(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to the "Supercloud 22." I'm John Furrier, host of "The Cube." This is the Cloud-erati panel, the distinguished experts who have been there from day one, watching the cloud grow, from building clouds, and all open source stuff as well. Just great stuff. Good friends of "The Cube," and great to introduce back on "The Cube," Adrian Cockcroft, formerly with Netflix, formerly AWS, retired, now commentating here in "The Cube," as well as other events. Great to see you back out there, Adrian. Lori MacVittie, Cloud Evangelist with F5, also wrote a great blog post on supercloud, as well as Dave Vellante as well, setting up the supercloud conversation, which we're going to get into, and Chris Hoff, who's the CTO and CSO of LastPass who's been building clouds, and we know him from "The Cube" before with security and cloud commentary. Welcome, all, back to "The Cube" and supercloud. >> Thanks, John. >> Hi. >> All right, Lori, we'll start with you to get things going. I want to try to sit back, as you guys are awesome experts, and involved from building, and in the trenches, on the front lines, and Adrian's coming out of retirement, but Lori, you wrote the post setting the table on supercloud. Let's start with you. What is supercloud? What is it evolving into? What is the north star, from your perspective? >> Well, I don't think there's a north star yet. I think that's one of the reasons I wrote it, because I had a clear picture of this in my mind, but over the past, I don't know, three, four years, I keep seeing, in research, my own and others', complexity, multi-cloud. "We can't manage it. They're all different. "We have trouble. What's going on? "We can't do anything right." And so digging into it, you start looking into, "Well, what do you mean by complexity?" Well, security. Migration, visibility, performance. The same old problems we've always had. And so, supercloud is a concept that is supposed to overlay all of the clouds and normalize it. That's really what we're talking about, is yet another abstraction layer that would provide some consistency that would allow you to do the same security and monitor things correctly. Cornell University actually put out a definition way back in 2016. And they said, "It's an architecture that enables migration "across different zones or providers," and I think that's important, "and provides interfaces to everything, "makes it consistent, and normalizes the network," basically brings it all together, but it also extends to private clouds. Sometimes we forget about that piece of it, and I think that's important in this, so that all your clouds look the same. So supercloud, big layer on top, makes everything wonderful. It's unicorns again. >> It's interesting. We had multiple perspectives. (mumbles) was like Snowflake, who built on top of AWS. Jerry Chan, who we heard from earlier today, Greylock Penn's "Castles in the Cloud" saying, "Hey, you can have a moat, "you can build an advantage and have differentiation," so startups are starting to build on clouds, that's the native cloud view, and then, of course, they get success and they go to all the other clouds 'cause they got customers in the ecosystem, but it seems that all the cloud players, Chris, you commented before we came on today, is that they're all fighting for the customer's workloads on their infrastructure. "Come bring your stuff over to here, "and we'll make it run better." And all your developers are going to be good. Is there a problem? I mean, or is this something else happening here? Is there a real problem? >> Well, I think the north star's over there, by the way, Lori. (laughing) >> Oh, there it is. >> Right there. The supercloud north star. So indeed I think there are opportunities. Whether you call them problems or not, John, I think is to be determined. Most companies have, especially if they're a large enterprise, whether or not they've got an investment in private cloud or not, have spent time really trying to optimize their engineering and workload placement on a single cloud. And that, regardless of your choice, as we take the big three, whether it's Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, each of them have their pros and cons for various types of workloads. And so you'll see a lot of folks optimizing for a particular cloud, and it takes a huge effort up and down the stack to just get a single cloud right. That doesn't take into consideration integrations with software as a service, instantiated, oftentimes, on top of infrastructure of the service that you need to supplement where the obstruction layer ends in infrastructure of the service. You've seen most IS players starting to now move up-chain, as we predicted years ago, to platform as a service, but platforms of various types. So I definitely see it as an opportunity. Previous employers have had multiple clouds, but they were very specifically optimized for the types of workloads, for example, in, let's say, AWS versus GCP, based on the need for different types and optimized compute platforms that each of those providers ran. We never, in that particular case, thought about necessarily running the same workloads across both clouds, because they had different pricing models, different security models, et cetera. And so the challenge is really coming down to the fact that, what is the cost benefit analysis of thinking about multi-cloud when you can potentially engineer the resiliency or redundancy, all the in-season "ilities" that you might need to factor into your deployments on a single cloud, if they are investing at the pace in which they are? So I think it's an opportunity, and it's one that continues to evolve, but this just reminds me, your comments remind me, of when we were talking about OpenStack versus AWS. "Oh, if there were only APIs that existed "that everybody could use," and you saw how that went. So I think that the challenge there is, what is the impetus for a singular cloud provider, any of the big three, deciding that they're going to abstract to a single abstraction layer and not be able to differentiate from the competitors? >> Yeah, and that differentiation's going to be big. I mean, assume that the clouds aren't going to stay still like AWS and just not stop innovating. We see the devs are doing great, Adrian, open source is bigger and better than ever, but now that's been commercialized into enterprise. It's an ops problem. So to Chris's point, the cost benefit analysis is interesting, because do companies have to spin up multiple operations teams, each with specialized training and tooling for the clouds that they're using, and does that open up a can of worms, or is that a good thing? I mean, can you design for this? I mean, is there an architecture or taxonomy that makes it work, or is it just the cart before the horse, the solution before the problem? >> Yeah, well, I think that if you look at any large vendor... Sorry, large customer, they've got a bit of everything already. If you're big enough, you've bought something from everybody at some point. So then you're trying to rationalize that, and trying to make it make sense. And I think there's two ways of looking at multi-cloud or supercloud, and one is that the... And practically, people go best of breed. They say, "Okay, I'm going to get my email "from Google or Microsoft. "I'm going to run my applications on AWS. "Maybe I'm going to do some AI machine learning on Google, "'cause those are the strengths of the platforms." So people tend to go where the strength is. So that's multi-cloud, 'cause you're using multiple clouds, and you still have to move data and make sure they're all working together. But then what Lori's talking about is trying to make them all look the same and trying to get all the security architectures to be the same and put this magical layer, this unicorn magical layer that, "Let's make them all look the same." And this is something that the CIOs have wanted for years, and they keep trying to buy it, and you can sell it, but the trouble is it's really hard to deliver. And I think, when I go back to some old friends of ours at Enstratius who had... And back in the early days of cloud, said, "Well, we'll just do an API that abstracts "all the cloud APIs into one layer." Enstratius ended up being sold to Dell a few years ago, and the problem they had was that... They didn't have any problem selling it. The problem they had was, a year later, when it came up for renewal, the developers all done end runs around it were ignoring it, and the CIOs weren't seeing usage. So you can sell it, but can you actually implement it and make it work well enough that it actually becomes part of your core architecture without, from an operations point of view, without having the developers going directly to their favorite APIs around them? And I'm not sure that you can really lock an organization down enough to get them onto a layer like that. So that's the way I see it. >> You just defined- >> You just defined shadow shadow IT. (laughing) That's pretty- (crosstalk) >> Shadow shadow IT, yeah. >> Yeah, shadow shadow it. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I mean, this brings up the question, I mean, is there really a problem? I mean, I guess we'll just jump to it. What is supercloud? If you can have the magic outcome, what is it? Enstratius rendered in with automation? The security issues? Kubernetes is hot. What is the supercloud dream? I guess that's the question. >> I think it's got easier than it was five, 10 years ago. Kubernetes gives you a bunch of APIs that are common across lots of different areas, things like Snowflake or MongoDB Atlas. There are SaaS-based services, which are across multiple clouds from vendors that you've picked. So it's easier to build things which are more portable, but I still don't think it's easy to build this magic API that makes them all look the same. And I think that you're going to have leaky abstractions and security being... Getting the security right's going to be really much more complex than people think. >> What about specialty superclouds, Chris? What's your view on that? >> Yeah, I think what Adrian is alluding to, those leaky abstractions, are interesting, especially from the security perspective, 'cause I think what you see is if you were to happen to be able to thin slice across a set of specific types of workloads, there is a high probability given today that, at least on two of the three major clouds, you could get SaaS providers that sit on those same infrastructure of the service clouds for you, string them together, and have a service that technically is abstracted enough from the things you care about to work on one, two, or three, maybe not all of them, but most SaaS providers in the security space, or identity space, data space, for example, coexist on at least Microsoft and AWS, if not all three, with Google. And so you could technically abstract a service to the point that you let that level of abstract... Like Lori said, no computer science problem could not be... So, no computer science problem can't be solved with more layers of abstraction or misdirection... Or redirection. And in that particular case, if you happen to pick the right vendors that run on all three clouds, you could possibly get close. But then what that really talks about is then, if you built your seven-layer dip model, then you really have specialty superclouds spanning across infrastructure of the service clouds. One for your identity apps, one for data and data layers, to normalize that, one for security, but at what cost? Because you're going to be charged not for that service as a whole, but based on compute resources, based on how these vendors charge across each cloud. So again, that cost-benefit ratio might start being something that is rather imposing from a budgetary perspective. >> Lori, weigh in on this, because the enterprise people love to solve complexity with more complexity. Here, we need to go the other way. It's a commodity. So there has to be a better way. >> I think I'm hearing two fundamental assumptions. One, that a supercloud would force the existing big three to implement some sort of equal API. Don't agree with that. There's no business case for that. There's no reason that could compel them to do that. Otherwise, we would've convinced them to do that, what? 10, 15 years ago when we said we need to be interoperable. So it's not going to happen there. They don't have a good reason to do that. There's no business justification for that. The other presumption, I think, is that we would... That it's more about the services, the differentiated services, that are offered by all of these particular providers, as opposed to treating the core IaaS as the commodity it is. It's compute, it's some storage, it's some networking. Look at that piece. Now, pull those together by... And it's not OpenStack. That's not the answer, it wasn't the answer, it's not the answer now, but something that can actually pull those together and abstract it at a different layer. So cloud providers don't have to change, 'cause they're not going to change, but if someone else were to build that architecture to say, "all right, I'm going to treat all of this compute "so you can run your workloads," as Chris pointed out, "in the best place possible. "And we'll help you do that "by being able to provide those cost benefit analysis, "'What's the best performance, what are you doing,' "And then provide that as a layer." So I think that's really where supercloud is going, 'cause I think that's what a lot of the market actually wants in terms of where they want to run their workloads, because we're seeing that they want to run workloads at the edge, "a lot closer to me," which is yet another factor that we have to consider, and how are you going to be moving individual workloads around? That's the holy grail. Let's move individual workloads to where they're the best performance, the security, cost optimized, and then one layer up. >> Yeah, I think so- >> John Considine, who ultimately ran CloudSwitch, that sold to Verizon, as well as Tom Gillis, who built Bracket, are both rolling in their graves, 'cause what you just described was exactly that. (Lori laughing) Well, they're not even dead yet, so I can't say they're rolling in their graves. Sorry, Tom. Sorry, John. >> Well, how do hyperscalers keep their advantage with all this? I mean, to that point. >> Native services and managed services on top of it. Look how many flavors of managed Kubernetes you have. So you have a choice. Roll your own, or go with a managed service, and then differentiate based on the ability to take away and simplify some of that complexity. Doesn't mean it's more secure necessarily, but I do think we're seeing opportunities where those guys are fighting tooth and nail to keep you on a singular cloud, even though, to Lori's point, I agree, I don't think it's about standardized APIs, 'cause I think that's never going to happen. I do think, though, that SaaS-y supercloud model that we were talking about, layering SaaS that happens to span all the three infrastructure of the service are probably more in line with what Lori was talking about. But I do think that portability of workload is given to you today within lots of ways. But again, how much do you manage, and how much performance do you give up by running additional abstraction layers? And how much security do you give up by having to roll your own and manage that? Because the whole point was, in many cases... Cloud is using other people's computers, so in many cases, I want to manage as little of it as I possibly can. >> I like this whole SaaS angle, because if you had the old days, you're on Amazon Web Services, hey, if you build a SaaS application that runs on Amazon, you're all great, you're born in the cloud, just like that generations of startups. Great. Now when you have this super pass layer, as Dave Vellante was riffing on his analysis, and Lori, you were getting into this pass layer that's kind of like SaaS-y, what's the SaaS equation look like? Because that, to me, sounds like a supercloud version of saying, "I have a workload that runs on all the clouds equally." I just don't think that's ever going to happen. I agree with you, Chris, on that one. But I do see that you can have an abstraction that says, "Hey, I don't really want to get in the weeds. "I don't want to spend a lot of ops time on this. "I just want it to run effectively, and magic happens," or, as you said, some layer there. How does that work? How do you see this super pass layer, if anything, enabling a different SaaS game? >> I think you hit on it there. The last like 10 or so years, we've been all focused on developers and developer productivity, and it's all about the developer experience, and it's got to be good for them, 'cause they're the kings. And I think the next 10 years are going to be very focused on operations, because once you start scaling out, it's not about developers. They can deliver fast or slow, it doesn't matter, but if you can't scale it out, then you've got a real problem. So I think that's an important part of it, is really, what is the ops experience, and what is the best way to get those costs down? And this would serve that purpose if it was done right, which, we can argue about whether that's possible or not, but I don't have to implement it, so I can say it's possible. >> Well, are we going to be getting into infrastructure as code moves into "everything is code," security, data, (laughs) applications is code? I mean, "blank" is code, fill in the blank. (Lori laughing) >> Yeah, we're seeing more of that with things like CDK and Pulumi, where you are actually coding up using a real language rather than the death by YAML or whatever. How much YAML can you take? But actually having a real language so you're not trying to do things in parsing languages. So I think that's an interesting trend. You're getting some interesting templates, and I like what... I mean, the counterexample is that if you just go deep on one vendor, then maybe you can go faster and it is simpler. And one of my favorite vendor... Favorite customers right now that I've been talking to is Liberty Mutual. Went very deep and serverless first on AWS. They're just doing everything there, and they're using CDK Patterns to do it, and they're going extremely fast. There's a book coming out called "The Value Flywheel" by Dave Anderson, it's coming out in a few months, to just detail what they're doing, but that's the counterargument. If you could pick one vendor, you can go faster, you can get that vendor to do more for you, and maybe get a bigger discount so you're not splitting your discounts across vendors. So that's one aspect of it. But I think, fundamentally, you're going to find the CIOs and the ops people generally don't like sitting on one vendor. And if that single vendor is a horizontal platform that's trying to make all the clouds look the same, now you're locked into whatever that platform was. You've still got a platform there. There's still something. So I think that's always going to be something that the CIOs want, but the developers are always going to just pick whatever the best tool for building the thing is. And a analogy here is that the developers are dating and getting married, and then the operations people are running the family and getting divorced. And all the bad parts of that cycle are in the divorce end of it. You're trying to get out of a vendor, there's lawyers, it's just a big mess. >> Who's the lawyer in this example? (crosstalk) >> Well... (laughing) >> Great example. (crosstalk) >> That's why ops people don't like lock-in, because they're the ones trying to unlock. They aren't the ones doing the lock-in. They're the ones unlocking, when developers, if you separate the two, are the ones who are going, picking, having the fun part of it, going, trying a new thing. So they're chasing a shiny object, and then the ops people are trying to untangle themselves from the remains of that shiny object a few years later. So- >> Aren't we- >> One way of fixing that is to push it all together and make it more DevOps-y. >> Yeah, that's right. >> But that's trying to put all the responsibilities in one place, like more continuous improvement, but... >> Chris, what's your reaction to that? Because you're- >> No, that's exactly what I was going to bring up, yeah, John. And 'cause we keep saying "devs," "dev," and "ops" and I've heard somewhere you can glue those two things together. Heck, you could even include "sec" in the middle of it, and "DevSecOps." So what's interesting about what Adrian's saying though, too, is I think this has a lot to do with how you structure your engineering teams and how you think about development versus operations and security. So I'm building out a team now that very much makes use of, thanks to my brilliant VP of Engineering, a "Team Topologies" approach, which is a very streamlined and product oriented way of thinking about, for example, in engineering, if you think about team structures, you might have people that build the front end, build the middle tier, and the back end, and then you have a product that needs to make use of all three components in some form. So just from getting stuff done, their ability then has to tie to three different groups, versus building a team that's streamlined that ends up having front end, middleware, and backend folks that understand and share standards but are able to uncork the velocity that's required to do that. So if you think about that, and not just from an engineering development perspective, but then you couple in operations as a foundational layer that services them with embedded capabilities, we're putting engineers and operations teams embedded in those streamlined teams so that they can run at the velocity that they need to, they can do continuous integration, they can do continuous deployment. And then we added CS, which is continuously secure, continuous security. So instead of having giant, centralized teams, we're thinking there's a core team, for example, a foundational team, that services platform, makes sure all the trains are running on time, that we're doing what we need to do foundationally to make the environments fully dev and operator and security people functional. But then ultimately, we don't have these big, monolithic teams that get into turf wars. So, to Adrian's point about, the operators don't like to be paned in, well, they actually have a say, ultimately, in how they architect, deploy, manage, plan, build, and operate those systems. But at the same point in time, we're all looking at that problem across those teams and go... Like if one streamline team says, "I really want to go run on Azure, "because I like their services better," the reality is the foundational team has a larger vote versus opinion on whether or not, functionally, we can satisfy all of the requirements of the other team. Now, they may make a fantastic business case and we play rock, paper, scissors, and we do that. Right now, that hasn't really happened. We look at the balance of AWS, we are picking SaaS-y, supercloud vendors that will, by the way, happen to run on three platforms, if we so choose to expand there. So we have a similar interface, similar capability, similar processes, but we've made the choice at LastPass to go all in on AWS currently, with respect to how we deliver our products, for all the reasons we just talked about. But I do think that operations model and how you build your teams is extremely important. >> Yeah, and to that point- >> And has the- (crosstalk) >> The vendors themselves need optionality to the customer, what you're saying. So, "I'm going to go fast, "but I need to have that optionality." I guess the question I have for you guys is, what is today's trade-off? So if the decision point today is... First of all, I love the go-fast model on one cloud. I think that's my favorite when I look at all this, and then with the option, knowing that I'm going to have the option to go to multiple clouds. But everybody wants lock-in on the vendor side. Is that scale, is that data advantage? I mean, so the lock-in's a good question, and then also the trade-offs. What do people have to do today to go on a supercloud journey to have an ideal architecture and taxonomy, and what's the right trade-offs today? >> I think that the- Sorry, just put a comment and then let Lori get a word in, but there's a lot of... A lot of the market here is you're building a product, and that product is a SaaS product, and it needs to run somewhere. And the customers that you're going to... To get the full market, you need to go across multiple suppliers, most people doing AWS and Azure, and then with Google occasionally for some people. But that, I think, has become the pattern that most of the large SaaS platforms that you'd want to build out of, 'cause that's the fast way of getting something that's going to be stable at scale, it's got functionality, you'd have to go invest in building it and running it. Those platforms are just multi-cloud platforms, they're running across them. So Snowflake, for example, has to figure out how to make their stuff work on more than one cloud. I mean, they started on one, but they're going across clouds. And I think that that is just the way it's going to be, because you're not going to get a broad enough view into the market, because there isn't a single... AWS doesn't have 100% of the market. It's maybe a bit more than them, but Azure has got a pretty solid set of markets where it is strong, and it's market by market. So in some areas, different people in some places in the world, and different vertical markets, you'll find different preferences. And if you want to be across all of them with your data product, or whatever your SaaS product is, you're just going to have to figure this out. So in some sense, the supercloud story plays best with those SaaS providers like the Snowflakes of this world, I think. >> Lori? >> Yeah, I think the SaaS product... Identity, whatever, you're going to have specialized. SaaS, superclouds. We already see that emerging. Identity is becoming like this big SaaS play that crosses all clouds. It's not just for one. So you get an evolution going on where, yes, I mean, every vendor who provides some kind of specific functionality is going to have to build out and be multi-cloud, as it were. It's got to work equally across them. And the challenge, then, for them is to make it simple for both operators and, if required, dev. And maybe that's the other lesson moving forward. You can build something that is heaven for ops, but if the developers won't use it, well, then you're not going to get it adopted. But if you make it heaven for the developers, the ops team may not be able to keep it secure, keep everything. So maybe we have to start focusing on both, make it friendly for both, at least. Maybe it won't be the perfect experience, but gee, at least make it usable for both sides of the equation so that everyone can actually work in concert, like Chris was saying. A more comprehensive, cohesive approach to delivery and deployment. >> All right, well, wrapping up here, I want to just get one final comment from you guys, if you don't mind. What does supercloud look like in five years? What's the Nirvana, what's the steady state of supercloud in five to 10 years? Or say 10 years, make it easier. (crosstalk) Five to 10 years. Chris, we'll start with you. >> Wow. >> Supercloud, what's it look like? >> Geez. A magic pane, a single pane of glass. (laughs) >> Yeah, I think- >> Single glass of pain. >> Yeah, a single glass of pain. Thank you. You stole my line. Well, not mine, but that's the one I was going to use. Yeah, I think what is really fascinating is ultimately, to answer that question, I would reflect on market consolidation and market dynamics that happens even in the SaaS space. So we will see SaaS companies combining in focal areas to be able to leverage the positions, let's say, in the identity space that somebody has built to provide a set of compelling services that help abstract that identity problem or that security problem or that instrumentation and observability problem. So take your favorite vendors today. I think what we'll end up seeing is more consolidation in SaaS offerings that run on top of infrastructure of the service offerings to where a supercloud might look like something I described before. You have the combination of your favorite interoperable identity, observability, security, orchestration platforms run across them. They're sold as a stack, whether it be co-branded by an enterprise vendor that sells all of that and manages it for you or not. But I do think that... You talked about, I think you said, "Is this an innovator's dilemma?" No, I think it's an integrator's dilemma, as it has always ultimately been. As soon as you get from Genesis to Bespoke Build to product to then commoditization, the cycle starts anew. And I think we've gotten past commoditization, and we're looking at niche areas. So I see just the evolution, not necessarily a revolution, of what we're dealing with today as we see more consolidation in the marketplace. >> Lori, what's your take? Five years, 10 years, what does supercloud look like? >> Part of me wants to take the pie in the sky unicorn approach. "No, it will be beautiful. "One button, and things will happen," but I've seen this cycle many times before, and that's not going to happen. And I think Chris has got it pretty close to what I see already evolving. Those different kinds of super services, basically. And that's really what we're talking about. We call them SaaS, but they're... X is a service. Everything is a service, and it's really a supercloud that can run anywhere, but it presents a different interface, because, well, it's easier. And I think that's where we're going to go, and that's just going to get more refined. And yes, a lot of consolidation, especially on the observability side, but that's also starting to consume the security side, which is really interesting to watch. So that could be a little different supercloud coming on there that's really focused on specific types of security, at least, that we'll layer across, and then we'll just hook them all together. It's an API first world, and it seems like that's going to be our standard for the next while of how we integrate everything. So superclouds or APIs. >> Awesome. Adrian... Adrian, take us home. >> Yeah, sure. >> What's your- I think, and just picking up on Lori's point that these are web services, meaning that you can just call them from anywhere, they don't have to run everything in one place, they can stitch it together, and that's really meant... It's somewhat composable. So in practice, people are going to be composable. Can they compose their applications on multiple platforms? But I think the interesting thing here is what the vendors do, and what I'm seeing is vendors running software on other vendors. So you have Google building platforms that, then, they will support on AWS and Azure and vice versa. You've got AWS's distro of Kubernetes, which they now give you as a distro so you can run it on another platform. So I think that trend's going to continue, and it's going to be, possibly, you pick, say, an AWS or a Google software stack, but you don't run it all on AWS, you run it in multiple places. Yeah, and then the other thing is the third tier, second, third tier vendors, like, I mean, what's IBM doing? I think in five years time, IBM is going to be a SaaS vendor running on the other clouds. I mean, they're already halfway there. To be a bit more controversial, I guess it's always fun to... Like I don't work for a corporate entity now. No one tells me what I can say. >> Bring it on. >> How long can Google keep losing a billion dollars a quarter? They've either got to figure out how to make money out of this thing, or they'll end up basically being a software stack on another cloud platform as their, likely, actual way they can make money on it. Because you've got to... And maybe Oracle, is that a viable cloud platform that... You've got to get to some level of viability. And I think the second, third tier of vendors in five, 10 years are going to be running on the primary platform. And I think, just the other final thing that's really driving this right now. If you try and place an order right now for a piece of equipment for your data center, key pieces of equipment are a year out. It's like trying to buy a new fridge from like Sub-Zero or something like that. And it's like, it's a year. You got to wait for these things. Any high quality piece of equipment. So you go to deploy in your data center, and it's like, "I can't get stuff in my data center. "Like, the key pieces I need, I can't deploy a whole system. "We didn't get bits and pieces of it." So people are going to be cobbling together, or they're going, "No, this is going to cloud, because the cloud vendors "have a much stronger supply chain to just be able "to give you the system you need. "They've got the capacity." So I think we're going to see some pandemic and supply chain induced forced cloud migrations, just because you can't build stuff anymore outside the- >> We got to accelerate supercloud, 'cause they have the supply. They are the chain. >> That's super smart. That's the benefit of going last. So I'm going to scoop in real quick. I can't believe we can call this "Web3 Supercloud," because none of us said "Web3." Don't forget DAO. (crosstalk) (indistinct) You have blockchain, blockchain superclouds. I mean, there's some very interesting distributed computing stuff there, but we'll have to do- >> (crosstalk) We're going to call that the "Cubeverse." The "Cubeverse" is coming. >> Oh, the "Cubeverse." All right. >> We will be... >> That's very meta. >> In the metaverse, Cubeverse soon. >> "Stupor cloud," perhaps. But anyway, great points, Adrian and Lori. Loved it. >> Chris, great to see you. Adrian, Lori, thanks for coming on. We've known each other for a long time. You guys are part of the cloud-erati, the group that has been in there from day one, and watched it evolve, and you get the scar tissue to prove it, and the experience. So thank you so much for sharing your commentary. We'll roll this up and make it open to everybody as additional content. We'll call this the "outtakes," the longer version. But really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much. >> Okay, we'll be back with more "Supercloud 22" right after this. (bright 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)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, brought to you by Girls in Tech.. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference 2018. About 700 mainly women, a few men, and they just brought in a busload of kids to come in and hear inspirational stories, really of women in technical leadership positions for the last two days. It's a really great event. We're excited to be back for a second time, and our next guest who's been travelin' just as much as theCube team, all the way back from Cisco Live, which we were at yesterday. Shubha Govil, she's the director of product management from Cisco. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So how was Cisco Live? >> Cisco Live was awesome. Yes, we had very different audience there. Percentage of women, as you can imagine, sometimes in the networking industry, is not as much as we would like to see, but that's why we are here. >> That's why you're here. >> And we are really trying to bring in lot more women in our product teams within Cisco. Again, it comes down to having the 50/50 voice, so this is a great place to be to meet other like-minded women, in industry, and trying to get some talent. >> Well, good for you for making the trip, 'cause I'm sure you guys are wiped out. When it's your own show you work harder than any other show, but it really begs a question. How long has Cisco been involved in Girls in Tech, and, again, what is it that this gives you that's so different than a big conference? >> Correct, so Cisco has been involved for last few years for Girls in Tech, and just like we have been involved with several other organizations in the industry, really it comes down to being out there and spotting the talent. Big part of that is being at the events, and networking with the talent, and understanding their needs. This comes down to really finding the right perspective, as well as the cultural fit for people that we bring in. The best part about the Girls in Tech events is that they're a lot more hands-on training that they are doing, in terms of as part of Cisco's DevNet environment. So I'm part of Cisco's DevNet team, and we are driving Cisco's developer program, to build more on top of Cisco's APIs, and in that role, always looking for people who are ready to go hands on, and build cool solutions on top of Cisco API, so this is a great place to have been doing a lot of coding camps, and other formal boot camps where girls can come in, and be part of this ecosystem, be ready for the next opportunity that comes. >> It's interesting because you can't just do what you could do in the past, which is just go do the campus recruiting, and kind of the things that we think of as everyday HR pipeline, because you need more, and you need more diverse. So to be active in all these various organizations that have very strong focuses in diversity, whether it be women or unrepresented populations, et cetera. So, pretty interesting investment that you guys are making there, with time, money, and people. >> Absolutely, absolutely. It is key. It is totally the key for Cisco, and for every single technology company out there to be out there and finding the diverse opinion. It really comes down to technologies not made just for men, and 50% of female population, there's not a lot of thinking that goes in in designing the technology as to how different people will use it, and big part of it is bringing the people who can think from that perspective, and that's kind of where we are out there, making sure that we can bring in that opinion. >> And the culture's such a bit thing, and you guys had such a big culture change with the new CEO shift, because there's such strong personalities, and now you guys have moved onto a new CEO. We keep hearing about culture over and over again, and how important it is to bring that up. So how important is it from the cultural aspect to be involved, and get these diversity of opinion? >> It is huge. So really, Chuck Robbins has been bringing a very humble culture, people really trying to be there for everyone, each other. And as a committee, you are really building the talent, not just for doing the right jobs, and bringing the right perspective, but also culturally bringing those opinions, as well as bringing the thinking that's going to change the culture moving forward. The technology disruption that's around us has to do a lot with how, culturally, things are changing. There is amalgamation of people coming from all over the world, and in that mode, when you're designing a technology, or when you are from networking perspective, as we think about Cisco's networking culture, network engineers are evolving too, and they are becoming more part of programmable network, and that culture shift goes along with it, which is to bring in the right people culture, and part of it is being out at the events, and meeting people coming from different places, and bringing those opinions. >> It's interesting we're at Bespoke, because I think it was last year we were here with the Cisco DevNet Team, and really a different kind of point of view coming out of Cisco, led by Susie Wee and the team, in terms of reaching out for developers, not a closed system, really trying to engage with the developer community. >> And that's part of it. Cisco's DevNet Committee is, we recently crossed a milestone of 500,000 developers. >> Oh, so I heard that was the big celebration at the party, right? Half a million, very good. >> Big celebration at Cisco Live. >> Congratulations. >> And DevNet Create was an attempt in that direction as well, to really bring the application developer, and that thinking about network engineers who have been changing the way each application works, how the internet of things is going to further drive the growth of internet, in that world, we also need a lot of application developers coming in, and that was the attempt for DevNet Create Conference, and that's where Girls in Tech and other such events are very important. >> Right, and only going to be more crazy when 5G comes online in a couple years. The demand for networking is, and the bandwidth is not slowing down anytime soon. >> It's not. (laughs) >> All right, Shubha, well thank you for spending a few times, I'm sure you are tired after the long event, so hopefully you get through this and you can take it easy this weekend. >> Thanks, Jeff. It was good to talk to you. >> All right, thanks for stopping by. I'm Jeff, and you're watching theCUBE from Girls in Tech Conference 2018. Thanks for watching. (laid-back electronic music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Bespoke. It's at the top of the Westfield Mall. Come on by sometime if you're doin' some shoppin', but we're here at Girls in Tech Catalyst. Really cool convention. We were in Phoenix a couple years ago, about 700 women, girls, some students that came in, and a few men as well. Really talking about great inspirational stories. Unbelievable lineup of leaders telling their stories, how they got to where they were, and sharing the information. Now we're excited to have our first guest. She's Patty McCord. She's an author of this great book, Powerful, and she used to be the head of HR, or chief, >> Talent officer. >> Talent officer at Netflix. Patty, great to see you. >> Nice to meet you, too. >> Absolutely. >> Yay. >> So you're going to be speaking in a little bit, so what is your topic on today? >> The future of work, but mostly I'm going to talk about my experience with work over the last 30 years, and that the future of work is right now. We just don't operate that way. >> So, Patty, what do people get right about culture, what do they get wrong about culture? >> What they get wrong about it is they think it's a document. They think if you write it down, you're done, and what they get wrong about it is they don't walk the walk, right? I mean, I know that's simple and cliched, but I can't tell you how many startup CEOs I meet that say, I want to be this, and I want to this. I want to be efficient, right? I want to be straightforward. Well, is there information that you hide from employees, and do you show up to meetings on time? Uuh, right? And it's also about the stories that you tell, what becomes legend, and people love those positive legend stories, and they forget that when you screw up, we'll tell that story for 10 years, right? And the third thing, I think, is people get nostalgic, and they think they can keep it, especially in little companies. Let's keep the culture the way it is, and you cannot do that if you are successful. >> It's so bizarre that people don't get the kind of do what I say, versus do what I do. I mean, this is 101, and it's such a slap in the face when a leader says one thing, and then immediately does something different. >> And you wonder, how did they end up to be this way, when their saying is break things, right? >> Well, failing up is a whole different conversation that we'll save for another day. >> But let's take failing up, right? I talked to a CEO who told me I give everybody who makes a mistake a bottle of champagne to celebrate failure. I'm like, well that's stupid. (both laugh) But it only matters if you fail up if you learn something from it, and that's the demonstrable stories that you tell, that become part of your culture, rather than you get rewarded with champagne if you screw up. >> And then the other thing we were talking about before we turned the camera on are some of these just kind of arcane, old processes that people just put 'em in it, is it-- >> Well, let's start with the fundamentals. I'm going to hire you, and you'll have a career for the rest of your life in our company. Big fat lie, has been for decades, and we still tell it, right? Second one-- >> God, people still tell that story? >> They still do tell that story. >> I've been in Silicon Valley too long. >> Yeah, me too, but I mean, I travel all over the world now, and I hear that story all the time. The second one, which I'll talk about in a minute, is we're family. You're not, right? It's not family, it's work. It's two different things. >> You pay me to come every day. >> That's right, so it's not just the processes that are archaic, like you and I talked about the annual performance review, which is we don't step back like we do with every part of the business and say, why did we do that? What's its purpose? Is it still effective, right? If it is a process to give people feedback so they'll improve their performance, you do it once a year? >> Right, like that's really going to make a big impact. >> Yeah, that's kind of dumb, and then I'm going to figure out how to pay you based on what you did or didn't do last year? And particularly for women, I mean particularly for women, the compensation systems that we have, equal pay, those are issues that they're just writing checks. How hard can this be to figure this stuff out, and when you do it, it's actually not that much money. So I'm advocating, I'm kind of on my bully pulpit here, saying people in my organizations, in HR, we need to fix the stuff that's broken, own the fact that we broke it, and stop talking about it in a language nobody understands. >> Is there some just historical legal compliance issues and stuff that keeps things like the annual performance review going, or is just minutiae? >> There's sort of this inward naval gazing thing we do, where go, well, it's best practices, 'cause everybody does it. I mean, I talk to people who say, well it's a legal requirement. No, it's not, right? We don't even ask. (laughs) If there's a law, I coach people-- >> You haven't seen it yet, and you've had the C title forever. >> I coach people all the time. When your lawyer says you can't do it, you say why, and they say, well it's against the law, and you say can I see the statute? They're written in english, right? It's not Sanskrit, right? So look at it and say, well that's not what I read it to say. Well, if you didn't do it, you'd get sued. What's the most recent lawsuit? What was the settlement? How many people sue for this sort of thing? So there's a-- >> Such a business-minded and analytical approach to these questions, right, as opposed to just accepting the status quo. >> You just said you'd been in Silicon Valley all your life, me too, and I love innovation, and I love being inventive, and I don't want to be on the outside of all this fun. It's like, if somebody, like when I was at Netflix, if we could invent a new way of consuming entertainment, then why couldn't I invent a new way of working? >> Right, interesting. And so I wanted your take on another kind of hot trend right now, especially with the younger kids comin' up, is mission, and mission-driven companies, mission-driven opportunities, and I think, rightly or wrongly, and it's kind of like we're going to have you forever, it's a more and more important reason why people are choosing to go to certain companies, and it's so competitive here, say in the Bay Area specifically, whereas you're an employer, how should they look at this? How real is it? >> Well, first of all, before you blame them, right? Before we blame them, we have to realize that these are the children of burnt-out corporate citizens, right? And they've watched their parents toil, and come home burnt-out and upset and empty after careers in the companies that they belonged in that didn't give 'em back what they promised, right? So I think we all want mission. I don't think it's unusual for them. I think they're just asking for it. When we felt like we had to wait until later in our career to ask for stuff that mattered to us. And the other thing is, I think the companies who are building now are more capable of delivering that. And I don't think that by mission they're talking about world peace. They just want to know, how do I matter, right? And so, for me, that's teaching people how businesses work, and what the complexities are, and what the opportunities and the challenges are, and being part of that, right? So that's what they're asking for. They're not asking for every single day to go home and feel like they've changed the world, for curing, not that curing cancer's a bad thing, I think we should do that too, but we can still feel mission driven by just connecting with our customers and our products and the work that we do every day. >> All right, Patty, well I know you got to go get mic'd up for your big presentation, so thanks for takin' a few minutes of your time. >> Yeah, it was great fun. >> And I look forward to jumping into the book and getting into the day. >> Great, okay, thanks. >> She's Patty, I'm Jeff. We're at Girls in Tech, the Catalyst Conference at Bespoke in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (laid-back electronic music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Downtown San Francisco at Bespoke. It's in the Westfield Shopping Mall, kind of a cool event space up on the fourth floor, and we're at Girls in Tech Catalyst. We were last here a couple years ago in Phoenix, and we're excited to be back. 700 people, really great event, and the program's pretty simple. You've got great women leaders telling their story, and the stories are varied and really cool, and we just got out of Christina's story. She's Christina Kosmowski, global head of customer success at Slack. >> That's right. >> Christina, really good job up there. >> Thank you. >> There was a couple of things I wanted to really kind of jump on that I thought were so important. In the first one you talk about early in your career and raising your hand. When opportunities come up, don't be afraid, raise your hand, go for it. >> Yeah, absolutely. I was always saying, yes to everything. And now I work on saying no to some things. (laughs) >> That's a whole other conversation-- >> I think it's really important that you know there's all those cliches around the fact that you know you've got to go through the window sometimes or you know opportunities are masked and they really are and so just saying yes to everything and really being open to trying new things and learning new experiences will give you opportunities you didn't even realize you had. And so, I always raised my hand, you know, in college to start the soccer team. I raised my hand in my first job to go to Europe and start the London office. I raised my hand to come to Salesforce, at every single point, Salesforce had something new, I said, oh I want to do it and so I was kind of known as the person who always liked to start and build things from scratch. And so, I always wanted to be that yes person and experience these new opportunities. >> And that was huge, I think you said when you started Salesforce, revenue was like 20 million and when you left it was-- >> Almost 10 million, yeah, it's crazy. It was quite a ride, quite a ride. >> But great, cause then you get those opportunities. >> Yeah. >> Another story you were telling which I thought was pretty impactful was, your college soccer experience, you're a soccer player and you know, the difference between putting in your own work and time to achieve something and, you know, nobody ever sees the work that happens when they're not there, but more importantly, bringing along the team. >> Yeah. >> And getting everybody else to buy into your work ethic to raise the performance of the team. I wonder if you can expand on that a little bit. Cause then you said you've used that throughout your career over and over again. >> I have, it was an important lesson. I think, for those that didn't see that speech, I talked about the fact that my freshman year in soccer, it was the first year of the varsity program. We won three games and I was very angry about that and so I spent the next year kind of working my butt off. And so I got to this level but my rest of the team didn't get to the level and so I was able to challenge them to match my level and we were ultimately able to get, you know, into the top six team in the country at the end of my career and that was the first time that I realized it's not just about me. And I've seen that in every step in the way is, I can get there, I can get my idea there, I can work as hard as I can but if I can't empower the team and I can't bring all the cross-functional leaders along with me, we aren't going to achieve what we need to achieve. And at Slack, I've even seen that to be even more of the case, because I've come into a function that's brand new, it started very much as a product-based company versus Salesforce was a little more sales focused. And so it's really important that people understand what our mission is, why it's important, how we can bring these other organizations with us. >> Right, so a great kind of business theme that touched both on Salesforce and at Slack, it's kind of the subscription economy. >> Yes. >> And we've done this conference and we all switched over to our paid Adobe subscription versus trying to find a friend who'll get you a license for a deal at the end of the year. (laughs) But I think the really important thing that you touched on, when you go to subscription economy it really changes the dynamic between you and your customer. And you run customer success. >> I do. >> Because it's not just take the check and send 'em the 15% maintenance bill anymore, now you've got to build a relationship, you've got to deliver value each and every month cause they're paying you each and every month. And so you've translated that into actually building an organization that supports this very different relationship. >> That's right. >> So why don't you tell us, you know, how did that transform? How hard of a sell was that and what's the ultimate outcome with your relationship with the customers? >> I think it's so important to realize that technology is really important, but if we can't apply that into the business setting and to specific outcomes and use cases, it doesn't become valuable over time. And so, we've built an organization that really focuses on customer maturity and value. And so we take it in steps. And so we look at what are those things we can do to give value and outcomes and affect people the way they're working today? And then what does that look like tomorrow, how do we build upon that, and then what does it look like to, they can get to this fully transformed state, and we've done that through a combination of working with product to build features and in-app education, we work with all of our customers to understand what are their needs, we bring people to the table, we bring one to many programs, we've really created this champion network where we are able to allow these peer to peer relationships, and really have this network effect with our customers, and so there's lots of different methods and vehicles that we're doing to really ensure that our customers are getting that outcome. >> Yeah, it's interesting, we cover a lot of the AWS shows and, you know, Jeff Bezos will talk about them just being maniacally customer focused, and lots of companies like to talk about being maniacally customer focused, but most of them are not, they're product focused or they're competitor focused or they're kind of opportunity focused, they're not customer focused. So, how do you build that culture, can you switch if it's not there or does it got to be from the top down at the beginning? >> You can, you can, I think, you know, at Slack, we've been really fortunate it also has that extreme customer focus, but our organization started about 15 months ago, so we brought even more rigor to that, and so there's lots of programs you can do to affect the culture. So, one of the programs we have is a red account program, and one of the things there is really about bringing all the company together to swarm around issues or risks that our customers might have seen, and that's one way that we can start to talk about customer importance. >> What do you call it? >> We call it the customer red account program. >> Red account, so red like treble, because, so you basically-- >> We swarm. >> Swarm, swarm, what a great, swarm meaning a lot of people from a lot of different places. >> Lot of different places, and there's full accountability on all parts of the organization to solve it, because my organization can't solve everything, we're really just the advocates and the facilitators back into, back into Slack, and so that's important that we have that accountability, and we're swarming all around the customer. We have product feedback sessions where we're able to bring that advocacy back, we have a lot of surveys and that promoter score, things where we're measuring and looking for accountability about how we're doing with out customers, and so there's lots of different programs that you can help bring this to light, even in just tactical ways that help ultimately build this culture of customer success. >> See, so like I said, you've got a lot of sniffers in the system to see when you need to call a code red. So, I'm just curious, when you get everyone together, are people surprised where the problems are, is it like, oh, I thought we were doing a great job, and this group's like, no, no, no, you know, you're the problem? >> Sometimes, sometimes, but I think it is really around it being a team effort and really understanding that when issues or challenges expose themselves, there's multiple root causes and you can really understand, okay, part of it could be a product, part of it could be how we supported them, part of it could be in some of our marketing and messaging. And how do we all solve that in a more universal experience? >> All right, last question before I let you go. Just your impressions of the Catalyst today, you said it's your first time here. >> This is my first time here, I am blown away by the energy and excitement and really the quality of speakers and conversations that are happening, I've been hanging around all morning, and just really powerful conversations, and I think I said this in my speech, but we are in a really fortunate time right now, and I think our time is now, and it's so great to see all these women come together, and we, you know, we're the ones that can do this. >> Excellent, we'll see you Amplify later this year. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Christina, well, thanks for stopping by and sharing your story. >> All right, thanks. >> All right, she's Christina, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at Girls in Tech Catalyst in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, brought to you by Girls in Tech.. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference 2018. About 700 mainly women, a few men, and they just brought in a busload of kids to come in and hear inspirational stories, really of women in technical leadership positions for the last two days. It's a really great event. We're excited to be back for a second time, and our next guest who's been travelin' just as much as theCube team, all the way back from Cisco Live, which we were at yesterday. Shubha Govil, she's the director of product management from Cisco. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So how was Cisco Live? >> Cisco Live was awesome. Yes, we had very different audience there. Percentage of women, as you can imagine, sometimes in the networking industry, is not as much as we would like to see, but that's why we are here. >> That's why you're here. >> And we are really trying to bring in lot more women in our product teams within Cisco. Again, it comes down to having the 50/50 voice, so this is a great place to be to meet other like-minded women, in industry, and trying to get some talent. >> Well, good for you for making the trip, 'cause I'm sure you guys are wiped out. When it's your own show you work harder than any other show, but it really begs a question. How long has Cisco been involved in Girls in Tech, and, again, what is it that this gives you that's so different than a big conference? >> Correct, so Cisco has been involved for last few years for Girls in Tech, and just like we have been involved with several other organizations in the industry, really it comes down to being out there and spotting the talent. Big part of that is being at the events, and networking with the talent, and understanding their needs. This comes down to really finding the right perspective, as well as the cultural fit for people that we bring in. The best part about the Girls in Tech events is that they're a lot more hands-on training that they are doing, in terms of as part of Cisco's DevNet environment. So I'm part of Cisco's DevNet team, and we are driving Cisco's developer program, to build more on top of Cisco's APIs, and in that role, always looking for people who are ready to go hands on, and build cool solutions on top of Cisco API, so this is a great place to have been doing a lot of coding camps, and other formal boot camps where girls can come in, and be part of this ecosystem, be ready for the next opportunity that comes. >> It's interesting because you can't just do what you could do in the past, which is just go do the campus recruiting, and kind of the things that we think of as everyday HR pipeline, because you need more, and you need more diverse. So to be active in all these various organizations that have very strong focuses in diversity, whether it be women or unrepresented populations, et cetera. So, pretty interesting investment that you guys are making there, with time, money, and people. >> Absolutely, absolutely. It is key. It is totally the key for Cisco, and for every single technology company out there to be out there and finding the diverse opinion. It really comes down to technologies not made just for men, and 50% of female population, there's not a lot of thinking that goes in in designing the technology as to how different people will use it, and big part of it is bringing the people who can think from that perspective, and that's kind of where we are out there, making sure that we can bring in that opinion. >> And the culture's such a bit thing, and you guys had such a big culture change with the new CEO shift, because there's such strong personalities, and now you guys have moved onto a new CEO. We keep hearing about culture over and over again, and how important it is to bring that up. So how important is it from the cultural aspect to be involved, and get these diversity of opinion? >> It is huge. So really, Chuck Robbins has been bringing a very humble culture, people really trying to be there for everyone, each other. And as a committee, you are really building the talent, not just for doing the right jobs, and bringing the right perspective, but also culturally bringing those opinions, as well as bringing the thinking that's going to change the culture moving forward. The technology disruption that's around us has to do a lot with how, culturally, things are changing. There is amalgamation of people coming from all over the world, and in that mode, when you're designing a technology, or when you are from networking perspective, as we think about Cisco's networking culture, network engineers are evolving too, and they are becoming more part of programmable network, and that culture shift goes along with it, which is to bring in the right people culture, and part of it is being out at the events, and meeting people coming from different places, and bringing those opinions. >> It's interesting we're at Bespoke, because I think it was last year we were here with the Cisco DevNet Team, and really a different kind of point of view coming out of Cisco, led by Susie Wee and the team, in terms of reaching out for developers, not a closed system, really trying to engage with the developer community. >> And that's part of it. Cisco's DevNet Committee is, we recently crossed a milestone of 500,000 developers. >> Oh, so I heard that was the big celebration at the party, right? Half a million, very good. >> Big celebration at Cisco Live. >> Congratulations. >> And DevNet Create was an attempt in that direction as well, to really bring the application developer, and that thinking about network engineers who have been changing the way each application works, how the internet of things is going to further drive the growth of internet, in that world, we also need a lot of application developers coming in, and that was the attempt for DevNet Create Conference, and that's where Girls in Tech and other such events are very important. >> Right, and only going to be more crazy when 5G comes online in a couple years. The demand for networking is, and the bandwidth is not slowing down anytime soon. >> It's not. (laughs) >> All right, Shubha, well thank you for spending a few times, I'm sure you are tired after the long event, so hopefully you get through this and you can take it easy this weekend. >> Thanks, Jeff. It was good to talk to you. >> All right, thanks for stopping by. I'm Jeff, and you're watching theCUBE from Girls in Tech Conference 2018. Thanks for watching. (laid-back electronic music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Downtown San Francisco at Bespoke. It's in the Westfield Shopping Mall, kind of a cool event space up on the fourth floor, and we're at Girls in Tech Catalyst. We were last here a couple years ago in Phoenix, and we're excited to be back. 700 people, really great event, and the program's pretty simple. You've got great women leaders telling their story, and the stories are varied and really cool, and we just got out of Christina's story. She's Christina Kosmowski, global head of customer success at Slack. >> That's right. >> Christina, really good job up there. >> Thank you. >> There was a couple of things I wanted to really kind of jump on that I thought were so important. In the first one you talk about early in your career and raising your hand. When opportunities come up, don't be afraid, raise your hand, go for it. >> Yeah, absolutely. I was always saying, yes to everything. And now I work on saying no to some things. (laughs) >> That's a whole other conversation-- >> I think it's really important that you know there's all those cliches around the fact that you know you've got to go through the window sometimes or you know opportunities are masked and they really are and so just saying yes to everything and really being open to trying new things and learning new experiences will give you opportunities you didn't even realize you had. And so, I always raised my hand, you know, in college to start the soccer team. I raised my hand in my first job to go to Europe and start the London office. I raised my hand to come to Salesforce, at every single point, Salesforce had something new, I said, oh I want to do it and so I was kind of known as the person who always liked to start and build things from scratch. And so, I always wanted to be that yes person and experience these new opportunities. >> And that was huge, I think you said when you started Salesforce, revenue was like 20 million and when you left it was-- >> Almost 10 billion, yeah, it's crazy. It was quite a ride, quite a ride. >> But great, cause then you get those opportunities. >> Yeah. >> Another story you were telling which I thought was pretty impactful was, your college soccer experience, you're a soccer player and you know, the difference between putting in your own work and time to achieve something and, you know, nobody ever sees the work that happens when they're not there, but more importantly, bringing along the team. >> Yeah. >> And getting everybody else to buy into your work ethic to raise the performance of the team. I wonder if you can expand on that a little bit. Cause then you said you've used that throughout your career over and over again. >> I have, it was an important lesson. I think, for those that didn't see that speech, I talked about the fact that my freshman year in soccer, it was the first year of the varsity program. We won three games and I was very angry about that and so I spent the next year kind of working my butt off. And so I got to this level but my rest of the team didn't get to the level and so I was able to challenge them to match my level and we were ultimately able to get, you know, into the top sixteen in the country at the end of my career and that was the first time that I realized it's not just about me. And I've seen that in every step in the way is, I can get there, I can get my idea there, I can work as hard as I can but if I can't empower the team and I can't bring all the cross-functional leaders along with me, we aren't going to achieve what we need to achieve. And at Slack, I've even seen that to be even more of the case, because I've come into a function that's brand new, it started very much as a product-based company versus Salesforce was a little more sales focused. And so it's really important that people understand what our mission is, why it's important, how we can bring these other organizations with us. >> Right, so a great kind of business theme that touched both on Salesforce and at Slack, it's kind of the subscription economy. >> Yes. >> And we've done this conference and we all switched over to our paid Adobe subscription versus trying to find a friend who'll get you a license for a deal at the end of the year. (laughs) But I think the really important thing that you touched on, when you go to subscription economy it really changes the dynamic between you and your customer. And you run customer success. >> I do. >> Because it's not just take the check and send 'em the 15% maintenance bill anymore, now you've got to build a relationship, you've got to deliver value each and every month cause they're paying you each and every month. And so you've translated that into actually building an organization that supports this very different relationship. >> That's right. >> So why don't you tell us, you know, how did that transform? How hard of a sell was that and what's the ultimate outcome with your relationship with the customers? >> I think it's so important to realize that technology is really important, but if we can't apply that into the business setting and to specific outcomes and use cases, it doesn't become valuable over time. And so, we've built an organization that really focuses on customer maturity and value. And so we take it in steps. And so we look at what are those things we can do to give value and outcomes and affect people the way they're working today? And then what does that look like tomorrow, how do we build upon that, and then what does it look like to, they can get to this fully transformed state, and we've done that through a combination of working with product to build features and in-app education, we work with all of our customers to understand what are their needs, we bring people to the table, we bring one to many programs, we've really created this champion network where we are able to allow these peer to peer relationships, and really have this network effect with our customers, and so there's lots of different methods and vehicles that we're doing to really ensure that our customers are getting that outcome. >> Yeah, it's interesting, we cover a lot of the AWS shows and, you know, Jeff Bezos will talk about them just being maniacally customer focused, and lots of companies like to talk about being maniacally customer focused, but most of them are not, they're product focused or they're competitor focused or they're kind of opportunity focused, they're not customer focused. So, how do you build that culture, can you switch if it's not there or does it got to be from the top down at the beginning? >> You can, you can, I think, you know, at Slack, we've been really fortunate it also has that extreme customer focus, but our organization started about 15 months ago, so we brought even more rigor to that, and so there's lots of programs you can do to affect the culture. So, one of the programs we have is a red account program, and one of the things there is really about bringing all the company together to swarm around issues or risks that our customers might have seen, and that's one way that we can start to talk about customer importance. >> What do you call it? >> We call it the customer red account program. >> Red account, so red like treble, because, so you basically-- >> We swarm. >> Swarm, swarm, what a great, swarm meaning a lot of people from a lot of different places. >> Lot of different places, and there's full accountability on all parts of the organization to solve it, because my organization can't solve everything, we're really just the advocates and the facilitators back into, back into Slack, and so that's important that we have that accountability, and we're swarming all around the customer. We have product feedback sessions where we're able to bring that advocacy back, we have a lot of surveys and that promoter score, things where we're measuring and looking for accountability about how we're doing with out customers, and so there's lots of different programs that you can help bring this to light, even in just tactical ways that help ultimately build this culture of customer success. >> See, so like I said, you've got a lot of sniffers in the system to see when you need to call a code red. So, I'm just curious, when you get everyone together, are people surprised where the problems are, is it like, oh, I thought we were doing a great job, and this group's like, no, no, no, you know, you're the problem? >> Sometimes, sometimes, but I think it is really around it being a team effort and really understanding that when issues or challenges expose themselves, there's multiple root causes and you can really understand, okay, part of it could be a product, part of it could be how we supported them, part of it could be in some of our marketing and messaging. And how do we all solve that in a more universal experience? >> All right, last question before I let you go. Just your impressions of the Catalyst today, you said it's your first time here. >> This is my first time here, I am blown away by the energy and excitement and really the quality of speakers and conversations that are happening, I've been hanging around all morning, and just really powerful conversations, and I think I said this in my speech, but we are in a really fortunate time right now, and I think our time is now, and it's so great to see all these women come together, and we, you know, we're the ones that can do this. >> Excellent, we'll see you Amplify later this year. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Christina, well, thanks for stopping by and sharing your story. >> All right, thanks. >> All right, she's Christina, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at Girls in Tech Catalyst in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Bespoke. It's at the top of the Westfield Mall. Come on by sometime if you're doin' some shoppin', but we're here at Girls in Tech Catalyst. Really cool convention. We were in Phoenix a couple years ago, about 700 women, girls, some students that came in, and a few men as well. Really talking about great inspirational stories. Unbelievable lineup of leaders telling their stories, how they got to where they were, and sharing the information. Now we're excited to have our first guest. She's Patty McCord. She's an author of this great book, Powerful, and she used to be the head of HR, or chief, >> Talent officer. >> Talent officer at Netflix. Patty, great to see you. >> Nice to meet you, too. >> Absolutely. >> Yay. >> So you're going to be speaking in a little bit, so what is your topic on today? >> The future of work, but mostly I'm going to talk about my experience with work over the last 30 years, and that the future of work is right now. We just don't operate that way. >> So, Patty, what do people get right about culture, what do they get wrong about culture? >> What they get wrong about it is they think it's a document. They think if you write it down, you're done, and what they get wrong about it is they don't walk the walk, right? I mean, I know that's simple and cliched, but I can't tell you how many startup CEOs I meet that say, I want to be this, and I want to this. I want to be efficient, right? I want to be straightforward. Well, is there information that you hide from employees, and do you show up to meetings on time? Uuh, right? And it's also about the stories that you tell, what becomes legend, and people love those positive legend stories, and they forget that when you screw up, we'll tell that story for 10 years, right? And the third thing, I think, is people get nostalgic, and they think they can keep it, especially in little companies. Let's keep the culture the way it is, and you cannot do that if you are successful. >> It's so bizarre that people don't get the kind of do what I say, versus do what I do. I mean, this is 101, and it's such a slap in the face when a leader says one thing, and then immediately does something different. >> And you wonder, how did they end up to be this way, when their saying is break things, right? >> Well, failing up is a whole different conversation that we'll save for another day. >> But let's take failing up, right? I talked to a CEO who told me I give everybody who makes a mistake a bottle of champagne to celebrate failure. I'm like, well that's stupid. (both laugh) But it only matters if you fail up if you learn something from it, and that's the demonstrable stories that you tell, that become part of your culture, rather than you get rewarded with champagne if you screw up. >> And then the other thing we were talking about before we turned the camera on are some of these just kind of arcane, old processes that people just put 'em in it, is it-- >> Well, let's start with the fundamentals. I'm going to hire you, and you'll have a career for the rest of your life in our company. Big fat lie, has been for decades, and we still tell it, right? Second one-- >> God, people still tell that story? >> They still do tell that story. >> I've been in Silicon Valley too long. >> Yeah, me too, but I mean, I travel all over the world now, and I hear that story all the time. The second one, which I'll talk about in a minute, is we're family. You're not, right? It's not family, it's work. It's two different things. >> You pay me to come every day. >> That's right, so it's not just the processes that are archaic, like you and I talked about the annual performance review, which is we don't step back like we do with every part of the business and say, why did we do that? What's its purpose? Is it still effective, right? If it is a process to give people feedback so they'll improve their performance, you do it once a year? >> Right, like that's really going to make a big impact. >> Yeah, that's kind of dumb, and then I'm going to figure out how to pay you based on what you did or didn't do last year? And particularly for women, I mean particularly for women, the compensation systems that we have, equal pay, those are issues that they're just writing checks. How hard can this be to figure this stuff out, and when you do it, it's actually not that much money. So I'm advocating, I'm kind of on my bully pulpit here, saying people in my organizations, in HR, we need to fix the stuff that's broken, own the fact that we broke it, and stop talking about it in a language nobody understands. >> Is there some just historical legal compliance issues and stuff that keeps things like the annual performance review going, or is just minutiae? >> There's sort of this inward naval gazing thing we do, where go, well, it's best practices, 'cause everybody does it. I mean, I talk to people who say, well it's a legal requirement. No, it's not, right? We don't even ask. (laughs) If there's a law, I coach people-- >> You haven't seen it yet, and you've had the C title forever. >> I coach people all the time. When your lawyer says you can't do it, you say why, and they say, well it's against the law, and you say can I see the statute? They're written in english, right? It's not Sanskrit, right? So look at it and say, well that's not what I read it to say. Well, if you didn't do it, you'd get sued. What's the most recent lawsuit? What was the settlement? How many people sue for this sort of thing? So there's a-- >> Such a business-minded and analytical approach to these questions, right, as opposed to just accepting the status quo. >> You just said you'd been in Silicon Valley all your life, me too, and I love innovation, and I love being inventive, and I don't want to be on the outside of all this fun. It's like, if somebody, like when I was at Netflix, if we could invent a new way of consuming entertainment, then why couldn't I invent a new way of working? >> Right, interesting. And so I wanted your take on another kind of hot trend right now, especially with the younger kids comin' up, is mission, and mission-driven companies, mission-driven opportunities, and I think, rightly or wrongly, and it's kind of like we're going to have you forever, it's a more and more important reason why people are choosing to go to certain companies, and it's so competitive here, say in the Bay Area specifically, whereas you're an employer, how should they look at this? How real is it? >> Well, first of all, before you blame them, right? Before we blame them, we have to realize that these are the children of burnt-out corporate citizens, right? And they've watched their parents toil, and come home burnt-out and upset and empty after careers in the companies that they belonged in that didn't give 'em back what they promised, right? So I think we all want mission. I don't think it's unusual for them. I think they're just asking for it. When we felt like we had to wait until later in our career to ask for stuff that mattered to us. And the other thing is, I think the companies who are building now are more capable of delivering that. And I don't think that by mission they're talking about world peace. They just want to know, how do I matter, right? And so, for me, that's teaching people how businesses work, and what the complexities are, and what the opportunities and the challenges are, and being part of that, right? So that's what they're asking for. They're not asking for every single day to go home and feel like they've changed the world, for curing, not that curing cancer's a bad thing, I think we should do that too, but we can still feel mission driven by just connecting with our customers and our products and the work that we do every day. >> All right, Patty, well I know you got to go get mic'd up for your big presentation, so thanks for takin' a few minutes of your time. >> Yeah, it was great fun. >> And I look forward to jumping into the book and getting into the day. >> Great, okay, thanks. >> She's Patty, I'm Jeff. We're at Girls in Tech, the Catalyst Conference at Bespoke in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (laid-back electronic music)