>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios today on this kind of ongoing leadership conversation, reaching out to the community during these crazy times, we're two months into the COVID crisis, and we're excited to have two of our favorite guests, one is a frequent guest, Greg Sands, he's the founder and managing partner of Costanoa Ventures, Greg, great to see you. And he brought along Martina Lauchengo, also from Costanoa, Martina, great to see you, is this, I think your first time on theCUBE, right? >> This is my first time, nice to be on, Jeff. >> Great, and Greg, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here. >> So let's get into it, I mean, part of this conversation came from a lot of efforts that you guys are putting into really getting information out to the community, and I think if there's a silver lining and there's a couple here and there, that have come from this, is that everyone is really trying to help each other out. So you've come up with something you call virtual office hours. What is that all about, is that new, or is that just kind of a greater emphasis now that most people are working from home? >> Well, we've also always done a great deal of work with our portfolio on how to deal with changing times, how to graph, go to market, both sales and marketing onto what are often product-led and founder-led companies, and in a time of crisis, we felt like it was important to share that knowledge more broadly, and to set up a venue where we can interact with the broader startup community, and hopefully in the process of doing that, we're useful. >> I just saw a quote I think today or yesterday, from Jim Hackett, the CEO of Ford, and it was "I didn't have the playbook for the global pandemic," in terms of preparation and being able to pull something off the shelf to help work through this, so as we've gone through mid-March, just this immediate, full stop, unanticipated light switch moment, now we're two months in, what are the specific actions you've been giving to your portfolio companies, and how has that changed over the course of the last 60 days? >> Well I'll take a first stab, and Martina, feel free to jump in if you've got additional thoughts, I think the first piece, going back, six, seven, eight weeks, was we all had that hair on fire moment, where you just have to understand where you are. And so I think that sense of situational awareness, and how does it affect your customers and your market, and figure out if the basics of the business, including revenue rate and what's guaranteed and what's not and expense base and planned growth trajectory are any of those foundational elements what you thought they were going to be, and readjust them, and re-plan, so almost every company went through two or three complete planning cycles, trying to understand where we are. And I think also trying to do that with a sense of authenticity and transparency and humanity, 'cause you're dealing with a company, and people's careers and people's jobs. So now I think we're more at the place where we understand the foundation, and you can more reasonably plan for the future. >> Yeah, I'd say I think what I've observed in our portfolio is people are through the shock, and that's also true for all of the customers that they're trying to reach out to, and the big adjustment is, what does our new normal look like? Jeff, before we started we were talking about how everyone has moved digital and virtual, so people did that initially because they had no choice, but now they're looking at the data they've been collecting saying "Gosh, should this mean that we should no longer do "physical events because we're having five or 10x "the amount of registration that we did before." Our digital channels are way more successful than they were in terms of outreach and awareness raising, and so everyone's looking at this moment, and saying "How should be adjust our new normal, "even post-COVID era, and do things differently "as a result of what we're learning from this time "where we have to be constrained in what we--" >> Right, so Greg, you had an interesting quote in an article recently talking about the harder challenge is going to be for people that are on this blitz scaling run, and you've talked about there's kind of two paths, there's growth at all costs, and then there's growth within a reasonable plan, clearly, if you were growth at all costs, and you were Uber or Lyft or one of these types of operations where your revenue just got turned practically off, really significant challenge, so as you look at it from an investor point of view, and what is a good rate of growth, what is the way to build a company versus this hellbent hair on fire, grab global market share at absolutely no, just spend spend spend spend spend? >> Yeah, and so of course this is independent of the pandemic, I think it's the case that there was this orientation towards blitz scaling, towards we're going to grow as fast as we can, and one of the things, if you just think about a biological metaphor, growth is expensive, growth takes a ton of capital, a ton of hiring, a ton of on-ramping, and the like, and you do all of that at very rapid speeds and you tend to cut corners, have people poorly trained, drop balls on the floor and the like, so I think the, generally speaking, our experience is that our portfolio companies, partly due to our guidance, partly 'cause we've selected each other, have been, look, we've got some very fast growers, we've got companies like Alation that have been here a lot, that have created brand new categories, but they've done it with bounce, and they've done it efficiently, and that's always what we preach, it's always what we've believed in, and I think our companies are in much better shape as a result. Martina and I both grew up as young athletes, and one of the things that you learn as an athlete is you got to be balanced, you don't know if your next step is going to have to be forward, back, left or right, and you've got to have all your sensors out and be paying attention, to figure out where you ought to go, and if you're all in one direction, you can only go forward. And when the environment changes, you're toast. >> Yeah, it's really wild to see, 'cause who ever plans for literally a binary turnoff of revenue stream, and we're seeing it in hotels and in obviously conferences and airlines and a whole bunch of industries, so it's pretty challenging. But for a lot of people, business still goes on, and Martina I want to jump into it with you, 'cause you've been a marketer in tech for a long time, but man oh man, the conference itself, the physical events, whether it be a big giant one like AWS re:Invent which had I don't know, 50,000 people, it's going to outgrow Vegas, to smaller events, those are no longer an option, yet people are still delivering products, they still have messaging to get out, they still want to touch their community. How are you kind of looking at the new normal around marketing, both for the portfolio companies but also a little bit of a broader view? >> So I'll start with the broader view, I'd say in general, Dreamforce is canceled, AWS, I mean all these things have shifted so massively and all the major companies have simultaneously made that shift, and I think one thing that they are all seeing is, they are getting a lot more registration, they're getting a lot more in engagement, this happened at Atlassian where, they rapidly made the shift to virtual, and what they saw was because they had that many more people participating in events, that they had a much bigger social bump, because that many more people were talking about what was happening simultaneously, and it also became this virtuous loop, where more and more people were talking, it was creating this intrigue, where people wanted to participate and see what was happening. So, I think people are looking at that and saying "Well how does that affect our business, "and how does that increased potential "for evangelism actually positively convert towards "a future customer, or more people talking about us "in a positive way?" So this is where they're looking at what they've put out in market and seeing what they should learn from that and I'd say that's the number one recommendation I have for all of our companies is, look at what the data is telling you, and trying to extract what your lessons are about this to what your ongoing normal should be from a marketing perspective. >> Yeah, it's such a good tip, there was so much focus at the beginning of this about what you cannot do in digital, you can't have the hall room chat or you can't have the water cooler chat, but on the other hand there's so many things you can do in digital that you can't do in the physical. And by separating content generation versus content publishing, if you will, and then content consumption, and those no longer have to happen at the same one hour window where there's an available conference room for a breakout session at the Sands on Tuesday at six, that I can't see 'cause I want to see somebody else's conference Tuesday, I mean there's so many things that you can do, and kind of just democratization of the access to the conference, if you don't have the means, the time, or just the ability to get on a plane and fly to Vegas or to New York or San Francisco, so there's a lot of stuff you can do in digital that's different, it's just not the same as the physical space, what are some of the other things that you're finding that are kind of unique and novel and actually really great? >> Well, one thing that you talked about is it relates to events, it's not just the attendees being there, it's also the talent. A lot of times you would want talent, but they're not available because they have a conflict or they can't accommodate that travel, a guy participating in a conference that's based out of London, and they are having people that it doesn't matter what time zone you're in, because they're like "Oh, you can prerecord it, "you can do it live if you choose," and so there's a flexibility that just wasn't there before, certainly as it relates to events. But in terms of novel stuff, people are reexamining things that they might have charged for in the past, so one company in our portfolio used to charge for their certifications, and now they've made it free and they've had over 1000 signups in the last couple of weeks, and so that was a small program that they ran and it's now the single largest generator of new leads for them, because they reexamined it and said "Well what assets do we have "and how can we use them differently?" And so I'd say it's not so much that people are doing monumentally new things that they haven't tried before, but they're examining the quiver of assets they have at their disposal and they're saying "Well how can we deploy them differently?" And they see the two things that are really bubbling up are you just have to do things in an excellent way, number one, and number two, you really have to do it in that much more empathetic way. >> Right, right. And Greg, I want to go back to you, go ahead. >> Jeff, if I can add two things, I think there are some things that it's worth noting that digital is uniquely good at. So one of which is inferring intent, which you don't necessarily get in the context of conferences, and the second is that as companies have dug deep and realized that they really need to take full advantage of their assets, one of the things that we find people really trying to do is to marry first party data, their own data about their own customers and their own interactions, with third party data which includes that intent data, and when you combine those together in a business to business marketing context, you can really do extraordinary things, and many companies have been under-optimized on that because they could rely on going to events and traditional face to face marketing activities. >> Well, and to me there's so many things, I mean conferences were designed in an age where there was no telephone, and you sent letters, and the speed of communication was weeks, and so that's how you had to get people together, but today, 2020, when information flows, it seems so waterfall to me to kind of squeeze everything in, especially for a big company, into three days in Las Vegas, in terms of all your product announcements, all your partner announcements, all these things, it seems completely against the trend of more of a DevOps world, which is if product group A is ready to roll, why do they have to wait to that date, and wait for product B and everyone else, not to mention that if you're some esoteric cool thing that gets lost in the sea of product announcements and press releases and events, does it really make sense? What we're seeing is there's certainly an opportunity for what's called a rally moment, whether that's a keynote or introducing a new CEO, or we want to have this moment where we have singular focus, but as soon as that's open, let the content be free, let people find what they want, when they want, and to your point Martina, if people want to self-organize, you can actually have almost infinite long tail sessions, if you give people a platform in which to organize, versus being this one way conduit of information which is the old way of working, but not really the new way in which we find, consume, and learn about things in 2020, it just seems so antiquated when we actually take a step back and think of how do we get our information today, and it's not wrapped up in one big giant splash moment. >> Well Jeff, I want to pull on a thread a little bit that you just brought up, which is that the old way of doing things, and I'd say old average, just there's no space for it right now, so I'm going to read through five things that were in my inbox this morning that went into the auto-delete pile, which is what everyone does every morning. "Tomorrow's webinar," "Only three days left, "have you registered yet?" "This week in review." So those were the bad ones that went to the automatic delete pile, that's the average run of the mill stuff that all of us get every day, and I hope everyone that's listening to this stops sending them. And here's the ones that stood out, "Why every startup CEO needs a chief of staff," so something that was specific, it told me more concretely why I should engage with what was being sent to me, it didn't tell me if it was an article or webinar, but it engaged me with content, and if you just look at Netflix as a platform, as an example of how they're very very content-forward, and they're trying to find what specifically is going to get you engaged, all the way down to the thumbnail level, that's what we are needing to do as marketers, where we're taking advantage of the knowledge that we have of our customers, where they are, and trying to create genuine connection with whatever it is we're trying to bring to them. >> With data, right, and you can AB type and all the stuff that Netflix does, it's so funny to me, the answers are all around us, we're just not looking in the right place, but I want to shift gears a little bit for marketing and talk about leadership, we've been doing a lot of these around leadership, 'cause leadership is so important. And really the uncertainty, more even the tough times, I think it's the uncertainty that really challenges people, and you mentioned something Greg, earlier, about really the transparency, and I think there's so much to be learned in terms of being human in your leadership, showing vulnerability, admitting, I'm a little scared too, I don't know what's happening, no one has been through this type of inexperience before, so from just a leadership perspective, again, what are you sharing with your portfolio companies, how are you advising people who are in this position, because they're probably nervous and uncomfortable as well, to lead these teams and to help them through this time of uncertainty. >> Well, it's an amazing and uncertain time, and frankly everybody is challenged by it, nobody's been through it before, even those of us that went through 2008 and 2000 and 2001, the ecommerce blowup in 9/11, this is different, it has a different cause and a different set of effects. I know in my case I spent the weekend rereading Jerry Collona's book, "Reboot," which talks about leading from the heart, and leading with transparency, and leading with authenticity, and what we've been trying to do in working with our founders is one, listen, and be there, and be a support, and recognize that we don't know all the answers either, and so we're in it together. Second is to try to give them the confidence and the room to do that in leading within their teams, and then the third is to focus on a couple of things that I think are particularly important, which is as I said before, situational awareness, you got to understand where you are, and the second is focus. So one of the things that everybody is finding, and we find it true with people's customers, too, hey, we were going to do five things, now we're going to do two. So companies have got to narrow the scope, they got to figure out how to be in the top two for their customers that have to get done. And so you got to do that from a strategic and execution perspective, you got to lead your team to do it, and in order to rally around it, people have to understand the facts, they have to trust you. And they have to know that your heart's in it. >> Yeah, it's almost interesting, the fact that everyone is separated, we have to communicate more, we have to communicate more frequently and we had Darren on from GitLab talking about the variety of types of communications beyond just your standard staff meeting and project updates to things, like social things and happy hours and these things, so it almost feels like because we're forced into scheduled communication, it's almost happening more frequently because you have to make sure it does, then maybe some of the ad hoc stuff that might happen in the hallways are on a more informal basis. You find that happening, are people really stepping up the scale in which they're making sure they're touching base with their team members? >> I'm definitely seeing that throughout our portfolio, so people are doing things like scheduled game nights that would've been more ad hoc in the past, or specifically scheduling water cooler time, or one of our companies has been doing specific meetings and get-togethers of parents, how do you maintain your full time job and actually coparent or figure it out while your kids are doing whatever it is that they need to and being a part of home, and working at home, and so they've definitely scheduled more, but it's really been about acknowledging the whole self that is part of this unique time, and that everybody's in the same boat, I think that is something that is really unique about this is that it is a global phenomenon, and so it's not sort of like oh, this country or this state or this industry is facing this, all of us are facing this, and so to your point, Jeff, about what does it mean to be human and to connect, it is a time in which we are uniquely capable of connecting with one another, and we all have the same way to do it, I meet a bunch of new people every week, and now we all start off actually seeing each other's homes. Saying "Oh, what is that, what book are you reading?" And so it's almost an invitation to have a more personal connection and I've definitely found despite the fact that we're doing all these meetings virtually, I actually feel more connected to a lot of people than I would have normally. >> Law of unintended consequences, you just never know. So last topic to shift gears before I let you go, we're still in the business of investing, and as I'm sure you're seeing or starting to see, now that the shock and awe's kind of over, and people are starting to define new opportunities, basically, to reassemble assets, to reassemble delivery methodologies, to reassemble business plans, and I wonder, as you look forward now to your next wave of investments, assuming everything's medium settled with the current portfolio, how is your investment thesis changing a little bit, what are you seeing in kind of a rejiggering of assets and business models that are going to take advantage of this new normal, 'cause sure enough, I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people in garages right now that are building those companies based on this new normal that are going to be leaders down the road. What are you thinking of, how are you thinking about what's going to happen later this year, and in 2021 and beyond? >> So, we absolutely are continuing to invest, and so for quick context, we're seed and A up and down the stack of enterprise technology, so think of it as applied AI and the infrastructure that supports it, much of which is data and machine learning infrastructure, but also cybersecurity and DevOps, and I think for us, one of the things that showed up right away was this idea of, we're all going to work in more distributed fashion. And I think many versions of that were "Oh, we've got a new work from home app," or the like, and we haven't actually found that those are the difference makers, what we think is that these business processes that tie together application logic and data and analytics and a collaboration layer, like in Alation, so that you can collaborate on your data, you can collaborate while you're performing an absolutely critical business function, and what used to be tribal knowledge that was passed around in the halls is embedded in software, and cataloged. And so we're seeing lots of opportunities to do that, both in workflow context and in the context of data scientists and data engineers working on the data stack and developers in and around the DevOps ecosystem, that we think are really interesting and acknowledge the fact that you can't assume that all the people working on this application are sitting in the same building, and get to talk around the water cooler. So they talk about it in the application. >> I just want to add a little something to what Greg said in terms of the things that we're seeing, really the importance of data right now, people are trying to refactor all of our operating plans, they're trying to say "What is this actually doing to our demand," and so the accuracy of data and the quality of it is more important than it ever has been, and being able to do that wherever it exists, if it's frontline, inside of a dashboard, if it's cleaning up stuff that's coming out of a data lake, people are investing in that infrastructure right now because they have the capacity to, so that's a place where we've seen I'd say probably the least amount of change, and then the other thing that this has revealed are gaps in the technology infrastructure that wasn't available, so for example supply chain, being able to identify all the elements of the mask, or the ventilator supply chain. Those systems were massively disconnected and extremely manual, and so people are looking at that saying there are some gaps that still need to be closed in a big way with infrastructure and technology, and those are some areas that we're seeing very interesting and illuminated as a result of this time. >> Yeah, I mean to certainly, what we've been talking about really is just a light switch moment, in terms of digital transformation and whether that is working from home, which is probably the top focus for a lot of people in the short term, or whether that's in education, suddenly everyone from kindergarten teachers to professors at Stanford had to suddenly learn to teach online with absolutely no preparation, no time to think about it, and then up into the data layer as well, because it's just this ongoing democratization and now with distributed teams, you are forced now to make that data available to them, really as a process as much as an objective to get it into hands to do more things, so certainly a digital transformation accelerant, like nobody expected, there's no more time to prepare and plan, it's ready set go, now. So we see it over and over again. Well thank you so much for coming on, thank you for sharing the information, just kind of last point, one of the things that I think is so interesting about today's time is it used to be the power was held by the people that had the information. And really what we've seen, and what you guys support is now the information is infinite and it's everywhere, and you should be able to find it. Now it's more about who shares the information, who's a trusted source to filter, to find the right information, and who can I go to who I know's going to give me stuff that's relevant for me, and I think you guys have really shown time and time again that in sharing information and helping others to do better, you get this multiplier effect that you wouldn't get if you're just worrying about yourself, and I think it's such a modern way to think about empowering people, and as you said, it even makes you more powerful and more successful, so really a very different way than it used to be in terms of everybody kind of holding the information, and who had the keys, had the information, that's completely turned up on the side of it's head. >> That is absolutely right, and we're thrilled to be here talking about it with you today, thanks for your continued support of the community and trying to help good people get the word out. >> Thank you, thanks a lot. >> Thanks for doing exactly what you're talking about, which is getting the right information out to people so they can be better. >> All right, well Greg, Martina, stay safe, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully next time we'll see you in person. You're watching theCUBE Conversation, Jeff Frick here in Palo Alto studio, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (calm music)

(orchestral music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation here in theCUBE's Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier. Where conversation around venture capital, entrepreneurship, crypto currencies, block chain, and more, Jonathan Ebinger our friend with BRV, formerly Blue Run Ventures, but BRV for short, sounds better, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks John, looking forward to it. >> Great to see you, we've known each other for a long time and you've been a great investor, your firm has done a lot of great stuff, deals are really famous deals, but also you dig into the companies and you really stand by your portfolio companies, but you've also done a lot of work in China. >> Yes. >> So you have a good landscape of what's going on. What's the, what's going on in China? >> Well China is really expanding in ways which we had not foreseen when we first started investing there almost 15 years ago. We were really active for five to 10 years, investing in companies that initially were considered copycat companies, you can't really use that term anymore. In fact what's happening more and more, you're seeing Chinese ideas coming to the United States. Businesses like We Chat are being copied as fast as they can, you're seeing Snapchat, Messenger and so forth, they're quickly trying to amalgamate as many assets as they can within their viewership much like we're seeing in a lot of the other Chinese analogs over there. It's exciting to see, it's very much an arms race. >> It's been interesting to watch. We were at the Ali Baba Cloud Conference last year, at the end of last year, it's interesting the innovation and entrepreneurial thirst has really changed. If you go back just 10 years ago when you guys were first getting in there, I remember the conversations were what's going on in China, it's very developmental but what's going on 10 years ago, they are dominating the mobile space, they're mobile usage is really much different makeup in how they do startups, the apps. How much of that has influenced some of their success just the demand? >> Always on, location always available, it opens up a whole new level of communication services. The idea of the larger screen format, people used to think in the United States, these large devices coming out of Korea first and then China, we thought these would never play in the United States, now Apple 10, larger screen size, it makes sense, it's mobile first right from the get go for a now billion plus users. >> So BRV, how many active portfolio companies do you guys have and what's the profile that you're looking for for entrepreneurs, what are some of the kind of companies? >> We're about 45 active companies right now. We're putting about, we're putting money in about 10 new companies a year at this point. We have a very disciplined approach of investing in Series A style companies, Series A of course means a lot of different things to people, but generally, we like to put $3 to $5 million to work early on and then follow on. >> How much do take for that, just a third? >> Typical in the 20%-25% range. There's a lot of companies out there that still fit that profile. Of course you're seeing some super sized Series A's that happen, we don't play in those but for the traditional software companies, evaluations are really right in our sweet spot. >> How big is the fund now, just what's the number in terms of capital? >> We're in fund six, we're just over $150 million. >> And you got to save some for follow on rounds. >> Exactly. >> Talk about the changes in venture capital because what's interesting, I had a conversation with Greg Sands with Costanoa Ventures, another great investor, formerly I think the first employee of Netscape I think or the business plan. Great guy, he talked about the dynamics of, you don't need that much cash anymore because if you can get unit economic visibility into what the business is working, you can do so much more with that and I'm calling it the hourglass effect, you get through that visibility, you're in control, you own your own destiny, versus the old Silicon Valley model which seems to be fading away, which is hey, what do you need? $40 million, or here's $100 million. That really limits your exit options and sometimes you can drown in your own capital. Talk about that dynamic. >> You're seeing the $40 million rounds with businesses that are much more capital intensive and that's coming back in vogue now but for the most part, I agree with what Greg's saying and this whole advent of seed funds and super seed funds and angel funds and so forth has been really great for the traditional series A investor. A lot of that early fundamental and foundational work is being done and then when the series A comes, it's more about expansion so we're effectively getting what was a Series B type stage company now we're investing in Series A. We're saying hey, this product works, there's product market fit, let's put dollars to work to really grow the market. >> So you're saying Series B was a kind of prove the business model, shifted down to the A because the cost to get there is lower and hence that's opened up a seed round lower in numbers, so it just shifts down a little bit. >> It really has, it really has and that plays into our sweet spot. We really like working on business models, distribution strategies, things like that. >> And what kind of startups do you want to invest in? What are some of the categories? >> Love financial services, we like health tech, we're doing education, we're really pretty omnivorous when it comes to the sector. What we're looking for is really businesses that are using data, real time data to disrupt the numbers. >> So you're not sector driven, you're disruption oriented. >> That's right. >> Okay let's talk about disruption, my favorite trend. Obviously I love the China dynamic because you're not sure what it is, but it's really doing well so you can't ignore it and they're innovative and they're hustling hard and they've got massive numbers. Block chain, we're super excited about, we love crypto, we think it's the biggest wave coming out there, so a lot of my smart, entrepreneurial friends are jumping on their surfboards literally and jumping out into those waves and there's a lot of action there. At the same time, people are saying, stay away from that crypto thing, it's a scam. Kind of a different perspective, what's your thoughts on that? >> If you look at, you separate the cryptocurrencies from block chain, I think it becomes a lot more clear. Block chain is for real. Tracking provenance on transactions, real estate transactions, multinational transactions, makes a lot of sense, dovetails nicely with security, so there's a real business there. You saw the announcement with IBM and Mersk the other day, what they are taking enterprise level block chain into their whole supply chain. I think that's really important. We have a company in the category called pay stand which is doing the same sort of thing with smaller size businesses, just accelerating the whole process on accounts receivable, taking working capital. >> And they're doing block chain for that? >> Yes block chain is an option, we're not forcing people onto block chain, but the idea of hey, let's give people more cost effective ways to transact, get rid of the paper checks, get rid of the invoicing and just join the modern world, much like you use Venmo if you and I are going to exchange money. >> That's pay stand, that's one of your hot companies. >> Yeah it is, absolutely. >> So are they using block chain or not? >> They are, yes. >> Okay, because it's a physical asset, it's kind of a supply chain thing? >> They use it to track the funds themselves, unlike a credit card where you have to pay a big fee or ACH which you can't really get proof of funds, with their block chain technology, you can be sure that you have the funds available and you get it instantly. >> Let's talk about use cases that you think out there, I'd like you to just weigh in on use cases for block chain that a mainstream person that's not in the tech business would understand, because they say, is it real or not? I agree block chain is legit, what are some use cases that would highlight that? >> I think if you've ever been involved in real estate, bought a home, things like that, just tracking title insurance, you're going all the way back if you live in California, you're going all the way back to pre-statehood days, you have to track the provenance of that land all the way through. You're paying title insurance, title insurance is a business you don't really need if you have accurate provenance tracking through block chain. I think that's one most of us can understand. Obviously bills of weighting with things coming over on ships. That's natural and right now things get held up in port because people are trying to find a clipboard before you can sign off on who, is this bill of weighting actually clean, that stuff can be done automatically with 2D barcodes, block chain usage. >> Certainly with perishable goods too, we learned that with IBM's example. >> Sure. >> Okay let's get into the hot companies you got going on. Name some of the hot investments that you've done. >> Sure, well I talked about pay stand a minute ago, really excited about them, another one we really like is a company called aerobotics. I know you're a fan of autonomous flying. If you think about drones and everyone knows DJI and they're a great company, that's one to one, one person flying one drone, that's not scalable obviously, it scales at one to one. With autonomous flying, you can have a whole army of drones out doing your business, whether they're doing site exploration, checking for chemical spills, looking at traffic and so forth. The company is now operating in three continents, it's just, if you think about what a drone is, effectively it's a flying cell phone. It's a cell phone that goes around, takes pictures, transmits data back, we know something about cell phones at BRV, we've been investing in this category for a long time so when we say aerobotics come along, we said this is just a natural extension of real time data, cellular technology, and location based services. >> You guys don't get a lot of credit as much as you should, in my opinion on that, you guys were very early on the mobile, mobile connectivity side and mobile footprint and device and software. That's playing well into the hottest trend that we see, that's not the sexiest trend, that's IOT. >> Absolutely. >> Because drones are certainly, industrial IOT is a big one. Instrumenting physical plants, equipment, and IOT in general the edge of the network. What's your thoughts on IOT and how would you, how do you see that evolving? It's more than just the edge of the network issue, it's bigger. >> It is, well of course the devices and sensors are important. I think a lot of that's been commoditized. The business that we've been seeing develop and there's a lot of folks, they've moved from analytics of the web to analytics of IOT, so there's a lot of interesting companies coming in the analytic space. We're not playing in that as much, we tend to like to invest in companies that are big enough that you need to have analytics for them. We like companies that have proprietary control of analytics versus necessarily running analytics for company X. >> So you're not poopooing IOT per se, just that from an investment thesis standpoint, it's not on your radar yet. >> That's right, they're either too capital intensive for us as a firm or you're basically managing someone else's data. I want to be in companies that we're managing our own data for a proprietary advantage. >> That's really what I was going to get to next, the role of data driven, so we've lived in dupe world, theCUBE started in 2010 in the offices of Cloud Air actually and people don't know the history and it's been interesting, Hadoop was supposed to save the world, the data, but it really started the data trend, the data driven trend, Mike Olsen, Amar Omadala and the team over there really nailed it but it didn't turn into be just Hadoop, it's everything so we're seeing that now become a bumper sticker, data driven marketer, I'm a data driven executive, I'm a data driven interviewer, all that stuff, what does it actually mean? What does data driven mean to you? >> Data is, there's big data and then there's actionable data obviously people talk about exhaust, the data coming off, we really got started with, as you know, we were investors in Waze, awful lot of data coming out of your cell phone, extracting just the important pieces of it are really what's important. We're investors in a company called Cabbage which looks at every transaction a small business makes to determine their credit worthiness. It's really the science. People talk about data scientists, what do they actually do? What they're actually doing is separating out the wheat from the chaff because it's just a crush of data. I saw your interview with Andy Jazzy to other day from AWS, the amount of data that's being stored, it's almost unfathomable but the important people. >> They have a lot of data. You'd like to invest in them now. >> Exactly, but that's really the thing, it's being able to separate the good data from the bad. >> You look at Amazon, I was talking to Jesse and he didn't really go there because he was kind of on message but when I talked with Swami who runs the AI group over there, we were talking about, I said to him straight up, I'm like, you're running a lot of workloads on your cloud, I'm sure you have data on those workloads. Just the impact of what they could do with that data. This is the virtuous cycle that their business model is made up of, but it's changing the game for what they can become. The thing that we're seeing in the data world is, sometimes the outcome might not be what you think because if you can use the data effectively, it's a competitive advantage, not a department. >> Right and you have to really stay true to your commitment to data. What we've seen happen is when companies, if you've been around for 10 years or so, you start to trust your gut, that's important, but it can also not lead you to see obvious conclusions because the world changes. >> And also committing to data also means from a practitioner's standpoint, investing in the tech, investing in things to be data driven, not just to say it. >> Exactly. >> Okay so what's the future for you guys? What are you looking at next year, what are some of the things you'd like to accomplish for investment opportunities, besides getting all the hot deals, you did Waze, that was an amazing deal, one of my favorite products, how did that go down? How many people passed on Waze? >> I don't know how many people passed, but we were lucky, they wanted to bring us in to the initial syndicate, they wanted to have some folks who understood. >> But it wasn't that obvious though at the beginning. What was the original pitch? >> The initial pitch was that they were going to have folks have the dash devices, the product would sit on your dashboard and they were going to be using it to map Eastern Europe because Eastern Europe was just coming into the Western world and they didn't really have good roads and good maps. We thought, that's interesting but they probably also don't have smartphones, so why don't we come across the Atlantic and let's make this thing work in the US and then from there, the rest took off country by country we were the number one navigation app in I think 150 countries at one point. >> What's the biggest thing that you've learned over the past few years in the industry that's different now I mean obviously there's some context that I'll share which is obviously the big cloud players are becoming bigger, scale's a big thing, you got Google, you got Microsoft and Amazon, you've got Facebook's out there as well. Then you get the political climate. You go to Washington D.C. and New York, Silicon Valley is not really talked highly about these days on the hill in Washington, yet GovCloud is completely changing the game of how the government is going to work with massive innovations and efficiencies, literally overnight, it's almost weird. >> It is and it isn't. If you look at it through a longer term horizon, Silicon Valley is again at the forefront, we're really the first ones with more transparency in the industry, all the different movements which are really important and all the conversations that are happening are important and they're happening here first. I think you're starting to see a ripple effect, you're seeing it going through entertainment, you're going to see it in the government, industry after industry I think is going to start to have to be more open as Silicon Valley has led the way on that. >> That's a great point. Take a minute to describe the folks out there watching that aren't from here, what is Silicon Valley about in your opinion? >> Silicon Valley is, of course it's more than a mindset, but folks who are here are here on purpose. They come here intentionally. There are very few people that I know who were born and raised here, so they're coming here because they want to be part of a shared ethos around success, around success, around shared values and competition so it's a very healthy environment, I came, I used to live in Washington D.C. and I couldn't be happier to be 3000 miles away. >> If you're a technology entrepreneur, this is where all the sports and action is, as I always say, we always love sports analogies. Okay, I got to ask you about the VC situation around ICOs, initial coin offerings are being talked about as an alternative to fundraising, there's some security options on token sales as a utility, the SEC has started to put some guidelines down on what that looks like, but the general sentiment is, it's a new way to raise money and some people are doing private rounds with venture capital and doing token sales through ICOs. You see some hybrids, but for the most part, the hard core I don't want to say right or left wing, is there a wing of the political spectrum, but the hard core ICO guys are like, this is all about disrupting the VC community and you're a VC, so you got to take that a little bit personal but the point is, what do you think about that? Is that talked about? >> I think that's good salesmanship. The VC industry such as it is, you can fit every VC into one section of Stanford stadium. There just aren't that many VCs to really go after. We're a small group of folks. I think that going after maybe disrupting the way folks are raising money through Kickstarter and things like that, that's all great. We're not going to stop it, we're going to embrace it. I think that there's plenty of different ways to raise capital, I have no compunction about those things. >> Do you think it's more of a democratization trend or a new asset class, so you don't see it disrupting the VCs per se, but if it's only a handful of VCs that could fit into Stanford Stadium, for instance, then certainly there's more options, it's a dilution. >> I think you look at it as it's just an alternative financing method, do I take debt, do I take equity, do I take venture, do I take friends and family? It's just one more arrow in the quiver of the entrepreneur, I think you have to be smart about it because thinking that you're going to get the same level of attention from an investor in your ICO that you are going to get from a series A investor who owns 20% of your company, those are two very different value propositions. >> So you see a lot of pitches and sometimes, you have to say no a lot and that's the way the game is, but a lot of times, you want the best deals. But the founders' side of the table, they're looking at the VC, I need money. So that's one of the options, what they really want is a value added partner, so what's your current take on what that means these days? Sometimes it means a firm, sometimes it means a partner, sometimes it means the community. How are you guys looking at BRV as value add versus the worst case scenario which is value subtract, you just want to have that be positive. >> I see that written about venture too. >> I know, some people experienced it. >> I think it helps that we've been around now for almost 20 years, we got started in '98 so you have to look at our body of work and the continuum of investments and founders and CEOs and CTOs that we've invested in. There's hundreds and hundreds of people who have taken money from BRV, and so that's one of the real positives about this current state we're in is that there's so much transparency. The fact that we are, I like to think we're good actors and have been for a long time, that comes out, now through our words but through the words of. >> What would they say about you guys? What would your entrepreneurs say about BRV? >> Aside from using buzzwords like value add, they say, they know their industry, they're not afraid to ask for help, they try to call problems when they see it, things like that. >> You stand by your companies. >> Absolutely. >> Awesome, well what's your favorite trend that you're personally interested in? >> I think you have to go after health care right now. It is just such a big market right now. People have been nibbling all different sides of it right now, there's been folks who are trying to expedite processing, there's actual innovations happening on the medical side, I think there is just, technology is just now starting to get into that, technology has gotten into education. >> How about the startup you guys funded that's related to the health care field. >> Yes, we're in a company called Hello Heart which is really at the confluence of a number of trends. It starts off, what Hello Heart is, it's a personal blood pressure cuff for you as an employee of a big company, more and more companies are starting to self insure. If you're a big enough company, 10,000 plus employees or even fewer, you're going to want to self insure to save money but also, your employees get very much more comfortable with you as an employer, you care about my well being, so it's a very virtuous cycle for the employees. >> So companies themselves insuring their own employees. >> Absolutely. >> They have to be super big, this company. >> This is just one component of a self insured business. You also, of course you still have access to doctors and stuff, I'm not making the pitch for being self insured as a company, I'm just saying that. >> But that's a trend. >> It's absolutely a trend and you're seeing a lot of what I would call point solutions stepping in, whether it's psychiatric, whether it's opioid help, whether it's working on heart conditions, these are all different point solutions which are being amalgamated together to help companies which are self insuring. >> So is Hello Heart for consumers or for business? >> It's sold to businesses but individual employees have it so they can keep track of their blood pressure. >> But I can't buy one if I wanted one? >> Not today, but I'll make sure I can get one to you. >> I need one, get all of our employees instrumented. >> Exactly. >> Drug tested all that stuff going on. People worry about the privacy, that's something I would be concerned with, putting. >> That's taken a really fast pendulum swing. A few years ago, Generation X was privacy, there is no privacy, the default was, location is always on, that's just flipped 180 degrees in the last few years. >> Well Jonathan, thanks for coming into this CUBE conversation, I want to ask you one final question, one thing we're passionate about is women in tech and underserved minorities, obviously Silicon Valley has to do a better job, it's out on the table, and it's working but we're still seeing a lot more work to be done, we're seeing titles not being at the right level, but pay's getting there in some places but titles aren't, some paying still below for women, still a lot more to do, what are you guys doing for the women in tech trend, how are you guys looking at that? Certainly it's a sensitive topic these days, but more importantly, it's one that's super important to society. >> It is, I think like a lot of things that have long term value, it's really about your actions versus your words, so our firm has two out of the five investment professionals are female, one of the last three CEO's we've founded is a female CEO, we have technologists, we have marketing people, we have CEO's that are females it's very much of a cross the board, sex, race and so forth. >> You guys are indiscriminate, a good deal's a good deal. >> Exactly right. >> It's about making money, VC's are in the business of making money, a lot of people don't understand, you guys have a job to do but you do a good job. >> We're in the business of making money but our investors for the most part are not for profits. Large universities, our biggest investor is the Red Cross, so when we do well, the Red Cross does well and the country does well. >> You're mission driven at this point. >> Exactly. >> Is that by design or is that just, your selection? >> We're delighted with our LP's, it's important that we have synergies aside from just finances with our investors. >> That's super well, I appreciate you coming on, I think it's super great that you're tying society benefits into money making and entrepreneurship, great stuff Jonathan Ebinger here on theCUBE, BRV check them out, great VC firm here in Silicon Valley. It's a CUBE conversation, we're talking about startups and entrepreneurship I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

>> Live from midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media and its ecosystem sponsors. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back, everyone. Live here in New York, Day Three coverage, winding down for three days of wall to wall coverage theCUBE covering Big Data NYC in conjunction with Strata Data, formerly Strata Hadoop and Hadoop World, all part of the Big Data ecosystem. Our next guest is Nenshad Bardoliwalla Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Paxata, hot start up in the space. A lot of kudos. Of course, they launched on theCUBE in 2013 three years ago when we started theCUBE as a separate event from O'Reilly. So, great to see the success. And Stephanie McReynolds, you've been on multiple times, VP of Marketing at Alation. Welcome back, good to see you guys. >> Thank you. >> Happy to be here. >> So, winding down, so great kind of wrap-up segment here in addition to the partnership that you guys have. So, let's first talk about before we get to the wrap-up of the show and kind of bring together the week here and kind of summarize everything. Tell about your partnership you guys have. Paxata, you guys have been doing extremely well. Congratulations. Prakash was talking on theCUBE. Great success. You guys worked hard for it. I'm happy for you. But partnering is everything. Ecosystem is everything. Alation, their collaboration with data. That's there ethos. They're very user-centric. >> Nenshad: Yes. >> From the founders. Seemed like a good fit. What's the deal? >> It's a very natural fit between the two companies. When we started down the path of building new information management capabilities it became very clear that the market had strong need for both finding data, right? What do I actually have? I need an inventory, especially if my data's in Amazon S3, my data is in Azure Blob storage, my data is on-premise in HDFS, my data is in databases, it's all over the place. And I need to be able to find it. And then once I find it, I want to be able to prepare it. And so, one of the things that really drove this partnership was the very common interests that both companies have. And number one, pushing user experience. I love the Alation product. It's very easy to use, it's very intuitive, really it's a delightful thing to work with. And at the same time they also share our interests in working in these hybrid multicloud environments. So, what we've done and what we announced here at Strata is actually this bi-directional integration between the products. You can start in Alation and find a data set that you want to work with, see what collaboration or notes or business metadata people have created and then say, I want to go see this in Paxata. And in a single click you can then actually open it up in Paxata and profile that data. Vice versa you can also be in Paxata and prepare data, and then with a single click push it back, and then everybody who works with Alation actually now has knowledge of where that data is. So, it's a really nice synergy. >> So, you pushed the user data back to Alation, cause that's what they care a lot about, the cataloging and making the user-centric view work. So, you provide, it's almost a flow back and forth. It's a handshake if you will to data. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, I mean, the idea's to keep the analyst or the user of that data, data scientist, even in some cases a business user, keep them in the flow of their work as much as possible. But give them the advantage of understanding what others in the organization have done with that data prior and allow them to transform it, and then share that knowledge back with the rest of the community that might be working with that data. >> John: So, give me an example. I like your Excel spreadsheet concept cause that's obvious. People know what Excel spreadsheet is so. So, it's Excel-like. That's an easy TAM to go after. All Microsoft users might not get that Azure thing. But this one, just take me through a usecase. >> So, I've got a good example. >> Okay, take me through. >> It's very common in a data lake for your data to be compressed. And when data's compressed, to a user it looks like a black box. So, if the data is compressed in Avro or Parquet or it's even like JSON format. A business user has no idea what's in that file. >> John: Yeah. >> So, what we do is we find the file for them. It may have some comments on that file of how that data's been used in past projects that we infer from looking at how others have used that data in Alation. >> John: So, you put metadata around it. >> We put a whole bunch of metadata around it. It might be comments that people have made. It might be >> Annotations, yeah. >> actual observations, annotations. And the great thing that we can do with Paxata is open that Avro file or Parquet file, open it up so that you can actually see the data elements themselves. So, all of a sudden, the business user has access without having to use a command line utility or understand anything about compression, and how you open that file up-- >> John: So, as Paxata spitting out there nuggets of value back to you, you're kind of understanding it, translating it to the user. And they get to do their thing, you get to do your thing, right? >> It's making a Avro or a Parquet file as easy to use as Excel, basically. Which is great, right? >> It's awesome. >> Now, you've enabled >> a whole new class of people who can use that. >> Well, and people just >> Get turned off when it's anything like jargon, or like, "What is that? I'm afraid it's phishing. Click on that and oh!" >> Well, the scary thing is that in a data lake environment, in a lot of cases people don't even label the files with extensions. They're just files. (Stephanie laughs) So, what started-- >> It's like getting your pictures like DS, JPEG. It's like what? >> Exactly. >> Right. >> So, you're talking about unlabeled-- >> If you looked on your laptop, and if you didn't have JPEG or DOC or PPT. Okay, I don't know that this file is. Well, what you have in the data lake environment is that you have thousands of these files that people don't really know what they are. And so, with Alation we have the ability to get all the value around the curation of the metadata, and how people are using that data. But then somebody says, "Okay, but I understand that this file exists. What's in it?" And then with Click to Profile from Alation you're immediately taken into Paxata. And now you're actually looking at what's in that file. So, you can very quickly go from this looks interesting to let me understand what's inside of it. And that's very powerful. >> Talk about Alation. Cause I had the CEO on, also their lead investor Greg Sands from Costanoa Ventures. They're a pretty amazing team but it's kind of out there. No offense, it's kind of a compliment actually. (Stephanie laughs) >> They got a symbolic >> Stephanie: Keep going. system Stanford guy, who's like super-smart. >> Nenshad: Yeah. >> They're on something that's really unique but it's almost too simple to be. Like, wait a minute! Google for the data, it's an awesome opportunity. How do you describe Alation to people who say, "Hey, what's this Alation thing?" >> Yeah, so I think that the best way to describe it is it's the browser for all of the distributed data in the enterprise. Sorry, so it's both the catalog, and the browser that sits on top of it. It sounds very simple. Conceptually it's very simple but they have a lot of richness in what they're able to do behind the scenes in terms of introspecting what type of work people are doing with data, and then taking that knowledge and actually surfacing it to the end user. So, for example, they have very powerful scenarios where they can watch what people are doing in different data sources, and then based on that information actually bubble up how queries are being used or the different patterns that people are doing to consume data with. So, what we find really exciting is that this is something that is very complex under the covers. Which Paxata is as well being built upon Spark. But they have put in the hard engineering work so that it looks simple to the end user. And that's the exact same thing that we've tried to do. >> And that's the hard problem. Okay, Stephanie back ... That was a great example by the way. Can't wait to have our little analyst breakdown of the event. But back to Alation for you. So, how do you talk about, you've been VP of Marketing of Alation. But you've been around the block. You know B2B, tech, big data. So, you've seen a bunch of different, you've worked at Trifacta, you worked at other companies, and you've seen a lot of waves of innovation come. What's different about Alation that people might not know about? How do you describe the difference? Because it sounds easy, "Oh, it's a browser! It's a catalog!" But it's really hard. Is it the tech that's the secret? Is it the approach? How do you describe the value of Alation? I think what's interesting about Alation is that we're solving a problem that since the dawn of the data warehouse has not been solved. And that is how to help end users really find and understand the data that they need to do their jobs. A lot of our customers talk about this-- >> John: Hold on. Repeat that. Cause that's like a key thing. What problem hasn't been solved since the data warehouse? >> To be able to actually find and fully understand, understand to the point of trust the data that you want to use for your analysis. And so, in the world of-- >> John: That sounds so simple. >> Stephanie: In the world of data warehousing-- >> John: Why is it so hard? >> Well, because in the world of data warehousing business people were told what data they should use. Someone in IT decided how to model the data, came up with a KPR calculation, and told you as a business person, you as a CEO, this is how you're going to monitor you business. >> John: Yeah. >> What business person >> Wants to be told that by an IT guy, right? >> Well, it was bounded by IT. >> Right. >> Expression and discovery >> Should be unbounded. Machine learning can take care of a lot of bounded stuff. I get that. But like, when you start to get into the discovery side of it, it should be free. >> Well, no offense to the IT team, but they were doing their best to try to figure out how to make this technology work. >> Well, just look at the cost of goods sold for storage. I mean, how many EMC drives? Expensive! IT was not cheap. >> Right. >> Not even 10, 15, 20 years ago. >> So, now when we have more self-service access to data, and we can have more exploratory analysis. What data science really introduced and Hadoop introduced was this ability on-demand to be able to create these structures, you have this more iterative world of how you can discover and explore datasets to come to an insight. The only challenge is, without simplifying that process, a business person is still lost, right? >> John: Yeah. >> Still lost in the data. >> So, we simply call that a catalog. But a catalog is much more-- >> Index, catalog, anthology, there's other words for it, right? >> Yeah, but I think it's interesting because like a concept of a catalog is an inventory has been around forever in this space. But the concept of a catalog that learns from other's behavior with that data, this concept of Behavior I/O that Aaron talked about earlier today. The fact that behavior of how people query data as an input and that input then informs a recommendation as an output is very powerful. And that's where all the machine learning and A.I. comes to work. It's hidden underneath that concept of Behavior I/O but that's there real innovation that drives this rich catalog is how can we make active recommendations to a business person who doesn't have to understand the technology but they know how to apply that data to making a decision. >> Yeah, that's key. Behavior and textual information has always been the two fly wheels in analysis whether you're talking search engine or data in general. And I think what I like about the trends here at Big Data NYC this weekend. We've certainly been seeing it at the hundreds of CUBE events we've gone to over the past 12 months and more is that people are using data differently. Not only say differently, there's baselining, foundational things you got to do. But the real innovators have a twist on it that give them an advantage. They see how they can use data. And the trend is collective intelligence of the customer seems to be big. You guys are doing it. You're seeing patterns. You're automating the data. So, it seems to be this fly wheel of some data, get some collective data. What's your thoughts and reactions. Are people getting it? Is this by people doing it by accident on purpose kind of thing? Did people just fell on their head? Or you see, "Oh, I just backed into this?" >> I think that the companies that have emerged as the leaders in the last 15 or 20 years, Google being a great example, Amazon being a great example. These are companies whose entire business models were based on data. They've generated out-sized returns. They are the leaders on the stock market. And I think that many companies have awoken to the fact that data as a monetizable asset to be turned into information either for analysis, to be turned into information for generating new products that can then be resold on the market. The leading edge companies have figured that out, and our adopting technologies like Alation, like Paxata, to get a competitive advantage in the business processes where they know they can make a difference inside of the enterprise. So, I don't think it's a fluke at all. I think that most of these companies are being forced to go down that path because they have been shown the way in terms of the digital giants that are currently ruling the enterprise tech world. >> All right, what's your thoughts on the week this week so far on the big trends? What are obvious, obviously A.I., don't need to talk about A.I., but what were the big things that came out of it? And what surprised you that didn't come out from a trends standpoint buzz here at Strata Data and Big Data NYC? What were the big themes that you saw emerge and didn't emerge what was the surprise? Any surprises? >> Basically, we're seeing in general the maturation of the market finally. People are finally realizing that, hey, it's not just about cool technology. It's not about what distribution or package. It's about can you actually drive return on investment? Can you actually drive insights and results from the stack? And so, even the technologists that we were talking with today throughout the course of the show are starting to talk about it's that last mile of making the humans more intelligent about navigating this data, where all the breakthroughs are going to happen. Even in places like IOT, where you think about a lot of automation, and you think about a lot of capability to use deep learning to maybe make some decisions. There's still a lot of human training that goes into that decision-making process and having agency at the edge. And so I think this acknowledgement that there should be balance between human input and what the technology can do is a nice breakthrough that's going to help us get to the next level. >> What's missing? What do you see that people missed that is super-important, that wasn't talked much about? Is there anything that jumps out at you? I'll let you think about it. Nenshad, you have something now. >> Yeah, I would say I completely agree with what Stephanie said which we are seeing the market mature. >> John: Yeah. >> And there is a compelling force to now justify business value for all the investments people have made. The science experiment phase of the big data world is over. People now have to show a return on that investment. I think that being said though, this is my sort of way of being a little more provocative. I still think there's way too much emphasis on data science and not enough emphasis on the average business analyst who's doing work in the Fortune 500. >> It should be kind of the same thing. I mean, with data science you're just more of an advanced analyst maybe. >> Right. But the idea that every person who works with data is suddenly going to understand different types of machine learning models, and what's the right way to do hyper parameter tuning, and other words that I could throw at you to show that I'm smart. (laughter) >> You guys have a vision with the Excel thing. I could see how you see that perspective because you see a future. I just think we're not there yet because I think the data scientists are still handcuffed and hamstrung by the fact that they're doing too much provisioning work, right? >> Yeah. >> To you're point about >> surfacing the insights, it's like the data scientists, "Oh, you own it now!" They become the sysadmin, if you will, for their department. And it's like it's not their job. >> Well, we need to get them out of data preparation, right? >> Yeah, get out of that. >> You shouldn't be a data scientist-- >> Right now, you have two values. You've got the use interface value, which I love, but you guys do the automation. So, I think we're getting there. I see where you're coming from, but still those data sciences have to set the tone for the generation, right? So, it's kind of like you got to get those guys productive. >> And it's not a .. Please go ahead. >> I mean, it's somewhat interesting if you look at can the data scientist start to collaborate a little bit more with the common business person? You start to think about it as a little bit of scientific inquiry process. >> John: Yeah. >> Right? >> If you can have more innovators around the table in a common place to discuss what are the insights in this data, and people are bringing business perspective together with machine learning perspective, or the knowledge of the higher algorithms, then maybe you can bring those next leaps forward. >> Great insight. If you want my observations, I use the crazy analogy. Here's my crazy analogy. Years it's been about the engine Model T, the car, the horse and buggy, you know? Now, "We got an engine in the car!" And they got wheels, it's got a chassis. And so, it's about the apparatus of the car. And then it evolved to, "Hey, this thing actually drives. It's transportation." You can actually go from A to B faster than the other guys, and people still think there's a horse and buggy market out there. So, they got to go to that. But now people are crashing. Now, there's an art to driving the car. >> Right. >> So, whether you're a sports car or whatever, this is where the value piece I think hits home is that, people are driving the data now. They're driving the value proposition. So, I think that, to me, the big surprise here is how people aren't getting into the hype cycle. They like the hype in terms of lead gen, and A.I., but they're too busy for the hype. It's like, drive the value. This is not just B.S. either, outcomes. It's like, "I'm busy. I got security. I got app development." >> And I think they're getting smarter about how their valuing data. We're starting to see some economic models, and some ways of putting actual numbers on what impact is this data having today. We do a lot of usage analysis with our customers, and looking at they have a goal to distribute data across more of the organization, and really get people using it in a self-service manner. And from that, you're being able to calculate what actually is the impact. We're not just storing this for insurance policy reasons. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And this cheap-- >> John: It's not some POC. Don't do a POC. All right, so we're going to end the day and the segment on you guys having the last word. I want to phrase it this way. Share an anecdotal story you've heard from a customer, or a prospective customer, that looked at your product, not the joint product but your products each, that blew you away, and that would be a good thing to leave people with. What was the coolest or nicest thing you've heard someone say about Alation and Paxata? >> For me, the coolest thing they said, "This was a social network for nerds. I finally feel like I've found my home." (laughter) >> Data nerds, okay. >> Data nerds. So, if you're a data nerd, you want to network, Alation is the place you want to be. >> So, there is like profiles? And like, you guys have a profile for everybody who comes in? >> Yeah, so the interesting thing is part of our automation, when we go and we index the data sources we also index the people that are accessing those sources. So, you kind of have a leaderboard now of data users, that contract one another in system. >> John: Ooh. >> And at eBay leader was this guy, Caleb, who was their data scientist. And Caleb was famous because everyone in the organization would ask Caleb to prepare data for them. And Caleb was like well known if you were around eBay for awhile. >> John: Yeah, he was the master of the domain. >> And then when we turned on, you know, we were indexing tables on teradata as well as their Hadoop implementation. And all of a sudden, there are table structures that are Caleb underscore cussed. Caleb underscore revenue. Caleb underscore ... We're like, "Wow!" Caleb drove a lot of teradata revenue. (Laughs) >> Awesome. >> Paxata, what was the coolest thing someone said about you in terms of being the nicest or coolest most relevant thing? >> So, something that a prospect said earlier this week is that, "I've been hearing in our personal lives about self-driving cars. But seeing your product and where you're going with it I see the path towards self-driving data." And that's really what we need to aspire towards. It's not about spending hours doing prep. It's not about spending hours doing manual inventories. It's about getting to the point that you can automate the usage to get to the outcomes that people are looking for. So, I'm looking forward to self-driving information. Nenshad, thanks so much. Stephanie from Alation. Thanks so much. Congratulations both on your success. And great to see you guys partnering. Big, big community here. And just the beginning. We see the big waves coming, so thanks for sharing perspective. >> Thank you very much. >> And your color commentary on our wrap up segment here for Big Data NYC. This is theCUBE live from New York, wrapping up great three days of coverage here in Manhattan. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. See you next time. (upbeat techo music)