(bright music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here featuring Jon Dahl, an entrepreneur and CEO, and co-founder of MUX, one of the hottest video platforms and fast growing startups in the industry. They've been selected for this upcoming AWS Startup Showcase on April 5th. Jon, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. >> Thank you, John. >> You know, we've been following you guys for a long time, a couple years now and a customer of your products, so we do the video here. Video is at the center of the pandemic and the way where people are using it for video conferencing, we're seeing all the success. But video has been this dark art, it's been hard to use, it's been... And very difficult unless you were in the business. But now you guys are bringing in a new model making it easier to use and making it developer friendly, which I think is really compelling. So congratulations, love the story. First question, what is the business of MUX, the tech, the consumption model? Can you take a minute to explain what MUX is all about? >> Yeah, for sure. We are a video platform for developers. So we are APIs to all of the different hard problems that you have to deal with if you want to stream video online. Like you said, video is growing it's a really important part of the internet today, it's a really important part of the future of the internet. And yet it's still really, really difficult to work with. The kind of status quo is you hire video experts and you build your own video platform if you want to stream video online. And so we built MUX in order to do all that hard heavy lifting for thousands of other companies. So we are core infrastructure for video stream for companies like you and any software company really that wants to work with video. >> What's interesting is when you look at the rise of the video creator or the influencer or media or any business, cloud computing has shown the way of a new business model standard up quick, be agile and fast. DevOps is infrastructures code, you guys are kind of like videos code. I mean, simply just API enable and you're up and running. Is that right? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. When we started the company actually, we're thinking about, how do we want to shape the products? We actually thought about our experience. The founders are all developers. We thought about our experience. If we were going to design, if we were going to build software and just think of an abstract API to video as an entity, how would you design APIs that give you that kind of functionality. So we spend a lot of time thinking about API design and the developer experience of what we're doing really in order to let developers build the way they want, build anything they want with video in as easy a way as possible. >> You know, it's interesting and I'd love to get your thoughts on this 'cause this brings in the whole data aspect of it, you know, building better video data something that you guys talk a lot about. And that's a background you guys have come from, you kind of vectored it in that way as developers. So you combine data analytics with developers which want to make it easy and fast and get it out there. As you bring that together, what is the real benefit with this model of the cloud? Can you share your thoughts of how you bring that video and data piece together? >> Yeah, for sure. It's the kind of thing where if you're a software developer and you want to deploy software at scaled today, you have to invest in good observability, good monitoring good analytics, good data. You know, if you're a dev team and your company's like, "Hey, we're just going to turn off all of our monitoring for our software," you're probably not going to be very happy. And yet a lot of people are streaming video today at scale and high volumes without really great insight into what actually happens when they stream video. So the first product we actually built was a product called Mux Data, which is an analytics platform for developers operating video platforms. So the user is a DevOps engineer, whoever's on call for the video stack, as well as marketing teams who want to see how this video is being used. So we built that because we knew how important it was. We built video platform forms before for ourselves, a company called Zencoder, for a company called Brightcove that we ended up spending some time at after selling Zencoder. And we saw firsthand how impactful data is to building great video streaming. >> What's the role of cloud and all this? How do you guys see the cloud playing into this? >> Yeah, I mean, at a simple level we run, like everyone we run our software in the cloud. But I think really what the cloud is and does is a way of abstracting a way of hard problems from developers. So if you look at the world today there's actually more demand for software than there are software developers to build it. There's just softwares growing like crazy, there's just huge need for software. And so in that kind of situation, one of the most powerful things you can do is make it easier for developers to build things. So that's why dev tools are so important, that's why you see so much growth in that area. And we do that for video. We replace, you know, tens of... Hundreds of thousands of hours of engineering time to build the same thing everyone else has, to build, you know, your own version of Netflix or YouTube or whatever. So that's kind of how we fit in, but I really think that's a lot of what the cloud is, it's a way of accelerating the growth of software. >> You know, Andy Jassy always says on theCUBE, you know we want to do all the heavy lifting. And that sounds like what MUX is doing and I know you guys have that analytics culture. What influence does that have on your business decisions and the product roadmap? >> Yeah, a couple of things. So, we really directly use data in our technology. So as we build video streaming which is our MUX video product as we build other products over time, whenever possible we want to build them with data first. So we actually have a lot of data into how people stream video and that can inform the way we design products. As a business itself, we also... As we've grown we've stood up our own analytics team, which has just been hugely important. Like we... I have so much more insight into our business now than I did two years ago before we really invested in our own internal analytics team. >> John: How hard was that to do >> How hard? It was... It's a kind of thing that I think you benefit by hiring experts. So I know how to... I kind of know how to look at data and make decisions from that, but I'm not a trained day analyst, I'm not a data scientist, I'm a software developer turn founder. And so, you know, I think early when we were small we were a 20 person startup, we aspire hired to be data driven or data informed but it's hard honestly at that scale. So as we got bigger, we actually hired. It was hard to find great people but we've built a really strong analytics team, (mumbles) team data engineering team. And I think what we're doing now, we've done over the last year, is just learn how to use that data, learn how to leverage all those, that expertise and that data that we have to make better decisions. Well, speaking of data and you got a lot of coming in 'cause you guys have been highly successful and again, your product has really hit the right time because people want to code, they want to build into the applications video, video first as everyone's going in data first video first, what kind of data do you guys have on the use of the video on the raw of the consumption side of it especially as you're seeing it in every application now? >> Yeah, I mean, we have, we have a couple things. We have our own growth of video streaming, which has grown really quickly, probably not a surprise, but I think we saw live video grow by... It's just like you measure, but by like 3000% in 2020. We just saw a huge explosion of new companies doing live streaming and existing companies that were doing other kinds of video really lean into live. So, I think we've seen the fastest growth in the world of live, but really we've seen growth across the board on different platforms, different types of video. >> What's your advice to folks out there because you guys now are our key building block? And again, love the API approach. Easy to integrate and again, we're customers happy... Happy customers on our end. When you see applications being built, what's the trend? What are people doing? Are they rolling their own video apps? Is it... Do you guys see you guys as a platform, as a service? It's not a tool because you got the platform but there's tools out there. So you got the emergence of more tools and the need for more platform. How do you see this kind of shaping out? >> Yeah, it depends how you define the different categories. The way we think about it is we're infrastructure because we sit low down in the stack. So if you build on top of MUX you're still building your own... You're still own video streaming. We just do the heavy lifting under the hood. We move the bits, we do the encoding. So we're infrastructure. We also see our ourselves as a platform because you can build flexible things on top of us. And we have each of the different parts of the video stack. We have videos, live video On Demand, video, data, player those kind of things. So I think, I think like you said there's really a lot of different related categories that are a little different. So we see tooling being something like Mux Data where it's not really the like operational flow of something, it's more on the side to make it better or to give observability or to increase developer productivity. >> Yeah, data is key and in hybrid events are big too seeing that Simulive is a big growth category. I probably imagine. >> Yeah. >> What about reliability and uptime? I see... I can envision kind of an SRE role emerging around video. I'm sure you guys are dealing with it every day 'cause you're the transport you're moving bits around, you know, no one wants downtime. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think... Again, I think the, the infrastructure of video streaming, like we really need to deliver that with exceptional up time and everyone that we rely on and we build on top of other cloud platforms and we build on top of other other tools. So we certainly invest a lot in that. I think the other side of that is we are that to owe customers in some ways where we give them real time data about what's happening on their platforms. So you know, there's stories that tell 'cause of NDAs, but like we've had major events where live video has kept streaming because someone detected a problem early using Mux Data and was able to remedy the problem before it actually impacted users. But absolutely, I mean, SREs are-- >> And cloud helps because you can spin up all kinds of queuing and all kinds of cool things. I mean, new microservice could be built as the future limit. Let's see here around video. What are the biggest surprises you see looking back? I know you guys are kind of a humble startup, I would say, you guys aren't going out there too hardcore and thing things up. You've got good product. What's the biggest learnings you look back over the past two years with MUX and video? >> I mean, I think some of what has been unexpected is the uses of video. I think we did not expected the pandemic and we didn't expect all of the ways people would adapt. And we've seen some really fascinating things from yeah, offline businesses very quickly building their own digital arms, which you you'd think they couldn't, but a lot actually really successfully did back in 2020. And then now a lot of companies going in that hybrid direction where maybe a yoga studio will forever have in-person classes as well as livestream classes or, you know, a university will have in person and live streamed On Demand. >> What are some trends that you would recommend people to look at if they want to get into doing some video development? What should they stay away from? What should they double down on? And obviously cloud scales, obviously, easy to stand things up in the cloud, roll of data's important. How should someone roll their own with MUX? What's the best practice? And do you have a playbook or are things developing? >> Yeah, yeah. So I think... I mean, the thing about a video is just the high bandwidth way of communicating with, you know, one on one or with a group or, you know, learning or, or whatever. And so, you know, first understand your audience cares about, understand how video can help drive that communication. And then as you're building, I mean, I think obvious take this with... I'm heavily biased here, but we don't think, we don't think anyone should build their own video infrastructure today unless you can devote maybe 200 full-time engineers to it. I think that that's a reasonable benchmark for like really starting something from scratch and going all the way. You know, a small company, maybe a team of five, can do something, but you really need to decide what's most important to your users and how do you avoid doing the undifferentiated heavy lifting that Andy Jassy talks about? >> Yeah, and I think, you know, you guys have the founding team, have the years of experience, decades of experience collectively between you guys. What's the secret sauce? I mean, you guys look at MUX, if someone had asked you two questions what's the secret sauce and what's the culture like at MUX? >> Yeah, secret sauce. I think for us, it's two things. One is, again, developer experience. So really deeply understanding how do people want to build, understanding how developers like to bring APIs on their platform or tooling into their platforms, investing a lot in API design and documentation and finding the right abstractions over these hard problems. I think the second is performance. So if you're going to do something like video and this applies to any number of other technical products you really need to go deep. So it's really important for us to do things in order to publish via better and hire quality, publishing even faster, more higher reliability and all that. So lots more, if you want to... Lot more we could dig into there if we have time, but those are probably the two most important. >> What's the culture of the company if you had to define it? >> Yeah, we... When you... If you'd ask team, probably the first answer you get is be human. That's one of our core values, is be human. So we tend to have a culture of caring about people in the company, caring about our customers, treating people like people and not treating people like just, you know, (mumbles). I think we also have a culture. We have another value of care obsessively. So we have a culture of really caring about doing great work. So we try to hire excellent people who are excited to build great products or to serve customers well. So probably those two would be the most important >> Well, great to have you on, Jon. Congratulations on the success and of MUX, thanks for building the product. And again, infrastructure is a service for video whatever you want to call it, it's the beginning of a big wave. Video's not going away. It just has to get easier and easier. >> Yeah, awesome, thank you. >> Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate the conversation. Keep it right there for more coverage from theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's "theCUBE." (intro music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello, everyone and welcome to this week's episode of Wikibon's CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're going to take a break from our traditional spending assessment and share with you our advice on how to deal with this crisis, specifically shifting your physical to digital in the age of Coronavirus. So, we're not going to be digging into the spending data. I talked to ETR this week, and they are obviously surveying on the impact of COVID-19, but those results won't be ready for a little bit. So, theCUBE team has been in discussions with over 20 companies that have events planned in the near term and the inbound call volume has been increasing very rapidly. Now, we've been doing digital for a decade, and we have a lot of experience, and are really excited to share our learnings, tools, and best practices with you as you try to plan through this crisis. So look, this is uncharted territory. We haven't ever seen a country quarantine 35 million people before, so of course everyone is panicked by this uncertainty but our message, like others, is don't panic but don't be complacent. You have to act and you have to make decisions. This will reduce uncertainty for your stakeholders, your employees, and of course, your community. Now as you well know, major physical events are dropping very fast as a risk mitigation measure. Mobile World Congress, HIMSS canceled, Kube-Con was postponed, IMB Think has gone digital, and so it goes. Look, if you have an event in the next three weeks, you have little choice but to cancel the physical attendee portion of that event. You really have three choices here. One is to cancel the event completely and wait until next year. Now the problem with that is, that type of capitulation doesn't really preserve any of the value related to why you were originally holding the physical event in the first place. Now you can do what Kube-Con did and postpone til the summer or kind of indefinitely. Okay, that's a near-term recision on the event, but now you're in limbo. But if you can sort out a venue down the road, that might work. The third option is to pivot to digital. It requires more thought but what it does is allow you to create an ongoing content ark that has benefits. The number-one complaint brands tell us about physical events is that after the event, they don't create a post-event halo effect. A digital strategy that expands time will enable that. This is important because when the market calms down, you're going to be able to better-leverage digital for your physical events. The key question you want to ask is, what are the most important aspects of that physical event that you want to preserve? And then start thinking about building a digital twin of those areas. But it's much more than that. And I'll address this opportunity that we think is unfolding for you a little later. Your challenge right now is to act decisively and turn lemons into lemonade with digital. Experiences are built around content, community, and the interaction of people. This is our philosophy. It's a virtuous cycle where data and machine intelligence are going to drive insights, discovery by users is going to bring navigation which leads to engagement and ultimately outcomes. Now, very importantly, this is not about which event software package to use. Do not start there. Start with the outcome that you want to achieve and work backwards. Identify the parts of that outcome that are achievable and then work from there. The technology decision will be easy and fall out of it if you take that path. So out of a high-level, you have two paths. One, which is the preferred path is to pivot to digital, on the right-hand side, especially if your event is in March or early April. Two is hold your physical event, but your general counsel is going to be all over you about the risks and precautions that you need to take. There are others better than I to advise you on those precautions. I've listed some here on the left-hand side and I'm going to publish this on Wikibon, but you know what to do there. But we are suggesting advising for the near-term events that you optimize for digital. That's the right side. Send out a crisp and clear communications, Adobe has a good example, that asks your loyal community to opt-in for updates and start the planning process. You want to identify the key objectives of your event and build a digital program that maximizes the value for your attendees and the maps to those objectives. We're going to share some examples that theCUBE participated in this week on what might look like the digital event, and we'll share that with you. Event software should come last. Don't even worry about that until you've envisioned your outcome. And I'll talk about software tools a little bit later. So new thinking is required, we believe. The old way was a big venue, big bang event, you get thousands of people. You're spending tons of money on a band. There's exhibitor halls. You're not going to preserve that, obviously. Rather, think about resetting the physical and optimizing for digital which really is about serving a community. Now let's talk about, again, what that might look like in the near-term and then we're going to close on how we see this evolving to a new era. The pattern emerging with our sponsors and our clients is, they want to preserve five key content areas from physical. Not necessarily all of them but in some combination. First is the keynotes. You bring together a captive audience, and you have your customers there, they want to hear from executives. Your customers have made a bet on you, and they want to feel good about it. So one is keynotes. Two is the breakout sessions, the deeper dives from subject matter experts. Third are technical sessions. A big reason customers attend these events is to get technical training. Four is to actually share news in a press conference-like format. And the fifth area that we've seen is, of course, theCUBE. Many of our customers have said, "We not only want you to turn to turnkey the digital event, we want to plug theCUBE into our digital production that we are running." Now these are not in stone, they're just examples of what some of the customers are doing, and they're blending keynotes into their press conference, and there's a lot of different news cases. I want to stress that, initially, everyone's mindset is to simply replicate physical to digital. It's fine to start there, but there's more to this story that we'll address later on. So let's have a look at what something like this might look like in the near-term. Here's an example of a digital event we did this week with a company called "Aviatrix." Small company but very nice look for their brand which is a priority for them. You can see the live audience vibe. This was live but it can be pre-recorded. All the speakers were together in one place. You can see the very high production value. Now, some of our clients have said, "Look, soon we want to do this completely remote with 100 percent of the speakers distributed." And our feeling is that's much more challenging for high-value events. Our strong recommendation is plan to get the speakers into a physical venue. And ideally, get a small VIP/influencer audience to be there. Make the audience feel important with a vibe of a VIP event. Yeah, you can wait a few weeks to see how this thing shakes out, and if travel loosens up, then you can pull this off. But for your Brand value, you really want to look as professional as possible. Same thing for keynotes. You can see how good this looks. Nice stage, lighting, the blue lights, and a live audience. This is a higher-end production with a venue, and food, and music for the intros and outros, very professional audio and visual. And this requires budget. You got to think about at least 200 to 300 thousand dollars and up for a full-blown event that you bring in influencers and the like. But you have options. You can scale it down. You can host the event at your facility. Host it off at our facility in Palo Alto. I'll talk about that a little later. Use your own people for the studio audience. Use your own production people and dial back the glam, which will lower the cost. Just depends on the brand that you want to convey, and of course, your budget. Now as well, you can run the event as a live or as a semi-live. You can pre-record some of all of the segments. You can have a portion, like the press conference and/or the keynotes, run live and then insert the breakouts into the stream as a semi-live, or as on-demand assets. You have options. Now before I talk about technical sessions, I want to share another best practice. theCUBE this week participated in a digital event at Stanford with the Women in Data Science organization, WiDS, and we plugged into their digital platform. WiDS is amazing. They created a hybrid physical/digital event, and again, had a small group of VIPs and speakers onsite at Stanford with keynotes and panels and breakouts, and then theCUBE interviews all were streaming. What was really cool is they connected to dozens and dozens of outposts around the globe, and these outposts hosted intimate meet-ups and participated in the live event. And, of course, all the content is hosted on-demand for a post-event halo effect. I want to talk a little bit about technical sessions. Where as with press conferences and keynotes, we're strongly recommending a higher scale and stronger brand production. With technical sessions, we see a different approach working. Technical people are fine with you earbuds and laptop speakers. Here's an example of a technical talk that Dan Hushon, who is the Senior VP and CTO at DXC, has run for years using the CrowdChat platform. He used the free community edition, along with Google Handouts, and has run dozens and dozens of these tech talks designed for learning and collaboration. Look, you can run these weekly as part of the pre-game, up to your digital event. You can run them day of the event, at the crescendo, and you can continue the cadence post-event for that halo effect that I've been talking about. Now let's spend the moment talking about software tooling. There are a lot of tools out there. Some, super functional. Some are monolithic and bloated. Some are just emerging. And you might have some of these, either licensed or you might be wed to one. Webinar software, like ON24 and Brightcove, and there's other platforms, that's great, awesome. From our standpoint, we plug right into any platform and are really agnostic to that. But the key is not to allow your software to dictate the outcome of your digital event. Technology should serve the outcome, not the reverse. Let me share with you theCUBE's approach to software. Now first thing I want to tell you is our software is free. We have a community editions that are very robust, they're not neutered. And we're making these available to our community. We've taken a CloudNative horizontally scalable angle bringing to bear the right tools for the right job. We don't think of software just to hold content. Rather, we think about members of the community and our goal is to allow teams to form and be successful. We see digital events creating new or evolving roles in organizations where the event may end, but the social organization and community aspect lives on. Think of theCUBE as providing a membrane to the conference team and a template for organizing and executing on digital events. Whether it's engaging in CrowdChats, curating video, telling stories post-event, hosting content, amplifying content, visualize your community as a whole and serve them. That's really the goal. Presence here is critical in a digital event, "Oh hey, I see you're here. "Great, let's talk." There are a number of news cases, and I encourage you to call us, contact us, and we'll focus on how to keep it simple. We have a really simple MVP use case that we're happy to share with you. All right, I got to wrap. The key point here is we see a permanent change. This is not a prediction about Coronavirus. Rather, we see a transformation created with new dynamics. Digital is about groups which are essentially a proxy for communities. Successful online communities require new thinking and we see new roles emerging. Think about the protocol stack for an event today and how that's going to change. Today is very structured. You have a captive audience, you got a big physical venue. In the future, it may evolve to multiple venues and many runs of shows. Remote pods rules around who is speaking. Self-forming schedules is not going to be the same as today. We think digital moves to a persistent commitment by the community where the group collectively catalyzes collaboration. Hosting an online event is cool, but a longterm digital strategy doesn't just move physical to digital. Rather, it reimagines events as an organic entity, not a mechanism or a piece of software. This is not about hosting content. Digital communities have an emotional impact that must be reflected through your brand. Now our mission at theCUBE has always been to serve communities with great content. And it's evolving to provide the tools, infrastructure, and data for communities, to both self-govern and succeed. Even though these times are uncertain and very difficult, we are really excited to serve you. We'll make the time to consult with you and are really thrilled to share what we've learned in the last 10 years and collaborate with you to create great outcomes for audiences. Okay, that's a wrap. As always, we really appreciate the comments that we get on our LinkedIn posts, and on Twitter, I'm @DVellante, so thanks for that. And thank you for watching, everyone. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. And we'll see you next time. (outro music)