>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto studios. During this time of the pandemic, we're doing a lot of remote interviews, supporting a lot of events. theCUBE virtual is our new brand because there's no events to go to, but we certainly want to talk to the best people and get the most important stories. And today I have a great segment with a world-class entrepreneur, Ajeet Singh co-founder and executive chairman of ThoughtSpot. And they've got an event coming up, which is going to be coming up in December 9th and 10th. But this interview is really about what it takes to be a world-class leader and what it takes to see the future and be a visionary, but then execute an opportunity because this is the time that we're in right now is there's a lot of change, data, technology, a sea change is happening and it's upon us and leadership around technology and how to capture opportunities is really what we need right now. And so Ajeet I want to thank you for coming on to theCUBE conversation. >> Thanks for having me, John. Pleasure to be here. >> For the folks watching, the startup that you've been doing for many, many years now, ThoughtSpot you're the co-founder executive chairman, but you also were involved in Nutanix as the co-founder of that company as well. You know, a little about unicorns and creating value and doing things early, but you're a visionary and you're a technologist and a leader. I want to go in and explore that because now more than ever, the role of data, the role of the truth is super important. And as the co-founder, your company is well positioned to do that. I mean, your tagline today on the website says insight is the speed of thought, but going back to the beginning, probably wasn't the tagline. It was probably maybe like we got to leverage data, take us through the vision initially when you founded the company in 2012. What was the thinking? What was on your mind? Take us through the journey. >> Yeah. So as an entrepreneur, I think visionary is a very big term. I don't know if I qualify for that or not, but what I'm really passionate about is identifying very large markets, with very, very big problems. And then going to the white board and from scratch, building a solution that is perfectly designed for the big problem that the market might be facing from scratch. And just an absolute honest way of approaching the problem and finding the best possible solution. So when we were starting ThoughtSpot, the market that we identified was analytics, analytics software. And the big problem that we saw was that while on one hand, companies were building very big data lakes, data warehouses, there was a lot of money being spent in capturing and storing data how that data was consumed by the end-users, the non-technical people, the sales, marketing, HR people, the doctors, the nurses, that process was not changing. That process was still stuck in old times where you have to ask an analyst to go and build a dashboard for you. And at the same time, we saw that in the consumer space, when anyone had a question they wanted to learn about something, they would just go to Google and ask that question. So we said, why can't analytics be as easy as Google? If I have a question, why do I have to wait for three weeks for some data experts to bring some insights to me for most simple questions, if I'm doing some very deep analysis, trying to come up with fraud algorithms, it's understood, you know, you need data expert. But if I'm just trying to understand how my business is doing, how my customers are doing, I shouldn't have to wait. And so that's how we identified the market and the problem. And then we build a solution that is designed for that non-technical user with a very design thinking UX first approach to make it super easy for anyone to ask that question. So that was the Genesis of the company. >> You know, I just love the thinking because you're solving a problem with a clean sheet piece of paper, you're looking at what can be done. And it's just, you can bring up Google because you know, you think about Google's motto was find what you're looking for. And they had a little gimmicky buttons, like I'm feeling lucky, which just took you to a random webpage at that time while everyone else was tryna build these walled gardens and this structural apparatus, Google wanted you in and out with your results fast. And that mindset just never came over to the enterprise and with all that legacy structure and all the baggage associated with it. So I totally loved the vision, but I got to ask you, how did you get to beachhead? How did you get that first success milestone? When did you see results in your thinking? >> Yeah, so I mean, I believe that once you've identified a big market and a big problem, it comes down to the people. So I sort of went on a recruit recruiting mission and I recruited perhaps the best technology and business team that you can find in any enterprise segment, not only just analytics, some of the early engineers, my co-founder, he was at Google before that, Amit Prakash, before that he was at Microsoft working on Bing. So it took a lot of very deliberate effort to find the right kind of people who have a builder's mentality and are also deep experts in areas like search large-scale distributed systems. Very passionate about user experience. And then you start building the product, you know, it took us almost, I would say one and a half three years to get the initial working version of the product. And we were lucky enough to engage with some of the largest companies in the world, such as Walmart who are very interested in our solution because they were facing these kinds of problems. And we almost co-developed this technology with our early customers, focusing on ease of use, scale, security, governance, all of that, because it's one thing to have a concept where you want to make access to data as easy as Google, you have a certain interface people can type and get an answer. But when you are talking about enterprise data and enterprise needs, they are nowhere similar to what you have in consumer space. Consumer space is free for all, all the information is there you can crawl it and then you can access it. In enterprise, for you to take this idea of search, but make it production grid, make it real and not just a concept card. You need to invest a lot in building deep technology and then enabling security and scalability and all of that. So it took us almost , I would say a two and a half to three years to get to the initial version of the product and the problem we are solving and the area of technology search that we are working on. We brought it to the market. It's almost an infinite game. You know, you can keep making things easier and easier. And we've seen how Google has continued to evolve their search over time And it is still evolving. We just feel so lucky to be in this market, taking the direction that we have taken. >> Yeah. It's easy to talk a big game in this area because like you said, it's a hard technical problem because it'll structural data, whether it's schema databases or whatever, legacy baggage, but to make it easy, hard. And I like what you guys go with this, find the right information and put it in the right place, the right time. It's a really hard problem. And the beautiful thing is you guys are building a category while there's spend in the market that needs the problem today. So category creation with an existing market that needs it. So I got to ask you, if you could do me a favor and define for the audience, what is search-driven analytics? What does that mean from your standpoint? >> Yeah, what it means is for the end user, it looks like search but under the hood is driving large scale analytics. I like to say that our product looks like a search engine on the surface, but under the hood, it's a massive number crunching machine. So Search and AI driven analytics. There's two goals there. One, if the user has, any user and we're talking about non-technical users here, we're not talking about necessarily data experts, but if a user has a question, they should be able to get an answer instantly. They shouldn't have to wait. That is what we achieve with Search and with Spot IQ, our AI engine, we help surface insights where people may not even know that those are the questions they should be asking because data has become so complex. People often don't even know what question they should be asking. And we give them a pool that's very easy to use, but it helps surface insights to them. So there is both a pool model that we enabled through Search and a push model that we enable through Spot IQ. >> So I have to ask you that you guys are pioneering this segment you're in first. And sometimes when you're first, you have arrows in your back as you know, it's not all the beginners survive, they get competition copies, but you guys have had a lead. You had success. What's different today as you have competition coming in trying to say, "Oh, we got Search too." So what's different today with ThoughtSpot? How are you guys differentiated? >> Yeah. I mean, that's always a sign of success. If what you are trying to do, if others are saying we have it too, you have done something that is valuable. And that happens in all industry. I think the best example is Tesla. They were the first to look at this very well-known problem. I mean, we haven't had a very sort of unique take on the existence of the problem itself. Everybody knows that there is a problem with access to data, but the technology that we have built is so deep that it's very, very hard to really copy it and make it work in real world with Tesla in automotive industry in cars, there is obviously so many other companies that have launched battery powered cars, electric cars, but there is Tesla and there is all the other electric cars which are a bit of an afterthought, because if you want to build an analytics product, where Search is at the core, Search cannot be added on the top, Search has to be the core, and then you build around it. And that requires you to build a fundamental architecture from the ground up. And you can't take an existing BI product that is built for dash boarding and add a search bar. I have always said that adding a search bar in a UI is perhaps, you know, 10 to 20 lines of JavaScript code. Anyone can add it and there is so much open source stuff out there that you can just take it and plug it. And many people have tried to do that, but taking off the shelf, Search technology that is built for unstructured data and sticking it on to a product that is required to do analytics on enterprise data, that doesn't work. We built a search technology that understands enterprise data at a very deep level, so that when our customers take our product and bring it into their environment, they don't have to fundamentally change how they manage their data. Our goal is to add value to their existing enterprise data Cloud Data Warehouses and deliver this amazing Search experience where our Search engine is enable to understand what's in their data Lake, what's in their Cloud Data Warehouse. What are the schema, the tables, the joints, the cardinality, the data archive, the security requirements, all of things have to be understood by the technology for you to deliver the experience. So now that said, we pride ourselves in not resting on our laurels. You know, we have this sort of motto in the company. We say we are only 2% done. So we are on our own sort of a continuous journey of innovation. And we have been working on taking our Search technology to the next level. And that is something really powerful that we are going to unveil at our upcoming conference, Beyond, in December. And that is one to create even more distance between us and the competition. And it's all driven by what we have seen with our customers, how they're using our product or learnings what they like, what they don't like, where we see gaps and where we see opportunity to make it even easier to deliver value to our customers and our users. >> I think that's a really profound insight you just shared, because if you look at what you just said around thinking about Search as an embedded architectural foundational, you know, embedded in the architecture, that's different than bolting on a feature where you said Java code or some open source library. You know, we see in the security market, people bolted on security had huge problems. Now, all you hear is, "Oh, you got a big security in from the beginning." You actually have baked Search into everything from the beginning. And it's not just a utility, it's a mindset. And it's also a technology metadata data about data software, and all kinds of tech is involved. Am I getting that right? I mean, cause I think this is what I heard you say. It's like, you got to have the data. >> This is totally right. I mean, if I can use an analogy, there is Google search and obviously Yahoo also tried to bring their own search Yahoo search Yahoo actually, Yahoo versus Google is a perfect example or a perfect analogy to compare with ThoughtSpot versus other BI product Yahoo was built for predefined content consumption. You know, you had a homepage, somebody defined it. You could make some customizations. And there is predefined content you can consume it. Now, they also did add search, but that didn't really go so far. While Google said, we will vary from scratch ability to crawl all the data, ability to index all the data and then build a serving infrastructure that deliver this amazing performance and interactivity and relevance for the user. Relevance is where Google already shined. And you can't do those things until you think about the architecture from the ground up. >> Ajeet I'm looking forward to having more deep dive conversations on that one topic. But for the folks who might not be old enough, like me to remember Google back at that time, Yahoo was the best search engine and it was directory basically with a keyword search. It was trivial, technically speaking, but they got big. And then the portal wars came out, we got to have a portal. Google was very much not looked down as an innovator, but they had great technical chops and they just stayed the course. They had a mission to provide the best search engine to help users find what they're looking for. And they never wavered. And it was not fashionable about that time to your point. And then Yahoo was number one, then Google just became Google and the rest is history. So I really think that's super notable because companies face the same problem. What looks like fashionable tech today might not be the right one. I think that's... >> Yeah, and I totally agree. And I think a lot of times in our space, there's a lot of sort of hype around AI and machine learning. We as a company have tried to stay close to our customers and users and build things that will work for them. And a lot of stuff that we are doing, it has never been done before. So it's not to say that along the way, we don't have our own failures. We do have failures and we learn from them. >> Yeah. Yeah. Just don't make the same mistake twice. >> Yeah, I think if you have a process of learning quickly, improving quickly, those are the companies that will have a competitive advantage. In today's world, nobody gets it right the first time. If you're trying to do something fundamentally different, if you're copying somebody else, then you're too late already. >> I totally agree. >> If you do something new, it's about how fast you penetrate And that's... >> That's a great mindset. That's a great mindset. And I think that's worth capturing calling out, but I got to ask you because what's first of all, distinguished history and I love your mindset and just solving problems, big problems. All great. I want to ask you something about the industry and where you guys were in 2012 alright when you started the company, you were literally in what I call the before Cloud phase. Cause it was before Cloud companies and then during Cloud companies and then after Cloud, you know, Amazon clearly took advantage of that for a lot of startups. So right around 2012 through 2016, I'd call that the Amazon is growing up years. How did the Cloud impact your thinking around the product and how you guys were executing because you were right on that wave. You were probably in the sweet spot of your development. >> Yeah. >> Pre business planning. You were in the pre-business planning mode, incomes, Amazon. I'm sure you're probably using Amazon cause your starters and all start up sort of use Amazon at first, but I just think about, do we all have found premise with a data center? How did that impact you guys? And how does that change today? >> Certainly. Yeah it's been fascinating to see how the world is evolving how enterprises have also really evolved in depth, thinking on how they leverage the cloud infrastructure now. In the Cloud, there is the compute and storage infrastructure. And then you have a Cloud Data Warehouse, the analytics stack in the Cloud. That's becoming more popular now with a company like Google, having BigQuery and then Snowflake really amazing concepts and things like that. So when we started, we looked at where our customers are , where is their data. And what kind of infrastructure is available to us at the time there wasn't enough compute to drive the search engine that we wanted to build. There were also not any significant Cloud Data Warehousing at the time, but our engineering team our co-founders, they came from companies like Google, where building a Cloud based architecture and elastic architecture, service oriented architecture is in their DNA. So we architected the product to run on infrastructure that is very elastic that can be run practically anywhere. But our initial customers and applies the Global 2000. They had their data on-prem. So we had started more with on-prem as a go-to-market strategy. and then about four and a half years ago, once cloud infrastructure I'm talking about the compute infrastructure started to become more mature, we certified our software, to run on all three clouds So today we have more than 75 to 80% of our customers already running our software in the Cloud. And as now, because we connect to our primary data sources, our Cloud Data Warehouses, Cloud Data Lakes. Now with Snowflake and BigQuery and Synapse and Redshift, we have enough of our customers who have deployed Cloud Data Warehouses. So we are also able to directly integrate with them. And that's why we launched our own hosted SaaS Offering about a month ago. So I would say our journey in this area has been sort of similar to companies like Splunk or Elastic, which started with a software model initially deployed more on-prem, but then evolved with the customers to the Cloud. So we have a lot of focus and momentum and lot of our customers, as they're moving their data to the Cloud, they're asking us as well to be in the Cloud and provide a hosted offering. And that is what we have built for the last one year. And we launched it a month ago. >> It's nice to be on the right side of history. I got to say, when you're on the way to be there. And that also makes integrations easy too. I love the Cloud play. Let's get to the final segment here. I want to get your thoughts on your customers, your advice. There's a huge untapped opportunity for companies when it comes to data, a lot of them are realizing that the pandemic is highlighting a lot of areas where they have to go faster and then to go to Cloud, they're going to build modern apps more data's coming in than ever before. Where are these untapped opportunities for customers to take advantage of the data? And what's your opinion on where they should look and what they should do? >> Yeah, I really think that the pandemics has shown for the first, the value of data to society at large, there is probably more than a billion people in the world that have seen a chart for the first time in their life. Everybody is being... and COVID has done some magic. But everybody was looking at charts of infection and so on and so forth. So there is a lot more broad awareness of what data can do in improving our society at large for the businesses of course, in the last six, seven months, you heard it enough from lot of leaders that digital transformation is accelerating. Everybody is realizing that the way to interact in the world is becoming more and more digital expecting your customers to come to your branch to do banking is not really an option. And people are also seeing how all the SaaS companies and SaaS businesses, digital businesses, they have really taken off. So if a company like Zoom can suddenly have a a hundred, $150 billion valuation, because you are able to do everything remote, all the enterprises are looking to really touch their customers and partners in a lot more digital way than they could do before. And definitely COVID has also really created this almost, you know, pool buckets of organization. There is lot of companies that have tremendously benefited from it. And there a lot of companies that have been poorly affected, really in a difficult place. And I think both of them for the first category, they are looking at how do I maintain this revenue even after COVID, because one of this thing, you know, hopefully early next year we have a vaccine and things can start to look better again sometime next year. But we have learned so much. We have attracted so many new customers, how do we retain and grow them further? And that means I need to invest more and more in my technology. Now, companies that are not doing well, they really want to figure out how to become more operationally efficient. And they are really under pressure to get more value from there and both categories, improving your revenue, retaining customers. You need to understand the customer behavior. You need to understand which products they are buying at a fine grain level, not with the law of averages, not by looking at a dashboard and saying our average customer likes this kind of product. That one doesn't really work. You have to offer people personalized services and that personalization is just not possible at scale, without really using data on the front lines. You can't have just manager sitting in their office, looking at dashboards and charts and saying these are the kinds of campaigns I need to run because my average customer seems to like these kinds of offers. I need to really empower my sales people, my individual frontline workers, who are interfacing with the customer to be able to make customized offers of services and products to them. And that is possible on the data. So we see a really, a lot more focus in getting value from data, delivering value quickly and digital transformation broadly but definitely leveraging data in businesses. There is tremendous acceleration that is happening and, you know, next five years, it's all going to be about being able to monetize data on the front lines when you are interfacing with your customers and partners >> Ajeet, that's great insight. And I really appreciate what you're saying. And you know, I wrote a blog post in 2007. I said, data will be the new development kit. Back then we used to call development kits, software user development. >> John, you are the real visionary. It took me until 2012 to be able to do this. >> Well, it wasn't clear, but you saw other data was going to have to be programmed be part of the programming. And I think, what you're getting at here is so profound because we're living 2020 people can see the value of data at the right time. It changes the conversations, it changes what's going on in the real time communications of our world with real-time access to information, whether that's machine to machine or machine to human, having data in the right place, changes the context. >> Yap. >> And that is a true, not a tech thing, that's just life, right? I think this year, I think we're going to look back and say, this was the year that everyone realized that real time communications, real-time society needs real time data. And I think it's going to be more important than ever. So it's a really big problem and important one. And thank you for sharing that. >> Yeah. And actually you bring up a very good point programming, developing big data. Data as a development kit. We are also going to announce a new product at Beyond, which will be about bringing ThoughtSpot everywhere, where a lot of business users are in their business applications. And by using ThoughtSpot product, using our full experience, they can obviously do enterprise wide analytics and look at all the data. But if they're looking for insights and nuggets, and they want to ask questions in their business workflows. We are also launching a product capability that will allow software developers to inject data in their business applications and enable and empower their own business users to be able to ask any questions that they might have without having to go to yet another BI product. >> It's data as code. I mean, you almost think about like software metaphors, where's the compiler? Where's the source code? Where's the data code? You start to get into this new mindset of thinking about data as code, because you got to have data about the data. Is it clean data, dirty data? Is it real time? Is it useful? There's a lot of intelligence needed to manage this. This is like a pretty big deal. And it's fairly new in the sense in the science side. Yeah, machine learning has been around for a while and you know, there's tracks for that. But thinking of this way as an operating system mindset, it's not just being a data geek. You know what I'm saying? So I think you're on the right track Ajeet. I really appreciate your thoughts here. Thank you. >> Thank you John. >> Okay. This is a cube conversation. Unpacking the data. The data is the future. We're living in a real-time world and in real-time data can change the outcomes of all kinds of contexts. And with truth, you need data and Ajeet Singh co-founder executive chairman of ThoughtSpot shares his thoughts here in theCUBE. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. 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>> From around the globe. It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of DockerCon Live 2020. brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome to DockerCon 2020. I'm John Furrier here in the DockerCon virtual studios. It's CUBE studios it's theCUBE virtual meets DuckerCon 2020 virtual event with my coach, Jenny Barocio and Peter McKee, as well as Brett Fisher, over on the captains who's doing his sessions. This is the wrap up of the long day of continuous amazing action packed DockerCon 2020. Jenny and Peter, what a day we still got the energy. We can go another 24 hours, let's do it now. This is a wrap up. So exciting day, tons of sessions, great feedback. Twitter's on fire the chats and engagements are on fire, but this is the time where we do the most coveted piece, the community awards, so Jenny, this is the time for you to deliver the drum roll for the community awards, take it away. >> Okay, (mumbles) It's the past few years and have been able to recognize those in the community that deliver so much to everyone else. And even though we're wrapping up here, there is still other content going on because we just couldn't stop till five o'clock. Peter what's happening right now? >> Yeah, so over in the Devs in Action channel, we have earning Docker Daemon with rootless mode. That's still going on, should be a great talk. And then in the How To channel, we have transforming open source into live service with Docker. They're still running now, two great talks. >> Awesome, and then the captains are still going. I think they probably started the after party already, although this channel's going to wait till, you know, 30 more minutes for that one. So if you're an after party mode, definitely go check out after we announced the awards, Brett and Marcos and Jeff and the captain's channel. So, we have some great things to share. And I mentioned it in my last segment, but nothing happens without the collective community. DockerCon is no exception. So, I really just want to take a moment again to thank the Docker team, the attendees, our sponsors and our community leaders and captains. They've been all over the virtual conference today, just like they would have been at a real conference. And I love the energy. You know, as an organizer planning a virtual event, there's always the concern of how it's going to work. Right, this is new for lots of people, but I'm in Florida and I'm thrilled with how everyone showed up today. Yeah, for sure. And to the community done some excellent things, Marcus, over them in the Captain's channel, he has built out PWD play with Docker. So, if you haven't checked that out, please go check that out. We going to be doing some really great things with that. Adding some, I think I mentioned earlier in the day, but we're adding a lot of great content into their. A lot more labs, so, please go check that out. And then talking about the community leaders, you know, they bring a lot to the community. They put there their free time in, right? No one paying them. And they do it just out of sheer joy to give back to the community organizing events. I don't know if you ever organized an event Jenny I know you have, but they take a lot of time, right? You have to plan everything, you have to get sponsors, you have to find out place to host. And now with virtual, you have to figure out how you're going to deliver the feel of a meetup in virtually. And we just had our community summit the other day and we heard from the community leaders, what they're doing, they're doing some really cool stuff. Live streaming, Discord, pulling in a lot of tools to be able to kind of recreate that, feel of being together as a community. So super excited and really appreciate all the community leaders for putting in the extra effort one of these times. >> Yeah, for really adapting and continuing in their mission and their passion to share and to teach. So, we want to recognize a few of those awesome community leaders. And I think we get to it right now Peter, are you ready? >> Set, let's go for it, right away. >> All right, so, the first community leaders are from Docker Bangalore and they are rocking it. Sangam Biradar, Ajeet singh Raina and Saiyam Pathak, thank you all so much for your commitment to this community. >> All right, and the next one we have is Docker Panang. Thank you so much to Sujay Pillai, did a great job. >> Got to love that picture and that shirt, right? >> Yeah. >> All right, next up, we'd love to recognize Docker Rio, Camila Martins, Andre Fernande, long time community leaders. >> Yeah, if I ever get a chance that's. I have a bunch of them that I want to go travel and visit but Rio is on top of list I think. >> And then also-- >> Rio maybe That could be part of the award, it's, you get to. >> I can deliver. >> Go there, bring them their awards in person now, as soon as we can do that again. >> That would be awesome, that'd be awesome. Okay, the next one is Docker Guatemala And Marcos Cano, really appreciate it and that is awesome. >> Awesome Marcos has done, has organized and put on so many meetups this last year. Really, really amazing. All right, next one is Docker Budapest and Lajos Papp, Karoly Kass and Bence Lvady, awesome. So, the mentorship and leadership coming out of this community is fantastic and you know, we're so thrilled to write, now is you. >> All right, and then we go to Docker Algeria. Yeah we got some great all over the country it's so cool to see. But Ayoub Benaissa, it's been great look at that great picture in background, thank you so much. >> I think we need we need some clap sound effects here. >> Yeah where's Beth. >> I'm clapping. >> Lets, lets. >> Alright. >> Last one, Docker Chicago, Mark Panthofer. After Chicago, Docker Milwaukee and Docker Madison one meet up is not enough for Mark. So, Mark, thank you so much for spreading your Docker knowledge throughout multiple locations. >> Yeah, and I'll buy half a Docker. Thank you to all of our winners and all of our community leaders. We really, really appreciate it. >> All right, and the next award I have the pleasure of giving is the Docker Captain's Award. And if you're not familiar with captains, Docker captains are recognized by Docker for their outstanding contributions to the community. And this year's winner was selected by his fellow captains for his tireless commitment to that community. On behalf of Docker and the captains. And I'm sure the many many people that you have helped, all 13.3 million of them on Stack Overflow and countless others on other platforms, the 2020 tip of the Captain's Hat award winner is Brandon Mitchell, so so deserving. And luckily Brandon made it super easy for me to put together this slide because he took his free DockerCon selfie wearing his Captains' Hat, so it worked out perfectly. >> Yeah, I have seen Brandon not only on Stack Overflow, but in our community Slack answering questions, just in the general area where everybody. The questions are random. You have everybody from intermediate to beginners and Brandon is always in there answering questions. It's a huge help. >> Yeah, always in there answering questions, sharing code, always providing feedback to the Docker team. Just such a great voice, both in and out for Docker. I mean, we're so proud to have you as a captain, Brandon. And I'm so excited to give you this award. All right, so, that was the most fun, right? We get to do the community awards. Do you want to do any sort of recap on the day? >> What was your favorite session? What was your favorite tweet? Favorite tweet was absolutely Peter screenshotting his parents. >> Mom mom my dear mom, it's sweet though, that's sweet. I appreciate it, can't believe they gave me an award. >> Yeah, I mean, have they ever seen you do a work presentation before? >> No, they've seen me lecture my kids a lot and I can go on about life's lessons and then I'm not sure if it's the same thing but yeah. >> I don't think so. >> No they have never see me. >> Peter you got to get the awards for the kids. That's the secret to success, you know, and captain awards and the community household awards for the kids. >> Yeah, well I am grooming my second daughter, she teaches go to afterschool kids and never thought she would be interested in programming cause when she was younger she wasn't interested in, but yes, super interested in now I have to, going to bring her into the community now, yeah. >> All right, well, great awards. Jenny is there any more awards, we good on the awards? >> Nope, we are good on the awards, but certainly not the thank yous is for today. It's an absolute honor to put on an event like this and have the community show up, have our speakers show up have the Docker team show up, right? And I'm just really thrilled. And I think the feedback has been phenomenal so far. And so I just really want to thank our speakers and our sponsors and know that, you know, while DockerCon may be over, like what we did today here and it never ends. So, thank you, let's continue the conversation. There's still things going on and tons of sessions on demand now, you can catch up, okay. >> One more thing, I have to remind everybody. I mentioned it earlier, but I got to say it again go back, watch the keynote. And I'll say at this time there is an Easter egg in there. I don't think anybody's found it yet. But if you do, tweet me and might be a surprise. >> Well you guys-- >> Are you watching your tweet feed right now? Because you're going to get quite a few. >> Yeah, it's probably blowing up right now. >> Well you got to get on a keynote deck for sure. Guys, it's been great, you guys have been phenomenal. It's been a great partnership, the co-creation this event. And again, what's blows me away is the global reach of the event, the interaction, the engagement and the cost was zero to attend. And that's all possible because of the sponsors. Again, shout out to Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure Engine X, Cockroach Labs and sneak of Platinum sponsors. And also we had some ecosystem sponsors. And if you liked the event, go to the sponsors and say hello and say, thank you. They're all listed on the page, hit their sessions and they really make it possible. So, all this effort on all sides have been great. So, awesome, I learned a lot. Thanks everyone for watching. Peter you want to get a final word and then I'll give Jenny the final, final word. >> No again, yes, thank you, thank you everybody. It's been great, theCUBE has been phenomenal. People behind the scenes has been just utterly professional. And thank you Jenny, if anybody doesn't know, you guys don't know how much Jenny shepherds this whole process through she's our captain internally making sure everything stays on track and gets done. You cannot even imagine what she does. It's incredible, so thank you, Jenny. I really, really appreciate it. >> Jenny, take us home, wrap this up 2020, dockerCon. >> All Right. >> In the books, but it's going to be on demand. It's 365 days a year now, come on final word. >> It's not over, it's not over. Community we will see you tomorrow. We will continue to see you, thank you to everyone. I had a great day, I hope everyone else did too. And happy DockerCon 2020, see you next year. >> Okay, that's a wrap, see on the internet, everyone. I'm John, for Jenny and Peter, thank you so much for your time and attention throughout the day. If you were coming in and out, remember, go see those sessions are on a calendar, but now they're a catalog of content and consume and have a great evening. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and as part of my CEO and CXO series I've been bringing in leaders around the industry and I'm really pleased to have Sudheesh Nair, who is the CEO of ThoughtSpot Cube alum. Great to see you against Sudheesh, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure Dave. Thank you so much for having me. I hope everything is well with you and your family. >> Yeah ditto back at you. I know you guys were in a hot spot for a while so you know we power on together, so I got to ask you. You guys are AI specialists, maybe sometimes you can see things before they happen. At what point did you realize that this COVID-19 was really going to be something that would affect businesses globally and then specifically your business. >> Yeah it's amazing, isn't it? I mean we used to think that in Silicon Valley we are sitting at the top of the world. AI and artificial intelligence, machine learning, Cloud, IOT and all of a sudden this little virus comes in and put us all in our places basically. We are all waiting for doctors and others to figure these things out so we can actually go outside. That tells you all about what is really important in life sometimes. It's been a hard journey for most people because of what a huge health event this has been. From a Silicon Valley point of view and specifically from artificial intelligence point of view, there is not a lot of history here that we can use to predict the future, however early February we had our sales kick off and we had a lot of our sellers who came from Asia and it became sort of clear to us immediately during our sales kick off in Napa Valley that this is not like any other event. The sort of things that they were going through in Asia we sort of realized immediately that us and when it gets to the shores of the US, this is going to really hurt. So we started hunkering down as a company, but as you mentioned early when we were talking, California in general had a head start, so we've been hunkered down for almost five weeks now, as a company and as the people and the results are showing. You know it is somewhat contained. Now obviously the real question is what next? How do we go out? But that's probably the next journey. >> So a lot of the executives that I've talked to, of course they start with the number one importance is the health and well-being of our employees. We set up the work from home infrastructure, et cetera. So that's I think, been fairly well played in the media and beginning to understand that pretty well. Also, you saw I talked to Frank Slootman and he's sort of joked about the Sequoia memos, that you know eliminate unnecessary expenses and practices. I've always eliminated unnecessary expenses, keep it to the essentials, but one of the things that I haven't probed with CEOs and I'd love your thoughts on this is, did you have to rethink sort of the ideal customer profile and your value proposition in the specific context of COVID? Was that something that you deliberately did? >> Yeah so it's a really important question that you asked, and I saw the Frank interview and I a 100% agree with that. Inside the company we have this saying, and our co-founder Ajeet actually coined the phrase of living like a middle-class company, and we've always lived that, even though we have, 300 plus million dollars in the bank and we raised a big round last year. It is important to know that as a growth stage company, we are not measured on what's in the bank. It's about the value that we are delivering and how much I'll be able to collect from customers to run the business. The living like a middle-class family has always been the ethos of the company and that has been a good thing. However, I've been with ThoughtSpot for a little more than 18 months. I joined as the CEO. I was an early investor in the company and there are a couple of big changes that we made in the last 18 months, and one of is moving to Cloud which we can talk. The other one has been around narrowing our focus on who we sell to, because one of the things that, as you know very well Dave, is that the world of data is extremely complex. Every company can come in and say, "We have the best solution out there" and it can just be in the world, but the reality is no single product is going to solve every problem for a customer when it comes to a data analytics issue. All we can hope for is that we become part of a package or solution that solves a very specific problem, so in that context there's a lot of services involved, a lot of understanding of customer problems involved. We are not a bi-product in the sense of Tableau or click on Microsoft, but they do. We are about a use case based outcomes, so we knew that we can't be everywhere. So the second change we made is actually a narrower focus, exclusively sell to global. That class, the middle class mentality, really paid off now because almost all the customers we sell to are very large customers and the four work verticals that we were seeing tremendous progress, one was healthcare, second was financial sector, the third was telecom and manufacturing and the last one is repair. Out of these four, I would say manufacturing is the one where we have seen a slowdown, but the other verticals have been, I would say cautiously spending. Being very responsible and thus far, I'm not here to say that everything is fine, but the impact if you take Zoom as a spectrum, on one end of the spectrum, where everything is doing amazingly well, because they are a good product market fit to hospitality industry on the other side. I would say ThoughtSpot and our approach to data analytics is closer to this than that. >> That's very interesting Sudheesh because, of course health care, I don't think they have time to do anything right now. I mean they're just so overwhelmed so that's obviously an interesting area that's going to continue to do well I would think. And they, the Financial Services guys, there's a lot of liquidity in the system and after 2009 the FinTech guys or the financial, the banks are doing quite well. They may squeeze you a little bit because they're smart negotiators, but as you say manufacturing with the supply chains, and in retail, look, if your ecommerce I mean Amazon hit, all-time highs today up whatever, 20% in the last two weeks. I mean just amazing what's happening, so it's really specific parts of those sectors will continue to do well, won't they? >> Absolutely, I think look, I saw this joke on Twitter, what's the number one cost? What is in fact (mic cuts out). Very soon people will say it is COVID and even businesses that have been tried to, sort of relatively, reluctant to really embrace the transformation that the customers have been asking for. This has become the biggest forcing function and that's actually a good thing because consumers are going to ultimately win because once you get groceries delivered to you into your front doors, it's going to be hard to sort of go back to standing in the line in Costco, when InstaCart can actually deliver it for you and you get used to it, so there are some transformation that is going to happen because of COVID. I don't think that society will go back from, but having said that, it's also not transformation for the sake of transformation. So speaking from our point of view on data analytics, I sort of believe that the last three to four years we have been sort of living in the Renaissance of enterprise data analytics and that's primarily because of three things. The first thing, every consumer is expecting, no matter how small or the big business, is to get to know them. You know, I don't want you to treat me like an average. I don't want you treat me like a number. Treat me like a person, which means understand me but personalize the services you are delivering and make sure that everything that you send me are relevant. If there's a marketing campaign or promo or customer support call, make sure it's relevant. The relevance and personalization. The second is, in return for that. customers are willing to give you all sorts of data. The privacy, be damned, so to a certain extent they are giving you location information, medical information,-- And the last part is with Cloud, the amount of data that you can collect and free plus in data warehouse like Snowflakes, like Redshift. It's been fundamentally shifted, so when you toggle them together the customers demand for better actors from the business, then amount of data that they're willing to give and collect to IOT and variables and then cloud-based technologies that allows you to process and store this means that analyzing this data and then delivering relevant actions to the consumers is no longer a nice to have and that I think is part of the reason why ThoughtSpot is finding sort of a tailwind, even with all this global headwind that we are all in. >> Well I think too, the innovation formula really has changed in our industry. I've said many times, it's not Moore's law anymore, it's the combination of data plus AI applied to that data and Cloud for scale and you guys are at the heart of that, so I want to talk about the market space a little bit. You look at BI and analytics, you look at the market. You know the Gartner Magic Quadrant and to your point, you know the companies on there are sort of chalk and cheese, to borrow a phrase from our friends across the pond. I mean, you're not power BI, you're not SaaS. I mean you're sort of search led. You're turning natural language into complex sequel queries. You're bringing in artificial intelligence and machine intelligence to really simplify and dramatically expand and put into the hands of business people analytics. So explain a little bit. First of all, do I have that sort of roughly right? And help us frame the market space how you think about it. >> Yeah I mean first of all, it is amazing that the diverse industry and technologies that you speak to and how you are able to grasp all of them and summarize them within a matter of seconds is a term to understand in itself. You and Stew, you both have that. You are absolutely right. So the way I think of this is that BI technologies have been around and it's played out really well. It played it's part. I mean if you look at it the way I think of BI, the most biggest BI tool is still Excel. People still want to use Excel and that is the number one BI tool ever. Then 10 years ago Tableau came in and made visualizations so delightful and a pic so to speak. That became the better way to consume complex data. Then Microsoft came in Power BI and then commoditized and the visualization to a point that, you know Tableau had to fight and it ended up selling to the Salesforce. We are not trying to play there because I think if you chase the idea of visualization it is going to be a long hard journey for ThoughtSpot to catch Tableau in visualization. That's not what we are trying to do. What we are trying to do is that you have a lot of data on one hand and you have a consumer sitting here and saying data doesn't mean you treated me well. What is my action that is this quote, very customized action quote. And our question is, how does beta turn into bespoke action inside a business? The insurance company is calling. You are calling an insurance company's customer support person. How do you know that the impact that you are getting from them is customized. But turning data into insight is an algorithmic process. That's what BI does, but that's like a few people in an organization can do that. Think of them like oil. They don't mix with water, that's the business people. The merchandising specialist who figures out which one should become site and what should be the price what should be ranking. That's the merchandiser. Their customer support person, that's a business user. They don't necessarily do Python or SQL, so what happens is in businesses you have the data people like water and the business people who touch the customer and interact with them every day, they're like the water. They don't mix. The idea of ThoughtSpot is very simple. We don't want this demarcation. We don't want this chasm. We want to break it so that every single person who interact with the customer should be able to have an interactive storytelling with the data, so that every decision that they make takes data into insight to knowledge to action, and that decision-making pipeline cannot be gut driven alone. It has to be enabled by data science and human experience coming together. So in our view, a well deployed data platform, decision-making platform, will enhance and augment human experience, as opposed to human experience says, this data says that, so you've got to pick one. That's an old model and that has been the approach with natural language based interactive access with the BI being done automated through AI in the backend, parts what we are able to put very complex data science in front of a 20 year experienced merchandising specialist in a large e-commerce website without learning Python, without learning people, without understanding data warehouse >> Right so, a couple of things I want to pick up on. I mean data is plentiful, insights aren't. That's really the takeaway from one of the things that you mentioned and this notion of storytelling is very, very important. I mean, all business people, they better be storytellers in some way shape or form and what better way to tell stories than with data, and so, because as you say it's no longer gut feel, it's not the answer anymore. So it seems to me Sudheesh, that you guys are transformative. The decision to focus on the global 2000 and really not, get washed up in the Excel, well I could just do it in Excel, or I'm going to go get Power BI, it's good enough. It's really, you're trying to be transformative and you've got a really disruptive model that we talked about before, search led and you're speaking to the system, or, typing in a way that's more natural, I wonder if you could comment on that and particularly that disruption of that transformation. >> Remember we are selling to global 2000. Almost all of them will have Tableau or one of these power BI or one of these solutions already, so you're not trying to go right and change that. What we have done is very clearly focus on use cases. We're transforming data into action. We will move the needle for the bit, but for example with the COVID situation going on, one of the most popular use cases for us is around working capital management. Now a CFO who's been in the business for 20 or 30 years is an expert and have the right kind of gut feeling about how her business is running when it comes to working capital. However, imagine now she can do 20 what-if scenarios in the next five seconds or next 10 minutes without going to the SPN 18, without going to the BI team. She can say what if we reduce hiring in Japan and instead we focus them on Singapore? What if we move 20% of marketing dollars from Germany to New York? What would be the impact of AR going up by 1% versus AP going down by 1%? She needs to now do complex scenarios, but without delay. It's sort of like how do I find a restaurant through Yelp versus going to the lobby to talk to a specialist who tells me the local restaurant. This interactive database storytelling for gut enhances the decision-making is very powerful. This is why, customer have, our largest customer has spent more than $26 million with ThougthSpot and this is not small. Our average is around close to 700k. This week for example, we are having a webinar where Verizon's SVP of Analytics specifically focused on finance. He's actually going to be on a webinar with our CFO. Our CFO Sophie, one of our financial specialists and Jeff Noto from Verizon are going to be on this talking about working capital management. What parts ThoughtSpot is a portion of, but they are sharing their experience of how do we manage, so that kind of varies, like extremely rigid focus on use cases, supply chain, modeling different things so that someone who knows Asia can really interact with the data to figure out if our supply chain from Bangladesh is going to be impacted because of COVID can we go to Ecuador? What will that look like? What will be the cost? What's the transportation cost, the fuel cost, Business has become so complex you don't have time to take five, six days to look at the report, no matter how pretty that report is, you have to make it efficient. You need to be able to make a lightning fast decision and something like COVID is really exposing all of that because day by day situation on the ground is changing. You know, employees are calling in sick. The virus is breaking out in one place, other place. If it's not, curves are going up and down so you cannot have any sort of delay between human experience and data signs and all of that comes down to your point telling visual stories so that the organization can rally behind the changes that they want to make. >> So these are mission-critical use cases. They are big problems that you're solving and attacking. As you said, you're not all things to all people. One of the things you're not is a data store, right? So you've got a partner, you've got to have an ecosystem, whether it's cloud databases, the cloud itself. I wonder if you could talk about some of the key partnerships that you're forming and how you're going to market and how that's affecting your business. >> Yeah, I mean one of the things that I've always believed in Silicon Valley is that companies die out of indigestion, not out of starvation. You try to do everything. That's how you end up dying and for us in the space of data, it's an extremely humbling space because there is so much to do, data prep, data warehousing, you know a mash-up of data, hosting of data, We have clearly decided that our ability is best spent on making artificial intelligence to work, interactive storytelling for business use and that's it. With that said, we needed a high velocity agility partner in the back end and Cloud based data warehouse have become a huge tailwind for us because our entire customer deployments are on Cloud, and the number one, obviously as you know from Frank's thing, the Snowflake has actually given, customers have seen Snowflakes plus ThoughtSpot is actually a good thing and we are exclusive in global 2000 and the Snowflake is climbing up there and we are able to build a good mutual partnership, but we are also seeing a really creative partnership all the way from product design to go to market and compensation alignment with Amazon on their push on Redshift as well. Google, we have announced partnership. There is a little bit of (mic cuts out) in the beginning we are getting, and just a couple of weeks ago we started working with Microsoft on their Azure Synapse algo. Now I would say that it's lagging, we still have work to do but Amazon and Snowflake are really pushing in terms of what customers want to see, and it completely aligns with our value popular, one plus one equals three. It really works well for our customers >> And Google is what, BigQuery plus Google Cloud, or what are you doing there? >> Yep so both Amazon and Google. Well, what we are doing at three different pieces. One if obviously the hosting of their cloud platforms. Second is data warehouse and enterprise data warehouse, which is Redshift and BigQuery. Third, we are also pretty good at taking machine learning algorithms that they have built for specific verticals. We're going to take those and then ingest them and deliver better. So for example if you are one of the largest supply companies in the world and you want to know what's the shipment rate from China and it shows and then the next thing you want to know is what the failure rate on this based on last behavior when you compressed a shipment rate, and that probably could use a bit of specific algorithms and you know Google and others have actually built a library of algorithms that can be injected into ThoughtSpot. We will simply answer the question of we may have gotten that algorithm from the Google library, sort of the business use is concerned. It doesn't really matter, so we have made all that invisible and we are able to deliver democratized access to Bespoke Insights to a business user, who are too sort of been afraid to deal with the sector data. >> Since you mentioned that you've got obviously several hundred million dollars in cash. You've raised over half a billion. You've talked previously about potential acquisitions, about IPO, are you considering acquisitions? M&A at this point in time? I mean there may be some deals out there. There's certainly some talent out there, but boy the market is changing so fast. I mean, it seems to, certain sectors are actually doing quite well. Will you consider M&A at this point? >> Yes, so I think IPO and M&A are two different-- IPO definitely, it will be foolish to say that this hasn't pushed our clients back a little bit because this is a huge event. I think there will be a correction across valuation and all of that. However, it is also important for us we use this opportunity to look at how we are investing our resources and investment for long-term versus the short-term and make sure that we are more focused and more tightening at the belt. We are doing that internally. Having said that, being a private company our valuation is, you know at least in theory, frozen, and then we have a pretty good cash position of close to $300 million, which means that it is absolutely an opportunity for us to seriously consider M&A. The important thing going back to my adage of, companies don't die out of starvation. It is critical to make sure that whatever we do, we do it with clarity. Are we doing it for talent? Are we doing it for tech? Or are we doing it for market? When you have a massive event like this, it is a poor idea to go after new market. It is important to go to our existing customers who are very large global 2000 firms and then identify problems that we cannot solve otherwise and then add technology to solve those problems, so technology acquisitions are absolutely something to consider, but it needs some more time to settle in because, the first two weeks were all people who were blindsided by this, then the last two weeks we have now gotten the mojo back in sales and mojo back in engineering, and now I think it is time for us to digest and prepare for these next two, three quarters of event and as part of that, companies like us who are fortunate enough to be on a good cash position, we'll absolutely look for interesting and good deals in the M&S space. >> Yeah, it makes sense, is tell and tech and, post IPO you can worry about Tam expansion. You'll be under pressure to do that as the CEO, but for now that's a very pragmatic approach. My last question is, there's some things when you think about, you say five weeks now you've been essentially on lockdown. You must, as many of us start thinking about wow, a lot of this work from home which came so fast people wouldn't even think about it earlier. You know, some companies mandated the beehive approach. Now everybody's open to that. There are certain things that are likely to remain permanent post COVID. Have you thought much about that? Generally and specifically how it might affect your business, the permanence of post COVID. Your thoughts. >> Yeah I've thought a lot about it. In fact, this morning I was speaking with our CRO Brian McCarthy about this. I think the change will happen, think of like an onion's inner most layer, I think the most, my hope is, that the biggest change will be in every one of us internally, as a what sort of a person am I and what does my position in the world means. The ego of each one of us that we carry because if this global event in one shot did not make you rethink your own sort of position in this big universe I think that's a mess. So the first thing has to be about being a better person. The second thing is, I had this two, three days of fever which was negative for COVID but I isolated myself, but that gave me sort of an idea of dipping in the dark room where I'm hoping my family won't get infected and you know my parents are in India so I sort of also realized that what is really important for you in life and how much family should mean to you, so that goes to the first, yourself second, your relationship with family, but having said that, the third thing when it comes to business building is also the importance for building with quality people, because when things go wrong it is so critical to have people who believe in the purpose of what you are trying to build. People with good faith and unshakable faith, personal faith and unshakable faith in the purpose of the company and most importantly you mentioned something which is the story telling. People, leaders who can absolutely communicate with clarity and certainty. It becomes the most important thing to lead an organization. I mean, you are a small business owner. You know we are in a small company with around 500 people. There is nothing like sitting at home waiting to see how the company is doing over email if you're a friend line engineer or a seller. Communication becomes so critical, so having the trust and the respect of organization and have the ability to clearly and transparently communicate is the most important thing for the company and over communicating due to the time of crisis. These things are so useful even after this crisis is over. Obviously from a technology point of view, you know people have been speaking a lot about working remotely and technology changes, security, those things will happen but I think if these three things were to happen in that order. Be a better person, be a better family member and be a better leader, I think the world will be better off and the last thing I'll also tell you, that you know in Silicon Valley sometimes we have this disregard for arts and literature and fight over science. I hope that goes away, because I can't imagine living without books, without movies, without Netflix and everything. Art makes yourself creative and enriches our lives. You know, sports is no longer there on TV and the fact that people are able to immerse their imagination in books and fiction and watch TV. That also reminds you how important it is to have a good balance between arts and science in this world, so I have a long list of things that I hope we as a people and as a society will get better. >> Yeah, a lot more game playing in our household and it's good to reconnect in that regard. Well Sudheesh, you've always been a very clear thinker and you're in a great spot and an awesome leader. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really great to see you again. All the best to you, your family and the broader community in your area. >> Dave, you've been very kind with this. Thank you so much, I wish you the same and hopefully we'll get to see face-to-face in the near future. Thanks a lot. >> I hope so, thank you. All right and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)