>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stuart Miniman and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm in our Boston area studio and one of the things we always love to do is talk to startups and really find out they're usually on the leading edge of helping customers, new technologies, conquering challenges. And to that point, we have the co-founder and CEO of env0, that is, Ohad Maislish and we brought along with him he's got two of his investors, one of his advisors. So sitting next to Maish, we have Ed Sim, who's the founder and managing partner of Boldstart Ventures and sitting next to him is Guy Podjarny, who is the founder of Snyk. So now, you know is the acronym for Snyk and if you didn't know that, I know I'd heard about the company a couple years before that and my understanding is, Guy your the ones that connected Ohad with Ed who was the first investor. So Guy let's talk to Ohad in a second, but how the conversation started? And what what piqued your interest about what is now env0? >> Yeah, I think it started with people. I mean, I think fundamentally when you think about technology and think about startups, it needs to be an interesting market, it needs to be a good idea, but it really, first and foremost is about the people. So I've I've known Ohad from actually some work that he's done at Snyk earlier on, and was really impressed with his sharpness, his technical chops, and a lot of times the bias for feedback. And then when he presented the idea to me around kind of making Infrastructure as Code easy, and I don't want to sort of steal his thunder, talking about it and about kind of engaging with developers for it, a thought that literally resonated with me, I think, we'll probably dig into it some more. But in we live in a world in which more and more activities, more and more decisions, and really more effort is rolled on to developers. So, there's a constant need for great solutions that make on one hand make it easy for developers to embrace these solutions, on the other hand, still kind of allow the right kind of governance and controls. And I felt like Infrastructure as Code was like a great space for that, where we asked developers to do more, there's a ton of value in developers doing more around controlling these Infrastructure decisions, but it's just too hard today. So, anyways, I kind of liked the skills, I liked the idea. And I pulled in Ed, who I felt was kind of natural to kind of help introduce these experiences with other startups that share a similar philosophy to kind of help make this happen. >> Awesome, thank you Guys. So Ohad, let's let's throw it to you. Give us a little bit about your background, your team, Infrastructure as Code is not a new term. So I guess would love you to kind of weave into it. You know why now? Is it becoming more real in why your solution is positioned to help the enterprise? >> Awesome, first of all, thank you for having me. It's really exciting and again thank you for the opportunity. Regarding your question, so my background is technical. I was maybe still am a geek started University at a young age at the age of 14 in Palo Alto High School. And started my career in non technical roles very early. I have now like 21 years of experience, this is my second startup and third company, as I mentioned, my previous company is services company, provided services for Snyk and we became friends and later on partners, investors, and so on. And, we we've seen huge shift, we call the Infrastructure as Code the third data center revolution. We look at the first one being virtualization about 20 years ago led by VMware and then ZenSourcer. The second obviously, is the public cloud when companies started clicking buttons in order to get those compute resources but now nobody is clicking those buttons anymore. And instead writing, maintaining and executing that code, that Infrastructure as Code and as the Guy mentioned, it made it much more relevant for developers to influence the Infrastructure decisions and not just the app decisions. With that many challenges and opportunities around Infrastructure as Code management and automation, and that's where we focus. >> All right, so Ed I'm sure like me, you've seen a number of companies, try to climb this mountain and fall down and crash so I feel like five years ago, I would talk to a company and they say, oh, we're going to help, really help the enterprise enable developers for networking for storage, for security or anything like that. And it was like, oh, okay, good luck with that. And they just kind of crashed and burned or got acquired or did something like that. So, I feel like from our viewpoint we've seen for a long time that growth of developers and how important that is, but that gap between the enterprise and the developers feels like we're getting there. So, it gets similar what I asked Ohad why now, why this group, why the investment from you? >> Yeah, so I'll echo Guy's comment about the people. So, first and foremost, I was fortunate enough to invest in Guy back in his prior company before he started Snyk and then invested in Snyk. And there are lots of elements of env0 that remind me of Snyk the idea, for example, that developers are doing more, and that security is no longer a separate piece of developing, it's now embedded kind of in what developers and teams are doing. And I felt like the opportunity was still there for Infrastructure as Code. How do you make developers more productive, but provide that control plan or governance that's centralized so that environments can easily be reproduced. And the thing that got me so excited, was the idea that Ohad was going to tie kind of cloud costs from a proactive basis versus a reactive basis. Meaning that once we know that your environments are up and running, you could actually automatically tag it and tie the environment to the actual application. And to me, tying the business piece to the development piece was a huge, huge opportunity that hasn't been tapped yet. And so there are lots of elements of both Snyk and env0 and we're super excited to be invested in both. >> Alright, so Ohad maybe just step back for a second, give us some of the speeds and feeds we read your blog post 3.3 million dollars of the early investment, how many people you have, what is the stage of the product customer acquisition and the like? >> Sure, so we just launched our public beta and announced the funding couple of months ago led by Boldstart and another VC in Israel named Grove, and then angel investors Guy is the greatest investor among those and so we have some others as well. And now we have like 10 employees nine in Israel, one in New York City, I'm relocating after this all pandemic thing will get better. I'm moving to the Bay Area as soon as possible. That's more or less the status. And as I've mentioned, we just launched our public beta. So we have our first few design partners and early like private beta customers now starting to grow more. >> Yeah, and how would you characterize, what is the relationship between what you're doing in the public clouds. We understand, in the early days, it was like, Oh, well, cloud is going to be easy, it's going to just be enable it, it has been a wonderful tool set for developers. But simple is definitely not, I think anyone would describe the current state of environments. So, help it help us give it a little bit of what you're seeing there. And how you deal with like some very large players in ecosystem. >> Our customers are the same as the cloud vendors customers. The cloud vendors provide great value with the technical aspect with Infrastructure. But once you want to manage your organization, you want to empower your developers, you want to shift left some decisions, APM, did shift left for a performance, Snyk is doing great shift left for security. I believe that we are doing similar things to the cost. And you in the cloud vendors are in charge of you being able to do some technical orchestration. But when do you need to tear down those resources? When do you understand that there is a problematic resource or environment and what exactly made it? What is the association, how you can prevent from (mumbles) deployments from even happening at first. So all of those management information and insight ties back to your business logic and processes that's where we fit. >> I think there's actually a lot of analogy if I can chime in, on maybe an ownership aspect that happens in cloud. So we talk about the cloud and oftentimes cloud is interpreted as the technical aspect of it. So the fact that it allows you to do a bunch of things in the clouds and sort of renting someone else's hardware, and then automating a lot of it. But what cloud also does and that definitely represents what we're doing security and I think applies here, is that it moves a lot of things that used to be IT responsibility being a part of the application. So a lot of decisions, including ones really security, and including ones related cost around anywhere from provisioning of servers to, network access, to when you burst out, and to the balancing of business value to the cost involved or the risk involved. Those are no longer done by a central IT organizations, but rather, they're being done by developers day in and day out. And so I think that's really where the analogy really works with cloud is, it's not so much, like clearly there's an aspect of that that is the the technical piece of tracking how much does it cost in the on demand surrounding of cloud, but there's a lot of the ownership change, or the fact that the decisions that impact that are done by developers, and they're not yet well equipped to have the insights, to have the tools, to make the right decisions with a press of button. >> Thank you Guy and absolutely, 'cause cloud is just one of the platforms you're living on, you know well from Snyk that integration between what's happening in the platform, where open source fits into it, the various parts of the organization that are there. So, you've got some good background, I'm sure, helps you're an advisor to Ohad there to helps pull through a little bit of some of those challenges. Yeah, I mean, Ed I'd love to hear just in general your viewpoint on how startups are doing at monetizing things in the era of... You've got the massive players like Amazon and Microsoft out there. >> Look, the enterprise pain is higher than ever right now, every fortune 500 is a tech company right now and they need engineers, and they're hiring engineers. In fact, many of the largest fortune 500 have more engineers than some of the tech companies. And developer productivity is number one, front and center. And if you talk to CIOs, we just hosted a panel with the CIO of Guardian Life and the CTO of Priceline. They're all looking at how do I kind of automate my tool chain? How do I get things done faster? How do I do things more scalable? And then how do I coordinate processes amongst teams. As Guy hit upon and Ohad as well, not just security, there's product design being embedded with developers as product management being embedded with developers. There's finance now, FinOps. If you're going to spend more and more in the cloud, how do you actually control that proactively before things happen versus after or months after that happens? So I think this is going to be a huge, huge opportunity on the FinOps side. And, the final thing I would say is that winning the hearts and minds of developers to win the enterprise is a tried and trued model, and I think it's going to be even more important as we move forward in the next few years, to be honest with you. >> All right, so Ohad you know I think Ed talked about those hearts and minds of developers absolutely critical. When you look at the tooling landscape out there, the challenge of course, is there's so many tools out there, that there's platform battles, there's developers that find certain things that they love, and then there's, oh, wait, can I have a general purpose solution that can help. You talk about this being the third wave, how does this kind of tie into or potentially replace some of the last generation of automation tools. How do you see yourself getting into the accounts and growing your developer base? >> I think, I have a very simple answer, because, now enterprises have two options. Either they go with productivity self-service, or they go with governance, but they cannot have both. So if it's the smaller or they have less risks, so they go with the productivity and they take those risks, take the extra costs, take that potential damage that can happen. But more we see the case of I cannot allow myself this mess, so I have to block this velocity. I have to block those developers, they cannot just orchestrate cloud resources as they wish they have to open tickets, they have to go through some manual process of approval or we see more and more developers that understand there is a challenge they built in-house env0 of self-service combined with governance solution, and they always struggle doing it well, because it's not their core business. So once you see the opportunity of a more and more customers doing a lot of investment in in-house solution that do the same thing, probably a good idea to do it, as a separate product. And also the fact that we have the visibility of different customers, we can be very early but for later on adds pattern recognition, and notice what makes sense, what is problematic and give those insights and more business logic back to the customers which is impossible for them to do if they're only isolated on their cases. So as providing the same great solution to different companies, allowing them self-service combined with governance, and then additionally, add those and Smart Insights later on. >> Yeah, I think what I love about what he said is that I don't think he even sort of said finance or cost at any time of those. So really, like you said, governance and I think you can swap governance or you can swap the kind of the entity that's doing the governance for security for all of those. And that sounds awfully familiar for Snyk, which really kind of begs the answer to be the same, it's the reason that env0 approach is promising and that it would win against competition is that it tends to be that the competition or the people that are around are focused on the governance piece, they're they're focused on just sort of the entity that is the controlling entity. I like to say that it's actually not about shift left, it's about if you want to choose a direction, it's going to be the sort of the top to bottom. So it's more about, like this governance entities, whether security or finance, they need to shift from a controlling mindset that is top down that is like this dictatorship of sort of telling you what you should and shouldn't do to more of a bottom up element and allowing the teams the people in the trenches people actually make decisions to make correct decisions, and in this case, correct decisions from a financial perspective. And then alongside that, the governing entity, they need to switch to being a supportive entity an enabling entity and I think that transition will happen across many aspects of sort of software development and definitely anything that requires that type of governance from from outside of the development process today that is to change. >> Yeah, to chime in and add to Guys point, development is so important, it touches every aspect of an organization. So I always think about it as almost a collaborative workflow layer versus being reliant on kind of one control entity. Great developers always want to move fast. But, how do you kind of build that collaborative workflow and I think that Ohad in env0 is providing that for the environment and finance. Guys doing it for security. And there's lots of other opportunities out there, like privacy as well. And I wouldn't be surprised if finance folks start getting embedded with development at some point just like security is, or design is, product management is as well, because that is probably one of the highest costs around right now for many companies, and they're all trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding much earlier. >> Yeah, it's been lots of discussion, of course, we kind of go beyond DevOps, I think FinOps is in there. Ohad you have a favorite term that you've had from your advisors yet, how you categorize what you're doing. Any final words on kind of that organizational dynamic which we know so often it's the technology can be the easy part, it's getting everybody in the org, pulling in the same direction. >> Yeah, I think I'm looking at maybe a physical metaphor, or just an example, if you just enter a developer's room, you might see a screen TV there with some APM Datadog, New Relic Metrics, developers care about performance. They know very early if they did something wrong. And now they see more and more in those dashboards, in the developers rooms, things like Snyk to make sure you're not putting any bad open source package, which has security or ability. What we believe is that now they don't have the right tools, the right product that they can be part of the responsibility, of course, and that's like somebody else's problem. In other rooms, you have those TVs, those screens that show what is the cost, and maybe only later on in the waterfall kind of way you try to isolate and root cause analysis on what went wrong, but there is no good reason why those graphs of the past should be in the same rooms next to the APM and the Snyks and to prevent those as early as possible, maybe to change the discussion and build more trust between the developers that now seem not to care about the cost because they used not to care like 10 years ago when we used to have is called Apex-Cloud. The VMware or even EC2 Instances with the predicted pricing, that's all school. Now you have auto scaling Kubernetes, you have Lambda those kind of things you pay per usage. So the possibility for engineers to know how much their code is about to cost to the organization is very challenging now. If we tie from the developer up to, the financial operations, we will provide better service, and just better business value for our customer. >> Awesome, so final question I have for you, and Ohad I'm going to have you go last on this one is you kind of painted the picture of where things are going to go. So give us what success look like, Ed, start with you, give us out 12 to 24 months as to env0 in this wave as what should we be looking for? >> Success to me would be that every large enterprise has this on their budget line item as a must have. And the market is still early and evolving right now, but I have no doubt in my mind, it's going to happen. And as you hear about many large enterprises saying that we were in the second inning of cloud migration now we're in the fourth. That is what success will be and I know it's going to happen faster than we all thought. >> I'll take the developer angle to it, I think success is really when developers are delighted, or sort of they feel they're building better software by using env0 and by factoring this aspect of quality into their daily activities. And I think a lot of that comes down to ease of use. Like, I kind of encourage folks to sort of try out the env0 and see the cost calculation, it's all about making it easy. So what excites me is really around that type of success where it's so easy that it's embedded into their sort of daily activities, and that they're happy it's not a forced thing. It's something they've accepted and like having as part of their software development process. >> I fully agree with both Ed in Guy, but I want to add on on a personal note, that one of the reasons we started env0 is because we saw developers quitting jobs at some places. And the reason for that was that they didn't give them self-service, they didn't empower those developers, they were blocked by DevOps, they needed to open tickets, to do trivial things. And this frustration is just a bigger motivation for us to solve. So we want to reduce this frustration. We want developers to be happy and productive, and do what they need to do, and not getting blocked by others. So that's, I think, another way to look at it, to make sure that those developers are really making good use out of their time and going back home at the end of the day, and feeling that they did what they were paid for, not for waiting for others to locate some cloud resources for them. >> All right, well, Ohad want to wish you the best, absolutely. Some of the early things that we've seen sometimes they're the tools that help, we've been talking gosh I remember 15, 20 years about breaking down the silos between various parts of the organization, some of the tools give you different viewpoints into what you're doing, help have some of the connection and hopefully some empathy as to what the various pieces are there. You really highlighted there's nothing worse than I'm not being appreciated for the work I'm doing, or they don't understand the challenges that I'm going through. So, congratulations on env0. We look forward to following going forward and definitely hope being part your customers in the future. Thanks so much. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> All right, and Guy really appreciate your perspectives on this thank you for joining us. >> Thanks for having them. >> All right, be sure to check out theCUBE.net where you can find all of the events we're doing online these days, of course, where there's a huge back catalog of what we have in the thousands of interviews that we've done. I'm Stuart Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)