>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and we are here live at Magento Imagine 2019, our second time being back here with theCUBE and we're very excited to welcome Brittany Hodak to theCUBE, entrepreneur, customer engagement speaker, writer, co-founder of the Superfan Company. Brittany it's so exciting to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. >> So, you have an incredibly impressive background and I'm like where do we start? >> Thank you. >> So, here we are talking about customer experiences and how Magento and Adobe empower a lot of customer experiences. But you've written a ton of articles, over 350, you've been published in the Huff Post, Wall Street Journal, talk to us about your experiences with customer engagement, some of the things that you as a co-founder of the Superfan have discovered working with a variety of brands from Walmart to Katy Perry? >> Well, thank you so much for saying that. I always say that the biggest problem brands and entertainers have is often one that's not even on their radar at all. I talked to a lot of small and medium sized business owners and they say, You know, my big problem is people don't know who I am. I've got an awareness problem. I'm struggling to let people know who I am. And I really think my business would change if more people knew. And I said, You know, that's not the problem. You can always fix awareness. You can always spend money to get your message out there. Your big problem is apathy. Your problem is there are people who know and don't care. And you've got to figure out how to make people care. You've got to figure out how to connect your story with their story in a way that's meaningful, and in a way that's going to mean something in their lives because that's how you really start the fan engagement process. That's how you lay the groundwork for creating a culture of super fandom amongst your customers, that's really going to help you grow not just the business but a brand. >> Is it about having a more relevant messages or is it just finding those people that have a propensity to be a fan to the services that you provide? >> Well, it's understanding your uniqueness in a way that really makes your value proposition different from anybody else is. Once you understand your uniqueness and you're able to turn it into service of others, that's when you really you position yourself to be able to make the kind of difference that makes somebody want to be a super fan. And I always say, we've had the fortune of working with tons of celebrities, some of the biggest recording artists and superstars on the planet, and a lot of times people say to me, Oh, you know, it's easy when you're talking about being a super fan of Taylor Swift or being a super fan of Katy Perry, but, you know, I'm a plumber or I'm an electrician, how can I have super fans? And I say, By providing people the kindness service that changes their lives. I have an exterminator who I am a super fan of. His name is Scott and the reason I am a super fan of him is because he makes sure there are no brown recluse spiders in my house and I am absolutely terrified about recluse spiders. They are super evil creatures if you're not familiar with them, I encourage you not to google it. They're like nastiest little bug in the world. But you know to me that's super important because he's not just killing bugs, he's helping me feel safe in my home. So that's absolutely a vital service and finding the right guy to do that and the right guy to put my mind at ease and let me know there aren't going to be brown recluse spiders in my house is invaluable and because of that, like there's no way I would ever switch exterminators because Scott's my guy. And I know you know, I can text him 50 different pictures of critters and say, Is this okay, Is this okay? And he's going to get back to me and let me know. So, it's all about points of connection and finding ways to make your audience feel really valued, and connecting your story with their story. >> So, if you look at an exterminator versus a Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or Walmart, are there similarities and what they need to do to deliver this service that's impacting lives? Or are there fundamental differences? >> There are some fundamental differences, but there's more overlap than you would think. And I always say, if you think about it like a Venn diagram, you've got your brand or your business, your service, your product, whatever it is that you're providing, and you've got your customers over here. Where the magic happens is that point of intersection, where your story overlaps with their story, that intersection, that's where super fandom happens. And I like to talk about something I call the four A's of super fandom. So, you can, I see a lot of people make the mistake of trying to talk to everybody the same way. So, whether somebody is encountering your brand for the very first time or has been your customer for a long time, using the same messaging for those people and that doesn't work. So, I talk a lot about the four A's. So, the first day is awareness. That's when somebody is first uncovering your brand, first interacting with your brand. The second a is action, that's when somebody is actually interacting with your brand for the first time. The third a is affinity. Those are the people who are fans of your brand. They've sort of bought into your why, these are the satisfied customers, I would say. And a lot of businesses stop there. They say, These are the people who are satisfied. These are the people who liked what I'm doing, they're buying from me. And that's a mistake that a lot of especially small and medium sized businesses make they sort of feel like, I've got these customers, I don't have to do anything else. They're not over delivering or over serving them which is a huge missed opportunity because if you do, you're able to convert people from that third A to the fourth a which is advocacy. And advocacy is where you want to get the majority of the people because those are your superfans so to speak, those are the ones who are out there sharing your story and your why with other people, helping refer new customers and new clients to you. So, I always say if you can get past the affinity, the people who are happy with you but not really talking about it and really make them feel valued. That's how you create advocates and advocacy is really the super secret sauce when you're talking about super fandom. >> So where should people get started to try to build super fandom within their client base? Is that really with the good customers that they already have, they try to get them to be advocates or I think most people spend so much time focusing on the fat end of the funnel as opposed to on the narrow end of the funnel and converting that transaction into a fan which is what it sounds like you're suggesting? >> Yeah, well, it's important to to focus on all parts of the funnel man, like I said that that awareness, that that fat of the top, you certainly need to be dealing with those people to get them further down. But the skinny part of the funnel is really where you want to make sure that people are continuing to drip out to the other side to make those referrals for you. So, absolutely focusing on everybody. One thing that I am always shocked I when I do consulting and work with small businesses and medium sized businesses, when I asked how much referral business they get, a lot of people don't know that number off the top of your head. So, if you're not tracking the amount of referrals, you absolutely need to know that as a metric, and the number one thing that you can do to increase the amount of referral business that you're getting is by asking your customers for referrals. It's so funny the amount of people who say, I hardly get any referral business at all. And I say, Well, when's the last time you asked? When's the last time that you went to one of your clients or your customers and said, I so appreciate your business. And I wonder if you know anybody in your network who could benefit from our product or service. And they say, oh I've never done that. But yeah, they wonder why they don't have any referrals so-- >> It seems like such an easy step but to your point, you're saying they're focusing on awareness, getting my brand, my service, my name out there, getting people to take action? >> Yes. >> And building that affinity and then I'm good, but that simply asking to make it a referral whether it's a yelp or something as simple as that seems like a pretty easy step. Strategically, how do you advise customers to get from that, take that if you look at it like a funnel like Jeff saying, take that group of affinity customers and convert some percentage to advocates, what's your strategy for helping a consumer brand or even a service provider, like an exterminator for actually making those conversions and then and then having that be a really kind of engine to drive referrals, to drive more leads to the top of that funnel? >> That's a great question. So, I like to talk about something I call the high five which is knowing the five most important people that have the potential to drive your business forward for the next quarter, the next year and the next five years. So, this is an actual list of five people. And any business owner hopefully can sit down and say, Here are the people that I need to really super serve in order to move my business forward. So knowing who those five people are, it could be an advisor, it could be an investor, it could be somebody you've never even met, maybe a thought leader whose thought that you really enjoy, that you think this person could really help me and open me up to a lot of people in their network if they knew who I was. Make a list of those five people, and then figure out how often you need to be doing something staying top of mind for those people. So for me, I like to make sure it's at least once every two weeks. So, sometimes it's as simple as sending an article and saying, Hey, I came across this article, I thought you would really love it, wanted to send it your way. Now and reality, did I just come across that article? No, I spent maybe an hour looking for the right article to forward that person. It's taking the time out to show them that they matter to you, so whether that's sending them a nice gift in the mail for no reason or a handwritten thank you note after they made an introduction for you. It's checking in on things, I always say, you should know what is important to the people who are important to you. You should know the teams that they follow, you should know their spouse, their children, the things that are happening in their lives so you can check in with them. And we live in an age where it's so easy to get information about anyone because all of us are putting content out there on the internet all the time about ourselves. So take the time to figure out what matters to those people who matter to you, and then stay top of mind, letting them know that they matter to you. So, like I said, for me, it's once every two weeks and I look at my list of five about every six months in terms of adding a couple of new people on maybe cycling some people off. But I've been doing this for four years. So, I have a list of 20 people. And I those are like my alums, some of the alumni of my high five, and I'm still extremely close with all of them. I still make sure that I'm trying to add value to them because having one person who's going to advocate for you could open the door for millions of dollars of revenue for you. So, it's just identifying who those people are, because to your point, it's impossible to sort of make everyone the most important person, it's impossible to take everyone at that third step and take them to the fourth step. So, rather than holistically thinking about it. I like to really drill in and say let's start with five. And if you've got 50 employees and you assign five people to each of those 50 employees to say make sure this vendor or make sure this customer, or make sure this partner feels very appreciated by you on a regular basis. You're going to, you really start to see the ROI very, very quickly in your business. >> So some of the trends, if we look at this we're all consumers of any kind of product service, we have this expectation, this growing expectation that we're going to be able to get whatever we want whenever we want it, have it delivered in an hour or a day, or so, we want to be able to have this experience on mobile, maybe started there, maybe finish it in the store, what are some of the trends that you're seeing that you recommend that the company with any product or service needs to get on board with, for example, this morning they were talking about progressive web apps and being able to deliver an experience where the person doesn't have to leave the app, or they can transact something like through Instagram. What are some of those top tools that you recommend to your broad client base. You got to get on board with like mobile, for example, right away. >> Yes, I was going to say the PWAs are absolutely critical, because I think we've all as consumers been in the situation of trying to load something on our phone, and it's five seconds goes by six seconds, I'm like forget about it. >> We're done. >> Yeah, I'm done, I'm over it. So PWAs is super important because it's all about putting your customer first and making things simple for them. The other thing is making sure that whatever system process you're using, everything needs to be connected. You can't be managing stuff across eight different platforms and expect for things not to fall through the cracks which is I'm learning so much here at Imagine and listening to all the best practices of people who are using Magento to manage every part of their business because something is seemingly minor as sending a confirmation email twice instead of once or having eight hours go by before the customer gets that, those types of things, say to a customer on a subliminal level, I'm not important, I don't matter, they're not putting me first. >> So just fan comes from fanatic. And there's great things about fans, and some times there's less great things about fans and we've seen a little bit of that here in terms of this really passionate community around Magento. And it was independent. And then it went to eBay and then it went back out of eBay. And now it's back in Adobe. And it's funny seeing the people that have been here for the whole journey. Part of that responsibility, if you're going to invite someone to be a fan is you have to let them participate, you have to let them contribute. And often which we're seeing, I guess, in Game of Thrones, I'm not a big fan, but if you get outside of kind of the realm of where the fans want things to go, it can also cause some conflict. So, how to people manage encouraging fans, really supporting fans, but at the same time not letting them completely knock their business off or hold the business back probably from places where the entrepreneur needs to still go? >> That's a great question. There was a really fascinating study that Viacom did a couple of years ago about fans. And especially in the under 35 sets, so millennials, gen Z. And the vast majority of people felt like fans have some ownership of the thing that they're a fan of. And that's a really interesting study in psychology to think about these people who feel the ownership. But you know, it's true. You mentioned Game of Thrones, that's a great example of seeing these fan bases who come up with names for themselves, and who are tweeting in real time about things that are happening. Magento a great example because open source has been such an important part of the culture and the history of the platform. These people feel in a very real sense this ownership. And you're right, I think sometimes that scares small business owners, medium sized business owners. They say, Well, we don't want to relinquish control. We don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we're upsetting people. And I would say, You're right, fan comes from the word fanatic. And that fanaticism, that passion is something you absolutely want. Because I would argue that a greater threat than that is what I was talking about earlier, which is apathy. You don't want people to be like, I don't care. And passion is of course, the opposite of apathy. And that's what you're looking for. So I would say, are you going to put yourself in a position where sometimes there could be a disagreement, you could upset somebody? Absolutely, but you those are the people, it's like if you're in a relationship with somebody and you have a fight that passion that's there is because there's care on both sides. You're both super engaged, you're both very passionate about your position. So, having a system in place to defuse that by saying, I hear you I understand where you're coming from, let's figure this out together, is part of the customer service staff that you've just got to prepare for. >> Can you using, sorry Brittany, using all this data that's available that Magento, Adobe et cetera can deliver and enable organizations to understand that and maybe even kind of marry those behaviors with apathy on one hand passion on the other and how do we get to that happy medium? >> Exactly, how do we get to the happy medium, what are the data points that matter? How are we, the idea of super fan means something different to every organization. So, part of it is uncovering what it is that really matters to you. I always say a super fan is somebody who over indexes and their affinity for a product, service, brand, entertainer, therefore increasing the chance that they're going to advocate on its behalf. So, thinking about, there could be people who are spending a lot of money with your brand who just aren't really that passionate about it. They're not going to tell people and that's fine. But those aren't the people who would be a quote unquote superfan, even though they may be spending a lot of money with you. So, it's figuring out what the markers are that are important to your brand or service. I work with a lot of brands on this because it really is different for everyone. But figuring out who those people are and then talking to them because this is something that, there's so much psychology around the why. Like why people behave the way we do that the consumer behavior, the internal and philosophical drives that are making us make the decisions that we make and the best way to uncover that is to talk to your customers because a lot of times you'll learn so much about your brand, you'll find so many things. I always love talking to recording artists about this, they put out a new song or a new album and in the fans find all these hidden messages >> Taylor is known for that. >> Always some-- >> Taylor is one of the best in the world. And a lot of times artists will say, Oh, yeah, like, I didn't do that on purpose but I'm totally going to take credit for it because these fans found it. And oh, yeah, of course, I meant to do that. So, you'll find that some of these customers understand your brand oftentimes better than you do which is a really fun thing. >> It's also just the ecosystem. You my favorite one always reference is Harley Davidson, guess how many brands get tattooed on people's arms, and just the whole ecosystem of other products that were built up around the motorcycle, and to support kind of that community they weren't getting any nickels necessarily if somebody sold a saddle bag or a leather jacket, or whatever but it was such and it still is, I think such a vibrant community again, and as evidence by you put a tattoo on your arm that it's something to strive for, not easy to get. >> Why we always say build a brand not a business because the brand are those things that people are connecting to. We were talking about NASA before we started filming. I'm a huge space geek and Lisa loves space having worked for NASA in the past and that's one of those things, I don't know this to be true but I got to believe NASA way outpaces like every other combined government agency in licensing. I mean, people walk around wearing NASA logos on everything >> I saw at least three of them this morning. >> Yeah, I mean, I bought in the last month, probably three different NASA licensed products. So I mean that's the passion that if you can connect to somebody on an emotional level and make your story part of their story. They want to represent it, they want to get that Harley tattooed on their arm. >> That emotional connection but also that personalization that's key? >> Yes. >> What's difference in from your perspective on a superfan versus an influencer? Are they one in the same? >> It's a great question. So, they a lot of times are one in the same and that same Viacom study that I mentioned earlier. Something like two thirds of people said that they consider themselves to be pop culture influencers which sounds like a lot. But if you think about it, pretty much everyone is an influencer and that's because for Nielsen, the most trusted recommendation is or the most trusted form advertising is a recommendation from a friend or a family member, 92% of people trust a recommendation from a friend or family member, which far outpaces every other form of advertising. So in a lot of ways, these micro influencers are the next wave of advertising. These advocates or these super fans are, I think in many ways an untapped well of resources for the fans who drill in and you mentioned Taylor Swift before. How many people listen to Taylor Swift for the first time because a friend suggested they listen to Taylor Swift. I would argue that lots and lots of people and Taylor said something to me years ago that like a former manager, or someone said to her, and that was, if you want to sell half a million albums, you're going to have to meet half a million people. That was said to her when she was like, 15, 16 years old and she thought, okay, yeah, I'm going to go meet half a million people. I'm going to be befriend them, I'm going to listen to their stories, I'm going to let them know what they say matters to me. And here we are, she sold, I don't know, 50, 60 million albums, however many she sold worldwide. And but that's really where it starts, that one to one connection. >> Seems to just kind of all go back to referral. And isn't that sort of the basic human connection? It's like, are we trying to over-complicate this with all these different tools that simply, even with hiring and tech or whatever industry, referrals are so much more important because you've got some sort of connection to a brand or a person or a product or service. >> You've got that connection, you've got somebody who's already very well qualified. And I like to talk about something that I call the wave method which the wave is a ritual hello, goodbye. How many times a day do you wave at people, countless. And virtually you say hello to tons of people everyday. People who are coming to one of your social pages, people who are engaging with your website. So I say, I encourage people to think about that hello and goodbye, that interaction. Think of a wave as an acronym and ask yourself, are you making everybody who's going to come into contact with you today feel welcomed? Is there something on your virtual site or in your real storefront. If you're a brick and mortar business that's going to make people feel welcomed? How are you making them feel like they belong? The A is appreciated, how are you letting those people know that they are appreciated by your business? I think I know I have often felt like I'm a number or I don't matter. Utility companies are notorious for this for making you feel like they don't really care if they have your business or not. Or they know perhaps that they're going to because there's not like a different water company you can you can use it your home. And that sucks, like we've all been made to feel like we weren't appreciated by somebody that we were doing a financial transaction with. So ask yourself, how can you make your potential and current customers feel appreciated? The V stands for validated, and one of the best quotes that I've ever come across is from Oprah. On her last episode, she was imparting some of the lessons that she had learned over the years of hosting her shows and she said she'd interviewed something like 30,000 people over the years, and they all wanted the same thing. And that was validation. They all want it to feel like they were important and their feelings mattered. I see you, I hear you what you're saying is important to me. So, validate your customers. One big mistake that I see people make all the time in customer service is when somebody has a complaint, having your rebuttal be like, Oh, I've never heard that before. Or it's 10,000 people haven't have had great experiences. That's absolutely the worst thing that you can ever say to somebody because you're bringing in other experiences that don't matter to them. It's a one to one conversation. It's a one to one relationship. So bringing in, that's like having a fight with your significant other and saying like, Well none of the women I dated before you ever had a problem with this, like how well is that going to go over? Like you don't want to bring in other experiences. So that V and wave validated >> And the E? >> and then the E is excited, making people feel excited because that passion, having people feel like you know you're excited that they're a customer of yours and you can bring something that's going to make their lives better is the most important key. >> Brittany, thank you so much. I could keep talking to ya. I wish we didn't end but we do, for sharing your experiences, your expertise, your recommendations on becoming any kind of brand with any product or service, generating the super fans. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. It was so great speaking with you guys today. >> Ditto. >> Thanks. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this on theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas, thanks for watching.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in Monaco for the MoCo crypto summit. I'm John fur. You're host of the cube. We got a great guest Dustin plant Boltz who is a crypto advisor, but also the crypto editor for Forbes Monaco here. Seeing the official event, the AAL event of the Monaco crypto summit in Monaco, your coverage area for Forbes, your MCing. Welcome to the >>Cube. Thank you for having me. And it's, it's always fun when I get to have an event in our backyard, cuz I get to hear what others know. And to me I'm very curious. Yeah. Always >>Learning. So you're on the MC on the stage here, you know, queue in the program online great program. So it's innovative event, inaugural event, great name by the way. Crypto summit and mono crypto >>Summit. Yeah, the MoCo crypto summit. >>That sounds like I want to attend every year. >>You're you're more than welcome to attend next year. >>Well, I hope so. Either way. I'm at the Al event with you. So gimme the take on what's on stage. What's been the program, like what's your observations going on here at the event today? >>So what we're starting to see globally is this digitization of things and the people that are part of the innovation side. And so that's what we've been able to see this morning. We're we're now at the break is what sort of companies are out there, the good ones and what are they building? Is this innovation? Is it even innovative and figuring out how they're gonna do it and the roadmaps to getting there from the metaverses to NFTs and even to decentralized finance. >>Yeah, it's the number one question I get is what's legit. What's not legit. And then you're starting to see the, the, the wheat and the shaft separating here and you know, something called crypto winter. But I don't see it. I mean, I see correction for some of the bad things going on in terms of not having the right underpinning infrastructure, the creative ideas are amazing. We're also seeing like digital bits and other platforms kind of coming together to enable the creators and, and the NFT side for instance has been huge. What has been your observation on that enablement? Because you have two schools of thoughts. You have the total nerds we're up and down building everything. Then you have artists and creators, whether it's music, tech apps building, they don't necessarily want to get 'em to the covers. They don't want to deal with all that. Yeah. Have you seen, what's your, what's your take on that? >>So I I'm seeing that a lot of these major brands, you know, they they're striving for excellence. You know, they're being more careful of who they partner with and the types of companies and you know, they, they look at it from reality and a little tough love to figure out should they align their brand. So what we're seeing here is is that there is so much inertia moving forward. That we're just at the beginning of this thing. Yeah. McKinsey recently said that the ecosystem will be over $30 trillion. So when you recognize that we are so early and it's those right now, or some might say are the risk takers. But to me there, aren't taking risk. They're being a part of making history. >>Yeah. You get the pioneers and you get the financial. So as they come together, how do you see the market? Cause what I've noticed with crypto and here in, in this, this market is international. One lot of international finance us is kind of lag behind. You got all kinds of rules, but you got the, the combination of the, the future billionaires. Sure. Okay. The pioneers and then the financeers yeah. Coming the money, the money and the power coming together. What's your reporting show you that's going on right now? What should people know about on how this is evolving? What they shouldn't >>Expect? Well, so you have a group that wants to become cryers they're seeing these individuals globally. They're making lots and lots of money, but what they don't realize is that not everybody is gonna have that outcome, but looking at the technology aspect of it and how it's going to improve a system that many can agree is collectively broken legacy just can't move beyond. It was never designed to you'll see people take shots at certain card companies and I go, but you recognize they developed the assembly line. And so I'm seeing that the smart money they got in long ago, believe it or not. And those now they're looking out for their errors are the ones that saying, I will not have an excuse when my, my grandkids or my, my nieces or my nephews, when they come and ask, where were you when the greatest transformational shift in human history, from both education to jobs, to careers and even wealth was being shifted to a digital world, why were you on the sideline waiting? And so I think what we're gonna see is this tsunami coming, and it's gonna start with one big player and then two and five, you go, go alone. You go far, go together. You go further. And that's what we're seeing is that this collective is moving forward >>And the community, we just had Beth Kaiser on, I've known Beth for many, many years. And she's what she's her journey has done. She's had a great mission and then gets she's a data scientist and came to Analytica. Now she's doing work with Ukraine and the rallying support around it has been impressive. And it's a community vibe, but the community's not just like sympathetic they're hands on together to your point. >>Yeah. It, but it also takes courage. I mean, you look at Britney Kaiser and what she had, and to me, courage is not, not having fear. Courage is not allowing the fear to stop. You, you know, recently asked my executive coach, who's 85 and I'm turning 39. This question of, do you let fear stop you? How do you decide? And he said, you know, you can either let, you can either ride the dragon. And I said, or let the dragon chase you. And Brittany has been one of these that made a decision to do what was right. And it came down to integrity. Yeah. >>So what are you have to these days what's going on in your world? >>What is going on in my world? So I moderate events all over and I connect and I like to ask people questions. So I'm gonna ask you, I'm gonna turn at the interviewer on the >>Interview. It's good. Natural. >>What are you learning? >>I mean, I'm learning, I mean today or this week or this month or this year. Well, I was just talking with Brittany about this. The security world is converging cloud technology, cloud computing. That revolution has just been amazing. Amazon posted their earnings yesterday. They blew it away as far as I'm concerned. So they kind of show there's no tech recession. I've learned that this recession, that we're so called in is the first downturn in tech where there's been cloud players as hyperscalers as an economic engine. Okay. So from a, from a business perspective, Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure now Google cloud, Alibaba's now in, in international version. This is the first time at downturns ever happened with cloud computing as an economic engine. And so therefore what I'm seeing is the digital transformation that's happening across the world for enterprises and entrepreneurs is not stopping. >>It's actually accelerating. So although the GDPs down in inflation is down, you're seeing a massive shift continuing to accelerate, spending and transformation with cloud technologies and decentralized. So you can almost see it kind of in the, this event and other events, even some of the bigger events, the best smartest people are working on it. The applications in all the categories are transforming. If cloud is step one, decentralized gonna be step two. So I see that kind of bridge going from cloud computing, cloud native to decentralized native. And I think a D DAPP market's gonna just explode. I think NFTs are just scratched on the surface. I think that's kind of, I won't say gimmicky, but I think no, but you're right, much more of a much more of a, an illustration that there's more coming. >>There is a lot more coming because people are seeing that there's more to an NFT than an ugly luck and J you know, ugly and JP image that there's, that there's data in there. And that your avatar will be stored as just that as an NFT. And I learned today from go of sing, that decentralization is, is the key to innovation. And I agree with that statement. Holy. >>Yeah. I mean, I think access to stuff is gonna be multidimensional. Like you think about the NFT as, as an ID, whether it's him or UN unstoppable domains is that company just got financing another round where the billion dollars, their concept is like, Hey, one NFT is your access for all of your potential identities in context. >>And isn't that exciting that we're now gonna be at this stage where you travel with you. Yeah. Instead of someone else traveling with you, you get to decide who you will be. And to me, everything you're doing in this world, this reality is now becoming part of your digital asset as a whole. >>I remember when I started my podcasting company in 20 2004, early pioneers, Evan Williams was there with Odo and you had, you know, the blogging revolution going on that whole democratization wave actually didn't happen right then. But all the people that were involved in that web two oh, kind of CRAs was all about democratization. It's kind of happening now. I mean, 15, 20 years later at web services is transformed cloud the democratization for own your own data, putting users in control. And I think in the middle of that, the Facebook's the world, the world garden data, you know, manipulation kind of took it off track a little bit. So I think now I'm, I psych to see that it's back on track to where it was. I mean, Facebook made billions of dollars. Now you got LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn's great for your resume, but it's also become a wall's garden with no data export. >>Yeah. And then >>No APIs keep >>Changing. Think about this. That if you wanna apply for a job, just change something quickly. Yeah. Ah, now you're the senior VP. Yeah. Before you were, you're an office manager >>Like to see the immutable block change, >>You don't get to see when did the record change. Yeah. >>Reputation data. You're a digital exhaust people gonna wanna reign that in. And I think the user in charge message that Brit Kaiser was talks about is hugely a mess under, under, under amplified concept. Digital assets are key, but the data ownership is something that I think is, is >>Powerful. So I'm gonna be launching a brand new company in and around September called cryptos. And it's a crypto career center. Think of it like the, the crypto for LinkedIn, that it's an aggregator becoming the industry standard for education, becoming the industry standard for crypto ships, with partners like ledger and moon pay and Casper labs. >>Look at this, we got an exclusive scoop on the cube. This >>Is the first time I will tell you this the first time in, in an environment like this. Yeah. That I'm excited to, I'm excited to talk about, right. Because it's time to be part of the change. Yeah, exactly. You know, as a father, I look at, I know where it's headed in the world of business. I know in the world of this, that we're gonna call the internet of connected things. Yeah. That it's gonna require you to have a certain talent skill or a certain certification. And to me, it's important to have an industry that supports one >>Staff and also, and also history on misinformation, smear campaigns can happen and ruin a career >>Overnight. Can you imagine that one little thing and because the internet never forgets. Yeah. It stays around indefinitely. >>The truth has to come out. Dustin. Great to have you on the queue. Thank you so much. Final question. What have you learned in there is MC what's your takeaway real quick? >>What I've learned is I never tire of learning. Thank you again, to learn more. Dustin plan.com. >>All right. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Cube coverage here at Monaco. I'm Shawn furry. We'll back with more coverage after this short break.

[Music] hello everyone welcome back to the live coverage here in monaco for the monaco crypto summit i'm john furrier host of thecube uh we have a great great guest lineup here already in nine interviews small gathering of the influencers and the people making it happen powered by digital bits sponsored by digital bits presented by digital bits of course a lot happening around decentralization web 3 the metaverse we've got a a powerhouse influencer on the qb ryan gills the founder of openmeta been in the issue for a while ryan great to see you thanks for coming on great to be here thank you you know one of the things that we were observing earlier conversations is you have young and old coming together the best and brightest right now in the front line it's been there for a couple years you know get some hype cycles going on but that's normal in these early growth markets but still true north star is in play that is democratize remove the intermediaries create immutable power to the people the same kind of theme has been drum beating on now come the metaverse wave which is the nfts now the meta verses you know at the beginning of this next wave yeah this is where we're at right now what are you working on tell us what's what's open meta working on yeah i mean so there is a reason for all of this right i think we go through all these different cycles and there's an economic incentive engine and it's designed in because people really like making money but there's a deeper reason for it all and the words the buzzwords the terms they change based off of different cycles this one is a metaverse i just saw it a little early you know so i recognized the importance of an open metaverse probably in 2017 and really decided to dedicate 10 years to that um so we're very early into that decade and we're starting to see more of a movement building and uh you know i've catalyzed a lot of that from from the beginning and making sure that while everything moves to a closed corporate side of things there's also an equal bottom-up approach which i think is just more important and more interesting well first of all i want to give you a lot of props for seeing it early and recognizing the impact and potential collateral damage of not not having open and i was joking earlier about the facebook little snafu with the the exercise app and ftc getting involved and you know i kind of common new york times guy comment online like hey i remember aol wanted to monopolize dial up internet and look the open web obviously changed all that they went to sign an extinction not the same comparable here but you know everyone wants to have their own little walled guard and they feel comfortable first-party data the data business so balancing the benefit of data and all the ip that could come into whether it's a visualization or platform it has to be open without open then you're going to have fragmentation you're going to have all kinds of perverse incentives how does the metaverse continue with such big players like meta themselves x that new name for facebook you know big bully tons of cash you know looking to you know get their sins forgiven um so to speak i mean you got google probably will come in apple's right around the corner amazon you get the whales out there how do is it proprietary is walled garden the new proprietary how do you view all that because it's it's still early and so there's a lot of change can happen well it's an interesting story that's really playing out in three acts right we had the first act which was really truly open right there was this idea that the internet is for the end user this is all just networking and then web 2 came and we got a lot of really great business models from it and it got closed up you know and now as we enter this sort of third act we have the opportunity to learn from both of those right and so i think web 3 needs to go back to the values of web one with the lessons in hindsight of web 2. and all of the winners from web 2 are clearly going to want to keep winning in web 3. so you can probably guess every single company and corporation on earth will move into this i think most governments will move into it as well and um but they're not the ones that are leading it the ones that are leading it are are just it's a culture of people it's a movement that's building and accumulating over time you know it's weird it's uh the whole web 2 thing is the history is interesting because you know when i started my podcasting company in 2004 there's only like three of us you know the dave weiner me evan williams and jack dorsey and we thought and the blogging just was getting going and the dream was democratization at the time mainstream media was the enemy and then now blogs are media so and then all sudden it like maybe it was the 2008 area with the that recession it stopped and then like facebook came in obviously twitter was formed from the death of odio podcasting company so the moment in time in history was a glimmic glimmer of hope well we went under my company went under we all went under but then that ended and then you had the era of twitter facebook linkedin reddit was still around so it kind of stopped where did it where did it pick up was it the ethereum bitcoin and ethereum brought that back where'd the open come back well it's a generational thing if you if you go back to like you know apple as a startup they were trying to take down ibm right it was always there's always the bigger thing that was that we we're trying to sort of unbundle or unpackage because they have too much power they have too much influence and now you know facebook and apple and these big tech companies they are that on on the planet and they're doing it bigger than it's ever been done but when they were startups they existed to try to take that from a bigger company so i think you know it's not an it's not a fact that like facebook or zuckerberg is is the villain here it's just the fact that we're reaching peak centralization anything past this point it becomes more and more unhealthy right and an open metaverse is just a way to build a solution instead of more of a problem and i think if we do just allow corporations to build and own them on the metaverse these problems will get bigger and larger more significant they will touch more people on earth and we know what that looks like so why not try something different so what's the playbook what's the current architecture of the open meta verse that you see and how do people get involved is there protocols to be developed is there new things that are needed how does the architecture layout take us through that your mindset vision on that and then how can people get involved yeah so the the entity structure of what i do is a company called crucible out of the uk um but i i found out very quickly that just a purely for-profit closed company a commercial company won't achieve this objective there's limitations to that so i run a dao as well out of switzerland it's called open meta we actually we named it this six months before facebook changed their name and so this is just the track we're on right and what we develop is a protocol uh we believe that the internet built by game developers is how you define the metaverse and that protocol is in the dao it is in the dow it's that's crucial crucible protocol open meta okay you can think of crucible as labs okay no we're building we're building everything so incubator kind of r d kind of thing exactly yeah and i'm making the choice to develop things and open them up create public goods out of them harness things that are more of a bottom-up approach you know and what we're developing is the emergence protocol which is basically defining the interface between the wallets and the game engines right so you have unity and unreal which all the game developers are sort of building with and we have built software that drops into those game engines to map ownership between the wallet and the experience in the game so integration layer basically between the wallet kind of how stripe is viewed from a software developer's campaign exactly but done on open rails and being done for a skill set of world building that is coming and game developers are the best suited for this world building and i like to own what i built yeah i don't like other people to own what i build and i think there's an entire generation that's that's really how do you feel about the owning and sharing component is that where you see the scale coming into play here i can own it and scale it through the relationship of the open rails yeah i mean i think the truth is that the open metaverse will be a smaller network than even one corporate virtual world for a while because these companies have billions of people right yeah every room you've ever been in on earth people are using two or three of facebook's products right they just have that adoption but they don't have trust they don't have passion they don't have the movement that you see in web3 they don't have the talent the level of creative talent those people care about owning what they create on the on what can someone get involved with question is that developer is that a sponsor what do people do to get involved with do you and your team and to make it bigger i mean it shouldn't be too small so if this tracks you can assume it gets bigger if you care about an open metaverse you have a seat at the table if you become a member of the dao you have a voice at the table you can make decisions with us we are building developing technology that can be used openly so if you're a game developer and you use unity or unreal we will open the beta this month later and then we move directly into what's called a game jam so a global hackathon for game developers where we just go through a giant exploration of what is possible i mean you think about gaming i always said the early adopters of all technology and the old web one was porn and that was because they were they were agnostic of vendor pitches or whatever is it made money they've worked we don't tell them we've always been first we don't tolerate vaporware gaming is now the new area where it is so the audience doesn't want vapor they want it to work they want technology to be solid they want community so it's now the new arbiter so gaming is the pretext to metaverse clearly gaming is swallowing all of media and probably most of the world and this game mechanics under the hood and all kinds of underlying stuff now how does that shape the developer community so like take the classic software developer may not be a game developer how do they translate over you seeing crossover from the software developers that are out there to be game developers what's your take on that it's an interesting question because i come to a lot of these events and the entire web 3 movement is web developers it's in the name yeah right and we have a whole wave of exploration and nfts being sold of people who really love games they're they're players they're gamers and they're fans of games but they are not in the skill set of game development this is a whole discipline yeah it's a whole expertise right you have to understand ik retargeting rigging bone meshes and mapping of all of that stuff and environment building and rendering and all these things it's it's a stacked skill set and we haven't gone through any exploration yet with them that is the next cycle that we're going to and that's what i've spent the last three or four years preparing for yeah and getting the low code is going to be good i was saying earlier to the young gun we had on his name was um oscar belly he's argo versus he's 25 years old he's like he made a quote i'm too old to get into esports like 22 old 25 come on i'd love to be in esports i was commenting that there could be someone sitting next to us in the metaverse here on tv on our digital tv program in the future that's going to be possible the first party citizenship between physical experience absolutely and meta versus these cameras all are a layer in which you can blend the two yeah so that that's that's going to be coming sooner and it's really more of the innovation around these engines to make it look real and have someone actually moving their body not like a stick figure yes or a lego block this is where most people have overlooked because what you have is you have two worlds you have web 3 web developers who see this opportunity and are really going for it and then you have game developers who are resistant to it for the most part they have not acclimated to this but the game developers are more of the keys to it because they understand how to build worlds yeah they do they understand how to build they know what success looks like they know what success looks like if you if you talk about the metaverse with anyone the most you'll hear is ready player one yeah maybe snow crash but those things feel like games yeah right so the metaverse and gaming are so why are game developers um like holding back is because they're like ah it's too not ready yet i'm two more elite or is it more this is you know this is an episode on its own yeah um i'm actually a part of a documentary if you go to youtube and you say why gamers hate nfts there's a two-part documentary about an hour long that robin schmidt from the defiant did and it's really a very good deep dive into this but i think we're just in a moment in time right now if you remember henry ford when he he produced the car everybody wanted faster horses yeah they didn't understand the cultural shift that was happening they just wanted an incremental improvement right and you can't say that right now because it sounds arrogant but i do believe that this is a moment in time and i think once we get through this cultural shift it will be much more clear why it's important it's not pure speculation yeah it's not clout it's not purely money there's something happening that's important for humanity yeah and if we don't do it openly it will be more of a problem yeah i totally agree with you on that silent impact is number one and people some people just don't see it because it's around the corner visionaries do like yourselves we do my objective over the next say three to six months is to identify which game developers see the value in web 3 and are leaning into it because we've built technology that solves interoperability between engines mapping ownership from wallets all the sort of blueprints that are needed in order for a game developer to build this way we've developed that we just need to identify where are they right because the loudest voices are the ones that are pushing back against this yeah and if you're not on twitter you don't see how many people really see this opportunity and i talked to epic and unity and nvidia and they all agree that this is where the future is going but the one question mark is who wants it where are they you know it's interesting i talked to lauren besel earlier she's from the music background we were talking about open source and how music i found that is not open it's proprietary i was talking about when i was in college i used to deal software you'd be like what do you mean deal well at t source code was proprietary and that started the linux movement in the 80s that became a systems revolution and then open source then just started to accelerate now people like it's free software is like not a big deal everyone knows it's what it was never proprietary but we were fighting the big proprietary code bases you mentioned that earlier is there a proprietary thing for music well not really because it's licensed rights right so in the metaverse who's the proprietary is it the walled garden is the is it is it the gamers so is it the consoles is it the investment that these gaming companies have in the software itself so i find that that open source vibe is very much circulating around your world actually open maps in the word open but open source software has a trajectory you know foundations contributors community building same kind of mindset music not so much because no one's it's not direct comparable but i think here it's interesting the gaming culture could be that that proprietary ibm the the state the playstation the xbox you know if you dive into the modding community right the modding community has sort of been this like gray area of of gaming and they will modify games that already exist but they do it with the values of open source they do it with composability and there's been a few breakthroughs counter-strike is a mod right some of the largest games of all time came from mods of other games look at quake had a comeback i played first multiplayer doom when it came out in the 90s and that was all mod based exactly yeah quake and quake was better but you know i remember the first time on a 1.5 cable mode and playing with my friends remember vividly now the graphics weren't that good but that was mod it's mod so then you go i mean and then you go into these other subcultures like dungeons and dragons which was considered to be such a nerdy thing but it's just a deeply human thing it's a narrative building collective experience like these are all the bottom-up type approaches modding uh world building so you're going to connect so i'm just kind of thinking out loud here you're going to connect the open concept of source with open meta bring game developers and software drills together create a fabric of a baseline somewhat somewhat collected platform tooling and components and let it just sell form see what happens better self form that's your imposing composability is much faster yeah than a closed system and you got what are your current building blocks you have now you have the wallet and you have so we built an sdk on both unity and unreal okay as a part of a system that is a protocol that plugs into those two engines and we have an inventory service we have an avatar system we basically kind of leaned into this idea of a persona being the next step after a pfp so so folks that are out there girls and boys who are sitting there playing games they could build their own game on this thing absolutely this is the opportunity for them entrepreneurs to circumvent the system and go directly with open meta and build their own open environment like i said before i i like to own the things i built i've had that entrepreneurial lesson but i don't think in the future you should be so okay with other companies or other intermediaries owning you and what you build i think i mean opportunity to build value yeah and i think i think your point the mod culture is not so much going to be the answer it's what that was like the the the the dynamic of modding yes is developing yes and then therefore you get the benefit of sovereign identity yeah you get the benefit of unbanking that's not the way we market this but those are benefits that come along with it and it allows you to live a different life and may the better product win yeah i mean that's what you're enabling yeah ryan thanks so much for coming on real final question what's going on here why are we here in monaco what's going on this is the inaugural event presented by digital bits why are we here monaco crypto summit i'm here uh some friends of mine brittany kaiser and and lauren bissell invited me here yeah i've known al for for a number of years and i'm just here to support awesome congratulations and uh we'll keep in touch we'll follow up on the open meta great story we love it thanks for coming on okay cube coverage continues here live in monaco i'm john furrier and all the action here on the monaco crypto summit love the dame come back next year it'll be great back with more coverage to wrap up here on the ground then the yacht club event we're going to go right there as well that's in a few hours so we're going to be right back [Music] you

>>We'll come back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2021, the industry's most important hybrid event. Very few hybrid events, of course, in the last two years. And the cube is excited to be here. Uh, this is our ninth year covering AWS reinvent this the 10th reinvent we're here with Joel Minnick, who the vice president of product and partner marketing at smoking hot company, Databricks and Greg Rokita, who is executive director of technology at Edmonds. If you're buying a car or leasing a car, you gotta go to Edmund's. We're gonna talk about busting data silos, guys. Great to see you again. >>Welcome. Welcome. Glad to be here. >>All right. So Joel, what the heck is a lake house? This is all over the place. Everybody's talking about lake house. What is it? >>And it did well in a nutshell, a Lakehouse is the ability to have one unified platform to handle all of your traditional analytics workloads. So your BI and reporting Trisha, the lake, the workloads that you would have for your data warehouse on the same platform as the workloads that you would have for data science and machine learning. And so if you think about kind of the way that, uh, most organizations have built their infrastructure in the cloud today, what we have is generally customers will land all their data in a data lake and a data lake is fantastic because it's low cost, it's open. It's able to handle lots of different kinds of data. Um, but the challenges that data lakes have is that they don't necessarily scale very well. It's very hard to govern data in a data lake house. It's very hard to manage that data in a data lake, sorry, in a, in a data lake. >>And so what happens is that customers then move the data out of a data lake into downstream systems and what they tend to move it into our data warehouses to handle those traditional reporting kinds of workloads that they have. And they do that because data warehouses are really great at being able to have really great scale, have really great performance. The challenge though, is that data warehouses really only work for structured data. And regardless of what kind of data warehouse you adopt, all data warehouse and platforms today are built on some kind of proprietary format. So once you've put that data into the data warehouse, that's, that is kind of what you're locked into. The promise of the data lake house was to say, look, what if we could strip away all of that complexity and having to move data back and forth between all these different systems and keep the data exactly where it is today and where it is today is in the data lake. >>And then being able to apply a transaction layer on top of that. And the Databricks case, we do that through a technology and open source technology called data lake, or sorry, Delta lake. And what Delta lake allows us to do is when you need it, apply that performance, that reliability, that quality, that scale that you would expect out of a data warehouse directly on your data lake. And if I can do that, then what I'm able to do now is operate from one single source of truth that handles all of my analytics workloads, both my traditional analytics workloads and my data science and machine learning workloads, and being able to have all of those workloads on one common platform. It means that now not only do I get much, much more simple in the way that my infrastructure works and therefore able to operate at much lower costs, able to get things to production much, much faster. >>Um, but I'm also able to now to leverage open source in a much bigger way being that lake house is inherently built on an open platform. Okay. So I'm no longer locked into any kind of data format. And finally, probably one of the most, uh, lasting benefits of a lake house is that all the roles that have to take that have to touch my data for my data engineers, to my data analyst, my data scientists, they're all working on the same data, which means that collaboration that has to happen to go answer really hard problems with data. I'm now able to do much, much more easy because those silos that traditionally exist inside of my environment no longer have to be there. And so Lakehouse is that is the promise to have one single source of truth, one unified platform for all of my data. Okay, >>Great. Thank you for that very cogent description of what a lake house is now. Let's I want to hear from the customer to see, okay, this is what he just said. True. So actually, let me ask you this, Greg, because the other problem that you, you didn't mention about the data lake is that with no schema on, right, it gets messy and Databricks, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, has begun to solve that problem, right? Through series of tooling and AI. That's what Delta liked us. It's a man, like it's a managed service. Everybody thought you were going to be like the cloud era of spark and Brittany Britain, a brilliant move to create a managed service. And it's worked great. Now everybody has a managed service, but so can you paint a picture at Edmonds as to what you're doing with, maybe take us through your journey the early days of a dupe, a data lake. Oh, that sounds good. Throw it in there, paint a picture as to how you guys are using data and then tie it into what y'all just said. >>As Joel said, that they'll the, it simplifies the architecture quite a bit. Um, in a modern enterprise, you have to deal with a variety of different data sources, structured semi-structured and unstructured in the form of images and videos. And with Delta lake and built a lake, you can have one system that handles all those data sources. So what that does is that basically removes the issue of multiple systems that you have to administer. It lowers the cost, and it provides consistency. If you have multiple systems that deal with data, you always arise as the issue as to which data has to be loaded into which system. And then you have issues with consistency. Once you have issues with consistency, business users, as analysts will stop trusting your data. So that was very critical for us to unify the system of data handling in the one place. >>Additionally, you have a massive scalability. So, um, I went to the talk with from apple saying that, you know, he can process two years worth of data. Instead of just two days in an Edmonds, we have this use case of backfilling the data. So often we changed the logic and went to new. We need to reprocess massive amounts of data with the lake house. We can reprocess months worth of data in, in a matter of minutes or hours. And additionally at the data lake houses based on open, uh, open standards, like parquet that allowed us, allowed us to basically hope open source and third-party tools on top of the Delta lake house. Um, for example, a Mattson, we use a Matson for data discovery, and finally, uh, the lake house approach allows us for different skillsets of people to work on the same source data. We have analysts, we have, uh, data engineers, we have statisticians and data scientists using their own programming languages, but working on the same core of data sets without worrying about duplicating data and consistency issues between the teams. >>So what, what is, what are the primary use cases where you're using house Lakehouse Delta? >>So, um, we work, uh, we have several use cases, one of them more interesting and important use cases as vehicle pricing, you have used the Edmonds. So, you know, you go to our website and you use it to research vehicles, but it turns out that pricing and knowing whether you're getting a good or bad deal is critical for our, uh, for our business. So with the lake house, we were able to develop a data pipeline that ingests the transactions, curates the transactions, cleans them, and then feeds that curated a curated feed into the machine learning model that is also deployed on the lake house. So you have one system that handles this huge complexity. And, um, as you know, it's very hard to find unicorns that know all those technologies, but because we have flexibility of using Scala, Java, uh, Python and SQL, we have different people working on different parts of that pipeline on the same system and on the same data. So, um, having Lakehouse really enabled us to be very agile and allowed us to deploy new sources easily when we, when they arrived and fine tune the model to decrease the error rates for the price prediction. So that process is ongoing and it's, it's a very agile process that kind of takes advantage of the, of the different skill sets of different people on one system. >>Because you know, you guys democratized by car buying, well, at least the data around car buying because as a consumer now, you know, I know what they're paying and I can go in of course, but they changed their algorithms as well. I mean, the, the dealers got really smart and then they got kickbacks from the manufacturer. So you had to get smarter. So it's, it's, it's a moving target, I guess. >>Great. The pricing is actually very complex. Like I, I don't have time to explain it to you, but knowing, especially in this crazy market inflationary market where used car prices are like 38% higher year over year, and new car prices are like 10% higher and they're changing rapidly. So having very responsive pricing model is, is extremely critical. Uh, you, I don't know if you're familiar with Zillow. I mean, they almost went out of business because they mispriced their, uh, their houses. So, so if you own their stock, you probably under shorthand of it, but, you know, >>No, but it's true because I, my lease came up in the middle of the pandemic and I went to Edmonds, say, what's this car worth? It was worth like $7,000. More than that. Then the buyout costs the residual value. I said, I'm taking it, can't pass up that deal. And so you have to be flexible. You're saying the premises though, that open source technology and Delta lake and lake house enabled that flexible. >>Yes, we are able to ingest new transactions daily recalculate our model within less than an hour and deploy the new model with new pricing, you know, almost real time. So, uh, in this environment, it's very critical that you kind of keep up to date and ingest their latest transactions as they prices change and recalculate your model that predicts the future prices. >>Because the business lines inside of Edmond interact with the data teams, you mentioned data engineers, data scientists, analysts, how do the business people get access to their data? >>Originally, we only had a core team that was using Lakehouse, but because the usage was so powerful and easy, we were able to democratize it across our units. So other teams within software engineering picked it up and then analysts picked it up. And then even business users started using the dashboarding and seeing, you know, how the price has changed over time and seeing other, other metrics within the, >>What did that do for data quality? Because I feel like if I'm a business person, I might have context of the data that an analyst might not have. If they're part of a team that's servicing all these lines of business, did you find that the data quality, the collaboration affected data? >>Th the biggest thing for us was the fact that we don't have multiple systems now. So you don't have to load the data. Whenever you have to load the data from one system to another, there is always a lag. There's always a delay. There is always a problematic job that didn't do the copy correctly. And the quality is uncertain. You don't know which system tells you the truth. Now we just have one layer of data. Whether you do reports, whether you're data processing or whether you do modeling, they all read the same data. And the second thing is that with the dashboarding capabilities, people that were not very technical that before we could only use Tableau and Tableau is not the easiest thing to use as if you're not technical. Now they can use it. So anyone can see how our pricing data looks, whether you're an executive, whether you're an analyst or a casual business users, >>But Hey, so many questions, you guys are gonna have to combat. I'm gonna run out of time, but you now allow a consumer to buy a car directly. Yes. Right? So that's a new service that you launched. I presume that required new data. We give, we >>Give consumers offers. Yes. And, and that offer you >>Offered to buy my league. >>Exactly. And that offer leverages the pricing that we develop on top of the lake house. So the most important thing is accurately giving you a very good offer price, right? So if we give you a price, that's not so good. You're going to go somewhere else. If we give you price, that's too high, we're going to go bankrupt like Zillow debt, right. >>It took to enable that you're working off the same dataset. Yes. You're going to have to spin up a, did you have to inject new data? Was there a new data source that we're working on? >>Once we curate the data sources and once we clean it, we see the directly to the model. And all of those components are running on the lake house, whether you're curating the data, cleaning it or running the model. The nice thing about lake house is that machine learning is the first class citizen. If you use something like snowflake, I'm not going to slam snowflake here, but you >>Have two different use case. You have >>To, you have to load it into a different system later. You have to load it into a different system. So like good luck doing machine learning on snowflake. Right. >>Whereas, whereas Databricks, that's kind of your raison d'etre >>So what are your, your, your data engineer? I feel like I should be a salesman or something. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not saying that. Just, just because, you know, I was told to, like, I'm saying it because of that's our use case, >>Your use case. So question for each of you, what, what business results did you see when you went to kind of pre lake house, post lake house? What are the, any metrics you can share? And then I wonder, Joel, if you could share a sort of broader what you're seeing across your customer base, but Greg, what can you tell us? Well, >>Uh, before their lake house, we had two different systems. We had one for processing, which was still data breaks. And the second one for serving and we iterated over Nateeza or Redshift, but we figured that maintaining two different system and loading data from one to the other was a huge overhead administration security costs. Um, the fact that you had to consistency issues. So the fact that you can have one system, um, with, uh, centralized data, solves all those issues. You have to have one security mechanism, one administrative mechanism, and you don't have to load the data from one system to the other. You don't have to make compromises. >>It's scale is not a problem because of the cloud, >>Because you can spend clusters at will for different use cases. So your clusters are independent. You have processing clusters that are not affecting your serving clusters. So, um, in the past, if you were running a serving, say on Nateeza or Redshift, if you were doing heavy processing, your reports would be affected, but now all those clusters are separated. So >>Consumer data consumer can take that data from the producer independ >>Using its own cluster. Okay. >>Yeah. I'll give you the final word, Joel. I know it's been, I said, you guys got to come back. This is what have you seen broadly? >>Yeah. Well, I mean, I think Greg's point about scale. It's an interesting one. So if you look at cross the entire Databricks platform, the platform is launching 9 million VMs every day. Um, and we're in total processing over nine exabytes a month. So in terms of just how much data the platform is able to flow through it, uh, and still maintain a extremely high performance is, is bar none out there. And then in terms of, if you look at just kind of the macro environment of what's happening out there, you know, I think what's been most exciting to watch or what customers are experiencing traditionally or, uh, on the traditional data warehouse and kinds of workloads, because I think that's where the promise of lake house really comes into its own is saying, yes, I can run these traditional data warehousing workloads that require a high concurrency high scale, high performance directly on my data lake. >>And, uh, I think probably the two most salient data points to raise up there is, uh, just last month, Databricks announced it's set the world record for the, for the, uh, TPC D S 100 terabyte benchmark. So that is a place where Databricks at the lake house architecture, that benchmark is built to measure data warehouse performance and the lake house beat data warehouse and sat their own game in terms of overall performance. And then what's that spends from a price performance standpoint, it's customers on Databricks right now are able to enjoy that level of performance at 12 X better price performance than what cloud data warehouses provide. So not only are we jumping on this extremely high scale and performance, but we're able to do it much, much more efficiently. >>We're gonna need a whole nother section second segment to talk about benchmarking that guys. Thanks so much, really interesting session and thank you and best of luck to both join the show. Thank you for having us. Very welcome. Okay. Keep it right there. Everybody you're watching the cube, the leader in high-tech coverage at AWS reinvent 2021

>>From around the globe with digital coverage of 2020 brought to you by beam. Welcome back. I'm assuming a man, and this is the cubes coverage of Veem on 2020 online. I'm really happy to welcome to the program. We had done the Milan many years, first time doing it online and we have two first time guests. the center square. We have Daniel freed. He is the GM and senior vice president of AMEA and the head of worldwide sitting on the other side of the screen. Is it David Harvey? He's the vice president of Dietrich alliances. Both of them, of course, with beam. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. >>All right, Daniel, maybe start with you, uh, you know, the online event, obviously, uh, you know, it gives us, you know, there's some allergens, but there's also some opportunities rather than, you know, thousands of us gathering in Las Vegas where right. There's a diversity of locations because if you look up and down the street, the strip, um, and instead we really have a global event in an operation, unity, I'm speaking to you where you are in Asia right now. What, what is, you know, the online event mean? And you know, how you can relate to, you know, how many countries do you have a attending the event. Okay. Yeah. >>Okay. So, so the good, the good thing about, about being online is, as you mentioned, as you said, is, is we can have all, all people from all countries, all around the world present. Of course we are surely, uh, now with my responsibility, my worldwide responsibility for the channels, uh, all countries in the world, we have partners of all in all countries in the world, which means that all our teams, as well as all our butlers are virtual things or the kid limits, uh, of, of joining that, that event today. But that's, that's why I'm very, very happy to have these virtual events, which is much easier. And they're heading all people try flying in from all the different parts of the world, do they guess? Right. And, and, and David, you know, also with alliances standpoint, I assume since, you know, they don't actually have to fly to Vegas. We've got the special guest appearances by Satya Nadella, uh, you know, Arvin, Krishna, you know, all of the, you know, Andy Jassy, you know, everyone's coming in, but no, and also seriousness from an Alliance standpoint, uh, you know, we'd love to hear how you're, you're working with them., uh, for, for the global event. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And security is having a tough time keeping them at Bay right now. I mean, the online thing is handy because we can just cut them off, but, uh, yeah. Uh, but you're exactly right. It, the support of the alliances has been fantastic. Uh, everyone was trying to adjust to this new world we're in, but what you're seeing this week, um, he's a fantastic mom's body alliances. So once in Mike, all items should really work and we're doing the same for their events. And it's just a really nice >>If >>Camaraderie is coming together. And so, um, they've been great in supporting us as you've as seen through the week. Um, and we're excited about know whole vibe that getting in a commitment >>That, that we're getting from the customers I'm from the alliances, which is really, really good. Excellent. Well, we know that, you know, Veeam is a hundred percent partner focus, Daniel, maybe let's start with you, uh, you know, what, what's new kind of in the last year. So since we were together, last year, so on the new, on the new things that we have been doing for the last year, it's actually continuing first to move with our hundred percent, uh, since the beginning of, of, of Veem and all the way to the fully do squatters, that's more important even that is definitely the move that we see, uh, with working with your answers, uh, and their partners, as well as working much more with the Saudis providers, meaning the cloud service providers, where are there is a big, big trend now in the market with customers requesting more and more rather than, than I would say, technologies and products on premise. >>Uh, so we see that everywhere around the world. It is actually writing now again with the nutrition that we see, well, why, because of these, Nope, this is about situation, uh, where virtual is a big move that we, uh, we, we can see from customers and the partners that we have, the ecosystem that we've built, um, all around the world, he's helping very much in this move. Excellent. And David would love to hear the, the, the progress that, uh, your group with some of the parts. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's been a, it's been a really exciting ride, uh, year over year growth rates with the alliances, continue to shoot out, which we're really excited about. Um, the VTN launch was fantastic for us for most of our major strategic alliances. So we're really pleased about that. And a lot of our technical alliances as well, they really benefited from some of the new capability coming out there. >>So what we're seeing is not only are we seeing our go to market, be enriched more and have a lot of success with the strategic alliances, the technology Alliance is a really starting to benefit from some of that new innovation that just came out and funny as well. So that global systems integrators, we've seen a massive uptick in that interest in the last, in the last couple of quarters. And that's really helping too Alison tonight. Oh, I spy. So yeah, it's been a really exciting year. And certainly when you do these types of events virtually yeah. LinkedIn, your, I am, and text messages go through the roof, which is a nice way to, to keep communication with the alliances. Yeah, I did. David, I'd like to just drill in a little bit on some of the pieces that you're talking about there, uh, you know, I really feel in the last year, yeah. We saw a real maturation in what we do talk about. Yeah. Hybrid cloud and multicloud. Um, I, I know one of the, you know, key strategic Alliance is actually from day one for Veem. Yeah. And you know, every time I saw an announcement of some of the VMware Bob pieces, I usually felt like there was soon after a Veem piece of it. Uh, could you bring us inside a little bit, especially some of the cloud pieces and maybe how beam differentiate, uh, from, from some of the competition out there, you know, both VMware, >>You know, Amazon, Microsoft and that whole ecosystem. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as you touched on, uh, VMware and ops have been very close, Brown is process, and we're really excited about, uh, some of the recent work has been going on with them as well. Um, we're also have tremendous steps fools with Amazon that continues to be a strong area. And the Microsoft is a cloud in the way that we continue during the harms, the way we work with their solution. Um, it's really providing right strides forwards, especially for the enterprise customers. Uh, we also were excited about the recent announcement related to Google cloud as well. So that's another big area for us. Um, and so that was another thing that continues to differentiate us. And what I would say overall though, is it's about having that philosophy as customers continue to have there philosophical view related to on premise cloud on off premise cloud. >>What we're showing is whether it's through the hardware partners, whether it's through the application partners well through the cloud is we're enabling you to decide your workflows. And I think that's the bit it's a little bit different than, and some of the others that are out there taking that heritage, should we put into the virtual world and that mentality, there's certain it departments have. It enables us to really synergize with those different partners as they go through their evolution and a certain customers move more towards the public cloud. And then you might be look towards some workplace back to the private that synergy between all of those areas is hugely important. And even for the hardware partners that we have, do you have cloud plays, mentioning some of their value solutions as well. So it's a really sort of, um, heterogeneous world that it we're really pleased on the way that the market is accepting it. Yeah. And Daniel that this, this move and a maturation of what's happened in the cloud is a significant impact on the channel. I'd love to hear, you know, anything specifically, you know, with your, uh, your viewpoint on the channel as to, you know, how your partners are now adjusting to that, you know, VMware, Microsoft, uh, some of the other pieces is that how they are now ready, uh, to help customers, uh, through these transitions. >>Yeah. And, and let me, let me make one run back, which is very important. First of all, VIM is not Mmm. The cloud provider and will not be accepted, right. Or in other words, the idea is that we will never compete with our brothers, never. Uh, so we provide technology, which is used by our partners and a number of them. I just think that technology to provide services, a number of them are using this technology to resell, uh, or to implement some additional services for the customers. And this is a key, key element. We're not there to do anything and competition. We are here to compliment and to use it, to leverage as much as possible, all our partners, as much as we can, uh, they know very good the market, they know very good at how things are moving. They know very good where they can do they know very good where they cannot do and what their customers want or, or, Oh,. >>Um, so the big, big move that we see in the market is how everyone is moving more and more to, again, there's said initially, uh, to the cloud, um, I mean, providing cloud services, whether it's multicloud hybrid cloud, as you mentioned it, as you listed them, we have all different types of scenarios. And this is a very interesting thing, is us helping them, educating them on how to use our technology, to be able to verify we be provide services and capabilities to their end customers. So we have a big, big investments in this enablement in what we call sales acceleration software, because it's all about businesses, uh, and helping our partners to get there and to move them as fast as placebo. Again, there is a big, a big need, a big request from the end customers and the role of the partners. I understand that and have to move very quickly to this new world of services. >>And we are there to help and support because we strategically no, that this is a way not only for him, but for the entire market. Yeah. And Danielle, you know, an important point. I think anybody that thinks that, okay, editor, uh, you know, to the channel or things, you know, probably doesn't matter. Okay. Or value proposition, a Veeam. What I'm curious from your standpoint is what was the impact of know wire now? You know, obviously some management changes there. Uh, I'm, I'm curious what feedback you've gotten and how that impact, uh, you know, the channel first. Yeah. I mean, let's be open as you know, it's one of, I hope one of our qualities, that theme is the transparency and the way we communicate again with the world, with our, especially with our partners. So initially the feedback that I had and with a number of partners and partners, well, a little bit of, okay, Nope, no worries. >>Uh, no, no. What is going to happen? What is next? Are we going to, to lose the DVM culture? Are we going to, are we going to go through a number of changes eventually in the strategy of him? And actually I have to say, and I'm extremely comfortable, uh, in my, let's say regular communications and connections with, with the insight partners, we have quiet team software because they think that the strategy that we had and the strategy that we have now is the strategy they want just to keep on doing, because it is a successful strategy. And by the way, when we do get the data, uh, that we got from the market from, uh, from, from some, from IDC that that was out lately, we see that Veeam is the number one in both, all around the world, compared to all the other vendors, doing the same kind of technology. >>That means that each is a successful strategy going with the partners and through the partners, he's a very successful strategy. And there is no reason that that yeah, and insight partners understands that extremely good. And I feel very comfortable with it. Yeah. With our future. That would mean more to us, but that's okay. We'll see. In the coming quarters. Well, I, I think, uh, you know, we, we, we do need to have, make sure that VMs has a little bit more focused on getting some green in your home environments there. Um, cause normally if I'm doing an interview with green, I'm expecting with BMI Mexican and a little bit more of the, of the breaker in there, David, you know, obviously, you know, the strategic alliances, uh, you know, some of those executive relationships, good morning, bring us in a little bit, as you know, Daniel was saying there's a little bit yeah. >>Of trepidation at the bit. And they've worked ruin, uh, from the Alliance standpoint, uh, you know, what is this, uh, what what's, what's transpired. Yes, true. It's, it's one of those things. It's a really unexciting answer because they aren't similar, simple answers calmness. Um, I often 24 hours, once we announced it, my call sheet was pretty, pretty empty for the simple reason being that, uh, we've spoken to everybody very quickly and the resonant feedback was that's great news. We know insight. We trust insight. We're glad it is say a growth play. Uh, also it clears up the future. And obviously, yeah, when you have strategic alliances is always in the back of their mind, wondering when is one of our competitors going to come in and Acqua you guys Mmm. Your article feedback was, this is fantastic. This is exactly what we wanted to see. >>Um, you provide clarity to our partnership. You can continue to invest in grow, which you've demonstrated for years, and you can move that forward for the next few years. Um, but also more importantly, this enables us to feel even better doubling down on veins. And so frankly, while we haven't had any issues and I'm sure a lot of the viewers out there have been through events seeing sometimes that can be crazy. It's a Daniel was pointing the strategy. Hasn't changed, we're executing, we've got the support. And the strategic Alliance is probably for the executive level and also the day to day level on leaning in more and more of them please that we're executing on our strategy, focusing in the U S with a big push. Okay. Bringing the investment, moving forward, stabilizing the leadership team. It's just been overall. It's been fantastic. So yeah. >>Yeah. It's, it's a really unexciting new soundbite answer, but that's a, how long has inclarity clarity has been a real takeaway? Excellent. Well, one of the, the key messages in the keynote, of course talking about a digital transformation, we'd love to hear, uh, for, from both of you, uh, you know, what you're seeing and hearing how beam's message is a, you know, engaging with both partners and ultimately the, the end user itself, uh, Daniel, maybe we'll start with you on that. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for asking. It's usually always comes from the end customers and their needs, and we all know that the need for data uh he's he's getting exponential. Uh, so that is why we can't do things manually anymore. So it has to be digitalized everywhere. Yeah. The very interesting thing is that not only something that express with the end customers, but we see more and more because it's an absolute need. Uh, when partners are providing, uh, services or providing all night, chubby she's out services or providing even, even products, they have digitalize also themselves. They are doing it at very, very high speed. But I know I'm mentioning that because I'm extremely pleased with the ecosystems of partners that we have >>Because they understand it's very good, how the market is, is evolving. I'm still only about the customers, but it's also about themselves. Yeah. That they are evolving 21st. And did you digitalization of all the processors? Well, the way they work with their customers, it's definitely one of the key elements, uh, which is going to be extremely good for the future. That's why, because of all this moves in a very positive dynamic way, there is no reasons why we should change our strategies and no remaining said our rights, uh, lions first, whatever it is, uh, continue driving the ecosystem, building the ecosystems, organizing the acquisition. And he's absolutely key for the success of everyone, including people, Brittany and David, please from the Alliance side. Yeah, it's do, I'm sure you'll notice, but in anybody and, uh, we're in a fortunate situation that we probably both get to sit through, uh, all of the strategies that a lot of the Titans of industry are all focused on right now and, and, and having ecosystem we do in your line side, that rich tapestry from the very large to very small is focused on that digital transformation. >>And I think that the good news from my point of view, and I'm going to touch on one of the points Daniel mentioned before was we don't eat with them. And so, yeah, he volunteers, we've got his work hogging, a piece of that, the strategy that they're looking for, the criticality of data three is transformation is huge as everybody knows. Um, and what we're finding right now is that the approach that we take yep. Approach to focus on doing what we do extremely well is synergizing with the evolution of the customer is seeing as they go through that transformation and transformation, sometimes a scary transformation sometimes brings nervousness and they want to do it with a lot of their thought leaders. They working with the VM-ware has the Microsoft, the HBS, and then apps, et cetera. And so from that point of view, the fact that we can providing them with that peace of mind for the complete solution, it's been fantastic. >>So, you know, when you look at a 75 plus partners, there's always going to be one way you need to thread the needle. Shall we say on exactly where intellectual property provides that value to them? But the good news is we don't have to spend a lot of time on that because we're clear, we're concise. Uh, and a lot of times they've been involved in a lot of our strategy sessions. So they're on board with us. And I think the Daniels area as well with the channel, the channel sees that as well. And that's why, whether it's through the alliances channel or with us directly to the resellers, uh, we're finding that, uh, that harmony is bringing a lot of peace of mind. So you can focus on the pains of the customer. I'm not worried about your technology partners fighting with themselves. And that's really where we are, right. Uh, the overall ethic of the company. All right. Well, the final item I have for, for both of you is, you know, normally, you know, but we have a certain understanding of where we are and what the roadmap is. Look, of course, we're dealing with a global pandemic, right? So >>As we look forward to the outlook, uh, I'd love to be able to hear a little bit about, you know, what you're hearing from your partners, how that is coloring, you know, decisions that are made really for the rest of kind of the next 12 months or so. Um, and you know, okay. Any other data points that you have, uh, from your broad perspectives as to how people think the recovery is going to be know, obviously we understand there's a lot of inserts. Nope. Daniel, you've got a, uh, great global viewpoint. We understand, uh, you know, what, what is happening impacts differently locally quite a bit, but, um, what are you seeing going forward and do you know the impact? Bye bye. Yeah. So I couldn't say the contrary. Yeah. So they correct. And we see it in our numbers that the countries, which are the most impacted, I would buy the QVC. >>I would have been more difficulties than the others, uh, to move, to move forward for a business standpoint, uh, which everybody understands, but we've received in the numbers. No, the thing. And this is what I liked very much about, but our ecosystem and where is we had a plan, uh, that we said that we said in 2019 before we knew anything about curvy a con for 2020, and you know what, uh, we are now in no, in, in, in our, the second part of the month of the year, you too, and are going to make our numbers. We are going to make our plans and why are we going to make it? That's the only because, you know, it's just been because perfect, but he's very, very much because of all our partners who, despite all the issues that are, they are in country because of coverage are just getting there, biking, helping themselves, helping us, and altogether as, as a big business machine, as big business system, we all just making success. >>And this will only show extremely good at the end of the year. When we look at the market share, Jamie's going to gain again, uh, with all our butters, it will be the, the results of the success. So good results. Very good results. No. And, and do you mean just continuing to move with these, he's a network of fathers and David, obviously we've seen, you know, you know, many of the big partners, you know, uh, you know, very circumstance and their response, you know, nobody wants, are you seen as, uh, you know, doing something that is untoward towards customers taking care of business. Okay. So, you know, how how's this impacting, you know, what you're doing with your partners? And it gives a little bit of the outlook going forward. Yeah. I mean, why not use for this as energy? Mmm. Some of these headlines that you see, of course, they're not going to get picked up with the impact related to it on a day to day basis, through the discussions with the executives are in the field level, we're seeing the energy with same people want to make sure on what is a tricky situation was a very impactful situation. >>Um, but what, we're not seeing people Mmm. He was onto it. We're seeing people really want to, um, make sure that they are also relating to the needs of their customers today, whether it's more and point whether it's moving towards the user experience, but also taking this time to keep building the foundation for a lot of that infrastructure related to data protection, data availability, um, that we've enjoyed for a long period of time. So yeah, you know, you, you have a degree of disruption, but the objective that I'm seeing from all the major guys that are out there is let's make sure we drive hard. Let's not take the pedal off the metal. Let's not use this as an excuse. Let's keep moving. What, uh, I mean, I sh I would say our engagement with them has increased in sort of happened. Um, and so I don't think we ever expected to be running into tempo. >>We're running bean does it as standard, but we don't normally I have that same temperature. Okay. From some of the, uh, some of the alliances we're really pushing hard with him. So, yeah, we're excited. And we continue to evolve rudeness how, in a situation, everyone's going to be employees with a lot of aggression, a lot of desire to keep capitalizing on the work we've done together. The key solving the customer demands that are going to come over the next 18 to 24 months, um, and reading, make sure that, uh, this is really okay. Yeah. It's impactful just to be clear, but, but not one that we're going to let define our future. I'm looking into that together. So I think from us, um, we're excited about not only as Daniel said, beam success. Well, what, we're starting to see us really good attitudes, uh, from all of our lines bombs, which we love. Yeah. All right. Well, Daniel and David, thank you so much for the update. Great. Yep. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. All right. Lots more covered from Veeam on 2020 online. I'm assuming a minute. Thank you. Oh, wow. The cube.