>> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE been profiling the leaders in the technology world, women in technology from developers to the boardroom, everything in between. We have two great guests promoting in from Malaysia. Nancy Wang is the general manager, also CUBE alumni from AWS Data Protection, and founder and board chair of Advancing Women in Tech, awit.org. And of course Kate Watts who's the executive director of Advancing Women in Tech.org. So it's awit.org. Nancy, Kate, thanks for coming all the way across remotely from Malaysia. >> Of course, we're coming to you as fast as our internet bandwidth will allow us. And you know, I'm just thrilled today that you get to see a whole nother aspect of my life, right? Because typically we talk about AWS, and here we're talking about a topic near and dear to my heart. >> Well, Nancy, I love the fact that you're spending a lot of time taking the empowerment to go out and help the industries and helping with the advancement of women in tech. Kate, the executive director it's a 501C3, it's nonprofit, dedicating to accelerating the careers of women in groups in tech. Can you talk about the organization? >> Yes, I can. So Advancing Women in Tech was founded in 2017 in order to fix some of the pathway problems that we're seeing on the rise to leadership in the industry. And so we specifically focus on supporting mid-level women in technical roles, get into higher positions. We do that in a few different ways through mentorship programs through building technical skills and by connecting people to a supportive community. So you have your peer network and then a vertical sort of relationships to help you navigate the next steps in your career. So to date we've served about 40,000 individuals globally and we're just looking to expand our reach and impact and be able to better support women in the industry. >> Nancy, talk about the creation, the origination story. How'd this all come together? Obviously the momentum, everyone in the industry's been focused on this for a long time. Where did AWIT come from? Advancing Women in Technology, that's the acronym. Advancing Women in Technology.org, where'd it come from? What's the origination story? >> Yeah, so AWIT really originated from this desire that I had, to Kate's point around, well if you look around right and you know, don't take my word for it, right? Look at stats, look at news reports, or just frankly go on your LinkedIn and see how many women in underrepresented groups are in senior technical leadership roles right out in the companies whose names we all know. And so that was my case back in 2016. And so when I first got the idea and back then I was actually at Google, just another large tech company in the valley, right? It was about how do we get more role models, how we get more, for example, women into leadership roles so they can bring up the next generation, right? And so this is actually part of a longer speech that I'm about to give on Wednesday and part of the US State Department speaker program. In fact, that's why Kate and I are here in Malaysia right now is working with over 200 women entrepreneurs from all over in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia Philippines, Vietnam, Borneo, you know, so many countries where having more women entrepreneurs can help raise the GDP right, and that fits within our overall mission of getting more women into top leadership roles in tech. >> You know, I was talking about Teresa Carlson she came on the program as well for this year this next season we're going to do. And she mentioned the decision between the US progress and international. And she's saying as much as it's still bad numbers, it's worse than outside the United States and needs to get better. Can you comment on the global aspect? You brought that up. I think it's super important to highlight that it's just not one area, it's a global evolution. >> Absolutely, so let me start, and I'd love to actually have Kate talk about our current programs and all of the international groups that we're working with. So as Teresa aptly mentioned there is so much work to be done not just outside the US and North Americas where typically tech nonprofits will focus, but rather if you think about the one to end model, right? For example when I was doing the product market fit workshop for the US State Department I had women dialing in from rice fields, right? So let me just pause there for a moment. They were holding their cell phones up near towers near trees just so that they can get a few minutes of time with me to do a workshop and how to accelerate their business. So if you don't call that the desire to propel oneself or accelerate oneself, not sure what is, right. And so it's really that passion that drove me to spend the next week and a half here working with local entrepreneurs working with policy makers so we can take advantage and really leverage that passion that people have, right? To accelerate more business globally. And so that's why, you know Kate will be leading our contingent with the United Nations Women Group, right? That is focused on women's economic empowerment because that's super important, right? One aspect can be sure, getting more directors, you know vice presidents into companies like Google and Amazon. But another is also how do you encourage more women around the world to start businesses, right? To reach economic and freedom independence, right? To overcome some of the maybe social barriers to becoming a leader in their own country. >> Yes, and if I think about our own programs and our model of being very intentional about supporting the learning development and skills of women and members of underrepresented groups we focused very much on providing global access to a number of our programs. For instance, our product management certification on Coursera or engineering management our upcoming women founders accelerator. We provide both access that you can get from anywhere. And then also very intentional programming that connects people into the networks to be able to further their networks and what they've learned through the skills online, so. >> Yeah, and something Kate just told me recently is these courses that Kate's mentioning, right? She was instrumental in working with the American Council on Education and so that our learners can actually get up to six college credits for taking these courses on product management engineering management, on cloud product management. And most recently we had our first organic one of our very first organic testimonials was from a woman's tech bootcamp in Nigeria, right? So if you think about the worldwide impact of these upskilling courses where frankly in the US we might take for granted right around the world as I mentioned, there are women dialing in from rice patties from other, you know, for example, outside the, you know corporate buildings in order to access this content. >> Can you think about the idea of, oh sorry, go ahead. >> Go ahead, no, go ahead Kate. >> I was going to say, if you can't see it, you can't become it. And so we are very intentional about ensuring that we have we're spotlighting the expertise of women and we are broadcasting that everywhere so that anybody coming up can gain the skills and the networks to be able to succeed in this industry. >> We'll make sure we get those links so we can promote them. Obviously we feel the same way getting the word out. I think a couple things I'd like to ask you guys cause I think you hit a great point. One is the economic advantage the numbers prove that diverse teams perform better number one, that's clear. So good point there. But I want to get your thoughts on the entrepreneurial equation. You mentioned founders and startups and there's also different makeups in different countries. It's not like the big corporations sometimes it's smaller business in certain areas the different cultures have different business sizes and business types. How do you guys see that factoring in outside the United States, say the big tech companies? Okay, yeah. The easy lower the access to get in education than stay with them, in other countries is it the same or is it more diverse in terms of business? >> So what really actually got us started with the US State Department was around our work with women founders. And I love for Kate to actually share her experience working with AWS startups in that capacity. But frankly, you know, we looked at the content and the mentor programs that were providing women who wanted to be executives, you know, quickly realize a lot of those same skills such as finding customers, right? Scaling your product and building channels can also apply to women founders, not just executives. And so early supporters of our efforts from firms such as Moderna up in Seattle, Emergence Ventures, Decibel Ventures in, you know, the Bay Area and a few others that we're working with right now. Right, they believed in the mission and really helped us scale out what is now our existing platform and offerings for women founders. >> Those are great firms by the way. And they also are very founder friendly and also understand the global workforce. I mean, that's a whole nother dimension. Okay, what's your reaction to all that? >> Yes, we have been very intentional about taking the product expertise and the learnings of women and in our network, we first worked with AWS startups to support the development of the curriculum for the recent accelerator for women founders that was held last spring. And so we're able to support 25 founders and also brought in the expertise of about 20 or 30 women from Advancing Women in Tech to be able to be the lead instructors and mentors for that. And so we have really realized that with this network and this individual sort of focus on product expertise building strong teams, we can take that information and bring it to folks everywhere. And so there is very much the intentionality of allowing founders allowing individuals to take the lessons and bring it to their individual circumstances and the cultures in which they are operating. But the product sense is a skill that we can support the development of and we're proud to do so. >> That's awesome. Nancy, I want to ask you some never really talk about data storage and AWS cloud greatness and goodness, here's different and you also work full-time at AWS and you're the founder or the chairman of this great organization. How do you balance both and do you get, they're getting behind you on this, Amazon is getting behind you on this. >> Well, as I say it's always easier to negotiate on the way in. But jokes aside, I have to say the leadership has been tremendously supportive. If you think about, for example, my leaders Wayne Duso who's also been on the show multiple times, Bill Vaas who's also been on the show multiple times, you know they're both founders and also operators entrepreneurs at heart. So they understand that it is important, right? For all of us, it's really incumbent on all of us who are in positions to do so, to create a pathway for more people to be in leadership roles for more people to be successful entrepreneurs. So, no, I mean if you just looked at LinkedIn they're always uploading my vote so they reach to more audiences. And frankly they're rooting for us back home in the US while we're in Malaysia this week. >> That's awesome. And I think that's a good culture to have that empowerment and I think that's very healthy. What's next for you guys? What's on the agenda? Take us through the activities. I know that you got a ton of things happening. You got your event out there, which is why you're out there. There's a bunch of other activities. I think you guys call it the Advancing Women in Tech week. >> Yes, this week we are having a week of programming that you can check out at Advancing Women in Tech.org. That is spotlighting the expertise of a number of women in our space. So it is three days of programming Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday if you are in the US so the seventh through the ninth, but available globally. We are also going to be in New York next week for the event at the UN and are looking to continue to support our mentorship programs and also our work supporting women founders throughout the year. >> All right. I have to ask you guys if you don't mind get a little market data so you can share with us here at theCUBE. What are you hearing this year that's different in the conversation space around the topics, the interests? Obviously I've seen massive amounts of global acceleration around conversations, more video, things like this more stories are scaling, a lot more LinkedIn activity. It just seems like it's a lot different this year. Can you guys share any kind of current trends you're seeing relative to the conversations and topics being discussed across the the community? >> Well, I think from a needle moving perspective, right? I think due to the efforts of wonderful organizations including the Q for spotlighting all of these awesome women, right? Trailblazing women and the nonprofits the government entities that we work with there's definitely more emphasis on creating access and creating pathways. So that's probably one thing that you're seeing is more women, more investors posting about their activities. Number two, from a global trend perspective, right? The rise of women in security. I noticed that on your agenda today, you had Lena Smart who's a good friend of mine chief information security officer at MongoDB, right? She and I are actually quite involved in helping founders especially early stage founders in the security space. And so globally from a pure technical perspective, right? There's right more increasing regulations around data privacy, data sovereignty, right? For example, India's in a few weeks about to get their first data protection regulation there locally. So all of that is giving rise to yet another wave of opportunity and we want women founders uniquely positioned to take advantage of that opportunity. >> I love it. Kate, reaction to that? I mean founders, more pathways it sounds like a neural network, it sounds like AI enabled. >> Yes, and speaking of AI, with the rise of that we are also hearing from many community members the importance of continuing to build their skills upskill learn to be able to keep up with the latest trends. There's a lot of people wondering what does this mean for my own career? And so they're turning to organizations like Advancing Women in Tech to find communities to both learn the latest information, but also build their networks so that they are able to move forward regardless of what the industry does. >> I love the work you guys are doing. It's so impressive. I think the economic angle is new it's more amplified this year. It's always kind of been there and continues to be. What do you guys hope for by next year this time what do you hope to see different from a needle moving perspective, to use your word Nancy, for next year? What's the visual output in your mind? >> I want to see real effort made towards 50-50 representation in all tech leadership roles. And I'd like to see that happen by 2050. >> Kate, anything on your end? >> I love that. I'm going to go a little bit more touchy-feely. I want everybody in our space to understand that the skills that they build and that the networks they have carry with them regardless of wherever they go. And so to be able to really lean in and learn and continue to develop the career that you want to have. So whether that be at a large organization or within your own business, that you've got the potential to move forward on that within you. >> Nancy, Kate, thank you so much for your contribution. I'll give you the final word. Put a plug in for the organization. What are you guys looking for? Any kind of PSA you want to share with the folks watching? >> Absolutely, so if you're in a position to be a mentor, join as a mentor, right? Help elevate and accelerate the next generation of women leaders. If you're an investor help us invest in more women started companies, right? Women founded startups and lastly, if you are women looking to accelerate your career, come join our community. We have resources, we have mentors and who we have investors who are willing to come in on the ground floor and help you accelerate your business. >> Great work. Thank you so much for participating in our International Women's Day 23 program and we'd look to keep this going quarterly. We'll see you next year, next time. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thanks so much John. >> Thank you. >> Okay, women leaders here. >> Nancy: Thanks for having us >> All over the world, coming together for a great celebration but really highlighting the accomplishments, the pathways the investment, the mentoring, everything in between. It's theCUBE. Bring as much as we can. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

(inspirational music) >> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting electronic music) (crowd chattering in background) >> Hi everybody. We're back at the Fira in Barcelona. Winding up our four day wall-to-wall coverage of MWC23 theCUBE has been thrilled to cover the telco transformation. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Really excited to have NTT on. Shahid Ahmed is the Group EVP of New Ventures and Innovation at NTT in from Chicago. Welcome to Barcelona. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me over. >> So, really interesting title. You have, you know, people might not know NTT you know, huge Japan telco but a lot of other businesses, explain your business. >> So we do a lot of things. Most of us are known for our Docomo business in Japan. We have one of the largest wireless cellular carriers in the world. We serve most of Japan. Outside of Japan, we are B2B systems, integration, professional services company. So we offer managed services. We have data centers, we have undersea cables. We offer all kinds of outsourcing services. So we're a big company. >> So there's a narrative out there that says, you know, 5G, it's a lot of hype, not a lot of adoption. Nobody's ever going to make money at 5G. You have a different point of view, I understand. You're like leaning into 5G and you've actually got some traction there. Explain that. >> So 5G can be viewed from two lenses. One is just you and I using our cell phones and we get 5G coverage over it. And the other one is for businesses to use 5G, and we call that private 5G or enterprise grade 5G. Two very separate distinct things, but it is 5G in the end. Now the big debate here in Europe and US is how to monetize 5G. As a consumer, you and I are not going to pay extra for 5G. I mean, I haven't. I just expect the carrier to offer faster, cheaper services. And so would I pay extra? Not really. I just want a reliable network from my carrier. >> Paid up for the good camera though, didn't you? >> I did. (Dave and Dave laughing) >> I'm waiting for four cameras now. >> So the carriers are in this little bit of a pickle at the moment because they've just spent billions of dollars, not only on spectrum but the infrastructure needed to upgrade to 5G, yet nobody's willing to pay extra for that 5G service. >> Oh, right. >> So what do they do? And one idea is to look at enterprises, companies, industrial companies, manufacturing companies who want to build their own 5G networks to support their own use cases. And these use cases could be anything from automating the surveyor belt to cameras with 5G in it to AGVs. These are little carts running around warehouses picking up products and goods, but they have to be connected all the time. Wifi doesn't work all the time there. And so those businesses are willing to pay for 5G. So your question is, is there a business case for 5G? Yes. I don't think it's in the consumer side. I think it's in the business side. And that's where NTT is finding success. >> So you said, you know, how they going to make money, right? You very well described the telco dilemma. We heard earlier this week, you know, well, we could tax the OTT vendors, like Netflix of course shot back and said, "Well, we spent a lot of money on content. We're driving a lot of value. Why don't you help us pay for the content development?" Which is incredibly expensive. I think I heard we're going to tax the developers for API calls on the network. I'm not sure how well that's going to work out. Look at Twitter, you know, we'll see. And then yeah, there's the B2B piece. What's your take on, we heard the Orange CEO say, "We need help." You know, maybe implying we're going to tax the OTT vendors, but we're for net neutrality, which seems like it's completely counter-posed. What's your take on, you know, fair share in the network? >> Look, we've seen this debate unfold in the US for the last 10 years. >> Yeah. >> Tom Wheeler, the FCC chairman started that debate and he made great progress and open internet and net neutrality. The thing is that if you create a lane, a tollway, where some companies have to pay toll and others don't have to, you create an environment where the innovation could be stifled. Content providers may not appear on the scene anymore. And with everything happening around AI, we may see that backfire. So creating a toll for rich companies to be able to pay that toll and get on a faster speed internet, that may work some places may backfire in others. >> It's, you know, you're bringing up a great point. It's one of those sort of unintended consequences. You got to be be careful because the little guy gets crushed in that environment, and then what? Right? Then you stifle innovation. So, okay, so you're a fan of net neutrality. You think the balance that the US model, for a change, maybe the US got it right instead of like GDPR, who sort of informed the US on privacy, maybe the opposite on net neutrality. >> I think so. I mean, look, the way the US, particularly the FCC and the FTC has mandated these rules and regulation. I think it's a nice balance. FTC is all looking at big tech at the moment, but- >> Lena Khan wants to break up big tech. I mean for, you know, you big tech, boom, break 'em up, right? So, but that's, you know- >> That's a whole different story. >> Yeah. Right. We could talk about that too, if you want. >> Right. But I think that we have a balanced approach, a measured approach. Asking the content providers or the developers to pay for your innovative creative application that's on your phone, you know, that's asking for too much in my opinion. >> You know, I think you're right though. Government did do a good job with net neutrality in the US and, I mean, I'm just going to go my high horse for a second, so forgive me. >> Go for it. >> Market forces have always done a better job at adjudicating, you know, competition. Now, if a company's a monopoly, in my view they should be, you know, regulated, or at least penalized. Yeah, but generally speaking, you know the attack on big tech, I think is perhaps misplaced. I sat through, and the reason it's relevant to Mobile World Congress or MWC, is I sat through a Nokia presentation this week and they were talking about Bell Labs when United States broke up, you know, the US telcos, >> Yeah. >> Bell Labs was a gem in the US and now it's owned by Nokia. >> Yeah. >> Right? And so you got to be careful about, you know what you wish for with breaking up big tech. You got AI, you've got, you know, competition with China- >> Yeah, but the upside to breaking up Ma Bell was not just the baby Bells and maybe the stranded orphan asset of Bell Labs, but I would argue it led to innovation. I'm old enough to remember- >> I would say it made the US less competitive. >> I know. >> You were in junior high school, but I remember as an adult, having a rotary dial phone and having to pay for that access, and there was no such- >> Yeah, but they all came back together. The baby Bells are all, they got all acquired. And the cable company, it was no different. So I don't know, do you have a perspective of this? Because you know this better than I do. >> Well, I think look at Nokia, just they announced a whole new branding strategy and new brand. >> I like the brand. >> Yeah. And- >> It looks cool. >> But guess what? It's B2B oriented. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> It's no longer consumer, >> Right, yeah. >> because they felt that Nokia brand phone was sort of misleading towards a lot of business to business work that they do. And so they've oriented themselves to B2B. Look, my point is, the carriers and the service providers, network operators, and look, I'm a network operator, too, in Japan. We need to innovate ourselves. Nobody's stopping us from coming up with a content strategy. Nobody's stopping a carrier from building a interesting, new, over-the-top app. In fact, we have better control over that because we are closer to the customer. We need to innovate, we need to be more creative. I don't think taxing the little developer that's building a very innovative application is going to help in the long run. >> NTT Japan, what do they have a content play? I, sorry, I'm not familiar with it. Are they strong in content, or competitive like Netflix-like, or? >> We have relationships with them, and you remember i-mode? >> Yeah. Oh yeah, sure. >> Remember in the old days. I mean, that was a big hit. >> Yeah, yeah, you're right. >> Right? I mean, that was actually the original app marketplace. >> Right. >> And the application store. So, of course we've evolved from that and we should, and this is an evolution and we should look at it more positively instead of looking at ways to regulate it. We should let it prosper and let it see where- >> But why do you think that telcos generally have failed at content? I mean, AT&T is sort of the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they got some great properties, obviously, CNN and HBO, but generally it's viewed as a challenging asset and others have had to diversify or, you know, sell the assets. Why do you think that telcos have had such trouble there? >> Well, Comcast owns also a lot of content. >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. >> And I think, I think that is definitely a strategy that should be explored here in Europe. And I think that has been underexplored. I, in my opinion, I believe that every large carrier must have some sort of content strategy at some point, or else you are a pipe. >> Yeah. You lose touch with a customer. >> Yeah. And by the way, being a dump pipe is okay. >> No, it's a lucrative business. >> It's a good business. You just have to focus. And if you start to do a lot of ancillary things around it then you start to see the margins erode. But if you just focus on being a pipe, I think that's a very good business and it's very lucrative. Everybody wants bandwidth. There's insatiable demand for bandwidth all the time. >> Enjoy the monopoly, I say. >> Yeah, well, capital is like an organism in and of itself. It's going to seek a place where it can insert itself and grow. Do you think that the questions around fair share right now are having people wait in the wings to see what's going to happen? Because especially if I'm on the small end of creating content, creating services, and there's possibly a death blow to my fixed costs that could be coming down the line, I'm going to hold back and wait. Do you think that the answer is let's solve this sooner than later? What are your thoughts? >> I think in Europe the opinion has been always to go after the big tech. I mean, we've seen a lot of moves either through antitrust, or other means. >> Or the guillotine! >> That's right. (all chuckle) A guillotine. Yes. And I've heard those directly. I think, look, in the end, EU has to decide what's right for their constituents, the countries they operate, and the economy. Frankly, with where the economy is, you got recession, inflation pressures, a war, and who knows what else might come down the pipe. I would be very careful in messing with this equilibrium in this economy. Until at least we have gone through this inflation and recessionary pressure and see what happens. >> I, again, I think I come back to markets, ultimately, will adjudicate. I think what we're seeing with chatGPT is like a Netscape moment in some ways. And I can't predict what's going to happen, but I can predict that it's going to change the world. And there's going to be new disruptors that come about. That just, I don't think Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple are going to rule the world forever. They're just, I guarantee they're not, you know. They'll make it through. But there's going to be some new companies. I think it might be open AI, might not be. Give us a plug for NTT at the show. What do you guys got going here? Really appreciate you coming on. >> Thank you. So, you know, we're showing off our private 5G network for enterprises, for businesses. We see this as a huge opportunities. If you look around here you've got Rohde & Schwarz, that's the industrial company. You got Airbus here. All the big industrial companies are here. Automotive companies and private 5G. 5G inside a factory, inside a hospital, a warehouse, a mining operation. That's where the dollars are. >> Is it a meaningful business for you today? >> It is. We just started this business only a couple of years ago. We're seeing amazing growth and I think there's a lot of good opportunities there. >> Shahid Ahmed, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. Really a pleasure. >> Thanks for having me over. Great questions. >> Oh, you're welcome. All right. For David Nicholson, Dave Vellante. We'll be back, right after this short break, from the Fira in Barcelona, MWC23. You're watching theCUBE. (uplifting electronic music)

>> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day two of CloudNative Security CON 23. Lisa Martin here in studio in Palo Alto with John Furrier. John, we've had some great conversations. I've had a global event. This was a global event. We had Germany on yesterday. We had the Boston Studio. We had folks on the ground in Seattle. Lot of great conversations, a lot of great momentum at this event. What is your number one takeaway with this inaugural event? >> Well, first of all, our coverage with our CUBE alumni experts coming in remotely this remote event for us, I think this event as an inaugural event stood out because one, it was done very carefully and methodically from the CNCF. I think they didn't want to overplay their hand relative to breaking out from CUBE CON So Kubernetes success and CloudNative development has been such a success and that event and ecosystem is booming, right? So that's the big story is they have the breakout event and the question was, was it a good call? Was it successful? Was it going to, would the dog hunt as they say, in this case, I think the big takeaway is that it was successful by all measures. One, people enthusiastic and confident that this has the ability to stand on its own and still contribute without taking away from the benefits and growth of Kubernetes CUBE CON and CloudNative console. So that was the key. Hallway conversations, the sessions all curated and developed properly to be different and focused for that reason. So I think the big takeaway is that the CNCF did a good job on how they rolled this out. Again, it was very intimate event small reminds me of first CUBE CON in Seattle, kind of let's test it out. Let's see how it goes. Again, clearly it was people successful and they understood why they're doing it. And as we commented out in our earlier segments this is not something new. Amazon Web Services has re:Invent and re:Inforce So a lot of parallels there. I see there. So I think good call. CNCF did the right thing. I think this has legs. And then as Dave pointed out, Dave Vellante, on our last keynote analysis was the business model of the hackers is better than the business model of the industry. They're making more money, it costs less so, you know, they're playing offense and the industry playing defense. That has to change. And as Dave pointed out we have to make the cost of hacking and breaches and cybersecurity higher so that the business model crashes. And I think that's the strategic imperative. So I think the combination of the realities of the market globally and open source has to go faster. It's good to kind of decouple and be highly cohesive in the focus. So to me that's the big takeaway. And then the other one is, is that there's a lot more security problems still unresolved. The emphasis on developers productivity is at risk here, if not solved. You saw supply chain software, again, front and center and then down in the weeds outside of Kubernetes, things like BIND and DNS were brought up. You're seeing the Linux kernel. Really important things got to be paid attention to. So I think very good call, very good focus. >> I would love if for us to be able to, as the months go on talk to some of the practitioners that actually got to attend. There were 72 sessions, that's a lot of content for a small event. Obviously to your point, very well curated. We did hear from some folks yesterday who were just excited to get the community back together in person. To your point, having this dedicated focus on CloudNativesecurity is incredibly important. You talked about, you know, the offense defense, the fact that right now the industry needs to be able to pivot from being on defense to being on offense. This is a challenging thing because it is so lucrative for hackers. But this seems to be from what we've heard in the last couple days, the right community with the right focus to be able to make that pivot. >> Yeah, and I think if you look at the success of Kubernetes, 'cause again we were there at theCUBE first one CUBE CON, the end user stories really drove end user participation. Drove the birth of Kubernetes. Left some of these CloudNative early adopters early pioneers that were using cloud hyperscale really set the table for CloudNative CON. I think you're seeing that here with this CloudNative SecurityCON where I think we're see a lot more end user stories because of the security, the hairs on fire as we heard from Madrona Ventures, you know, as they as an investor you have a lot of use cases out there where customers are leaning in with getting the rolling up their sleeves, working with open source. This has to be the driver. So I'm expecting to see the next level of SecurityCON to be end user focused. Much more than vendor focused. Where CUBECON was very end user focused and then attracted all the vendors in that grew the industry. I expect the similar pattern here where end user action will be very high at the beginning and that will essentially be the rising tide for the vendors to be then participating. So I expect almost a similar trajectory to CUBECON. >> That's a good path that it needs to all be about all the end users. One of the things I'm curious if what you heard was what are some of the key factors that are going to move CloudNative Security forward? What did you hear the last two days? >> I heard that there's a lot of security problems and no one wants to kind of brag about this but there's a lot of under the hood stuff that needs to get taken care of. So if automation scales, and we heard that from one of the startups we've just interviewed. If automation and scale continues to happen and with the business model of the hackers still booming, security has to be refactored quickly and there's going to be an opportunity structurally to use the cloud for that. So I think it's a good opportunity now to get dedicated focus on fixing things like the DNS stuff old school under the hood, plumbing, networking protocols. You're going to start to see this super cloud-like environment emerge where data's involved, everything's happening and so security has to be re imagined. And I think there's a do over opportunity for the security industry with CloudNative driving that. And I think this is the big thing that I see as an opportunity to, from a story standpoint from a coverage standpoint is that it's a do-over for security. >> One of the things that we heard yesterday is that there's a lot of it, it's a pretty high percentage of organizations that either don't have a SOCK or have a very primitive SOCK. Which kind of surprised me that at this day and age the risks are there. We talked about that today's focus and the keynote was a lot about the software supply chain and what's going on there. What did you hear in terms of the appetite for organizations through the voice of the practitioner to say, you know what guys, we got to get going because there's going to be the hackers are they're here. >> I didn't hear much about that in the coverage 'cause we weren't in the hallways. But from reading the tea leaves and talking to the folks on the ground, I think there's an implied like there's an unlimited money from customers. So it's a very robust from the data infrastructure stack building we cover with the angel investor Kane you're seeing data infrastructure's going to be part of the solution here 'cause data and security go hand in hand. So everyone's got basically checkbook wide open everyone wants to have the answer. And we commented that the co-founder of Palo Alto you had on our coverage yesterday was saying that you know, there's no real platform, there's a lot of tools out there. People will buy anything. So there's still a huge appetite and spend in security but the answer's not going to more tool sprawling. It's going to more platform auto, something that enables automation, fix some of the underlying mechanisms involved and fix it fast. So to me I think it's going to be a robust monetary opportunity because of the demand on the business side. So I don't see that changing at all and I think it's going to accelerate. >> It's a great point in terms of the demand for the business side because as we know as we said yesterday, the next Log4j is out there. It's not a matter of if this happens again it's when, it's the extent, it's how frequent we know that. So organizations all the way up to the board have to be concerned about brand reputation. Nobody wants to be the next big headline in terms of breaches and customer data being given to hackers and hackers making all this money on that. That has to go all the way up to the board and there needs to be alignment between the board and the executives at the organization in terms of how they're going to deal with security, and now. This is not a conversation that can wait. Yeah, I mean I think the five C's we talked about yesterday the culture of companies, the cloud is an enabler, you've got clusters of servers and capabilities, Kubernetes clusters, you've got code and you've got all kinds of, you know, things going on there. Each one has elements that are at risk for hacking, right? So that to me is something that's super important. I think that's why the focus on security's different and important, but it's not going to fork the main event. So that's why I think the spin out was, spinout, or the new event is a good call by the CNCF. >> One of the things today that struck me they're talking a lot about software supply chain and that's been in the headlines for quite a while now. And a stat that was shared this morning during the keynote just blew my brains that there was a 742% increase in the software supply chain attacks occurring over the last three years. It's during Covid times, that is a massive increase. The threat landscape is just growing so amorphously but organizations need to help dial that down because their success and the health of the individuals and the end users is at risk. Well, Covid is an environment where everyone's kind of working at home. So there was some disruption to infrastructure. Also, when you have change like that, there's opportunities for hackers, they'll arbitrage that big time. But I think general the landscape is changing. There's no perimeter anymore. It's CloudNative, this is where it is and people who are moving from old IT to CloudNative, they're at risk. That's why there's tons of ransomware. That's why there's tons of risk. There's just hygiene, from hygiene to architecture and like Nick said from Palo Alto, the co-founder, there's not a lot of architecture in security. So yeah, people have bulked up their security teams but you're going to start to see much more holistic thinking around redoing security. I think that's the opportunity to propel CloudNative, and I think you'll see a lot more coming out of this. >> Did you hear any specific information on some of the CloudNative projects going on that really excite you in terms of these are the right people going after the right challenges to solve in the right direction? >> Well I saw the sessions and what jumped out to me at the sessions was it's a lot of extensions of what we heard at CUBECON and I think what they want to do is take out the big items and break 'em out in security. Kubescape was one we just covered. They want to get more sandbox type stuff into the security side that's very security focused but also plays well with CUBECON. So we'll hear more about how this plays out when we're in Amsterdam coming up in April for CUBECON to hear how that ecosystem, because I think it'll be kind of a relief to kind of decouple security 'cause that gives more focus to the stakeholders in CUBECON. There's a lot of issues going on there and you know service meshes and whatnot. So it's a lot of good stuff happening. >> A lot of good stuff happening. One of the things that'll be great about CUBECON is that we always get the voice of the customer. We get vendors coming on with the voice of the customer talking about and you know in that case how they're using Kubernetes to drive the business forward. But it'll be great to be able to pull in some of the security conversations that spin out of CloudNative Security CON to understand how those end users are embracing the technology. You brought up I think Nir Zuk from Palo Alto Networks, one of the themes there when Dave and I did their Ignite event in December was, of 22, was really consolidation. There are so many tools out there that organizations have to wrap their heads around and they need to be able to have the right enablement content which this event probably delivered to figure out how do we consolidate security tools effectively, efficiently in a way that helps dial down our risk profile because the risks just seem to keep growing. >> Yeah, and I love the technical nature of all that and I think this is going to be the continued focus. Chris Aniszczyk who's the CTO listed like E and BPF we covered with Liz Rice is one of the most three important points of the conference and it's just, it's very nerdy and that's what's needed. I mean it's technical. And again, there's no real standards bodies anymore. The old days developers I think are super important to be the arbiters here. And again, what I love about the CNCF is that they're developer focused and we heard developer first even in security. So you know, this is a sea change and I think, you know, developers' choice will be the standards bodies. >> Lisa: Yeah, yeah. >> They decide the future. >> Yeah. >> And I think having the sandboxing and bringing this out will hopefully accelerate more developer choice and self-service. >> You've been talking about kind of putting the developers in the driver's seat as really being the key decision makers for a while. Did you hear information over the last couple of days that validates that? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's clearly the fact that they did this was one. The other one is, is that engineering teams and dev teams and script teams, they're blending together. It's not just separate silos and the ones that are changing their team dynamics, again, back to the culture are winning. And I think this has to happen. Security has to be embedded everywhere in making it frictionless and to provide kind of the guardrail so developers don't slow down. And I think where security has become a drag or an anchor or a blocker has been just configuration of how the organization's handling it. So I think when people recognize that the developers are in charge and they're should be driving the application development you got to make sure that's secure. And so that's always going to be friction and I think whoever does it, whoever unlocks that for the developer to go faster will win. >> Right. Oh, that's what I'm sure magic to a developer's ear is the ability to go faster and be able to focus on co-development in a secure fashion. What are some of the things that you're excited about for CUBECON. Here we are in February, 2023 and CUBECON is just around the corner in April. What are some of the things that you're excited about based on the groundswell momentum that this first inaugural CloudNative Security CON is generating from a community, a culture perspective? >> I think this year's going to be very interesting 'cause we have an economic challenge globally. There's all kinds of geopolitical things happening. I think there's going to be very entrepreneurial activity this year more than ever. I think you're going to see a lot more innovative projects ideas hitting the table. I think it's going to be a lot more entrepreneurial just because the cycle we're in. And also I think the acceleration of mainstream deployments of out of the CNCF's main event CUBECON will happen. You'll see a lot more successes, scale, more clarity on where the security holes are or aren't. Where the benefits are. I think containers and microservices are continuing to surge. I think the Cloud scale hyperscale as Amazon, Azure, Google will be more aggressive. I think AI will be a big theme this year. I think you can see how data is going to infect some of the innovation thinking. I'm really excited about the data infrastructure because it powers a lot of things in the Cloud. So I think the Amazon Web Services, Azure next level gen clouds will impact what happens in the CloudNative foundation. >> Did you have any conversations yesterday or today with respect to AI and security? Was that a focus of anybody's? Talk to me about that. >> Well, I didn't hear any sessions on AI but we saw some demos on stage. But they're teasing out that this is an augmentation to their mission, right? So I think a lot of people are looking at AI as, again, like I always said there's the naysayers who think it's kind of a gimmick or nothing to see here, and then some are just going to blown away. I think the people who are alpha geeks and the industry connect the dots and understand that AI is going to be an accelerant to a lot of heavy lifting that was either manual, you know, hard to do things that was boring or muck as they say. I think that's going to be where you'll see the AI stories where it's going to accelerate either ways to make security better or make developers more confident and productive. >> Or both. >> Yeah. So definitely AI will be part of it. Yeah, definitely. One of the things too that I'm wondering if, you know, we talk about CloudNative and the goal of it, the importance of it. Do you think that this event, in terms of what we were able to see, obviously being remote the event going on in Seattle, us being here in Palo Alto and Boston and guests on from Seattle and Germany and all over, did you hear the really the validation for why CloudNative Security why CloudNative is important for organizations whether it's a bank or a hospital or a retailer? Is that validation clear and present? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think it was implied. I don't think there was like anyone's trying to debate that. I think this conference was more of it's assumed and they were really trying to push the ability to make security less defensive, more offensive and more accelerated into the solving the problems with the businesses that are out there. So clearly the CloudNative community understands where the security challenges are and where they're emerging. So having a dedicated event will help address that. And they've got great co-chairs too that put it together. So I think that's very positive. >> Yeah. Do you think, is it possible, I mean, like you said several times today so eloquently the industry's on the defense when it comes to security and the hackers are on the offense. Is it really possible to make that switch or obviously get some balances. As technology advances and industry gets to take advantage of that, so do the hackers, is that balance achievable? >> Absolutely. I mean, I think totally achievable. The question's going to be what's the environment going to be like? And I remember as context to understanding whether it's viable or not, is to look at, just go back 13 years ago, I remember in 2010 Amazon was viewed as an unsecure environment. Everyone's saying, "Oh, the cloud is not secure." And I remember interviewing Steve Schmidt at AWS and we discussed specifically how Amazon Cloud was being leveraged by hackers. They made it more complex for the hackers. And he said, "This is just the beginning." It's kind of like barbed wire on a fence. It's yeah, you're not going to climb it so people can get over it. And so since then what's happened is the Cloud has become more secure than on premises for a lot of either you know, personnel reasons, culture reasons, not updating, you know, from patches to just being insecure to be more insecure. So that to me means that the flip the script can be flipped. >> Yeah. And I think with CloudNative they can build in automation and code to solve some of these problems and make it more complex for the hacker. >> Lisa: Yes. >> And increase the cost. >> Yeah, exactly. Make it more complex. Increase the cost. That'll be in interesting journey to follow. So John, here we are early February, 2023 theCUBE starting out strong as always. What year are we in, 12? Year 12? >> 13th year >> 13! What's next for theCUBE? What's coming up that excites you? >> Well, we're going to do a lot more events. We got the theCUBE in studio that I call theCUBE Center as kind of internal code word, but like, this is more about getting the word out that we can cover events remotely as events are starting to change with hybrid, digital is going to be a big part of that. So I think you're going to see a lot more CUBE on location. We're going to do, still do theCUBE and have theCUBE cover events from the studio to get deeper perspective because we can then bring people in remote through our our studio team. We can bring our CUBE alumni in. We have a corpus of content and experts to bring to table. So I think the coverage will be increased. The expertise and data will be flowing through theCUBE and so Cube Center, CUBE CUBE Studio. >> Lisa: Love it. >> Will be a integral part of our coverage. >> I love that. And we have such great conversations with guests in person, but also virtually, digitally as well. We still get the voices of the practitioners and the customers and the vendors and the partner ecosystem really kind of lauded loud and clear through theCUBE megaphone as I would say. >> And of course getting the clips out there, getting the highlights. >> Yeah. >> Getting more stories. No stories too small for theCUBE. We can make it easy to get the best content. >> The best content. John, it's been fun covering CloudNative security CON with you with you. And Dave and our guests, thank you so much for the opportunity and looking forward to the next event. >> John: All right. We'll see you at Amsterdam. >> Yeah, I'll be there. We want to thank you so much for watching TheCUBES's two day coverage of CloudNative Security CON 23. We're live in Palo Alto. You are live wherever you are and we appreciate your time and your view of this event. For John Furrier, Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching guys. We'll see you at the next show.

(uplifting music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of CloudNativeSecurityCon, the inaugural event, in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here in the Palo Alto Studios. We're calling it theCUBE Center. It's kind of like our Sports Center for tech. It's kind of remote coverage. We've been doing this now for a few years. We're going to amp it up this year as more events are remote, and happening all around the world. So, we're going to continue the coverage with this segment focusing on the data stack, entrepreneurial opportunities around all things security, and as, obviously, data's involved. And our next guest is a friend of theCUBE, and CUBE alumni from 2013, entrepreneur himself, turned, now, venture capitalist angel investor, with his own firm, Opher Kahane, Managing Director, Sonoma Ventures. Formerly the founder of Origami, sold to Intuit a few years back. Focusing now on having a lot of fun, angel investing on boards, focusing on data-driven applications, and stacks around that, and all the stuff going on in, really, in the wheelhouse for what's going on around security data. Opher, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure. Great to be back. It's been a while. >> So you're kind of on Easy Street now. You did the entrepreneurial venture, you've worked hard. We were on together in 2013 when theCUBE just started. XCEL Partners had an event in Stanford, XCEL, and they had all the features there. We interviewed Satya Nadella, who was just a manager at Microsoft at that time, he was there. He's now the CEO of Microsoft. >> Yeah, he was. >> A lot's changed in nine years. But congratulations on your venture you sold, and you got an exit there, and now you're doing a lot of investments. I'd love to get your take, because this is really the biggest change I've seen in the past 12 years, around an inflection point around a lot of converging forces. Data, which, big data, 10 years ago, was a big part of your career, but now it's accelerated, with cloud scale. You're seeing people building scale on top of other clouds, and becoming their own cloud. You're seeing data being a big part of it. Cybersecurity kind of has not really changed much, but it's the most important thing everyone's talking about. So, developers are involved, data's involved, a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities. So I'd love to get your take on how you see the current situation, as it relates to what's gone on in the past five years or so. What's the big story? >> So, a lot of big stories, but I think a lot of it has to do with a promise of making value from data, whether it's for cybersecurity, for Fintech, for DevOps, for RevTech startups and companies. There's a lot of challenges in actually driving and monetizing the value from data with velocity. Historically, the challenge has been more around, "How do I store data at massive scale?" And then you had the big data infrastructure company, like Cloudera, and MapR, and others, deal with it from a scale perspective, from a storage perspective. Then you had a whole layer of companies that evolved to deal with, "How do I index massive scales of data, for quick querying, and federated access, et cetera?" But now that a lot of those underlying problems, if you will, have been solved, to a certain extent, although they're always being stretched, given the scale of data, and its utility is becoming more and more massive, in particular with AI use cases being very prominent right now, the next level is how to actually make value from the data. How do I manage the full lifecycle of data in complex environments, with complex organizations, complex use cases? And having seen this from the inside, with Origami Logic, as we dealt with a lot of large corporations, and post-acquisition by Intuit, and a lot of the startups I'm involved with, it's clear that we're now onto that next step. And you have fundamental new paradigms, such as data mesh, that attempt to address that complexity, and responsibly scaling access, and democratizing access in the value monetization from data, across large organizations. You have a slew of startups that are evolving to help the entire lifecycle of data, from the data engineering side of it, to the data analytics side of it, to the AI use cases side of it. And it feels like the early days, to a certain extent, of the revolution that we've seen in transition from traditional databases, to data warehouses, to cloud-based data processing, and big data. It feels like we're at the genesis of that next wave. And it's super, super exciting, for me at least, as someone who's sitting more in the coach seat, rather than being on the pitch, and building startups, helping folks as they go through those motions. >> So that's awesome. I want to get into some of these data infrastructure dynamics you mentioned, but before that, talk to the audience around what you're working on now. You've been a successful entrepreneur, you're focused on angel investing, so, super-early seed stage. What kind of deals are you looking at? What's interesting to you? What is Sonoma Ventures looking for, and what are some of the entrepreneurial dynamics that you're seeing right now, from a startup standpoint? >> Cool, so, at a macro level, this is a little bit of background of my history, because it shapes very heavily what it is that I'm looking at. So, I've been very fortunate with entrepreneurial career. I founded three startups. All three of them are successful. Final two were sold, the first one merged and went public. And my third career has been about data, moving data, passing data, processing data, generating insights from it. And, at this phase, I wanted to really evolve from just going and building startup number four, from going through the same motions again. A 10 year adventure, I'm a little bit too old for that, I guess. But the next best thing is to sit from a point whereby I can be more elevated in where I'm dealing with, and broaden the variety of startups I'm focused on, rather than just do your own thing, and just go very, very deep into it. Now, what specifically am I focused on at Sonoma Ventures? So, basically, looking at what I refer to as a data-driven application stack. Anything from the low-level data infrastructure and cloud infrastructure, that helps any persona in the data universe maximize value for data, from their particular point of view, for their particular role, whether it's data analysts, data scientists, data engineers, cloud engineers, DevOps folks, et cetera. All the way up to the application layer, in applications that are very data-heavy. And what are very typical data-heavy applications? FinTech, cyber, Web3, revenue technologies, and product and DevOps. So these are the areas we're focused on. I have almost 23 or 24 startups in the portfolio that span all these different areas. And this is in terms of the aperture. Now, typically, focus on pre-seed, seed. Sometimes a little bit later stage, but this is the primary focus. And it's really about partnering with entrepreneurs, and helping them make, if you will, original mistakes, avoid the mistakes I made. >> Yeah. >> And take it to the next level, whatever the milestone they're driving with. So I'm very, very hands-on with many of those startups. Now, what is it that's happening right now, initially, and why is it so exciting? So, on one hand, you have this scaling of data and its complexity, yet lagging value creation from it, across those different personas we've touched on. So that's one fundamental opportunity which is secular. The other one, which is more a cyclic situation, is the fact that we're going through a down cycle in tech, as is very evident in the public markets, and everything we're hearing about funding going slower and lower, terms shifting more into the hands of typical VCs versus entrepreneur-friendly market, and so on and so forth. And a very significant amount of layoffs. Now, when you combine these two trends together, you're observing a very interesting thing, that a lot of folks, really bright folks, who have sold a startup to a company, or have been in the guts of the large startup, or a large corporation, have, hands-on, experienced all those challenges we've spoken about earlier, in turf, maximizing value from data, irrespective of their role, in a specific angle, or vantage point they have on those challenges. So, for many of them, it's an opportunity to, "Now, let me now start a startup. I've been laid off, maybe, or my company's stock isn't doing as well as it used to, as a large corporation. Now I have an opportunity to actually go and take my entrepreneurial passion, and apply it to a product and experience as part of this larger company." >> Yeah. >> And you see a slew of folks who are emerging with these great ideas. So it's a very, very exciting period of time to innovate. >> It's interesting, a lot of people look at, I mean, I look at Snowflake as an example of a company that refactored data warehouses. They just basically took data warehouse, and put it on the cloud, and called it a data cloud. That, to me, was compelling. They didn't pay any CapEx. They rode Amazon's wave there. So, a similar thing going on with data. You mentioned this, and I see it as an enabling opportunity. So whether it's cybersecurity, FinTech, whatever vertical, you have an enablement. Now, you mentioned data infrastructure. It's a super exciting area, as there's so many stacks emerging. We got an analytics stack, there's real-time stacks, there's data lakes, AI stack, foundational models. So, you're seeing an explosion of stacks, different tools probably will emerge. So, how do you look at that, as a seasoned entrepreneur, now investor? Is that a good thing? Is that just more of the market? 'Cause it just seems like more and more kind of decomposed stacks targeted at use cases seems to be a trend. >> Yeah. >> And how do you vet that, is it? >> So it's a great observation, and if you take a step back and look at the evolution of technology over the last 30 years, maybe longer, you always see these cycles of expansion, fragmentation, contraction, expansion, contraction. Go decentralize, go centralize, go decentralize, go centralize, as manifested in different types of technology paradigms. From client server, to storage, to microservices, to et cetera, et cetera. So I think we're going through another big bang, to a certain extent, whereby end up with more specialized data stacks for specific use cases, as you need performance, the data models, the tooling to best adapt to the particular task at hand, and the particular personas at hand. As the needs of the data analysts are quite different from the needs of an NL engineer, it's quite different from the needs of the data engineer. And what happens is, when you end up with these siloed stacks, you end up with new fragmentation, and new gaps that need to be filled with a new layer of innovation. And I suspect that, in part, that's what we're seeing right now, in terms of the next wave of data innovation. Whether it's in a service of FinTech use cases, or cyber use cases, or other, is a set of tools that end up having to try and stitch together those elements and bridge between them. So I see that as a fantastic gap to innovate around. I see, also, a fundamental need in creating a common data language, and common data management processes and governance across those different personas, because ultimately, the same underlying data these folks need, albeit in different mediums, different access models, different velocities, et cetera, the subject matter, if you will, the underlying raw data, and some of the taxonomies right on top of it, do need to be consistent. So, once again, a great opportunity to innovate, whether it's about semantic layers, whether it's about data mesh, whether it's about CICD tools for data engineers, and so on and so forth. >> I got to ask you, first of all, I see you have a friend you brought into the interview. You have a dog in the background who made a little cameo appearance. And that's awesome. Sitting right next to you, making sure everything's going well. On the AI thing, 'cause I think that's the hot trend here. >> Yeah. >> You're starting to see, that ChatGPT's got everyone excited, because it's kind of that first time you see kind of next-gen functionality, large-language models, where you can bring data in, and it integrates well. So, to me, I think, connecting the dots, this kind of speaks to the beginning of what will be a trend of really blending of data stacks together, or blending of models. And so, as more data modeling emerges, you start to have this AI stack kind of situation, where you have things out there that you can compose. It's almost very developer-friendly, conceptually. This is kind of new, but kind of the same concept's been working on with Google and others. How do you see this emerging, as an investor? What are some of the things that you're excited about, around the ChatGPT kind of things that's happening? 'Cause it brings it mainstream. Again, a million downloads, fastest applications get a million downloads, even among all the successes. So it's obviously hit a nerve. People are talking about it. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, so, I think that's a great point, and clearly, it feels like an iPhone moment, right, to the industry, in this case, AI, and lots of applications. And I think there's, at a high level, probably three different layers of innovation. One is on top of those platforms. What use cases can one bring to the table that would drive on top of a ChatGPT-like service? Whereby, the startup, the company, can bring some unique datasets to infuse and add value on top of it, by custom-focusing it and purpose-building it for a particular use case or particular vertical. Whether it's applying it to customer service, in a particular vertical, applying it to, I don't know, marketing content creation, and so on and so forth. That's one category. And I do know that, as one of my startups is in Y Combinator, this season, winter '23, they're saying that a very large chunk of the YC companies in this cycle are about GPT use cases. So we'll see a flurry of that. The next layer, the one below that, is those who actually provide those platforms, whether it's ChatGPT, whatever will emerge from the partnership with Microsoft, and any competitive players that emerge from other startups, or from the big cloud providers, whether it's Facebook, if they ever get into this, and Google, which clearly will, as they need to, to survive around search. The third layer is the enabling layer. As you're going to have more and more of those different large-language models and use case running on top of it, the underlying layers, all the way down to cloud infrastructure, the data infrastructure, and the entire set of tools and systems, that take raw data, and massage it into useful, labeled, contextualized features and data to feed the models, the AI models, whether it's during training, or during inference stages, in production. Personally, my focus is more on the infrastructure than on the application use cases. And I believe that there's going to be a massive amount of innovation opportunity around that, to reach cost-effective, quality, fair models that are deployed easily and maintained easily, or at least with as little pain as possible, at scale. So there are startups that are dealing with it, in various areas. Some are about focusing on labeling automation, some about fairness, about, speaking about cyber, protecting models from threats through data and other issues with it, and so on and so forth. And I believe that this will be, too, a big driver for massive innovation, the infrastructure layer. >> Awesome, and I love how you mentioned the iPhone moment. I call it the browser moment, 'cause it felt that way for me, personally. >> Yep. >> But I think, from a business model standpoint, there is that iPhone shift. It's not the BlackBerry. It's a whole 'nother thing. And I like that. But I do have to ask you, because this is interesting. You mentioned iPhone. iPhone's mostly proprietary. So, in these machine learning foundational models, >> Yeah. >> you're starting to see proprietary hardware, bolt-on, acceleration, bundled together, for faster uptake. And now you got open source emerging, as two things. It's almost iPhone-Android situation happening. >> Yeah. >> So what's your view on that? Because there's pros and cons for either one. You're seeing a lot of these machine learning laws are very proprietary, but they work, and do you care, right? >> Yeah. >> And then you got open source, which is like, "Okay, let's get some upsource code, and let people verify it, and then build with that." Is it a balance? >> Yes, I think- >> Is it mutually exclusive? What's your view? >> I think it's going to be, markets will drive the proportion of both, and I think, for a certain use case, you'll end up with more proprietary offerings. With certain use cases, I guess the fundamental infrastructure for ChatGPT-like, let's say, large-language models and all the use cases running on top of it, that's likely going to be more platform-oriented and open source, and will allow innovation. Think of it as the equivalent of iPhone apps or Android apps running on top of those platforms, as in AI apps. So we'll have a lot of that. Now, when you start going a little bit more into the guts, the lower layers, then it's clear that, for performance reasons, in particular, for certain use cases, we'll end up with more proprietary offerings, whether it's advanced silicon, such as some of the silicon that emerged from entrepreneurs who have left Google, around TensorFlow, and all the silicon that powers that. You'll see a lot of innovation in that area as well. It hopefully intends to improve the cost efficiency of running large AI-oriented workloads, both in inference and in learning stages. >> I got to ask you, because this has come up a lot around Azure and Microsoft. Microsoft, pretty good move getting into the ChatGPT >> Yep. >> and the open AI, because I was talking to someone who's a hardcore Amazon developer, and they said, they swore they would never use Azure, right? One of those types. And they're spinning up Azure servers to get access to the API. So, the developers are flocking, as you mentioned. The YC class is all doing large data things, because you can now program with data, which is amazing, which is amazing. So, what's your take on, I know you got to be kind of neutral 'cause you're an investor, but you got, Amazon has to respond, Google, essentially, did all the work, so they have to have a solution. So, I'm expecting Google to have something very compelling, but Microsoft, right now, is going to just, might run the table on developers, this new wave of data developers. What's your take on the cloud responses to this? What's Amazon, what do you think AWS is going to do? What should Google be doing? What's your take? >> So, each of them is coming from a slightly different angle, of course. I'll say, Google, I think, has massive assets in the AI space, and their underlying cloud platform, I think, has been designed to support such complicated workloads, but they have yet to go as far as opening it up the same way ChatGPT is now in that Microsoft partnership, and Azure. Good question regarding Amazon. AWS has had a significant investment in AI-related infrastructure. Seeing it through my startups, through other lens as well. How will they respond to that higher layer, above and beyond the low level, if you will, AI-enabling apparatuses? How do they elevate to at least one or two layers above, and get to the same ChatGPT layer, good question. Is there an acquisition that will make sense for them to accelerate it, maybe. Is there an in-house development that they can reapply from a different domain towards that, possibly. But I do suspect we'll end up with acquisitions as the arms race around the next level of cloud wars emerges, and it's going to be no longer just about the basic tooling for basic cloud-based applications, and the infrastructure, and the cost management, but rather, faster time to deliver AI in data-heavy applications. Once again, each one of those cloud suppliers, their vendor is coming with different assets, and different pros and cons. All of them will need to just elevate the level of the fight, if you will, in this case, to the AI layer. >> It's going to be very interesting, the different stacks on the data infrastructure, like I mentioned, analytics, data lake, AI, all happening. It's going to be interesting to see how this turns into this AI cloud, like data clouds, data operating systems. So, super fascinating area. Opher, thank you for coming on and sharing your expertise with us. Great to see you, and congratulations on the work. I'll give you the final word here. Give a plugin for what you're looking for for startup seats, pre-seeds. What's the kind of profile that gets your attention, from a seed, pre-seed candidate or entrepreneur? >> Cool, first of all, it's my pleasure. Enjoy our chats, as always. Hopefully the next one's not going to be in nine years. As to what I'm looking for, ideally, smart data entrepreneurs, who have come from a particular domain problem, or problem domain, that they understand, they felt it in their own 10 fingers, or millions of neurons in their brains, and they figured out a way to solve it. Whether it's a data infrastructure play, a cloud infrastructure play, or a very, very smart application that takes advantage of data at scale. These are the things I'm looking for. >> One final, final question I have to ask you, because you're a seasoned entrepreneur, and now coach. What's different about the current entrepreneurial environment right now, vis-a-vis, the past decade? What's new? Is it different, highly accelerated? What advice do you give entrepreneurs out there who are putting together their plan? Obviously, a global resource pool now of engineering. It might not be yesterday's formula for success to putting a venture together to get to that product-market fit. What's new and different, and what's your advice to the folks out there about what's different about the current environment for being an entrepreneur? >> Fantastic, so I think it's a great question. So I think there's a few axes of difference, compared to, let's say, five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. First and foremost, given the amount of infrastructure out there, the amount of open-source technologies, amount of developer toolkits and frameworks, trying to develop an application, at least at the application layer, is much faster than ever. So, it's faster and cheaper, to the most part, unless you're building very fundamental, core, deep tech, where you still have a big technology challenge to deal with. And absent that, the challenge shifts more to how do you manage my resources, to product-market fit, how are you integrating the GTM lens, the go-to-market lens, as early as possible in the product-market fit cycle, such that you reach from pre-seed to seed, from seed to A, from A to B, with an optimal amount of velocity, and a minimal amount of resources. One big difference, specifically as of, let's say, beginning of this year, late last year, is that money is no longer free for entrepreneurs, which means that you need to operate and build startup in an environment with a lot more constraints. And in my mind, some of the best startups that have ever been built, and some of the big market-changing, generational-changing, if you will, technology startups, in their respective industry verticals, have actually emerged from these times. And these tend to be the smartest, best startups that emerge because they operate with a lot less money. Money is not as available for them, which means that they need to make tough decisions, and make verticals every day. What you don't need to do, you can kick the cow down the road. When you have plenty of money, and it cushions for a lot of mistakes, you don't have that cushion. And hopefully we'll end up with companies with a more agile, more, if you will, resilience, and better cultures in making those tough decisions that startups need to make every day. Which is why I'm super, super excited to see the next batch of amazing unicorns, true unicorns, not just valuation, market rising with the water type unicorns that emerged from this particular era, which we're in the beginning of. And very much enjoy working with entrepreneurs during this difficult time, the times we're in. >> The next 24 months will be the next wave, like you said, best time to do a company. Remember, Airbnb's pitch was, "We'll rent cots in apartments, and sell cereal." Boy, a lot of people passed on that deal, in that last down market, that turned out to be a game-changer. So the crazy ideas might not be that bad. So it's all about the entrepreneurs, and >> 100%. >> this is a big wave, and it's certainly happening. Opher, thank you for sharing. Obviously, data is going to change all the markets. Refactoring, security, FinTech, user experience, applications are going to be changed by data, data operating system. Thanks for coming on, and thanks for sharing. Appreciate it. >> My pleasure. Have a good one. >> Okay, more coverage for the CloudNativeSecurityCon inaugural event. Data will be the key for cybersecurity. theCUBE's coverage continues after this break. (uplifting music)

>>Good Morning Cloud community and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are at AWS Reinvent. It is day four here on the Cube. I'm Savannah Peterson with Lisa Martin. You are looking fantastic. Day four, we've done 45 interviews. How are you feeling? Oh, >>Great. I can't believe it's day four. The cube will be producing over 100 interviews. >>Impressive. Right >>On this stage where there are two sets, and of course we have the set upstairs as well. It's amazing how much content we've created, how many great conversations we've had, right? And the excitement around AWS and the, and the community. >>Yeah. I feel like we've learned so much together. Love co-hosting with you, and so excited for our first conversation this morning with Wira. Welcome, Tim and Kashmira, welcome to the show. How you doing? You both look great for day four. Thank >>You. Yeah, we're doing good. Great. We're doing good. Ready to go. Day four, let's go. >>That's the spirit. That's exactly the energy we need here on the cube. So just in case someone in the audience is not familiar, tell us about Wipro. >>So Wipro is a global consulting company and we help transform our customers and their businesses. >>Transformation's been a super hot topic here at the show, quite frankly a big priority, especially with cost cutting and everything else that's going on. How, how do you do that? How do you help customers do that? Has >>Me run? So we, we, so we have our A strategy, which we call our full stride cloud strategy. So particularly from a cloud perspective here, obviously with aws, we have end to end client services. So from high end strategic consulting through customer journeys, technology implementation, all the way through to our managed services. So we help customers with the end to end journey, particularly as here we're talking about cloud, but also business transformation as well. And we have, you know, a whole host of technologies. So about a few years ago we made an announcement around a billion investment in cloud casual and that Yeah, absolutely. A cool billion and just a cool billion. Yeah. And that pocket >>Change. Exactly. >>Right. And that investment. Over the last few years, we've acquired a number of really exciting companies like Capco, which is a consulting company in the financial services space. We've acquired design companies, a company called Design it, looking at customer journeys and user experience, and then also technology companies called Rising, which looks after the whole SAP space. So we've kind of got the end to end solutions and technologies. And then we also invest in what we call Wipro Ventures. These are really innovative, exciting startups. We invest in those companies to really drive transformation. And the final thing that really brings the whole thing together is that we have decades of experience in engineering. That's kind of the heart of where we come from. So that experience all of that together really helps our clients to transform their business. And particularly as we're talking about cloud helps us to transform the cloud. Now what we are really hoping is that we can help our clients become what we call intelligent enterprises, and we are focusing more and more on customer outcomes and really helping them with those business outcomes. >>Yeah. It doesn't matter what we do if there isn't that business outcome. >>Yeah. That's what it's all about. I'm curious, Tim, to get your, as the America's cloud leader, one of the things that, that our boss, John Furrier, who is the co CEO of the Cube, was able to do every year, he gets to sit down with the head of AWS for a preview of reinvent, right? He's been doing this for 10 years now, and one of the things that Adam Olitsky said to him, this is something about a week or so ago, is CIOs and CEOs are not coming to me to talk about technology. They wanna talk about transformation. Sure, yeah. Business transformation, not an amorphous topic of digital transformation. Are you hearing the same? >>Absolutely. Right. So I think this is my seventh reinvent, right? And I think six, seven years ago, the majority of the conversations you would've had are about technology, right? Great technology, but kind of technology for it to solve it problems. You know, how do I, how do I migrate, how do I modernize, how do I use data? How do I make all this stuff happen? Right now it's about how do I drive new business opportunities, new revenue streams, how do I drive more efficiencies through the manufacturing 2.0 or what have you, right? Yeah. One really good example, like take, take medical devices, right? So like a connected defibrillator, right? Anytime you're building a, what they call an IOT device or a connected device, right? You have four competing an edge device in the space, an edge device, yeah. Right? You have four competing elements, right? >>You've got form factor, power, connectivity and intelligence, and all those things compete, right? I can have all the power if I want, if I can have something as biggest as a tape, right? You know, I can have satellite if I, it gets right off if I can plug it in somewhere. But when you're talking about an implanted defibrillator, right? That, that all competes. So you have an engineering problem, an engineering challenge that's based on a device, right? And then it's gotta connect to the cloud, right? So you have a lot of AWS services, I ot, core device shadowing, all sorts of things. That individual patient then, so, so there's the engineering challenge of, okay, I wanna build a device, I gotta prototype it, I gotta design it, I gotta build it at scale, I have to support it. Then you have a patient, right? Which is the end goal of the business is the patient care. >>They have a console at home that connects to that defibrillator via Bluetooth, let's say. And that's where you get your device updates, just like your laptop, right? You know, now push from where updates to your chest. Yes. Device, ot. It's like, okay, I'm just gonna do this every Thursday, right? So now you've very quickly move to a patient experience and that patient experience will very greatly, right? You know, based on age and exposure to technology and all other sorts of things, how diligent they are. Do they do the update every week Right. To their primary care provider? And then what we're, we're also hearing, okay, so like Kashmira mentioned, we, we can, we can have that design discussion, right? Yeah. We can have the engineering device discussion with our device, device lab. Then we can have our, you know, what's the, what's the patient experience, but then broader, what's the patient experience as they move, as we all do through a healthcare, that's a healthcare network, it's a provider network, it's a series of hospitals and providers. So what does that big picture and ecosystem look like? And it's, you haven't heard me mention server or data center or any of that stuff? No. Right? This is >>The most human anecdote we've had on >>Show. Fantastic. This >>Sidebar. Okay. I mean it great. Keep going. It's wonderful. And it's, and it's, it's fascinating because none of this happens or is possible without cloud and, and the type of services that AWS is, is releasing out into their, into their, into their, into the world, right? But it very quickly moves from technology to human. It very quickly moves from individual to ecosystem to to, to partner and culture and, you know, society, right? So, so these are the types of conversations we're having. I mean, this is kind of stuff that gets me outta bed in the morning. So it's great, right? It's great that, I love that. It's great that we've moved, we moved into that space. >>Well, it's, I mean the human element is so important. Every, every company has to be a data company. Hospitals, absolutely. Grocery stores, retailers, you name it. And what we're seeing is this, and we talk about data democratization all the time. Well, another thing that Adam Slosky told John Furrier is that the role of, of data analysts is gonna, is going to change, maybe go away or the, or the term because data needs to be everywhere. The doctors need the data. Absolutely. Every person in the organization needs to be able to analyze data to deliver outcomes. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's fundamental part of our strategies. And when we are looking at, you know, data is everywhere, you need to really think about how do you align to it. But we are looking at it from an industry perspective. So when we're looking at solutions for our clients, we're looking at how do we deliver data solutions for our bank? How do we deliver data solutions in healthcare? How do we deliver data solutions in various different industry? So >>Many different verticals that you're >>Touching. Yeah, all the different verticals. So that's, you know, we have like a four point strategy industry is the first one. So we have been really worked with a lot of clients around migrations and modernizations. What we're moving to now is really this industry play. So this week we've spent a lot of time with our energy and utilities clients and the AWS practice at banking and financial services, which is a very significant part of our business. Also cloud automotive. This is a really, really, you know, the fascinat, this is so exciting, but the fundamental part of that, it's very, is data, right? It's all hits on data. So it was really great to hear some of the announcements this week around the data piece announcements just for me, that's really exciting. Yeah. A couple of other things that when we're thinking about our overall focus and strategy is, you know, looking at business transformation is, as you mentioned, is the ecosystem. >>So how do we bring all this together? And it's really, we see ourselves as an ecosystem orchestrator, and we are really here to look at leveraging our relationship with the best partners. We've actually met 17 partners here this week and had client sessions with them. And that's, you know, working with the license of Snowflake and Data Break in the, in the data space, our long term partners like sap, ibm, VMware, and you know, and new partners like Con. And we are looking at how do we bring the best of this ecosystem orchestration so that to support those client business outcome. Sure. And then one final sort of pillar, sorry, is talent, right? So the biggest thing that everyone is thinking about and we all think about every single day is talent. So we've done two really exciting things this year. One has been around our own talent. >>So we've really looked at our own internal influences, people who are speaking to our clients every single day. Not so much the technology people, but the client people speaking to the client. And we've really raised the level of cloud fluency with these people so that they can really start to have that discussion. You know, and our clients, you know, they know this technology way better than us, you most of the time. And then secondly, we actually announced last week and, and you initiative, which we are calling skill skills, which is very well known to our AWS clients because AWS provide this skill, skill concept to their clients. But we are the first partner to do the skills. Skills Yeah. From a partnering perspective. And this is really gonna transform. So it's not just about training and enablement, it's actually about creating a journey for you to, you know, do your best work. >>Tim, what, how do you define cloud fluency? We were actually talking about it yesterday. Sure, sure. Yeah. And, and really kind of bringing that across an organization, but what, what does it take for an individual who may not be a technologist to become cloud fluent? >>Sure. Well, there's a couple, there's a couple angles to that, right? One is, one is how do you create cloud fluency for people who might already be technical, right? And that's, and that's, you know, I've spent over a decade with, you know, boutique disruptive consulting companies who live and die by whether they can attract and retain talent. And there's sort of four elements to that. It's, can you, can you show people they're gonna work on interesting stuff, right? Are they gonna be excited about what they do? Can you show that they're gonna expand their skill sets? Yep. Can you show them a career path? And you can, can you surround all of that with a supportive engineering first culture, right? That, you know, rewards for outcomes, but also creates this sort of community, right? Yeah. That's, that's one thing that sort of, you know, that that will be a natural entropy, people will be attracted to that. On the other side of it, as you create fluency, you kind of do it with the conversation that I just had, like around something like medical devices or something like the cloud car. When you just say, look, you start with something everybody already knows, right? We all know what patient care is like. We all know what autonomous vehicles is kind of like, right? And you work backwards from that and say, now here's, here's how all the pieces stitch together to create this end outcome for, for us and for our customers, for >>The, you know, I'm speaking my language, Tim. So I run a boutique consultancy, my talent go, I live and die on that. Quite frankly. It's everything, right? And, and it's so, wow, it's so important. I mean, in eliminating that churn at scale, how big is your team? Now I'm just thinking about this cause I'm sure you're, your talent retention has to be a challenge as well. Sure. >>So, so we have 25,000 woo professionals on aws trained on, you know, tech cloud technologies globally. Impressive. Yeah. And then we have, in terms of our go to market team, we've got 50 strong as well. Well, so we, these are people who are live and breathe aws, right? And speaking and working with the cloud. >>Let's hang out there a little bit. Tell us a little bit more about the partnership with aws. Cast me, >>Let's go to you. Yeah, so our partnership is, you know, it's 11 years strong. It's been an and a really, really great partnership's. >>How longs >>That's true. Yeah. >>No, is you, were, you're, you're like day ones there. That's Yeah. Real legacy it. >>Awesome. You know, this year excitingly, we actually won the APJ partner of dsi, partner of the year. Congratulations. >>Really casual. >>Yeah. Just like >>Married the lead there. Congratulations. >>Yeah. So that really is testament to how we're really knuckling down and working proactively to, to really support our clients. And, you know, the, the partnership is a really, really strong partnership. It's been there for many years with, you know, great solutions and engagement and many of the things I talked about in terms of our industry plays that we're driving. We've got a whole new set of competencies that we've launched, like a new energy competency this year. So we're focusing on industry and then also security, two new security competencies. And you know, what's really exciting on the security side, you saw the announcements around the security data lake, but we've been working over the last few months with Gary, me and his team, and actually are one of the first partners that are driving that initiative. So we're really proud to be part of that. So yeah. You know, and then there's a client engagement as well. So we have a dedicated team at AWS that works with our dedicated team. So we're supporting the client's needs day to day. >>Are you as customer obsessed as AWS is? Absolutely. I >>Figured so. Absolutely. Everything's about the customer. Nothing happens about >>That. Right? Well, you talked about outcomes, it's all about outcomes. >>Well, and I mean, quite literally going for the heart with the defibrillator analogy. No, I mean, you tell the customers at the heart of what you're doing, part of everything. Can't resist a good pun there. So as I warned you, we have a little challenge for you here on the cube. We're looking for your hot take your 32nd sound bite thought leadership. What's the biggest takeaway from the event and moving forward, looking into 2023? Tim, you're giving me that eye contact. I'm going to you first, >>Right? Okay, sure. Love to. So I don't know how hot a take it is, but I kind of see this transition as cloud, as the operating system, right? So, so let's take the, the what we call the cloud car project. We have the connected car. You know, a car is a durable good, and we all know, or there's been a lot of talk about the electric cars or the autonomous vehicles being like more of a computer than a vehicle, right? But a vehicle's supposed to last 10, 15, 20 years. Our laptops don't last 10, 15, 20 years. So there's this cell, there's this major challenge to say, how can I, how can I change the way the technology operates within the vehicle? So you see this transition to where instead of it being a car that, that has a computer, then it, the, the, the latest transition is to more of a computer that, that operates like a car. >>This new vehicle that's going to emerge is gonna be much like a cell phone, right? Where it, it traverses the world and depending on where it is, different things might be available, right? And, and how and how, how the actual technology, the software that is running will, will be, you know, sort of amorphous and move between different resources in the network on the car, everywhere else. And so that's a really different way of thinking about if, if we think about how quickly the Overton window, like what becomes normal, it changes over time. We're really getting to like a very fast movement of that into something like this vehicle's still gonna be something that we don't even maybe think of as a car anymore. Just the way that an iPhone isn't what we used to think of a phone at our >>Pocket computer. Yeah. What's in the mirror part? Great. >>That's kind my >>Take. Awesome. Right? Catch me man. >>Yeah, and I mean I, if I was to suggest that, you know, summarize it by simply, for me it's really focusing on industry solutions, delivering client outcomes, fundamentally underpinned by data security and sustainability. You know, I think Nailed it. >>Yeah. Knock it outta the park. Perfect little sound bite. That was fantastic. You both were a wonderful start to the day. Thank you so much for being here. Tim and Kashmir, absolute >>Pleasure. >>This is, this is a joy. We're gonna keep learning here on the cube. And thank all of you for tuning in to our fabulous AWS reinvent coverage here from Sin City with Lisa Martin. I'm Savannah Peterson and you are watching The Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat electronic music) >> As we've previously reported on theCUBE, Alation was an early pioneer in the data, data governance, and data management space, which is now rapidly evolving with the help of AI and machine learning, and to what's often referred to as data intelligence. Many companies, you know, they didn't make it through the last era of data. They failed to find the right product market fit or scale beyond their close circle of friends, or some ran out of money or got acquired. Alation is a company who did make it through, and has continued to attract investor support, even in a difficult market where tech IPOs have virtually dried up. Back with me on theCUBE is Satyen Sangani, who's the CEO and co-founder of Alation. Satyen, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, Dave. It's always nice to be on theCUBE. >> Hey, so remind our audience why you started Alation 10 years ago, you and your co-founders, and what you're all about today. >> Alation's vision is to empower a curious and rational world, which sounds like a really, I think, presumptuous thing to say. But I think it's something that we really need, right? If you think about how people make decisions, often it's still with bias or ideology, and we think a lot of that happens because people are intimidated by data, or often don't know how to use it, or don't know how to think scientifically. And we, at the core, started Alation because we wanted to demystify data for people. We wanted to help people find the data they needed and allow them to use it and to understand it better. And all of those core consumption values around information were what led us to start the company, because we felt like the world of data could be a little easier to use and manage. >> Your founding premise was correct. I mean, just getting the technology to work was so hard, and as you well know, it takes seven to 10 years to actually start a company and get traction, let alone hit escape velocity. So as I said in the open, you continue to attract new investors. What's the funding news? Please share with us. >> So we're announcing that we raised 123 million from a cohort of investors led by Thoma Bravo, Sanabil Investments, and Costanoa. Databricks Ventures is a participant in that round, along with many of our other existing investors, which would also include Salesforce amongst others. And so, super excited to get the round done in this interesting market. We were able to do that because of the business performance, and it was an up round, and all of that's great and gives our employees and our customers the fuel they need to get the product that they want. >> So why the E Round? Explain that. >> So, we've been accelerating growth over the last five quarters since our Series D. We've basically increased our growth rate to almost double since the time we raised our last round. And from our perspective, the data intelligence market, which is the market that we think we have the opportunity to continue to be the leading platform in, is growing super fast. And when faced with the decision of decelerating growth in the face of what might be, what could be a challenging macroeconomic environment, and accelerating when we're seeing customers increase the size of their commitments, more new customers sign on than ever, our growth rates increasing. We and the board basically chose to take the latter approach and we sort of said, "Look, this is amazing time in this category. This is an amazing time in this company. It's time to invest and it's time to be aggressive when a lot of other folks are fearful, and a lot of other folks aren't seeing the traction that we're seeing in our business. >> Why do you think you're seeing that traction? I mean, we always talk about digital transformation, which was a buzzword before the pandemic, but now it's become a mandate. Is that why? Is it just more data related? Explain that if you could. >> I think there's this potentially, you know, somewhat confusing thing about data. There's a, maybe it's a dirty secret of data, which is there's the sense that if you have a lot of data, and you're using data really well, and you're producing a ton of data, that you might be good at managing it. And the reality of it is that as you have more people using data and as you produce more data, it just becomes more and more confusing because more and more people are trying to access the same information to answer different questions, and more workloads are produced, and more applications are produced. And so the idea of getting more data actually means that it's really hard to manage and it becomes harder to manage at scale. And so, what we're seeing is that with the advent of platforms like AWS, like Snowflake, like Databricks, and certainly with all of the different on-premise applications that are getting born every single day, we're just seeing that data is becoming really much more confusing, but being able to navigate it is so much more important because it's the lifeblood for any business to build differentiation and satisfy their customers. >> Yeah, so last time we talked, we talked about the volume and velocity bromide from the last decade, but we talked about value and how hard it is to get value. So that's really the issue is the need and desire for more organizations to get more value out of that data is actually a stronger tailwind than the headwinds that you're seeing in the macroeconomic environment. >> Right. Because I think in good times you need data in order to be able to capitalize off all the opportunities that you've got, but in bad times you've got to make hard choices. And when you need to make hard choices, how do you do that? Well, you've got to figure out what the right decisions are, and the best way to do that is to have a lot of data and a lot of people who understand that data to be able to capitalize on it and make better insights and better decisions. And so, you don't see that just, by the way, theoretically. In the last quarter, we've seen three companies that have had cost reductions and force reductions where they are increasing at the same time their investment with Alation. And it's because they need the insight in order to be able to navigate these challenging times. >> Well, congratulations on the up round. That's awesome. I got to ask you, what was it like doing a raise in this environment? I mean, sellers are in control in the public markets. Late stage SaaS companies, that had to be challenging. How did you go about this? What were the investor conversations like? >> It certainly was a challenging fundraise. And I would say even though our business is doing way better and we were able to attract evaluation that would put us in the top quartile of public companies were we trading as a public company, which we aspire to do at some point, it was challenging because there was a whole slew of investors who were basically sitting on their hands. I had one investor conversation where an investor said to me, "Look, we think you're a great business, but we have companies that are able to give us 2.5 liquidation preference, and that gives us 70%, 75% of our return day one. So we're just going to go do those companies that may have been previously overvalued, but are willing to give us these terms because they want to keep their face valuation." Other investors said, "Look, we'd really rather that you ran a lower growth plan but with a potentially lower burn plan. But we think the upside is really something that you can capitalize on." From our perspective, we were pretty clear about the plan that we wanted to run and didn't want to necessarily totally accommodate to the fashion of the current market. We've always run a historically efficient business. The company has not burned as much as many of the data peers that we've seen to grow to get to our scale, but our general view was, look, we've got a really clear plan. The board, and the company, and the management team know exactly what we'd like to do. We've got customers that know exactly what they want from us, so we really just have to go execute. And the luck is that we found investors who were willing to do that. Many investors, and we picked one in Thoma Bravo that we felt could be the best partner for the coming phase of the company. >> So I love that because you see the opportunity, you've had a very efficient business. You're punching above your weight in terms of your use of capital. So you don't want to veer off. You know your business better than anybody. You don't want to veer off that plan. The board's very supportive. I could see you, you hear it all the time, we're going to dial down the growth, dial up the EBIT, and that's what markets want today. So congratulations on sticking to your beliefs and your vision. How do you plan to use the funds? >> We are planning to invest in sales and marketing globally. So we've expanded in Asia-Pacific over the most recent year, and also in (indistinct) and we plan to continue to do that. We're going to continue to expand in public sector with fed. And so, you would see us basically just increase our presence globally in all of the markets that you might expect. In particular, you're going to see us lean in heavily to many of the partners Databricks invested alongside this particular round. But you would have seen previously that Snowflake was a fabulous, and has been a fabulous partner of ours, and we are going to continue to invest alongside these leading data platforms. What you would also expect to see from us, though, is a lot of investment in R&D. This is a really nascent category. It's a really, really hard space. People would call it a crowded market because there are a lot of players. I think from our perspective, our aspirations to be the leading data intelligence platform, platform being a really key word there because it's not like we can do it all ourselves. We have a lot of different use cases in data intelligence, things like data quality and data observability, things like data privacy and data access control. And we have some really great partners that we walk alongside in order to make the end customer successful. I think a lot of folks in this market think, "Oh, we can just be master of all. Sort of jack of all trades, master of none." That is not our strategy. Our strategy is to really focus on getting all our customers super successful, really focused on engagement and adoption, because the really hard thing with these platforms is to get people to use them, and that is not a problem Alation has had historically. >> You know, it's really interesting, Satyen, you talk about, I mean, Thoma Bravo, obviously, very savvy investors, deep pockets, they've been making some moves. Certainly we've seen that in cyber security and data. So you got some quasi patient capital there. But the interesting thing to me is that the previous Snowflake investment last year and now Databricks, a lot of people think of them as sort of battling it out, but my view is it's not a zero sum game, meaning, yes, there's overlap, but they're filling a lot of gaps in the marketplace, and I think there's room, there's so much opportunity, and there's such a large tam, that partnering with both is a really, really smart idea. I'll give you the last word. Going forward, what can we expect from Elation? >> Well, I think that's absolutely true, and I think that the biggest boogeyman with all of this is that people don't use data. And so, our ability to partner together is really just a function of making customers successful and continuing to do that. And if we can do that, all companies will grow. We ended up ultimately partnering with Databricks and deepening our partnership, really, 'cause we had one already, primarily because of the fact that we have over a hundred customers that are jointly using the products today. And so, it certainly made sense for us to continue to make that experience better 'cause customers are demanding it. From my perspective, we just have this massive opportunity. We have the ability and the insight to run a really efficient, very, very high growth business at scale. And we have this tremendous ability to get so many more companies and people to use data much more efficiently and much better. Which broadly is, I think, a way in which we can impact the world in a really positive way. And so that's a once in a lifetime opportunity for me and for the team. And we're just going to get after it. >> Well, it's been fun watching Alation over the years. I remember mid last decade talking about this thing called data lakes and how they became data swamps, and you were helping clean that up. And now, the next 10 years, and data's not going to be like the last, you know, simplifying things and and really democratizing data is the big theme. Satyen, thanks for making time to come back on theCUBE, and congratulations on the raise. >> Thank you, Dave. It's always great to see you. >> And thank you for watching this conversation with the CEO in theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (gentle electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. This is season two, episode four of our ongoing series, where we're talking with exciting partners in the AWS ecosystem. This topic on this episode is cybersecurity. Detect and protect against threats. I have two guests here with me today from Hunters. Please welcome Lital Asher-Dotan, the CMO. And Ofer Gayer, the VP of product management. Thank you both so much for joining us today. >> Thank you for having us, Lisa. >> Our pleasure. Lital, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of Hunters. What does it do, when was it founded, what's the vision? All that good stuff. >> So Hunters was founded in 2018. Two co-founders coming out of Unit 8200 in the Israeli Defense Force. The founders and our people in engineering and R&D are mostly coming from both offensive cybersecurity as well as defensive threat hunting, advanced operations, or being able to see and response to advance attack. And with the knowledge that they came with, they wanted to enable security teams in organizations, not just those that are coming from, you know, military background but those that actually need to defend day in and day out against the growing cyber-attacks that are growing in sophistication, in the numbers of attacks. And we all know that every organization nowaday is being targeted, is it ransomware, more sophisticated attacks. So this thing has become a real challenge. And we all know those challenges that the industry is facing with talent scarcity, with lack of the knowledge and expertise needed to address this. So came in with this mindset of we want to bring our expertise into the field, build it into a platform, into a tool that will actually serve security teams in organizations around the world to defend against cyber attacks. So born and raised in Tel Aviv, became a global company. Recently raised a serious CO funding. Funded by the world's greatest VCs, from Stripes, Wild Ventures, supported by Snowflake data breaks and Microsoft M12, also as strategic partners. And we now have broad variety of customers from all industries around the world, from tech to retail to e-commerce to banks that we work closely with. So very exciting times. And we're very excited to share today how we work with AWS customers to support the environments. >> Yeah, we're going to unpack that. So really solid foundation the company was built on, only a few years ago. Lital was there, why a new approach? Was there a compelling event? Obviously, we've seen dramatic changes in the threat landscape in recent years. Ransomware becoming a, when it happens to us, not if. But any sort of compelling event that really led the founders to go, "Ah! This new approach, we got to go this direction." >> Absolutely. We've seen a tremendous shift of organizations from cloud adoption to adoption of more security tools. Both create a scenario which the toolsets that are currently being used by security organizations, the security teams are not efficient anymore. They cannot deal with the plethora of a variety of data. They cannot deal with the scale that is needed. And the security teams are really under a tremendous burden of tweaking tools that they have in their environment without too much of automation, with a lot of manual work processes. So we've seen a lot of points where the current technology is not supporting the people and the processes that need to support security operations. And with that, Ofer, and his product team kind of set a vision of what a new platform should come to replace and enhance what teams are using these days. >> Excellent. Ofer, that's a perfect segue to bring you into the conversation. Talk about that vision and some of those really key challenges and problems that Hunters is solving for organizations across any industry. >> Yeah. So as Lital mentioned, it was very rightful. The problem with the SIM space, that the space that we're disrupting is the well-known secret around is it's a broken space. There's a lot of competitors. There's a lot of vendors out there. It's one of the most mature, presumably mature markets in cybersecurity. But it seems like that every single customer and organization we talk to, they don't really like their existing solution. It doesn't really fit what they need. It's a very painful process and it's painful all across their workflow from the time they ingest the data. Everybody knows if you ever had a SIM solution or a SOC platform, just getting the data into your environment can take the most amount of your time, the lion's share of whatever your engineers are working on will go to getting the data into the system, and then keeping it there. It's this black hole that you have to keep feeding with more and more resources as you go along. It's an endless task with a lot of moving pieces, and it's very very painful before you even get a single moment of value of security use case from your product. That's a big, painful piece. What you then see is, once they set it up, their detection engineering is so far behind the curve because of all the different times of things they need to take care of. It used to be a limited attack surface. We all know the attack surface here today is enormous, especially when you talk about something like AWS, there's new services, new things all the time, more accounts, more things. It keeps moving a lot, and keeping track of that and having someone that can actually look into a new threat when it's released, look into a new attack surface, analyze it, deploying the detections in time, test and tweak, and all those things. Most organizations don't even how to start approaching this problem, and that's a big pain for them. When they finally get to investigating something, there lacks the context and the knowledge of how to investigate. They have very limited information coming to them and they go on this hunting chase of not hunting the attackers but hunting the data, looking for the bits and pieces they're missing to complete the picture. It's like this bad boss that gives you very little instructions or guidelines, and then you need to kind of try to figure out what is it that they asked, right? That's the same thing with trying to do triaging with very minimal context. You look at the IP and then you try to figure out, you look at the Hash, you look at all these different artifacts and you try to figure out yourself. You have very limited insights. And the worst is when you're under the gun, when there's a new emerging threat that happens like a Log4Shell, and now you're under the gun and the entire company's looking at you and saying, "Are we impacted? What's going on? What should we doing?" So from start to finish, it's a very painful process that impacts everybody in the security organization. A lot of cumbersome work with a lot of frustration. >> And it's companies in any industry, Ofer, don't have time. You talked about some of the time involved here in the lag. And there isn't time in the very dynamic threat landscape that customers are living in. Lital, question for you, is your primary target audience existing SIM customers? 'Cause Ofer mentioned the disruption of the SIM market. I'm just wanting to understand in terms of who you're targeting, what does that look like? >> Definitely looking for customers that have a SIM and don't like it, don't find that it helps them improve the security posture. We also have organizations that are young, emerging, have a lot of data, a lot of tech companies that have grown in the last 10, 15 years, or even five years. With Snowflake as a customer, they're booming. They have so much data that going the direction of traditional tools to aggregate the logs, cross-correlate them doesn't make any sense with the scale that they need. They need the cloud-based approach, SaaS approach that is capable of taking care of the environment. So we both cater to those organizations that we're shifting from on-prem to cloud and need visibility into those two environments and into those cloud natives. Born to the cloud don't want to even think of a traditional SIM. >> You mentioned Snowflake. We were just at Snowflake Summit a couple of months ago, I think that was. And tremendous company that massive growth, massive growth in data across the board though. So I'm curious, Ofer, if we go back to you, if we can dig into some of these data challenges. Obviously, data volume and variety, it's only going to continue to grow and proliferate and expand. Data in silos is still a problem. What are some of those main data challenges that Hunters helps customers to just eliminate? >> Definitely. So the data challenge starts with getting the right data in. The fact that you have so many different products across so many different environments and you need to try to get them in some location to try to use them for running your queries, your rules, your correlation. It's a big prompt. There's no unified standard for anyone, even if there was, you would have a lot of legacy things on-premises, as well as your AWS environment. You need to combine all these. You can keep things only on-prem. You can own... Mostly a lot of, most organizations are still in hybrid mode. They have, they're shifting most of their things to AWS. You still have a lot of things on-prem that they're going to shift in the next 3, 4, 5 years. So that hybrid approach is definitely a problem for gathering the data. And when they gather the data, a lot of the times their existing solutions are very cost prohibitive and scale prohibitive from pushing all the data in essential location. So they have these data silos. They'll put some of it there, some of it here, some of that in a different location, hot storage, cold storage, long-term storage. They don't really, they end up not knowing really where the data is especially when they need it the most becomes a huge problem for them. Now with analytics, it's very hard to know upfront what data I'll need not tomorrow, but maybe in three months to look back and query. Making these decisions is very hard. Changing them later is even harder. Keeping track of all these moving pieces. You know, you have a device, you have some vendor sending you some logs, they changed their APIs. Who's in charge of fixing it? Who's in charge of changing your schema? You move from one EDR vendor to the other. How are you making sure that you keep the same level of protection? All these data challenges are very problematic for most customers. The most important thing is to be able to gather as much data as possible, putting it in a centralized location, and having good monitoring in a continuous flow of, I know what data I'm getting in. I know how much I'm using, and I'm making sure that it's working and flowing. It's going to a central place where I can use it at any time that I want. >> We've seen, if I can add- >> So, Lital- >> Sorry. >> Yes, please. >> You wanted to add on that? We've seen too much compromise on data that because of prohibitive costs, structure of tools, or because of inability to manage the scale, teams are compromising or making choices and are paying a price of the latency of being able to then go search if an incident happened, that if you are impacted by something. It all means money and time at the end of the day when you actually need to answer yourself, am I breached or not? We want to break out from this compromise. We think that data is something that should not be compromised. It's a commodity today. Everything should be retained, kept, and used as appropriately without the team needing to ration what they're going to use versus what they're not going to use. >> Correct (faintly speaking). >> That's a great point. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah. And we've seen customers either having entire teams dedicated to just doing this and, or leveraging products and companies that actually build a business around helping you filter the data that you need to put in different data silos, which to me is, shows how much problem, pain, and how much this space is broken with what it provides with customers that you have these makeshift solutions to go around the problem instead of facing it head on and saying, "Okay, let's build something that you're put all your data as much as you want, not have to compromise on security." >> You both bring up such a great point where data and security is concerned. No business can afford to compromise. Usually compromise is a good thing, but in that case, it's really not. Companies can't afford that. We know with the threat landscape, the risk, all of the incentives for bad actors that companies need to ensure that they're doing the right things in a timely manner. Lital, I'm curious, you mentioned the target markets that you're going after. Where were customer conversations? Is this a C-suite conversation from a data security perspective? I would this is more than the CISO. >> It's a CISO conversation, as well as we talk on a daily basis with those that lead security operations, head of SOCs. Those that actually see how the analyst are being overworked, are tired, have so many false positives that they need to deal with, noise day in, day out, becoming enslaved with the tools that they need to work on and tweak. So we have seen that the ones that are most enlightened by a solution like Hunters are actually the ones that have the SOC reporting to them. They know the daily pain and how much the process is broken. And this is probably one of the... We all talk about, you know, job satisfaction or dissatisfaction, the greatest, the great resignation, people are living. This is the real problem in security. And the SOC is one of these places that we see this alert, fatigue, people are struggling. It's a stressful work. And if there is anything that we can do to offload the work that is less appealing and have them work on what they sign up for, which is dealing with real threat, solving them, instead of dealing with false positives. This is where we can actually help. >> Can you add a little bit on that, Lital? And you mentioned the cybersecurity skills gap, which is massive. We talked about that a lot because it's a huge problem. How is Hunters a facilitator of companies that might be experiencing that? >> Absolutely. So we come with approach of, we call it the 80/20 of detection and response. Basically, there are about 80%, probably more, it's actually something like 95% of the threats are shared across all organizations in the world. Also, 80 to 90% of the environments are similar. People are using similar tools. They're on similar cloud services. We think that everything that goes around detection of threats, around those common attacks, scenarios in common attack landscape should come out of the box from the vendor like Hunters. So we automate, we write the rules, we cross-correlate. We provide those services out of the box once you sign in to use our solution. Your data flows in and we basically do the processing and the analysis of all the data, so that your team can actually focus on the 20%, or the 15, or the 5% that are very unique to your organization. If you are developing a specific app and you have the knowledge about the DevSecOps that needs to take place to defend it. Great, have your team focus on that. If you are a specific actor in a specific space and specific threats that are unique to you, you build your own detections into our tool. But the whole idea that we have the knowledge, we see attacks across industries and across industries we have the researchers and the capabilities to be on top of those things, so your team doesn't need to do it on a daily basis because new attacks come almost on a daily basis. Now, we read them in the news, we see them. So we do it, so your team doesn't have to. >> And nobody wants to be that next headline where a breach is concerned. Lital, close this out here with outcomes. I noticed some big stats on your website. I always gravitate towards that. What are some of the key outcomes that Hunters customers are achieving and then specifically AWS customers? >> Absolutely. Well, we already talked a lot about data and being able to ingest it. So we give our customers the predictability, the ability to ingest the data knowing what the cost is going to be in a very simple cost model. So basically you can ingest everything that you have across all IT tools that you have in your environment. And that helped companies reduce up to 75% of the data cost. We've seen with large customer, how much it change when they moved from traditional SIMs to using Hunters. Specifically, AWS customers can actually use the AWS Credits to buy Hunters if they're interested. Just go to AWS Marketplace, search for Hunters and come to a website, you can use your credits for that. I think we talked also about the security burden, the time spent on writing rules plus correlating incidents. We have seen sometimes a change in, instead of investigating an incident for two days, it is being cut for 20 minutes because we give them the exact story of the entire attack. What are the involved assets? What are the users that are involved, that they can just go see what's happening and then immediately go and remediate it. So big shift in meantime to detect meantime to respond. And I'm sure Ofer has a more kind of insights that he's seen with some of our customers around that. >> Yeah. So some great examples recently there. So there's two things that I've been chatting to customers about. One thing they really get a benefit of is we talked about the problem with talent. And where that really matters the most is that under the gun mode, we have a service that is, we see it as the natural progression of the service that we provide called Team Axon. What Team Axon does for you is when you're under the gun, when something like Log4Shell happens and everybody's looking at you, and time is ticking, instead of trying to figure out on yourself, Team Axon will come in, figure out the threat, will devise a report for all the customers, run queries on your behalf on your data, and give it to you within 24 hours. You'll have something to show your CEO or your executive team, your board even, this is where we got impacted or not impacted. This is what we did. Here's the mitigation thing, step that we need to take from world-class experts that you might not get access to for every single attack out there. That really helps customers kind of feel like they're safe. There's someone there to help them. There's a big brother there. I call it sometimes the Bat-Signal when we need it the most. The other thing is on the day-to-day, a lot of solution, we'll kind of talk about out-of-the-box security. Now, the problem with out-of-the-box security is keeping it up to date, that's what a lot of people miss. You have to think that you installed a year ago, but security doesn't stay put, you need to keep updating it. And you need to keep the updated pretty pretty frequently to stay ahead of the curve. If you're behind couple of months on your security updates, you know what happens. Same thing with your SOC platform on your SIM rule base. The reason that customers don't update is because if they usually do, then it might blow up the amount of alerts they're getting 'cause they need to tweak them. With the approach that we take that we tested on our customer's data transparently for them, and make sure to release them without false positives. We're just allowing them to push the updates transparently directly to their account. They don't need to do anything. And one customer, one of our biggest accounts, they have dozens of subsidiaries and multiple SOCs and one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world. And the person running security, he said, "If I had to do what Hunters gives me out of the box myself, I have to hire 20 people and put them to work for 18 months for what you give me out of the box." So for me, it's a very- >> That's huge. >> What we give customers and the kind of challenges that we're able to solve for them. >> Big challenges. Lital and Ofer, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today as part of this AWS Startup Showcase, talking about what Hunters does, why the vision and the value in it for customers. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> For having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching this episode of the AWS Startup Showcase. We'll see you soon. (cheerful music)

(electronic music) (background party chatter) >> All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Cube. Coming up, Bryan Talebi will be here with Ahura A.I? >> Ahura A.I. >> Ahura A.I. Bryan Talebi here with Ahura A.I. We are at The Cube post party networking event, special on the ground, extended coverage. Bryan, we were at The Futurist, not The Futurist Conference, The Future of Blockchain which was the Monaco Crypto Summit over at the Grimaldi Center. Now we're at the VIP gala, the prince is here, a lot of action's happening. You had a chance to look all the presentations we have all the heavy hitters here, kind of a movement going on, right? >> Absolutely. Well, first of all, I think it's absolutely amazing that Prince Albert II put this all together. He obviously understands the future and understands technology. It's absolutely brilliance. And Julio as well, I mean is incredible. So I take off my hat to all the people that put this event together and the speakers were brilliant. I mean, did you see all the speakers the technologies that they've built have the potential to radically transform billions of people's lives. >> It's interesting, you know, I've been covering crypto for a very long time and watched it emerge and then start exploding. And there's always been, and I saw this with the web too early on, legit versus not legit. And all early markets have the hype cycles go down and up, and you always kind of have that but now you're starting to see legitimate tie-in between physical digital assets where, and the confluence of the business value, societal value, government value, all across the spectrum. Every vertical, every use case is got a decentralized vibe going on right now because it's a forcing function. And, and here in Monaco, the price and the king they're leaning into it cause I think they see the future because they could answer their legacy. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And look, you're absolutely right about this because this downturn that we're facing, especially this new crypto winter, I think is the best thing that could possibly have happened to the crypto space because what it's doing is pushing out the let's call them the less than honest brokers within the crypto community, the people that were just in it for a buck, the pump and dumpers and so forth it's really pushing those folks out. And the companies that remain are the true technologists that aren't looking at crypto as just a speculative asset, but rather an underlying technology that can transform the way that we engage with the world in a decentralized way. >> Bryan, you know, we didn't mention in the intro but you also do investment. >> I do. >> You also have a lot of things going on. You got a great history, great pedigree of seeing the waves of innovation the best. That's something, an investment question, like are you in it for the money or are you in it for the make it happen mission? That becomes kind of like the probing question. Someone comes to the table, "Hey, I need some cash. We do funding." What's your exit strategy? "I want to make an exit in two years." Okay. You're out. (Bryan laughs) (John) But it's almost that easy now, right? >> Sure. >> (John) To figure out who's in it for the money. >> Sure. >> (John) Who's in it for the mission. Yeah, the mission's successful. You make a lot of money. >> That's exactly right. Look, one of my mentors once taught me is, money like power is only amassed in great amount if indirectly sought because money by itself is not intrinsically a motivator. And so, what we do at our AB+ Ventures, my venture capital fund, is we only invest, not only in companies that are impact driven and have the capacity to impact a billion people, but we invest in founders that are climbing their third or fourth mountain. So these are people who've already made their money. They either had a couple big exits at over a hundred million dollars or they became rock stars or they became astronauts. They did things where they achieved the highest levels of achievement. And now are building technologies because they believe that they're going to impact the world in a meaningful way. >> They kind of know it's important, right? They made some money, they've been successful. They have scar tissue and experience to apply almost I want to say for the legacy of it, but more for value. >> Yeah. >> For everybody. >> Absolutely. >> All right. So I got to ask about what your current venture, I know you got some good action going on. It's growing pretty good. As they say in golf, it's middle of the fairway. It's growing, got momentum. It's a turbine market. You probably has some offers on the table. I mean, I could imagine all the AI you got going on. Blockchain, very attracted. It's a hard problem, but it's the first inning. Not even. >> Yeah. >> What going on with the company? >> We're very early. Look, we've been building our technologies, the deep tech platform we've been building for four and a half years. There's a whole bunch of offers on the table to buy us. But look, the reality is right now is a fantastic hiring opportunity. There's a lot of amazing talent out there that now wants to come to us, which is great. Number one, number two, if you look back to the 2000 Dot-com bubble, what you saw is all of the companies that didn't really solve real problems went away and it left a more oxygen in the room for the companies that were really solving problems that needed to be solved. And those are now all trillion dollar companies. So, >> Well, Brian, you and I both got a little gray hair. So let's talk about the Dot-com bubble. The other thing, I'll add to that, by the way great commentary, is that everything that was like bullshit actually happened. People bought pet food online, >> Right. >> Groceries delivered to their house. So to your point, the things actually happen. See the visions and the aspirations were correct, timing and capital markets spree. >> Sure. >> Is there similarities going on in crypto? Is it the crypto winter, weeding out those pretenders? Is that what you're saying? >> Well, there's definitely a lot of similarities there but if you look at the example that you use, right, pets.com versus Amazon, people are still buying pet food online. I buy all my pet supplies for my two puppies online. However, if you look at the reason that Amazon works is because of their supply chain and the innovations that they created on being able to deliver anything to you within a day or two days in an extremely cost effective manner. It wasn't just because they had a website and they did some hand wavy stuff to say isn't this a good idea. You actually have to have the underlying operational capability and innovation from a technology standpoint to make it happen. And so, when we talk about crypto over the past number of years, and I've been in the crypto space for a long time, as you have there's been a lot of hand wavy stuff. There's been a lot of people like, "wouldn't this be a good idea?" but then you have the true operators that are able to find the underlying competitive advantages that actually make it work. And that's what I'm interested in. >> I'd love to get your thoughts on that. First of all, great point if you look at like, I was just commentating earlier I was asked the question what I think, and I said, well, I do a lot of lot of reporting and analysis on cloud computing. I watch what Amazon Web Service has done from many, many years ago. And all the followers now. Scale data, higher level services, they're all happening and it's creating a lot of value. Okay? That's going to come to crypto. And so, okay, the dots aren't connected there yet, but you've got this, but one of the things that has proven to be a success criteria, ecosystems. When you have enabling technology like DigitalBits, for instance, is kind the main powering of this ecosystem here, the value that's being created on top of it has to be a step function or multiple of the cost or operational cost to deploy the platform. Okay, so that's kind of in concert with everyone else. You product decentralized, what's your thoughts on that? Because now you have a lot of potential ecosystems that could connect together cause there's no one centralized ecosystem. >> (Bryan) Absolutely. >> But what is, what, how do you get that? How do you square that circle? So to speak. What's your take on that? How does ecosystems play into defi, decentralization, de-apps blockchain? >> So what you really talking about is interoperable, right? So again, if we use an analogy, if we look back to the late nineties, when Web 1.0 was really flourishing and then in the 2000s where everybody created their own websites, people went to the world wide web, but every company had their own website. They had their own social media platform. They had their entire Salesforce platform or what have you. So everyone had their entire separate organization. And so, I suspect that the future of crypto is going to be very similar, where there's going to be a bunch of different metaverses, a bunch of different ecosystems, but someone's going to come along, and I think there's a number of people on the back end that are actually working on this, Some of them are really brilliant, that are going to create an interoperable mechanism for people that jump from metaverse to metaverse from chain to chain in a completely easy experience from a user experience standpoint where you don't have to have a PhD in crypto, so to speak, that doesn't exist, but you don't have to have that level. >> Well, if you're working on crypto for the past five years you've got a PhD. >> Basically. >> The thesis is, you're still alive producing. (Brian laughs) Well, that's a good point. So I'm looking for like, this defacto enabler, right? Because TCP/IP was an example in the old days, you know, the levels of the stack that never, TCP/IP is part of the OSI model. It's just interconnect. That layer, nothing got above it, was open. It was just hard and top that TCP/IP the rest was all standard. Ethernet, token ring add that data layer and then cards. That worked, the industry could galvanize around that. I'm waiting for the crypto moment now, where, what is going to be that cloud (indistinct), Kubernetes and service matches and whatnot. What, is there anything on the horizon that you see that has that kind of coalescent ecosystem, let's get, if we all get behind this, we all win. Rather than chasing crumbs. >> Sure. >> You know, the bigger pie, rising tide, all that stuff. >> Well, so I think there's a really interesting analogy from a couple of hundred years ago on this. So most people don't realize that when the United States first had their railroad system which was the innovative infrastructure play at the time each state or each region had their own systems they had different size railroad. So what would happen if you were trying to ship a bunch of grain from one part of the country to the other you would take it by a train. You get to a train station, you'd have to take everything off, put it on a different train, on a different set of train tracks. You would go a couple states over. You'd have to do that again, go a couple states over. You have to do that again. Eventually what happened is the federal government came in and said, hey, we need to create a system of policies around one set of rules for all trains and all logistics across the country. And so, I do think there's a role for governments to come together, along with the operators and the companies to work collaboratively together to say, hey, what are the regulations? What are the rules of the road? How do we make sure we get all the scam artists out of the system? How do we create a system that actually works for everybody? Now, there's always dangers there, right? You have regulatory capture. Sometimes the government, oftentimes they're slow, they don't understand the technology. So they come down with a heavy hand. And so if it's done properly, and it's not just the United States alone, by the way, it's all the countries in the world. Now at this point, it's a global effort. >> There's money involved, too. >> Exactly. But if we are able to bring together people that are much smarter than me from the public and private sectors as well as the nonprofit sectors, together to come up with one set of rules I think that will enable crypto to massively expand across the entire globe. >> What are you passionate about right now? I know you got the investment fund for, you know, helping society and the planet, you get your project with your startup company, AI is in a hot area. What's going on? What's your top goals for the year? >> So there's two things. Number one, my company, Ahura A.I. is my baby. It's where I spend 70, 80 hours a week. We invent a technology that enables people to learn three to five times faster than traditional education. >> (John) Is that so? >> Because I believe that education is the first step. It's the first variable, that impacts all of the sustainable development goals, impacts the world in a very real way. >> And you're not wearing your UA pin. >> I'm not wearing my pin, I always point to it. >> I wanted to grab it, I saw it earlier. >> But then the second thing I'm super focused on is existential risk. Look, so I throw a lot of events where I bring together four categories of people, CEOs of impact driven companies, investors, whether they're VCs or billionaires or family offices, global experts, and celebrities that want to use their influence for good in the world. And one of the speakers that I had at one of my events is a guy at Stanford who runs their lab on existential risk and what he told the group, and what he told me, is according to Stanford and all the researchers, there's a one in six chance that we're all going to go extinct by 2050. One in six, that's a dice roll. And so to me, the most important thing I can do is bring people together that have capacity, have resources, have capabilities, to address these drivers of existential risk because selfishly, I don't want to live in a dystopian Hellscape. >> Exactly, yeah. Bryan, thanks for coming on. We're going to get back into dinner. Great to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> The Cube after dark, extended hours. Look at us, we're going the whole day. VIP gala, Prince Albert, the team, DigitalBits, The Cube, all here at the Yacht Club in Monaco. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

(gentle upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone, to "theCUBE"'s live stage performance here in Palo Alto, California at "theCUBE" Studios. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, kicking off our first inaugural Supercloud event. It's an editorial event, we wanted to bring together the best in the business, the smartest, the biggest, the up-and-coming startups, venture capitalists, everybody, to weigh in on this new Supercloud trend, this structural change in the cloud computing business. We're about to run the Ecosystem Speaks, which is a bunch of pre-recorded companies that wanted to get their voices on the record, so stay tuned for the rest of the day. We'll be replaying all that content and they're going to be having some really good commentary and hear what they have to say. I had a chance to interview and so did Dave. Dave, this is our closing segment where we kind of unpack everything or kind of digest and report. So much to kind of digest from the conversations today, a wide range of commentary from Supercloud operating system to developers who are in charge to maybe it's an ops problem or maybe Oracle's a Supercloud. I mean, that was debated. So so much discussion, lot to unpack. What was your favorite moments? >> Well, before I get to that, I think, I go back to something that happened at re:Invent last year. Nick Sturiale came up, Steve Mullaney from Aviatrix; we're going to hear from him shortly in the Ecosystem Speaks. Nick Sturiale's VC said "it's happening"! And what he was talking about is this ecosystem is exploding. They're building infrastructure or capabilities on top of the CapEx infrastructure. So, I think it is happening. I think we confirmed today that Supercloud is a thing. It's a very immature thing. And I think the other thing, John is that, it seems to me that the further you go up the stack, the weaker the business case gets for doing Supercloud. We heard from Marianna Tessel, it's like, "Eh, you know, we can- it was easier to just do it all on one cloud." This is a point that, Adrian Cockcroft just made on the panel and so I think that when you break out the pieces of the stack, I think very clearly the infrastructure layer, what we heard from Confluent and HashiCorp, and certainly VMware, there's a real problem there. There's a real need at the infrastructure layer and then even at the data layer, I think Benoit Dageville did a great job of- You know, I was peppering him with all my questions, which I basically was going through, the Supercloud definition and they ticked the box on pretty much every one of 'em as did, by the way Ali Ghodsi you know, the big difference there is the philosophy of Republicans and Democrats- got open versus closed, not to apply that to either one side, but you know what I mean! >> And the similarities are probably greater than differences. >> Berkely, I would probably put them on the- >> Yeah, we'll put them on the Democrat side we'll make Snowflake the Republicans. But so- but as we say there's a lot of similarities as well in terms of what their objectives are. So, I mean, I thought it was a great program and a really good start to, you know, an industry- You brought up the point about the industry consortium, asked Kit Colbert- >> Yep. >> If he thought that was something that was viable and what'd they say? That hyperscale should lead it? >> Yeah, they said hyperscale should lead it and there also should be an industry consortium to get the voices out there. And I think VMware is very humble in how they're putting out their white paper because I think they know that they can't do it all and that they do not have a great track record relative to cloud. And I think, but they have a great track record of loyal installed base ops people using VMware vSphere all the time. >> Yeah. >> So I think they need a catapult moment where they can catapult to the cloud native which they've been working on for years under Raghu and the team. So the question on VMware is in the light of Broadcom, okay, acquisition of VMware, this is an opportunity or it might not be an opportunity or it might be a spin-out or something, I just think VMware's got way too much engineering culture to be ignored, Dave. And I think- well, I'm going to watch this very closely because they can pull off some sort of rallying moment. I think they could. And then you hear the upstarts like Platform9, Rafay Systems and others they're all like, "Yes, we need to unify behind something. There needs to be some sort of standard". You know, we heard the argument of you know, more standards bodies type thing. So, it's interesting, maybe "theCUBE" could be that but we're going to certainly keep the conversation going. >> I thought one of the most memorable statements was Vittorio who said we- for VMware, we want our cake, we want to eat it too and we want to lose weight. So they have a lot of that aspirations there! (John laughs) >> And then I thought, Adrian Cockcroft said you know, the devs, they want to get married. They were marrying everybody, and then the ops team, they have to deal with the divorce. >> Yeah. >> And I thought that was poignant. It's like, they want consistency, they want standards, they got to be able to scale And Lori MacVittie, I'm not sure you agree with this, I'd have to think about it, but she was basically saying, all we've talked about is devs devs devs for the last 10 years, going forward we're going to be talking about ops. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things I learned from this day and looking back, and some kind of- I've been sauteing through all the interviews. If you zoom out, for me it was the epiphany of developers are still in charge. And I've said, you know, the developers are doing great, it's an ops security thing. Not sure I see that the way I was seeing before. I think what I learned was the refactoring pattern that's emerging, In Sik Rhee brought this up from Vertex Ventures with Marianna Tessel, it's a nuanced point but I think he's right on which is the pattern that's emerging is developers want ease-of-use tooling, they're driving the change and I think the developers in the devs ops ethos- it's never going to be separate. It's going to be DevOps. That means developers are driving operations and then security. So what I learned was it's not ops teams leveling up, it's devs redefining what ops is. >> Mm. And I think that to me is where Supercloud's going to be interesting- >> Forcing that. >> Yeah. >> Forcing the change because the structural change is open sources thriving, devs are still in charge and they still want more developers, Vittorio "we need more developers", right? So the developers are in charge and that's clear. Now, if that happens- if you believe that to be true the domino effect of that is going to be amazing because then everyone who gets on the wrong side of history, on the ops and security side, is going to be fighting a trend that may not be fight-able, you know, it might be inevitable. And so the winners are the ones that are refactoring their business like Snowflake. Snowflake is a data warehouse that had nothing to do with Amazon at first. It was the developers who said "I'm going to refactor data warehouse on AWS". That is a developer-driven refactorization and a business model. So I think that's the pattern I'm seeing is that this concept refactoring, patterns and the developer trajectory is critical. >> I thought there was another great comment. Maribel Lopez, her Lord of the Rings comment: "there will be no one ring to rule them all". Now at the same time, Kit Colbert, you know what we asked him straight out, "are you the- do you want to be the, the Supercloud OS?" and he basically said, "yeah, we do". Now, of course they're confined to their world, which is a pretty substantial world. I think, John, the reason why Maribel is so correct is security. I think security's a really hard problem to solve. You've got cloud as the first layer of defense and now you've got multiple clouds, multiple layers of defense, multiple shared responsibility models. You've got different tools for XDR, for identity, for governance, for privacy all within those different clouds. I mean, that really is a confusing picture. And I think the hardest- one of the hardest parts of Supercloud to solve. >> Yeah, and I thought the security founder Gee Rittenhouse, Piyush Sharrma from Accurics, which sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, former head of product at VMware. >> Right. >> Who's now an investor kind of looking for his next gig or what he is going to do next. He's obviously been extremely successful. They brought up the, the OS factor. Another point that they made I thought was interesting is that a lot of the things to do to solve the complexity is not doable. >> Yeah. >> It's too much work. So managed services might field the bit. So, and Chris Hoff mentioned on the Clouderati segment that the higher level services being a managed service and differentiating around the service could be the key competitive advantage for whoever does it. >> I think the other thing is Chris Hoff said "yeah, well, Web 3, metaverse, you know, DAO, Superclouds" you know, "Stupercloud" he called it and this bring up- It resonates because one of the criticisms that Charles Fitzgerald laid on us was, well, it doesn't help to throw out another term. I actually think it does help. And I think the reason it does help is because it's getting people to think. When you ask people about Supercloud, they automatically- it resonates with them. They play back what they think is the future of cloud. So Supercloud really talks to the future of cloud. There's a lot of aspects to it that need to be further defined, further thought out and we're getting to the point now where we- we can start- begin to say, okay that is Supercloud or that isn't Supercloud. >> I think that's really right on. I think Supercloud at the end of the day, for me from the simplest way to describe it is making sure that the developer experience is so good that the operations just happen. And Marianna Tessel said, she's investing in making their developer experience high velocity, very easy. So if you do that, you have to run on premise and on the cloud. So hybrid really is where Supercloud is going right now. It's not multi-cloud. Multi-cloud was- that was debunked on this session today. I thought that was clear. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think- >> It's not about multi-cloud. It's about operationally seamless operations across environments, public cloud to on-premise, basically. >> I think we got consensus across the board that multi-cloud, you know, is a symptom Chuck Whitten's thing of multi-cloud by default versus multi- multi-cloud has not been a strategy, Kit Colbert said, up until the last couple of years. Yeah, because people said, "oh we got all these multiple clouds, what do we do with it?" and we got this mess that we have to solve. Whereas, I think Supercloud is something that is a strategy and then the other nuance that I keep bringing up is it's industries that are- as part of their digital transformation, are building clouds. Now, whether or not they become superclouds, I'm not convinced. I mean, what Goldman Sachs is doing, you know, with AWS, what Walmart's doing with Azure connecting their on-prem tools to those public clouds, you know, is that a supercloud? I mean, we're going to have to go back and really look at that definition. Or is it just kind of a SAS that spans on-prem and cloud. So, as I said, the further you go up the stack, the business case seems to wane a little bit but there's no question in my mind that from an infrastructure standpoint, to your point about operations, there's a real requirement for super- what we call Supercloud. >> Well, we're going to keep the conversation going, Dave. I want to put a shout out to our founding supporters of this initiative. Again, we put this together really fast kind of like a pilot series, an inaugural event. We want to have a face-to-face event as an industry event. Want to thank the founding supporters. These are the people who donated their time, their resource to contribute content, ideas and some cash, not everyone has committed some financial contribution but we want to recognize the names here. VMware, Intuit, Red Hat, Snowflake, Aisera, Alteryx, Confluent, Couchbase, Nutanix, Rafay Systems, Skyhigh Security, Aviatrix, Zscaler, Platform9, HashiCorp, F5 and all the media partners. Without their support, this wouldn't have happened. And there are more people that wanted to weigh in. There was more demand than we could pull off. We'll certainly continue the Supercloud conversation series here on "theCUBE" and we'll add more people in. And now, after this session, the Ecosystem Speaks session, we're going to run all the videos of the big name companies. We have the Nutanix CEOs weighing in, Aviatrix to name a few. >> Yeah. Let me, let me chime in, I mean you got Couchbase talking about Edge, Platform 9's going to be on, you know, everybody, you know Insig was poopoo-ing Oracle, but you know, Oracle and Azure, what they did, two technical guys, developers are coming on, we dig into what they did. Howie Xu from Zscaler, Paula Hansen is going to talk about going to market in the multi-cloud world. You mentioned Rajiv, the CEO of Nutanix, Ramesh is going to talk about multi-cloud infrastructure. So that's going to run now for, you know, quite some time here and some of the pre-record so super excited about that and I just want to thank the crew. I hope guys, I hope you have a list of credits there's too many of you to mention, but you know, awesome jobs really appreciate the work that you did in a very short amount of time. >> Well, I'm excited. I learned a lot and my takeaway was that Supercloud's a thing, there's a kind of sense that people want to talk about it and have real conversations, not BS or FUD. They want to have real substantive conversations and we're going to enable that on "theCUBE". Dave, final thoughts for you. >> Well, I mean, as I say, we put this together very quickly. It was really a phenomenal, you know, enlightening experience. I think it confirmed a lot of the concepts and the premises that we've put forth, that David Floyer helped evolve, that a lot of these analysts have helped evolve, that even Charles Fitzgerald with his antagonism helped to really sharpen our knives. So, you know, thank you Charles. And- >> I like his blog, by the I'm a reader- >> Yeah, absolutely. And it was great to be back in Palo Alto. It was my first time back since pre-COVID, so, you know, great job. >> All right. I want to thank all the crew and everyone. Thanks for watching this first, inaugural Supercloud event. We are definitely going to be doing more of these. So stay tuned, maybe face-to-face in person. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante now for the Ecosystem chiming in, and they're going to speak and share their thoughts here with "theCUBE" our first live stage performance event in our studio. Thanks for watching. (gentle upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone in live coverage here at theCUBE, Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS re:inforce 22 security conference for Amazon Web Services. Obviously reinvent the end of the years' the big celebration, "re:Mars" is the new show that we've covered as well. The res are here with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host with a great guest, Ameesh Divatia, co-founder, and CEO of a company called "Baffle." Ameesh, thanks for joining us on theCUBE today, congratulations. >> Thank you. It's good to be here. >> And we got the custom encrypted socks. >> Yup, limited edition >> 64 bitter 128. >> Base 64 encoding. >> Okay.(chuckles) >> Secret message in there. >> Okay.(chuckles) Secret message.(chuckles) We'll have to put a little meme on the internet, figure it out. Well, thanks for comin' on. You guys are goin' hot right now. You guys a hot startup, but you're in an area that's going to explode, we believe. >> Yeah. >> The SuperCloud is here, we've been covering that on theCUBE that people are building on top of the Amazon Hyperscalers. And without the capex, they're building platforms. The application tsunami has come and still coming, it's not stopping. Modern applications are faster, they're better, and they're driving a lot of change under the covers. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> And you're seeing structural change happening in real time, in ops, the network. You guys got something going on in the encryption area. >> Yes >> Data. Talk about what you guys do. >> Yeah. So we believe very strongly that the next frontier in security is data. We've had multiple waves in security. The next one is data, because data is really where the threats will persist. If the data shows up in the wrong place, you get into a lot of trouble with compliance. So we believe in protecting the data all the way down at the field, or record level. That's what we do. >> And you guys doing all kinds of encryption, or other things? >> Yes. So we do data transformation, which encompasses three different things. It can be tokenization, which is format preserving. We do real encryption with counter mode, or we can do masked views. So tokenization, encryption, and masking, all with the same platform. >> So pretty wide ranging capabilities with respect to having that kind of safety. >> Yes. Because it all depends on how the data is used down the road. Data is created all the time. Data flows through pipelines all the time. You want to make sure that you protect the data, but don't lose the utility of the data. That's where we provide all that flexibility. >> So Kurt was on stage today on one of the keynotes. He's the VP of the platform at AWS. >> Yes. >> He was talking about encrypts, everything. He said it needs, we need to rethink encryption. Okay, okay, good job. We like that. But then he said, "We have encryption at rest." >> Yes. >> That's kind of been there, done that. >> Yes. >> And, in-flight? >> Yeah. That's been there. >> But what about in-use? >> So that's exactly what we plug. What happens right now is that data at rest is protected because of discs that are already self-encrypting, or you have transparent data encryption that comes native with the database. You have data in-flight that is protected because of SSL. But when the data is actually being processed, it's in the memory of the database or datastore, it is exposed. So the threat is, if the credentials of the database are compromised, as happened back then with Starwood, or if the cloud infrastructure is compromised with some sort of an insider threat like a Capital One, that data is exposed. That's precisely what we solve by making sure that the data is protected as soon as it's created. We use standard encryption algorithms, AES, and we either do format preserving, or true encryption with counter mode. And that data, it doesn't really matter where it ends up, >> Yeah. >> because it's always protected. >> Well, that's awesome. And I think this brings up the point that we want been covering on SiliconAngle in theCUBE, is that there's been structural change that's happened, >> Yes. >> called cloud computing, >> Yes. >> and then hybrid. Okay. Scale, role of data, higher level abstraction of services, developers are in charge, value creations, startups, and big companies. That success is causing now, a new structural change happening now. >> Yes. >> This is one of them. What areas do you see that are happening right now that are structurally changing, that's right in front of us? One is, more cloud native. So the success has become now the problem to solve - >> Yes. >> to get to the next level. >> Yeah. >> What are those, some of those? >> What we see is that instead of security being an afterthought, something that you use as a watchdog, you create ways of monitoring where data is being exposed, or data is being exfiltrated, you want to build security into the data pipeline itself. As soon as data is created, you identify what is sensitive data, and you encrypt it, or tokenize it as it flows into the pipeline using things like Kafka plugins, or what we are very clearly differentiating ourselves with is, proxy architectures so that it's completely transparent. You think you're writing to the datastore, but you're actually writing to the proxy, which in turn encrypts the data before its stored. >> Do you think that's an efficient way to do it, or is the only way to do it? >> It is a much more efficient way of doing it because of the fact that you don't need any app-dev resources. There are many other ways of doing it. In fact, the cloud vendors provide development kits where you can just go do it yourself. So that is actually something that we completely avoid. And what makes it really, really interesting is that once the data is encrypted in the data store, or database, we can do what is known as "Privacy Enhanced Computation." >> Mm. >> So we can actually process that data without decrypting it. >> Yeah. And so proxies then, with cloud computing, can be very fast, not a bottleneck that could be. >> In fact, the cloud makes it so. It's very hard to - >> You believe that? >> do these things in static infrastructure. In the cloud, there's infinite amount of processing available, and there's containerization. >> And you have good network. >> You have very good network, you have load balancers, you have ways of creating redundancy. >> Mm. So the cloud is actually enabling solutions like this. >> And the old way, proxies were seen as an architectural fail, in the old antiquated static web. >> And this is where startups don't have the baggage, right? We didn't have that baggage. (John laughs) We looked at the problem and said, of course we're going to use a proxy because this is the best way to do this in an efficient way. >> Well, you bring up something that's happening right now that I hear a lot of CSOs and CIOs and executives say, CXOs say all the time, "Our", I won't say the word, "Our stuff has gotten complicated." >> Yes. >> So now I have tool sprawl, >> Yeah. >> I have skill gaps, and on the rise, all these new managed services coming at me from the vendors who have never experienced my problem. And their reaction is, they don't get my problem, and they don't have the right solutions, it's more complexity. They solve the complexity by adding more complexity. >> Yes. I think we, again, the proxy approach is a very simple. >> That you're solving that with that approach. >> Exactly. It's very simple. And again, we don't get in the way. That's really the the biggest differentiator. The forcing function really here is compliance, right? Because compliance is forcing these CSOs to actually adopt these solutions. >> All right, so love the compliance angle, love the proxy as an ease of use, take the heavy lifting away, no operational problems, and deviations. Now let's talk about workloads. >> Yeah. >> 'Cause this is where the use is. So you got, or workloads being run large scale, lot a data moving around, computin' as well. What's the challenge there? >> I think it's the volume of the data. Traditional solutions that we're relying on legacy tokenizations, I think would replicate the entire storage because it would create a token wall, for example. You cannot do that at this scale. You have to do something that's a lot more efficient, which is where you have to do it with a cryptography approach. So the workloads are diverse, lots of large files in the workloads as well as structured workloads. What we have is a solution that actually goes across the board. We can do unstructured data with HTTP proxies, we can do structured data with SQL proxies. And that's how we are able to provide a complete solution for the pipeline. >> So, I mean, show about the on-premise versus the cloud workload dynamic right now. Hybrid is a steady state right now. >> Yeah. >> Multi-cloud is a consequence of having multiple vendors, not true multi-cloud but like, okay, they have Azure there, AWS here, I get that. But hybrid really is the steady state. >> Yes. >> Cloud operations. How are the workloads and the analytics the data being managed on-prem, and in the cloud, what's their relationship? What's the trend? What are you seeing happening there? >> I think the biggest trend we see is pipelining, right? The new ETL is streaming. You have these Kafka and Kinesis capabilities that are coming into the picture where data is being ingested all the time. It is not a one time migration. It's a stream. >> Yeah. >> So plugging into that stream is very important from an ingestion perspective. >> So it's not just a watchdog. >> No. >> It's the pipelining. >> It's built in. It's built-in, it's real time, that's where the streaming gets another diverse access to data. >> Exactly. >> Data lakes. You got data lakes, you have pipeline, you got streaming, you mentioned that. So talk about the old school OLTP, the old BI world. I think Power BI's like a $30 billion product. >> Yeah. >> And you got Tableau built on OLTP building cubes. Aren't we just building cubes in a new way, or, >> Well. >> is there any relevance to the old school? >> I think there, there is some relevance and in fact that's again, another place where the proxy architecture really helps, because it doesn't matter when your application was built. You can use Tableau, which nobody has any control over, and still process encrypted data. And so can with Power BI, any Sequel application can be used. And that's actually exactly what we like to. >> So we were, I was talking to your team, I knew you were coming on, and they gave me a sound bite that I'm going to read to the audience and I want to get your reaction to. >> Sure. >> 'Cause I love this. I fell out of my chair when I first read this. "Data is the new oil." In 2010 that was mentioned here on theCUBE, of course. "Data is the new oil, but we have to ensure that it does not become the next asbestos." Okay. That is really clever. So we all know about asbestos. I add to the Dave Vellante, "Lead paint too." Remember lead paint? (Ameesh laughs) You got to scrape it out and repaint the house. Asbestos obviously causes a lot of cancer. You know, joking aside, the point is, it's problematic. >> It's the asset. >> Explain why that sentence is relevant. >> Sure. It's the assets and liabilities argument, right? You have an asset which is data, but thanks to compliance regulations and Gartner says 75% of the world will be subject to privacy regulations by 2023. It's a liability. So if you don't store your data well, if you don't process your data responsibly, you are going to be liable. So while it might be the oil and you're going to get lots of value out of it, be careful about the, the flip side. >> And the point is, there could be the "Grim Reaper" waiting for you if you don't do it right, the consequences that are quantified would be being out of business. >> Yes. But here's something that we just discovered actually from our survey that we did. While 93% of respondents said that they have had lots of compliance related effects on their budgets. 75% actually thought that it makes them better. They can use the security postures as a competitive differentiator. That's very heartening to us. We don't like to sell the fear aspect of this. >> Yeah. We like to sell the fact that you look better compared to your neighbor, if you have better data hygiene, back to the. >> There's the fear of missing out, or as they say, "Keeping up with the Joneses", making sure that your yard looks better than the next one. I get the vanity of that, but you're solving real problems. And this is interesting. And I want to get your thoughts on this. I found, I read that you guys protect more than a 100 billion records across highly regulated industries. Financial services, healthcare, industrial IOT, retail, and government. Is that true? >> Absolutely. Because what we are doing is enabling SaaS vendors to actually allow their customers to control their data. So we've had the SaaS vendor who has been working with us for over three years now. They store confidential data from 30 different banks in the country. >> That's a lot of records. >> That's where the record, and. >> How many customers do you have? >> Well, I think. >> The next round of funding's (Ameesh laughs) probably they're linin' up to put money into you guys. >> Well, again, this is a very important problem, and there are, people's businesses are dependent on this. We're just happy to provide the best tool out there that can do this. >> Okay, so what's your business model behind? I love the success, by the way, I wanted to quote that stat to one verify it. What's the business model service, software? >> The business model is software. We don't want anybody to send us their confidential data. We embed our software into our customers environments. In case of SaaS, we are not even visible, we are completely embedded. We are doing other relationships like that right now. >> And they pay you how? >> They pay us based on the volume of the data that they're protecting. >> Got it. >> That in that case which is a large customers, large enterprise customers. >> Pay as you go. >> It is pay as you go, everything is annual licenses. Although, multi-year licenses are very common because once you adopt the solution, it is very sticky. And then for smaller customers, we do base our pricing also just on databases. >> Got it. >> The number of databases. >> And the technology just reviewed low-code, no-code implementation kind of thing, right? >> It is by definition, no code when it comes to proxy. >> Yeah. >> When it comes to API integration, it could be low code. Yeah, it's all cloud-friendly, cloud-native. >> No disruption to operations. >> Exactly. >> That's the culprit. >> Well, yeah. >> Well somethin' like non-disruptive operations.(laughs) >> No, actually I'll give an example of a migration, right? We can do live migrations. So while the databases are still alive, as you write your. >> Live secure migrations. >> Exactly. You're securing - >> That's the one that manifests. >> your data as it migrates. >> Awright, so how much funding have you guys raised so far? >> We raised 36 and a half, series A, and B now. We raised that late last year. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Who's the venture funders? >> True Ventures is our largest investor, followed by Celesta Capital, National Grid Partners is an investor, and so is Engineering Capital and Clear Vision Ventures. >> And the seed and it was from Engineering? >> Seed was from Engineering. >> Engineering Capital. >> And then True came in very early on. >> Okay. >> Greenspring is also an investor in us, so is Industrial Ventures. >> Well, privacy has a big concern, big application for you guys. Privacy, secure migrations. >> Very much so. So what we are believe very strongly in the security's personal, security is yours and my data. Privacy is what the data collector is responsible for. (John laughs) So the enterprise better be making sure that they've complied with privacy regulations because they don't tell you how to protect the data. They just fine you. >> Well, you're not, you're technically long, six year old start company. Six, seven years old. >> Yeah. >> Roughly. So yeah, startups can go on long like this, still startup, privately held, you're growing, got big records under management there, congratulations. What's next? >> I think scaling the business. We are seeing lots of applications for this particular solution. It's going beyond just regulated industries. Like I said, it's a differentiating factor now. >> Yeah >> So retail, and a lot of other IOT related industrial customers - >> Yeah. >> are also coming. >> Ameesh, talk about the show here. We're at re:inforce, actually we're live here on the ground, the show floor buzzing. What's your takeaway? What's the vibe this year? What if you had to share what your opinion the top story here at the show, what would be the two top things, or three things? >> I think it's two things. First of all, it feels like we are back. (both laugh) It's amazing to see people on the show floor. >> Yeah. >> People coming in and asking questions and getting to see the product. The second thing that I think is very gratifying is, people come in and say, "Oh, I've heard of you guys." So thanks to digital media, and digital marketing. >> They weren't baffled. They want baffled. >> Exactly. >> They use baffled. >> Looks like, our outreach has helped, >> Yeah. >> and has kept the continuity, which is a big deal. >> Yeah, and now you're a CUBE alumni, welcome to the fold. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate you coming on. And we're looking forward to profiling you some day in our startup showcase, and certainly, we'll see you in the Palo Alto studios. Love to have you come in for a deeper dive. >> Sounds great. Looking forward to it. >> Congratulations on all your success, and thanks for coming on theCUBE, here at re:inforce. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay, we're here in, on the ground live coverage, Boston, Massachusetts for AWS re:inforce 22. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, who's in an analyst session, right? He'll be right back with us on the next interview, coming up shortly. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Thanks. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of snowflakes. Summit 22 live from Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here. I have three guests here with me. We're gonna be talking about Snowflake Ventures and the snowflakes start up Challenge. That's in its second year. I've got Harry Glaser with me. Co founder and CEO of Model Bit Start Up Challenge finalist Damon Bryan joins us as well. The CTO and co founder of Hyper Affinity. Also a startup Challenge Finalists. And Stephane Williams to my left here, VP of Corporate development and snowflake Ventures. Guys, great to have you all on this little mini panel this morning. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Let's go ahead, Harry, and we'll start with you. Talk to the audience about model. But what do you guys do? And then we'll kind of unpack the snowflake. The Snowflakes challenge >>Model bit is the easiest way for data scientists to deploy machine learning models directly into Snowflake. We make use of the latest snowflake functionality called Snow Park for python that allows those models to run adjacent to the data so that machine learning models can be much more efficient and much more powerful than they were before. >>Awesome. Damon. Give us an overview of hyper affinity. >>Yes, so hyper affinity were Decision Intelligence platform. So we helped. Specifically retailers and brands make intelligent decisions through the use of their own customer, data their product data and put data science in a I into the heart of the decision makers across their business. >>Nice Step seven. Tell us about the startup challenge. We talked a little bit about it yesterday with CMO Denise Pearson, but I know it's in its second year. Give us the idea of the impetus for it, what it's all about and what these companies embody. >>Yeah, so we This is the second year that we've done it. Um, we it was really out of, um Well, it starts with snowflake Ventures when we started to invest in companies, and we quickly realised that there's there's a massive opportunity for companies to be building on top of the Lego blocks, uh, of snowflake. And so, um, open up the competition. Last year it was the inaugural competition overlay analytics one, Um, and since then, you've seen a number of different functionalities and features as part of snowflakes snow part. Being one of them native applications is a really exciting one going forward. Um, the companies can really use to accelerate their ability to kind of deliver best in class applications using best in class technology to deliver real customer outcomes and value. Um, so we've we've seen tremendous traction across the globe, 250 applicants across 50. I think 70 countries was mentioned today, so truly global in nature. And it's really exciting to see how some of the start ups are taking snowflake to to to new and interesting use cases and new personas and new industries. >>So you had 200 over 250 software companies applied for this. How did you did you narrow it down to three? >>We did. Yeah, >>you do that. >>So, behind the scenes, we had a sub judging panel, the ones you didn't see up on stage, which I was luckily part of. We had kind of very distinct evaluation criteria that we were evaluating every company across. Um and we kind of took in tranches, right? We we took the first big garden, and we kind of try to get that down to a top 50 and top 50. Then we really went into the details and we kind of across, um, myself in ventures with some of my venture partners. Um, some of the market teams, some of the product and engineering team, all kind of came together and evaluated all of these different companies to get to the top 10, which was our semifinalists and then the semi finalists, or had a chance to present in front of the group. So we get. We got to meet over Zoom along the way where they did a pitch, a five minute pitch followed by a Q and A in a similar former, I guess, to what we just went through the startup challenge live, um, to get to the top three. And then here we are today, just coming out of the competition with with With folks here on the table. >>Wow, Harry talked to us about How did you just still down what model bit is doing into five minutes over Zoom and then five minutes this morning in person? >>I think it was really fun to have that pressure test where, you know, we've only been doing this for a short time. In fact model. It's only been a company for four or five months now, and to have this process where we pitch and pitch again and pitch again and pitch again really helped us nail the one sentence value proposition, which we hadn't done previously. So in that way, very grateful to step on in the team for giving us that opportunity. >>That helps tremendously. I can imagine being a 4 to 5 months young start up and really trying to figure out I've worked with those young start ups before. Messaging is challenging the narrative. Who are we? What do we do? How are we changing or chasing the market? What are our customers saying we are? That's challenging. So this was a good opportunity for you, Damon. Would you say the same as well for hyper affinity? >>Yeah, definitely conquer. It's really helped us to shape our our value proposition early and how we speak about that. It's quite complicated stuff, data science when you're trying to get across what you do, especially in retail, that we work in. So part of what our platform does is to help them make sense of data science and Ai and implement that into commercial decisions. So you have to be really kind of snappy with how you position things. And it's really helped us to do that. We're a little bit further down the line than than these guys we've been going for three years. So we've had the benefit of working with a lot of retailers to this point to actually identify what their problems are and shape our product and our proposition towards. >>Are you primarily working with the retail industry? >>Yes, Retail and CPG? Our primary use case. We have seen any kind of consumer related industries. >>Got it. Massive changes right in retail and CPG the last couple of years, the rise of consumer expectations. It's not going to go back down, right? We're impatient. We want brands to know who we are. I want you to deliver relevant content to me that if I if I bought a tent, go back on your website, don't show me more tense. Show me things that go with that. We have this expectation. You >>just explain the whole business. But >>it's so challenging because the brothers brands have to respond to that. How do you what is the value for retailers working with hyper affinity and snowflake together. What's that powerhouse? >>Yeah, exactly. So you're exactly right. The retail landscape is changing massively. There's inflation everywhere. The pandemic really impacted what consumers really value out of shopping with retailers. And those decisions are even harder for retailers to make. So that's kind of what our platform does. It helps them to make those decisions quickly, get the power of data science or democratise it into the hands of those decision makers. Um, so our platform helps to do that. And Snowflake really underpins that. You know, the scalability of snowflake means that we can scale the data and the capability that platform in tangent with that and snowflake have been innovating a lot of things like Snow Park and then the new announcements, announcements, uni store and a native APP framework really helping us to make developments to our product as quick as snowflakes are doing it. So it's really beneficial. >>You get kind of that tailwind from snowflakes acceleration. It sounds like >>exactly that. Yeah. So as soon as we hear about new things were like, Can we use it? You know, and Snow Park in particular was music to our ears, and we actually part of private preview for that. So we've been using that while and again some of the new developments will be. I'm on the phone to my guys saying, Can we use this? Get it, get it implemented pretty quickly. So yeah, >>fantastic. Sounds like a great aligned partnership there, Harry. Talk to us a little bit about model bit and how it's enabling customers. Maybe you've got a favourite customer example at model bit plus snowflake, the power that delivers to the end user customer? >>Absolutely. I mean, as I said, it allows you to deploy the M L model directly into snowflake. But sometimes you need to use the exact same machine learning model in multiple endpoints simultaneously. For example, one of our customers uses model bit to train and deploy a lead scoring model. So you know when somebody comes into your website and they fill out the form like they want to talk to a sales person, is this gonna be a really good customer? Do we think or maybe not so great? Maybe they won't pay quite as much, and that lead scoring model actually runs on the website using model bit so that you can deploy display a custom experience to that customer we know right away. If this is an A, B, C or D lead, and therefore do we show them a salesperson contact form? Do we just put them in the marketing funnel? Based on that lead score simultaneously, the business needs to know in the back office the score of the lead so that they can do things like routed to the appropriate salesperson or update their sales forecasts for the end of the quarter. That same model also runs in the in the snowflake warehouse so that those back office systems can be powered directly off of snowflake. The fact that they're able to train and deploy one model into two production environment simultaneously and manage all that is something they can only do with bottled it. >>Lead scoring has been traditionally challenging for businesses in every industry, but it's so incredibly important, especially as consumers get pickier and pickier with. I don't want I don't want to be measured. I want to opt out. What sounds like what model but is enabling is especially alignment between sales and marketing within companies, which is That's also a big challenge at many companies face for >>us. It starts with the data scientist, right? The fact that sales and marketing may not be aligned might be an issue with the source of truth. And do we have a source of truth at this company? And so the idea that we can empower these data scientists who are creating this value in the company by giving them best in class tools and resources That's our dream. That's our mission. >>Talk to me a little bit, Harry. You said you're only 4 to 5 months old. What were the gaps in the market that you and your co founders saw and said, Guys, we've got to solve this. And Snowflake is the right partner to help us do it. >>Absolutely. We This is actually our second start up, and we started previously a data Analytics company that was somewhat successful, and it got caught up in this big wave of migration of cloud tools. So all of data tools moved and are moving from on premise tools to cloud based tools. This is really a migration. That snowflake catalyst Snowflake, of course, is the ultimate in cloud based data platforms, moving customers from on premise data warehouses to modern cloud based data clouds that dragged and pulled the rest of the industry along with it. Data Science is one of the last pieces of the data industry that really hasn't moved to the cloud yet. We were almost surprised when we got done with our last start up. We were thinking about what to do next. The data scientists were still using Jupiter notebooks locally on their laptops, and we thought, This is a big market opportunity and we're We're almost surprised it hasn't been captured yet, and we're going to get in there. >>The other thing. I think it's really interesting on your business that we haven't talked about is just the the flow of data, right? So that the data scientist is usually taking data out of a of a of a day like something like Smoke like a data platform and the security kind of breaks down because then it's one. It's two, it's three, it's five, it's 20. Its, you know, big companies just gets really big. And so I think the really interesting thing with what you guys are doing is enabling the data to stay where it's at, not copping out keeping that security, that that highly governed environment that big companies want but allowing the data science community to really unlock that value from the data, which is really, really >>cool. Wonderful for small startups like Model Bit. Because you talk to a big company, you want them to become a customer. You want them to use your data science technology. They want to see your fed ramp certification. They want to talk to your C. So we're two guys in Silicon Valley with a dream. But if we can tell them the data is staying in snowflake and you have that conversation with Snowflake all the time and you trust them were just built on top. That is an easy and very smooth way to have that conversation with the customer. >>Would you both say that there's credibility like you got street cred, especially being so so early in this stage? Harry, with the partnership with With Snowflake Damon, we'll start with you. >>Yeah, absolutely. We've been using Snowflake from day one. We leave from when we started our company, and it was a little bit of an unknown, I guess maybe 23 years ago, especially in retail. A lot of retailers using all the legacy kind of enterprise software, are really starting to adopt the cloud now with what they're doing and obviously snowflake really innovating in that area. So what we're finding is we use Snowflake to host our platform and our infrastructure. We're finding a lot of retailers doing that as well, which makes it great for when they wanted to use products like ours because of the whole data share thing. It just becomes really easy. And it really simplifies it'll and data transformation and data sharing. >>Stephane, talk about the startup challenge, the innovation that you guys have seen, and only the second year I can. I can just hear it from the two of you. And I know that the winner is back in India, but tremendous amount of of potential, like to me the last 2.5 days, the flywheel that is snowflake is getting faster and faster and more and more powerful. What are some of the things that excite you about working on the start up challenge and some of the vision going forward that it's driving. >>I think the incredible thing about Snowflake is that we really focus as a company on the data infrastructure and and we're hyper focused on enabling and incubating and encouraging partners to kind of stand on top of a best of breed platform, um, unlocked value across the different, either personas within I T organisations or industries like hypothermia is doing. And so it's it's it's really incredible to see kind of domain knowledge and subject matter expertise, able to kind of plug into best of breed underlying data infrastructure and really divide, drive, drive real meaningful outcomes for for for our customers in the community. Um, it's just been incredible to see. I mean, we just saw three today. Um, there was 250 incredible applications that past the initial. Like, do they check all the boxes and then actually, wow, they just take you to these completely different areas. You never thought that the technology would go and solve. And yet here we are talking about, you know, really interesting use cases that have partners are taking us to two >>150. Did that surprise you? And what was it last year. >>I think it was actually close to close to 2 to 40 to 50 as well, and I think it was above to 50 this year. I think that's the number that is in my head from last year, but I think it's actually above that. But the momentum is, Yeah, it's there and and again, we're gonna be back next year with the full competition, too. So >>awesome. Harry, what is what are some of the things that are next for model bed as it progresses through its early stages? >>You know, one thing I've learned and I think probably everyone at this table has internalised this lesson. Product market fit really is everything for a start up. And so for us, it's We're fortunate to have a set of early design partners who will become our customers, who we work with every day to build features, get their feedback, make sure they love the product, and the most exciting thing that happened to me here this week was one of our early design partner. Customers wanted us to completely rethink how we integrate with gets so that they can use their CI CD workflows their continuous integration that they have in their own get platform, which is advanced. They've built it over many years, and so can they back, all of model, but with their get. And it was it was one of those conversations. I know this is getting a little bit in the weeds, but it was one of those conversations that, as a founder, makes your head explode. If we can have a critical mass of those conversations and get to that product market fit, then the flywheel starts. Then the investment money comes. Then you're hiring a big team and you're off to the races. >>Awesome. Sounds like there's a lot of potential and momentum there. Damon. Last question for you is what's next for hyper affinity. Obviously you've got we talked about the street cred. >>Yeah, what's >>next for the business? >>Well, so yeah, we we've got a lot of exciting times coming up, so we're about to really fully launch our products. So we've been trading for three years with consultancy in retail analytics and data science and actually using our product before it was fully ready to launch. So we have the kind of main launch of our product and we actually starting to onboard some clients now as we speak. Um, I think the climate with regards to trying to find data, science, resources, you know, a problem across the globe. So it really helps companies like ours that allow, you know, allow retailers or whoever is to democratise the use of data science. And perhaps, you know, really help them in this current climate where they're struggling to get world class resource to enable them to do that >>right so critical stuff and take us home with your overall summary of snowflake summit. Fourth annual, nearly 10,000 people here. Huge increase from the last time we were all in person. What's your bumper sticker takeaway from Summit 22 the Startup Challenge? >>Uh, that's a big closing statement for me. It's been just the energy. It's been incredible energy, incredible excitement. I feel the the products that have been unveiled just unlock a tonne, more value and a tonne, more interesting things for companies like the model bit I profanity and all the other startups here. And to go and think about so there's there's just this incredible energy, incredible excitement, both internally, our product and engineering teams, the partners that we have spoke. I've spoken here with the event, the portfolio companies that we've invested in. And so there's there's there's just this. Yeah, incredible momentum and excitement around what we're able to do with data in today's world, powered by underlying platform, like snowflakes. >>Right? And we've heard that energy, I think, through l 30 plus guests we've had on the show since Tuesday and certainly from the two of you as well. Congratulations on being finalist. We wish you the best of luck. You have to come back next year and talk about some of the great things. More great >>things hopefully will be exhibited next year. >>Yeah, that's a good thing to look for. Guys really appreciate your time and your insights. Congratulations on another successful start up challenge. >>Thank you so much >>for Harry, Damon and Stefan. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of snowflakes. Summit 22 live from Vegas. Stick around. We'll be right back with a volonte and our final guest of the day. Mhm, mhm

(bright music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Two days of coverage, AWS Summit 2022 in New York city's coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. Events are back. theCUBE is back. Of course, with theCUBE virtual, CUBE hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out, a lot of content this year more than ever. A lot more cloud data, cloud native, modern applications, all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, CUBE alumni, CEO of Observe, Inc. in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data, observability. Jeremy, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Always great to come and talk to you on theCUBE man. It's been a few years. >> Well, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability space, hot area, but also you've been a senior executive. President of Dell, EMC, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Look around, it's cloud meets big data. >> Yeah, the cloud thing I think was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for sort of catching that bus early, We were on the bus early and I think it was only inevitable. Like if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >> So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved. The board level, the founders, the people there, cloud, Amazon, what's going on here? You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, chief of Observe, Inc., which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data, engineering, large scale integrations, data as code, integrating into applications. It's a whole another world developing, like you see with Snowflake, it means Snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's this wave we're on? How would you describe the wave? >> Well, a couple of things. People are, I think, riding more software than ever before. Why? Because they've realized that if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think more applications now than any point, not just ever, but the mid nineties. I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for Windows. Well now they're building for things like, AWS is now the platform. So you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the transactions, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can I understand who my best customers are? What I sell today? If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off? All of that they want to analyze. And the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it? >> In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that, and I want to get your opinion on or reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse, and then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more effort to say, let's go look at the data, 'cause now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once, they're iterating. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting That's a Silicon Valley story. That's like how startups were, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have this data concept that's now part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole new cycle of data being reused and repurposed, then figure it out. >> Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan of, years ago, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee, at the MIT labs. I spent time with and he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look, he said, I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And this has going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and certainly, research is on the forefront. But I think starting to see that mindset of the MIT research be mainstream in enterprises. They're realizing that, yeah, it is about the data. If I can better understand my data better than competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is how? What technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to allow me to do that? >> So let's talk about Observe, Inc. You're the CEO. Given you've seen the waves before, you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action. What's going on with the company? Give a quick minute to explain Observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status? What's the product status? And what's the customer status? >> Yeah, so we realized, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago. Look, the way people are building applications is different. They're way more functional. They change every day. But in some respects there are a lot more complicated. They're distributed, microservices architectures. And when something goes wrong, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not going to fly because you had so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So that's observability. It's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was, a guy called, like everything in tech, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by, but there's a guy called Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kind of term. And the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for the best part of four years now. It took us three years just to build the product. I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. So yeah, this last year, we did our first year selling. We've got about 40 customers now. We got great investors Sutter Hill Ventures. Mike Speiser who was really the first guy in the Snowflake and the initial investor. We're fortunate enough to have Mike on our board. And part of the Observe story is closely knit with Snowflake because all of that telemetry data, we store in there. >> So I want to pivot to that. Mike Speiser, Snowflake, Jeremy Burton, theCUBE kind of same thinking. This idea of a super cloud or what Snowflake became. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. And now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of Snowflake. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, like as Jerry Chen in Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with Snowflake's. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a Snowflake or an AWS, because again, you got to go where the data is. You need all the data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> What's your take on that? >> Having enough gray hair now. Again, in tech, I think if you want to predict the future, look at the past. And 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a smaller company called Oracle. And an Oracle was the database company and their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms. One, Windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And then that was the ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years, gray hairs, the platform isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, Google cloud. I probably look around if I say that in. >> It's okay. But Hyperscale. >> Yeah. >> CapEx built out. >> That is the new platform. And then Snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and of course my ambition would be, look, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of Snowflake, as they were on top of Oracle, then we'd probably be quite happy. >> So you're building on top of Snowflake? >> We're building on top of Snowflake a hundred percent. And I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that's a risk. >> Are you still on the board? >> Yeah, I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am long on Snowflake. >> It sounds, well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board then you'll know as going on. Okay, seriously, this is a real dynamic. >> Jeremy: It is. >> It's not a one off. >> Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS, it is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like Snowflake and folks like Observe, it's an order magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >> Yeah, and I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you got to be on a platform. >> Yeah and it's quite easy. >> Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >> Well, value migrates up over time. So when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure for service, platform as a service. My old employee EMC, we had Pivotal. Pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to extract a real business, you got to move up, you got to add value, you got to build databases, then you got to build applications. >> It's interesting. Moving from the data center to the cloud was a dream for starters 'cause they didn't have to provision the CapEx. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got Snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >> The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. >> Yeah, it's almost free. >> But as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've got to get into. >> And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm going to get a serious multiple of value in what I'm paying. Most people don't even blink at their AWS bills unless they're like massively huge. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question. But for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >> Yeah, a lot of people ask me like, look, you're building on Snowflake. You're going to be paying their money. How does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. We could build a database as well in Observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as Snowflake. And so we made the call early on that, no, we want to innovate above the database. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and the same is true with something like Amazon, like Snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >> Yeah and what's interesting is that Dave Vellante and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously more on Snowflake. I've been looking at Databricks and the same dynamics happening. The proof is the ecosystem. >> Yeah. >> If you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and Databricks, it's exploding. The shows are selling out. This floor space is booked. That's the old days at VMware. The old days at AWS. >> One and for Snowflake and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing because we build on Snowflake and we pay their money. They don't have to sell to us. And we do a lot of the support. And so the economics work out really, really well if you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >> And then also you get a trajectory of economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of Snowflake, integrations, new products, you're scaling and step function with them. >> Yeah, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. When I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had one petabyte customer. And so at Observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so being able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable. >> Well, Jeremy, great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. We got a couple minutes left, put a plug in for Observe. What do you guys do? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You get in traction. >> Yeah >> Scales around the corner sounds like. Is that where you at? Pre-scale? >> We've got a big announcement coming up in two or three weeks. We've got new funding, which is always great. The product is really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, at which point can you just start hiring salespeople and the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. We've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting enterprise type customers. We're F5 networks. We're POC in right now with Capital One. We've got some interesting news around Capital One coming up. I can't share too much, but it's going to be exciting. And like I said, Sutter Hill continue to stick. >> And I think Capital One's a big Snowflake customer as well, right? >> They were early and one of the things that attracted me to Capital One was they were very, very good with Snowflake early on and they put Snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And today that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >> Capital One, very innovative cloud. Obviously, AWS customer and very innovative. certainly in the CISO and CIO. On another point on where you're at. So you're pre-scale meaning you're about to scale. >> Jeremy: Right. >> So you got POCs. What's that trajectory look like? And you see around the corner, what's going on? What's around the corner that you're going to hit the straight and narrow and gas it fast? >> Yeah, the key thing for us is we got to get the product right. The nice thing about having a guy like Mike Speiser on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions at the board are always about like, is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? 'Cause we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and the revenue will take care of itself. So right now all the attention is on the product. This year, the exciting thing is we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the New Relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of APM tools. You're going to be able to do that within Observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one 'cause we complete the trifecta, the logs. >> What's the secret sauce of observe if you put it into a sentence, what's the secret sauce? >> I think, an amazing founding engineering team, number one. At the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way and we've got great long term investors. And the biggest thing our investors give is, actually it's not just money, it gives us time to get the product right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >> Got it. Final question while I got you here. You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there? You got people doing POCs, Capital One scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Obviously, we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business, restructure. So a lot of happening in cloud. What's the criteria? How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >> Yeah, enterprises, they know they've got to spend money transforming the business. I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but what we were saying five years ago is happening. Everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or take a bet on new technology in order to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that A, have money, B, are prepared to take risks, and it's a race against time to get their offerings in this new digital footprint. >> Final, final question. What's the state of AWS? Where do you see them going next? Obviously, they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0? Or they always say it's day one, but it's maybe more like day 10, but what's next for AWS? Where do they go from here? Obviously, they're doing well and they're getting bigger and bigger. >> Yeah, it's an amazing story. We are on AWS as well. And so I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They have an early leads. And if you look at where, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the late nineties, it was they stopped really caring about developers and the folks who are building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they have an amazing head start. And if they did more, if they do more than that, that's what's going to keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >> They got the Silicon and they got the Stack developing. Jeremy Burton inside theCUBE, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called Observe, Inc. In the middle of all the action and the board of Snowflake as well. Great startup. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Live from San Francisco's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Stay with us. More coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Every company needs great salespeople, it's one of the most lucrative professions out there. And there's plenty of wisdom and knowledge that's been gathered over the years about selling. We've heard it all, famous quotes from the greatest salespeople of our time, like Zig Ziglar and Jeffrey Gitomer, and Dale Carnegie and Jack Welch, and many others. Things like, "Each of us has only 24 hours in a day, "it's all about how we use our time." And, "You don't have to be great to start, "but you have to start to be great." And then I love this one, "People hate to be sold, but they love to buy." "There are no traffic jams on the extra mile, "make change before you have to." And the all time classic, "Put that coffee down. "Coffee is for closers." Thousands of pieces of sales advice are readily available in books, videos, on blogs and in podcasts, and many of these are free of charge. So why would entrepreneurs start a company to train salespeople? And how is it that sharp investors are pouring millions of dollars into this space? Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube Video Exclusive, my name is Dave Vellante, and today we welcome Paul Fifield who's the co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy who's going to answer these questions and share some exciting news on the startups. Paul, welcome to "The Cube" good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to see you again, Dave, great to be here. >> Hey, so before we get into the hard news, tell us a little bit about the Sales Impact Academy, why'd you start the company, maybe some of the fundamentals of this market, your total available market, who you're targeting, you know, what's the premise behind the company? >> Yeah sure. So I mean, I started the company, it was actually pretty organic in the way it began. I had a 10 year career as a CRO and it was, you know, had a couple of great hits with two companies, but it was a real struggle to basically, you know, operate as a CRO and learn your craft at the same time. And so when I left my last company, I kind of got out there, I wanted to kind of give back a little bit and I started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London, and I actually, one of the companies I started was in New York so I got schooled very much on a sort of US approach to how you build a modern you know, go to market and sales operation. Started going out there, doing some teaching, realized that so many people just didn't have a clue about how to build a scalable and predictable revenue function, and I kind of felt sorry for them. So I literally started doing some, you know, online classes myself, got my co-founder Alex to put curriculum together as well and we literally started just doing online classes, very live, very organic, just a Google Drive and some decks, and it really just blew up from there. >> That's amazing. I mean, so you've my, you know, tongue and cheek up front, but people might wonder, why do you need a platform 'cause there's so much free information out there? Is it to organize, is it a discipline thing? Explain that. >> Well, I think the way I sort of see this is that is that the lack of structured learning and education is actually one of the greatest educational travesties, I think, of the last 50 years, okay. Now sales and go to market is a huge global profession, right? Half the world's companies are B2B, so roughly that's a proxy for half the world's GDP, right? Which is $40 trillion of GDP. Now that 40 trillion rests on kind of the success of the growth and the sales functions of all those companies. Yet in its infinite wisdom, the global education system literally just ignored sales and go to market as a profession. Some universities are kind of catching up, but it's really too little too late. So what I sort of say to people, you imagine this Dave, right. You imagine if the way that law worked as a profession let's say, is that there's no law school, there's no law training, there's no even in work professional continuous professional development in law. The way that it works is you leave university, join a company, start practicing law and just use like YouTube just to maybe like, you know, where you're struggling, just use YouTube to like work out what's going on. The legal profession would be in absolute chaos. And that's what's happened in the sales and go to market profession, okay. What this profession desperately desperately needs is structured learning, good pedagogy, good well designed course and curriculum. And here's the other thing, right? Is the sort of paradox of infinite information is that just because all the information is out there, right, doesn't mean it's actually a good learning experience. Like, where do you find it? What's good? What's not good? And also the other thing I'd point out is that there is this kind of myth that all the information is out there on the internet. But actually what we do, and we'll come into it in a second is, the people teaching on our platform are the elite people from the industry. They haven't got time to do blog posts and just explain to people how they operate. They're going from company to company working at like, you know, working at these kind of elite companies. And they're the people that teach, and that information is not readily available and freely out there on the internet. >> Yeah, real opportunity, you made some great points there. I think business schools are finally starting to teach a little bit about public speaking and presenting, but nobody's teaching us how to sell. As Earl Nightingale says, "To some degree we're all salespeople, "selling our family on living the good life" or whatever. What movie we want to see tonight. But okay, let's get to the hard news. You got fresh funding of 22 million, tell us about that, congratulations. You know, the investors, what else can you share with us? >> Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, immensely proud. We started from very sort of humble beginnings, as I said, we've now scaled very rapidly, we're a subscription business, we're a SaaS business. We'll come onto some of the growth metrics shortly, but just in a couple of years, you know, the last year which ended January, we grew 500% from year one, we're now well over 125 people, and I'm very, very, very honored, flattered, humbled that MIT, obviously one of those prestigious universities in the world, has taken a direct investment by their endowment fund, HubSpot Ventures. Another Boston great has also taken a direct investment as well. They actually began as a customer and loved what we were doing so much that they then decided to make an investment. Stage 2 Capital who invested in our seed round pretty much tripled down, played a huge role in helping us assemble MIT and HubSpot ventures as investors, and they continue to be an incredible VC giving us amazing, amazing support that their LP network of go to market leaders is second to none. And then Emerge Education, who is our pre-seed investor, they're actually based in London, also joined this round as well. >> Great, well actually, let's jump ahead. Let's talk about the metrics. I mean, if Stage Two is involved, they're hardcore. What can you share with us about, you know, everybody's chasing AR and NR and the like, what can you share with us? >> They are both pretty important. Well, I think from a headcount perspective, so as I mentioned our fiscal ends at the end of January, each year. We've gone from 25 to over 125 employees in that time. We've gone from 82 to 260 customers also in that time. And customers now include HubSpot, Gong, Klaviyo, GitHub, GT, Six Cents, so some really sort of major SaaS companies in the space. Our revenue's grown significantly with 5X. So 500% increase in revenue year over year, which is pretty fast, very proud of that. Our learning community has gone from over 3000 people to almost 15,000 professionals, and that makes us comfortably, the largest go to market learning community in the world. >> How did you decide when to scale? What were the sort of signals that said to you, "Okay, we're ready, "we have product market fit, "we can now scale the go to market." What were the signals there, Paul? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think for a very small team to achieve that level of growth in customers, to be kind of honest with you, like it's the pull that we're getting from the market. And I think the thing that has surprised me the most, perhaps in the last 12 months, is the pull we're getting from the enterprise. We're you know, I can't really announce, we've actually got a huge pilot with one of the largest companies actually in the world which is going fantastically well, our pipeline for enterprise customers is absolutely huge. But as you can imagine, if you've got distributed teams all over the world, we're living and working in this kind of hybrid world, how on earth do you kind of upscale all those people, right, that are, like I say, that are so distributed. It's impossible. Like in work, in the office delivery of training is pretty much dead, right? And so we sort of fill this really big pain, we solved this really, really big pain of how to effectively upskill people through this kind of live curriculum and this live teaching approach that we have. So I think for me, it's the pull that we're getting from the market really meant that you know, we have to double down. There is such a massive TAM, it is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I think there are 20 million people just in sales and go to market in tech alone, right. And I mentioned to you earlier, half the world's companies effectively, you know, are B2B and therefore represent, you know, at its largest scope, our TAM. >> Excellent, thank you for that. Tell us more about the product and the platform. How's it work if I'm a customer, what type of investment do I have to make both financially? And what's my time commitment? How do you structure that? >> So the model is basically on a seat model. So roughly speaking, every seat's about a thousand dollars per year per rep. The lift is light. So we've got a very low onboarding, it's not a highly complex technical product, right? We've got a vast curriculum of learning that covers learning for, you know, SDRs, and the AEs, and CS reps, and leadership management training. We're developing curriculum for technical pre-sales, we're developing curriculum for revenue operations. And so it's very, very simple. We basically, it's a seat model, people literally just send us the seats and the details, we get people up and running in the platform, they start then enrolling and we have a customer success team that then plots out learning journeys and learning pathways for all of our customers. And actually what's starting to happen now, which is very, very exciting is that, you know, we're actually a key part of people's career development pathway. So to go from you know, SDR1 let's say to SDR2, you have to complete these three courses with Sales Impact Academy, and let's say, get 75% in your exam and it becomes a very powerful and simple way of developing career pathway. >> Yeah, so really detailed curriculum. So I was going to say, do I as a sales professional, do I pick and choose the things that are most relevant for me? Or are people actually going through a journey in career progression, or maybe both? >> Yeah, it's a mixture of both. We tend to see now, we're sort of starting to standardize, but really we're developing enough curriculum that over, let's say a 15 year period, you could start with us as an SDR and then end as a chief revenue officer, you know, running the entire function. This is the other thing about the crazy world of go to market. Very often, people are put into roles and it's sink or swim. There's no real learning that happens, there's no real development that happens before people take these big steps. And what this platform does so beautifully is is it equips people with the right skills and knowledge before they take that next step in their profession and in their career. And it just dramatically improves their chances of succeeding. >> Who are the trainers? Who's leading the classes, how do you find these guys, how do you structure? What are the content, you know, vectors, where's all that come from? >> Yeah. So the sort of secret source of what we do, beyond just the live instruction, beyond the significant amount of peer to peer learning that goes on, is that we go and source the absolute most elite people in go to market to teach, okay. Now I mentioned to you before, you've got these people that are going from like job to job at the very like the sort of peak of their careers, working for these incredible companies, it's that knowledge that we want to get access to, right. And so Stage 2 Capital is an incredible resource. The interesting thing about Stage 2 Capital as you know Dave, you know, run by Mark Roberge, who was on when we spoke last year and also Jay Po is all the LPs of Stage 2 Capital represent 3 to 400 of the most elite go to market professionals in the world. So, you know, about seven or eight of those are now on an advisory board. And so we have access to this incredible pool of talent. And so we know by consulting these amazing people who are the best people in certain aspects of go to market. We reach out to them and very often they're at a stage in their career where they're really kind of willing to give back, of course there are commercials around it as well, and there's lots of other benefits that we provide our teachers and our faculty, and what we call our coaches. But yeah, we source the very, very best people in the world to teach. >> Now, how does it work as a user of your service? Is it all on demand? Do you do live content or a combination? >> Yeah look, one of the big differentiators is this is a live delivery of learning, okay. Most learning online is typically done on demand, self-directed, and there's a ton of research. There's a great blog post on Andrew's recent site. A short time ago, which is talking about how the completion rates of on demand learning are somewhere between 3 and 6%. That is like, that's awful. >> Terrible. >> I was like why bother? However, we're seeing through that live instruction. So we teach two, one hour classes a week, that's it. We're upskilling very busy people, they're stressed, they've got targets. We have to be very, very cognizant of that. So we teach two, one hour classes a week. Typically, you know, Monday and a Wednesday, or a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that pace of learning is about right, it's kind of how humans learn as well. You know, short bursts of information, and then put that learning and those skills that you've acquired in class literally to work minutes after the class finishes. And so through that, and it sits in your calendar like a meeting, it doesn't feel overwhelming, you're learning together as a team as well. And all that combined, we see completion rates often in excess of 80% for our courses. >> Okay, so they block that time out- >> In the calendar, yeah. >> And they make an investment. Go ahead, please. >> Yeah yeah, exactly, sorry Dave. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, you know, we have course lengths. So one of our shorter courses are like four hours long over two weeks. And again, it's just literally in the calendar. We also teach what we call The Magic Learning Hour. And the magic learning hour is this one specific hour in the day that enables teams all over the western hemisphere to join the same class. And that magic learning hour is eight o'clock Pacific 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM over in the UK, and 5:00 PM in the rest of Europe. And that one time in the day means that these enterprises have got teams all over the western hemisphere joining that class, learning together as a team, plus it's in the calendar and it's that approach is why we're seeing such high engagement and completion. >> That's very cool, the time zone thing. Now who's the target buyer? Are you selling only to sales teams? Can I as an individual purchase your service? >> Yeah, that's a good question. Currently it's a very much like a B2B motion. As I mentioned earlier on, we're getting an enormous pull from the enterprise, which is very exciting. You know, we have an enterprise segment, we have sort of more of a startup earlier stage segment, and then we have a mid-market segment that we call our sort of strategic, and that's typically and most of like venture backed, fast growth tech companies. So very much at the moment a B2B motion. We're launching our own technology platform in the early summer, and then later on this year we're going to be adding what's called PLG or a product led growth, so individuals can actually sign up to SIA. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you said $1,000 per year per rep, is that right? I mean, that's- >> Yeah. >> That's a small investment for an individual that wants to be part of, you know, this community and grow his or her career. So that's the growth plan? You go down market I would imagine, you talked about the western hemisphere, there's international opportunities maybe, local language. What's the growth plan? >> Yeah, I mean look, we've identified the magic learning hour for the middle east and APAC, which is eight o'clock in the morning in Istanbul, right. Is 5:00 PM in Auckland, it's quite fun trying to work out like what this optimum magic learning hour is. What's incredible is we teach in that time and that opens up the whole of the middle east and the whole of APAC, right, right down to Australia. And so once we're teaching the curriculum in those two slots, that means literally you can have teams in any country in the world, I think apart from Hawaii, you can actually access our live learning products in work time and that's incredibly powerful. So we have so many like axis of growth, we've got single users as I mentioned, but really Dave that's single users we'll be winning from the enterprise and that will represent pipeline that we could then potentially convert as well. And look, you make a very good point. You know, we've seen students are now leaving university with over $100,000 dollars in debt. We've got a massive, massive debt problem here in the US with student debt. You could absolutely sign up to our platform at let's say a hundred bucks a month, right. And probably within six months, gain enough knowledge and skill to walk into a $60,000 a year based salary job as an SDR, that's a huge entry level salary. And you could do that without even going to university. So there could be a time here where we become a really viable alternative to actually even going to university. >> I love it. The cost education going through the roof, it's out of reach for so many people. Paul, congratulations on the progress, the fresh funding. Great to have you back in "The Cube." We'd love to have you back and follow your ascendancy. I think great things ahead for you guys. >> Thank you very much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "The Cube, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Despite the more than $100 billion spent each year fighting Cyber-crime. When we do an end-of-the year look back and ask "How did we do?" The answer is invariably the same, "Worse than last year." Pre pandemic, the picture was disheartening, but since March of 2020 the situation has only worsened as cyber-criminals have become increasingly sophisticated, better funded and more brazen. SecOps pros continue to fight, but unlike conventional wars, this one has no end. Now the flip side of course, is that markets continue to value cybersecurity firms at significant premiums. Because this huge market will continue to grow by double digits for the foreseeable future. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we look at the state of cybersecurity in 2021 and beyond. We'll update you with the latest survey data from enterprise technology research and share the fundamentals that have investors piling into the security space like never before. Let's start with the customer view. Cybersecurity remains the number one priority for CIOs and CSOs. This latest ETR survey, once again asked IT buyers to rank their top priorities for the next 12 months. Now the last three polling period dating back to last March. Cybersecurity has outranked every top spending category, including cloud, data analytics, productivity software, networking, AI, and automation or RPA. Now this shouldn't surprise anybody, but it underscores the challenges that organizations face. Not only are they in the midst of a non-optional digital transformation, but they have to also fund a cyber war that has no ceasefires, no truces, and no exit path. Now there's much more going on in cybersecurity than ransomware, but certainly that has the attention of executives. And it's becoming more and more lucrative for attackers. Here's a snapshot of some of the more well-documented attacks this decade many which have occurred in very recent months. CNA Financial, they got hit earlier this year and paid a $40 million ransom. The Ireland Health Service also got hit this year and refused to pay the ransom, but it's estimated that the cost to recover and the damage to the organization exceeded half a billion dollars. The request was for a $20 million ransom. The JBS meat company hack, they paid $11 million. CWT travel paid $5 million. The disruption from the Colonial Pipeline company, was widely reported they paid more than $4 million, as the Brenntag, the chemical company. The NBA got hit. Computer makers, Quanta and Acer also. More than 2,000 random attacks were reported to the FBI in the first seven months of 2021. Up more than 60% from 2020. Now, as I've said many times, you don't have to be a genius to be a ransomware as today. Anyone can go on the dark web, tap into ransomware as a service. Attackers, they have insidious names like darkside, evil, the cobalt, crime gang, wizard spider, the Lazarus gang, and numerous others. Criminals they have negotiation services is most typically the attackers, they'll demand a specific amount of money but they're willing to compromise in an exchange of cryptocurrency for decryption keys. And as mentioned, it's not just ransomware supply chain attacks like the solar winds hack hit organizations within the U.S government and companies like Mimecast this year. Now, while these attacks often do end up in a ransom situation. The attackers sometimes find it more lucrative to live off the land and stealth fashion and ex filtrates sensitive data that can be sold or in the case of many financial institution attacks they'll steal information from say a chief investment officer that signals an upcoming trading strategy and then the attackers will front run that trade in the stock market. Now, of course phishing, remains one of the most prominent threats. Only escalated by the work from home trend as users bring their own devices and of course home networks are less secure. So it's bad, worse than ever before. But you know, if there's a problem, entrepreneurs and investors, they're going to be there to solve it. So here's a LinkedIn post from one of the top investors in the business, Mike Speiser. He was a founding investor in Snowflake. He helped get pure storage to escape velocity and many, many other successes. This hit my LinkedIn feed the other day, his company Sutter Hill Ventures is co-leading a 1.3 Series D on an $8.3 billion valuation. They're putting in over $200 million. Now Lacework is a threat detection software company that looks at security as a data problem and they monitor exposures across clouds. So very timely. So watch that company. They're going to soar. Now the right hand chart shows venture investments in cybersecurity over the past several years. You can see it exploded in 2019 to $7.6 billion. And people thought the market was peaking at that time, if you recall. But then investments rose a little bit to $7.8 billion in 2020 right in the middle of lockdown. And then the hybrid work, the cloud, the new normal thesis kicked in big time. It's in full gear this year. You can see nearly $12 billion invested in cybersecurity in the first half of 2021 alone. So the money keeps coming in as the problem gets worse and the market gets more crowded. Now we'd like to show this slide from Optiv, it's their security taxonomy. It'll make your eyes cross. It's so packed with companies in different sectors. We'll put a link in our posts, so you can stare at this. We've used this truck before. It's pretty good. It's comprehensive and it's worth spending some time to see what that landscape looks like. But now let's reduce this down a bit and bring in some of the ETR data. This is survey data from October that shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. That's a measure of mentioned share if you will. Now this is just isolated on the information security sector within the ETR taxonomies. No filters in terms of the number of responses. So it's every company that ETR picks up in cybersecurity from its buyer surveys. Now companies above that red line, we consider them to have a highly elevated spending momentum for their products and services. And you can see, there are a lot of companies that are in this map first of all, and several above that magic mark. So you can see the momentum of Microsoft and Palo Alto. That's most impressive because of their size, their pervasiveness in the study, Cisco and Splunk are also quite prominent. They don't have as much spending momentum, but they're pretty respectable. And you can see the companies that have been real movers in this market that we've been reporting on for a while. Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, CyberArk, SailPoint, Authzero, all companies that we've extensively covered in previous breaking analysis episodes as the up and comers. And isn't it interesting that Datadog is now showing up in the vertical axis. You see that in the left-hand side up high, they're becoming more and more competitive to Splunk in this space as an alternative and lines are blurring between observability, log analytics, security, and as we previously reported even backup and recovery. But now let's simplify this picture a bit more and filter down a little bit further. This chart shows the same X, Y view. Same data construct and framework, but we required more than a hundred responses to hit the chart. So the companies, they have to have a notable market presence in the ETR survey. It's perhaps a bit less crowded, but still very packed. Isn't it? You can see firms that are less prominent in the space like Datadog fell off. The big companies we mentioned, obviously still prominent Microsoft, Palo Alto, Cisco and Splunk and then those with real momentum, they stand out a little bit. There's somewhat smaller, but they're gaining traction in the market. As we felt they would Okta and Auth zero, which Okta acquired as we reported on earlier this year, both showing strength as our CrowdStrike, Zscaler, CyberArk, which does identity and competition with Okta and SentinelOne, which went public mid this year. The company SentinelOne uses AI to do threat detection and has been doing quite well. SalePoint and Proofpoint are right on that red elevated line and then there's a big pack in the middle. Look, this is not an easy market to track. It's virtually every company plays in security. Look, AWS says some of the most advanced security in the business but they're not in the chart specifically, but you see Microsoft is. Because much of AWS security is built into services. Amazon customers heavily rely on the Amazon ecosystem which is in the Amazon marketplace for security products. And often they associate their security spend with those partners and not necessarily Amazon. And you'll see networking companies you see right there, like Juniper and the bottom there and in the ETR data set and the players like VMware in the middle of the pack. They've been really acquisitive for example, with carbon black. And the, of course, you've got a lot of legacy players like McAfee and RSA and IBM. Look, virtually every company has a security story and that will only become more common in the coming years. Now here's another look at the ETR data it's in the raw form, but it'll give you a sense of two things; One is how the data from the previous chart is plotted. And two, it gives you a time series of the data. So the data lists the top companies in the ETR data sets sorted by the October net score in the right most column. Again, that measures spending momentum. So to make the cut here, you had to have more than a hundred mentions which is shown on the left-hand side of the chart that shared N, IE that's shared accounts in the dataset. And you can track the data from last October, July of this year and the most recent October, 2021 survey. So we, drew that red line just about at the 40% net score market coincidentally, there are 10 companies that are over that figure over that bar. We sometimes call out the four star companies. We give four stars to those companies that both are in the top 10 and spending momentum and the top in prominence are shared N in the dataset. So some of these 10 would fit into that profile by that methodology, specifically, Microsoft, Okta, CrowdStrike, and Palo Alto networks. They would be the four star companies. Now a couple of other things to point out here, DDoS attacks, they're still relevant, and they're real threat. So a company like CloudFlare which is just above that red line they play in that space. Now we've also shaded the companies in the fat middle. A lot of these companies like Cisco and Splunk for example, they're major players in the security space with very strong offerings and customer affinity. We sometimes give them two stars. So this is what makes this market so interesting. It's not like the high end discourage market where literally every vendor in the Gartner magic quadrant is up in the right, okay. And there's only five or four or five, six vendors there. This market is diverse with many, many segments and sub segments, and it's such a vital space. And there's so many holes to fill with an ever changing threat landscape as we've seen in the last two years. So this is in part which makes it such a good market for investors. There's a lot of room for growth and not just from stealing market share. That's certainly an opportunity there, but things like cloud, multi-cloud, shifting end points, the edge ,and so forth make this space really ripe for investments. And to underscore this, we put together this little chart of some of the pure play security firms to see how their stock performance has done recently. So you can see that here, you know, it's a little hard to read, but it's not hard to see that Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler on the left have been big movers. These charts where possible all show a cross here, starting at the lockdown last year. The only exception is SentinelOne which IPO mid this year. So that's the point March, 2020 when the whole world changed and security priorities really started to shift to accommodate the work from home. But it's quite obvious that since the pandemic, these six companies have been on a tear for the fundamental reason that hybrid work has created a shift in spending priorities for CSOs. No longer are organizations just spending on hardening a perimeter, that perimeter has been blown away. The network is flattening. Work is what you do, it's no longer a place. As such threats are on the rise and cloud, endpoint security, identity access tools there become increasingly vital and the vendors who provide them are on the rise. So it's no surprise that the players that we've listed here which play quite prominently in those markets are all on fire. So now in summary, I want to stress that while the picture is sometimes discouraging. The entire world is becoming more and more tuned in to the cyber threat. And that's a good thing. Money is pouring in. Look, technology got us into this problem and technology is a defensive weapon that will help us continue this fight. But it's going to take more than technology. And I want to share something. We get dozens and dozens of in bounds this time of the year because we do an annual predictions posts. So folks and they want to help us out. So now most of the in bounds and the predictions that we get, they're just kind of observations or frankly, non predictions that can't really be measured as like where you right, or where you're wrong. So for the most part I like predictions that are binary. For example, last December we predicted their IT spending in 2021 would rebound and grow at 4% relative to 2020. Well, it did rebound but that prediction really wasn't as accurate as I'd like. It was frankly wrong. We think it's actually the market's going to actually grow. Spending's going to grow more like 7% this year. Not to worry plenty of our predictions came true, but we'll leave that for another day. Anyway, I got an email from Dean Fisk of Fisk partners. It's a PR firm representing an individual named Lyndon Brown chief of strategy officer of Pondurance. Pondurance is a security consultancy. And the email had the standard, Hey, in case you're working on a predictions post this year end, blah, blah, blah. But instead of sharing with me, a bunch of non predictions, the notes said here's some trends in cybersecurity that might be worth thinking about. And there were a few predictions sprinkled in there, but I wanted to call it a couple of the comments from Linden Brown, whom I don't know, I never met the guy, but I really thought his trends were spot on. The first was a stat I'll share that the United Nations report cyber crime is up 600% due to the pandemic. If as if I couldn't feel worse already. His first point though was that the hybrid workplace will be the new frontier for cyber. Yes, we totally agree. There are permanent shifts taking place. And we actually predicted that last year, but he further cited that many companies went from zero to full digital transformation overnight and many are still on that journey. And his point is that hybrid work is going to require a complete overhaul of how we think about security. We think this is very true. Now the other point that stood out is that governments are going to crack down on this behavior. And we've seen this where criminals have had their critical infrastructure dismantled by governments. No doubt the U.S government has the capabilities to do so. And it is very much focused on this issue. But it's tricky as Robert Gates, who was the former defense secretary, told me a few years back in theCUBE. He said, well, we have the best offense. We also have the most to lose. So we have to be very careful, but Linden's key point was you are going to see a much more forward and aggressive public policy and new laws that give crime fighters more latitude . Again, it's tricky kind of like the Patriot act was tricky but it's coming. Now, another call-out from Linden shares his assertion that natural disasters will bring increased cyber risk. And I thought this was a really astute point because natural disasters they're on the rise. And when there's chaos, there's cash opportunities for criminals. And I'll add to this that the supply chain risk is far from over. This is going to be continuing theme this coming year and beyond. And one of the things that Linden Brown said in his note to me is essentially you can't take humans out of the equation. Automation alone can't solve the problem, but some companies operate as though they can. Just as bad human behavior, can tramp good security, Good human education and behavior is going to be a key weapon in this endless war. Now the last point is we're going to see continued escalation government crackdowns are going to bring retaliation and to Gates' point. The U.S has a lot at stake. So expect insurance premiums are going to go through the roof. That's assuming you can even get cyber insurance. And so we got to hope for the best, but for sure, we have to plan for the worst because it's coming. Deploy technology aggressively but people in process will ultimately be the other ingredients that allow us to live to battle for another day. Okay. That's a wrap for today. Remember these episodes they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen just search "breaking analysis" podcast. Check out ETR his website at ETR.plus. We also publish a full report every week on Wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch. Email me @david.volante@tsiliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante. Comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week. everybody stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (techno music)