>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE! Covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum for Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm here with Lauren Cooney, the analyst, for the Wikibon team and our next guest is I'm proud to have Guy Kawasaki here on theCUBE. Guy is, goes without mentioning, a legend in the industry. Currently, the chief evangelist for Canva author of Art of the Start, a real pioneer in entrepreneurship, tech entrepreneurship, tech evangelism. Guy, great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Among other things, you've done a lot of amazing things. Thanks for joining us. >> What better place to be. >> The tech culture now is so mainstream. You're seeing Facebook CEO draw in more audience than a Supreme Court justice. >> More people watched the Senate hearings yesterday-- >> He probably has more impact than a Supreme Court justice. >> He's running the world. The tech culture has really grown to be a mainstream...in the early days the computer industry when it was really the beginning of the revolution, the PC revolution, Macintosh and the PC, you were there. So much has happened. I mean, as you look back, I mean looked out at the young guns coming up, what's your view, what's your reaction to all this? You have these (mumbles) moments. >> What's your take on all this? >> I suppose many people would say, we never thought it would get to this point. It's turned destructive and negative and all that. But it's a short snapshot of time and, first of all, can we put the genie back in the bottle? No, so it doesn't really matter. But, all things considered, the democratization of computing, everybody has a computer, whether it's a phone or a computer. The democratization of the transfer of information, obviously some information may be faint, may be not what you like. But would we go back to a time where we send things by fax machines? Not at all, I mean all things considered, >> it's a great time to be alive. >> Democratization goes through these waves, democratization with the PC, democratization with the internet, democratization of web 2.0 and social media. The beginning of social media, about 15 years, maybe 10, whatever way you might want to mark it. And now democratization with data and AI is interesting. So you're having these waves of democratization. It's going to take some time to sort out. I mean, as you look at the tech trends, how do you make sense of it, or what do you get excited about? How do you surf that wave? (chuckling) If you're going to surf the wave, the big wave coming, which some say is block chain and cryptocurrency and decentralization. What's the wave that you're on, that's the question? >> To use a surfing analogy, if we're going to go down that rat hole, a good, experienced surfer knows where to sit, can look out and say, I'll take the fourth wave. And I'll sit in the right place, turn around at the right time, paddle at the right time, you know, all that. And then there's people like me. We sit in the same place, and every 15 minutes, the right wave comes along and catches us. Those are the two theories. >> I think if only predicting tech trends were as easy as predicting surfing. >> Interviewer: Timing's everything. >> Timing is everything, luck is a lot to do with it. We only learn about the Apples and the Googles and the Ciscos and the Facebooks and the Pinterests and the Instagrams. I think you think, well, there are these really smart people and they can predict the trend or cause a trend. I think it's more the game of big numbers where if you have enough surfers in the water, somebody's going to catch a wave. (chuckling) And then you can say, yeah, I knew he was the best surfer. >> But really, right place, right time. >> And you got to know what a wave looks like. >> Guy: Well, yeah. >> You got to be, like, okay, am I in a tide pool >> or am I on a boogie board. >> And to your point, you've got to be in the water. [John] Yeah, yeah. >> You can't be standing on the shore, saying I'm going to catch a wave. You have to be in the water, and if you're in the water, >> nine times out of ten you're going to get crushed. (chuckling) >> If you're not out in front of that next wave, you're driftwood. In surfing, people will jump and try to take your wave, this sounds like the tactic of the whole industry. >> Guy: Exactly, right, right. >> What waves do you see that are coming, in your mind. You've seen a lot of waves in your day. I mean, right now, what wave is exciting you right now. >> If you look at the waves, what's out there? >> What I learn about that is, you can only declare your intelligence and victory after the fact, right. I can tell you the internet of things is big. I can tell you that social media is big. I can tell you that computing is big. Problem is I could tell you that because I know it's big now. Can I tell you what's in the future, no. If I could...first of all I wouldn't tell you. (chuckling) So I think in a rare moment of humility it's the law of big numbers. Infinite monkeys typing at keyboards, somebody's going to come up with Beethoven. >> I want to ask you a question because I get asked this question a lot, Hey, John, you've been around a while. I want to catch that next big wave, I want to be in the next Google, I want to be rich on stock options. (Guy chuckling) I said, a lot of times the best companies where you take the most advantage of is when no one else wants to work there or no one yet knows it. We really can't say, Oh, I'm going to get rich on that company because by that time it's either too late and people are chasing the wrong thing. >> Guy: Absolutely. >> How do you give that same advice to someone? >> Listen, you're talking to a guy who quit Apple twice and turned down Steve once. So how smart could I be? (John chuckling) Now we can say Apple is the most valuable company in the world, you should have stayed there. Well, thank you very much, thanks for tell me now. I think it's really... I don't want to be too dramatic, but I could almost build a case that you should invest in or work for the most dumb-ass idea you heard of. Because at any given point-- >> Airbnb, we're going to rent out mattresses >> and give out cereal. >> Very good example, Airbnb. Let's face it, if somebody told you Airbnb, before there was Airbnb, you would say, So you're telling me that I'm going to rent a room from somebody I met on the internet, and I'm going to sleep in that person's house, hoping he's not a murderer or pedophile. On the flip side, you're saying, I'm going to rent out my room to someone who I hope is not a pedophile or an ax murderer. Or ebay...I'm going to buy this printer from 3000 miles away and I'm going to assume it works. Or I'm going to sell my good printer to someone 3000 miles away and assume that he's not going to say he never got it or that it didn't work and he wants a refund. So if you go down the line of all these ideas, you'd have to say at the time, nobody. Even take an extreme: Zappos. If you told me that women would buy shoes without trying them on, seeing them, smelling them, and touching them, I would tell you you're crazy. You'd buy a book that way. You'd buy a CD that way, you'd buy a DVD. Would you buy shoes, would you buy shoes without trying them on. >> I totally would. (laughing) Now I can say that. >> To Zappos's credit, some of the way it made that work is it offered shipping back for free. So there was really no risk. But I would have been a skeptic about Zappos. >> Well, it was one of those things for me, Zappos, where they shipped in one day so I could get them immediately, try them on and if they didn't work, I could ship them back and get a different size. It was no big deal, it was very low overhead. So that's one of the reasons that that worked. But I think when you mention all of these great things like Ebay and Airbnb, it's really part of the sharing economy with people really wanting to share the goodness of their goods with other people that need them. >> It's just really connecting those folks. >> Places like Oakland and San Francisco, where there are certain streets where you line up and you just get in the next car with a stranger, and you go to San Francisco with them. >> Lauren: Yeah. >> And it's not computerized or anything. It's just trust. >> I did that once and it was frightening. (laughs) You never know who the driver is going to be or how they're going to drive. >> But you did it. >> I did it. >> People do it every day. >> I know. >> I'm amazed. >> I did it once, but... (laughing) >> Let's ask you a question. What's the craziest idea that you've seen that worked and the craziest idea that didn't work. >> Let's start with the easy one. I had a company called garage.com, and we were a venture capitalist investment bank, so we got pitched all the time. One day, a guy comes in and says, I'm going to build... A dirigible hotel over San Francisco. So you stay in the dirigible. Another person said, We're going to build a geodesic dome over Los Angeles. And I can't remember if it was to keep the air pollution in or out. I'll just tell you one really great one. These people were from Seagate so they had Cray, they worked for Seagate. And they say, We have this patent-pending, curb-jumping, patent-pending whatever technology so that if you drop your laptop with your hard disk, the head won't crash into the hard disk and ruin the hard disk. And at the time, this was 15 years ago, that was a great idea, right. It wasn't solid state. Heads crashing into hard disks. >> Moving parts. >> Seagate, so this is a great idea. Every hard disk in every laptop should be like it. So we get in the car, we go to their office, and the receptionist says, Oh, they're running late because they're on the phone with IBM. IBM is really interested in using this technology for the IBM PC laptop. Keep us waiting, keep us waiting. And they get out, and, Yeah, IBM was really, they're so excited, they're ready to move. And I, like, we're really excited. And finally I said, Give me the jist, what is your technology, is it like some special chip that detects gravitational fall, it's too fast, it's got to be hitting the ground so it parks the head because it recognizes motion or whatever. And I swear to God, I swear to God, he brings out this piece of foam and he says this is military spec foam. So we take your hard disk, we put this foam thing around it, and we put it in the laptop. And I swear to God, I was having an out of body experience. >> You're telling me-- >> I drove all the way here-- >> That your proprietary technology is putting foam around the hard disk, and IBM is excited by this foam. So welcome to my life. >> So what are you up to now. Talk about your evangelism. I know you're a (mumbles) Mercedes. You have a bunch of things going on. You've been very prolific in social media. You were on the suggested user list from day one on Twitter. >> No, I wasn't. >> Oh, no, you weren't, that's right. But you have a zillion followers. >> That's why I have never forgiven Twitter for that. >> I thought they put you on. >> Guy: No. >> Okay, I stand corrected. >> You had to be an actress. >> Some tech people got on there, I know. >> Guy: Yeah. >> But I was not on. >> There you go. >> Measly 20,000 or so. But you got a million and a half followers active. You've really been prolific in a good way. (laughing) Engaging with communities. >> Yeah. >> What have you learned and how do you view this next generation of social because you're seeing the Facebooks, you're seeing LinkedIn. There's siloed platforms. Is there hope? What's your take on it, is it going to grow? >> I've come to the point where I always believe things are never as good or as bad as they seem. So I don't think it's as bad as people say. If these social media sites are selling my data, they're going to go broke selling my data. (laughs) I don't know how you could look at my data. First of all, I never look at ads, so go ahead, sell my data. I'm not going to look at the ad anyway. It doesn't matter. I think the ability to spread ideas, arguably good or bad, the ability to spread ideas with social media, all things considered, is better. It's going to be abused and all that. My father was a state senator in Honolulu, and we were into banner ads way before anybody else. Banner was literally a piece of cloth with his name on it that you staple to the side of a building, saying Vote for Duke Kawasaki. That was the nature of banner advertisement back then. Do I think that social media targeting and all that for sales is a good thing? Yes, I do. If you're a real estate broker, and you wanted to reach people who live in Silicon Valley, age 50 to 70, female or male or whatever, in such-and-such an income bracket, how else can you do it but Facebook? >> It's good and bad. >> That's why Facebook is so successful. >> The metadata is all about the clan and the culture, and I think putting ideas out there is a way to send your ideas into the ether, make it happen. So, that's key. Now, we're here at a developer conference, so one of the things that's also a big part of this community is the notion of how open source has become a tier one citizen, and it's really running the world. Which is also grounded in community as well. You have this ethos of community, ethos of software open. >> I believe in open source. I believe that the more intelligent people pounding on your stuff, the better it is. I'm an author, and what I do is, speaking in the sense of open source. So right now I'm about 80% done with my book. I put out a post on social media saying anybody that wants to review my book, test my book, send me your information. So I do this, I cut it off at about 280 people. I send them the Word document, the entire Word document of my book. Does that mean they can take it and publish it in China tomorrow, yes. But, from that, I get hundreds and hundreds of comments. >> John: Wisdom of the crowds, self-editing. >> Yeah, and they point out stuff that I never would have noticed because I'm too close to at this point. So is there a downside, yes. Is there piracy, yes. Arguably, would those pirates have bought the book anyway? No. >> Our content's all free. We're really big in China because they actually take it and translate it in the native language. >> Guy: Which you would never have done. >> With all the jargon, you can't hire a-- >> Guy: You would never have done that. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Guy, great to catch up with you. Thanks for coming on. What are you working on now, you mentioned the book, what's the book about? >> The book is called Wise Guy, and it's a compilation of the stories that have influenced my life. So it's not an auto-biography. It is not a memoir. Have you ever heard of the book Chicken Soup for the Soul? >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> You know, it's inspirational stories. This is miso soup for the soul. (laughing) So I'm working on that, TV evangelism with Canva is just going gangbusters. Brand ambassadors for Mercedes Benz. I'm on the board of directors of a company called Cheeze with a zee. It's an anti-social photo-sharing and vidoo-sharing app. And that's it. >> You've been an inspiration to many, great job of the year has been a big fan of your work. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Guy Kawasaki here inside theCUBE. We're at Devnet Create. This is Cisco's cloud developer conference. Different from their core Devnet Cisco Networking developer, and this is all about dev ops open source. And this is theCUBE bringing you all the action here in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back with more after this short break.

>>Hello and run. Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage here. Day three of Cube's coverage, two sets, wall to wall coverage. Third set upstairs in the Executive Briefing Center. I'm John Furry, host of the Cube with Dave Alon. Two other hosts here. Lot of action. Dave. The cheer here is the CEO of MongoDB, exclusive post on Silicon Angle for your prior to the event. Thanks for doing that. Great to see >>You. Likewise. Nice to see you >>Coming on. See you David. So it's great to catch up. Prior to the event for that exclusive story on ecosystem, your perspective that resonated with a lot of the people. The traffic on that post and comments have been off the charts. I think we're seeing a ecosystem kind of surge and not change over, but like a an and ISV and new platform. So I really appreciate your perspective as a platform ISV for aws. What's it like? What's this event like? What's your learnings? What's your takeaway from your customers here this year? What's the most important story going on? >>First of all, I think being here is important for us because we have so many customers and partners here. In fact, if you look at the customers that Amazon themselves announced about two thirds of those customers or MongoDB customers. So we have a huge overlap in customers here. So just connecting with customers and partners has been important. Obviously a lot of them are thinking about their plans going to next year. So we're kind of meeting with them to think about what their priorities are and how we can help. And also we're sharing a little bit of our product roadmap in terms of where we're going and helping them think through like how they can best use Mongadi B as they think about their data strategy, you know, going to next year. So it's been a very productive end. We have a lot of people here, a lot of sales people, a lot of product people, and there's tons of customers here. So we can get a lot accomplished in a few days. >>Dave and I always talk on the cube. Well, Dave always goes to the TAM expansion question. Expanding your total stressful market, the market is changing and you guys have a great position growing positioned. How do you look at the total addressable market for Mongo changing? Where's the growth gonna come from? How do you see your role in the market and how does that impact your current business model? >>Yeah, our whole goal is to really enable developers to think about Mongo, to be first when they're building modern applications. So what we've done is first built a fir, a first class transactional platform and now we've kind expanding the platform to do things like search and analytics, right? And so we are really offering a broad set of capabilities. Now our primary focus is the developer and helping developers build these amazing applications and giving them tools to really do so in a very quick way. So if you think about customers like Intuit, customers like Canva, customers like, you know, Verizon, at and t, you know, who are just using us to really transform their business. It's either to build new applications quickly to do things at a certain level of performance of scale they've never done before. And so really enabling them to do so much more in building these next generation applications that they can build anywhere else. >>So I was listening to McDermott, bill McDermott this morning. Yeah. And you listen to Bill, you just wanna buy from the guy, right? He's amazing. But he was basically saying, look, companies like he was talking about ServiceNow that could help organizations digitally transform, et cetera, but make money or save money or in a good position. And I said, right, Mongo's definitely one of those companies. What are those conversations like here? I know you've been meeting with customers, it's a different environment right now. There's a lot of uncertainty. I, I was talking to one of your customers said, yeah, I'm up for renewal. I love Mongo. I'm gonna see if they can stage my payments a little bit. You know, things like that. Are those conversations? Yeah, you know, similar to what >>You having, we clearly customers are getting a little bit more prudent, but we haven't seen any kind of like slow down terms of deal cycles or, or elongated sales cycles. I mean, obviously different customers in different sectors are going through different issues. What we are seeing customers think about is like how can I, you know, either drive more efficiency in my business like and big part of that is modernization of my existing legacy tech stack. How can maybe consolidate to a fewer set of vendors? I think they like our broad platform story. You know, rather than using three or four different databases, they can use MongoDB to do everything. So that that resonates with customers and the fact that they can move fast, right? Developer productivity is a proxy for innovation. And so being able to move fast to either seize new opportunities or respond to new threats is really, you know, top of mind for still C level executive. >>So can your software, you're right, consolidation is the number one way in which people are save money. Can your software be deflationary? I mean, I mean that in a good way. So >>I was just meeting with a customer who was thinking about Mongo for their transactional platform, elastic for the search platform and like a graph database for a special use case. And, and we said you can do all that on MongoDB. And he is like, oh my goodness, I can consolidate everything. Have one elegant developer interface. I can keep all the data in one place. I can easily access that data. And that makes so much more sense than having to basically use a bunch of peace parts. And so that's, that's what we're seeing more and more interest from customers about. >>So one of the things I want to get your reaction to is, I was saying on the cube, now you can disagree with me if you want, but at, in the cloud native world at Cuban and Kubernetes was going through its hype cycle. The conversation went to it's getting boring. And that's good cause they want it to be boring. They don't want people to talk about the run time. They want it to be working. Working is boring. That's invisible. It's good, it's sticky, it's done. As you guys have such a great sticky business model, you got a great install base. Mongo works, people are happy, they like the product. So it's kind of working, I won't wanna say boring cuz that's, it's irrelevant. What's the exciting things that Mongo's bringing on top of the existing base of product that is gonna really get your clients and prospects enthused about the innovation from Mongo? What's what cuz it's, it's almost like electricity in a way. You guys are very utility in, in the way you do, but it's growing. But is there an exciting element coming that you see that they should pay attention to? What's, what's your >>Vision that, right, so if you look back over the last 10, 15 years, there's been big two big platform shifts, mobile and cloud. I think the next big platform shift is from what I call dumb apps to smart apps. So building more intelligence into applications. And what that means is automating human decision making and embedding that into applications. So we believe that to be a fundamentally a developer problem to solve, yes, you need data scientist to build the machine learning algorithms to train the models. Yeah. But ultimately you can't really deploy, deployed at scale unless you give developers the tools to build those smart applications that what we focused on. And a big part of that is what we call application driven analytics where people or can, can embed that intelligence into applications so that they can instead rather having humans involved, they can make decisions faster, drive to businesses more quickly, you know, shorten it's short and time to market, et cetera. >>And so your strategy to implement those smart apps is to keep targeting the developer Yes. And build on that >>Base. Correct. Exactly. So we wanna essentially democratize the ability for any customer to use our tools to build a smart applications where they don't have the resources of a Google or you know, a large tech company. And that's essentially resonating with our customer base. >>We, we were talking about this earlier after Swami's keynote, is most companies struggle to put data at the core of their business. And I don't mean centralizing it all in a single place as data's everywhere, but, but really organizing their company and democratizing data so people can make data decisions. So I think what you're saying, essentially Atlas is the platform that you're gonna inject intelligence into and allow developers to then build applications that are, you know, intelligent, smart with ai, machine intelligence, et cetera. And that's how the ones that don't have the resources of a Google or an Amazon become correct the, that kind of AI company if >>You, and that's, that's the whole purpose of a developer data platform is to enable them to have the tools, you know, to have very sophisticated analytics, to have the ability to do very sophisticated indexes, optimized for analytics, the ability to use data lakes for very efficient storage and retrieval of data to leverage, you know, edge devices to be able to capture and synchronize data. These are all critical elements to build these next generation applications. And you have to do that, but you don't want to stitch together a thousand primitives. You want to have a platform to do that. And that's where we really focus. >>You know, Dave, Dave and I, three, two days, Dave and I, Dave Ante and I have been talking a lot about developer productivity. And one observation that's now validated is that developers are setting the pace for innovation. Correct? And if you look at the how they, the language that they speak, it's not the same language as security departments, right? They speak almost like different languages, developer and security, and then you got data language. But the developers are making choices of self-service. They can accelerate, they're driving the behavior behavior into the organizations. And this is one of the things I wrote about on Friday last week was the organizational changes are changing cuz the developers set the pace. You can't force tooling down their throat. They're gonna go with what's easy, what's workable. If you believe that to be true, then all the security's gonna be in the developer pipeline. All the innovations we've driven off that high velocity developer site, we're seeing success of security being embedded there with the developers. What are you gonna bring up to that developer layer that's going to help with security, help with maybe even new things, >>Right? So, you know, it's, it's almost a cliche to say now software is in the world, right? Because every company's value props is driven by, it's either enabled to find or created through software. What that really means is that developers are eating all the work, right? And you're seeing, you saw in DevOps, right? Where developers basically enro encroach into the ops world and made infrastructure a programmable interface. You see developers, to your point, encroaching in security, embedding more and more security features into their applications. We believe the same thing's gonna happen with data scientists and business analysts where developers are gonna embed that functionality that was done by different domains in the Alex world and embed that capability into apps themselves. So these applications are just naturally smarter. So you don't need someone to look at a dashboard and say, aha, there's some insight here now I need to go make a decision. The application will do that for you and actually make that decision for you so you can move that much more quickly to run your business either more efficiently or to drive more, you know, revenue. >>Well the interesting thing about your business is cuz you know, you got a lot of transactional activity going on and the data, the way I would say what you just described is the data stack and the application stacks are coming together, right? And you're in a really good position, I think to really affect that. You think about we've, we've operationalized so many systems, we really haven't operationalized our data systems. And, and particularly as you guys get more into analytics, it becomes an interesting, you know, roadmap for Mongo and your customers. How do you see that? >>Yeah, so I wanna be clear, we're not trying to be a data warehouse, I get it. We're not trying to be like, you know, go compete. In fact, we have nice partnership with data bricks and so forth. What we are really trying to do is enable developers to instrument and build these applications that embed analytics. Like a good analogy I'd use is like Google Maps. You think about how sophisticated Google Maps has, and I use that because everyone has used Google Maps. Yeah. Like in the old, I was old enough to print out the directions, map quest exactly, put it on my lap and drive and look down. Now have this device that tells me, you know, if there's a traffic, if there's an accident, if there's something you know, going will reroute me automatically. And what that app is doing is embedding real time data into, into its decision making and making the decision for you so that you don't have to think about which road to take. Right? You, you're gonna see that happen across almost every application over the next X number of years where these applications are gonna become so much smarter and make these decisions for you. So you can just move so much more quickly. >>Yeah. Talk about the company, what status of the company, your growth plans. Obviously you're seeing a lot of news and Salesforce co CEO just resigned, layoffs at cnn, layoffs at DoorDash. You know, tech unfortunately is not impacted, thank God. I'm not that too bad. Certainly in cloud's not impacted it is impacting some of the buying behavior. We talked about that. What's going on with the company head count? What's your goals? How's the team doing? What are your priorities? >>Right? So we we're going after a big, big opportunity. You know, we recognize, obviously the market's a little choppy right now, but our long term, we're very bullish on the opportunity. We believe that we can be the modern developer data platform to build these next generation applications in terms of costs. We're obviously being a little bit more judicious about where we're investing, but we see big, big opportunities for us. And so our overall cost base will grow next year. But obviously we also recognize that there's ways to drive more efficiency. We're at a scale now. We're a 1.2 billion business. We're gonna announce our Q3 results next week. So we'll talk a little bit more about, you know, what we're seeing in the business next week. But we, we think we're a business that's growing fast. You know, we grew, you know, over 50, 50% and so, so we're pretty fast growing business. Yeah. You see? >>Yeah, Tuesday, December 6th you guys announce Exactly. Course is a big, we always watch and love it. So, so what I'm hearing is you're not, you're not stepping on the brakes, you're still accelerating growth, but not at all costs. >>Correct. The term we're using is profitable growth. We wanna, you know, you know, drive the business in a way that we think continues to seize the opportunity. But we also, we always exercise discipline. You know, I, I'm old enough where I had to deal with 2000 and 2008, so, you know, seen the movie before, I'm not 28 and have not seen these markets. And so obviously some are, you know, emerging leaders have not seen these kinds of markets before. So we're kind of helping them think about how to continue to be disciplined. And >>I like that reference to two thousand.com bubble and the financial crisis of 2008. I mentioned this to you when we chat, I'd love to get your thoughts. Now looking back for reinvent, Amazon wasn't a force in, in 2008. They weren't really that big debt yet. Know impact agility, wasn't it? They didn't hit that, they didn't hit that cruising altitude of the value pro cloud agility, time of value moving fast. Now they are. So this is the first time that they're a part of the economic equation. You're on, you're on in the middle of it with Amazon. They could be a catalyst to recover faster if plan properly. What's your CEO take on just that general and other CEOs might be watching and saying, Hey, you know, if I play this right, I could leverage the cloud. You know, Adams is leading into the cloud during a recession. Okay, I get that. But specifically there might be a tactic. What's your view on >>That? I mean, what, what we're seeing the, the hyperscalers do is really continue to kind of compete at the raw infrastructure level on storage, on compute, on network performance, on security to provide the, the kind of the building blocks for companies like Monga Beach really build on. So we're leveraging that price performance curve that they're pushing. You know, they obviously talk about Graviton three, they're talking about their training model chip sets and their inference model chip sets and their security chip sets. Which is great for us because we can leverage those capabilities to build upon that. And I think, you know, if you had asked me, you know, in 2008, would we be talking about chip sets in 2022? I'd probably say, oh, we're way beyond that. But what it really speaks to is those things are still so profoundly important. And I think that's where you can see Amazon and Google and Microsoft compete to provide the best underlying infrastructure where companies like mongadi we can build upon and we can help customers leverage that to really build the next generation. >>I'm not saying it's 2008 all over again, but we have data from 2008 that was the first major tailwind for the cloud. Yeah. When the CFO said we're going from CapEx to opex. So we saw that. Now it's a lot different now it's a lot more mature >>I think. I think there's a fine tuning trend going on where people are right sizing, fine tuning, whatever you wanna call it. But a craft is coming. A trade craft of cloud management, cloud optimization, managing the cost structures, tuning, it's a crafting, it's more of a craft. It's kind of seems like we're >>In that era, I call it cost optimization, that people are looking to say like, I know I'm gonna invest but I wanna be rational and more thoughtful about where I invest and why and with whom I invest with. Versus just like, you know, just, you know, everyone getting a 30% increase in their opex budgets every year. I don't think that's gonna happen. And so, and that's where we feel like it's gonna be an opportunity for us. We've kind of hit scap velocity. We've got the developer mind share. We have 37,000 customers of all shapes and sizes across the world. And that customer crown's only growing. So we feel like we're a place where people are gonna say, I wanna standardize among the >>Db. Yeah. And so let's get a great quote in his keynote, he said, if you wanna save money, the place to do it is in the cloud. >>You tighten the belt, which belt you tightening? The marketplace belt, the wire belt. We had a whole session on that. Tighten your belt thing. David Chair, CEO of a billion dollar company, MongoDB, continue to grow and grow and continue to innovate. Thanks for coming on the cube and thanks for participating in our stories. >>Thanks for having me. Great to >>Be here. Thank. Okay, I, Dave ante live on the show floor. We'll be right back with our final interview of the day after this short break, day three coming to close. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

(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.