appeared to be gender bias. But unfortunately, because the model could not be replicated, there was no way to this Prove that, and that was not a good thing. So all of this is built in a vertical, and with vertical 10. We've taken the next step, just like with with Hadoop. We know that innovation happens within vertical, but also outside of vertical. We saw that data scientists really love their preferred language. Like python, they love their tools and platforms like tensor flow with vertical 10. We now integrate even more with python, which we have for a while, but we also integrate with tensorflow integration and PM ML. What does that mean? It means that if you build and train a model external to vertical, using the machine learning platform that you like, you can import that model into a vertical and run it on the full end to end process. But run it on all the data. No more accuracy challenges MPP Kilometer execution. So it's blazing fast. And if somebody wants to know why a model made a decision, you can replicate that model, and you can explain why those are very powerful. And it's also another cultural unification. Dave. It unifies the business analyst community who speak sequel with the data scientist community who love their tools like Tensorflow and Python. >>Well, I think joy. That's important because so much of machine intelligence and ai there's a black box problem. You can't replicate the model. Then you do run into a potential gender bias. In the example that you're talking about there in their many you know, let's say an individual is very wealthy. He goes for a mortgage and his wife goes for some credit she gets rejected. He gets accepted this to say it's the same household, but the bias in the model that may be gender bias that could be race bias. And so being able to replicate that in and open up and make the the machine intelligence transparent is very, very important, >>It really is. And that replica ability as well as accuracy. It's critical because if you're down sampling and you're running models on different sets of data, things can get confusing. And yet you don't really have a choice. Because if you're talking about petabytes of data and you need to export that data to a machine learning platform and then try to put it back and get the next at the next day, you're looking at way too much time doing it in the database or training the model and then importing it into the database for production. That's what vertical allows, and our customers are. So it right they reopens. Of course, you know, they are the ones that are sort of the Trailblazers they've always been, and ah, this is the next step. In blazing the ML >>thrill joint customers want analytics. They want functional analytics full function. Analytics. What are they pushing you for now? What are you delivering? What's your thought on that? >>Well, I would say the number one thing that our customers are demanding right now is deployment. Flexibility. What? What the what the CEO or the CFO mandated six months ago? Now shout Whatever that thou shalt is is different. And they would, I tell them is it is impossible. No, what you're going to be commanded to do or what options you might have in the future. The key is not having to choose, and they are very, very committed to that. We have a large telco customer who is multi cloud as their commit. Why multi cloud? Well, because they see innovation available in different public clouds. They want to take advantage of all of them. They also, admittedly, the that there's the risk of lock it right. Like any vendor, they don't want that either, so they want multi cloud. We have other customers who say we have some workloads that make sense for the cloud and some that we absolutely cannot in the cloud. But we want a unified analytics strategy, so they are adamant in focusing on deployment flexibility. That's what I'd say is 1st 2nd I would say that the interest in operationalize in machine learning but not necessarily forcing the analytics team to hammer the data science team about which tools or the best tools. That's the probably number two. And then I'd say Number three. And it's because when you look at companies like Uber or the Trade Desk or A T and T or Cerner performance at scale, when they say milliseconds, they think that flow. When they say petabytes, they're like, Yeah, that was yesterday. So performance at scale good enough for vertical is never good enough. And it's why we're constantly building at the core the next generation execution engine, database designer, optimization engine, all that stuff >>I wanna also ask you. When I first started following vertical, we covered the cube covering the BBC. One of things I noticed was in talking to customers and people in the community is that you have a community edition, uh, free addition, and it's not neutered ais that have you maintain that that ethos, you know, through the transitions into into micro focus. And can you talk about that a little bit >>absolutely vertical community edition is vertical. It's all of the verdict of functionality geospatial time series, pattern matching, machine learning, all of the verdict, vertical neon mode, vertical and enterprise mode. All vertical is the community edition. The only limitation is one terabyte of data and three notes, and it's free now. If you want commercial support, where you can file a support ticket and and things like that, you do have to buy the life. But it's free, and we people say, Well, free for how long? Like our field? I've asked that and I say forever and what he said, What do you mean forever? Because we want people to use vertical for use cases that are small. They want to learn that they want to try, and we see no reason to limit that. And what we look for is when they're ready to grow when they need the next set of data that goes beyond a terabyte or they need more compute than three notes, then we're here for them, and it also brings up an important thing that I should remind you or tell you about Davis. You haven't heard it, and that's about the Vertical Academy Academy that vertical dot com well, what is that? That is, well, self paced on demand as well as vertical essential certification. Training and certification means you have seven days with your hands on a vertical cluster hosted in the cloud to go through all the certification. And guess what? All of that is free. Why why would you give it for free? Because for us empowering the market, giving the market the expert East, the learning they need to take advantage of vertical, just like with Community Edition is fundamental to our mission because we see the advantage that vertical can bring. And we want to make it possible for every company all around the world that take advantage >>of it. I love that ethos of vertical. I mean, obviously great product. But it's not just the product. It's the business practices and really progressive progressive pricing and embracing of all these trends and not running away from the waves but really leaning in joy. Thanks so much. Great interview really appreciate it. And, ah, I wished we could have been faced face in Boston, but I think it's prudent thing to do, >>I promise you, Dave we will, because the verdict of BTC and 2021 is already booked. So I will see you there. >>Haas enjoyed King. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. And thank you for watching. Remember, the Cube is running this program in conjunction with the virtual vertical BDC goto vertical dot com slash BBC 2020 for all the coverage and keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante with the Cube. We'll be right back. >>Yeah, >>yeah, yeah.

(electronic music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada it's The Cube covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by The Cube. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube live coverage here in Toronto, Canada Ontario for Untraceable presents Blockchain Futurist Conference. Two days we've been here. We're on day two, amazing event here, great community, I'm John Furrier your host. Dave Vellante went back east so he was here yesterday. Our next guest Pablo Gonzales is the Founder and CEO of Genesis Blockchain Technologies, welcome to The Cube thanks for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I'm glad to have you on. First of all when Bradley Rodder says oh watch out for that guy, you must be smart because we trust Bradley so but you're doing something really cool. The future of trading and exchanges has been a topic that everyone's been talking about but not a lot of people have been actually moving the needle on. You've got some movement here, people doing here but no one's actually had the full package and they're running as fast as they can to do it. You guys have done it. >> We have. >> How? Take a minute, what have you guys done? What is the product? How did you guys do it and what can people use today? >> Thank you. So it's no longer hot air, as you said. A lot of people are saying what they're going to do. We're here to say what we have done which is very different. Yesterday up at the main stage we launched the world's first decentralized exchange on a mobile platform. We're fully licensed by the Costa Rican Commodities Exchange, we have brokerage license, a currency exchange license and a money remittance license. We already possess the licenses, we're not in pursuit of the licenses we have them. What we did obviously we pursued an MNA strategy, we acquired companies that were over a decade in the business and we just transformed them and cryptomized them, as I use the term and launched the exchange with those licenses and platforms. We listed the exchange with over 40 coins. Over four billion dollars of shared market cap and over half a million dollars of daily trading and liquidity. >> So this is right now going on in Costa Rica, mainly if stable. Is it stable? How's the stability there? >> So Costa Rica is extremely stable, they haven't had an army for over 50 years, it's considered a world-class country for banking, for international businesses so much so. Amazon, HP, Intel, all these humongous companies have large operations in the country. >> And their posture to crypto is they've come out formally. >> Yes. >> To state well what's the posture from Costa Rica? >> So they consider cryptocurrencies a commodity and not a security and that's why went on to pursue a commodities exchange license. >> So that opens up doors for you to do this. >> Of course it opens up the doors, think about it. So you can now trade Bitcoin with gold. In our exchange, not as of today we're going to launch that in January, so now you can trade cryptocurrencies with commodities and cryptocurrencies with fiat currencies. >> So I'm just kind of speculating here in terms of my mind where I'm going with this. Almost imagine the shakeup that's coming. It's like a blender, we trading gold and Bitcoin it's just like who would have thought that was possible a year ago? >> That's correct. >> They've been compared, people compare Bitcoin to new digital gold but actually comparing them this is going to shakeup like a blender. >> That's correct. >> Blend up the commodities market. >> Disrupt it. >> What's your vision? What do you see happening? >> I just think that a lot of people are focusing on they say on one of the interviews earlier today, one of the interviewers was asking me is that Bitcoin to the moon? I'm like guys we need to stop. If we want this industry to really grow and develop stop using those analogies. We need to create a community that's larger, we need mass adoption and I think by including the commodities into the equation you're catering to the traditional investors that are a little bit uncomfortable with cryptocurrencies because they don't know about them but they know about gold and then all of a sudden now you compare gold with Bitcoin. >> It brings retail into it. >> Yes. >> It brings a real retail market. >> That's correct. >> You know I just want to say something. I agree with you 100%. These news outlets out there, these other people they tend to focus on the price of Bitcoin and it's almost like okay can we get over that? Yes it's going to go up and down, if you're in the long game it should be 20,000. Okay we can buy that but let's talk about what people are doing. Who's building something? >> Yes. >> That's the focus. So if I ask you now that question, hey Pablo what have you built and what you you going to continue to build if this is a foundational product, what are you guys going to do on top of it? What's the build plan? >> Thank you. So yesterday we launched the decentralized exchange with 40 coins. We're going to add probably between now and December another 110 different tokens. We're doing 20 for now and in January we're launching a centralized exchange so that's where we're going to add the fiat currencies and the commodities. >> What date again? >> End of January. >> Okay got it. >> Then we're going to make an announcement in November at one of the conferences in Malta and so we're reserving the date and everything else for that but in May of next year we're launching over the counter trading desk with full KYC AML you know counter terrorism financing, all of the world class policies and by this time next year we're going to be launching our institutional platform. So we want to be a one stop shop via the currency exchange that we own. We already have the ability from the Central Bank of Costa Rica which is amazing to issue Visa cards. So now our users, besides trading, they can take their crypto with them from their mobile phone, convert it to fiat and pay, you know, for gasoline, buy groceries. >> So I'm an entrepreneur, I got my own cube coin coming out, cube token, security token or utility, what's in it for me? If I asked you Pablo what's in it for me? What do I get out of it as a business? Are people going to start trading my coins? Am I instantly going to have an over the counter so as a business what do I have to worry about? What's the benefit? What matters to me? What's the impact? >> So if you were to be a coin to list on our exchange you mean? Well first of all we all know exchanges now to list on them you know they're changing, some of them I'm not going to say the name. >> They're charging a lot of money. >> Yeah 400 BTC and crazy amounts like this. We are going to charge. It's a business at the end of the day but what we're looking for with the coins that we're going to list is partnerships and seeing what ways we can do more entrepreneurial projects to change the landscape of the industry together as an exchange and a coin because potentially what a coin is is a company. You know what's behind the coin is what's important to us and not the coin itself. As the company develops and progresses so will the coin's price appreciated value or depreciated value and so yes, besides facilitating trading fees and lowering that, up listing and so forth what we're bringing to the table wants to be much more dynamic. >> You got to balance you know business that you got to do with infrastructure build out. It's like the old telecom days you got to build some cell towers before you roll out mobile. You got to build this entire retail global fabric. >> Yes. How does community play in for it? Obviously community is very important. I agree with you that's big time. How are you guys building your community? Tapping into anything else? Obviously Untraceable has got a great community. How are you going to grow your community. >> So as an exchange there could be a conflict of interest we have to be really careful how we get involved in the community but what we want to do is by selected partnerships with projects and coins. The coins are already doing their work. They are appealing to a community. They are raising the money from that community what we want to do is we want to partner up with those coins, the coins that are worth partnering up with and that way our reach automatically will multiply. On top of that of course we want to work with government and banks and institutions. We believe, it may not be popular what I'm about to say, you know the good old honor kids that came to the hardcore crypto, forget about central banks and centralization, I don't think that that's ever going to happen. I think the more we cooperate with government, that the more we work with them, we together can shape the industry and the landscape for good. I do believe in that. It's a collaboration and cooperation with governments and banks to us is pivotal. >> I mean you can be a coach to the regulatory. >> Absolutely. >> You can be an advocate and partner. >> We are being. >> And not an enemy. >> In Costa Rica, so before they considered and they took a position on whether is was a commodity or not you know they approached us and we were teaching them so much so that a congressman that was going to be at the conference and couldn't make it, he's the founder of the Libertarian movement in Costa Rica he created a think tank of crypto because of us that now has Latin America reach. Think about it, there are 1.3 billion people in Latin America. >> They have mobile phones. >> Exactly. That can now learn about crypto and so we're going to capitalize on this. >> It's a real democratization, what you do is change a society. If you continue to get this right this is really key. Congratulations. Now I want to ask you personal questions so I love the hat, you look great. >> Thank you. >> How did you get here? Were you scratching an itch that was around this? Was it, how did you get to the point where you said hey I'm going to go out and build the first exchange. I'm going to roll up the companies, wire them together, cryptotize them and go nuts and build an exchange. I mean how did you get here? What's the story? >> Thank you well, it's a story. I began entrepreneurial projects over 10 years ago, been in the private sector, because Costa Rica is a services company we put together a call center. Took it from like four people to 4000 people in four years. I went on to like building my own sports brand in over 10 countries but then about two years ago a few companies from Canada they called me from here, they called me to help them go public in the Canadian Securities Exchange. I took two companies public last year and after that I was saying to myself and the crew guys what do we do next? How can we really disrupt the industry? And one of the things we were talking about was man, we're in a decentralized community that brags about decentralization, trading and centralized exchanges. How ironic is that? >> Yeah it's got to change. >> So we said you know what let's be the pioneers, let's head out on a quest to build the world's first mobile decentralized exchange and we achieved that. It's unbelievable. Now you hear all the big guys, the whales talking about we're going to come up with a decentralized exchange because that's what people want at the end of the day and we were able to be the first ones ever to give that. >> And stability is critical. I mean I was just at a bank starting up a new account for a new startup that we're doing and they're like is this a blockchain company? I'm like no, no God no, no, no we're a media business. >> Those are bad guys. >> So you can't even open a bank account some places. So this has really got to get fixed and I got liquid, I got fiat currency, I got to make movements around. The retail market, whether it's trading, investing, it's got to be converted over to the new world. >> Yes, yes. >> I mean it's almost like a full changeover. >> That's correct. Obviously I think that it'll be a transition process. It'll take some time. There are some banks that already getting more involved into the process. What's interesting in our case is we even got the Costa Rican Central Bank to be our bank. Think about it, we're not banking with any private bank or public bank but the Costa Rican Central Bank and I think that more and more banks will follow suit as they see good use cases. The ICO craze of last year, I don't think that it did any good to the greater good of the community. If anything it brought a lot of prejudice. >> It's a black eye. They'll be a hangover on that but that's like the dotcom bubble. All those things on the dotcom bubble actually happened so I think you're going to just see get that jested out of the system. >> Inevitable. >> And focus on quality. That's what happening now. >> Inevitable. >> Pablo thanks for coming on. Pablo Gonzales who is the Founder and CEO of Genesis Blockchain Technologies. First ever exchange bringing all new magic to the marketplace. This is The Cube bringing you the content magic here in Toronto, Canada. I'll be right back with more. Stay with us. Live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Week. Now here's John Furrier. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. We're here in New York City for on the ground coverage for three days, wall-to-wall for Blockchain Week, New York's part of Consensus 2018. Sold out show, we're out in the open. Open (mumbles) to all the cons here. Next guest is Alex Mashinsky, Founder and CEO of Celsius. Seasoned entrepreneur, great debater on stage, great brawl recently at the Milk Institute. We'll talk about that. But more importantly, he's got a great project called Celsius, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> So, I love we just chatted before the camera turned on about some of the things you've done. You've gotten into a little bit of a great heated panel discussion. With someone who actually doesn't even hold cryptocurrency. He's saying it's all bullshit. >> Yes >> Right, so tell about the story. It was written up by Bloomberg, what was this famous brawl in the Milk Institute? >> Yeah, so the Milk Institute, they've been having conferences for the last 25 years and they're trying to combine the making money with doing good in the world, right? So, it's doing well and doing good at the same time. And that's what crypto is all about, right? And so, they had a panel about crypto with me and Nouriel Roubini, who's like Doctor Doom who predicted the last 15 recessions. There were only two, but they were predicted all 15 of them. So, I was telling him, even a broken clock is right twice a day, you know? He was going at me, he was going at the community, he was calling it a scam. And when you don't own any coin and you have not come to an event like this and seen 8,000 people celebrate this innovation, power to the people, then what are you talking about? So, I was there to really defend the community. It wasn't about me or him. >> Yeah, you did a good job. Well, thank you for doing that. Also, you're on a great project. I've been talking about a lot of other things I want to get to in the industry that you have a view and opinion on I would like to get. But your project Celsius. Take a minute to explain that, because I think this highlights really what's going on. I chatted earlier today about token economics. This is a new way, a new infrastructure, a new capability, a new mechanism that's really becoming powerful, of a network effect. >> Yes. >> So, the old world was DNS. 30 years-old stack on ecommerce, search engines, they're not accurate for network effects, a new dynamic, new data source is happening and it's creating new value, new data. >> Yes. >> Talk about Celsius the project and your value proposition. >> Right, so Celsius Network is basically trying to create an algorithmic cloud-based solution that does everything in your best interest. So, you have to think of it as a basket of financial services that do simple things like give you a loan or allow you to earn interest, give you access to a lot of great financial products, insurance and other things, that altogether do everything in your best interest. And what we're doing is we're enabling 100 million new people to come into the cryptocommunity and enabling them to benefit from all these things both for the increase in the value of the coins but also allowing their money to earn money for them. And today, if you think about banks, right? They take your money, right? You make a deposit, they take your money, they'll lend it to me on my credit card, they charge me 25%, they give you 1%. So, they take all that margin that you talked about. They squeeze all of that and keep it to themselves. >> And they're representing two people. It's like a realtor, who do you represent, the buyer or the seller? >> They're a toll collector in the middle, exactly. They're not adding any value. >> So, the new shift is on user value-- >> Exactly. >> And you see real-world examples of this. The whole Facebook debacle, who owns your data, and Mark Zuckerberg was testifying in front of the Senate in Congress, saying, "No, we don't sell your data." But they license the data and they use it. >> They extract all the value from it. >> They don't actually sell the data, true. But they license the shit out of it, to target you. >> They squeeze every last penny out of it. >> This is now obvious to people. >> Yes. >> That problem. >> Yes. >> Talk about the cryptobenefits, where is this shift happening, users, the power to the people, I get the phrase, but where is it happening? The token level-- >> So for example, Yeah, let's take an example, so most of the people here on this floor, they take their coins, they put them in exchanges, they celebrate the fact that the coin went up 50, 100% or whatever, but they don't realize that they leaving a lot of money on the table, because these exchanges do shorting, front-running, all kind of other stuff that should be illegal, but they do it, so they announce these amazing earnings, Binance announced amazing earnings and a lot of that earnings comes from the money that should be given back to you and me. So, if you think about the credit card company giving you two percent back, this is kind of the same thing. We are basically taking all of that earnings and giving it back to the coin-holders and we're saying, "Don't keep your money on exchanges, keep your money in a wallet that represents your best interest." It extracts all that value and gives it back to you. >> And so, what's your value proposition? You know what, you should say, "Use our wallet, use our system." >> Right. >> And then you represent their currency? >> So, we huddle together, we create a giant pool of BTC, a giant pool of ETH, or other coins, and we lend against that. So, we can do loans to the community, we charge nine percent for asset-backed loans, basically, so you need a loan against your crypto. This way you don't have to pay taxes, you can defer your tax, you can get liquidity without triggering all the tax that today you have to-- or you can just earn interest. So, without selling the coins, you can basically generate five to nine percent income that's continuous on top of that appreciation, you still get all the appreciation of the coin, but you're also generating income. >> So, you can bring contextual services around the crypto-holder interest. >> Yeah, so we find people willing to pay that. For example, other crypto-holders who want a loan, and they pay us nine percent, we give five percent to the community. Hedge funds who short BTC or ETH, they pay us ten or 15%, we give most of it back to the community. But the beauty is that the coin-holder doesn't have to do anything. They don't have to move from this account to that account. They don't do transactions. All they have to do is decide if Celsius Network is doing everything in their best interest or not. And the point is is that the next 100 million people that are going to join crypto, they're not speculators or anarchists or libertarians like most of the people here on the floor. They're people who kind of look at all this, saying, "It's too complicated, I don't know what to do, I'm not going to get in at the right time, I'm not going to get out at the right time." They don't have anyone they can trust. >> So, I'm going to be able to ask the Average Joe six-pack question, "Hey that's all fine, I love what you're doing. Come on, sign me up. But wait a minute. If you put all this crypto in one spot, the frickin' hackers are going to get it. >> Right. >> Because, how do you protect me against-- I heard, see, Mt. Gox was in the-- and all this stuff's going on, I'm worried that it's going to get hacked. Even wherever I put it." >> Exactly. And then Nouriel basically asked me the same question. So, in 10 years since BitCoin was created, there hasn't been a single instance of anyone cracking the blockchain itself. All the theft, everything that happened was because we gave somebody our private key and we entrusted them with it, and they screwed up. Mt. Gox, it basically broke into the exchange and so on. So, we keep everything in cold storage. And it's not ours, we have a custodian that is a giant company that is willing to accept all that, keep it in cold storage and we lend against it. We lend against the pull. >> So the private key's going in cold storage? >> Everything is staying in cold storage, which is the safest way to keep your crypto. It's much safer than keeping it on an exchange or keeping it in a different place. >> And it's all through--it's encryption, it's never safe to--a private key's a private key. Right, I mean, we've seen this before. >> Exactly. >> It's not rocket science. >> But even if you keep it in your home, in your safe, that's not as safe as putting it in a facility that is resistant to nuclear attack and has four layers of security and no human can get into the last room. It's a physical connection. >> I've heard this problem, just estate planning, someone dies, where's his cryptokey? >> Exactly. >> Unlocking, say 30 to 100 million dollars' worth of crypto. >> Exactly. >> It's not obvious. Well, the guy was smart, he put it in lock boxes all around the country. Wait a minute, no one knows where they are. >> But as a custodian, if you show us that you are the ultimate heir and you have the legal representation, then we can handle it, right? We can transfer that. But really, you're protecting it against a hacker coming in and stealing it from you. All the legal ramifications still apply. >> So, let's talk about the industry. What do you like about the industry right now, and what do you think that needs more work on, faster, or behavior-wise, what's your general temperature-taking of the current community? A lot of back-end work being done. Some complaints I heard about the demos, where some people say the front end was pretty sucky. >> Yes. >> But I think that's because a lot of back end work's being done. >> Well, this reminds me of 95 through 2000, I wrote some of the original Void protocols and everybody told me it's not going to work, the Internet is too slow, you can't scale, it's not safe. >> Yeah. >> I hear the same arguments again and again. >> Exactly. >> Today a billion people use Void every day and they don't even know who created it or how it works. I go in a room, I do speeches, right? And I ask, "Who here knows how Void works?" Not a single hand goes up. So, we need to get to the point where blockchain and crypto works the same way, no one needs to understand how it works, they just need to use it and trust it. So, the biggest thing I think holding us up right now is actually not technical. Because there's over 130 different blockchains. And some of them solves the scalability issues and security issues. The problem is is that we kind of have the early adopter phase, but we cannot leapfrog into the mass adoption phase. Because we're still at the early phase of operation. >> Exactly, is this just evolution or is it something specific? >> Well, the applications that we have today are not things that most of the people on the planet can use. That's what I'm saying, like for example, lending and borrowing is much more attractive than trading coins with each other. >> Yeah, it's like the Web, and Web 1.0, I mean-- >> Exactly. >> Search was the first application, and then everyone went to there, check their stock quotes. >> Looking at travel-- >> Travel, buy your car-- >> Exactly. >> Basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs kind of things. >> Yes. >> So, but that was interesting, because it was a whole new way. And by the way, same arguments I heard in the Web. "It's so slow. A mini-computer's so much faster than this AOL thing at 9600 bot modem." But the apples weren't being compared to other apples. It was replacing direct mail where I used to put stamps on envelopes and mail things. >> That's right, look. The bank gives you one percent. We pay five percent. So, that is a very attractive reason to switch from the bank to Celsius. Also, most people don't realize that the power the bank has is because we make all the deposits there. We stop depositing money there, they will have to pay us five percent, because as the money leaves them, they will have to raise the rates, they're going to have to attract you with more interest. So, it's a win-win, the community wins on the crypto side, and we're forcing the banks to do the right thing. >> Alright, I want to get your opinion, Alex, on ICOs. Did you guys do an ICO? How much did you raise? And what's your general take of the ICO market? I mean, certainly, blockchain, I've said this before, takes inefficiencies and makes them highly efficient, and we know the capital markets are very inefficient, so it's a bubble, okay. I have a choice. Tokens or VC, it's a no-brainer, go tokens. >> So look, I've had coins since 2013, I've invested in over 30 ICOs myself, and then when I couldn't find what Celsius does, I decided to start a new company, this is my eighth company as a founder. And so, I raised a billion dollars on the VC side, I know how that world works, had plenty of exits, and here we went to the community, we excluded all the VCs, we did not take money from a single venture guy because this is all about building the community. So, we just closed our round, about a month ago, we raised $15 million. We had 15,000 people sign up, 95% men. And it just drove me crazy, because half of our company's women, I thought that at least half of the people would be female. And I realized how big the problem is that we do not-- I mean, if you look at the floor here, we do not include the stronger sex. So, she's female, exactly. >> I'm promoting it here. >> I agree, I'm a big supporter too, so, I think when you think about it, if we want to be inclusive and we want this revolution to take hold, we have to solve these problems. What is the killer app, where are the female participants, how do we make it global, how do we make it inclusive, and how do we make the user interface and everything else so simple that you don't have to understand anything to use it every day. >> And what's your vision on how the ICOs are going to trend? >> Right. >> More stability, obviously. It'll level out, the bubble will-- I don't think it'll be a massive pop, I think it's going to be a small squeeze, so I think there's enough community involvement that self-governance will kick, in my opinion, but what's your take on the ICO? >> So, we definitely, this is like a Cambrian explosion. So, we are throwing money at everything. So, we're throwing money at good projects, bad projects, it's like a spray-and-pray mentality of the old days in 95 to 2000, we've seen that before. But from this some great companies are going to be born and I think the winners here are going to be bigger than Google, bigger than Apple, because the market is bigger. Money is the biggest market in the world, right? There's nothing bigger than all the money in the world, by definition. So, it's bigger than advertising, it's bigger than the social networks and it's bigger than Apple and whatever they're making. So, I believe that out of these companies, there are several thousand companies here, 8,000 participants, there were 4,000 ICOs that already took place or that are coming to be and out of that you're going to have your giant winners. And obviously Celsius is hoping to be one of them, but it's whoever builds the biggest community is the one that's going to win. And for us, it's all about giving back everything to the community. >> Your mission is awesome, I love your mission, and I love your expertise, love your experience. I think the community really is great to have you being a champion, being a mentor, I know you're doing a lot of paying it forward, great job. What's your view for the young entrepreneur out there, or someone who's got a growing opportunity that says, "Hey, you know what? I'm actually tailor-made for decentralization, I have a network community, network effect, I have all these great things going on, I want to scale." >> That's a great question because-- >> What's the playbook? >> A lot of people come to me and say, Oh, I'm too late to the game." No one is too late to the game. The experts have a six month experience. So, you talk to most of the people here, this is the first event, this is the first show. So, what I say to a lot of entrepreneurs is that if you pick the right vertical, you can very quickly become the best in the world at it. And I think the first phase of evolution here in the blockchain is all about financial products and financial solutions. I wouldn't go after healthcare, I wouldn't go after-- so like, insurance, or solving financial problems that currently have giant toll collectors who collect all the value, like the banks, or like the financial service providers, the insurance and so on. So, if you can solve those areas, you can scale very quickly, because Interen already has six or seven billion people on it, so now you can just bring them all in and haggle on their behalf in the cryptocommunity. >> I feel like I should lie down on the couch and ask Dr. Alex for some more advice. So, I'm actually going to ask you some specific questions. >> No couch here, man! There's no off switch here. >> I'll pass out, so much action going on. I mean, the vibe here is amazing. So, theCUBE, we're doing an open token model, got a great community, we want to grow and be number one at digital media, covering events with a network effect, video and media. We see token as a great opportunity. What's your advice? You're on our advisory team, what do you tell us to do? >> So, the curation is excellent, I think you guys do a great job at pulling the content. And what's missing in this community is really an automated process that kind of asks the community, "What do you guys believe in?" It's very hard for most people here to figure out which ones of these thousands of projects are trending right now, for example. And we can all vote on our app, for example. If you could create an app that allowed all of us to vote during the show, on what's trending and you had those guys being interviewed instead of me, you would have the killer apps. All of us know what they are and are not, but we should vote on it. >> So, use collective intelligence of the data-- >> Yes. >> And make a content operating system-- >> Exactly, use your metadata that you're already producing to do real-time input and bring those guys here, interview them and ask them about why their projects are hot. Celsius, people ask me all the time, "How do I get involved? How do I get involved? I saw you on Rubena, I saw you on this show." And so, we manage to create a lot of buzz around us and there are a few other projects like that, the community needs to get around the good projects and support them, because when we spend a lot of money on bad projects, we're not giving enough support to the good projects. >> You got to close loop that data, make it a community brand. That's what you're doing, that's what we're trying to do here, covering the events. So, we're going to build a content operating system. >> There we go! >> Run-time assembly, whatever the votes-- >> Let everybody vote in real-time, yes. >> Give me 50 times I see the hashtag-- >> Right, and the size of the name grows based on the adoption. >> You would have to have, like, clips instantly available, you would have to have all the metadata-- >> It's all real-time. >> You'd have to have all that stuff available. >> And the community will post it for you, you just do the final interviews, just bring these guys and say, "Okay, you won number one, number two, number three, and you give them the awards. >> Awesome, I love this conversation, even though we're kind of riffing, having fun. But the point of it is-- >> It's a new start-up let's do an ICO. >> Let's do an ICO, we can (mumbles) with that. No, but this is really fundamental for the entrepreneurs at the tech culture, we're talking about basically dev ops. >> Yes. >> Using cloud computing, we can have unlimited-- >> You can spin it up in a few days. >> You can apply automation, AI, that's your point, trust the software. >> Yes. If you're doing it for the community, they will recognize it and adopt you very quickly. >> They'll apply a human curation layer on top of it. >> With full transparency, you've got to show that you're doing everything for the community, like what we're trying to do, right? We're showing, when we tell you you're going to earn 5.1%, you can dig in and see who's getting paid and why they're getting this much money, what's the allocation, every token that's being given to anyone, all the math behind it is fully transparent, right? >> Final question-- >> Try to ask the bank for that. See what they're saying. >> Transparency? Go find another bank. Final question, your summary of the show. What's your take, was it good? Good vibes? What was the content agenda? What was the most exciting thing you saw, what's your summary of Consensus 2018? >> So, Consensus, when they organized it, they were bragging that 4,000 people are going to show up, and that's why they moved to the Hilton from the Marriott. And then 8,000 people show up, the lines were outside the whole hotel, so it proves that the demand is there. Everybody wants to come and learn about it, they want to know why this is so hot, why this revolution is here to stay, so what I'm taking out of the show is that this innovation is just in its infancy and there's a lot of people who are still yet to join. And the best ideas, the winners, have not yet been decided. So, watch out for all those new ideas that we haven't heard about yet. >> And it's accelerated from other trends. >> Yes, it definitely accelerated. >> Alex Mashinsky, CEO of Celsius, former entrepreneur of multiple startups. See, he knows the old way, he sees the new way, he's been a successful entrepreneur, seasoned community member. Thanks for coming on, we appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. I appreciate it. >> I'm John Furrier here with theCUBE on the ground out in the open, in the community, CUBE coverage here, Blockchain Week 2018 New York. Thanks for watching. (electronic-based music)

(energetic music) >> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE, covering CoinAgenda. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE. >> Hello and welcome to our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of CoinAgenda, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here covering all the action at Restart, we've got a ton of events, all the thoughts leaders, influencers, decision makers, you name it, in the industry, pioneers making it happen. My next guest is Toni Lane, who's the founder of CoinGraph. She's a true influencer with a lot of impact in this market. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> We're so glad to have you on. Like the little joke at the beginning about being an influencer, you actually are an influencer. You've done such great work in the industry, well regarded in the community. You have publication and you do a lot of great content. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh, for sure, yeah, thanks for having me. >> So being the influencer, what does that mean these days? Because we were just talking before the camera on, we came on camera, influence changes. You can't be an influencer all the time. You can be super or expert at something, but your expertise could change, you move to a new topic, learn something. And there's a lot of people in the digital marketing world saying I'm an influencer. It's kind of half baked, and really, I mean, it's not about the followers, your thoughts? >> Well, I mean, most of those followers are purchased. So there's a big difference between being an influencer and having actual influence. Because if you're, you know, if you have a million followers on Twitter, that's nice. How much engagement do you have? And that's actually what you look for, it's like when you look at someone's, whether it's, you know, social media, their digital presence, it's not about followers, it's all about engagement. You know, I don't even have that many, like I don't spend a lot of time doing that, at least I haven't so far, it's something I'm getting more into. But I have people that are really engaged, and so I look at people that have 15 million followers and I'm like, you have just as many likes on your things as I do, right. Because these people aren't real people. And it's less about, having influence in general is in many ways about having authenticity. And so influence is your ability to get something done. Being an influencer is your ability to hold someone's attention for a fragment of time. But being an influencer is not the same as having influence. >> And this community here, certainly, with decentralization here, you get the decentralized applications coming up blockchain, you got ICOs booming. It's all about the network effect, if you look at network effect, that is a new concept that ad technology does not know because you can't cookie a network connection. The only way to measure someone's true network is through malware today, and that's not good, no one does that. Well, they do, they're-- >> Toni: Unfortunately, yeah. >> But you can't you do it at business price, not sustainable. So the point is, it's not about how many followers you have. It could be that one follower, maybe 200 or 2,000, that opens up more. This is the network effect. This is what this community is all about, so I want to get your thoughts on this community's vibe. A lot of mission-driven, impact-oriented, merged with tech. So you have a fusion of technology, artistry, craftsmanship and mission-driven societal change in one melting pot. This is your wheelhouse. Share your thoughts on this. >> Well, so all of the different digital currencies have different value systems and they attract a different breed. And there are different incentives for each of these based on how the technology is designed, each protocol, right? So if you look at Bitcoin, in Bitcoin, the incentives are, you know, mining is done by computers, so your only incentive is like having social influence? And this is, I think, why we've seen a lot of kind of I would call it a scarcity mentality in terms of the way, why we see even more trolls in Bitcoin is because social influence is a huge way that success is measured, because as a developer, you can't have, you can't achieve a level of status any other way as a developer or as an influencer in Bitcoin, because the Bitcoin network is so far removed from that. And that's actually a perverse incentive in and of itself, and not only that, but early days in Bitcoin, there were major organizations who would hire people to man 100 Reddit and Twitter accounts and go into the Bitcoin community and actually fragment the public opinion using a technique grassroots psychological insurgency. So buying Reddit accounts that had been active for the last 10 years and going through and, you know, essentially just stabbing at people and creating, even having conversations with themselves to empower the voice of trolls. And what happens is you start bringing out what we call, actually, what the former Assad called, after Henry Kissinger, there was a big move that happened in the Middle East, where Kissinger realized the Middle East was becoming too powerful, and he saw it as a threat to American democracy. And so Kissinger organized a deal that fragmented the Middle East. And Assad said to Kissinger that his actions would be, he played Assad, basically. And Assad said to Kissinger, "Your actions "will bring up demons hidden underneath "the surface of the Arab world." And that strategy is actually something used in the Bitcoin community to leverage the incentives that are created, which is why we have seen previously so much, even from our industry leaders, so much fragmentation and so much tension. But the network is the most secure and the least corruptible, hands down, fundamentally. It's real cryptography. >> But let's talk about that, I love this conversation, because with networks, you have the concept of self-heal, and this gets nerdy on the packets, how packets move, at that level, self-healing networks has been a paradigm that's been proven. So that's out there, that's got to go to a societal level. The other one is the incentive system, if you have an immune system, if you will, in a network, this is a cultural thing. So actions, the Reddit's obvious, right. Weaponizing content has been well-documented, it's coming now mainstream, people are getting it that this outcome was actually manufactured by bad behavior. Now, I argue that there's an exact opposite effect. You can actually weaponize for good, 'cause everything has a polar opposite. So what is your view on that, because this is something that we've been teasing out for the first time. How do you weaponize content for good, (mumbles) not the right word, but look for the opposite value? >> Right, yeah, I mean, it is in so many ways, right. So I think it's about, there's a professor at Stanford whose name is BJ Fogg, and he's a behavioral researcher and he talks about essentially, you know, he writes a lot about habits. But something that's even more interesting about his understanding of propaganda is I studied a lot of Edward Bernays, he's responsible, he created the theory of propaganda, right. And he's the nephew of Sigmund Freud, he's responsible for essentially every consumptive theory in like leading up to the last century, he's actually, I would say he's responsible for the state of advertising and the economy today, almost really single handedly. And what's fascinating about this theory is that you can use propaganda to get women to smoke by unearthing what it is unconsciously in men that makes them not want to smoke. You can also use propaganda to get people to invest in health and wellness. You can also use propaganda to get people to stop their bad habits. So it's understanding that a technique works in a cognitive capacity in a way that affects a large amount of people. And it's really about the intention behind why a person who has influence, as we were saying, is leveraging that relationship. So I would say it's more about-- >> So we have to reimagine influence. Because the signalings that are igniting the cognitive brain can be tweaked. So that's what you're getting at here, right, so that's what we have to do. >> And it's an illusion from almost every angle. It's even the idea that, in the United States, the level of influence the president has and who's running, you know, and who, yeah, and who's at the wheel, right. So it's, we live in a world that is built on manufactured consent, and manufactured consent is enabled through thinkers like Bernays and through what I call the illusion of things like our former construct of even American democracy. That these things we've imagined to be so, the foundation and the structure for the way that we live. All of those things have become so far removed from their theory that they're no longer serving the principles under which they were founded, and that disconnect is actually a huge, it's a gap, it's an inertia gap for exploitation or it's an inertia gap for growth, and usually what happens is you have the exploitation first. Someone says oh, here's a big gap of information asymmetry, so I'm going to exploit the information asymmetry. And then once people start realizing that that information asymmetry is being exploited, you experience a huge inversion of that and you have enough kind of, you have enough inertia behind that slingshot to launch it into something totally different. >> Yeah, this is a great concept, I interviewed the founder of the Halcyon HAL in Washington, DC, and she's an amazing woman. And she had a great conscious about this, and what she postulated was, bubbles that burst, exploitation's always, we've seen it in all trends. The underbelly, 'cause it's motivated, no dogma. They don't care about structural incentives, they just want to make cash. But she had an interesting theory, she was talking about you can let the air out of the bubble with community and data. So all the societal entrepreneurship activities now that are mission-driven, now getting back to mission-driven is interesting. There might be a way to actually avoid the pop. Because, depending upon what the backlash might be on the exploitation side, as we saw in the dotcom bubble, you can actually let the air out a little bit through things like data. I mean, how do you see, in your mind, just thinking out loud, how do you see that playing out, because we have community now. We have access to open data. Blockchain is all about immutability. It's all about power to the user's data. This is a mega trend. Your thoughts? >> So interdependence is huge in the blockchain community, and that's actually to touch back on the incentives in Bitcoin, I think that that's actually one of Bitcoin's, it's not that it's a wrong or a right, it just is, right, like sidechains will be launched eventually, but the idea that Ethereum created something that was adaptable and empowered people to be creative, and yet they're creating incentives for her people to launch products that are, I believe, 'causing, in some ways, could cause some serious harm to the ecosystem once the air is let out of that bubble. >> John: The data. >> The data, so data, yes yes yes. >> How do you let the air out of the bubble, because the pop will be massively implosion, it'll leave a crater. >> So data is a non-scarce resource. This is actually how I describe blockchain to people. And this is actually, I think, one of the, the challenge, if you want to look at it from the perspective of challenge, and then I'll talk about for the benefit, just between Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are obviously other blockchains, EOS is like coming out super soon, Holochain. There are tons, Steem has actually its own infrastructure, tons of other blockchains to speak about. But just to take these two main blockchains, which are not competitors. In Bitcoin, you have, it's really cryptography. Cryptography is not about, you know, like let's do some rapid prototyping, cryptography is about let's like put a lot of thought into this thing and have mathematical certainty that this is not exploitatable. And Ethereum is just kind of like, well, let's build a framework and then let people play as much as they can. And so there are challenges and benefits to both of those models, the challenge of Ethereum being that you've let all of this capital into the industry which is not actually, 46% of ICOs have already failed. Already failed. And then if you look at Bitcoin-- >> And a person with your industry (mumbles) at 1,200, so it's a 50% discount. >> Oh yeah, oh yeah. And then if you do the same thing and you're looking at the Bitcoin blockchain, we've seen that the capacity for innovation, Bitcoin could have done what, they could've been the first to market for what Ethereum is doing. And they chose a different route, and I think there are some pros and cons to both of those things, but I think there is an intentionality behind why the world played out in the way that it did. And I think it's the right strategy for both products. So the way I describe applications using blockchain technology to people and what I call the future of an infinite economy is that, if you think about why are Facebook and Google these multi billion dollars companies, it's really simple. It's because what do they own, right? The data, the data. And they're some of the last companies that are still stewarding these things in a way that is taking vast amount of aggregated ownership over an asset that people are generating every day that's extremely valuable to companies in the private sector. So the way that I describe blockchain is that, if we being to own our self-sovereign identity, then when we're owning our data, that's the foundation for universal basic income. If we take a non-scarce resource like data that's being generated every day, not just from us, right, but the data in the health of the ocean, right. The stewardship of the ocean, the health of the fish, actually saying okay, fish are thriving in this area, and so there's a healthy ecosystem, and so this coin is trading higher because we're stewarding this area of the ocean so we don't overfish. The quality of the air so that, when we're actually de-polluting the air collectively, everyone around us is creating and generating data to say we're making the air better. The air, actually, the health of our bodies, of our Earth, of our minds, of our planet, of even the health of our innovation. Right, what are the incentives behind our innovation, those are all forms of data. And that's a non-scarce resource, so if we take all of these different applications and make many different blockchains. Which I fundamentally believe that there's a powerful theory in having blockchains that are economically scarce, because I believe you're going to empower more diverse spectrums and also have a level of difficulty in creating the coin. You're going to have more innovation. And so-- >> Well, this is a key area. I mean, this is super important. Well, I mean, you step back for a second, you zoom out, you say okay, we have data, data's super valuable, if you take it to the individual's levels, which has not been, quite frankly, the individual's been exploited. Facebooks of the world, these siloed platforms, have been using the data for advertising. That's just what everyone knows, but there's other examples. The point is, when you put the data in the hands of the users, combine that with cloud computing and the Internet of Things when you can have an edge of the network high powered computer, the use cases have never been pushed before. The envelope that we're pushing now has never been in this configuration. You could never have a decentralized network, immutable, storing users' data, you've never had the ability to write the kind of software you can today, you've never had cloud computing, you've never had compute at the edge, which is where the users live, they are the edge. You have the ability where the user's role can enable a new kind of collective intelligence. This is like mind blowing. So I mean, just how would you explain that to a common person? I mean, 'cause this is the challenge, 'cause collective intelligence has been well documented in data science. User generated content is kind of the beginning of what we see in user wearables. But if you can control the data streaming into the network, with all the self-healing and all the geek stuff we're talking about, it's going to change structural things. How do you explain that to a normal person? >> You don't, you don't, right. So you show them. Because I can sit here all day and I can talk to you about, you know, I could talk to you about all of these things, but at the end of the day, with normal people, it's not something you want to explain. You want to show them, because with my, actually, my grandma gets Bitcoin. My grandma hit me up in like 2012 and she was like, "Do you know what that Bitcoin thing is?" I'm like, "Mimi," I'm like, "How do you know "what Bitcoin is, Mimi?" And she's just like, "I don't know, I read." You know, I was like, "This is, so what are you reading? "Like, are you hanging out on like libertarian forums, "like what's up?" And so-- >> What's going on in the club there, I mean, are they playing-- >> Yeah, but she is a really unique lady. So I would say that, for most people, they are not going to, when you explain things to people-- >> What would you show them, I mean, what's an example? >> The way that, so when I was, so I got into Bitcoin in 2011, and the way that I would explain Bitcoin to people is I would just send it to them. I would be like, "Here's Bitcoin, like take this Bitcoin, "here's some Bitcoin for you." And that was, people got it, because they were like, I have five dollars now in my hands that was not there. And this person just sent it to me. And for some people even still, you know, to be honest, even then, I remember how much energy it took for me to do that. Everywhere I go, I'd be like, in cabs, I'd be checking out grocery stores and I would try, I would essentially pitch Bitcoin to every person that I met. >> John: You were evangelizing a lot of it. >> It took so much energy though, and even after that, there was a period-- >> It was hard for people to receive it, they would have to do what at that time? Think about what the process was back then. >> Oh yeah. There were very few people who, even after doing that, really got it. But you know what happened. This is so much perspective for me, I remember doing that in 2013 and I remember, in 2018, actually, I think it was the end of 2017. I went to a gas station, it's the only gas station in San Francisco with a Bitcoin ATM. And I was like, I need to get some cash and I'm running on Bitcoin. >> John: You guys want a mountain view now. >> Yeah, yeah. And so I go in and these guys, I'm like frustrated, I'm like oh, the ATM is like the worst user experience ever, I'm like (groans). That's literally, I'm like, it's just, it was like eyes rolling in the back of my head, like just so frustrated because I'm a super privacy freak. And so it was just a super complex process, but the guys that, the guy's (mumbles) he looks at me and he goes, "Yo." And I was like, "What's up, man?" And he goes, "Are you trying to buy some Bitcoin?" I was like, "I'm trying to sell some Bitcoin right now." (John laughs) >> You're dispensing it, they're like yeah. >> Yeah, he's like, "Oh, word." And he's like, "How much are you trying to sell?" And I'm like, "I don't know, like 2K." And so he goes, "Aight." And he's like, "Let me hit up my friends," he literally calls three of his friends who come down and they just like, they're like, "Do you want to sell more?" They're like, all they just peer to peer. It's like we bypass the ATM and it was actually a peer to peer exchange. And I didn't have to explain anything. You know what made people get it? You showed them the money, you showed them the money. And sometimes people don't, you can explain these concepts that are world-changing, super high level or whatever. People are not actually going to get it until it's useful to them. And that's why a user interface is so important. Like, if you even look at the Internet. Who made the money on the Internet, right, it was the people who understood how to own the user interface. >> I had a conversation with Fred Kruger from WorkCoin, he's been around the block for a long time, great guy. We were riffing on the old days. But we talked about the killer app for the mini computer and the mainframe, the mini computer and then the PC, it was email, for 20 years, the killer app was email. We were like, what's the killer app for blockchain? It's money, the killer app is money. And it's going to be 50 year killer app. Now, the marketplace is certainly maybe tier two killer app, but the killer app is money. >> For sure, that's amazing. >> That's the killer app. Okay, so we're talking about money, let's talk about wallets and whatnot. There's a lot of people that I know personally that had been, wallets had been hacked. Double authentication (mumbles) news articles on this, but even early on, you got to protect yourself. It's something that you're an advocate of, I know recently, you've been sharing some stuff on Telegram. Share your thoughts on newbies coming in, be careful. Your wallet can be hacked, and you got to take care of yourself online. Is there a best practice, can you share some color commentary on when you get into the system, when you get Bitcoin or crypto, what are some of the best practices? >> It's not even, I think you need to remember a key principle of cryptography when you're dealing with digital currency, which was like don't really trust anything unless you call someone, you have like first hand verification from a person that you trust. Because these things are, I mean, I've had, literally last week, I had seven friends contact me, actually more than that once I posted about it, and they were like, "Is this you?" And I was like what, like people would literally just go online, they would scrape my Facebook photo, they'd go on Telegram and they would make, my name is @ToniLaneC, T-O-N-I-L-A-N-E-C, and so is my Twitter, and people would scrape my photos from my Twitter or my Telegram or my Facebook and they would create fake accounts. And they would start messaging people and say "Hey, like "what's up, how are you, that's cool, great, awesome. "So like, I need like 20 BTC for a loan. "Can you help me?" And all my friends were like, "I was just talking to you, is this you?" And I'm like no. And so I think that there's, the other thing you have to, it's not just security in terms of, and this is actually a problem Blockchain has to solve, right. It's not just security in terms of protecting your wallet and, you know, getting like a Ledger or a Trezor and making sure that you're keeping things like in cold storage, that you're going, there are so many, keeping your money in a hard wallet, not keeping your private keys on your computer, like keeping everything, storing your passwords in multiple places that you know are safe. Both handwritten, like in lock boxes, putting it in your safe deposit box or, you know, there are so many different ways that we can get into like the complexities of protecting yourself and security. Not using centralized cell networks is one of the big ways that I do this. Because if you are using two factor-- >> John: What's a centralized cell network? >> AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. Because you are putting yourself in a situation where, if you're using a centralized system, those centralized systems are really easily exploitable. I know because my mom, when I was a kid one time, she put a password on my account so I couldn't buy games. I was not happy about it, it was my money that I was using, it was my money I was using to buy games, she was like, "You should just spend your money on better things." And so I remember going in when I was a kid, and I was like, this is my money, I totally want to buy this upgrade on this game. And so I went in and I essentially figured out how to hack into my own phone to be able to use my own money to buy the games that I wanted to buy-- >> Highly motivated learning opportunity there (laughs). >> But I realized that, in the same way we were talking about things that can be used for good can be used for bad, in the same way that someone can do something like that, you can also say, well, I'm in a call and say that I'm this person and take their phone and then get their two factor auth. So I don't use centralized cell networks, I don't use cell networks at all. >> John: What do you use? >> So, I mean, I have different kinds of like strategies or different things that mostly-- >> You might not want to say it here, okay, all right. >> Yeah yeah yeah, they're different, I'm happy to talk about those privately. The way that I've kind of handled that situation, and then the other thing that I would say is like, we really need hardcore reputation systems in our industry and for the world. And not social reputation systems like what is happening in China right now, where you can have someone leave you, like let's say I get into an Uber and I'm 30 seconds late. I can end up in a situation where I'm like not able to be admitted into a hospital or I'm not able to take a public train. Because someone rates me lower on this reputation system, I think that's a huge human rights issue. >> John: Yeah, that's a huge problem. >> And so not reputation systems like this, but reputations like the one we're working on at CULTU.RE that are really based more on the idea of restoration and humanization, rather than continued social exploitation to create some kind of collective norm, I think that kind of model is, it's not only a-- >> Well, the network should reject that by-- >> Toni: Exactly, exactly. >> All right, so let's talk about digital nations, we have China, so there's some bad behavior going on there. I mean, some will argue that there's really no R&D over there, and now they're trying to export the R&D that they stole into other countries, again, that's my personal rant. But the innovation there is clear, we chat and other things are happening. They finally turned the corner where they're driving a lot of, you know, mainly because of the mobile. But there's other nations out there that are kind of left behind. The UK just signed this week with Coinbase a pretty instrumental landmark licensing deal, which is a signal, 'cause I know Estonia, Armenia, you name every country wants to, Bahrain's got, you know, Dubai envy. So I mean, every country wants to be the crypto country. Every country wants to be the smart cities digital nation. I know this is something that you liked, and you and I were talking about 'cause we both are interested in. Your reaction, your thoughts on where that's going, I see, it's a good sign. What are the thresholds there, what are some of the keys things that they need to do to be a real digital nation? >> Well, I think it's less about digital nations in terms of like a nation is a series of borders, and more about first nations that we are, this is what we work on at CULTU.RE, that we are actually a nation of people and a lot of those nations have overlap and we should be able to participate in many different nations who have many different economies that are all really cooperating interdependently to create the best possible life for all human good, rather than just saying like I care about me and mine, because that strategy, the way government works now, it's a closed network with low trust that is extremely inefficient in management of resources. And the only way you can really-- >> That's the opposite, by the way, of what this movement's about. >> Yeah, exactly. And the only way you can have influence in government is to go in government and to work through government. All right. So it's the idea that, look at how much food we waste in the United States. If we took the food we wasted in the United States and repurposed it, we could literally cure world hunger. That is how bad it has gotten, right. And there are people starving in the US. There are people on food stamps in the US. >> Well, I mean, every institution, education, healthcare, you name it, it's all, you know, FUBAR, big time. >> Yeah, but we're throwing away tons of lettuce and all of this different kinds of produce because it like looks funky. Like this peach looks a little too much like a bottom. So we're like not able to sell it. >> Or lettuce got a little brown on it, throw the whole thing away. >> Yes, exactly, exactly, and that waste is unacceptable. So what we need to move toward is a model of open networks of governance where we have peer to peer distribution of finance and of resources in a way that allows people to aggregate around the marketplaces that are actually benefiting the way that they believe the world should work. So it's about creating a collective strategy of collective non-violence and eliminating harm, so obviously, you know, having a society that has enough proper incentives so that people are well off and that people are provided for, and I think blockchain will-- >> I noticed you're wearing a United Nations pin. >> Woo-hoo, yeah. And blockchain, I think, will also create this. >> John: I have one too. >> Let's up top. (slap) Yeah, I think blockchain will also help create universal basic income, but in addition to that, it's the idea that, if I'm living next door, I'll give two examples. So one is about the legality of the way that we contribute to the society. So let's say I have a next door neighbor. And let's say that this next door neighbor and I feel literally, we totally get along on everything, there's just one issue we feel we're like, I totally disagree with this, I totally disagree. And that issue is the use of, and I hope this isn't controversial to say, but anyway. So the use of medical marijuana, right. And it shouldn't be, because we can have two different opinions and the world can still work and that's the point. >> Well, in California, it's now legal to own marijuana. >> Yeah, for sure, it's legal here as well. So it's the idea that, if I, so let's say I'm a woman who, you know, I have someone in my life who was injured by a driver who was driving under the influence of marijuana. And so that's all I know about marijuana because I don't really do drugs, I've never been around drugs. So when I hear that word, I immediately think about the person in my life who was harmed because of, yes, and so immediately triggered, and I'm like, I don't want to support anything, I don't want to support anything to do with marijuana, I think marijuana is like the Devil's lettuce. And I have no interest in supporting marijuana. She never has to support marijuana, she doesn't have to. But her next door neighbor is a veteran with Parkinson's disease, her, me, whatever, is a veteran with Parkinson's disease, okay. And the only way that this man can move is, he's literally shaking, but when he smokes medical marijuana, he's actually able to, you watch and literally 30-45 minutes, he's upright, he looks like a normal healthy man. And so he says, "I believe that every, "after I fought in this, I believe every person "should have access to medical marijuana, "because this is the only way I'm able "to even operate my life." >> The different context. >> And I'm so, yes, exactly. And so what culture is really about is about understanding each other's context, that's even how reputation works. It's contextual awareness that provides greater understanding of who we are as individuals and the way we work together to make society work. So maybe they can mutually agree that he is not going to smoke while he's driving and he can pay to support everyone to have access who needs access to medical marijuana. >> Or he could finance Uber rides for them. You know, or whatever, I mean, these are mechanisms. >> Yes, yes, but it's the, yes, exactly, exactly. It's the idea that we are all, we're coming together to share context is a way that's not aggressive and not accusatory, so two people can believe two totally different things and still develop enough mutual respect to live together peacefully in a society. >> You know, the other too I'm riffing on that is that now KYC is a concept (mumbles) kicked around here, know your customer. I've been riffing on the notion of KYC for know your neighbor. And what we're seeing in these communities, even the analog world, people don't know who their neighbors are. Like, they don't actually even like care about them. >> Toni: For sure. >> You know, maybe I grew up in, you know, a different culture where, you know, everyone played freely, the parents were on the porch having their cocktail or socializing and watching the kids from the porch play on the lawn. Now I call that Snapchat, right. So I can see my kids Snapchat, so I'm not involved, but I have peripheral view. >> Toni: For sure. >> But we took care of each other. That doesn't happen much anymore, and I think one of the things that's interesting in some of these community dynamics that's been successful is this empathy about respect. They kind of get to know people in a non-judgmental way. And I think that is something that you see in some of these fragmented communities, where it's just like, if they just did things a little bit different. Do you agree, I see you're shaking your head, your thoughts on this? This super interesting social science thing that's, now you can measure it with digital or you can measure that kind of-- >> We can incentivize it. We can incentivize it. And that's the difference, measurement is one thing. Incentive is a behavior changer. Incentive is a behavior changer. And that is what we actually have to do in the way we think about the foundation of these systems, is it's not incentivizing competitive marketplaces that are like my way of thinking about this is right and your way of thinking about this thing is wrong, and like ah, it's not about that. At the end of the day like, I think we forget or misquote so much of, so many of the great thinkers of the last generation, like if you think about Darwin. What does everyone know about Darwin, right, it's like survival of the fittest. It's not what Darwin said, okay. It's misquoted and it's used, it's like one of those things where people who want to exploit-- >> It's a meme, basically. >> Yeah, people who want to exploit someone else's knowledge for their own ends will use that to, in some way, uplift the kind of like strategy of, you know, incentives of the time. What Darwin actually said was that human beings with the highest capacity for sympathy, qualities we now identify as altruism, compassion, empathy, reciprocity, will be the most likely to survive during hardship. Fundamentally, I mean, look at the state of the world today. It doesn't look good, it's like, you look at the way people interact with each other, it's like a virus that's attacking itself in an ecosystem that is our planet Earth, and we need to be, you know what is the antibody, our own sense of consideration for our fellow man. That is the antibody to violence. And so we can incentivize this, and we're going to have to because we're going to, AI, automation, these will fundamentally transform the way we think about jobs in a way that will liberate us like we've never known before. And once given the freedom, I think that we'll see the world start to change. >> Toni, I really appreciate you spending the time in this thought leadership conversation, riffing back and forth. Feels great and it's a great productive conversation. I got to ask you, how did you get there? I mean, who are you? I mean, you're amazing. Like, how did you get here, you obviously, Coin Telegraph's one of the projects you're running, great content. You're wearing the UN pin, I'm aligning with that. Got a great perspective. What's your story? Where did you come from originally, I mean... How did you get here? >> I think, you know, I don't know. I'm really connected to Saturn, I don't know where my home planet is. >> Which spaceship did you come in on? No, I mean, seriously, what's your background? How did you weave into this? 'Cause you have a holistic view on things, it's impressive. But you also can get down and dirty on the tech, and you have a good, strong network. Did you kind of back into this by accident on purpose, or was it something that you studied? What's the evolution that you have? >> Yeah, you know. I studied performance art and I was an artist all of my life. And I had a really big existential crisis, because I realized, as I was looking around, that technology was replacing every form. I remember the first time I watched an AI generate, this was maybe in like, I don't remember how, this was a long time ago, but I was essentially watching, before like the deep dream stuff, maybe like 2009 or 10. And I remember watching computers generate art. And I just was like, I was like mic drop, I was like anything that could ever be created can and will be created by computers, because these are, you are looking at this data, you can scan every art piece in the world and create an amalgamation of this in a way that extends so far beyond team and capacity that the form that we have used to express artistic integrity, all forms will, in some way, become obsolete as a form of creative expression. And I had this huge existential crisis as a performer, realizing that the value of my work was essentially, like, how long would the value of my work live on if no one is, I am not alive to continue singing the song. You don't remember the people who played Carmen, you remember Bizet who wrote the opera, you remember Carmen the character, but the life of the performer is like that of a butterfly. It's like you emerge from the cocoon, you fly around the world beautifully for a very short amount of time. And then you just, you know, stardust again. And so I had this huge existential moment, and it was a really big awakening call. It was as though the gravity of the universe came into the entire dimension of my being and said these, what you have learned has given you a skill, but this is not your path. So I went okay, I just need some time to like process that and so, 'cause this is my entire life, it's the only thing I ever imagined I would ever do. And so I ended up spending three months in silence meditating. And people are like whoa, like how did you do that? And I don't think people, I don't know, not that people don't understand, but I'm not certain that a lot of people have the level of this kind of existential moment that I experienced. And I couldn't have done anything else, I really just needed to take that time to process that I was actually reformulating every construct at the foundation of my own reality. And that was going to take, that's not something you just do overnight, right, like some people can do it more fluidly, but this was a real shift, a conscious shift. And so I asked myself three questions in that meditation, it was what is my purpose, what is the paradigm shift and where is my love. And so I just meditated on these three questions and started to, I don't know how deeply you've studied lucid dreaming or out of body experiences, but that's another, a conversation we can get into in another time, that was my area of study during that period. And so I ended up leaving the three months in silence and I just kind of, I started following my intuition. So I would just, essentially, sometimes I'd walk into a library and I would just shut my eyes and I would just walk around and I would touch books. And I would just feel what they felt like to me, like the density of their knowledge. And I would just feel something that I felt called to, and I would just pull it out of the shelf and just read it. And I don't know how to explain it-- >> (mumbles) Energy, basically-- >> I was guided, I was guided to this. This was in 2011. And so what I started getting into was propaganda theory, the dissolution of Aristotelian politics as an idea of citizen and state when we're really all consumers in a Keynesian economy structured by Edward Bernays, the inventor of propaganda, who essentially based our entire attitude of economic health on, you know, a dissolving human well being. Like, the evolution of our economic well being and our human well being were fundamentally at odds, and not only was that system non-sustainable, but it was a complete illusion. At every touch, point and turn, that the systems we lived in were illusions. And so is all of the world, right, like this whole world is an illusion, but these illusions in particular have some serious implications in terms of people who don't have the capacity, or not the capacity, everyone has the capacity, but who have not explored that deeply, right, who haven't gone that deep with themselves. >> And one of those books was like a tech book or was like-- >> It was just multiple, no, it was multiple books. And it's not that I would even read all of the books all of the way through. Sometimes I would just pick up a book and I would just open it to a certain page and I would read like a passage or a couple pages, and I'd just feel like that's all I need to read out of that book. It's, you just tune into it. >> When was your first trade on Bitcoin, first buy, 2011? >> You want to know something nuts? People always, people are like, "When did you first buy Bitcoin?" I was not, I didn't. So after I started, once you know, all this knowledge came to me, I just started talking about it, I was like, I've been given some wisdom, I just have to share it. So I started going out into the world and finding podiums and sharing. And that was when someone put a USB full of Bitcoin into my hands. I very rarely, I don't necessarily buy, I've just been gifted a lot. >> Good gifts. >> Toni: They've been great gifts, yeah. >> And then when did you start Coin Telegraph, when did that come online? >> So that was in 2013. I joined, the property had been operable for I think like three or four months. And some guys called me and they said, "We're just really impressed with you "and we want to work with you." And I said, "Well, that's nice," I was like, "But you don't have a business, right?" And they were like, "What do you mean?" And I was like, "Well, you have a blog, right?" And so I went in and I said, essentially like, here's, to scale the property, I was like, "Here's a plan for the next three years. "If we really want to get this property to where "it needs to be." I'm like, "Here are the programs that we need "to institute, here's like this entire, "countries we can be operable in "and then other acquisitions of other properties." I essentially went in and said like, "Here's the business model and the plan at scale," and they were just like, I think they were a little like, the first call that we had, I think they were just like, "We just called you to," it was a bold move, like, "We just called you to offer you something, "and you countered our offer by saying "we don't have a business?" It was one of those things, but they-- >> Well, it was the labor of love for them, right, I mean-- >> Well, for all of us, yeah, for all of us. >> When all you do is you're blogging, you're just sharing. And then you start thinking about, you know, how to grow, and you got to nurture it, you need cash. >> Yes, and so I essentially came in and then started, I was both editor in chief and CEO and co-founder of the property who helped bring in a lot of the network, build the reputation for the brand, create a scaling strategy. A lot of mergers and acquisitions, a lot of franchises and-- >> How many properties did you buy roughly, handful, six, less than six? >> So I would also say that-- >> Little blogs and kind of (mumbles) them together, bring people together, was that the thinking? >> Yeah, you know, what's interesting is media from all shapes and sizes, 15 to 20 offices in 25 different countries. I always say this when I talk about this, a very important lesson that I learned. How do you manage a team of 40 anarchists? You don't, you don't, that's the answer, you don't, you don't even like, you're like oh. I remember when I was like, "We're a team!" And someone was like, "No, we're not, "I don't believe in teams, I work for myself "and I don't need," I was like oh, wow. I was like oh-- >> John: The power of we, no. >> I was just like, all right, but it was a good learning experience, because I was like well, this is the way, these are your needs. So if that's your, I was like, well, let's embrace that, let's embrace the idea-- >> But that's the culture, you can't change it. >> And let's create the economy around that, let's actually do direct incentive for it, if you think that you're, if you want to be in this on your own, then let's say okay, we're going to make this fully free market economics and we're going to have a matter of consensus on whether or not someone who's exploiting the system, you write an article, you send it out, the number of views and shares that it gets from accounts that are, you know, proven verified, that is how much you get out of the bounty that's created from our ad sales, and if the community comes together in a consensus and says that someone wrote an article that was basically exploiting the system, like beer, guns, tits and weed plus Bitcoin and then they just shared it with everyone, then obviously, they would be weighted differently because the community would reach consensus so-- >> Change the incentive system. >> We just, I started, yeah, I started redesigning, essentially, once I had that moment, I was like okay, I was like, well, we really got to change the incentives here then because the incentives are not going to work like that. If that's the, if there's a consensus that that is the way you guys want to do things, then I got to change things around that. All right, cool, and so yeah, it was a really interesting awesome learning experience from like, you know, a team of like, maybe like 20 to 40 into, probably took it up 40, and then with all of the other, you know, companies and franchises, to about 435 people. And then just took the revenue from, yeah, just took, it was like skating revenue and then rocketing revenue. So that was really my role in the growth of the business and we're all, you know, it's amazing to see how these kind of blockchain holacracies work, you know, at a micro scale and at a macro scale. And what it really takes to build a movement, right. And then, in some ways, I guess it'd either become or create a meme. >> Well, I really appreciate the movement you've been supporting, we're here to bring theCUBE to the movement, our second show, third show we've been doing. And getting a lot more this year, as the ecosystem is coming together, the norms are forming, they're storming, they're forming, it's great stuff. You've been a great thought leader, and thanks for sharing the awesome range of topics here for theCUBE. >> For sure. >> Toni Lane here inside theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of CoinAgenda, we'll be right back. (energetic music)