>>Welcome back to super cloud 22, our inaugural event. It's a pilot event here in the cube studios we're live and streaming virtually until we do it in person. Maybe next year. I'm John fury, host of the cube with Dave Lon two great guests, distinguished engineers managers, CTOs investors. Mariana Tessel is a CTO of Intuit ins Ray founder of vertex ventures. Both have a lot of DNA. Founder allow cloud here with mark Andre and Ben Horowitz, a variety of other great ventures you've done. And now you're an investor. Yep. Maria, you've been a seasoned CTO, VP of engineering, VMware Docker Intuit. Now thanks for joining us. >>Absolutely. >>So super cloud is a, is a thing. And apparently it's got a lot of momentum and you guys got stats over there at, at Intuit in, so you're investing and we were challenged on super cloud. Our initial thesis was you build on the clouds, get all that leverage like snowflake, you get a good differentiation and then you compete and then move to other clouds. Now it's becoming a thing where I can do this. Every enterprise could possibly do it. So I want to get your guys thoughts on what you think of super cloud concept and where are the holes in it, what needs to be defined. And so we'll start with you. You've done a lot of cloud things in your day. What >>Do you think? Yeah, it's the whole cloud journey started with a desire to consolidate and desire to actually provide uniformity and, and standards driven ways of doing things. And I think Amazon was a leader there. They helped kind of teach everybody else. You know, when I was in loud cloud, we were trying to do it with proprietary stacks just wouldn't work. But once everyone standardized upon Unix and you know, the chip sets no longer became as relevant. They did a lot of good things there, but what's happened since then is now you've got competing standards at the API layer at the interface layer no longer at the chip set layer, no longer at the operating system layer. Right? So the evolution of the, the, the battles are still there. When you talk about multicloud and super cloud, though, like one of the big things you have to keep in mind is latency is not free. Latency is very expensive and it's getting even more expensive now with, with multi-cloud. So you have to really understand where the separations of boundaries are between your data, your compute, and, and the network is just there as a facilitator to help binding compute and data. Right? And I think there's a lot of bets being made across different vendors like CloudFlare Akamai, as well as Amazon Google Microsoft in terms of how they think we should take computing either to the edge, from the core or back and forth. >>These, this is structural change. I mean, this is structural, >>It's desired by incumbents, but it's not something that I'm seeing from the consumption. I'd love to hear, hear from our end's per perspective, from a consumption point of view, like how much edge computing really matters. Right. >>Mario. >>So I think there's like, there's kind of a, a story of like two, like it's kind of, you can cut it for both edges. No, no pun intended on one end. It is really simplifying to actually go into like a single cloud and standardize on it and just have everything there. But I think what over time companies find is that they end up in multiple clouds, whether like, you know, through acquisitions or through like needing to use a service in another cloud. So you do find yourself in a situation where you have multi multi-cloud and you have to kind of work through it and understand how to make it all like work and latency is an issue, but also for many, many workloads, you can work around it and you can make it work where you have workloads that actually span multiple vendors and clouds. You know, again, having said that, I would say the world is such, that is still a simplifying assumption. When if you go to a single cloud, it's much easier to just go and, and bet on that >>Easier in terms of everything's integrated, IAS works with SAS, they solve a lot of problems. >>Correct. And you can do like for your developers, you can actually provide an environment that's super homogenous, simple. You can use services easily up and down the stack. And, you know, we, we actually made that deliberate decision. When we started migrating to the cloud at the beginning, it was like, oh, let's do like hybrid we'll, you know, make it, so it work anywhere. It was so complicated. It was not worth it. >>When was the, when did you give up, what was the moment? Was there a flash point where you said, oh, this is terrible. This is >>Dead. Yeah. When, when we started to try to make it interoperable and you just see what it requires to do that and the complexity of the architecture that it just became not worth it for the gains you have. >>So speaking obviously as a SAS provider, right. So it just doesn't, it didn't make business case sense for you guys to do that. So it was super cloud. Then an infrastructure thing we just heard from Ben wa deja VI that they're not, they're going beyond instantiating their, their data cloud. They're actually running, you know, their own little snow grid. They called it. And, and then when I asked him, well, what about latency? He said, well, we copied data over, you know, so, okay. That's you have to do, but that's a singular experience with the same governance or the same security. Just wasn't worth it for you guys is what I'm hearing. >>Correct. But again, like for some workload or for some services that we want to use, we are gonna go there and we are gonna then figure out what is the work around the latency issue, whether it's like copy or, you know, redundancy. >>Well, the question I have Dave on snowflake is maybe the question for you and in the panel is snowflake a tan expansion opportunity, or is there a technical reason to go to other clouds? >>I think they wanted to leverage the hyperscale infrastructure globally. And they said that they're out there, it's a free gift. We're gonna go take it. I, I think it started with we're on AWS. Do you think? And then we're on Azure and then we're on Google. And then they said, why don't we just connect all these and make it a singular experience? And yeah, I guess it's a TA expansion as a differentiator and it's, it adds value. Right. If I can share data across that global network, >>We have customers on Azure now, >>Right? Yeah. Yeah. Of course. >>You guys don't need to go CP. What do you think about that? >>Well, I think Snowflake's in a good position cuz they work mostly with analytical workloads and you have capacity. That's always gonna increase like no one subtracts, their analytical workload like ever, right. So there was just compounded growth is like 50% or 80% for, you know, many enterprises despite their best intentions, not to collect more data, they just can't stop doing it. So it's different than if you're like an Oracle or a transactional database where you don't have those, you know, like kind of infinite growth paths. So Snowflake's gonna continue to expand footprint their customers. They don't mind as long as you, they can figure out the, the lowest cost on denominator for, for that. >>Yeah. So it makes sense to be in all the clouds >>For them, for, for them, for sure. Yeah. >>But, but, but Oracle just announced with Microsoft what I would call super cloud, a, a cross cloud database service running on OCI and Azure with very low latency and a database that looks like a, the singular experience. Yeah. With, with a PAs layers >>That lost me after OCI that's >>Okay. You know, but that's the, that's the, the BS answer for all U VCs. The do nobody develops on Oracle? Well, it's a 240 billion market cap company. Show me who you all want be. >>We're gonna talk about SRDF and em C next, you >>All want Oracle. So there we go. You throw that into, you all want Oracle to buy your companies, your funding, you know, cause, cause we all wanna be like Oracle with that kinda cash flow. But, but anyway, >>Here's, here's one thing that I'm noticing that is gonna be really practical. I think for companies that do run SA is because like, you know, you have all these solutions, whether it's like analytics or like monitoring or logging or whatever. And each one of them is very data hungry and all of them have like SAS solutions that end up copy the data, moving data to their cloud, and then they might charge you by the size of your data. It does become kind of overwhelming for companies to use that many tools and basically maybe have that data kind of charge for it, multiple places because you use it for different purposes or just in general, if you have a lot of data, you know, that that is becoming an issue. So that's something that I've noticed in our, in our own kind of, you know, a world, but it's just something that I think companies need to think about how they solve because eventually a lot of companies will say, I cannot have all these solutions, so there's no way I'm gonna be willing to have so many copies of the data and actually pay for that. >>So many times, just something to think about. >>But one of the criticisms of the super cloud concept is that it's just SAS. If I'm running workload on prem and I, and I've got, you know, a connection to the cloud, which you probably do, that's, that's SAS, what's, what's the big deal and that's not anything new or different. So I'd love to get your thoughts on that. But Goldman Sachs, for instance, just announced the service last reinvent with AWS, connecting their tools, their data, and their software from on-prem to AWS, they're offering it as a service. I'm like, Hmm. Kind of looking like Supercloud, but maybe it's just SAS. >>It could be. And like, what I'm talking about is not so much like, you know, like what you wanna connect your data. But the idea is like a lot of the providers of different services, like in the past and, and like higher layer, they're actually COPI the data. They need the data in their cloud or their solution. And it just becomes complicated and expensive is, is kind of like my point. So yes, connecting it like for you to have the data in one place and then be able to connect to it. I think that is a valid, if, if that's kinda what you think about as a super cloud, that is a valid need, I think that companies will >>Have where developers actually want access to tools that might exist. >>Also the key is developers, right? Yeah. Developers decide all decisions, not database on administrators, not, you know, a hundred percent security engineers, not admins. So what's really interesting is where are the developers going next? If you look at the current winners in the current ecosystem, companies like MongoDB, I mean, they capture the minds of yeah. The JavaScript, you know, no JS developers absolutely very early on. And I started catch base and I could tell you like the difference was that capture motion was so important. So developers are basically used to this game-like experience now where they want to see tools that are free, whether it's open source or not, they actually don't care. They just want, and they want it SAS. They want it SAS delivered on demand. Right. And pay as you go. And so there's a lot of these different frameworks coming out next generation, no code, low code, whether it's Java, JavaScript, rust, you know, whatever, you know, go Lang. And there's a lot of people fighting religious wars about how to develop the next kind of modern pattern design pattern. Okay. And that's where a lot of excitement is how we look at like investment opportunities. Like where are those big bets who are, you know, frustrated developers, who are they frustrated, what's wrong with their current environment? You know, do they really enjoy using Kubernetes or trying to use Kubernetes? Yeah. Right. Like developers have a very different view than operator, >>But you mentioned couch base. I mean, I look at couch base what they're doing with Capellas as a form of Supercloud. I mean, I think that's an excellent, they're bringing that out to the edge. We're gonna hear later on from someone from couch base. That's gonna talk about that now. It's kind of a lightweight, you know, sort of, it's gonna be a, a synchronization, but it's the beginning >>A cool new venture deal that I'm not in, but was like duck DB. I'm like, what's duck DB like, well, it's an Emory database that has like this like remote store thing. I'm like, okay, that sounds interesting. Like let's call Mike Olson cuz that sounds like sleepy cat redone red distributed world. But like it's, it's like there's a lot of people refactoring design patterns that we're all grew up with since the popup days of, you know, typical round. Right? >>Yeah. That's the refactory I think that's the big pattern. So I have to ask you guys, what are you guys investing in? We've got a couple minutes left to chat about that. What are you investing at into it from a, from a, a CTO engineering perspective and what are you investing in that feels super cloud like to you? >>Well, the, the thing that like I'm focused on is to make sure that we have absolutely best in the world development environment for our engineers, where it's modern, it's easy to use and it incorporates as many things as we can into that environment. So the engineers don't have to think about it. Like one big example would be security and how we incorporated that into development environment. So again, the engineers don't have to bother with trying to think through how they secure their workloads and every step of the way their other things that we incorporated, whether it's like rollbacks or monitoring or, you know, like baly enough other things. But I think that's really an investment that has panned off for us. We actually started investing in development environment several years ago. We started measure our development velocity and we, it actually went up by six X justly investing. So >>User experience, developer experience and productivity pretty much right. >>Yeah. AB absolutely. Yeah. That's like a big investment area for us that, you know, cloud cloud >>Sounds like super cloudlike factor and I'm assuming it's you're on AWS. >>We are mostly on AWS. Yes. >>And so what are you investing in that from a VC money doling out standpoint? That feels super cloudlike >>So very similar to what we just touched on a lot of developer tool experiences. We have a company that we've invested in called ops level that the service catalogs it's, it's helping, you know, understand your, where your services live and how they could be accessed and, and you know, enterprise kind of that come with that. And then we have a company called Lugo that helps you do serverless debugging container debugging, cuz it turns out debugging distributed, you know, applications is a real problem right now just you can only do so much by log tracing, right? We have a company haven't announced yet that's in the web assembly space. So we're looking at modernizing the next generation past stack and throwing everything out the window, including Java and all of the, you know, current prebuilt components because turns out 90% of enterprise workloads are actually not used. They're they're just policy code. You compiled with they're sitting there as vulnerabilities that no one's actually accessing, but you still have to compile with all of it. So we have a lot of bloatware happening in the enterprise. So we're thinking about how do you skinny that up with the next generation paths that's enterprise capable with security context and frameworks >>Super pass. >>Well, yeah, super pass. That's a kind of good way to, well, is >>It, is it a consistent developer experience across clouds? >>It is. And, and, and, and web assembly is a very raw standard if you can call it that. I mean it's, but it's supported by every modern browser, every major platform, vendor cloud, and Adobe and others, and are using it for their uses. And it's not just about your edge browser compute. It's really, you can take the same framework and compile it down to server side as well as client site, just like JavaScript was a client side tool before it became node. Right. Right. So we're looking at that as a very interesting opportunity. It's very nascent. Yeah. >>Great patterns. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for spending the time outta your busy day. Ariana. Thanks for your commentary. Appreciate your coming on the cubes first in IGUR super cloud event, pilot. Thanks for, for sharing. Thanks for having, thanks for having us. Okay. More coverage here. Super cloud 2022. I'm Jeff David Alane stay with us. We got our cloud ARA panel coming up next.

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's the Cube, covering blockchain unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (upbeat Cuban music) >> Hello there, and welcome back to our exclusive coverage. This is the Cube's coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. We start week of variety of activities here on the island around blockchain, cryptocurrency, the decentralized internet, the future of work, the future of play, the future of society, all here, happening. My next guest is an entrepreneur. Steve Steward is the CEO and co-founder of that's V-E-Z-T. Really changing the game around music, relationship to fans, and using blockchain and tokens to enable that. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much John, it's great to be here. >> Thanks for coming on, so first talk a little bit about what your value proposition, what you guys are doing. Obviously, people who ever downloaded iTunes, and then said, "This sucks, let's go to Spotify." Now are going, "Hey, I'm on Instagram. "I have access to my artist directly." The internet is a response vehicle; one on one. Tell them about your opportunity. >> There's two value props. One for the consumer, right? So, if you're an artist fan, and you love a song. You love an artist. You want to be involved with that artist on a one to one basis, there's no way to do that right now. You can follow somebody on Twitter, you can like their YouTube, that doesn't connect you with them. Our platform let's you buy in, and by buy in I mean ownership. You own a piece of the IP with that artist in their song, so it's on a song by song basis. But if Ariana Grande's my favorite artist, I want to buy a little slice of her song for $10 or $100, I now have the opportunity to put that out there, and I can share in that royalty stream with her. And she and I will connect on a level. If she wants to take my information and send other things to me like concert tickets or backstage passes, that's possible now. So the value prop for the fan, is connection with the artist and ability to say, "I own a piece of that royalty stream. "I own a piece of that song." And on the artist side the value prop is, "I now get to actually share directly with my fans, "build that community directly. "There's no gate keeper like a label "or publishing company in the middle, "and I have the ability to reach out "and monetize directly based on demand and merit. "Then take that and do whatever I want "and build up my brand." >> So this is a great example where artists that have direct relationships, might be undervalued. Also, in a way there doing their own mini ICO, so to speak, with their fans by sharing in the future value of the success with the people that got 'em there. >> They are, we call it an ISO, Initial Song Offering. So just like a ticket on sale, it allows an artist to pick a time and date and say, "At noon on Thursday, I'm putting out 5% of my song "to raise $10,000." They pick the pricing, they pick the amount they want to put up, we admin the actual royalty stream for those people that put money into it, and the artist keeps the rest of it. >> I've seen a lot of pitches, I've seen a lot of stuff online, "Oh yeah, we're going to revolutionize "the new music industry, were going to use tokens." I've seen I feel pitches, but again, if you look at the smart money investors, they're looking at deals and saying, "Is there a network effect? "Is there a protocol of some sort in there?" Obviously you've identified a relationship that has tokenization or token economics built into the business model. Take a minute to explain that key tokenization. Why you're business is set for token economics? Why you, over someone else? >> So my backgrounds in the music business, I used to manage a band called Stone Temple Pilots for 20 years. Actually for 10 years, from 1990 to 2000. I had 20 other artist in that meantime. I understand the pain points from an artists perspective. I also know where the value is in the industry. It's in the publishing. Most of these entertainment businesses, the IP is where the real value is. Film, books, T.V., music, it's all in the underlying content. Not the distribution, not how many times I've downloaded it, but the actual ownership of the content. What we want to do, is put that in a basis so the artist can now take that on a fractional basis. We can use a tokenized product to let the fans buy in. The blockchain helps us track those rights, keep them secure, make them transparent, and allow the ownership to be shared between thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. >> And this also helps build community. I want to get your thoughts on something. I held a panel on Sundance this year, Sundance Film Festival, called The New Creative. What you're seeing emerging is a new artist. The new artists are digital native, their fan base is direct. Things we just talked about. But they're undervalued, because the gatekeepers, either the studios and or labels in your instance, are controlling distribution and they're also controlling the activities. So we all know what Apple's done with some of their artists, and artists have to go on the road and do all this work. Well digital changes all that, so from your perspective as a industry guru in music, how has digital changed that dynamic? And talk about this new artist breed, this new young upcoming digital generation of artists. >> There's two things. First, internet really hasn't delivered what it said it was going to the music community, right? When you had Napster come out, it's great for the fan base. The artist and the creators actually lost out. Music got valued from here to here. It went almost to zero. People were sharing files for free, so at some point we thought-- >> Regulatory tried to solve that legal-- >> Tried and tried, but once you build a generation on free, it's hard to change that. On the fan side it was great. There was a lot more distribution. On the artist and creator side, it wasn't so great. What we're trying to do is bring value back to that. We're going to use digital in a way that lets people share what they believe in, without these gatekeepers like you said; fully demand based. If I'm the small artist who plays banjo in Kentucky, but I've got a 100,000 fans who really love me, and they can show that by buying in, forget the labels. Forget the publishers. Forget the brands. I now have a direct connection. I'm earning a living directly from my fan base, which is how it should be. >> Kind of like we do open source content. We were talking about our business, you are enabling people to self-identify with the artist, letting the artist be open to that, make that handshake or if you will, digital handshake, and have a relationship beyond just being a fan. >> Most of the labels, in fact all the labels: Spotify, YouTube, Pandora. None of those platforms let the artist share directly with the consumer, right? If I say, "Look, I've got 20,000 streams today, "can you tell me who they were, no. "Can you show me where the downloads are, no." Why aren't they letting those people connect. The artist has a natural connection with their fans. >> That's because the tech platforms are optimized for a different business model. Look at Facebook, they're living in their own problem. Their success is almost killing them. They have this centralized data optimization for the wrong incentive. They're optimizing data for advertising, not user experience. In this case, you're saying, "Hey, lets use the infrastructure and crypto "to optimize the fan relationship and expand it." >> The reason artists get on stage, the reason they write a song, is to connect with people, right? We've disembodied that connection to the point where they're out there in the ether and the fans are over here. They're like, "How do we get together?" If we can bring that back, there's a very powerful connection there that we can take advantage of and let people actually make money from their craft. >> Well Steve, great to have you on The Cube because one, you have domain expertise, you're business model solid, and we've been saying yesterday and on The Cube that it's a reverse of the old stack model. The top of the stack is the business model. You nail the business model, the underlying plumbing will sort itself out. With that in mind, how are you guys looking at the plumbing? What are you doing here in Puerto Rico? Are you raising money? Are you doing an ICO? Take a little bit to explain your relationship to the plumbing under the hood, in the blockchain, crypto world. And then what you guys are doing here in Puerto Rico. >> We started building our platform the traditional way. We took traditional VC funding about a year ago. As we were building the platform, we understood the importance of a blockchain, some type of decentralized ledger that allows people to look transparently under the ownership stack. As we were building that, one of our engineers said, "hey, have you guys heard of an ICO?" we had no idea what this was. It was about a year ago. Got educated very quickly, dove deep on it, and realized there's an opportunity, not really for the fact that it's crypto, but to actually capitalize the company in a meaningful way. We want to scale this very quickly. We've got strategic partners in Asia, other parts of the world, that we need to grow very quickly into. We realized it was an opportunity to have. We did a raise close of December 1st; oron exchanges. >> An equity raise or a token raise? >> The token raise. We did a U.S. based PPM SAFT. >> So a security token. >> It's a utility token, but we followed a process that our legal advisors advised us. In the U.S., keep it as a PPM SAFT. If it's offshore, it's offshore. >> So accredited investors? >> Accredited investors only, small cap, try to keep it reasonable, because we don't need 100 billion dollars to build this platform right now. We're looking to get this in a traditional business sense, so we're building a real platform with a real team. We took advantage of that. We got listed on an exchange January 12th. At this point, we're head down in product. We're looking to launch this in 45 days at Coachella. We had an event two nights ago at South by Southwest. We came up here from Austin, so we're going back to California tomorrow. >> John: You're on a plane. >> Yeah, we're on a roadshow. We've got artist brand partners now. We're signing people, two or three artists a week that come in. We've got publishing catalogs that are coming on board realizing that there's a B to be played, because publishers only monetize the top two or 3% of their catalogs. The other 98% get no love. If they can put that on a retail platform like us, and allow consumers to buy directly into it, it's a whole windfall for them. >> Everyone's a media company these days. We've been saying it, and that's the new media model. You got a great formula, good luck. We'd love to keep in touch. >> Absolutely. >> What are you guys looking to do next six months as you get the product out the door? Ecosystem, you got to recruit more artists? What's the plan? >> My goal is 100,000 songs in the platform by the end of summer. Like I said, we're doing a lot of brand activations at music festivals. We see people, you know, exponential growth. Each song comes with an artist fan base. This builds into it. We're also supporting producers, co-writers, performers, the other guys that aren't on the stage. We realize this platforms for them, because the own live ownership in these songs, but have never had a way to monetize it. We're growing this very quickly. >> Steve Steward, CEO/co-founder of that's V-E-Z-T. Check 'em out. If you like music, this is a great way to actually take part in being a fan and owner of the actual property; great business model. We'll keep in touch. Thanks for sharing on The Cube. More live coverage here on The Cube, bringing you all the action, and extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more coverage after this break. >> Thanks guys, thanks John. (electronic instrumental music)