>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to our coverage here on theCUBE of Red Hat Summit 2019. We're live in Boston right now, and I'm joined by a couple of award winning professionals. And we're looking forward to hearing what their story is because it's fascinating on both fronts. And also by DeLisa Alexander who has a great job title at Red Hat. Chief People Officer. I love that title. DeLisa, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Also with us, Limor Fried who is the and founder and lead engineer of Adafruit and Saloni Garg who is an undgergrad student, third year student, at the LNM Institute of Technology. And that's in Jaipur, India. So Saloni, glad to have you with us. And Limor, a pleasure as well. >> Thank you. >> And you're all lit up. You've got things going on there, right? >> I'm glowing, we're gonna get all into that. >> We'll get into that later. First, let's talk about the award that, they're two women in open-source are our winners this year. On the community side, Limor won, on the academic side, Saloni won, so talk about the awards if you would, DeLisa. The process and really what you're trying to do with recognizing these kinds of achievements. >> Well, this is our fifth year for the Women in Open-Source Award. So after this period of time, I can tell you what we wanna do is make an impact by really fostering more diverse communities, particularly gender diverse in open-source. And so that's the whole goal. Five years into it, what we've discovered is that when you really focus on diversity and inclusion within a community, you actually can make an impact. And the thing that's so exciting this year is that our award winners are really evidence of that. >> So talk about the two categories then if you would please. You have community on one side, academics on the other. It appears to be pretty clear cut what you're hoping to achieve there by recognizing an active contributor, and then somebody who is in the wings and waiting for their moment. But go ahead and fill in a little bit about, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Limor and Saloni too about, why are they here. >> Limor: Why am I here? >> Yes, well, really what we're trying to do is create role models for women and girls who would like to participate in technology but perhaps are not sure that that's the way that they can go. And they don't see people that are like them, so there's less a tendency to join into this type of community. So with the community award winner, we're looking at the professional who's been contributing to open-source for a period of time. And with our academic winner, we're looking to score more people who are in university to think about it. And, of course, the big idea is you'll all be looking at these women as people that will inspire you to potentially do more things with open-source and more things with technology. We've been hearing for many, many years that we definitely need to have more gender diversity in tech in general and in open-source. And Red Hat is kind of uniquely situated to focus on the open-source community, and so with our role as the open-source leader, we really feel like we need to make that commitment and to be able to foster that. >> Well, it makes perfect sense. Obviously. Great perfect sense. Saloni, if you would, let's talk first about your work. You've been involved in open-source for quite some time. I know you have a lot of really interesting projects that you're working on right now. We'll get to that in a bit, but just talk about, I guess, the attraction for you in terms of open-source and really kind of where that came from originally through your interest in stem education. >> Okay, so when I first came to college, I was really influenced to contribute to open-source by my seniors. They have already selected in programs like Google Summer of Code Outreach channel, so they actually felt empowered by open-source. So they encouraged me to join it too. I tried open-source, and I feel really, like, I'm a part of something bigger than myself. And I was helped greatly by my seniors, so I feel it's my duty to give it back to my juniors and to help them when they need it so that they can do wonders, yeah. >> Great. And Limor, for you, I know you founded the company. 100% female owned. You've got-- >> Yeah, 100% me. >> Yeah, right. 100% you. >> It's my fault. >> Right. Well, I wasn't going to blame you. I'll credit you instead. >> Yeah, that's our big thing. We wanna change. Get blame to get credit. >> Right. It's all about credit. >> More positive. >> So 100 employees? Is that right? >> 100, 150, yep. >> Okay, talk a little bit about kind of the origin, the genesis of the company and where that came from and then your connection on the open-source side. >> Well, I, yeah, so I grew up actually in Boston. So I've lived here a very long time. >> You said like a block from here. Two blocks. >> I used to live, actually, yes, in South Station nearby. I used to live by the Griffin Book line, and so Wilson has a very strong open-source community, you know. Ephesoft is here. And, yeah, that's kind of the origins of a lot of this free software and open-source software community. And when I went to school, I ended up going to MIT, and the open-source software and open-source technology is kind of part of, like, the genetics there. There's actually this thinking that you wouldn't do it. It's kind of by default. People write code, you open-source, you release it. There's a culture of collaboration. Scientists, engineers, students, researchers. All working together and sharing code. And when I was in school, so I had to take Thesis. I really didn't wanna do it, and so instead, I started building, like, MP3 players and video games. Taking all the engineering that I was studying and, like, not doing the work I was supposed to be doing. But instead, I was having fun and building cool electronic parts, and I would publish these projects online. I had, like, a MediaLab webs page, and I would publish, you know, here's all the chips and the schematics and the layout. And people sort of started coming up with the idea of open-source hardware. Let's take the philosophy of open-source software where we release the source code. But, in here, you release CAD files, firmware, layouts, 3D models. And so I did that, and I was publishing here's how you make this, like, Lite-Brite toy for Burning Man or an MP3 player or a cell phone jammer. All these fun projects, and people would end up contacting me and saying, hey, these are really cool projects. I would like to build this project myself, but unlike software where you just, like, type in, like, make, config, and compile and all that. You actually have to buy parts, you have to get these physical things. And so they said, you know, could you sell me a kit, like a box, where we'd get it and take it home and be able to build it. And I was totally like, no, I'm busy. I have to, like, not write this thesis. >> That's not what I do. >> But eventually, I did write the thesis. And then I was really stuck because I'm like, now what do I do? So I ended up selling kits. So I sold the synthesizer kits and such, and I did an art fellowship and stuff. And then, eventually, I was kind of like, this is, I was doing, you know, it's, you kind of fall into business by accident because if you knew what you were getting into, you wouldn't do it in my opinion. So I ended up sort of developing that, and that was 13 years ago. And now we have 4,000 products in the store, you know. >> 4,000 products? >> Yeah, I know. Ridiculous, right? That's a lot. >> Yeah, who's doing that inventory, right? >> Well, we have a pretty intense inventory system that I'd love to talk to you about, but it's kind of boring. >> I'll bet you do. Now, I was reading something about an circuit playground express. >> Yes. >> Is that right? So is that what this is all about is-- >> Yes! I knew you'd ask, and that's why I wore this. >> So it's a, kind of, an exploratory circuit board of-- >> Yeah! It's open-source, open-source hardware, open-source software and firmware. And we had a lot of parents and teachers and educators and camp counselors come to us and say, we wanna teach physical computing. We wanna teach coding but with physical hardware because, you know, we all, all the tier coders, right? No, I don't know. But, eventually, you're like, I'm typing on the screen. And you want to take that and you wanna make it physical. You wanna bring it out into the world where there's a wearable or a cosplay or assistive technology, or you wanna make video games, that are, like, physical video games. And the problem that teachers had were the classrooms, a lot of these classrooms, they don't have a lot of money. So they said it has to be very low-cost. It has to be durable because these kids are, like, chewing on it and stuff, which is fun. And it also has to work on any computer, even extremely old computers. 'Cause a lot of these schools, they only have a budget every seven years to buy laptops. And so this actually becomes a very difficult technological problem. How do you design something that's $20 but can teach physical computing to anybody? From kids who are not even good at typing all the way to college students who wanna implement fast 48 transforms, and so we designed this hardware. It's open-source, and it's cool 'cause people are, like, remixing it and making improvements to it. It's open-source circuit playground, and I'm wearing it. And it's glowing, and I don't know. It's fun! It's got LEDs and sensors. And you can just alligator clip to it and make projects, and we've got schools from around the world learning how to code. And I think it's a much more fun experience than just typing at a computer. >> Absolutely. Yeah, Solani, on your side of the fence, so I obviously, in your education years if you will, not that we ever stop learning, but formally right now. But you're involved, among the many projects that you've been involved with, a smart vehicle. >> Yeah, I'm working on it. >> Project, right? So tell us a little bit about that and how open-source has come into play with what you're looking at in terms of, I assume, traffic and congestion and flows and those kinds of things. >> Yeah. So what we're working on is, basically, we'll be fitting cameras and Raspberry Pis on buses, college buses. And then they'll detect, like, they'll detect lane detection and traffic signal violation and will report the assigned people. If there's any breakage of law or any breakage of traffic signals, so that's what, basically, we are working on and how open-source comes into the play is that we actually knew nothing about OpenCV and all the technology that is before all this. So I looked up some open-source projects that had already the lump sum of all this, and I got to learn a lot about how things actually work on the code-based side. So that's how open-source actually helped me to make this project. >> And, ultimately, who do you report to on that? Or how is that data gonna become actionable or, I assume it can be. >> Yeah. >> At some point, right? I mean, who's your partner in that? Or who is the agency or the body that, you know, can most benefit from that? >> Yeah, so, currently, this is an academy project, and a classmate of mine has been working with me. And we are working on a faculty member. And so, basically, we have decided to expand this project and to use it as a government project. And we, authorities we'll be reporting to whenever there's a signal or law breakage is that the traffic police department will be notifying them in case of any signal breakage. >> So if there's an uptick in speeding or red light running in Jaipur, we know who to blame. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Shouldn't have run a report. >> It's, Solani, why'd you do that to them, right? All right, ladies, if you would. And I'm gonna end with DeLisa, but I'd like to hear your thoughts about each other. Just about, as you look at the role of women in tech and the diversity that Red Hat is trying to encourage, Limor, what have you seen in Solani here over the last day, day and a half, that maybe you think will leave a lasting impression on you? >> I love Solani's energy and her passion, and I can just, she's has this emanated strength. I can just tell that nothing stops her from achieving what she wants. Like, she wants to, like, do this Raspberry Pi traffic camera. She's just gonna figure out what it takes to solve that problem. She's gonna use open-source software, hardware, whatever it takes. And she's just gonna achieve her goal. I totally sense that from her from the last few days we've been together. >> That's great. >> Thank you. >> Yeah! >> All right. Solani, your turn. For Limor. >> What I have done is just a fraction of what she has been doing. She's, like, inspiration. I look up to her, and I, also, I mean, I hope I start my own company someday. And she's really a role model and an inspiration for me. So yeah. >> Yeah, I think you've got a pretty good mentor there in that respect. And then, DeLisa, when you see young ladies like this who are, you know, their achievements are so impressive in their respects. What does that say to you about Red Hat, the direction of the program, and then the impact on young women that you're having? >> Well, the program has gotten so much more participation. So many people, 8,000 people actually voted to select our winners. And all of our finalists were so impressive. We have major contributors to open-source, and so, along with our finalists, our winners are people who are just role models. And I am just so impressed with them, and I think that every year, we're learning something different from each of the winners. And so, as they round down into a community, the things that they'll be able to mentor people on will just be exponentially increasing. And so it's really exciting. >> Fantastic. Well, thank you all. The three of you, the ladies. Congratulations on your recognition, your accomplishments. Well done. Safe travels back to New York and back to India as well, and I would look forward to hearing more about what you're up to down the road. I think this is not the last we're gonna hear from the two of you. >> Thank you for having us. >> And thank you for calling me a young lady. >> Absolutely. I mean, look at the source. Open-source, you might say. That was awful. All right, back with more Red Hat Summit 2019. We're live here on theCUBE in Boston. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here at theCUBE, we're wrapping up a long day at Conga Connect West. The silent disco has started. If you've never done one of these, it's totally fun. You put it on, you can listen to the red, the green and the blue. >> We got three channels, that's right. >> Wow, great day today. >> Three DJs, three channels, I think you've got oldies, I've got top 40. >> I think I went EDM, I think I'm green. >> You got EDM, okay. >> I think, I know. >> I think red is oldies. >> Alright. >> So come on down to, well, it's probably too late, but-- >> Probably too late tonight. >> We're filling up the space here. >> Two more days at the Thirsty Bear. What do you have going on tomorrow entertainment-wise? >> Tomorrow, whole day of circus entertainment in the tent out back. Tomorrow night, Beats Antique which is a edgy, I think they played at Burning Man. >> Burning man. >> That's right. >> So they've got to have something going on. >> They're going to have something crazy going on. So we've got a circus tent out back, performances all day long. Open bar. >> Open bar. >> For everyone who's at Dreamforce. >> Open food. >> Food all day and by the way, we did not run out of food today. Unfortunately I heard Moscone did. (Jeff laughs) So, if you're hungry, come on down. Demo stations, solution stations. We've actually got a fire marshal in the house, so we're legal. >> Oh, did the fire marshal come on down? >> And we've got dancers right here. >> We got dancers. >> Dancers right here, he's on the red channel. >> You get the vibe. >> So the silent disco's pretty amazing 'cause you put the headphones on, only you can hear the music and you get to dance to your own beat. >> Except for your friends that have the same color. >> So you're green, I'm blue, We're all on our own. >> So we're on different beats. You get the message, it's Conga Connect West, Thirsty Bear. Free food, free drink, free entertainment and silent disco. Come on down. >> Come on down. >> Bob, great day. >> Thanks for being here. Great day today. >> Alright. Thanks for watching. >> Cheers. >> We're checking out, time to go dance, bye. (upbeat jingle)

(energetic music) >> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE coverage here in San Francisco, California for VMware's Radio 2018 event. This is their R&D big event kickoff. It's like a sales kickoff for engineers, as Steve Herrod said on stage. Out next guest is Mornay Van Der Walt, VP of the Explore Group, Office of the CTO. Also, program chair of the Event Today Conference, working for the collective of people within VMware on a rigorous selection committee for a high bar here at your event. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you. >> Talk about the event, because I know a lot of work went into it. Congratulations, the talks were amazing. I see the schedule. We have Pat Gelsinger coming on later today. We just had Ray O'Farrell on. This is like the, I don't want to say, Burning Man of Vmware, but this is really a recognition, but also really important innovation. Take a minute to talk about the process that you go through to put this together. It's a fantastic event. The smartest minds, the cream rises to the top. It's hard, it's challenging, it's a team effort, but yet you gotta ride the right waves. >> Right. So, RADIO: R&D Innovation Offsite. And as you said, it is tough because we've got this huge R&D community and they've all got amazing ideas. So they get the opportunity to submit ideas. I think this this year we have over 1,700 ideas submitted, and at the end of the day we're only going to showcase 226 of those ideas across research programs, posters, breakout sessions, Just-In-Time BOFs, Birds Of a Feather. You know, so, the bar is high. we've got a finite amount of time, but what's amazing is we take these ideas, and we don't just showcase them at RADIO. We have four other programs that give us the ability to take those ideas to the next level. So when we think about the innovation programs that come out of OCTO, this is really to drive what we call "Off-Road Map Innovation." So Raghu and Rajiv, with our Product Cloud Services Division, are driving road map, zero to three years out the stuff that you can buy from sales, >> [Furrier] Customer centric? >> Customer centric, yeah. OCTO is providing an innovation program structure, these five programs: Tech Talks, Flings, Borathons, RADIO, and xLabs, and as a collective, they are focused on off-road map innovation. Maybe something that's-- >> Give me an example of what that means, Off-Road Map. >> Sure. So last year at RADIO we did a paper that was showcased on functions as a service. So you think of AWS Lambda, right. [Furrier] Yep, yep >> VM was uniquely positioned, with the substrate, to manage and orchestrate VM's containers and whynot functions. So this radio paper was submitted, I then, as the xLabs group, said we're going to fund this, but given where we are in this market, we said, "Alright, we'll fund this for 12 months." So, we're incubating functions as a service. In July/August time frame, that'll actually exit xLabs into the Cloud Native business. >> It's a real rapid innovation. >> Very rapid. >> Within a 12 month period, we're gonna get something into a BU that they can take it to market. >> Yeah, and also I would say that this also I've seen from the talks here, there's also off-road map hard problems that need to kind of get the concepts, building blocks, or architecture... >> [Van Der Walt] Correct. >> With the confluence of hitting, whatever, its IOT or whatever, blockchains, seeing things like that. >> [Van Der Walt] Yeah. Correct. >> Is that also accurate too? >> Very true. And, you know, Ray had a great slide in his keynote this morning, you know, we spoke about how we started in 2003, when he joined the company, it was all about computer virtualization. Fast-forward 15 years, and you look at our strategy today, it's any Cloud, any device, any app, right? Then, you gotta look to the future, beyond there, what we're doing today, what are the next twenty years going to look like? Obviously, there's things like, you know, blockchain, VR, edge computing, you know, AIML... >> [Furrier] Service meshes? >> Services meshes, adaptive security. And, you know, people say, "Oh, AIML, that's a hot topic right now, but if you look back at VM ware, we've been doing that since 2006. Distributed resource scheduler: a great example of something that, at the core of the product, was already using ML techniques, you know, to load-balance a data center. And now, you can load-balance across Clouds. >> It's interesting how buzzwords can become industry verticals. We saw that with Hadoop; it didn't really happen, although it became important in big data as it integrates in. I mean, I find that you guys, really from the ecosystem we look at, you guys have a really interesting challenge. You started out as "inside the box," if you will. I saw your old t-shirt there from the 14 year history you guys have been doing this event. Great collection of t-shirts behind me if you can't see it. It's really cool. But infrastructures, on premise, you buy, it's data center, growth, all that stuff happened. Cloud comes in. Big data comes in. Now you got blockchain. These are big markers now, but the intersection of all these are all kind of touching each other. >> [Van Der Walt] Correct. >> IOT...so it's really that integration. I also find that you guys do a great job of fostering innovation, and always amazed at the VM world with some great either bechmarks or labs that show the good stuff. How do you do it? Walk me through the steps because you have this Explorer program, which is working. >> [Van Der Walt] Yeah >> It's almost a ladder, or a reverse ladder. Start with tech talks, get it out to the marketplace... >> [Van Der Walt] Do a hackathon. >> Hackathon. Take us through the process. So there's four things: tech talks, borathons, which is the meaning behind the name, flings, and xLabs. >> Correct >> Take us through that progression. >> ... and RADIO, of course. >> And RADIO, of course, the big tent event. Bring it all together. >> So, I'm an engineer. I have a great idea. I wanna socialize it; I wanna get some feedback. So, at VMWare, we offer a tech talk platform. You come, you present your idea. It's live. There'll be engineers in the audience. We also record those, and then those get replayed, and engineers will say, "You know, have you thought about this?" or "Have you met up with Johnny and Mary?" They're actually working on something very similar. Why don't you go and, you know, compare ideas? I can actually make that very real. I was in India in November, and we were doing a shark tank for our xLabs incubator, and this one team presented an idea on an augmented reality desktop. We went over to another office, actually the air watch office, and we did another shark tank there. Another team pitched the exact same idea, so I looked at my host, and I said, "Do these two teams know each other?" and the guy goes, "Absolutely not," so what did we do? We made the connection point. Their ideas were virtually identical. They were 25 kilometers apart. Never met. >> [Furrier] Wow. >> You know, so when, that's one of the challenges when your company becomes so big, you've got this vast R&D organization that's truly global, in one country 25 kilometers apart, you had two teams with the same idea that had never met. So part of the challenge is also bringing these ideas together because, you know, the sum of the parts makes for a greater whole. >> And they can then collectively come together then present to RADIO one single paper or idea. >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely, or go ahead and say, you know what, let's take this to the next step, which would be a borathon, so borathons are heckathons. >> Explain the name because borathon sounds like heckathon, so it is, but there's a meaning behind the name borathon. What is the meaning? >> Sure. So, our very first build repository was named after Bora Bora, and so we paid homage to that, and so, instead of saying a heckathon, we called it a borathon. And one of our senior engineers apparently came up with that name, and it stuck, and it's great. >> So it's got history, okay. So, borathons is like ... okay, so you do tech talks, you collaborate, you socialize the idea via verbal or presentation that gets the seeds of innovation kinda planted. Borathon is okay, lets attack it. >> Turn it into a prototype. >> Prototype. >> And it gets judged, so then you get even more feedback from your most senior engineers. In fact ... >> And there's a process for all this that you guys run? >> Yeah, so the Explorer groups run these five innovation programs. We just recently, in Palo Alto, did a theme borathon. Our fellows and PE's came together. Decided the theme should be sustainability, and we mixed it up a little bit. So, normally, at a borathon, teams come with ideas that they've already been developing. For this one, the teams had no idea what the theme was going to be, so we announced the theme. Then, they showed up on the day to learn what the five challenges were going to be, and some of those challenges, one of them was quite interesting. It was using distributed ledger to manage microgrids, and that's a ... >> A blockchain limitation >> Well, it's a project that's, you know, is near and dear to us at VMWare. We're actually going to be setting up a microgrid on campus, and if you think about microgrids, and Nicola Acutt can talk more to this, we're gonna be looking at, you know, how can we give power back to the city of Palo Alto? Well, imagine that becoming a mesh network. >> [Furrier] With token economics. >> How do you start tracking this, right? A blockchain would be a perfect way to do this, right? So, then, you take your ideas at a borathon, get them into a prototype, get some more feedback, and now you might have enough critical mass to say, "Alright, I'm going to present a RADIO paper next year." So, then, you work as a team; get that into the system. >> [Furrier] And, certainly, in India and these third-world countries now becoming large, growing middle-class, these are important technologies to build on top of, say, mobile... >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely. >> And with solar and power coming in, it's a natural evolution, so that's good use case. Okay, so, now I do the borathon. I've got a product. Flings? >> It's a prototype, right, so now ... >> You can socialize it, you have a fling, you throw it out there, you fling it out there What happens? >> Yeah, so, I've done something at a borathon. It's like, I want to get some actual feedback from the ecosystem: our customers and partners. That example I used with vSAN. You know, vSAN launched. We wanted to get some health analytics. The release managers were doing their job. The products got a ship on the state. Senior engineers on the team got a health analytics tool out as a fling. It got incredible feedback from the community. Made it into the next release. We did the same with the HTML clients, right? And that's been in the press lately because, you know, we've got Rotoflex. Now, there's HTML, but that actually started - two teams started working on that. One team just did HTML >> a very small portion of the HTML client, presented a RADIO paper. Two years later, another team, started the work, and now we have a full-fledged HTML client that's embedded into the VIS via product. >> [Furrier] So, the fling brings in a community dynamic, it brings in new ideas, or diversity, if you will. All kinds of diverse ideas melting together. Now, xLabs, I'm assuming that's an incubator. That brings it together. What is xLabs? Is that an incubator? You fund it? What happens there? >> So with an xLabs, the real way to think about it, it's truly an incubator. I don't want to use the word "start-up" there because you've clearly got the protection of the larger VMware organization, so you're not being a scrappy start-up, but you've got a great idea, we see there's merit ... >> [Furrier] Go build a real product. >> We see it more being on the disruptive side, and so we offer two tracks in the xLabs. There's a light track, which typically runs three to six months, and you're still doing your day job. You know, so you're basically doing two jobs. You know, we fund you with a level of funding that allows you to bring on extra contracting, resources, developers, etc., and you're typically delivering one objective. The larger xLab is the full-track, so functions as a service. Full-track, we showcased it as a RADIO paper last year. We said, "Alright, we're going to fund this. We're going to give it 12 months worth of funding, and then it needs to exit into a business unit," and we got lucky with that one because we were already doing a lot of work with containers, the PKS, the pivotal. >> [Furrier] Do the people have to quit their day job, not quit their day job, but move their resource over? >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely. >> The full-track is go for it, green light >> Yep >> Run as fast as you can, take it to this business unit. Is the business unit known as the end point in time? Is it kind of tracked there, or is it more flexible still. >> Not all the time. You know so sometimes, with functions it was easier, right? So, we know we've got pull for zone heading up Cloud native apps. The Cloud native business unit is doing all the partnerships with PKS. That one makes sense. >> [Furrier] Yeah. >> We're actually doing one right now, another xLabs full, called network slicing, and it's going to play into the Telco space. We've obviously got NFV being led by Shekar and team, but we don't know if network slicing, when it exits, and this one is probably going to have a longer time arise and probably 24-36 months. Does it go into the NFV business unit, or does it become its own business unit. >> [Furrier] That's awesome. So, you got great tracks, end to end, so you have a good process. I gotta ask you the question that's on my mind. I think everyone would look at this, and some people might look at Vmware as, and most people do, at least I do, as kind of a cutting-edge tier one company. You guys always are a great place to work. Voted as, get awards for that, but you take seriously innovation and organic growth in community and engineering. Engineering and community are two really important things. How do you bring the foster culture because engineers can be really pissed off. "Oh my god! They're idiots that make the selection!" because you don't want engineers to be pissed cuz they're proud, and they're inventing. >> Yep, yep. >> So, how to manage the team approach? What's the cultural secret in the DNA that makes this so successful over 14 years? >> So, before I answer that question, I think it's important to take a step back. So, when we think about innovation, we call this thing the Vmware "innovation engine." It's really three parts to it, right? If you think about innovation at its core: sustaining, disruptive, internal, external, And, so, we've got product Cloud Services group, Raghu and Rajiv, we've got OCTO, headed up by Ray, we've got corp dev headed up by Shekar. Think of it as it's a three-legged stool. You take one of those legs away, the stool falls over. So, it's a balancing act, right? And we need to be collaborating. >> [Furrier] And they're talking to each other all the time. >> We're talking to each other all the time, right? Build or buy? Are we gonna do something internal, or we gonna go external, right? You think something about acquisitions like Nicira, right? We didn't build that; we bought it. You think about Airwatch, right? Airwatch put us into the top right quadrant from Gartner, right? So, these are very strategic decision that get made. Petchist presented at Dell emc world, Dell Technologies world. He had a slide on there that showed, it was the Nicira acquisition, and then it sort of was this arc leading all the way up to VeloCloud, and when you saw it on one slide, it made perfect sense. As an outsider looking in, you might have thought, "Why were they doing all these things? Why was that acquisition made? But there's always a plan, and that plan involves us all talking across. >> [Furrier] Strategic plan around what to move faster on. >> Correct >> Because there's always the challenge on M&A, if they're not talking to each other, is the buy/build is, you kinda, may miss a core competency. They always ... what's the core competency of the company? And should you outsource a core competency, or should you build it internally? Sometimes, you might even accelerate that, so I think Airwatch and Nicira, I would say, was kinda on the edges of core competency, but together with the synergies ... >> [Van Der Walt] Helped us accelerate. >> And I think that's your message. >> [Van Der Walt] Yep. >> Okay, so that's the culture. How do you make, what's the secret sauce of making all this work? I mean, cuz you have to kinda create an open, collaborative, but it's competitive. >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely. >> So how do you balance that? >> You know, so clearly, there's a ton of innovation going on within the prior Cloud services division. The stuff that's on the truck that our customers can buy today, alright? We also know we gotta look ahead, and we gotta start looking at solving problems that aren't on the truck today, alright? And, so, having these five programs and the collective is really what allows us to do that. But at the same time, we need to have open channels of communication back into corp dev as well. I can give you examples of, you know, Shekar and his team might be looking at Company X. We're doing some exploratory work, IOT, I did an ordered foray. IOT is gonna be massive; everybody knows that, but you know what's going to be even more massive is all the data at the edge, and what do you do with that data? How do you turn that data into something actionable, right? So, if you think about a jet engine on a big plane, right? When it's operating correctly, you know what all the good levels are, the metrics, the telemetry coming off it. Why do I need to collect that and throw it away? You're interested in the anomalies, right? As we start thinking about IOT, and we start thinking all this data at the edge, we're going to need a different type of analytics engine that can do real-time analytics but not looking at the norm, looking at the deviations, and report back on that, so you can take action on that, you know? So, we started identifying some companies like PubNub, Mulesoft, too, just got acquired, right? Shekar and his team were looking at the same companies, and was like, "These companies are interesting because they're starting to attack the problem in a different way. We do that at Vmware all the time. You think about Appdefense. We've taken a completely different approach to security. You know what the good state is, but if you have a deviation, attack that, you know? And then you can use things like ... >> It's re-imagining, almost flipping everything upside-down. >> Yeah, challenging the status quo. >> Yeah, great stuff, great program. I gotta ask you a final question since it's your show here. Great content program, by the way. Got the competition, got the papers, which is deep, technical coolness, but the show is great content, great event. Thanks for inviting us. What's trending? What's rising up? Have you heard or kind of point at something you see getting some buzz, that you thought might get buzz, or it didn't get buzz? What's rising of the topics of interest here? What's kind of popping out for you; what's trending if I had to a Twitter feed, not Twitter feed, but like top three trending items here. >> Well, I'll take it back to that last borathon that we did on sustainability. We set out the five challenges. The challenge that got the most attention was the blockchain microgrid. So, blockchain is definitely trending, and, you know, the challenge we have with blockchain today is it's not ready for the enterprise. So, David Tennenhouse and his research group is actually looking at how do you make blockchain enterprise ready? And that is a difficult problem to solve. So, there's a ton of interest in watching ... >> [Furrier] Well, we have an opinion. Don't use the public block chain. (both laugh) >> So, you know, that's one that's definitely trending. We have a great program called Propel, where we basically attract the brightest of the brightest, you know, new college grads coming into the company, and they actually come through OCTO first and do a sort of onboarding process. What are they interested in? They're not really interested in working for a particular BU, but, you know, when we share with them, "You're gonna have the ability to work on blockchain, AI, VR, augmented reality, distributed systems, new ways of doing analytics >> that's what attracts them. >> [Furrier] And they have the options to go test and put the toe in the water or jump in deep with xLabs. >> Absolutely >> So, I mean, this is like catnip for engineers. It draws a lot of people in. >> Absolutely, and, you know, we need to do that to be competitive in the valley. I mean, it's a very hard marketplace. >> Great place to work. >> You guys have a great engineering team. >> Congratulations for a great event, Mornay, and thanks for coming on theCUBE. We're here in San Francisco for theCUBE coverage of RADIO 2018. I'm John Furrier. Be back with more coverage after this break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

hello everyone I'm Jean Faria we are reporting on the ground near Puerto Rico for blockchain unbound exclusive conversations at coinage end of covering all the action restart week of ten of events cryptocurrency blockchain all the people are here with the local ecosystem the cube is here it's great to have you on thanks for joining blockchain innovation is today global this is a revolution way bigger than the Internet itself programmable money programmable contracts that wipes out finance it wipes out legal it wipes out governance in many ways there's no central authority you have access to open source software it's fully connected so now is the time to make it translate we've all heard about the steam digital transformation its businesses that if they don't evolve and adopt blockchain AI all these other things they have a threat of being put out of business it is extremely competitive a new set of stakeholders investors global players governments are it's happening now you have a chance to be a part of an economy without a permission of a centralized organization have to pay 200 people in 40 countries and it's an unholy mess with withholding taxes and concerns around money transfer costs a hassle it's a nightmare like all currency control so you're only allowed to move a certain amount of capital out the country legally so what happens in all your backups our currency and you can effectively invest in assets around the world this is making it much easier to contribute to help people to get healthy and you don't have to go to school there's a very big influx of young and talented minds at that right and this is really changing the revolution landscape you've got the radical Burning Man hippie guy all the way to a three-piece suit yeah and that diversity is very very rich a lot of people are scared I like whoa hold on slow down we're not gonna prove it the other half saying no this is the future so you have two competing forces colliding for some reason crypto really pokes at people's biases you know why does it have any value and I go well why does the United States dollar have any value I mean you've got Full Faith and Credit of the government that's in debt by 20 trillion dollars you know is that a good idea most people that come here sorry with the what the how and people are scared but the young people are like yo this is happening this is not a moment this is a movement is definitely oh say 1996-97 of the internet bubble it's just starting people know there's something really magical they don't quite know what you know America really grew because you're abused to have all the controls and so the capital by sea left Europe and away in America and now it's happening 300 years later as America has all the controls and the capital starting to go away so a new Liberation's happening incredible resources are now being poured in problems that were ignored for many many and what is beautiful is that block Candy's doing it open-source is accelerating the tech these ideas are being freely shared whereas before there's bottlenecks in the collaboration aspect if we're able to write a contract in a thousand people be able to verify that contract and we're able to transfer money from one person to another without the two parties being involved we've got a perfect scenario security and speed and fairness all at the same time you can create these chains of trust and that can happen anywhere in the world you're on a level playing field if you have 4G connectivity now you can compete globally and be a part of the global economy so if you're someone who's in the emerging developing world and you want to begin to build wealth and you'd like to own a piece of first world real estate and today the minimum is about a thousand dollars but by implementing the Plott chain further they won't eventually get down to one dollar you can buy a piece of real estate and enjoy the returns on that I want to solve the wealth gap and I truly believe we can do it when we can allow anyone anywhere to invest in good quality assets a conduit with the current system there's too many friction costs the killer app right is money it's paying people that is the killer app of the block type right now let's say that money is software and it is software so if you buy something with a credit card what do you think's happening it's all software and what has happened is open-source software has always eventually won with respect to close source software so proprietary money is probably back on its heels because open-source money's coming in something like that will give liquidity to a lot of small business owners America is a country of small business owners across the globe it supports small business owners it's an interesting model yeah you don't have to give up any equity you don't have to give up any poor seats yeah right it's much leaner my super if you're an investor you gotta get a pound of flesh somewhere is it's just getting it on the discounted tokens is there a little liquidity going on when you think about you know private sale presale is 99% a token deal right although equities coming in because a lot of more venture capital is coming in and they're demanding a piece of the action from a company and equity perspective its equity might be future revenue sometimes as dividends or the opportunity get dividends so it's a combination of you have a preference you care you know at the other day equity is I was always preferable there is a provision in the 1934 Securities Act called section 12 G it allows us Spacely to go public by telling the SEC we're doing it without having to delay it to wait for their permission after 60 days it's a derivative so we'll continue to clear comments but but the thing is with tokens who knows how long that'll take I mean is the SEC gonna Shepherd something through with crypto 1 or do they gonna make it take 5 years I don't know [Music] all over the island this is the new Oliver field the world is moving too fast today for a big country to keep up it's all gonna happen now in this next century at the city level and so we work a lot with four smaller countries or small countries because I know estonia armenia baja rains got you know dubai envy so i mean every country wants to be the crypto country multiple small countries are going to come into the space which they know now they can get the capital flowing into that company and they're gonna allow their rules to be lacs they're gonna let capital flow through and then us will have to change or maybe UK will have to change orders against us will have to change in the first world a lot of what we're talking about is a nice-to-have it's it's sort of a bit of a game and if i can participate but where I come from an emerging war that's a necessity they are no other solutions so if you live in South Africa or China or India and you want to get your money into a first world country like England Australia America it's very very difficult and virtually no one can do it but it's a major problem because you want wealth preservation you want but Plan B you want your children to be able to go to a first world university etc etc etc Puerto Rico being a free associated States of the United States of America is like the best place to actually test this possibly some push for that for infrastructure for you know internet for all sorts of different things in terms of building the best infrastructure the new newest best-in-class for your business it's four percent corporate taxes and individual it's zero percent now that's what you got to move here you gotta move here okay but you don't have to give you deliver your US citizenship no taxes are great at the same time they fall in love with the islands so it's amazing because to me Puerto Rico is a combination of LA's whether San Francisco's open-mindedness and Barcelona's you know deep European history it's just a really beautiful place and it's US territory so it's a short hop and a jump to the States if you need to most people in America mainland sort of think they're going to a foreign country because it's treated that way by our government how do I come to Puerto Rico do it right not offend the culture in abil them together what's your experience with the play ball stay good friends lost their relocation services for their business and themselves so they write a big check to you guys for the service but it's you guide them through the entire process and there's real energy here because there's a social movement underneath the entire cryptocurrency movement and that's to basically help your fellow man or women all these activity is really going to give a a shot in the arm to the Puerto Rican economy and we're bringing our funds and we're bringing our advisory the radar Thank You exponent there the hurricane was a horrible atrocity that happened and now we have this blank canvas to create a vision for Puerto Rico so what we're doing is we're connecting every single University on the island to work on open source projects to like make solutions for the private sector they know that if they can buy power on a cellphone like they're already doing for other goods and services now we've got a game-changer this is restart week and one of the other things that we've done is help all of the conference's come together collaborate rather than compete so go into the same week and put all of these satellite groups around it and then we blanket it a week around it so that we had one place for people to go and look for all of the events and then also for some for them to understand a movement about the education piece it's very difficult for people that kind of get caught up to speed because there's some technical things that need to understand to really apply this technology into the business world the other day we had an event where we talked 50 people how to create a smart contract from scratch those are 50 people who are not the same anymore ecosystems developing yet entrepreneurs you got projects you got funding coming in but as it's gonna be a fight for the ecosystem because you can't have zillion ecosystems there are definitely some you know the galaxies and you know regulatory aspects that you know put some concerns and a lot of you know people's mind since its inception you've seen people and media and mainstream media in particular target Bitcoin and they're just adopting the government narrative saying oh everyone in this industry is corrupt Oh everyone in this industry is an ICS camera Oh everyone in this industry is a a drug runner and they have all selling drugs on the dark web and and it's like you know what like you can do some research and don't get better than that traditional media they want to take down everybody that they don't consider you know like a birds of the same feather there actually are a lot of scammers and a lot of like dark forces inside of the cryptocurrency movement so that's why I think we welcome kind of more regulatory influence because you know none of us want to see bad actors in the space we've seen folks go out raise you know really big about to capital with no product roadmap no business talking roadmap no real way to get from zero to X what are they trying to shoehorn a regular business onto the blockchain and just assume that by adding crypto at the end of you know toilet paper they're gonna get something I had another founder tell me that you know Mike tokens are worth 100 million humming yep you don't have a user you just have a product you're tokens I've hiked if you ask me it's it's what little I can tell my house is 100 million dollars it's only worth as much as the top buyer how much we really need hardcore reputation systems in our industry and in the for the world I think 2018 is going to be the year of clarity on regulation and I think that's where Puerto Rico comes in and plays a major role just to see the thousands of people who have come here to support these several conferences has been amazing my most surprising thing though is the amount of people that have told me that they bought a one-way ticket and have no intention of going home so to make Puerto Rico your home I think is a really amazing first step when I go to the supermarket and where I go it's full of American and people from outside and when you ask them where you're from and they will tell you from Puerto Rico this is gonna become the epicenter of this multi-billion dollar market we need to have people prepared for this you have to create the transparency the beauty of the transparency is there's actually privacy baked in and that's what I love about blockchain is it has all of the good things all communities need to evolve in my opinion between technology communities open networks of governance where we have peer-to-peer distribution of finance and of resources in a way that allows people to aggregate around the marketplaces that are actually benefitting the way that they believe the world should work we're going to be tools that far surpassed what's currently available in terms of the messages the websites all these things for 20 years the Internet has been free it's a really beautiful thing for consumption and open-source is the absolute right methodology for software when it comes to your own content a reward it makes sense everybody is going to get to play together across every device the developers are going to get rewarded for creating content people are going to be rewarded for creating things inside the games and the players are going to get rewarded for getting to the top levels of all the games and we're going to reward them through our cryptocurrency if we begin to own ourself sovereign identity then when we're owning our data that's the foundation for universal basic income communications completely frictionless payment completely frictionless and governance completely frictionless and we have to put this all together who wins here the average citizen entrepreneur that is leveraged citizen player that wants to start something whether it's a banking a service provider of some sort an entrepreneur or a new financial instrument or firm you all have greenfield opportunity here the first thing I would tell found us is to reach out ok this community is very very supportive like you can reach out to me you can reach out to other guys LinkedIn Facebook or come to these events and say your idea and you need help because you will need help you cannot run this alone ok you are running a company you're running your team have a good team that's the first thing you got to be vigilant and you keeping your money in a hard wallet not keeping your private keys on your computer if you're using a centralized system those centralized systems are really easily exploitable strategic partnerships Advisors founding team and then show the idea to the people explain yourself frankly and honestly and I think the community will reward you to go and find it ring whether you're a fortune 500 company or a startup it's all about building the community and I believe that whether it's utility Target or security or combination of the two it provides an incredible vehicle to ultimately be the catalyst to your community and if you the to community adding value then you're going to build a company event it's always gonna be led by the business model because you need something to act as the power pull to pull the thing along right and you can continuously pump capital into something but if the model is wrong it's just going to drain and it's going to go to inefficient systems and in the end maybe do some help but but a very small percentage of the capacity of what it could do then the advice would be to entrepreneurs don't fret about the infrastructure just nail your business models right and because the switching cost might not be as high as you think that's right we're in the old days when we grew up yeah you made a bad technology decision you're out of business yeah but the first advice that I give my clients is to stomp this is this business that's too much formal in it yeah right if you're missing out so no just because everybody's out there Nico you should be doing an SEO right yeah 46% of I SEOs have already failed already failed start with the business gather this in the counties down right so free cash flow unique value proposition Prada market fit what sits under business think about the token model right the token model has to go in handy now with your business model and revenue model and once you figure out that business and took the models now it's time to think about compliance I'm gonna raise money in the US and abroad I've decided to go to security choking hypothetical instance absolute what do I do is there for you an incentive mechanism or is a fundraising mechanism or both who's gonna be my user who's gonna use this token right there aren't gonna be moms dads hospitals they was my target and then how they're gonna use it and are they gonna hold it I'm gonna sell it are they gonna trade it so all these different things define that oh c'mon once you get your token actually authenticated realized everything's transparent and it gets on that secondary market it's better to use that to invest in anything you need investment get everybody incentivized around your token all your employees all your vendors everybody incentivize around that token it's a thousand percent more powerful than a dollar so the dollar doesn't go up in value in your token your token can go up and down and as soon as you find just one spark it blows up everybody boats rise equal it's pasta Sara Lee the time to crack open the champagne you still have to demonstrate product market fit you have to help build a market in our particular case so there's a lot of hard work launch it's a start line it's just like it's only a step along the whole process you know what made people get it you showed them the money yeah you showed them the money sometimes people don't you can explain these concepts that are world-changing super high level or whatever people were not actually gonna get it until it's useful to them average business people and senior business people who have typically been shut off to the idea of blockchain are now seeing this as very real and here to stay momentum is just beginning it's gonna be amazing what these guys come up with that's one of the things I love about doing this thing right I'm an old guy and I get to hang around these smart young people makes me feel young again yeah but the other thing that we have and I think you should share it as well as we have to offer to these young guys experience thing we just invented a new category in the ico category an advisor token and a you have to have the stomach for it and I think you just have to be as educated and as you can what government entity can resist for the long term something that's actually trying to provide a better and better and better financial infrastructure you should be able to participate in many different nations who have many different economies that are all really cooperating interdependently to create the best possible life for all human good one dollar will not change your life but if you change your habits you'll change your financial destiny and so my philosophy is get it to a dollar so that every single person can participate and once you start to learn good habits around money and wealth the rest it's a formula like it's a flywheel instead the world will become a better place we'll have better companies positive impact is not counter to profit they go hand in hand the Puerto Rico movement it's a movement while Czech entrepreneurs capital investors the pioneers in the blockchain decentralized Internet are all here this is like the Silicon Valley of the crypto right I think they're calling it crypto island yes TV show we should be honest like it's not lost its crypto island exclusive coverage for Puerto Rico's - Cuba I'm John Ferrari getting the signal here out of all the noise in the market this is what we do this is the cube mission great strip we start week Point agenda open content community thanks for watching [Music]

Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's the Cube. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by, Blockchain Industries. >> Welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of the Cube, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. In Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound, this is a global conference. Going to the next level in industry migration up and growth, and blockchain, decentralized internet and obviously cryptocurrency, changing the world up and down the stack. I have an industry veteran here. My next guest Salim is founding CEO, Singularity University and author of the best-selling book, Exponential Organizations. He's seen many waves, friend, known him for years. Haven't seen you in a while, you look great. You haven't changed. >> (laughs) The hair has changed a lot. >> (laughs) I've still got mine. Hey great to see you. Bumping into you in Puerto Rico is really compelling because you have a nose for the future, and I've always respected that about you. You have the ability to understand at the root level what's going on but also pull back and see the big picture. Puerto Rico is the center of all the action because the killer wrap in this is money. So money is driving a lot of change, but there's some fundamental infrastructure, stack upgrades going on. Blockchain has been highly discussed, crypto is highly hyped, ICO's are-- Scammers out there but now some legits. What's your take? What's your view right now on the current situation? >> Well I think what's happening with a place like Puerto Rico is. When you get kind of wiped out of the old, you have the chance to leap-frog. When you think about any of our traditional environments, laying down Blockchain technologies, et cetera. It's really, really hard because you have to get the Supreme Court, the Constitution to approve blockchain based land titles, and then you build a stack there from a legal perspective. Here they can basically start from scratch and do it completely from the ground up. Which is what's exciting for everybody here. >> The top story that we've been reporting here is that Puerto Rico is rebooting. The hurricane obviously, I won't say a forcing function, but in general when you get wiped out, that is certainly an opportunity to rebuild. If there's any kind of silver lining in that. >> There's a long history of that. Japan got wiped out during World War II, so did Germany and they rebounded incredibly. We've seen that recently with Rwanda. We do a lot of work in Medillin, in Colombia, and that's just been one of the worst cities in the world, is now the most innovative city in the world. So this is the transition that we've seen a pattern for. >> One of the things I'm really excited about decentralization and blockchain is all the conversations have the same pattern. Efficiency is getting wired into things. So if you see slack in the system or inefficiencies, entrepreneurs are feeling the void. The entrepreneurial eye of the tiger goes that to that opportunity to reset, reduce steps, save time and make things easier. Classic value proposition in these new markets. You run a great university but also author of Exponential Organizations. A lot of people are scared, they're like, "Whoa, hold on. Slow down, this is bullshit, "we're not going to prove it." And then the other half saying, "No this is the future." So you have two competing forces colliding. You have the new guard saying, "We got to do this, this is the future." Old guard saying, "Blocks, Road blocks, blockers" You covered this in your book in a way, so how do you win, who wins? How do you create a win win? >> You can create a win win. What you have to do is leap-frog to the newest, fast as possible. The only question is, how can you get to the new? And the problem that you have is, as you rightly pointed out is. When you try disruptive innovation in any large organization or institution, the immune system attacks. I saw this at Yahoo running Brickhouse. Yahoo is supposedly a super advanced organization, and yet the minute you try to do something really radical, you spend all your time fighting the mother ship. So I've been focusing a lot of time the last few years focused on that particular problem, and we're pretty excited, we believe we've cracked it. >> How does someone crack that code? If I'm Puerto Rico, obviously the government officials are here at Blockchain Unbound. This is not just a tech conference. It's like a tech conference, investor conference, kind of world economic form rolled into one. >> Sure >> There's some serious players here. What's your advice to them? >> So what we do, and let me describe what we do in the private sector and what we do in the public sector. A couple of years ago, the global CI of Procter & Gamble came to me and said, "Hey, we'd like to work with you." And what we typically see is, some executive from a big company will come to Singularity. They'll go back headquarters with their hair on fire going, "Oh my god!" If they're from BMW for example. They go back going, "Drones, autonomous cars, hyperloop, VR." Back in Munich, they'll be given a white coat and some medicine and be put in a corner. "You're too crazy, now stand over there." And that's the tension that you are talking about. And then somebody else will come six months later then they'll do the Silicon Valley tour, then they'll have one of our people go over there, and it takes about three years for the big company to get up to speed, just the C-Suite to get up to speed. Forget transmitting that down. So I was talking to Linda Clement-Holmes and I said, "Look we're about to start this three year dance "I've been thinking about this, "let's shrink it to 10 weeks." So we designed what we now call an ExO Sprint. Which is how you get a leadership, culture and management thinking of a legacy organization, three years ahead in a 10 week process. And the way we do it is, we're in an opening workshop, that's really shock and awe. Freaks out all the incumbent management. And then young leaders and future lieutenants of the business do the thinking of what should come next. And they report back. Some thing about that opening workshop suppresses the immune system, and when the new ideas arrive they don't attack them in the same way. >> It's like a transplant if you will. >> It's like when you do a kidney transplant. You suppress the immune system, right? It's that same idea. So we've now run that like a dozen times. We just finished TD Ameritrade, HP, Visa, Black & Decker, et cetera. We're open-sourcing it. We're writing a manual on how to do it so that anybody can self-provision that process and run it. Because, every one of the Global 5000 has to go through that process with or without us. So then we said, "Okay, could we apply it to the public sector?" Where the existing policy is the immune system. You try and update transportation and you're fighting the taxis. Or education and you're fighting the teacher's unions. We have a 16 week process that we run in cities. We do it through a non-profit called the Fastrack Institute based out of Miami. We've run it four times in Medillin, in Colombia and we just finished four months with the mayor of Miami on the future of transportation. We're talking to the officials here about running a similar process here in Puerto Rico. >> Are they serious about that? Because they throw money at projects, it kind of sits on the vine, dies on the vine. Because there is an accelerated movement right now. I mean, exponential change is here. I'll give you an example. We're seeing and reporting that this digital nation trend is on fire. Suddenly everyone wants digital cities, IoT is out there. But now what cryptocurrency, the money being the killer app. It's flowing everywhere, out of Colombia, out of everywhere. Every country is moving money around with crypto it's easier, faster. So everyone is trying to be the crypto, ICO city. Saw it on Telegram today, France wants to be, Paris wants to be the ICO city. Puerto Rico, Bahrain, Armenia, Estonia. U.K. just signed a deal with Coinbase. What the hell is going on? How do you rationalize this and what do you see as a future of state here? >> Well I think, couple of thoughts. And you're hitting into some of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently. Number one is, that when you have a regulatory blockage, it's a huge economic developing opportunity for anybody that can leap-frog it. Nevada authorized autonomous cars early and now a lot of testing is done there. So the cities that have appreciated-- >> So you're saying regulatory is an opportunity to have a competitive advantage? >> Huge, because look at Zug in Switzerland. Nobody had ever heard of the place. You pass through there on the way to Zermatt. But now it's like a destination that everybody needs to get to because they were earlier. This is the traditional advantage of places like Hong Kong or Dubai or whatever. They're open and they're hungry. So we're going to see a lot of that going on. I think there's a bigger trend though, which is that we're seeing more and more action happen at the city level and very, very little happen at the national or global level. The world is moving too fast today for a big country to keep up. It's all going to happen this next century at the city level. >> Or smaller countries. >> Or small countries. >> So what's going on here at Blockchain Unbound for you? Why are you here? What are you doing? What's your story? >> I have this kind of sprint that we run in the private sector and in the public sector and then a community of about 200 consultants. And I have to pay 200 people in 40 countries and it's and unholy mess. Withholding taxes and concerns around money transfer costs-- >> It's a hassle. >> It's a nightmare. And so I've been thinking about an internal cryptocurrency just to pay our network. All of a sudden now, three or four countries have said, "Hey we want to buy that thing, "to have access to your network." So I've got all this demand over here, and I need to figure out how to design this thing properly. So I've been working with some of the folks like Brock and DNA and others to help think through it. But what I'm really excited about here is that, there's a-- You know what I love is the spectrum of dress. You got the radical, Burning Man, hippie guy, all the way to a three-piece suit. And that diversity is very, very rich and really, real creativity comes from it. This feels like the web in '96, '95. It's just starting, people know there's something really magical. They don't quite know what to do. >> Well what I'm impressed about is that there's no real bad vibe from either sets of groups. There's definitely some posturing, I've noticed some things. Obviously I'm wearing a jacket, so those guys aren't giving me hugs like they're giving Brock a hug. I get that, but the thing is, the coexistence is impressive. I'm not seeing any real mud-slinging, again I didn't like how Brock got handled with John Oliver. I thought that was unacceptable because he's done a lot of good work. I don't know him personally, I've never met him, but I like what he's doing, I like his message. His keynote here, at d10e, was awesome. Really the right messaging, I thought. That's something that I want to get behind and I think everyone should. But he just got trashed. Outside of that, welcoming culture. And they're like, "Hey if you don't like it, "just go somewhere else." They're not giving people a lot of shit for what they do. It's really accepting on all sides. >> Here's my take on the whole decentralization thing. We run the world today on a series of very top down hierarchical structures. The corporation, the military industrial complex, Judeo-Christian religions, et cetera. That are very hierarchical-- Designed for managing scarcity, right? We're moving the world very, very quickly to abundance. We now have an abundance of information, we'll soon have an abundance of energy, we'll soon have an abundance of money, et cetera. And when you do these new structures, you need very decentralized structures. Burning Man, the maker movement, the open-source movement, et cetera. It's a very nurturing, participatory, female type of archetype and we're moving very quickly to that. What we're seeing in the world today is the tension going from A to B. >> And also when you have that next level, you usually have entrepreneurs and sponsorships. People who sponsor entrepreneurs the promotion side of it, PR and that starts the industry. Then when it hits that level it's like, "Wow it's going to the next level." Then it gets capital markets to come in. Then you have new stake holders coming in now with government officials. This thing is just rocket-shipping big time. >> Yes >> And so, that's going to change the dynamics. Your thoughts and reaction to that dynamic. >> Completely, for example... When we do these public sprints we end up usually with a decentralized architecture that needs to built. For example, we're working with the justice system in Colombia. And the Supreme Court has asked us to come in and re-do the entire justice system. Now you think about all the court filings and court dates, and briefs, and papers all should be digitized and put on a blockchain type structure because it's all public filing. We have an opportunity to completely re-do that stack and then make that available to the rest of the world. I think that trend is irreversible for anything that previously had centered-- I mean, most government services are yes, ratifying this and ratifying that. They all disappear. >> Well Salim, I want to tap your brain for a second. Since you're here, get it out there, I want to throw a problem at you, quick real time riff with you. So one of the things that I've been thinking about is obviously look at what cloud computing did, no one saw Amazon web services early, except some of the insiders like us. Who saw it's easy to host and build a data center. "I have no money, I'm a start-up or whatever." You use AWS, EC2 and S3... They were misunderstood, now it's clear what they're doing. But that generated the DevOps movement. So question for you is, I want to riff with you on is, "Okay that created programmable infrastructure, "the notion of server-less now going mainstream." Meaning, I don't have to talk about the server, I need resource so I can just make software, make it happen. That's flipped around the old model, where it used to be the network would dictate to the applications what they could do. How is that DevOps ethos, certainly it's driven by open-source, get applied to this cryptocurrency? Because now you have blockchain, cryptocurrency, ICO is kind of an application if you will, capital market. How does that model get flipped? Is there a DevOps model, a blockchain ops model, where the decentralized apps are programming the blockchain? Because the plumbing is the moving chain right now. You got, Hashgraph's got traction, then you got Etherium, Lightning's just got 2.5 million dollars. I mean, anyone who's technical knows it's a moving train in the plumbing. But the business logic is pretty well-defined. I'm like, "I want to innovate this process. "I'm going to eliminate the efficiency." So this dynamic. Does the business model drive infrastructure? Does the plumbing drive the business model? Your thoughts on this new dynamic and how that plays out. >> I suspect you and in violent agreement here. It's always going to be lead by the business model because you need something to act as the power of pull to pull the thing along, right? The real reason for the success of Etherium right now is all the ICOs and it was a money driven thing. Today we're going to see these new stacks, now we're on version three of these new types of stacks coming along, and I think they're all looking for a business model. Once we find some new killer ops for this decentralized structure, then you'll see things happen. But the business model is where it's at. >> So basically I agree with you. I think we're on the same page here. But then advice would be to the entrepreneurs, don't fret about the infrastructure, just nail your business model because the switching cost might not be as high as you think. Where in the old days, when we grew up, you made a bad technical assess and you're out of business. So it's kind of flipped around. >> Yeah, just hearing about this term, atomic swaps. Where you can just, essentially once you have a tokenized structure, you can just move it to something else pretty quickly. Therefore, all the effort should be on that. I think finding the really compelling use cases for this world is going to be fascinating to see. >> So software-defined money, software-defined business, software defined society is coming. >> Yes >> Okay, software defined, that's the world Salim thanks for coming on, sharing your awesome expert opinon. Congratulations on your awesome book. How many countries is your book, Exponential Organizations-- >> It's now about a quarter of a million copies in 15 languages. >> Required reading in all MBA programs, and the C-Suite. Congratulations, it's like the TANEx Engineering that Mark Dandriso put out. A whole new paradigm of management is happening. Digital transformation. >> We now have the ability to scale an organization structure as fast as we can scale technology. >> Blockchain you know, the nature of the firm was all about having people in one spot. So centralized, you can manage stuff. Now with blockchain you have a decentralized organization. That's your new book, the Decentralized Organization. >> Although, I'm not sure I have another book in me. >> There's a book out there for somebody, Decentralized Organizations. Salim, thank you for joining us. The Cube here, I'm John Furrier the co-host. Day two coverage of Blockchain Unbound more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's the Cube. Covering Polycon '18. Brought to you by Polymath. >> Welcome back, everyone. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage. We're live in the Bahamas, here for day two of our wall to wall coverage of Polycon '18. It's a security token conference, securitizing, you know, token economics, cryptography, cryptocurrency. All this is in play. Token economics powering the world. New investors are here. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Nithin Eapen Who's the Chief Investment Officer for Arcadia Crypto Ventures. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much gentlemen. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for coming out. >> Excited to have you on for a couple reasons. One, we've been talking since day one, lot of hallway conversations. Small, intimate conference, so we've had a chance to talk. Folks haven't heard that yet, so let's kind of get some of the key things we discussed. You are very bullish and long on cryptocurrency and Blockchain. You guys are doing a variety of deals. You're also advising companies and you guys are rolling your sleeves up. So kind of interesting dynamics. So take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, your model. >> Okay. >> And we're going to try to get some of your partners on later. You have a great team. >> Yep. >> Experienced pros in investing. And you got wales, you got pros. So you got a nice balance. >> Yes we do. >> So take a minute to explain Arcadia, your approach and philosophy. >> Okay. Okay. So Arcadia Crypto Ventures primarily we are a private fund. We invest other money. We believe in the whole crypto space. We believe this market is expanding and it is growing and it's going to be the biggest thing that ever happened. It's going to be this fusion of internet and PC and mobile. And everything is going to go batshit, okay. We believe in the whole tokenization world. Everything is going to be tokenized. So as a whole, we believe this space is going to go very big. Okay, so that's one piece and because of that, we invest in the space, the whole space. Not one bitcoin or Ethereum, but everything in the space that makes sense. People who have a use case. Now the second piece of it is we advised great founders. We want to get founders to come out and build these new things because this is the new internet of the new era and people have to come out and build these things. And so many of them are traditional businesses and we have to explain to them why this matters, why you should come to this space and be decentralized and reach the whole world. Because initially, the internet came. The idea of the internet was everybody gets information. Now information did get everywhere. You don't have to worry that the mailman is there to deliver your email anymore. Even if it's a Sunday, your mail will get delivered. So that part was good. But now you have these few companies that's holding all your data. It's okay for most people, but they do censor a lot of people. So that is one point. That censorship. We want a censorship-resistant world where everybody's ideas get out. So that way, we believe that's how this whole internet space itself is going to change because of that. See this is if I explained in one word, this is the greatest sociopolitical economic experimental revolution ever that has happened in humankind. >> In the history of the world. I mean this is important. I'd said that on my opening today. >> Uh-huh. >> Dave and I were riffing and Dave and I have always been studying. We've been entre-- We are entrepreneurs. We live in Silken Valleys in Boston and so you seeing structural change going on. So it's not just make money. >> Nope. >> There's mission-based, younger demographics. So you starting to see really great stuff. So I want to ask you specifically, 'cause you guys are unique in the sense that you're investing in a lot of things. But startups, pure-playing startups? >> Which had only one path before, or two paths. >> Right, yeah. >> Cashflow financing and venture capital. >> Okay. >> So that's a startup model. The growing companies that are transform their growth business with token economics, those would have long odds. Those are the best deals. >> Okay. Then there's like the third deal. Well we're out of business, throw the Hail Mary, repivot. (laughs) Right, so categorically, you're starting to see the shape of the kinds of swim lanes of deals. >> Okay. >> Okay, pivoting, that Hail Mary. Okay, you can evaluate that pretty much straight up on that. Startups need nurturing, right? >> Yeah. >> So the VC1 al-oc-chew works really well for startups because of the product market fits going to be developed. You got cloud computing so you can go faster. So you guys are nurturing startups. At the same time, you're also doing growth deals. >> We do. >> Explain the dynamic between those kinds of deals, how you guys approach them. What's the dynamic? What are the key things that you're bringing? Is it just packaging? Is it tech? So on, so forth. >> So with a lot of people, when they are on the advisory side. Primarily we look at the founder and the tech. What are they trying to solve? That is key. If it's a turd, you can't package it. No matter how you package it, that's not going to work. >> You can't package dog you-know-what. >> Yeah, exactly, okay. >> So that's one thing that we look at. The founders and their idea. Now their idea, can it be decentralized? Some models are meant to be centralized maybe so it doesn't work, okay. Like, see it all boils down to-- Let me break it down. We look at it. Okay, do you have an asset? Behind the scenes, is there an asset? Is that asset being transferred among parties? If you have an asset and it's being transferred, is there some central mechanism in between? Because if there is a central mechanism in between, that means you're going to be paying rent to that. Okay, all right. You have these things. Okay, great. Now you have your asset. Do you have that in between party? But in some of them, let's say you have money in your pocket. You walk, it falls down. Somebody else pick ups the money. It's his. It's a bearer asset, okay? So that's where bitcoin solved a very big problem. It was bearer asset. >> Unless they hack your wallet, then they take your money. >> Right. That happens in real life too, right? Somebody can take money from your wallet. So it can happen in bitcoin. They can hack your wallet. All right. So bitcoin was solving that problem. Now the second piece is a registered asset. And I mean by registered asset is take your car. You buy your car, you go to the DMV, stand in line, register. There's a record of data at the DMV in their central database. If somebody steals your car, the car is still not his. It's only if they can change the record over there in DMV. Then it becomes his. Now there maybe you do want the DMV to be there. Or maybe we can-- But the DMV being there, now you have a problem. They're going to charge you rent and they can decide, oh you know what? John, I'm not going to give him a license or a car in the state of California. They can decide, right? So that is where now you decide do you want to go the centralized route or the decentralized route? So we break it down to the asset. >> So there could be a fit for decentralized. I get that. >> Yeah. >> Let me ask you a tactical question, because I know a lot of entrepreneurs out there. They're watching and they'll hear this. A big strategic decision up front is, obviously, token selection. >> So it's pretty clear that security token works really well for funding and whatnot. Then there's a role for security tokens. I mean utility tokens. >> Yes. >> So do people, should they start from a risk management standpoint, a new company. So let's just say we had an existing business. Entrepreneur says, "Hey, you know what? We're doing well. We're doing 10 million dollars in revenue and I want to do tokenize 'cause we're a decentralized business. That's a perfect fit." Do they start a new company or do they just use the security token with their existing stable company? >> I would suggest, usually at that time, that's more of a legal question at that time. I don't know if I'm a lawyer to answer that. I tell them, you have a business. The business model is going well. If you're happy with it, let that be there. Make a new company. If your business model was not doing good, you might as well start from there because you figure out it's not working. But again, at that time, we tried to come up with this question. Are you trying to put the old wine in a new bottle kind of thing? If the wine is old, it ain't going to work. You have to get to that realization. So, here. >> People are being sued. So mainly the legal question is do I want to risk being. >> All right, let me hop in here. I wanted to ask, go back to something you said about censorship. I had this conversation with my kid the other day. I was explaining Google essentially censors your search results based on what they think you're going to click on. >> They do that. >> He's like no and then he thought about it and he's like okay, yeah they kind of do that. Okay, so that's an underpinning of we're going to take back the internet, right? >> Yeah. >> Okay, I just wanted to sort of clarify that. From an investment philosophy standpoint, you're technical, yet you don't exclusively vet or invest in infrastructure protocols and dig deep into what-- You read the white papers, but there are some folks out there hedge funds, et cetera. All they do is just invest in utility tokens. They're trying to invest in stuff that's going to be infrastructure for the next internet. Your philosophy is different. You're saying, we talked about this, we don't really know what's going to win, but we make prudent investments in areas that we think will win. We like to spread it around a little bit. Why that philosophy? May reduce your return, but it also reduces your risk. Maybe you could describe that a little bit. >> Sure. See, in general, picking winners in the long run has been-- It's a proved fact that nobody could pick winners. Like if you take active hedge fund managers. Active hedge fund managers, in the long run, if you take 10 to 20 years, they lag the S and P. So if you had money, if you give it to an active hedge fund manager, and so that you just had to buy the S and P, you will have beaten 93%. >> That's Buffet's advice. Buy an S and P 500. >> Buffet made a bet for a billion dollars or something where, you know. So take Warren Buffet for that matter, his fund is lagging too. In reality, all his stock investments are down. He put it in IBM at $200 after eight years, it's at the 143 or something, right? So realistically,-- There's a lot of luck element, okay. You can do all of the analysis and you could still end up buying Enron, Lehman, and Bear Stearns, right? >> Right, yeah. >> And at that time, see they were using some models that they knew 'til then. Most people, investment comes from, you have this background that you know, okay this is what I look at. Cash flow, discounted cash flow. Great. If that is there, price to earnings, I'm going to buy. But then an Amazon came, most of the traditional investors never invested in Amazon. They were like, it's a loss- making company. They never going to survive. But they forgot the fact that companies like that there's this network effect and once the people are there, at any point, Jeff Bezos can just turn off the switch and take off the discount. You're not going to change your shopping from Amazon at that point because this month I lost my 15%. We're so used to it so people missed that. Nowadays they see that, but when it came to Blockchain they're like, oh, no, no, this is a fad. That's what most people said. >> So we talked about discounted cashflow as a classic valuation method. I see guys trying to do DCF on these investments. I mean, we were joking about that. (laughs) How do you-- What's your reaction to that? >> If anybody's saying that if they come to me and I'm like you-- I don't know what Kool-Aid do you drink at that point because what cashflow are they discounting? There's no cashflow. It's not like you're going to get dividends from these tokens. There's no dividends. It's like can you find out how many people are going to use it. What is the network effect? And again, for that, a lot of people are coming with a lot of these matrices or matrix right now. But I think even that, they're trying to retrofit into it. They're like, oh I can use this matrix. But, really we don't know. >> So people tend to want metrics. Dave and I talk about this all the time. When people part with their money, they need to know what they're betting on. So the question is when you look at investments, when you spend cash, when you write checks, what is your valuation technique? Do you look for the l-- How do you play that long game? What's the criteria? Besides like the normal stuff like founders, disruptive, like you got to write the check, let's say. Okay, buying a token. It's got to be worth something in the future, obviously. >> So we look at that space, where invariably they are trying to disrupt. Is there a big market? And even if it's a niche market, okay? So we're doing an error chain token. It's a very niche market. It's just the pilot, the maintenance folks, and the charter people, or the plain charter guys. It's a very small market, but that's good enough. It's very niche. They can have an ecosystem between themselves rather than being incentivized to long game miles and stuff like that, right? It doesn't have to be a very big market. We just look at it, okay. Founder is good, he has an idea, it is a space that can be decentralized and people can come in and they feel that they're part of the ecosystem. See the whole thing with the token economy and a traditional economy like let's say I'm spending money to buy a stock. So I buy stock. As an investor, what do I want? I want maximum returns. The employee, he wants to get maximum pay. And the consumer who's buying the product, he wants to get it at the cheapest price. So there's a-- It start aligned, okay? The moment you give 'em the cheapest price, my profits go down. If I increase the employees' salary, my profits go down. So we are all three of us are totally misaligned. >> If I for an important point, do you favor certain asset classes, you know, token, security tokens, or utility tokens, or you looking for equity? I mean, maybe just ... >> Right now, we've moved away from the whole equity bonds, or any of those things. We are totally concentrated on the utility or security tokens. We don't mind if it's a security token or utility token. >> And if it's a security token, are you looking for dividends, are you looking for >> At that point it's some kind of dividend. >> So you're not expecting equity as part of that security token? >> No, I like to expect equity, but if they are saying okay my token, if people buy and if they pay me $10, and out of that you're going to get $1 back, okay that's fine. We don't mind that as long as it's legal and all those things we're fine because it just makes the process easier. Earlier you invest and you didn't know when you could get out of your investment. At this point, it's become so liquid, at any point of time within two or three months, the token is less to people are either buying and selling. We know, otherwise, earlier when we used to do Ren Chain investments, we would get into our product, have it it's time seven to 10 years to get out. And in the meanwhile, they say great stories. Oh we're doing great. Who do I check with that we are doing great? I'm not getting any dividends. Nobody's buying this from me. How do I know? Where am I? I really don't know. I can make these values up and on my Excel sheet and say okay we valuing this company at a billion. >> So your technique is to say okay look at the equity plays the long game. You need an exit on liquidity, either M and A or IPO. >> Yes. >> Now you have a new liquidity market, so you play the game differently. I won't say spray and pray, but you have multiple bets going on so you can monitor liquidity opportunity. So that's a new calculation. >> And it's a great calculation, also. Because see we're in the market and now we know at any point of time, we don't have things on our books that are like we don't know what the value is. We know what that price is because the market is there, the exchange is there. What other people are willing to pay for us doesn't surprise. It's like saying my house is worth a million dollars. Actually it might be worth to me. It depends on what people are willing to pay me. >> Right exactly. >> If I have to synthesize this, you're taking high frequency trading techniques with classic venture investing, handling token from those two perspectives. >> Yes. >> High frequency trading meaning I'm looking at volatility and then option to abandon and get rid of whatever or whatever. >> The only thing is, we're not exiting our positions. We are in the long game. We believe the score market is supposed to at least reach eight trillion. When we started this whole investing, at that time, the whole market was at six billion and we said okay this market, based on our thesis, is supposed to reach eight trillion. Until then, we keep buying, okay? >> But to your HFT, you're not really arbitraging. >> No, no, we're not doing any of those. Because see >> They're applying real time techniques to token evaluations so they're game is try to get into a winner. >> Yes. >> With some tokens. >> A lot of the funds, they're doing this arbitrage more. They're trying to do arbitrage. But the problem is they're missing the big picture that way. So, arbitrage works in a very tight market. So S and P, let's say, somebody's doing 5% return on S and P. The guy with a arbitrage is coming and saying I made five point three, 5.5% or 6%. That's great in the equity world. Now, I want returns last year are 10 x or 30 x or 50 x. And somebody comes and tells me I made an extra 0.2%, doesn't really matter to me. I'm like instead of wasting that time doing arbitrage and paying taxes, I might just hold it. >> You believe in the fundamentals. >> You guys are in New York. Obviously, Arcadia Crypto Ventures, that's how they get ahold of you guys. Final question for you to end the segment. As new real pros come in, and let's take New York as a since you're in New York. The New York crowd comes in or the Silken Valley comes crowd existing market players other markets come in here. How important is optics packaging and compatibility with the sector, meaning I just can't throw my weight around on the hedge fund scene. We do it this way, I got money. Because people here have money. So what's the dynamic of pros coming in, we're seeing institutional folks come in, we're seeing real pros come in. They've never been to Burning Man. So, you know, they get that Burning Man culture exists, but this is not a Burning Man industry. >> Right, right. >> Business doesn't run like Burning Man. Maybe it should, that's a debate we'll have. Your take. >> So the new funds that are coming in, so they have a fear that they have missed out. They are missing the picture that this is just the beginning. So they've seen that this industry has gone from six billion to 500 billion in a year or year and a half. They're like, oh my god, I missed it. >> It's got to be over. >> So I have to write these big checks to get this. We don't write big checks. We write much smaller checks because we believe that if a founder is raising money, he has to raise it through small checks from everybody. That means all those people are really interested in this. And they're all of them really want the token to go up. Whether it's the investor, the user, and the employee who is working there because all of them they're interests are aligned. The moment you give a big check, so let's say you could raise 10 million from 10,000 people or you could raise it from one person. So when the big check is there, let's say I go to raise my money. There's this fund who's missed it and he says here's 10 million dollars. Okay, now I've got me and the fund and my tokens. Nobody else knows about my tokens. My tokens are as good as valueless. Now the funders looking okay, I need to exit. Nobody knows about my tokens. The fund is the only guy who has my tokens, he's trying to exit. Obviously the market is going to crash. There's no market. And he's like why did I get into this. So he missed that point that you need people around you. It's not just you alone. See, earlier days when ... >> This is your point about understanding how token economics works. >> Yes. >> So having more people in actually creates a game mechanic for trading. >> Because then you know that you're not the only guy interested in this. And earlier venture capital space there were these bunch of few venture capitals who wanted to capture that whole thing and tried to sell it to the next guy. Here, I'm what I'm saying is, we all have to come in together. We all can be together at the same price, which is good because the small person has, the common man has a chance to be a VC right now. Earlier you could never be a VC. I could only see Google, after IPO. I could never get it at what KPCB or Sequoia got it at. I had to wait 'til they got through CDA, CDB, which they bought at five cents. I would get at about $40 maybe. In this case, the big fund has a lot more money than me, but I can have my small 5,000 or 10,000. I can invest in the ICO. >> If you picked the right spot and you were there at the right place, the right time. 'Cause you are seeing guys come in and try to buy up all the tokens early on. >> They're trying to do that. They don't get it, but they will understand. So it is a learning (mumbles). Even they will evolve. They're like okay this is not how it works. And you have to make mistakes. >> Sorry, got to ask you one final, final since you brought it up. More people the better. So we're hearing rumors inside the hallways here that big wales are buying full allocations and then sharing them with all their friends. >> Possible, it is possible. >> We see some of that behavior. Dave calls it steel on steel, you know. Groups, you know. I'm going to take this whole deal down. We see that in venture capital. Used to be syndicates. Now you seeing Andreessen Horowitz doing the whole deals. That kind of creates some alienation, my opinion, but what's your take on that? I'm a big wale. I'm taking down the whole allocation. >> It's okay. Some of those things are going to happen, okay. It is fine. The only problem is usually when that happens the big wale who takes it he will realize very quickly. >> He's got to get more people. >> He needs more people otherwise he might be able to exit to his five buddies who were always taking it from him. Now those guys, they also have to exit at some point. Nobody knows about the product. Might as well just take a small piece, even the founders in this case typically in a token model. Founders who've taken 20% or 10% have done better than founders who took 60% of the whole tokens. >> Right. Nithin, great to have you on. Love your business model. Arcadia Crypto Ventures. They got real pros, they got a wale, they got people who know what they're doing, and they're active. They understand the ethos. I think you guys are well-aligned and you're not trying to come in and saying this is how we did it in New York before. You get the culture. You're aligned and you're making investments. Great perspective. Thanks for sharing. >> Thank you so much. >> This is the Cube, bringing the investor perspective live here in the Bahamas. More exclusive Cube coverage. Token economics, huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors to create value and capture it. That's Blockchain, that's crypto, that's token economics. I'm John with Dave Vallante. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (futuristic digital music)

(energetic electronic music) >> Narrator: Live, from Nassau, in the Bahamas it's theCUBE covering POLYCON18. Brought to you by, Polymath. (attendees chatting indistinctly) >> Crew Member: So, go, we're live. >> Okay, we're live, welcome back! This is day two of our exclusive CUBE coverage of the Bahamas' POLYCON18 It's a security token conference. It's where the world of cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitcoin and everything comes together around powering a new value economy. A new kind of decentralized internet. This is the biggest wave that I've seen in my lifetime. It's really bigger than all the other waves, combined. I'm here with Dave Vellante. We have two days of wall-to-wall coverage. And the bottom line is, Dave, we are seeing historic, massive, wealth creation. We're seeing crypto-billionaires here. I mean, people are new money, they're old money and a massive new landscape is emerging. And the tell-sign of this is, institutional money is coming in, real professionals are coming in. It's moving from a culture of Burning Man and cult of the personalities to real industry formation. You see that with companies coming out with real commercial opportunities. You're seeing ecosystems developing, and you're starting to see biz dev. And it's been probably at least a couple decades since I've gone to a conference where this kind of computer-industry movement is happening where the players are doing deals in the hallways. You're hearing people having substantive conversations around how they can work together to create tons of value. This is a dynamic that is absolutely happening. And we're seeing a lot of wealth involved, from people who have made tons of money, billions of dollars in Bitcoin, to kind of, new migration coming into the sector from Wall Street, from other global markets. We're seeing a sea change of democratizing, with an open-source ethos. To me, this is something that we've never seen before. It has all the elements of the modernization, business model modernizations, technology modernizations, real, disruptive, enabling, technology at the heart of it. And some people ask questions like, "How do we make money?" Bottom line is, there is money being made. How and with who, is the real question. So Dave, day one's over. We were out 'til one in the morning last night, working the hallways, having great conversations. I probably talked to at least six whales as they're called, billionaires in the business, and the vibe is the same. We're here to play the long game, we love this market. There's a culture of ethos, of partnership, and openness, and unwritten rules, and tons of activity. Sure there's bad actors! But there's a lot of great players here, and they are starting to crack down on behavior that's not right, because this is a funding dynamic. It's a funding growth companies dynamic. It's a liquidity dynamic. All these things, classic, business model modernization, happening with a massive wave, your take. >> So, let's share with our audience. Well, first of all, this is an investor conference. It's the first conference built around the topic of security tokens. And we can, maybe, explain that in a moment. But, I have, John, I have never seen at an investor conference, which I guess this is, but it's more than that, Blockchain, technology, etc. But, I've never seen such diversity. Like you said, there's new money, there's old money. There's tons of millennials. 100% of the people here are doing deals. >> Yeah. >> And the conversations in the hall, it's all about ICO's, security tokens, utility tokens, protocols, white papers, business models. So, a lot of diversity. Some super smart millennials. Developers that really understand this stuff, and a lot of money. >> And, more women in tech here than I had thought. >> Yeah, I think it's slightly higher proportion. But, you're also seeing, just really interesting, you're seeing VC's who aren't going to sit back and wait and get disintermediated. You're seeing developers who have made a ton of dough, that are now sprinkling the wealth. You're seeing private equity, you're seeing hedge funds. You're seeing, like I say, traditional VC's, new types of VC's. And, very importantly, you're seeing a major diversity in cultural impact, nationalities. And this is a heavily Canadian show, because the organizers of POLYCON, the folks who started Ethereum. But, a lot of diversity in terms of where people are coming from. It's not just U.S. based, you know, MBA's-- >> Silicon Valley. >> Yeah. >> I mean, the game's changing. The other thing I observed is, we're seeing validation of my premise, a couple weeks ago when I was in Washington D.C. with Theresa Carlson, the most powerful woman in D.C. She's also the chief, and head of, Amazon Web Services' global public sector. Is that the global national stage, the nation building, the digital nation transformation, is part of it. Two, the validation that societal change and entrepreneurship, that was used to be involved in non-profits that never went anywhere, you know, these philanthropy projects. Social entrepreneurship, or societal entrepreneurship, as I call it, is absolutely real. And, in this culture, you're seeing people with Bitcoin, and crypto-currencies funding mission based activities. Now, the younger demographics, I think, lean towards that. That's pretty clear in our reporting and our data. That the younger generation wants to work for companies and communities that have an ethos of mission base. But, mission base is not about changing the world, it's about saving the world. And, this is real, you're looking at Blockchain ventures that track water supply. You're looking at Blockchain ventures that track, you know, food supply. You're looking at solving world hunger kind of challenges. And I think the tell here is, Blockchain is used to identify markets and incumbents, or opportunities where there's idle resource. So, whether that's using compute in a P2P way or solving the world hunger problem, anywhere there's an opportunity to be efficient, Blockchain is being used to solve those problems. And, the creative talent is the technology providers. This is a completely new dynamic. One that Silicon Valley pays lip service to. 'Cause they don't actually do societal change. They say they do, but, they build apps and platforms. So, I think this is a nuanced, but an important game changer for the industry, and the global economy and global entrepreneurship, because you can do things now that can be global impact based investing, and technology investing, in one shot. So, you get a double down effect for change. This is not just cloud computing, have more power, faster, better apps, more monetization. Sure, but now you have over the top, impact to users. The community dynamic, and the societal change is very, very real. That's a big driver of this ecosystem in terms of market selection, human capital, technology, leverage, and now financial. So, it is pretty intoxicating here. People are geared up, they're energized, and it's just pretty phenomenal. >> So, many people in our audience are still probably saying, I just don't get it. So, let's go back to 2008 when Satoshi, whoever that person was, writes this, I think it was an eight page white paper. And, remember what 2008 was like, banks were blowing up, too big to fail, the economic system was melting down, and guess who paid for it? The taxpayers. So, some libertarian minded people said, screw that, we're going to change the world. We're going to create a virtual currency and we're going to take back what the government is taking from us. Essentially, okay. So, that started people like, what, I don't really get it. That has formed a whole new, and people often say, it's not about Bitcoin, it's about Blockchain. Blockchain is building out this whole new internet. And we've talked about that all week. But, what you're seeing now is this concept of a value store a virtual value store, and people leveraging that in so many different ways to build out this new internet. And, they're building protocols, they're building apps, they're building new capabilities that we haven't seen before. That brings state to the internet, a state of communications. Now, let's talk about the investor profiles that we see here. I want to start with developers. So, developers built the internet, and most of them didn't really get paid huge money. Here, many of the developers are like multi, multi-millionaires flying in on private jets. Okay, so why? Because they've developed a new token that they, basically, invested in with their sweat and their money, and the price has gone through the roof. Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc., VC's. VC's, you know, they elbowed out, well they're elbowing their way back in. Private equity, hedge funds, big money. And there's two paths there, one is, guys that read white papers, real hard core technical guys who say, I'm going to invest in just this infrastructure token, utility token. Other guys who say, You know what, I've got big money, I don't really understand the technology, but, I'm going to sprinkle my money around and try to get a big hit. You got angels, you got entrepreneurs, you got superstars that have become billionaires, that are mission based. All these, and here's the thing John, and I want you to sort of explain this to the audience. You have these investor ecosystems forming. It's like the PayPal Mafia, and they're basically buying up all the tokens early, elbowing other people out. You know, one investor told us, We're fighting steel with steel. Steel beats steel, you have to form, it's like Survivor Baha Mar, right? And they're forming groups, and they're eyeing each other, attacking opportunities, elbowing each out, and it's really interesting. >> I mean, it's happening, big time. And, this is healthy, I think, in my mind. Emerging ecosystems have this behavior. The early days of Silicon Valley was very much the same. And it became very much war, now in Silicon Valley. See, people don't syndicate deals as much as they used to. Some are and some aren't, but the notion of teamwork has always been part of Silicon Valley. The old saying is, venture capital is a team sport. That is very much what's going on here. Now, they team up because they have to, but, steel on steel implies art of war. You know, we're going to take more allocations down. That's because the new pro persona of the investor, Dave, is the billionaire developer who captured value from the technology that they built, not someone else, not some central organization, they're the players. Developers, and or the actors who were making money in the early days of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and Blockchain actually are also starting funds themselves. So, that is a new dynamic. We've never seen that before, where you see a wealthy developer become rich and then also start investing at the same time. You have a smarter investor there, but they're doing it in packs and herds. You have a tribe mentality and people are starting to recognize that, okay, this group here loves Burning Man, this group here is more commercial oriented, this group here, like Polychain is much more technical, and BlockTower's much more Goldman Sachs like. So, you're starting to see the formation of categorical roles in the ecosystem. This is very healthy. Now, in the short term there's some jockeying, right? So, you're starting to see people syndicate together. You buy my coin, I'll buy your coin. So, there's a healthy, robust equilibrium going on where the market of insiders is very much the story. The insiders of this industry are the players. They are the ones, not just building the technology, they're funding technology, they're also recruiting, the talent issue, human capital role, mission based. These are all new dynamics. This is going to be a hard nut to crack if you're an incumbent, venture capitalist, or hedge fund, trying to walk into this ecosystem, throw your weight around and compete on a frontal basis, money for money, steel on steel, if you don't play by the rules of engagement that's emerging. Such as, open source communities, unwritten rules, certain kinds of syndications, eliminating bad behavior. This is a dynamic that's real, and you'll either win or lose if you're an investor, win or lose if you're an entrepreneur if you don't recognize that, kind of, big picture. So, you get down and dirty, you got to pull back and say, okay, what's going on, how do I engage? This is where the true money making is going on. >> That's great analysis, John. You mentioned the word dynamics several times. The other underpinning dynamic is, we are going to take control of our own destinies. I've heard things all week like, I might move out of the U.S. Ya know. (laughs) Do you have a bank account overseas? (laughs) >> Estonia's looking good right now. >> Right, because I'm going to move to a place that's more friendly to this kind of concept. And the U.S. is anti-competitive. And this is the ethos of this community, We are going to control our own destiny. And we're going to go live in places and work in places that are friendly. >> This, to me, is perfect capitalism at work. You know, some would criticize Barack Obama or other folks that might have more of a socialistic bent around having government do redistribution of wealth. This is actually an example where I see redistribution of wealth going on in a capitalistic way. Where the enabling technology, Blockchain, and or new business models with cryptocurrency, which is money, basically open sourced money, as Miko Matsumura would say, and that is the dynamic. That is actually creating real value and redistribution of wealth. And the premise of Blockchain and cryptocurrency, although Bill Tighe pointed out, investor, and leader in the area, money's a concept, right? A dollar's a dollar, it has money value because it's a concept. But, if you look at things like what we learned in business school, the value chain of a organization, value chain, Blockchain, cryptocurrency money, is that this redistribution of wealth is going on in context to redefining business, redefining how people work. And again, I said earlier, the human capital component is very much a real dynamic, it's not just machines taking over the world. Some poopoo AI, some poopoo all this technology, but, human capital, a big force in this market. And, it is a big issue, and you got to learn protocols. We're all developers. So, again, zoom out, opportunity is right there. I think I'm long on this sector. I'm long on this game because the actors are going to self organize, Steel on steel turns into handshakes, or, steel on steel in the right areas, eliminating bad actors. FCC makes some regulations, that's only in the U.S. What about the opportunities for digital nations to say, hey, we're going to be the Wall Street of crypto. There are country opportunities right now where whoever builds that system, taking in crypto, converting it to fiat, will win everything. It's like, I'm surprised no one's done that yet. >> Yeah >> This is coming. >> I can't tell you what the price of Bitcoin is in August, but I agree with you, longterm, there's no question in my mind that this is going to be a key contributor to the digital economy. The build out of the next internet. Remember the fundamentals, you got Bitcoin, it's essentially, you know, a virtual Fort Knox. You got Ethereum, which is a horizontal infrastructure that's much more easily programmed by developers. And then you've got a zillion other protocols and tokens. I want to talk about risk factors. Like what could blow this up, what have we heard? Tax exposure, all these people, all these Bitcoin millionaires and billionaires that think, I don't have to pay taxes, well, guess what? (laughs) You do have to pay taxes. And so, one theory is that's why the price has moderated lately, 'cause people are saying, Wow, it's like I exercised the option, but I don't have cash to pay my taxes. 'Cause we saw a pullback recently. Regulation's the other one we heard. Too much regulation could put some brakes on the momentum here, your thoughts. >> Talent, talent. >> Yep, skill sets, and developer talent, right? >> Yeah, well, the top talent, in the protocol area is going to be at a premium. This is a global issue, so, you know, the old days when cloud, old days, when cloud computing came around, full stack developers were all the rage. Now protocol developers are all the rage. So, if you're a full stack developer and a protocol developer, you can have a lot of leverage. So, the danger, in my opinion is the job hopping nature of some of these ICO's. Hey, I made a bunch of dough on this ICO, they paid me in Ether and or Bitcoin whatever, I'm off to the next one and make a couple million bucks there, and move on to the next one. And so the job hopping factor for top talent is an issue. We heard that loud and clear. The tax thing, I'm bullish on Bitcoin, post April 16th. I think, buy Bitcoin right now and look for it to pop in April. Because I think people are going to realize, Oh shit, I should have sold some and had a tax carry over. >> Well, be careful, be careful. They might have to sell more to meet their tax bill. They might be holding on for a little bit, but I don't know. >> File the extension. (laughs) But anyway, I love the opportun-- >> No, you owe your taxes on the date. Extension doesn't remove you from paying the taxes. >> Yeah, but the issue Dave, is, that what's a scam and what's not a scam? So, you know, if you ask Joe Six Pack on the street, throw crypto and Bitcoin, it's a scam. There's a lot of stuff going on. This industry is absolutely, acutely aware of that dynamic. The risk on the wealth creation opportunity. They know it, so they're creating mechanisms to kind of weed that out. You're seeing PR firms having internal, called, in baseball and in sports it's like, clubhouse issues. There's a clubhouse issue going on in this industry. And they're going to take it amongst themselves. And I think that is going to be the tell sign if this ecosystem succeeds or not. >> Do you think there's more scams, or less scams going on there? >> There'll be less scams because, obviously there's too much money to be made right now. >> Right, and in terms of the percentage of the activity that's going on, in my opinion, the smallest percentages is the scams. The challenge is, anyone could be a scam so you have to sort that out, you got to do-- >> Due diligence. >> As always, you got to do homework. >> Alright, well, day two Dave, we're going to drill into. We got a great line up of guests. We'll be talking to investors, entrepreneurs, some whales coming on, we're going to get their opinion on the future of this market. What's the liquidity, how do you get paid? Who's making the money? How is the value that's being created ultimately captured? And, who's going to get that value? It's theCUBE coverage, from the Bahamas, exclusive coverage of the cryptocurrency, tokenization, here at POLYCON18. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

(energetic electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE! Covering POLYCON18, brought to you by Polymath. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is exclusive live CUBE coverage here in the Bahamas for POLYCON18, it's a crypto event. Just talking economics. It's all the players in the space really discussing the future. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest, Bill Tai, friend, Facebook friend, industry legend, venture capitalist, kite surfer. His Twitter handle is @kitevc. Follow him. He's also involved in Bitfury and a lot of Bitcoin-related activities. Been a mentor to others. Great to have you, Bill. >> Thank you, John. I really appreciate you having me on the show. >> You tweeted in 2010, "This Bitcoin thing is interesting. "Check out this white paper." Can? >> Yeah, that was a >> Seminal moment. >> You know, back then I didn't know it would be, maybe a seminal moment. I was just lonely. (laughing) So, and the back story there, a very good friend of mine is Philip Rosedale, and he had approached me when he was starting a site called Second Life, where you basically create a digital avatar, maybe of yourself, maybe not, and you have this kind of, you know, world where you have people in an unstructured environment. And in the very early days of Second Life, when people were kind of just milling about, I said to Philip, I said, "Hey, Philip. "You know, maybe we should create a currency." I said, you know like, "If you think about it. "Think about what is Las Vegas? "Las Vegas is this pile of sand "but there is this metropolis on it. "How did that happen?" I said, "You know, if you took ten people, "sat them in a circle, and you put one poker chip "in the system, and said 'Pass it to the right,' "and everybody did that a million times a year. "Everybody would have a million dollars of income. "And then you could take chunks off "and build a casino, and build a resort, "and you'd have Las Vegas." So I said, "Let's do that." And so the Linden dollar was born. And so, soon, there was this thriving economy in Second Life that just, it was quite amazing to see. And so, when Bitcoin came out in 2009, as soon as I heard about it, I wanted to see what it was. So I went to the site and I read the paper, and it just seemed really cool. And so I started to play with it a little bit, and by 2010, I just thought it was really cool, but no one else had seen it. >> Yeah. >> So I took to Twitter to say, (laughing) "Is anyone out there "using this P to P digital currency?" You know, and >> It's funny. Our first web, You know, I started SiliconANGLE in 2009. David and I partnered in 2010. Our first website, the developer didn't want PayPal. He wanted Bitcoin. It was 22 cents, I think, at the time and we used the site for about half a year, and then we changed it and went back paid fiat. But if you think about where these come from, you brought up Second Life. Okay, online virtual world, really ahead of its time, but really set the stage for what we're seeing now. Gaming people who know virtual currencies, thrive on crypto. >> Yeah. Yes. >> So I'd like to get your perspective. Because, I know you've done a lot of investing in mobile and gaming, and what not. Where does that cross over? Because there's been a lot of virtual currencies going on in games. >> Yes. >> For a long, long time. >> Yes. >> How is that influencing and impacting this industry? >> Well, you know it's, I guess you have to ask, when you ask, you know, where does the real and where does the digital, like do they cross? And what are they? What is currency? Is the U.S. dollar real, right? And actually, let me pause for a second and reach down to my phone, because did you see a tweet today from Sheila Bair? I have to read this. Okay, so I just saw a tweet from @zerohedge earlier today. Sheila Bair, on Bitcoin, Quote, "I don't think we should ban it. "The green bills in your pocket don't have "an intrinsic value either." >> Well, look, the government wants to get rid of paper money. The people want to get rid of paper money. Why not? >> What is it really? Right? I mean so >> Backed by the U.S. military maybe, I don't know, I mean what >> What is it? >> What is it? Right. >> That's a good question. >> So I don't really see a difference. You know, they're kind of the same thing. You know, it's just something that people believe in, as the embodiment of value exchange. Whatever it is. So if it's a green piece of paper, or it's not. If it's shell, if it's a pebble. There is a fascinating book that you can read called The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. He's at Stanford now at the Hoover Institute, but he got widely known after the great financial crisis unfolded. He basically wrote a book called The Ascent of Money which tracks the history of value exchange across civilized communities, for thousands of years, from pebbles to shells, to feathers, to credit, to default swaps. And coined the term "Cimerica," which is sort of the interdependence of the cash flow. And what became apparent to me when I read that, was that the world of ICOs is actually no different than anything we've experienced in civilized humanity. You know, if you think about, even in the United States, in the 1800s, at one time there were over 200 currencies circulating at the same time. If you think about the formation of the United States as colonies, a bunch of guys get off the boats. They draw lines around the forest. Here's Connecticut, here's Vermont, here's New York, here's Virginia. Let's do an ICO. They all did an ICO. If you think about it, they created their own unit of currency per their community and geography, no different than what's happening today. >> When Lincoln was shot, there was a five dollar confederate bill in his wallet, right? I mean, the confederates had their own money. >> Yeah, and also you brought a point up in the conference you were in in Dubai, which I thought was really intriguing, and provocative, but also kind of real. The Oil Dollar Association post-World War II, >> Yeah >> Essentially wasn't actually securitizing oil That was an ICO. >> It was the tokenization of oil, right. Yeah, so, you know, the modern currency system that we have today, that is commonly known as the Petrodollar, so it's actually a relatively recent phenomenon. So if you think about, of course, the quote "U.S. dollar" was around a little bit longer than 1944, but it was really at Brett Woods that the dollar had its sort of birth to become the world's standard currency. And, you know, this is maybe a little bit of an over-simplification, but think about the picture after World War II. So, you basically have every major productive economy have war, destroy themselves. The U.S. enters late, finishes it all off completely, and you basically have 100 million people milling about. A little bit like Second Life, right? So, what do you do? Got to make them productive. Create a currency, set of currencies. So for every community of interest, like every token community of interest, you say, "Well, here's a lira, here's a franc, "Here's a pound, here's a mark. "Let's take gold, "reference the dollar to gold, and reference "every one of these currencies against the dollar. "Gentlemen, start your engines." Right? >> There you go. >> So how is that different than an ICO? Okay, so that was fixed to gold for a long time until people started to game it. And when the French accumulated a lot of dollars and they realized, whoa, there's more dollars than there is gold, I'm just going to go cash all this in. So they literally came over to take all the gold, and then the president took it off the gold standard. >> Dave Vellante: That's right. >> So it had to couple with something. So what it the utility token that that became? That became referenced to petroleum because the U.S. had basically forced everybody in the Middle East to accept dollars as payment and what that did was it created the dollar as a storage of energy. So you could basically take a token of oil and, as a separate nation, you could store that through your trade, if you had sort of a surplus, and you provided yourself energy security. >> Well, most currencies, right, historically have had a pretty short shelf life. Presumably the same will be true in the Blockchain world. >> Don't know. >> The crypto world. >> Yeah, it's, if you look at the history of humans over six million years, and it's arguable it's at four or six, or whatever it is, you're right. Like there have always been multiple currencies all the time. And very rarely have they ever become sort of like super-dominating currencies. That is also a very recent phenomena. I think, driven by the industrial revolution, and a combination of the Petrodollar and scale economics and manufacturing. So, so that >> Yeah, and overwhelmingly here, at this event, people feel like security tokens, as an asset class, are going to vastly overtake utility tokens. >> You know, actually, securities are a whole, I mean regular securities, (laughing) that's an interesting subject altogether. Right, okay, so there was a time, in my lifetime, when I was a securities analyst at Alex Brown in the '80s, and in that period of time, everything traded at ten times earnings, right? So you had a barometer for, a stock should be valued at this, because is should have a PE of actual real earnings. >> Dave Vellante: Independent of its growth or anything else, right? >> Yes, and if it grew, you had a PEG ratio, so you'd have a little bit higher growth, and so a little higher PE, but what's happened to securities over time, of that ilk, okay, you had to get these companies profitable to get them public in that era, and then over time the sort of like network effects have come in, and communities of interest have formed around companies. So, and the structure of securities has moved from give me something with earnings multiply it by a number to get the value, to give me a share of something that has no voting rights and no earnings. Does that sound like a token? That's Snapchat, right? (laughing) >> So you literally have, you know, Google, Facebook, all these companies now issue shares that don't have the characteristics of equity shares. They don't vote. What are they now, right? So tokenization is sort of a natural extension of that. >> Dave Vellante: Do you see that as a >> They don't have dividends either >> You see that as a fundamental shift in the value equation, the perceived value equation? Both? Is it sustainable? >> I think it's basically, so, you know, I go back and forth on this, because is it a trend line or is it a return in the past? Right? So what is a confederate dollar that was in Abraham Lincoln's pocket? It's a belief. So what is a share of Snapchat? It's a belief. It doesn't have earnings >> John Furrier: And a token is a belief. >> Right. >> But the trend is securing something, right? So the trend we're seeing is, obviously the ruling, first of all the ruling in Switzerland was interesting. You now have a trading so an asset, so security, asset, and then trading. So they kind of went a little bit deeper, which I think is helpful. >> Yeah. >> For the community. But what are they securing? So the trend, as we see, is percentage of revenue, non dilutive and equity in the classic sense, so kind of a token. And then some sort of either buyback options, people are doing things like that. Do you see patterns like that? What are you seeing for? >> Well. >> I mean a security token makes sense. It's all credited. The paperwork's known. >> Yeah, so, you know, it feels like, so some people refer to sort of Bitcoin as digital gold, you know, and in that sense, like gold is a commodity but is the root of securities, you know, whether it's gold ETF's or something, because you perceive a limited supply, and you perceive a storage of value, so that is where I think Bitcoin sits. But then I think this whole other category of utility tokens, that may be considered security tokens by definition of law, that resembles the petrodollar. And as we were talking about earlier, you know gold used to represent or a dollar used to represent a share of gold, but it didn't anymore. So what was underpinning it? It was basically, in my opinion, the ability for that token to have utility as an instrument to purchase oil for your energy security. And so, I think that's kind of where the utility tokens are today. >> You're a leader in the industry, and you're well-known. Communities need to thrive. And factions form, curriencies form, and can be very productive, and also can be counterproductive. >> Yeah. >> So what is the unwritten rules that you guys are putting forth. Are people meeting? Are you talking? And sometimes, as people make money, which a lot of people are making a lot of money right now. I mean, for some people, it's the first time. Didn't have money, make money. You know, egos kind of come in. So all of these are normal things. But again, this is a societal community dynamic, >> Yes. >> But super important. Institutional investors are coming in. >> Right. >> Big money. This isn't Burning Man. This isn't. Burning Man's cool, but you can't model this industry after Burning Man. Maybe you could. I don't know. What is your take? >> Well, you know, it's, I think that the guiding principle really needs to be looking out for the greater good, because I think that is the issue that everyone is trying to solve for. And it's not just endemic to Bitcoin and Blockchain. It's a societal issue that's been with us since the creation of civilization. And I don't know how to solve for that, but I think you need people to stand up and just make sure that people are thinking about that all the time. You know, and I think, over my career, I think I started as kind of like a geek hacker, sitting in the back of the room, working on little microchips and building stuff, and I still do that on weekends sometimes, but, you know, for whatever reason, I've been thrust into this role now where I do have a set of communities of interest that started actually around kiteboarding, but it became sort of a larger community around entrepreneurship. And we've actually, I have a 501(c)(3) that supports ocean causes and entrepreneurial things, and it's called ACTAI Global, and we have a couple value statements. We actually, we're codifying it, so we actually have a little pin, you know the ACTAI stands for Athletes, Conservationists, Technologists, Artists and Innovators, and all of us collectively, we combine our energy to work on causes. Some of the things that we support are around ocean conservation and the preservation of ecosystems, but we also work on a lot of other entrepreneurial efforts to help each other. But the thing that I've realized with our group is we've been very productive as a community, and you see a lot of companies that are born in our community, funded in our community, like, you know, whether it's Canva or Zoom, or any number of projects that turn into community-based companies because the group of people, they think and they stand for something greater than themselves. So that's kind of one principle. It's sort of like, how do you, how do you place your values as something to support the greater community, and that's something that I think, if everybody would just think about that a little bit, and stand for something greater than themselves, the world would be a better place. And on that note, the second ethos that we operate to is that we strive to leave every person or place we touch better than before we touched it. So when you see us like kiting at a beach, you'll see us picking up garbage, too. You know? We don't go someplace without trying to improve it a little bit. And I think we help each other on the companies, too. And I think the last thing that people really should try to do, everybody in this world of technology, has a little bit of a superpower, whatever that is. You know, they wouldn't be doing the things that they're doing if they weren't totally insanely focused on a piece of technology. They know something that other people don't. And if everybody would just try a little bit to use the powers the universe has granted them, to empower others, to unlock other people, the world would be a better place. So I think, you know, I think all of these factions, if we could just get people to stand for something greater than themselves, work to make people and places better off than before they touched them, and empower other people, I think we'll have some great outcomes. >> You know, empathy, empathy is a wonderful thing. And also you mentioned, know your neighbor. You know, that's a big thing. We're doing our part here in theCUBE, bringing our mission content. Bill, been great to have you on. And we'll get that clip out on the network about your mission. Great stuff. >> Thank you, thanks. >> And great to see you >> It's an awesome philosophy. >> be successful, you're a great leader. People look up to you, and certainly we're glad to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Hey, more live coverage after this short break here on theCUBE in the Bahamas for crypto currency, token economics, POLYCON18. We'll be back with more after this short break.

from Austin Texas it's the cube covering cube con and cloud native con 2017 brought to you by Red Hat the Lenox foundations and the cubes ecosystem partners well everyone welcome back to our exclusive coverage from the cube here in Austin Texas we're live on the floor at cloud native con and cube con cubic on like kubernetes gone not the cube con us but cute con we're Michele norelli who's the senior software engineer at Microsoft also the co-chair with Kelsey Heights our great event record-setting attendance I'm John ferry your host with stew minimun Michele welcome to the cube thank you so much for having me so people don't know about if they might have watch the street if you had a stream you're on stage keynoting and managing the whole program here congratulations more attendees here at this event than all the other cube cause of cloud native combined shows the growth and interest in a new way to develop new way to engage with other developers and create value yeah kubernetes has been the heart of it explain cloud native con and cube con what's the difference because I love cloud native but what's this Cooper Denny's thing I love that too yeah was it related a intertwine Wayne take him into his plane there's a there's a really big kubernetes audience and community and they need time to engage and just like work with each other and learn from each other and that's where coop Connie came from soku-kun with the original conference and the first one was a November in Seattle in 2016 and I was actually at that wine was a few hundred people and it was just so small people were actually asking like what is a pod what is kubernetes which are fine questions asked today as well but it was everyone was asking this question nobody was past that point and then you know kubernetes was donated to the CNCs and there were also these other cloud native projects that came about in the space and so we wanted a conference that encompasses both all of the cloud native projects as well as serbs the kubernetes community as well so that's where both of them came from some of the other cloud native projects have their own conferences like Prometheus has prom time and that's been growing as well I think the last one was 200 people up from 70 the last so I gotta ask you because we even cover us we were there at the cube con I was actually having drinks with Luke Tucker at JJ we're like hey we should do this Cuban Eddie's thing and bolted onto the Linux Foundation so you're president creates with the whole team it's been fun to watch Wow yeah but it's the tale of two stories in the community in the industry companies that got funded and we're building open-source and our participants who are building projects out and then a new onboarding of new developers coming into the community a lot of first-timers here you're seeing a visibility into the success of cloud yeah and they're Rieger engaged so you got a lot of folks who have invested into the community and new entrants a migration into the community yeah what does that dynamic mean to the CN CF how is that impacting how you structure in the programming and what are some of the insiders talking about what it is what's the reality yeah I think a lot of it has to do with you know this is a really positive community and there are just like so many people working together and collaborating not just because they I mean it looks like nice to be in a positive community right but you kind of have to like these problems are really hard and it's good to learn from different organizations that have like come across these projects or problems starting in the in the space before and they'll come and collaborate I think some of the things that we've been talking about inside the community is how to actually how to onboard people so the kubernetes community is starting up a new mentorship program to help people that are new to the community start learning how to review code and then PR code and and be productive members in the community and whatever they whatever area they want miss Michelle want to hear about kind of some of the breadth and depth of the community here yeah you know we went there's so many announcements there's a bunch of wando's yeah it's a brand new project I think what it was four projects a year ago and it's now 14 you know right how does somebody's supposed to get their arms around it should they be beat me about that you know where should somebody start you know what do you recommend yeah start with the that's a great question by the way I think that people should start with with a solution to a problem they already have so just know that people have run into these problems before and you should just go into the thing that you know about first and then if that leads you to a different problem and there's a solution that the CNCs you know has already come across then you can go into and dive into the other palms for example I am really interested in kubernetes and have been in that space but I think tracing is really interesting too and I want to start learning how to incorporate that into my workflow as well so show you you're also one of the diversity chairs yeah for the event you talk about kind of a diverse global nature of this community yeah we are spread across all time zone so I actually want to share an experience I have as a sake lead in kubernetes so at first I really wanted to serve all of the time zones and so we have these weekly sick meetings at 9:30 a.m. Pacific and I was like no maybe we should have like alternate meetings like alternate weekly meetings for other time zones but after talking to those the people in the other time sounds like they're very far off actually like China Asia Pacific I realize that they're actually more interested in reading notes and watching videos which is something I didn't actually know you know it's it's you think like oh you have to serve every community in the same way but what I've learned and face to face yeah base to base exactly and that's not actually how that's not how actually everybody wants to interact and so that's been an interesting thing I've learned from the diverse nature and this in the space let's see a challenges I mean we've been talking we're just that reinvent last week at Amazon obviously the number of services that they're rolling out is pretty strong there's a leader in the cloud but as multi cloud becomes the choice for most most enterprises and businesses the service requirements the baseline is got to be established seeing your community rolling out a lot of great new services but storage old storage is transferring to machine learning in AI and you got I Oh tea right around the corner new new kinds of applications yeah okay it's changing the game on the old card storage and security obviously two important areas you got to store the data data is that the card of the value proposition and then security security how are you guys dealing with that those challenges those political grounds that people are have a lot of making a lot of money in an old storage you mean ship a storage drive and here's an architecture those are being disrupted yeah I think they I mean they'll continue to be disrupted I think people are just going to bring in new and new more new and new use cases and then people will come and meet them meet those customers where they are and people just have to change I guess get used to it yeah shifter die yeah I think that some that that we are getting to that point but I can't only time will tell we'll see what are something exciting things that you see from the new developers I just recognize some friends here that I've haven't that dark wondering the community are new and they're kind of like licking their chops like wow what an excitement I could feel value and I could have a distribution I got a community and I can make money and then Dan said you know project products profits you put the product profit motive right on the table but he's clear at the same not pay to play it's okay to have profits if you have a good product for me project I buy that but the new developers like that because as an end scoreboard what are you guys doing with that new community what survived there around those kinds of opportunities you guys creating any programs for them or yeah I think just to just they can get involved you know I think knowledge is power perspective is power also so being involved helps give you a perspective to see where those gaps are and then come up with those services that are profitable or those tools that are profitable and I think this space can be very lucrative based on the number of people he sponsors I think he said he said the show was wondering if you can comment when you're building the schedule how do you balance you know all those platinum sponsors versus you know some of the you know practitioner companies that are also getting involved how do you there are there are different levels of sponsorship right like you mentioned the events team has a sponsorship section or sponsorship team and they handle most of placing sponsors and all of that and so they'll get whatever level they want but actually Kelsey and I do a lot of research and see like what's happening in the community what's interesting what's new and and we'll find time to highlight that as well which one is research what's your role in Microsoft share with the audience what are you working on what's your day-to-day job is it just foundation work are you doing coding what do you coding what's your fav is the VI MX what do you prefer yes my work is 30% community and 70% engineering I really love engineering but I also really love the community and just getting these opportunities to give back you know build skills as well learning how to speak in front of people as well these are both valuable skills to learn and it gives me an opportunity to just give back what I've learned so I appreciate those but I mostly work on developer tools that are open source that help people use containers and kubernetes a little more easily so I work on projects like Helms drafts and Brigade and these are just like things that we've seen the pain points that we've experienced and we want to kind of share our solutions with them so draft is the one I've been working on a lot have you heard of drops okay let me do the two second draft is a tool for application developers to build containerized apps without really understanding or having to understand all of what is kubernetes and containers so that's my favorite space to know you know one of the things we look at coming in here is there's that balance between there's complexity but there's flexibility you know I've heard Kelsey talking about our on when I talk to customer they're like oh I love kubernetes because I take vault and I take envoy and I take all these different things that put together and it does what I want but a lot of people are daunted and they say oh I want to I want to just go to Microsoft Azure and they'll take care of that so how do you look at that and what is the balance that we should be looking for as an industry yeah we've been emphasizing in the community a lot on plug ability across contracts it's like a theme that I think almost every project hurts and a word that you'll hear a lot I'm sure you already have heard a lot and I think that's because you can't meet everyone's needs so you build this modular component that does one thing very well and then you learn how to extend it and or you give people the ability to extend it and so that's really great for scaling a project I I do really appreciate the clouds coming out all of them with their own managed services because it's hard to operate and understand all of these things it's it takes a lot of depth in knowledge context and just prior experience and so I think that'll just make it a lot easier for people to onboard onto these technologies I was going to ask you I was going to ask so you brought up fug ability we saw you know Netflix on stage was his phenomenal of the culture yeah dynamic I think that the Schumer important conversation you know something we've been talking about silage is a real part of what we're seeing tech being a part of but the the things that popped out at me in the keynote were service mesh and pluggable architecture so I want to get your thoughts for the folks that aren't there is that in the trenches and inside the ropes what is a pluggable architecture and what is a service mesh these days because you got lyft and uber and all these great companies who have built hyper scale and large-scale systems in open source and now our big tech success stories donating these kinds of approaches pluggable architectures and service man talk a minute to explain so pluggable architectures this is why you have one layer of your stuff there's a piece of software that does something does one thing very well but you know every I like to say that every company is a snowflake and that's okay and so you may have some workflow or need that is specific to your company and so we shouldn't limit you to just what we think is the right solution to a problem we should allow you to extend or extend these pieces of software with modular components or just extensible components that that work for you does that make a little more sense yeah I work on helm and we also have a pluggable architecture because we were just getting so many requests from the community and it didn't make sense to put everything in the core code based if we did if we accepted one thing it would really just interrupt somebody else's workflow so that that's helped us a lot in in my personal experience I really like plug water it's actually that means you can go build a really kick butt app yeah nail it down to your specifications but decoupler from a core or avoiding kind the old spaghetti code mindset but kind of creating a model where it can be leveraged yeah plugin we all know plugins are but right so so that someone else could take advantage of it exactly yeah a service mesh that's evolved yeah heard a lot of that what is that yeah it's um so developers this is actually the lift story is really interesting to me so at lyft developers were really uneasy about moving from the monolith to the micro-services architecture just because they didn't early understand the network component and we're like network reliability would not be so reliable would fail and time service meshes have allowed engineers at lyft to understand where their failures happen and in terms like of a network standpoint and so you're basically abstracting with network layer and allowing more transparency into it this is like very useful for when you have lots of Micra services and you want this kind of reliability and stability awesome so one point 9s coming Spence support Windows that's what key and now a congratulations just go to the next level I mean growth talk about the growth because it's fun for us to watch you know kind of a small group core young community less than three years old really to kubernetes kind of had some traction but it really is going to be commoditized and that's not a bad thing so how do you what's your take on this what's the vibe what's that what's the current feeling inside the community right now excited pinching ourselves no I think everybody's in awe everybody is in awe and we're just like we want to make this the best experience possible in terms of an open source experience you know we want to welcome people to the community we want to serve the people's needs and we just we just want to do a good job because this is really fun and I think the people working on these problems are having a lot of fun with with seeing this kind of growth and support it's been great certainly for US president creation president and creation of this whole movement it's been fun to watch a document final question what should people expect this week what is the show going to hopefully do what's your prediction what's your purpose here what should people expect this week and the folks that didn't make it what do they miss okay there are so many things happening it's insane you're going to get a little bit of everything there's lots of different tracks lots of diverse content I think I'm when I go to conferences in my personal experience I really love technical salons those are really great because you can get your hands dirty and you can get questions answered by the people who created the project that's an experience that is is really powerful for me I went to the first open tracing salon and that's where I kind of got my hands dirty with tracing and been siegelman who's doing the keynote today this afternoon was the person who was teaching me how to like do this stuff so yeah it was awesome like some marketing fluff no it's not and it's just like it's it's real experienced very expert like experts you know in the in the space teaching you these things so that that definitely can't be replicated I think the cig sessions will be really cool there's a big focus on not just learning stuff but also collaborating and and just talking about things before they get documented so that's a really good experience here it's an action-packed schedule I tweeted that it feels like I'm you know when Burning Man had like a hundred people announced this big thing I think this is the beginning of a amazing industry people are cool they're helpful they're getting you're getting involved answering questions open-book here yeah at cloud native Punk you've got thanks Michele Farrelly been coming on co-chair senior engineer at Microsoft great to have her on the cube great keynote great color great fun exciting times here at cloud native con I'm John furry the founders look at angle media with too many men my co-hosts more live coverage after the short break

>> Hello, we are here On the Ground. This is theCUBE's On the Ground program at Centrify's Headquarters. We go to Cricket Liu, chief DNS officer at Infoblox. Been with the company from the beginning. Great to see you again. Wrote the book on DNS. What year was that? That was between DNS, was like, when I was born. >> Yeah, 1992. September 1992 was when it was published. >> Great to see you. We've done some podcasts together over the years. >> Yeah, good to see you too. >> DNS, now obviously global, ICANN's now global, it's part of the U.N., all different governance bodies, but it's certainly still critical infrastructure. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Critical infrastructure is now the big conversation as the security paradigm has moved from data center to the Cloud, there's no perimeter anymore. >> Yeah. >> How is that changing the DNS game? >> Well, I think that folks are starting to realize how critical DNS is. In October of last year, we had that huge DDoS attack against Dyn, the big DNS hosting provider in New Hampshire and I think that woke a lot of folks up. A lot of folks realized, holy cow, these guys are not too big to fail as they say. Even though they have enormous infrastructure, widely distributed around the globe, they have such a concentrational power that a huge number of really, really popular web properties were inaccessible for quite sometime, so I think that caused a lot of people to look at their own DNS infrastructure and to reevaluate it and say, well maybe I need to do something. >> Interesting about the stack wars that are going on, that attack, as we've lived through and you've been part of it as chief technical officer in many companies. DNS was always that part where it'd be secure but now you have block change, you have new kinds of infrastructure with mobile computing now over 10 years post iPhone. >> Yep, the critical moment. >> How has infrastructure changed, beyond DNS 'cause it still needs to work together? >> Yeah, well, it's funny because we do have all of these new types of devices. We do have new technologies. But a lot of things have remained the same. DNS is still the same. The remarkable thing is that the latest version in my book is 10 years old, actually 11 years old now, so it's older than the iPhone and people still buy it because the underlying theory is still the same. It hasn't changed. It's a testament, really, to the quality of the original design of DNS that it still works for anything and that it's scaled to serve a network as diverse and as large as the internet is today. >> What's your biggest observation, looking back over the past decade with DNS, about the emergence of virtual machines, now Cloud. Again, the game is still the same 'cause DNS is the plumbing and it provides a lot of the key critical infrastructure for the web and now mobile. What's the biggest observations that you've seen over the decade? >> Well I'd say one of the things that's happened over the last several years that's maybe the most important development in DNS is something that we call response policy zones. Up until now, DNS servers have just been sort of blithely complicit when it comes to, for example, malware. Malware wakes up on a device and it assumes that it has DNS available to it and it uses DNS, for example, to find command to control server, maybe a drop server to exfiltrate data to. In the DNS server, even though it's being asked to look up the address record for CommandAndControlServer.Malware.Org, it just happily goes along with it. A few years ago, Paul Vixie, who I've known for a very long time, came up with this idea called response policy zones which is basically to imbue our DNS servers with resolution policy so that you can tell them, hey if you get a query for a domain name that we know is being used maliciously, don't answer it. Don't resolve it like you normally do. Instead, hand back a little white lie like that doesn't exist and moreover, log the fact that somebody looked it up because it's a good indication that they're infected. >> So bringing policy to DNS is really making it more intelligent. >> Yeah, that's right. >> And certainly as networks grow, I was just watching some of my friends setting up the wireless at Burning Man and the whole new change of how Wi-Fi is being deployed and how networks are being constructed is really coming down to some of the basic principles of DNS to route more, be responsive, and this is kind of a new change. >> Yeah, there's a lot going on in changes to the deployment of DNS. It used to be that most big companies ran all their own DNS infrastructure. At this point, I think most large companies don't bother running, for example, what we'd call their external authoritative DNS infrastructure. They give that to a big hosting provider to do, somebody like Dyn or Verisign or Neustar or somebody like that, so that's a big change. >> Cricket, I want to ask you about the CyberConnect Event going on in New York. Infoblox is involved. Security is paramount, so now an industry event. Centrify is the main sponsor. You guys are involved as a vendor, but it's not a vendor event, it's a industry event. It's a broad category. What's your thoughts on this kind of industry event? Usually in events it's been Black Hat or vendor events pushing their wares and selling their stuff but now security is global. What's your take on this event? >> Well, I'm hoping to be able to spend a little bit of time talking to folks who come to the event about DNS and how it can be used as a tool in their security tool chain. The folks who come to us as Infoblox to our events already know about DNS. They're already network administrators or they're responsible for DNS or something like that. My hope is that we can reach a broader audience through CyberConnect and actually talk to folks who maybe haven't considered DNS as a security tool. Who maybe haven't thought about the necessity to bolster their DNS infrastructure. >> One final question since we're on bonus material time. I've got to ask you about the global landscape. I mean, in my early days involved in DNS when I came was from the '98 to the 2000 time frame. International domain names were Unicode. That's not ASCII. So that technically wasn't DNS, but still, they were keywords. They had this global landscape in, say, China, that actually wasn't DNS so there's all these abstraction layers. Has anything actually evolved out of that trend of really bringing an abstraction layer on top of DNS and certainly now with the nation-states with security are issues, China, Russia, et cetera. How does all that play out? >> Well, international domain names have actually taken off in some areas. And basically it's as you say, you have the ability now to use Unicode labels in domain names in certain contexts, for example, if you're using your web browser you can type in a Unicode domain name and then what the web browser does is it translates it into an equivalent ASCII representation and then resolves it using DNS which is the traditional DNS that doesn't actually know about Unicode. There are actually some very interesting security implications to using Unicode. For example, people can register things that have Unicode, we would say, glyphs in them that look exactly like regular ASCII characters. For example, you could register paypal.com where the A's are actually lowercase A's in Cyrillic. It's not the same code point as an ASCII A. So it's visually. >> Great for hackers. >> Oh yeah. Visually indistinguishable from paypal.com in a lot of contexts and people might click on it and go to a page that looks like PayPal's. >> John: So its a phishing dream. >> Yeah, really dangerous potentially and so we're working out some of the implications of that, trying to figure out, within, for example, web browsers, how do we protect the user from things like this? >> And a lot of SSL out there, now you're seeing HTTPS everywhere. Is that now the norm? >> Yeah, actually, within the internet engineering task force, the IETF, after it became obvious that state-sponsored-- >> John: Attacks. >> Eavesdropping. >> You were smiling. >> Was kind of the norm. >> Got to find the right word. >> Yeah, the IETF embarked on an effort called DPRIVE and DPRIVE is basically a bunch of individual tracks to encrypt basically every single part of the DNS channel, especially that between what we call a stub resolver and the recursive DNS server so that if you're a customer here in the United States and a subscriber to an ISP like Comcast or whomever, you can make sure that that first hop between your computer and the ISP is secured. >> We're getting down and dirty under the hood with Cricket Liu on DNS. I got to ask kind of up level to the consumer. One of the things that kind of pisses me off the most when I'm surfing the web is you see the browser doesn't resolve or you go hit someone's website, oh yeah, something.io, these new domain names, top level gTLDs are out there, .media, all these, and companies have firewalls or whatever their equipment is and it doesn't let it through. Because they're trying to protect the perimeter still, must be, I mean, what does that mean when companies aren't letting those URLs then, it is a firewall issue or is it more they're still perimeter based, they're not resolving it, they're afraid of malware? Somethings aren't resolving in? What does that mean? >> Well I think as often as not it's an operational problem. It could be just a misconfiguration on the part of the folks who are hosting the target website's DNS. It could be that. I don't know a lot of folks who-- >> So it's one of their policies or something, it's just kind of locking down. >> Could be that too. Or it could be, for example, that they have a proxy server and they're trying to limit access to the internet by category. Maybe it does categorization and filtering by-- >> Can you work on that? Can you write some code for that? Well thanks, great to see you, thanks for sharing this conversation here On The Ground at Centrify. >> You're welcome. >> And good luck with the CyberConnect Conference. >> Yeah, nice to see you too. >> Alright, I'm John Furrier with On The Ground here on theCUBE at Centfity's headquarters in Silicon Valley. Thanks for watching.