>> live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back to the Cube. Live from Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Jeff correctly or coming to you from Magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen with about thirty, five hundred or so folks here. Big community, big open source spirit. We're very pleased to welcome from the keynote stage. Jenny Chang, The pee at PayPal. Jennie. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, Lee. >> So really enjoyed your keynote this morning. We'Ll get into a lot of the specifics, but just looking at Magenta Oh, Adobe, This evolution of e commerce that's really driven by consumers. We want to have everything right on her phone as easily as possible. We went out lightning fast. Talk to us. About From what? You seen this evolution of e commerce and where we are today. >> Yeah, It's been a fascinating journey. Toe watch us move from point no sale, mood from brick and mortar Teo online and engaged. And I think as part of that, you know, you think about the amount of time you spend on your mobile phone. It's not surprising that most sites. Fifty percent of the visitors on that site are on their mobile devices, and they're staying longer. Maybe you're killing time, right? Waiting for your husband to finish something or your child to come out of class. And so we naturally tend to get on our mobile phones, and we look for things to do so that engagement on the mobile phone it becomes absolutely critical and what's been fascinating As part of the conference, we've been sharing some early results about mobile optimization. And what we're finding is, even though engagement is going up from a mobile phone, revenue is not there. >> The gap. >> Yeah, there's a big, big gaffe, and you look at that. And you think, Well, I need to figure out how to actually convert some of these people coming to my website. So we've been partnering with a lot of the Sai community here, really interest in trying to understand best practices, and it's been a fun process for almost the last year. Things that you would think would help conversion don't necessarily help. And then the very, interestingly enough, other things that you may have said well, that seems unnecessary or busy on my mobile phone are actually improving conversion. So we've been really just sharing our early results in really encouraging everyone to participate. It's free, and we want to do is really come up with best practices and really help everyone essentially convert more and get more revenue. >> There's two things that strike me. It is you say that one is just the behaviour of a mobile phone in interaction is so different. You said. It's often when you're waiting, waiting in the grocery store line, you're waiting to pick up your kid your weight. So it is a much more kind of frequent fast in and out which which we keep hearing right. You need to connect with people over time in both the ways. But the other thing, when you say the conversion is actually not as high as you would expect. But at the same time we're hearing now that the content is so much so important and having things that aren't directly commerce to drive your engagement with that client in the way of content and forums and other things. I wonder if maybe that's why the conversion is there. You're getting him there, which is great they're hanging out longer, which I'm sure is a terrific metric. So maybe they're not converting because they're engaging with that other content arm or engaging with the brand. A >> combination of a couple things and one of them tear point is, you know, for better, Worse. You're easily interrupted when you're on your mobile phone to >> just trip when >> we have you, how can we quickly get to you? Pass that point of check out right? And I think part of that is, as you know, it's if you're like me, I will. Fat finger. You know, I have a difficult time typing on my mobile device. So wanted things we talk a lot about is removing that friction. So how do you make it really easy? See right. So if you're able to store your credentials, if you're able to make it simple to check out right, that's ultimately the goal for a lot of our merchants here, which is when we've got you. We've got to capitalize on your attention right at that moment in time and make it super easy for you to convert one of things that's been interesting about the optimized kind of mobile optimization results we've seen is that what we're finding is that a lot of people, what they're looking for at that point of engagement is coupon codes and you get distracted. You'LL think Well, I'm going to buy that. But maybe I need to go look for a coupon. >> Go back to my email me >> on And so you know So there are a lot of interesting ideas that were having as a community to share. How can we do that? How can we make sure? Maybe you get your coupon code, but you don't click off and disappear and maybe forget to come back on. I notorious for doing that. I'm also notorious for putting something in my shopping cart getting distracted and walking away. And so I think a lot of it is looking at these various ways to make sure you are back and engaged. And I think this is a big part of where the journey will go with the Palmers going forward. I think we'LL be looking at now that we've got your eyeballs. Now that we've got your time, how do we convince you this is going from a browse mode? Teo actual shop mode, >> right, creating more shop, a ble moments as magenta is marketing, material says. But also to your point about simplicity, probably for even any any generation is its basic marketing. Don't deliver a great piece of content and have a hyperlink in the first sentence that's going to take your audience somewhere else. Keep me in the experience. Use enough money. What do you say? Enough of the data to where it's going from. Creepy Teo >> Magic, Right, Right, right, right. If it works, it should be magic, right? But I already bought the tent. Now I need it. I need a sleeping bag. Don't keeps his enemy tent ads, right? >> Right. But that simplicity is sort of in AP in experience. Consistency is really key. Otherwise, your point and your point. We're doing this often while we're doing something else. There's a lot of multitasking going on. Make it easier, but also use the data with these systems that you're integrated with to know exactly. I bought it sent. I don't need one, but I might need that these other things >> right, right. And I think that's really where things are moving with artificial intelligence and machine learning We're trying to understand us a shopper and be able to predict right What else? You know, Bond from the tents. Now, maybe it's time to get a low. You know, uh, camper, maybe that's your next step up, right? Maybe you move into an RV. Who knows? Right. So I think there are evolution's to that buying experience >> with other evolution. Which people is that the very beginning was the alternative payment methods, right? Not not just your basic credit card or cash. And I don't know. It's a lot of people know that you guys have venmo, which if you have kids, you know we don't have young kids. You don't know what Venmo is. I wonder if you've got a take on, you know, as these alternative methods by come up and then we're also surrounded with alternative financing types of platforms where they're not using traditional FICO scores. They're not using kind of a traditional apply get approved process. It's really dynamic on the financing side as well. >> Yeah, onto your point. So PayPal. One of our best kept secrets I like to say is that we have both Braintree and Venmo is part of our overall services and then even broader than that. What we've done is packaged up the ability to really think about alternative pay methods based on what region you're on as well, because depending where you are outside the U. S. You might actually use a completely different payment method. And I think for us in the U. S. Were not as familiar with some of these other payment options. And what it does is it really allows for a lot more cross border trade as well for our merchants as they would look and offer kind of what is most relevant again. Get to you to go from brows mode to actually check out mode and to get to that actual conversion piece. So that's one of them. And then I would say, just generally on the credit comment, we actually credit at PayPal as well. And what we're always looking at is what our other ways we can help people finance and really kind of worked through the evolution of payments. I think some of the statistics that you've probably heard related to savings in the US, especially it's a bit staggering that we have, on average, uh, majority people have less than four hundred dollars in savings there, one paycheck away. And the reality is, it's tough. That's a really, really tough. And so I think, to be able tio, have a source of credit where you could bridge that gap and, to your point, not have to go through the entire credit processes. Sara Lee I think having those options are always good. >> Talk to us about what you guys are doing with Walmart. He showed that you came here this morning that it was very interesting from a collaboration. A partnership standpoint. >> I'm very passionate about this because pay panelists overall has a mission of democratizing financial services, and I think we're very fortunate being in high tech and being in the situation. We are where we're able, Tio not be intimidated necessarily by all this new technology on all the different options out there. So the partnership with Walmart was at the end of last year, and it really was looking at How do we get people access to their papal dollars easier, Faster and we continuously see this divide between the digital on the physical realms of accessing money. And so we opened up an option partnering with WalMart for us, which is it's really easy to rip a pal out. You bring up a unique bar code, you can go into a Wal Mart store and essentially like a debit card. It debits it out of your PayPal account and the Wal Mart cashier hand. You're the catch, which is super convenient again and an easy way to get to your money if you need something immediately. So I'm really excited. Proud of that, >> he said. You launch that last year. Some of the data, the market data that demonstrated that this was a good direction, her paper out to go in to be able to open up. This is a CZ, the ability to give people more access to their dollars, whether they're online or in physical locations. >> Yeah, I think it's someone of those overall statistics. We look at a lot because we're really looking at continuously bridging our open two sided network. We've got this great merchant face twenty one million merchants and then we're at almost round track to be almost three hundred million consumers, and we can we look at the consumer side and you think about Venmo you think about papal? We really started as a peer to peer right now, right? Oh, I owe you twenty bucks for dinner last night. Let me pay, pal. You that money, let me venmo you that money. And at some point, the question becomes will. Then how do I easily access my money? How do I make sure that I have access to it again? Not just digitally, but physically. And I think when we're looking at those realms, we're looking at more options to give people that ability, that if they need to get to that cash quickly, that can get to it quickly. They don't need to worry about getting to a bank. Um, you know, I think the reality is it's easier to get to a lot of Wal Mart stores in the U. S. Then it is necessarily to every bank out there. And so I think we're constantly looking at where can partnerships really add value to our overall customer base? And as I mentioned this morning's keynote, I love when partners really can work together and it becomes truly, you know, a little bit of a trite saying. But no one plus one is greater than two scenario, and I think when you can do that, it adds so much value to both sides of the equation. That's was really exciting for me. That's why I love partners, >> but also giving cut consumer's choice. Where you think this morning in your keynote, you showed this cute picture daughter approved your girl's in that ten years ago and then today, and, you know, ten years ago you couldn't just go in on happened order groceries. Now you were saying, when you know your mom would have to get multiple stores to get what you want, and now we can get it so easily. But there's also this sort of interesting dynamic where people still want to have that physical interaction, depending on the type of product or service. So being able to give customers that choice of being able to transact it through the app online or being able to access their money, for example, your Walmart. I mean, oftentimes, if I'm running out running errands and I don't have my wallet, and I know all right, I know the stories I can use bright certain payment methods from my phone, and that's great because I had that choice. And that's something that seems like PayPal is working to facilitators meeting consumer demand. Where it is. >> Yeah, I think that's the reality of what? Where we live right now, which is our customers want us there at that point of engagement. So don't make me necessarily. Come, Teo, you I would like you to come to me and you know, for better. Worse. It is a little bit of the overall experience that they're looking for, which is to say, I've got my favorite places to either shop or engage on my mobile device. So make it easy for me. And I think that's ultimately what we're kind of looking for. I know is a working parent. I'm always looking for convenience than I've just said. I'm gonna write a book on convenient parenting like that gets work for me. >> That was part of that. We'd be a bestseller. I think parents of humans or canine think we could all use any inspect a >> furry child as well. So yes, >> I'm curious what we're going to see in the next year, too. With that conversion of actually enabling an organization to not just have a great mobile experience, whether it's with like progressive Web maps that they were talking about this morning. But it's one thing to have a great mobile experience. It's a whole other thing to convert that to revenue. So curious to see with partnerships of papal, for example, with Beno how merchants of any sides are actually able to start increasing conversion from visitor to revenue. >> And I mentioned it as part of what we're doing with what we're calling smart payment buttons. And I think that's smart. Payment button concept is really again focused on giving you options to check out with whatever is easier for you but also looking to say, Let's make it easy. So how do you do that without having to type everything again? Because if you're an avid online shopper like I'm not, it's It becomes tiresome to feel like you have to sign up at every website, or you have to enter all your shipping information again your payment information. And so I think it's really looking at How do we give you that digital wallet access so that you have the ability to make it easy? Yes, and I think that's ultimately What we're kind of all looking for is how do you make it convenient? Easy for me to do what I want to do and do what I have to do. >> Spend more of my money. Thank you so much for joining me on the Cuban. Talking about what you guys are doing. A papal with your partners with Gento, etcetera. It's very interesting. And we look forward to seeing great things to come and not focus by long Communion. Parenting? Yes. Watch out like an advance. Copy you? Yeah. Thank you. Pleasure. Okay. For Jeff Rick, I'm least Martin live. The Cube is alive. Magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen from Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's the Cube! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone and we're live here at Cisco Live, 2019 in Europe. It's the Cube's three days of wall-to-wall coverage, day two. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Dave Vellante co-hosting with me as well as Stu Miniman who's been in and out on interviews. Our next guest is Alex Henthorn-Iwane, vice president of marketing for company Thousand Eyes. welcome back to the cube, welcome to the show. >> Thanks great to be here. >> So talk about what you guys do first, you guys do a very interesting business, a rapidly growing business. What is Thousand Eyes, what do you guys do, What's your product, who is your customer? >> OK, so the vision of thousand eyes was really to help organizations deal with all the connected experiences that they have to deliver. So we're giving visibility into those connected experiences but not just how there, you know if they're working or not but all the external dependencies that they rely on. So we developed a ton of expertise on how the internet works how the networks work, how routing works and all that. And we can give that insight so that all the things that IT now no longer controls and owns, but has to own the outcome for, we're giving that visibility. >> And when you guys sell a Saas Solutions, the software, what's the product? >> Yeah >> Who's the buyer? >> So we're Saas Platform and the way that we gather this data is we're primarily doing active monitoring at a few different layers; so we're monitoring the app layer things like HTTP and page loads and things like that you would think of that as synthetics classically but we've paired that with some patented ways of understanding how everything connects from a user out in the internet or from a branch office or from a data-center out to somewhere else typically across the internet all those networks the cloud networks going through things like Z-scaler all those complex pieces that again you don't control. We can trace all that and then map it down even to internet routing. One other kind of cool thing that we added to all that we do that on an agent basis so we have agents around the world that you can put them in your data-centers your VPC's and your branches. >> And the value proposition is what; visibility in the patterns; optimization; what's the outcome for the customer? >> The outcome is ultimately that we're going to help IT deliver the digital experiences for their employees for their customers that could be e-commerce, e-banking, it could be open banking or PSD2 here in Europe and UK. >> So full knowledge of what's going on >> Right >> But the name talks to that >> Yeah >> It talks to the problem you're solving >> Right, and it's really, the focus is and our specialty is all the external things, right. You've always had a lot of data, maybe too much data on the stuff that you did own, right, in IT. Okay, you could collect packets and flows and device status and all that sort of this and sort of, the challenge was always to know what does that mean, but whether or not that's perfect it exsited, but you simply can't get that from outside, you've got your four walls >> Yeah >> So you just have this big drop off in visibility once you get to the edge of your data-center etcetera >> Now, lets talk about the dynamics in IT; we were talking before we came on camera here about ya know, our lives in IT and going back and look at the history and how it's changed but there are new realities now >> Right >> Certainly Cisco here talking about intent based network ACI anywhere, Hyperflex anywhere, the ecosystem is growing the worlds changed. >> Right >> Security challenges, IOT, the whole things completely going high scale, more complexity. >> Right, Yeah. >> IT? What's the impact to IT? What's the structural change of IT from your prospective? >> Well, the way we see it what's happening with IT is the move from owning and controlling all the stuff, you know and managing that granting access to that. To a world where you really don't own a lot of the stuff anymore. You don't own the software, you don't own the networks. You don't own the infrastructure increasingly. Right? So how do you operate in that role? Changes. What the role of IT is in that role, really changes. And then out of that comes a big question. How does IT retain relevance? In that role? And a lot of that role is shifting away from being the proprietor, to being more of like a manager of an ecosystem. Right? And you need data to do that. So I think that's a really big step. >> So this is now, an actual job description kind of thing? >> Yeah. The roles and make up of the personnel in IT is changing. Because of the SAAS cloud, Hybrid cloud, Multi cloud? >> Right. It's more of like a product management role, than it is the classic operations role. You know? And we observed some really big changes in just operations. So, when you own all the stuff you can find a fix. Right? That's a classic statement of IT operations. But when all the stuff is outside, You can't fix it directly. So you go to what we call an evidence in escalation. You have to actually persuade someone else to fix it for you And if you can't persuade them, you don't have governance you don't have accountability and you don't have the outcome that you're supposed to deliver. >> So the infrastructure is to serve it's players; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, more SAAS All of this is taking data away from your control? >> Right >> And obviously network visibility? >> Sure >> So how are you guys dealing with that? What are some of the nuances of whether it's SAAS, or different infrastructures of service providers? >> And I would add to that SUN, Shift to the internet I would add to that just the increasing number of digital experiences that companies offer to customers. Right? >> Right. So the way that we deal with that is, that we believe that you need a highly correlated way of understanding things. Because at the top layer, if the outcome that IT is supposed to deliver is a digital experience. Right? The customers at the center now, not the infrastructure. Right? So I have to start with experience. So we need to look at, how is the app preforming? How is it delivering to that end user? And now you have to think about it from a persona basis. To who? Where? Right? So that's why we have all these agents floating around the world in different cities. Because if you're offering a let's say e-banking portal, and your surveying 100 cities as markets. You need to see from those cities, right? You also then need to be able to understand the why. When something is not working well, whose fault is it? Right? Is it us? >> Its the network guys! (laughing) >> What you don't to get is the everlasting war room circular firing squad kind of scenario. Where nobody actually knows, right? This is what happens, because the issue is that often times you suspect its not you. Maybe. Right? That search for innocents. >> Yeah. >> But again that's not enough because, the whole point is to deliver the experience. So, now who could it be? Say you're offering e-banking or e-commerce. Is it your CDM provider? Is it that your DMS manage provider is not responsive? Or somethings down? Are you under a D DOS attack? Or some of your ecosystem is. Is one of your back end providers, like your Braintree payments not working right. Right? There is so many pieces, is there an ISP in the middle there? That's being effected? >> There's so many moving parts now. >> If from each persona or location just to get to 1 URL. Could be traversing several ISP networks. Dozens of HOPS across the internet. How on earth are you supposed to isolate, and go an even find who to ask for help? That's a really sticky problem. >> So this will expose all those external credits? >> So we expose all those things. We expose all these multiple layers, and we have some patenting correlation, visual correlation. So you can say alright I see a drop in the responsiveness of a critical internal application or of .. I mean, we never have. Butt lets say like if SAAS like sails course, or something like that. And it may not be their fault by the way, its not them being a problem. But the users having a problem. So you see this drop and say well where's it happening? You can now say is it a network issue? Is it an app issue? Now if it is a network issue I can look at all the paths, from every where and say aha there's a commonality here. For example, we could surface through our collective intelligence that there's an ISP outage in the middle of the internet that's causing this. Or we could say, hey you know your ISP is having an issue. Or guess what? Sales force is maybe, you know things happen. People have problems in data centers sometimes. It's nothing you know, it's not.. >> So there's two things there's the post mortem view, and there's the reactive policy based intention. >> Right >> To say okay hey we've got an outage, go here do somethings take some action. >> Right. So some of those things you can automate. But the fact of the matter is that, automation requires learning. And machines need to be taught, and humans have to teach them. I mean that's one of the sort of sticky parts of automation. (laughing) Right, its not auto-magic its automation. >> So you guys are in the data business basically? >> Right, visibility, data. Right. >> Big data, its about data. You're servicing data. Insights, actionable insights, all this stuffs coming together. So the question is on AI. Cause AI plays a role here. IT OPS and machine learning you've got deterministic and non deterministic behavior. >> Sure. >> How do you solve the AI OPS problem here? Because this is a great opportunity for customers, to automate all this complexity and moving parts. To get faster time to data or insight. >> Okay so I would say that the prime place where you could do AI and ML is where you have a relatively closed system. Lets say an infrastructure that you do control. And you have a ton of data. You know like a high volumetric set of data-streams. That you can then train a machine to interpret. The problem with externalities is that One, you have sparse data. For example we have to use agents, cause you can't get all that traditional data from it. Right? So that means that that's why we built this in a visually correlated way. It's the only way to figure it out. But the other aspect to that is that, when your dealing with external providers you have an essential human part of this. There's no way as far as I know to automate an escalation process with your service providers. Which now we have so many, right? First of all, we have to figure out who. And then you have to have enough evidence, to get an escalation to happen to the right people. Empowered people. So they don't go through the three D's of provider response. Which is Deny, Deflect and Defer. (laughing) Right? You know you have to overcome plausible deniability, and that's very human interaction. So the way we deal with that. All this interactive correlated data we make it ridiculously easy, To share that. in an interactive way, with a deep link that you send to your provider and say "just look and see" and you can see that it's having issues. >> So get the evidence escalated, that's the goal as fast as possible? >> Right so then your time, like your mean time to repair now in the cloud is dependent on mean time to effective escalation. Right? >> Who are some of your customers? >> So, we have our kind of foundational customers. We have 20 of the top 25 SAAS companies in the world, as our customers. We have five of the top six US banks, four of the five top UK banks. 100 plus of global two thousand and growing fast. A lot of verticals, I would say enterprise I started with financials not surprisingly. But now we see heavy manufacturing, and telecom and oil and gas and all that. >> What's going on here at Cisco Live? What's your relationship with Cisco? >> So with Cisco we have a number of integration points, we have our enterprise agents. We have these could agents pre deployed, same software as what we call the enterprise agent. That's been certified as an VNF or as container deployments, on a variety of Cisco Adriatic platforms. So that's kind of our integration point. where we can add value and visibility from those you know, branch or data center or other places you know out to the cloud or outside in as well. >> And who's your buyer, typically? >> So I would say a couple of years ago we would be very network central. But now because of the change in IT, and our crossover into the largest enterprises we find that now it's the app owners. It's the folks who are rolling out sales force to forty thousand people and their adopting lighting. Right? You know or they're putting Office 365 out, and they're dealing with the complexities of a CDM based service or a centralized service like SharePoint. So we're seeing those kind of buyers emerge, along with the classic IT operations and network buyers. >> So it only gets better for you, as more API centric systems get out there. Because as its more moving parts, its basically an operating system. And you look at it wholistically, and you got to understand the IO if you will? >> Right. The microservices way of doing everything, means that when you click something or you interact with something as a user. There are probably 20 things happening at a back end, at least half of which are going off across the internet. And all of them have to work flawlessly. Right? For me to get that experience that I'm expecting. Whether I'm trying to buy something or, just get something done. >> What's your secret sauce in the application? >> So I'd say our secret sauce comes down to a couple really key things. One is the data that we generate. We have a unique data center from all these vantage points that we have now. That's what allows us to do this collective intelligence. No body else has that data. And an example we did a study, a couple studies last year. Major resource studies using our platform to look at public cloud performance from the internet within regions. Inter regions, and between clouds. And we found some really interesting phenomenon. And no body else had ever published that before. A lot of assumptions, a lot of inter-claims, we where actually able to show with data, exactly how this stuff performs. >> I'm sorry, you guys have published that? Where can we find that? >> Yeah, so we have that published, we also did another major report on DNS. >> Is that on your website? >> It's on our website, so definitely something to check out. >> Alright, Alex well thanks for coming on, give the quick plug, what's up for you guys? Hiring? What's new? Give the quick two cents. >> So here in Europe we're scaling up, hiring a lot and expanding across Europe. We have major offices in London and Dublin, so that's a big deal. And I think in this next year you'll see some bigger topped out ways that we can help folks understand. Not just how the internet is effecting them, but more of like the unknown of unknowns of internet behavior. So there's going to be some exciting things coming down the pipe. >> Well we need a thousand eyes on all the instrumentation as things become more instrumented having that data centric data. is it going to help feed machine learning? And again its just the beginning of more and more complexity being abstracted away by software on network Programmability. theCUBE bringing you The Data Here from Barcelona, for Cisco Live! Europe 2019 stay with us for more day 2 coverage after the short break. I'm Jeff Furrier here with Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. ( upbeat music )

>> From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network: Insights from Entrepreneurs and Tech Leaders. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here for a special conversations part of Mayfield's 50th anniversary People First Network. This is a series of interviews from fault leaders around entrepreneurship, and insights. Manish Chandra, who's the CEO, Co-Founder and CEO of Poshmark, a very successful company. A serial entrepreneur that I've known for many, many years, going back to his early startups. Great to see you, thanks for spending the time today. >> Thanks for having me, John. And it's great, we were just talking about our early days when you were doing your podcast, and me, I was doing a social shopping company back then, was it, 2006? 2005 timeframe, a long time back. >> Pioneers have arrows on their back, as they always say in entrepreneurship, but if you look at the time when we were doing startups, over 14 years ago, social sharing, democratization; these were the buzzwords. This was the wave that we were all trying to ride. When 2008 hit, it kind of took the water down a little bit. But still the game didn't change, a rise comes Facebook, Twitter, social, multiple channels. The consumer's expectations changed a lot in that timeframe, and I want to get your thoughts because you've had two successful companies, Kaboodle and now PoshMark, with almost 40 million users, billion dollar valuation, hundreds and hundreds of employees, got like a hundred openings in your company. You're ramping up and you're scaling. But the expectations of users has changed. What are some of those dynamics in your business that you're seeing? >> I think the biggest sort of, uh, culmination or ignition point for social platforms came with the advent of mobile. And uh, early days of mobile were crude days, but you know, if you look back at the advent of Poshmark, sort of the idea of Poshmark reignited in my mind in 2010, and iPhone 4 had just come out. It was a couple of months after Instagram had started. And SnapChat had not even started yet. And what, I think, mobile platform did, especially with the high quality platform like iPhone 4 was, it made the process of content creation, consumption, and sharing so fast, and you finally had the device that could produce it, that uh, it just kept accelerating. And now, in the days of, you know, iPhone Excess Max and what have you, it's just so easy. At the same time, the speed expectation, the transparency expectation, and the velocity of expectation has gone up, and so what we've seen in Poshmark is, day one, our users were spending somewhere between 20-25 minutes in the app. And here today, we have billions of users, and they're still doing that same thing, so that level of deep immersion that you see is sort of unique to the mobile paradigm. >> I want to dig into the user expectation and the experiences that you're delivering. But before we start, take a minute to explain Poshmark; what you guys are doing as a core business, how it's evolved. >> So Poshmark, very simply, is a simple way to buy and sell fashion and other sort of style-based paradigm, we call it a social commerce platform because it really brings together users in a unique way. But it really allows anybody to build a business starting with their closet all the way to opening up a full-brand, wholesale engine on the platform. We provide all of the infrastructure, you know, shipping, payments, technology, and you have to bring in your inventory, so we don't touch inventory, but everything else we handle for you. >> So you're really helping people, enabling them to be successful with the ease of use; heavy lifting. >> Heavy lifting. >> It's kind of like Amazon. You don't need to provision anything, just kind of get started. E-Commerce in the era now of Google, Amazon, and Cloud technology, you see the rise of all the scale. How are you riding that trend, because that's a tailwind for you? And what is that doing for the user's expectations, I mean, I have four kids, I see them all online, they never use their laptops, except for homework, but they're on the mobile device, they're doing new things, this is the new expectation; what are some of those expectations? >> In our business, which is the business of fashion and style, what it means for people is, number one is, if they see something. Whether they see something on Instagram, or something on SnapChat, it needs to be instantly shoppable, right? And that obviously benefits a platform like us, which makes easy access to all of the different brands and things that are developing. At the same time, what social media's also doing is making the obsoleting of your products very fast, because once you've used it, you've, you know, posted a picture, you want to be able to not consume it again. >> You've been seen wearing the same outfit, I can't wear it twice! >> Exactly! And so we make that easy as well. And then the third thing is, uh, everyone is a content creator, everyone is a seller, everyone is sort of participating in this economy; people are hosting AirBnB guests in their home, people are selling on Poshmark, and the reason is because phone, and sort of this new mindset of collaboration and social makes it very easy for people to participate, so they want to be able to sell, but they don't want any hassle in that process. And so the new consumer expectation is instantaneous, deeply immersive, and constantly changing, and if you can't satisfy all of those things, then it becomes harder for you to scale. So you have to use technology, the physical world, and sort of the emotion all in the right mixture. >> One of the things I know that you're passionate about, and we've had this conversation, we feel the same way, certainly, at theCUBE is, role of community. And I see a lot of companies these days, whether they're saying we're doing an ICO using tokens to, um, getting a big bag of money from venture capitalists, oh yeah, our key strategy is to build a community. You can't buy a community. You've got to really win the hearts and minds and provide value, and you really can't, and build trust. Talk about the role of community for you guys, especially in the stylist world, where you have all this, where style's involved, a very robust community. How did you do it? How did you foster a community, and how did you nurture it? And how has that played out for you guys? >> So community is a foundation of Poshmark. And community's our value, not just our customer, but also what we are, and uh, community is what I'm more passionate about, even more passionate than fashion; and that was sort of, in my previous company, the thing that was really highlighted for me. And so we did it very slowly, actually. During the first year of our company, we only had a hundred users, but these hundred users were immersed. And then we went from a hundred to a thousand. Then thousand to five thousand. But very deliberately and slowly. So the end of the first 18 months of our company's life, we had maybe ten thousand users, right? And then we went from ten thousand to 300,000 in the next seven months, then we went from 300,000 to 12 million in the next two years. And today we went from 12 million to 40 million in the next few years, because, once you have sort of figured out how the community is created, it can scale very fast, but the early days if you compromise in how the community is being created, it's very powerful. For example, in the first, probably, eight or nine months in the company, I answered every single customer service email. And today, I probably interact with 80-100 customers directly everyday. Really keeping the pulse in sort of servicing. And service and love are sort of two of our core values, and it is very important that's built into the system. The second thing is, the community has to be authentic. You cannot fake a community. Which means, there is conversations that will happen in the community, there is, which may be antithetical to what you think is your brand, but if you don't let that authenticity happen, then what ends up happening is the community sort of withers away, because people are not going to tolerate anything inauthentic. The third thing, as you mentioned, is trust. And so from day one, we created not just trust in the way platform was built, but also in the economics. So day one we said, hey, if you're going to be part of this platform, there's two things that you're going to pay for; one, is, as a buyer, you're going to pay for shipping, and as a seller, you're going to revenue share with us, and we're not going to charge you any other money. Nothing. And so we shared, started from day one, a 20-80 partnership with our sellers, and today, here we are six or seven years later, and we have the exact same partnership. On the buyers, we started by charging them $7 for shipping, today our shipping is $6.49, at that time our shipping was 3 pounds to 5 pounds. Everything was priority, today everything is priority. So in six to seven years, if you think of any other marketplace in the world, not just in the country, how many times have they raised their fees? How many times have they changed their paradigm, changed their shipping paradigm? For us, it was very important. In the early days, it felt, people were saying, why are you charging so heavily? I said, I don't want to charge anything different tomorrow that I'm charging today, and by the way, there's no additional fees we've ever imposed on the platform, so, we don't have any marketing fees, any promotion fees, any credit card fees, and so that trust that's created ultimately leads to a lot of loyalty. And so today, you see our consumers growing, our users growing, and every single cohort we have continues to grow in revenue more like SAAS businesses, as opposed to e-commerce businesses. And that, to me, is the power of community if you do it right. >> And that's an interesting point. There's a lot of things you said in there, I think, that are worth doubling down on. One, I just want to highlight it, if you're creating value, and you're certainly scaling, passing that down in cost savings, and reducing cost and adding value, that's a secret formula. You see, we know one company that does that really well: Amazon! And that's worked. And they recognize the value of keeping people in there engaged, and so I think that's almost a take away for anyone watching is that if you're not adding value and reducing the costs while you're scaling, you're probably doing your math right. >> Absolutely. >> The second thing I want to talk about, and get your reaction to is you know about community and slowing it down at first. That's almost counter-intuitive. The, almost the answer is put the pedal to the metal, let's get some numbers; you took a different approach. You decided to take your time. Was that to get a feeling for the community, build the trust, understand the dynamics? Talk about why you went slow at first. >> The key is that the first two, three years, you're perfecting a lot of things, right? You have to make sure things are getting right. And in the first year, it was all about getting the product right, right? Then we scaled. Then we quickly realized that that scaling was breaking everything, was breaking our shipping system, was breaking our technology's office; I actually, Mayfield, which was an early investor in Poshmark, was on the board, and I went to my board, and I said you know, I'm actually going to slow down growth by 60%. And if you can imagine a venture board hearing that from their CEO, in the early days, it's challenging. >> It's a tough conversation. >> Yes. But I think one of the things that I value about Mayfield and my early investors is their focus on partnership, at a people level, a human level, with me. And uh, trust, and so we actually cut down our marketing budget by 80%, filled out the systems, got the partnership with USPS where we created the country's first fashion shipping label called Poshpost, and built up our technology and infrastructure, built out our payment partnership with BrainTree and Paypal, and by sort of, early-to-mid 2014, we started scaling and have never stopped. And in fact, I had told my investors early on, that first two or three years of building this business will be challenging, so hopefully you are prepared to go on this journey with me; but once we build it, it will accelerate. And what you see with us is, the business continues to accelerate every quarter, and we are seeing hyper growth, six, seven years into the business, which is even faster than the growth we saw in the first few years. And part of it is that, network business, which are built around true sort of networks, continue accelerating and connects later on in the process, but if you haven't created the right foundation in the early days? They fall apart. >> I think that's a lesson that entrepreneurs can learn, because you got to go slow to go fast. In Cloud based businesses where you have network effects, if there's a crack in the foundation, it can come crumbling down. >> It can come completely crumbling down, and it did, I mean, there were times in 2013 when people were literally doing things and just, the data would get lost in other things. We had to fix many of those, the broken pieces. We had USPS come to our offices and say hey, either you pay us a multi-million dollar fine or we have the right to arrest you. We had to renegotiate our contract with them. There's a bunch of things that happen in that scaling, and you hear things like blitz scaling and stuff these days, and their great terms, but at the same time, if you don't fix what's broken, you can't build that super scalable business. >> You got to be ready to blitz scale. As you know, Reid Hoffmann's famous channel, Masters of Scale, points out, which, by the way, is a great program, but, if you're not ready, you can crash and burn big time. That's a good point. You know, I have conversations a lot with a lot of senior people, one of them Theresa Carlson, who runs Amazon Web Services Public Sector Cloud business, she talks about doing the hard work upfront. And, you know, she's using public sector, so you have to get those kind of certifications, it sounds like this is a lot of things that you had to do. How did that test your entrepreneurial spirit? I know you, and you're hard-charging, but you're pragmatic and we can see that. But taking the time to do the work can sometimes test the patience of the team and the entrepreneur themselves. What's your reaction to that? >> Um, I would say that, you know, when we started Poshmark, the mission was that can we serve a hundred million people. In the country, you know, not even around the world. In our way we have 40 million people. From day one what we saw was deep engagement in the platform, because of the level of usage we had, because of the level of, sort of, activation we had, we knew we were on to something. I'll share a small episode with you, which convinced us that we've touched a deep nerve within the community is, in May of 2012, we were barely, you know, six, seven months into our app being launched in the public space, and we had maybe five or ten thousand users. At that time, we were adjusting our shipping for the first time, and uh, literally we announced the, we had launched the product with a small discount on the shipping, we were going to take it back, and we just said, you know, we're going to take it back. We got 200 plus emails which ranged from, you know, you're going to take away my entire set of clothing, and my entire business and we barely thought we were even launched, and so we knew we were servicing something very deep. That commitment to servicing the community where you are, really helping people at a deep level, allowed us to ride through these crazy ups and downs. And there was a point of time we went along the valley, even though we had the initial funding, in the mid stages of it we got over 200 rejections in the paradigm; sometimes multiple by the same investors. And so, it was definitely not a smooth ride in the middle of building this company. But that sort of passion for community and what they were experiencing kept us going. >> Let's talk about People First and venture capital. And one of the things I'm impressed on with this program we're doing with Mayfield is, and theCUBE has newer effect as well in the community, it's a people-centric culture. We lived through the social media early days when social and democratization was happening. More than ever now, you're seeing the role of people, because we're all connected. So there's rapid communications, there's frictionless, for people to yell and/or raise their hand and give accolades as well. So you have now a social dynamic with the fabric around the world. People can transact and communicate, complain, you know, applaud. This is changing everything. How is that change your outlook on life, because you have to recruit people, they want to work for a company that's people-centric, they want to work for a mission-driven company. These are the new dynamics we're starting to see in this generation; how has People First impacted your core mission? >> So for me, life is all about people. This company's all about people. We serve people, people is one of our core values. And my connection with Mayfield, which is through Navid, started back, actually, in my previous company. At the very beginning of that journey, '04/'05, uh, and we tried to partner up but the timing was never right, so when we were starting Poshmark, Navin was the first one with a term sheet, even before he'd sort of seen the business idea. And to me, that was a huge belief in me and the team I could put together. And I have the same sort of feelings about the people we bring on into the company, where uh, many of my team members here, including two of my co-founders, were involved with me in Kaboodle. One of them was a co-founder in Kaboodle. The first 20, 30, 40 people, I think, in the company, are still here seven or eight years later. They were people who are now playing very senior roles in the company, where they've gone through their ups and downs and we are always behind, two or three people left and we recruited them back into the company. So I think at the end, life, anywhere, but particularly in today's world, is so much about people and relationships. And it's the same thing we did to our community. I mean, uh, we just finished our sixth annual user conference, which was six times bigger than our first one. What was amazing was, they were so many people who were there in the first conference who had been coming to all the six conferences, and they are now like mini-celebrities in the community. And so, it's just amazing to see how a focus on people can be both rewarding at a business level, but also very gratifying at a personal level. >> It's nice to see you hit that tipping point. Congratulations on your success, it's great to see. You're a great entrepreneur. I want to ask you the question around funding, because I know, we've both been through venture capital fundings, we've been through this point building this great company you run now, and you've actually hit massive growth to a whole other level, your challenge today and going forward. This is, given it's Mayfield's 50th anniversary, you've seen a lot of changes in venture capital. A rounds used to be A rounds, now there's B and pre-C, there's all kinds of nuance, and now you have alternative funding now and global landscape you're seeing block chain and cryptocurrency, although ICO's have taken a bath because of the regulatory issue. Issues around regulation, some scams out there, actually. But venture capital's been tried and true. What's changed in venture capital the past 25 years in your view? >> I think, two things, which have happened, particularly in the last seven or eight years is there's a lot of it. And secondly, it favors the mighty more than the weak. And so, those are sort of the two big changes that have happened in the venture capital business. I think you were just mentioning is the people I used to work with, a whole range of investors, are now investing in post-growth stage funds. I mean, the same company. So everyone is sort of leveled up and leveled up and then leveled up, you know? You see venture capitalists raising two, three, four billion dollar funds; I mean, that's not venture capital, there's no way you can deploy that at the venture stage. A company is staying private much longer at different scales, which I think is probably more sort of a sign of the times. And finally, I think, it is the metrics and the scale that your business can achieve, that these are obviously very aware of, is an order of magnitude bigger than it has ever been. In fact, sort of, in some ways, unicorn, being the unicorn is uh, as sometimes as people joke, sometimes an insult. You need to be a deca-unicorn these days. So the feeling of not being enough is constant. >> And that's challenging, too, for the venture industry, because, you know, there's still the classic building blocks of entrepreneurship and venture architecture, which is, you start with an idea and you get a prototype, and certainly it's easy to get on the Cloud computing certainly, a great win for the entrepreneur; so I can see maybe some acceleration. But at the end of the day, it's still the classic blocking and tackling with building your company. >> Yes. >> Building a durable company. >> Absolutely. And you and I have both seen the '98, '99, 2000 timeframe, you know, everyone believes nothing repeats, and, you know, we certainly see, maybe not exactly the same thing, maybe it's an order of magnitude less, but there's definitely some level of exuberance we see today. But if you're building a fundamentally good business, that has robust economics, that can scale, and is based on foundational principles, with a large sort of market, I don't think that we are wrong in terms of deploying massive amounts of capital up against it. But at the same time, um, I think it also creates certain socioeconomic, as well as responsibility challenges, that I don't think we are fully facing up to, as an economy, and as a Valley. >> You've raised over a hundred million plus, so you have done some funding. A lot of funding, you have a lot of cash you've raised. When you had to go through those exercises of looking at the fundraising, 'cos, you don't want it to die on the mind, you're building a durable business, you have to go through multiple rounds of fundings. What were the key decision points for you as you started to look at this fundraising process to build your business? >> See, in the early days it was literally just about survival, I mean, there were times where I ran the business on negative balance sheets, right? So it isn't that it's been easy. I was only, I would say, the last funding round was the one that was easy, where we got multiple term sheets proactively, and the first couple of them. In between--. >> When things are scaling things are great, you know? >> In the middle of it, every single round was effectively zero to one term sheets. Every single time. We were lucky to have Mayfield as a partner, and some of our early investors like Inventus and Menlo who sort of supported us through each of these pieces of the journey. Mayfield as an anchor point. But it was really, really hard. And part of it is that, what we were doing was challenging, so many things still are, that even to process our cohort data is hard. Do you think of it as used, do you think of it as buying, do you think of it as selling, what is it? It looks like a bird, but it moves like a plane, you know? What is it? It's Superman or Superwoman, right? So that being a challenge, uh, only in the last round did we have the freedom, we could raise no money, some money, all of the money, and um, most of the focus for us, for that capital, was really to have the deep pockets that would be required for global expansion. We had actually scaled the business, at that point in time, that we didn't need too much money for domestic expansion. And in fact, not only have we not touched any money from that round, we have not touched any money from the previous round, so far; most of the money from the previous round. And so, again, part of it is you need muscle to compete in a bigger world, but at the same time, if you build a fundamentally sound business, then over time you can scale with or without money. >> And you got SAAS, sellers and service, and network effects booming and great community. That's a great tailwind for you guys, for sure. >> It is a phenomenal tailwind, and in fact, um, I was just in my management team meeting this morning, and I said, you know, we are growing, but we can grow even faster at this point, because the level of network effect we are seeing in the community is an extraordinary effect, where there's sort of second order; our community is opening up Instagram accounts to promote Poshmark to sort of go out to YouTube, so there's sort of this wild, organic movement that's happening across the country, which is just bringing out a whole different level of growth that we've ever seen. >> Yeah, there's a whole new dynamic it seems. It's interesting, I'm seeing, and not a lot of people writing stories about it are documenting it, but Masters of Scale has a whole different perspective, but no one's really talking about something that you guys are touching upon, and we're seeing it in our business. Creating an environment that has network effects, and community, and good content in this case, product for your end. Um, creates a flywheel. And what's interesting is, in this new era of people who can create value, with the ability to capture it, is really a unique formula, and I think this is the new kind of management discussion. Certainly lower prices, increased value, that's an Amazon effect. That's a, lacking the words, good example, well-documented, you do that, you're good, you're doing it, but now you have the ability for people to create value. Who can then capture it. This is almost a whole 'nother big wave. Your reaction? >> I think the power of people today is at a very unique level, right? And it can go in the negative direction, but when you harness it from a positive perspective, it's phenomenal. And to me, you know, we've started added a fifth core value recently, is that at the end, the true happiness comes from service of others, right? And if you service everyone, in our job, you're servicing our community, who's then servicing other people, and that creates an amazing sort of paradigm. And if you remove the conversation of money, because it's taken care of, it's built into the platform, then it just keeps sort of circulating. And I think that's something that people underestimate. And one of the things that you, you know, you see is that, for example, open source software, right? You start by focusing on community and then it becomes all about money, and then you forget about the community and you see many of the larger open source companies slow down, because they forget the fact that what brought them there was the community. And to me, I think--. >> If they get greedy, the project's fail. >> Exactly, exactly. And so, the hardest thing at scale to balance is how do you make sure that you're still focused on the community? >> Great stuff! Final question for you. You know, these days, with venture capital, the question always is, where's the value at? Talk about your experiences with Mayfield, and what differentiates a value add versus a value subtract investor? When should an entrepreneur feel it? What's the tell signs of someone's got a value add, and partner is not? >> I think, I think Mayfield is so aligned in so many ways with our core values, which is focus on people and focus on service, that it's just been an amazing partnership with them. You know, even in our lowest moments, I knew that we would get funded; I didn't know how it is, because I knew that Navid and Mayfield would figure out a way, so I never sort of worried about the capital after I brought in Navid and saw him in action for a year and a half. And if you're a venture capitalist, you need to provide capital! And forget about any of the services, many VCs fail that one task, which is to provide capital when you most need it, right? But beyond that, it's been a great resource. I mean, I met my co-founder through Mayfield. Tracy and I were first introduced via Mayfield. Many of our recruiting of the top executives have come from Mayfield, but they're always available as a sounding board across the pieces, so I do think that they take their service paradigm to a whole new level. >> And they support you, too, right? The support's there? >> Support and they have an HR partner who's helped, I think, with some of the recruiting issues, hiring the recruiting partnerships, et cetera. PR, other areas as we needed it. Somebody that you could call on, too, even if it was just talking about searching for a general counsel, and Mayfield has been great, even in that. Help, at this late stage of a company, so it's fantastic. >> It's a great network; people, value, paying it forward. Manish, thanks for coming on, sharing your insights, here as part of theCUBE's 50th People Network with Mayfield. Thanks for sharing your experience. >> Thanks for having me! It's been a pleasure and joy to see you after so many years as well! >> This is theCUBE here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield for their 50th Anniversary as a Venture Capital Firm, sharing insights and ideas from entrepreneurs, and tech executives. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching! (electronic music)