>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, day two of our coverage of Cisco Live. We are live also from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, Stu Miniman is my co-host. And one of our alumni is back with us, Eric Herzog, the CMO of IBM Storage. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Welcome back. So, lots of buzz, we're in the DevNet Zone. This has been, I hear, one of the busiest expos at Cisco Live this year. The community is, I'm hearing, approaching 600,000 strong. Yesterday we were talking a lot about the big waves of innovation, one of them being GPU's everywhere, AI, but also some of the challenges with respect to data, that companies are generally getting less than 1% of that data to really extract insights from it. So let's talk about what IBM is doing with respect to AI and big data, and really helping customers really turn that dial up on getting more value out of what they have. >> Well, so we're doing a lot in that space. First of all, when you're running AI in particular, if you're really going to do something like run a robotic factory, you'd better make sure the storage doesn't fail. But that's sort of, you know, the checkbox item, just the way a car always has a spare tire. So the real differentiator, from a storage perspective, is what do you do to help the data prep, what do you help to do to make sure that the data is always in the right kind of pipeline? For example, just like a human always learns, right, at least smart humans always learn, so you learned certain things when you were seven or eight, they might've changed by the time you were in college, by the time you have your first kid they might be different again, and by the time you're getting ready to retire, but it could be still the same topic and the data's recycling, and then you learn new things about that topic. So in the case of a data workload, what you need to do is make sure you have data prep along the entire pipeline. And that's what we've done with a whole bunch of software that we offer for the big data and AI workloads and applications. >> So, Eric, we've talked with you many times about what's happening in the multi-cloud world. It feels like IBM and Cisco are on similar, parallel paths as to the move from, traditionally we think about boxes, and from a Cisco standpoint it's ports, and, you know, more and more it's about the software. So can you talk a little bit about that software-defined world in where IBM and Cisco are going together along that journey. >> So, one of the things that we've done from a storage division perspective, we do what we call the VersaStack. It's a converge infrastructure that includes Cisco UCS, our all-flash arrays, but it's packed with a bunch of software. So we can use that to transparently move block data out to a cloud, any cloud, IBM cloud, Amazon, Azure. We could move it out to a block store or to an object store. Now obviously to move it out to an object store, that can help you, can prevent ransomware and malware. And it's all automated. We've done the same thing with Scale-Out File, where we just see cloud as just a tier, and we've done the same thing with object storage. So the big thing we see from a hybrid, multi-cloud perspective at the IBM storage division, is everything needs to be able to have the data easily portable, easily migrateable, and easily replicable back, and constantly moving back and forth, not just going out to the cloud and staying there. So we've done that from our software-defined portfolio. But we also did it with our modern data protection portfolio, Spectrum Protect, which is one of the most award-winning products in the backup space. We've got over 400 small-medium cloud providers where their backup-as-a-service offering is based on Spectrum Protect. So if they go to Wikibon and Wikibon says, we want to back up to the cloud and you're using Tectrade or Cloud Temple or i-Virtualize, all those cloud providers, the backup-as-a-service they sell you is based on IBM Spectrum Protect. So for us cloud is just another tier. Just like hard drives and flash and tape, cloud's just the new tier. >> So in this pivot towards software-defined everything, with, say, VersaStack for example, give us one of your favorite customer success stories that really highlights the value of what IBM and your partnerships deliver. >> Sure, sure. So one of them would be Tectrade. So Tectrade is one of our public references. They only do PCI data. So, Wikibon couldn't be a customer, IBM can't be a customer, theCube can't be a customer, Cisco can't be, because we don't specialize, as you know, in financial-centric data. So they back up about, they do about two million backups a day, all of financial data across Europe and into North America, and they've got a VersaStack that happens to run Spectrum Protect on it. It's all flash, so they're not worried about performance. And then they back up to giant hard drive farms that they've also bought from IBM. But the real thing on the VersaStack is having that very fast edge, and then having the software that allows them to A, control the storage side, but then run Spectrum Protect to do backup. So if you were a bank, if theCUBE was a bank, then you guys could use Tectrade and they use a VersaStack for backing up data as a service. That's a perfect example of what we've done with the VersaStack solution, in this case in a hybrid cloud scenario. >> What are some of the business impacts that they have achieved so far? Are they finding new revenue streams, are they unlocking more valuable data to be more competitive? >> So, what they do is obviously in the PCI world. They're very centered, you can't lose anything. Because it's financial data. So for them, it's all about the security of the data, making sure the data gets there, the data's encrypted in flight, they know that the customers can do a lot of different things, because Spectrum tech is very much a big enterprise package that's very strong in the global Fortune 2000. So they like it for that. Now, we've had some other customers, and their the value has been things like the return on investment. For example, the second-largest dating site on the planet uses VersaStack. And they got a four month return on investment. They bought it, and in four months it paid for themselves, so they bought like four or five more. We had another customer who saved, and this is also a cloud service provider by the way, so they saved the equivalent of five full-time employees that were writing custom code and managing stuff, and they used Spectrum Protect also for backup. But in this case you and I could use them because they're not specialists like Tectrade is, and they'll back up anybody's data. And they saved five full-time equivalents. So they've now redeployed those full-time employees to do something else. So those are just examples from three different companies of ways that they've saved money and really driven a business value, not just about the data, and yeah, the data's fast, but really, if you're a storage guy, been doing it as long as I have, the data's always fast and it just gets faster every generation, so okay, it's fast. And in this case it's really about business value, about the value of the data, not about the storage. >> Eric, you mentioned security. Of course security is one of those topics that's hitting all of the environments here at Cisco, but bring us inside, especially from a storage division, modern data protection and how that's getting involved in the security discussion. >> Sure, so what we've done across the portfolio, even in primary storage, is made sure that we've done all sorts of things that help you against a ransomware or malware attack, keep the data encrypted. I think the key point actually, I think Silicon Angle wrote about this, something like 98% of all enterprises are going to get broken into anyway. So it's great that you've got security software on the edge, whether that be IBM or RSA or BlueCoat or Checkpoint, or who cares who you buy the software from. But when they're in, they're stealing. And sometimes, some accounts have told us that they can track them down in a day, but if you're a giant global Fortune 500 with data centers up, it might take you a week. They could be stealing stuff right and left. So we've done everything from, we have write-once technology, so it's immutable data, you can't change it. We've got encryption, so if they steal it, guess what, they can't use it. But the other thing we've done is real protection against ransomware and malware. So I am going to attack Wikibon, theCUBE, and I am going to charge you $10 million, and I'm going to steal every video you've ever created and hold it for ransom. So the way I would do that is I look at your snapshots, your replicas, and your backups first. So what do we do? We can actually snapshot a replica out to an object store, and ransomware and malware, at least today, doesn't attack object storage. So that way, when I'm talking to you or Stu and said I want $10 million, you start laughing, and go, what are you talking about? We replicate every night. Okay, we lose one day of data. He can't get half the $10 million. So that's ransomware or malware protection. We've also built that into Spectrum Protect, because what happens is when you're starting to, if you will, look at that data to get it wrapped up in the ransomware or malware, you have a whole bunch of extra activity around the backup data sets, so we send an alert. We'd send an alert to you, Lisa, and you would say, oh my god, what's going on? Why is all this activity going on the backup set? Because the backup's not scheduled, let's say, for tonight. And we would send you a note now, at two o'clock, that there's all kinds of activity, and you would go, what is going on, and you would check it out. So we can help with ransomware and malware, encryption on primary data. So we've really integrated across the portfolio, whether it be primary storage or secondary storage. And by the way, almost nobody thinks about storage. They always say, whose security package should I buy? And they never say okay, I'm going to buy it, but I, might buy some security for the storage, too. No one ever talks like that, which is why we're bringing up, and we actually launched a sales play for the field, all around storage for cyber resiliency. >> And how is that going, if you're saying it's-- >> It's actually gone incredibly well. We started with a product called Safeguarded Copy on the mainframe, and we actually got, in the first four months, almost $60 million a pipeline in the first four months of the product shipping. And now we've got it all over the whole portfolio, so we tried it just when we first got started, and now we're now talking about the ransomware and malware stuff, which by the way we've had for three years, but we were never emphasizing it to the end user. Now we're saying, by the way, has it happened or are you worried about it? Well guess what, if you're backing up with Spectrum Protect, we'll warn you. Why don't you go out to tape and air gap? Or why you don't go out to the cloud and we can do essentially a cloud air gap to object storage? And we weren't really talking like that until really we started doing it in Q4 and then really expanded it in Q1, so it's been very, very successful. The end users love it, our business partners who sell to the end users, they're loving it. And by the way, no one else is really talking about it. It's all about the security software company. So we're going beyond that. >> So, Eric, you talked about some of the products with Cisco and IBM working together. I wonder if you can up-level a little bit. You're a great watcher of the industry out there. Chuck Robbins, now four years into his tenure as CEO, Wall Street's doing well with the stock on there, finances look well. IBM and Cisco, two of the bellwethers in tech out there. How's Cisco doing? When you talk to your customers, what are they liking about Cisco, what do they want to see more from Cisco, are they aware of the transformation that Cisco's going through? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. First of all, IBM and Cisco have a mutual relationship that spans billions of dollars. Whether that be, for example, as they publicly have disclosed, IBM is the biggest customer for WebEx on the planet, and they talked about that. There's products that we sell to them that they're one of our biggest customers in the world as well. But then beyond that, whether it's common end users or common channel partners, we make sure that we deliver the right solutions together. So I think the feedback I get from both the end users and the partners is that Cisco's back. Right when Chuck came in, said, oh, what's going on with Cisco? They're still big, but the big sometimes fall over big, right? Like in the beanstalk, the giant falls over, right? So that's what I think people were thinking four years, I don't think people are thinking that now. From our perspective, we've always kept working tightly with them, between our relationship with them as a customer and us as their customer. But more importantly, it's really the common customers we have and the common channel partners, and we've never wavered for that support from a Cisco perspective. But just sort of off the cuff, when people make a comment that's like, hey, those Cisco guys are back. And four years ago people were saying, ehh, what do you think about Cisco? My wife works at Cisco, and my ex-wife works at Cisco, so it's a little easier for them to ask me that. Because I'm a Cisco shareholder too. But now you don't hear that question. It's like Cisco's got their act together, they're doing all the right stuff. So that's very good for me personally with my stock, but it's also good just for the industry. You know, you don't want someone to not be able to make the transition. And the valley's littered with that. DEC, Compaq, they're all gone. They're not the only guys that are gone. So Cisco's not going to go the way that other big companies have. They've made the transition and are transforming to what the end users really need. >> And I think the DevNet community growth is a great, speaks to the pivot that Cisco's making. DevNet has been in large part an accelerator of Cisco's transition from network appliance provider to more of a software services provider. But that community symbiosis with their end user customers, with their partners, and with their developer community, is really a driving force here. And I think just being in this DevNet Zone and how big it is, is a great example of how they're leveraging those other feedback channels to not just persist but be successful. So here we are, their Q3 2019 results are really strong, growth across all three business segments, we're in the middle of their fourth quarter. So for Cisco's FY 2020, what are some of the big bets that you can share with us that IBM and Cisco-- >> Well, the one we've done together has been one on security, so we have joint security products that we've done. We have a joint product on the system side with the VersaStack. We've done joint products with them also in the cloud solution area, both, if you think about hybrid cloud, but also in private cloud, so IBM Cloud Private for example is available on their HCI box, right, so their hyperconverged infrastructure solution includes an option for IBM Cloud Private. So IBM has made many bets with them in the security space, in the cloud space. Also, by the way, one of the biggest providers of service on Cisco solutions is actually IBM. So our services divisions do tons of business with Cisco, whether that's servicing the physical gear or servicing the software. And we've been doing that for years. So whether it be service, whether it be cloud, whether it be infrastructure, IBM is doing joint solutions across the board with the Cisco community. >> Got to ask you one last question, Eric. You've been in this industry a long time, you're a veteran extraordinaire. What keeps you excited about storage? >> Storage always change. Storage is not boring. Storage is boring for the uneducated. It is the most exciting thing, it changes all the time. I remember one of the good things about IBM was not just an array, come here, we only just do backup software, we've got high-end storage arrays, we still do tape. We're by far the dominant player, and we're having a huge resurgence there with hyperscalers and cloud providers. We're going crazy with tape because, for them, they're all about saving money for backup and archive, and we're critical to that. We are the number two storage software company in the world, all of our software works off of our gear. Some of the other guys that sell lots of software, yeah, they sell lots, but it only works on their products. Our software works with all of our competitor's products. So that makes everything exciting. I've done this now for 35 years. I've seen hard drives that were the size of a dishwasher to now flash that fits into your phone, or my MacBook, I've got five terabytes of flash. So, you know, to me that's all exciting. And the software is where it really matters. You know, we've gone from bare metal to virtualization, now to containers and cloud. So there's always new stuff going on. But I really think part of the problem with storage is everybody takes it for granted and doesn't realize, if your storage doesn't work, isn't performing, isn't reliable, and isn't available, basically your entire infrastructure caves in. I don't care whether you're in the cloud, whether you're in a virtual world, or you're still doing it really old hat with bare metal, the storage doesn't work, you're shutting down your company until that storage is back up and running again. So it is the critical foundation for every application workload and use case, in any company, big, medium, or small. And it's always evolving. So to me it's very exciting, although some people think storage is boring. I'd say networking is boring. That, to me, is boring. (Lisa laughs) Storage is exciting. >> Stu: Don't say that too loud, here. (Eric laughs) >> That's true, storage is sexy. Well Eric, it's been a pleasure to have you back on theCUBE once again, and we very much appreciate your time. >> Great, well thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, from Cisco Live in San Diego.

>> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We are here in the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host here with Rehan Jalil, former president and CEO of Elastica, here to talk about the People First network and his approach and experiences and his entrepreneurial journey. Rehan thanks for joining us. >> Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting. >> So we were talking before we came on. You have a great entrepreneurial journey. It's a great podcast up on the Mayfield.com website. Really a good story about what you've done. But you had a lot of different kind of experiences through your progression journey in entrepreneurship. You had some failures and some successes. And certainly now with cloud security hot, I'm sure you're probably go into another one. But what it's like right now for you? You just left Semantic. You're kind of out on your own. Are you clipping coupons? Going to go to the beach and hang out? Are you working on a new startup? What's happening? >> I think there's a lot to do. Frankly for me it's very important to actually understand some new problems that needs to be solved. Especially there's so much changing with AI and all the intrusions are you're seeing and breaches that are going on. There are new problems to solve and that's where my head is. I'm not going to take too much of a break. I'm going to get going. >> Yeah you seem to get it going. And that's, most entrepreneurs do that. Let's talk about some of the experience you have. And one of the things we were talking about, before I got my cameras out, back in the old days when before internet, broadband wireless was hot, you get a startup around Wimax, which was early days of broadband wireless. And then you had some failures that successes but didn't work out. Then you had another wireless startup that was successful that became part of that 4G movement. This is an example of being correct in the thesis but you picked the wrong door to go through. Talk about that journey because I think that time in history, this was around 2001, 2002, 2003 timeframe. This was the internet was growing. Wireless, we didn't have the phones we have now. Obviously it's smartphone in 2007 years later. This was pre-mobile boom. This was the beginning of the shift to broadband, true broadband. Now we see it everywhere: LTE, 5G's around the corner. This was a pivotal moment, but for you, you were as an entrepreneur, you had the right decision, broadband wireless, but it was shifting. Feels like cloud today but I want to get in touch here. What did you learn? >> I think they were two very different companies. The mission of the first company which I joined as an employee, the first company, which was to take the high speed internet to the masses. In US and some developed world, they were DSL and cable kind of first coming up, but that infrastructure did not exist in the rest of the world, and the mission was that if we could take same level of high speed connectivity and enable it for the rest of the world, it'd be really cool. And this is back in the day. So thesis was right and hence I joined that company. And it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot. But I think one thing you have to realize, even in those times, to do such a massive project and to go against some massive incumbents which exist in those ecosystems, the differentiation has to be extremely high. And to create differentiation on the radio side of things is just very difficult. And I think so, and of course at that time, the economy took a bad turn and that company didn't have some significant big outcome. From that learning I evolved a thesis that this technology needs to go mobile and this is again pre-iPhone times. It was Blackberry times. So if you were to go talk to investor and say look the world is going to look like when we will have internet in our pocket, the people would smile at you. It's like what are you talking about? So even raising money for that was not easy and that was my first company that I started myself called WiChorus. And these there was what if you could have DSL-type connectivity and literally all internet's power in your pocket. But the learnings from that first company were that if you go try to do that in straight in the wireless side of things in a telco environment, the competition is going to be significantly high. >> The scale, the presence, the market power they have. >> And the purchasing side. Most important is the purchasing cycles. People take time. Even if you come up with something really compelling, by the time it's going to be getting deployed, somebody will catch up to you. >> I mean just think about the time. This is a time for the folks watching, if you're younger or even older like my age, think about it. To actually have a phone in the car and surfing the internet didn't exist. I mean you could barely get email just through a lower latency and a lower bandwidth internet tower. They didn't have the broadband. And so today we surf, watch movies in the car. This was pre-broadband. So I remember a time when we were testing one router, it's like look it we're getting a ping back while we're driving down 101. That was like a miracle. Now it's standard. This is when big shifts happen and a lot of people are comparing that kind of environment to what we're seeing with cloud computing now. You're seeing Amazon Web Services, 26, 27 billion dollar run rate from just 47% a year. Google with great technology and now entering in. Microsoft pivoting to cloud. Those are big players and startups are now trying to figure out what you learned and how to not get in the way but also draft off the momentum. What's your view of this and what advice do you have for entrepreneurs that are out there because this is the number one question that I hear and I talk about entrepreneurs, either behind closed doors or on theCUBE. >> I think it's a blessing to have actually some infrastructure like that, but if you don't do it right it could be a curse. What I mean by that is that you have to leverage something that is available to you and not trying to kind of reinvent, do something slightly better. So I think on the infrastructure side, you have to be very thoughtful on where you could potentially play. And we're frankly some of the big players like AWS or Microsoft and perhaps Google is going to be basically wanting to actually play themselves in that area. However having said that, but the ecosystem and the layer of services that is made available, it's actually a big, big blessing for startups because all the value creation is kind of moving up the chain. And if you leverage that, then the cost of building startups and cost of doing new things is kind of gone down. So we did something very similar with Elastica, which was all about security for the cloud from the cloud. And if we didn't have that infrastructure and the layer available the amount of money that would have required would have been significantly higher. >> So the cloud gets you scaled up, leveled up quicker. Faster to go to market, more agile and dynamic, and then you could wrap IP around those old tasks of provisioning servers. >> There's plenty of intellectual property that first you can put on top of it but in a verticalized fashion. At least for Elastica it was very much kind of a vertical solution of security for the cloud in SaaS applications itself instead of trying to redo your own servers and server stack and our mission. I mean things that are available, just make use of it. >> So you guys were successful with the cloud and you sold that company to Symantec. What year was that? >> Actually it was 2015. We sold it to Bluecoat. And the Bluecoat got acquired by Symantec but then Bluecoat management took over Symantec and that was hurried. So we had like two acquisitions back to back. >> That's nice. It's a good experience. So I want to, before we move on to some of the things that are more personal, I want to get your take on an entrepreneurial dynamic that a lot of successful entrepreneurs take and I want to get your reaction to. Most entrepreneurs are very optimistic. They see the opportunity recognition. They go for it. They're persistent. But they're also in discovery mode to validate their thesis and always kind of self-aware, but there's always the fatal flaw out there that potentially could be there. We talked about broadband wireless, directionally correct, good concept, its fatal flaw was the incumbents. How do you in essence debug a startup venture, venture architecture or venture plan because if there's a fatal flaw in there it's like a bug in software. How as an entrepreneur do you debug that? I mean in your journey as you've had successes and you learned from some of the things that were teachable moments for you, is there a debugging formula? How would you react to that? How would you explain to entrepreneurs? Because that's what they always are naturally doing. Where's the fatal flaw? Where's the fatal flaw? >> And it's I think extremely important. Firstly, the intellectual honesty in setting your own direction is very important. You certainly have to have the aspiration to go do something and have that initiative to go do it, but at the same time setting direction is the most important thing or keep tuning the direction over time is actually extremely important. And then there is no one answer. The key thing is that if you're going to be building something, you have to see if there's going to be a big market for it. That's the first thing. And then when you're going to get there, how the adoption is going to be there. Would you have advantage in adoption as compared to incumbents if they get there? So I think you have to have a thesis because you just can't always project the right way, especially in the enterprise side of things. And if you can actually crack that code, and then if when you do offer this to the market, is it going to be easy to adopt? Easy to accept by the customers? And would it have some kind of an effect of quick movement? I think you have to have all those right. And some trend, if it kind of gives you support. Like when we built Elastica, there was thesis the cloud is going to take over. The SaaS is going to happen. >> That was a tailwind for you. >> So it was a tailwind. So it happened interestingly at the times when we had the product. Same actually happened for WiChorus interestingly, with a thesis that the need of very high speed internet to a mobile device, this is pre-iPhone times, would happen and luckily iPhone came on in around 2007 timeframe and we had the product which telco's would have needed and the iPhone came along. And we ended up building one of the first 4G networks along with ClearY in southern California. So I think all these things kind of have to line up. The market timing, your strategic advantage, your acceptance, all these stuff. >> The self awareness is a great point. Also having versatility and having the skills to flex because to get all those things right you're kind of juggling. And that persistence. Okay I got to ask you about People First. What does People First mean to you? >> At the end I think frankly that is the core, core of startups. And we've been kind of lucky within Elastica. Our main reason for success has been that the team that we ended up having and building over time, they not only had actually very good, diverse skill set because Elastica required very diverse skill set from networking to cloud to AI to all those. But the chemistry between the team was also quite amazing. So I think if you understand that not only the people and the company and the dynamics within them is going to be, which is going to be required, then you start paying attention to the culture that goes along with it. So the culture of executing as well as doing it with kindness and humility along the way. >> Sharing your experience, the journey together, co-creating, kind of creating that superglue in the culture. That's super important. What have you learned over your journey around the where it's worked, where it hasn't cause a lot of people are trying to figure out that people equation, and it's people they really if they sincerely believe they want to do it then but sometimes people don't know the playbook. Is there a playbook or people just go by their gut? What's your advice on in terms of hey I really want to get my people equation right. I want to get that right. We have a mission, you share that mission. What are some of the things that entrepreneurs and companies can do like immediately that's easy to get going? >> I think being is communication. And upfront I continue to start communicating not just in words, but in the things that you do yourself. Because it's not words don't count. How you actually deal with people and how you should treat them and how you actually collaborate additionally really matters. And that actually is the driving force of actually starting a culture I would say in place. And then if you observe anything that aren't working out, communication is going to be the key. You openly communicate and do it in a way that it is not a hostile environment. >> I love your history. I love your background. My personal family as a family of immigrants has come to the United States. You have a very immigrant story. Andy Grove was an immigrant, founder of Intel. I mean Silicon Valley is born, entrepreneurship is indiscriminate. Entrepreneurs are who they are but you have an interesting story where you came from, how you came to Silicon Valley. Tell that story. >> So I was born in Pakistan. My parents were born in India so they migrated to Pakistan which just happens to be that I came here for studies. Interestingly I didn't know much about Silicon Valley to be honest and I happened to have a job in Sun Microsystems that happened to be in Silicon Valley, but when I came here it was kind of a blessing. This is exactly where I needed to be because even when I was going to grad school I had the aspiration to actually go do something on my own but I didn't know how. And when you come here to Silicon Valley, the people around you and the friendships that you create here and the relations that you build here and what you learn from the other people is actually quite amazing. So I feel very blessed. >> And it really is a special place and you have to kind of understand that vibe and culture. I want to ask you a personal question. A lot of entrepreneurs think they can go to business school and get an entrepreneurship degree, and some do, but I always have that debate. You're kind of born with this kind of my philosophy. Some people might debate that. It's always a classic debate: are you born with it or can you learn it or both. Some people know their entrepreneurship early on. Some figure out like me when I'm in my 30's. That's when I kind of figured it out that I have that entrepreneurial talent looking back at some of the things I did. When did you find out that you knew that you were entrepreneurial and wanted to build stuff on your own and this is who I am as a person. What was that moment like? >> I think very early. I didn't have any doubt. This was undergrad times back in my undergrad school in Pakistan. I think I just knew that I'll be doing something on my own and that's exactly what I wanted to do so how I would do it, what time it was going to be, I didn't know any of that. But I had some belief in my mind that I'm going to basically build some things and build business around it. So it was quite early. >> You were lucky, got some time. And when you came to Silicon Valley, what were some of the things you did? Was it like a oh my God this is an amazing place or did you have to do some networking? What were some of the things that you did when you first came in to really kind of get in to that groove swing, entrepreneurial groove swing? >> This is one of those times when Sun was, is an amazing place. I ended up at Sun Microsystems and the people there were unbelievably talented. They have all kind of talented people there. >> Very entrepreneurial. Two coming out of Stanford, Scott McNeely, all the early DNA was very entrepreneurial. >> Exactly. So I think that was again a place where you could learn a lot not just in technology but actually how to solve problems, how to understand customer problems that you could solve and build new technology on top of it. And I didn't stay there that long. Within a couple of years, I decided that I need to go basically join a small company where I could do more things beyond just designing one aspect. I was building microprocessor designs. Instead of just doing that I could do other roles also. So I joined the broadband wireless company after that opportunity. >> As an entrepreneur, one of the big decisions is who are you going to marry in terms of the VC or partner, financial partner. It truly is taking on a new partnership and that's a big struggle and I think we've seen the programmer culture certainly amplified. It's just recently passed decade where everyone wants to go for the big valuations and like wow look it, I only sold 15% of my company and raised ten million or a big number, look how great it is. But then you realize that when they come to board meetings you got them a good valuation but they may not be receptive on the other side. So there's a dynamic in fundraising early on, not just market selection as a venture but partner selection. Talk about how important that is, how you handled it, and advice for people thinking about selection of a financial partner. >> In technology companies where you have to invest a bunch in R&D early on, you do need money. It's just the way it works. But money is not everything because right now at least, today, money is kind of commodity. You can actually raise from many, many different sources, many different VC's. But one thing I've learned within the startups is that any and all startups will have good times and bad times, will have doubt in a strategy and will have conviction. And when those times are not so good, you need people who you can just go talk frankly without having to worry about it and without getting judged along the way. >> Trust. >> Trust is the key. So I think you pick people essentially based on how much you actually trust them, especially very, very early stage startups. And then as you go along, perhaps things change over time because over time if the company's scaling you may need a lot more money. But I think again people first. You want to partner people you can actually trust. >> In that hard conversation sometimes, you want to be self aware and that's always step one but two, vulnerability and then partnering with a financial partner that's going to sit on the same side of the table at the right times and maybe on the other side to be a counterbalance at the right times. And also when you need more money they got to help you sell the next round too. There's a lot of things that they have do to, and the dynamic is critical. And you've had success with that. >> So far it's been a success. >> Well what's the big thing happening right now in your mind, just to kind of take it forward now as we look forward. You see a lot of cloud computing. You got a great experience with cloud. You've been successful. Cloud security is really hot. What do you see as opportunities in the cloud space now that you got your entrepreneurial 20 mile stare out, they're looking for opportunities. I'm sure you probably mean more security space but in general as an entrepreneur, what do you see as things that people can go after markets? >> In general I sit on the enterprise side of things. Anything that simplifies work and automates it, whether it's using AI and whether they're using other technologies, software technologies, I think that space is going to grow more because the horizontal layers where you have big data platforms and you have infrastructure providers, I think they are doing a great job in integrating the system, but now you're going to see a lot more verticalized solutions based on machine learning and AI and automation. I think we're going to see a lot more of that. There's plenty of opportunities. >> It's super early. Do you agree with that? Great, well thanks for coming in the CUBE conversation. I appreciate this part of the Mayfield People First conversations. I'm John from theCUBE. We are here with Rehan Jalil, former president and CEO of Elastica. Successful serial entrepreneur about to embark on his next adventure. Good luck and I'm looking forward to catching up. >> You know, thank you so much for inviting me. >> Thanks for watching. This is the CUBE conversation People First network. I'm John Furrier.