>>From around the globe. If the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 20, 20 special coverage sponsored by AWS worldwide public sector. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. To the cubes, virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, this is the cube virtual. I'm your host John farrier with the cube. The cube normally is there in person this year. It's all virtual. This is the cube virtual. We're doing the remote interviews and we're bringing in commentary and discussion around the themes of re-invent. And this today is public sector, worldwide public sector day. And the theme from Teresa Carlson, who heads up the entire team is to think big and look at the data. And I wanted to bring in a special cube alumni and special guests. Alan Cohen. Who's a partner at data collective venture capital or DCVC, um, which we've known for many, many years, founders, Matt OCO and Zachary Bogue, who started the firm, um, to over at about 10 years ago. We're on the really the big data wave and have grown into a really big firm thought big data, data, collective big ideas. That's the whole purpose of your firm. Alan. You're now a partner retired, retired, I mean a venture capitalist over at being a collective. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you as well. John, thanks for being so honest this morning. >>I love to joke about being retired because the VC game, it's not, um, a retirement for you. You guys made, you made some investments. Data collective has a unique, um, philosophy because you guys invest in essentially moonshots or big ideas, hard problems. And if I look at what's going on with Amazon, specifically in the public sector, genome sequencing now available in what they call the open data registry. You've got healthcare expanding, huge, you got huge demand and education, real societal benefits, uh, cybersecurity contested in space, more contention and congestion and space. Um, there's a lot of really hard science problems that are going on at the cloud. And AI are enabling, you're investing in entrepreneurs that are trying to solve these problems. What's your view of the big ideas? What are people missing? >>Well, I don't know if they're missing, but I think what I'd say, John, is that we're starting to see a shift. So if you look at the last, I don't know, forever 40, 50 years in the it and the tech industry, we took a lot of atoms. We built networks and data warehouses and server farms, and we, we kind of created software with it. So we took Adam's and we turned them into bets. Now we're seeing things move in the other direction where we're targeting bits, software, artificial intelligence, massive amount of compute power, which you can get from companies like, like AWS. And now we're creating better atoms. That means better met medicines and vaccines we're investor, um, and a company called abs Celera, which is the therapeutic treatment that J and J has, um, taken to market. Uh, people are actually spaces, a commercial business. >>If it's not a science fiction, novel we're investors in planet labs and rocket labs and compel a space so people can see right out. So you're sitting on your terrorists of your backyard from a satellite that was launched by a private company without any government money. Um, you talked about gene sequencing, uh, folding of proteins. Um, so I think the big ideas are we can look at some of the world's most intractable issues and problems, and we can go after them and turn them into commercial opportunities. Uh, and we would have been able to do that before, without the advent of big data and obviously the processing capabilities and on now artificial intelligence that are available from things like AWS. So, um, it's kind of, it's kind of payback from the physical world to the physical world, from the virtual world. Okay. >>Pella space was featured in the keynote by Teresa Carlson. Um, great to tie that in great tie in there, but this is the kind of hard problems. And I want to get your take because entrepreneurs, you know, it reminds me of the old days where, you know, when you didn't go back to the.com, when that bubble was going on, and then you got the different cycles and the different waves, um, the consumer always got the best kind of valuations and got the most attention. And now B to B's hot, you got the enterprise is super hot, mainly because of Amazon >>Sure. Into the Jordash IPO. Obviously this morning, >>Jordache IPO, I didn't get a phone call for friends and family and one of their top customers. They started in Palo Alto. We know them since the carton Jordache, these are companies that are getting massive, uh, zoom. Um, the post pandemic is coming. It's going to be a hybrid world. I think there's clear recognition that this some economic values are digital being digitally enabled and using cloud and AI for efficiencies and philosophy of new things. But it's going to get back to the real world. What's your, it's still hard problems out there. I mean, all the valuations, >>Well, there's always hard problems, but what's different now. And from a perspective of venture and, and investors is that you can go after really hard problems with venture scale level of investments. Uh, traditionally you think about these things as like a division of a company like J and J or general electric or some very massive global corporation, and because of the capabilities that are available, um, in the computing world, um, as well as kind of great scientific research and we fund more PhDs probably than any other, uh, any other type of background, uh, for, for founders, they can go after these things, they can create. Uh, we, uh, we have a company called pivot bio, uh, and I think I've spoken to you about them in the past, Sean, they have created a series of microbes that actually do a process called nitrogen fixation. Um, so it attaches the nitrogen to the roots of corn, sorghum and wheat. >>So you don't have to use chemical fertilizer. Well, those microbes were all created through an enormous amount of machine learning. And where did that machine learning come from? So what does that mean? That means climate change. That means more profitable farmers. Uh, that means water and air management, all major issues in our society where if we didn't have the computing capabilities we have today, we wouldn't have been able to do that. We clearly would have not been able to do that, um, as a venture level of investments to get it started. So I think what's missing for a lot of people is a paucity of imagination. And you have to actually, you know, you actually have to take these intractable problems and say, how can I solve them and then tear it apart to its actual molecules, just the little inside joke, right? And, and then move that through. >>And, you know, this means that you have to be able to invest in work on things. You know, these companies don't happen in two or three years or five years. They take sometimes seven, 10, 15 years. So it's life work for people. Um, but though, but we're seeing that, uh, you know, that everywhere, I mean, rocket lab, a company of ours out of New Zealand and now out of DC, which we actually launched the last couple of space, um, satellites, they print their rocket engines with a 3d printer, a metal printer. So think about that. How did all that, that come to bear? Um, and it started as a dangerous scale style of investments. So, you know, Peter Beck, the founder of that company had a dream to basically launch a rocket, you know, once a year, once a month, once a week, and eventually to once a day. So he's effectively creating a huge, um, huge upswing in the ability of people to commercialize space. And then what does space do? It gives you better observability on the planet from a, not just from a security point of view, but from a weather and a commerce point of view. So all kinds of other things that looked like they were very difficult to go after it now starts to become enabled. Yeah. >>I love the, uh, your investment in Capella space because I think that speaks volumes. And one of the things that the founder was talking about was getting the data down is the hard part. He he's up, he's up there now. He can see everything, but now I've got to get the data down because say, say the wildfires in California, or whether, um, things happening around the globe now that you have the, uh, the observation space, you got to get the data down there. This is the huge scale challenge. >>Well, let me, let me, let me give you something. That's also, so w you know, we are in a fairly difficult time in this country, right? Because of the covert virus, uh, we are going to maybe as quickly as next week, start to deliver, even though not as many as we'd like vaccines and therapeutics into this virus situation, literally in a year, how did all these things, I mean, obviously one of the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes, and maybe, you know, uh, of the past century, uh, how did that happen? How did it all day? Well, you know, some, I mean, the ability to use, um, computing power in, in assistance, in laboratory, in, in, uh, in, um, development of, of pharmaceutical and therapeutics is a huge change. So something that is an intractable problem, because the traditional methods of creating vaccines that take anywhere from three to seven years, we would have a much worse public health crisis. I'm not saying that this one is over, right. We're in a really difficult situation, but our ability to start to address it, the worst public health crisis in our lifetime is being addressed because of the ability of people to apply technology and to accelerate the ability to create vaccines. So great points, absolutely amazing. >>Let's just, let's just pause that let's double down on that and just unpack that, think about that for a second. If you didn't, and then the Amazon highlight is on Andy Jesse's keynote carrier, which makes air conditioning. They also do refrigeration and transport. So one IOT application leveraging their cloud is they may call it cold chain managing the value chain of the transport, making sure food. And in this case vaccine, they saw huge value to reduce carbon emissions because of it does the waste involved in food alone was a problem, but the vaccine, they had the cold, the cold, cold, cold chain. Can you hear me? >>Maybe this year, the cold chain is more valuable than the blockchain. Yeah. >>Cold don't think he was cold chain. Sounds like a band called play. Um, um, I had to get that in and Linda loves Coldplay. Um, but if you think about like where we are to your point, imagine if this hit 15 years ago or 20 years ago, um, you know, YouTube was just hitting the scene 20 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, so, you know, that kind of culture, we didn't have zoom education would be where we would be Skyping. Um, there's no bandwidth. So, I mean, you, you know, the, the bandwidth Wars you would live through those and your career, you had no bandwidth. You had no video conferencing, no real IOT, no real supply chain management and therapeutics would have taken what years. What's your reaction to, to that and compare and contrast that to what's on full display in the real world stage right now on digital enablement, digital transformation. >>Well, look, I mean, ultimately I'm an optimist because of what this technology allows you to do. I'm a realist that, you know, you know, we're gonna lose a lot of people because of this virus, but we're also going to be able to reduce a lot of, um, uh, pain for people and potentially death because of the ability to accelerate, um, these abilities to react. I think the biggest and the, the thing that I look for and I hope for, so when Theresa says, how do you think big, the biggest lesson I think we're going to we've learned in the last year is how to build resilience. So all kinds of parts of our economy, our healthcare systems, our personal lives, our education, our children, even our leisure time have been tested from a resilience point of view and the ability of technology to step in and become an enabler for that of resilience. >>Like there isn't like people don't love zoom school, but without zoom school, what we're going to do, there is no school, right? So, which is why zoom has become an indispensable utility of our lives, whether you're on a too much, or you've got zoom fatigue, does it really matter the concept? What we're going to do, call into a conference call and listen to your teacher, um, right in, you know, so how are you going to, you're going to do that, the ability to repurpose, um, our supply chain and, you know, uh, we, we, we see this, we're going to see a lot of change in the, in the global supply chain. You're going to see, uh, whether it's re domestication of manufacturing or tightening of that up, uh, because we're never going to go without PPE again, and other vital elements. We've seen entire industries repurposed from B2B to B to C and their ability to package, deliver and service customers. That is, those are forms of resilience. >>And, and, and, and taking that to the next level. If you think about what's actually happening on full display, and again, on my one-on-one with Andy Jassy prior to the event, and he laid this out on stage, he kind of talks about this, every vertical being disrupted, and then Dr. Matt wood, who's the machine learning lead there in Swami says, Hey, you know, cloud compute with chips now, and with AI and machine learning, every industry, vertical global industry is going to be disrupted. And so, you know, I get that. We've been saying that in the queue for a long time, that that's just going to happen. So we've been kind of on this wave of horizontal, scalability and vertical specialization with data and modern applications with machine learning, making customization really high-fidelity decisions. Or as you say, down to the molecule level or atomic level, but this is clear what, what I found interesting. And I want to get your thoughts because you have one been there, done that through many ways of innovation and now investor leading investor >>Investor, and you made up a word. I like it. Okay. >>Jesse talks about leadership to invent and reinvent. Can't fight gravity. You've got to get talent hungry for invention, solve real-world problems. Speed. Don't complexify. That's his message. I said to him, in my interview, you need a wartime conciliary cause he's a big movie buff. I quote the godfather. Yeah. Don't you don't want to be the Tom Hagen. You don't want to be that guy, right? You're not a wartime. Conciliary this is a time there's times in companies' histories where there's peace and there's wartime, wartime being the startup, trying to find its way. And then they get product market fit and you're growing and scaling. You're operating, you're hiring people to operate. Then you get into a pivot or a competitive situation. And then you got to get out there and, and, and get dirty and reinvent or re-imagine. And then you're back to peace. Having the right personnel is critical. So one of the themes this year is if you're in the way, get out of the way, you know, and some people don't want to hold on to hold onto the past. That's the way we did it before I built this system. Therefore it has to work this way. Otherwise the new ways, terrible, the mainframe, we've got to keep the mainframe. So you have a kind of a, um, an accelerated leadership, uh, thin man mantra happening. What is your take on this? Because, >>Sorry. So if you're going to have your F R R, if you're going to, if you are going to use, um, mob related better for is I'll share one with you from the final season of the Soprano's, where Tony's Prado is being hit over the head with a bunch of nostalgia from one of his associates. And he goes, remember, when is the lowest form of conversation and which is iconic. I think what you're talking about and what Andy is talking about is that the thing that makes great leadership, and what I look for is that when you invest in somebody or you put somebody in a leadership position to build something, 50% of their experience is really important. And 50% of it is not applicable in the new situation. And the hard leadership initiative has to understand which 50 matters in which 50 doesn't matter. >>So I think the issue is that, yeah, I think it is, you know, lead follow or get out of the way, but it's also, what am I doing? Am I following a pattern for a, for a, for an, a, for a technology, a market, a customer base, or a set of people are managing that doesn't really exist anymore, that the world has moved on. And I think that we're going to be kind of permanent war time on some level we're going to, we're going to be co we're because I think the economy is going to shift. We're going to have other shocks to the economy and we don't get back to a traditional normal any time soon. Yep. So I, I think that is the part that leadership in, in technology really has to, would adopt. And it's like, I mean, uh, you know, the first great CEO of Intel reminded us, right. Then only the paranoid survive. Right. Is that it's you, some things work and some things don't work and that's, that's the hard part on how you parse it. So I always like to say that you always have to have a crisis, and if there is no crisis, you create the crisis. Yeah. And, you know, >>Sam said, don't let a good crisis go to waste. You know? Um, as a manager, you take advantage of the crisis. >>Yeah. I mean, look, it wouldn't have been bad to be in the Peloton business this year. Right, too. Right. Which is like, when people stayed home and like that, you know, you know, th that will fade. People will get back on their bikes and go outside. I'm a cyclist, but you know, a lot more people are going to look at that as an alternative way to exercise or exercising, then when it's dark or when the weather is inclement. So what I think is that you see these things, they go in waves, they crest, they come back, but they never come back all the way to where they were. And as a manager, and then as a builder in the technology industry, you may not get like, like, like, okay, maybe we will not spend as much time on zoom, um, in a year from now, but we're going to still spend a lot of time on zoom and it's going to still be very important. >>Um, what I, what I would say, for example, and I, and looking at the COVID crisis and from my own personal investments, when I look at one thing is clear, we're going to get our arms around this virus. But if you look at the history of airborne illnesses, they are accelerating and they're coming every couple of years. So being able to be in that position to, to more react, more rapidly, create vaccines, the ability to foster trials more quickly to be able to use that information, to make decisions. And so the duration when people are not covered by therapeutics or vaccines, um, short, and this, that is going to be really important. So that form of resilience and that kind of speed is going to happen again and again, in healthcare, right. There's going to be in, you know, in increasing pressure across that in part of the segment food supply, right. I mean, the biggest problem in our food supply today is actually the lack of labor. Um, and so you have far, I mean, you know, farmers have had a repurpose, they don't sell to their traditional, like, so you're going to see increased amount of optimization automation and mechanization. >>Lauren was on the, um, keynote today talking about how their marketplaces collected as a collective, you know, um, people were working together, um, given that, given the big ideas. Well, let's, let's just, as we end the segment here, let's connect big ideas. And the democratization of, I mean, you know, the old expression Silicon Valley go big or go home. Well, I think now we're at a time where you can actually go big and stay and, and, and be big and get to be big at your own pace because the, the mantra has been thinking big in years, execute plan in months and execute weekly and month daily, you know, you can plan around, there's a management technique potentially to leverage cloud and AI to really think about bit the big idea. Uh, if I'm a manager, whether I'm in public sector or commercial or any vertical industry, I can still have that big idea that North star and then work backwards and figure that out. >>That sounds to the Amazon way. What's your take on how people should be. What's the right way to think about executing down that path so that someone who's say trying to re-imagine education. And I know a, some people that I've talked to here in California are looking at it and saying, Hey, I don't need to have silos students, faculty, alumni, and community. I can unify them together. That's an idea. I mean, execution of that is, you know, move all these events. So they've been supplying siloed systems to them. Um, I mean, cause people want to interact online. The Peloton is a great example of health and fitness. So there's, there's everyone is out there waiting for this playbook. >>Yeah. Unfortunately I, I had the playbook. I'd mail it to you. Uh, but you know, I think there's a couple of things that are really important to do. Maybe good to help the bed is one where is there structural change in an industry or a segment or something like that. And sorry to just people I'm home today, right? It's, everybody's running out of the door. Um, and you know, so I talked about this structural change and you, we talked about the structural change in healthcare. We talked about kind of maybe some of the structural change that's coming to agriculture. There's a change in people's expectations and how they're willing to work and what they're willing to do. Um, you, as you pointed out the traditional silos, right, since we have so much information at our fingertips, um, you know, people's responsibility as opposed to having products and services to deliver them, what they're willing to do on their own is really changed. >>Um, I think the other thing is that, uh, leadership is ultimately the most important aspect. And we have built a lot of companies in the industry based on forms of structural relations industry, um, background, I'm a product manager, I'm a sales person, I'm a CEO, I'm a finance person. And what we're starting to see is more whole thinking. Um, uh, particularly in early stage investors where they think less functionally about what people's jobs are and more about what the company is trying to get done, what the market is like. And it's infusing a lot more, how people do that. So ultimately most of this comes down to leadership. Um, uh, and, and that's what people have to do. They have to see themselves as a leader in their company, in their, in the business. They're trying to build, um, not just in their function, but in the market they're trying to win, which means you go out and you talk to a lot more people. >>You do a lot, you take a lot fewer things for granted. Um, you read less textbooks on how to build companies and you spend more time talking to your customers and your engineers, and you start to look at enabling. So the, we have made between machine learning, computer vision, and the amount of processing power that's available from things like AWS, including the services that you could just click box in places like the Amazon store. You actually have to be much more expansive in how you think about what you can get done without having to build a lot of things. Cause it's actually right there at your fingertips. Hopefully that kind of gets a little bit to what you were asking. >>Well, Alan, it's always great to have you on and great insight and, uh, always a pleasure to talk candidly. Um, normally we're a little bit more boisterous, but given how terrible the situation is with COVID while working at home, I'm usually in person, but you've been great. Take a minute to give a plug for the data collective venture capital firm. DCVC you guys have a really unique investment thesis you're in applied AI, computational biology, um, computational care, um, enterprise enablement. Geospatial is about space and Capella, which was featured carbon health, smart agriculture transportation. These are kind of like not on these are off the beaten path of like traditional herd mentality of venture capital. You guys are going after big problems. Give us an update on the firm. I know that firm has gotten bigger lately. You guys have >>No, I mean the further firm has gotten bigger, I guess since Matt, Zach started about a decade ago. So we have about $2.3 billion under management. We also have bio fund, uh, kind of a sister fund. That's part of that. I mean, obviously we are, uh, traditionally an early stage investor, but we have gone much longer now with these additional, um, um, investment funds and, and the confidence of our LPs. Uh, we are looking for bears. You said John, really large intractable, um, industry problems and transitions. Uh, we tend to back very technical founders and work with them very early in the creation of their business. Um, and we have a huge network of some of the leading people in our industry who work with us. Uh, we, uh, it's a little bit of our secret weapon. We call it our equity partner network. Many of them have been on the cube. >>Um, and these are people that work with us in the create, uh, you know, the creation of this. Uh, we've never been more excited because there's never been more opportunity. And you'll start to see, you know, you're starting to hear more and more about them, uh, will probably be a couple of years of report. We're a household name. Um, but you know, we've, we we're, we're washing deal flow. And the good news is I think more people want to invest in and build the things that we've. So we're less than itchy where people want to do what we're doing. And I think some of the large exits that starting to come our way or we'll attract more, more great entrepreneurs in that space. >>I really saw the data models, data, data trend early, you saw a Realty impacted, and I'll say that's front and center on Amazon web services reinvent this year. You guys were early super important firm. I'm really glad you guys exist. And you guys will be soon a household name if not already. Thanks for coming on. Right, >>Alan. Thanks. Thank you. Appreciate >>It. Take care. I'm John ferry with the cube. 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