>>Hello, and welcome back to the cubes coverage of coop con cloud native con 2021. We're here in person at a real event. I'm John farrier host of the cube, but Dave Nicholson, Michael has got great guests here. Two founders of brand new startup, one week old cable on ASCII and Dave Lawrence, uh, with chain guard, former Google employees, open source community members decided to start a company with five other people on total five total. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for >>Having us. So tell us like a product, you know, we know you don't have a price. So take us through the story because this is one of those rare moments. We got great chance to chat with you guys just a week into the new forms company and the team. What's the focus, what's the vision. >>How far back do you want to go with this story >>And why you left Google? So, you know, we're a gin and tonics. We get a couple of beers I can do that. We can do that. Let's just take over the world. >>Yeah. So we both been at Google, uh, for awhile. Um, the last couple of years we've been really worried about and focused on open-source security risk and supply chain security in general and software. Um, it's been a really interesting time as you probably noticed, uh, to be in that space, but it wasn't that interesting two years ago or even a year and a half ago. Um, so we were doing a bunch of this work at Google and the open source. Nobody really understood it. People kind of looked at us funny at talks and conferences. Um, and then beginning of this year, a bunch of attacks started happening, uh, things in the headlines like solar winds, solar winds attack, like you say, it attack all these different ransomware things happening. Uh, companies and governments are getting hit with supply chain attacks. So overnight people kind of started caring and being really worried about the stuff that we've been doing for a while. So it was a pretty cool thing to be a part of. And it seemed like a good time to start a company and keep your >>Reaction to this startup. How do you honestly feel, I suppose, feeling super excited. Yeah. >>I am really excited. I was in stars before Google. So then I went to Google where there for seven, I guess, Dan, a little bit longer, but I was there for seven years on the product side. And then yeah, we, we, the open source stuff, we were really there for protecting Google and we both came from cloud before that working on enterprise product. So then sorta just saw the opportunity, you know, while these companies trying to scramble and then sort of figure out how to better secure themselves. So it seemed like a perfect, >>The start-up bug and you back in the start up, but it's the timing's perfect. I got to say, this is a big conversation supply chain from whether it's components and software now, huge attack vector, people are taking advantage of it super important. So I'm really glad you're doing it. But first explain to the folks watching what is supply chain software? What's the challenge? What is the, what is the supply chain security challenge or problem? >>Sure. Yeah, it's the metaphor of software supply chain. It's just like physical supply chain. That's where the name came from. And it, it really comes down to how the code gets from your team's keyboard, your team's fingers on those keyboards into your production environment. Um, and that's just the first level of it. Uh, cause nobody writes all of the code. They use themselves. We're here at cloud native con it's hundreds of open source vendors, hundreds of open libraries that people are reusing. So your, your trust, uh, radius and your attack radius extends to not just your own companies, your own developers, but to everyone at this conference. And then everyone that they rely on all the way out. Uh, it's quite terrifying. It's a surface, the surface area explode pretty quickly >>And people are going and the, and the targeting to, because everyone's touching the code, it's open. It's a lot of action going on. How do you solve the problem? What is the approach? What's the mindset? What's the vision on the problems solving solutions? >>Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think like you said, the first step is awareness. Like Dan's been laughing, he's been, he felt like a crazy guy in the corner saying, you know, stop building software underneath your desk and you know, getting companies, >>Hey, we didn't do, why don't you tell them? I was telling him for five years. >>Yeah. But, but I think one of his go-to lines was like, would you pick up a thumb drive off the side of the street and plug it into your computer? Probably not. But when you download, you know, an open source package or something, that's actually can give you more privileges and production environments and it's so it's pretty scary. Um, so I think, you know, for the last few years we've been working on a number of open source projects in this space. And so I think that's where we're going to start is we're going to look at those and then try to grow out the community. And we're, we're watching companies, even like solar winds, trying to piece these parts together, um, and really come up with a better solution for themselves. >>Are there existing community initiatives or open source efforts that are underway that you plan to participate in or you chart? Are you thinking of charting a new >>Path? >>Oh, it's that looks like, uh, Thomas. Yeah, the, the SIG store project we kicked off back in March, if you've covered that or familiar with that at all. But we kicked that off back in March of 2021 kind of officially we'd look at code for awhile before then the idea there was to kind of do what let's encrypted, uh, for browsers and Webster, um, security, but for code signing and open source security. So we've always been able to get code signing certificates, but nobody's really using them because they're expensive. They're complicated, just like less encrypted for CAS. They made a free one that was automated and easy to use for developers. And now people do without thinking about it in six stores, we tried to do the same thing for open source and just because of the headlines that were happening and all of the attacks, the momentum has just been incredible. >>Is it a problem that people just have to just get on board with a certain platform or tool or people have too many tools, they abandoned them there, their focus shifts is there. Why what's the, what's the main problem right now? >>Well, I think, you know, part of the problem is just having the tools easy enough for developers are going to want to use them and it's not going to get in our way. I think that's going to be a core piece of our company is really nailing down the developer experience and these toolings and like the co-sign part of SIG store that he was explaining, like it's literally one command line to sign, um, a package, assign a container and then one line to verify on the other side. And then these organizations can put together sort of policies around who they trust and their system like today it's completely black box. They have no idea what they're running and takes a re >>You have to vape to rethink and redo everything pretty much if they want to do it right. If they just kind of fixing the old Europe's sold next solar with basically. >>Yeah. And that's why we're here at cloud native con when people are, you know, the timing is perfect because people are already rethinking how their software gets built as they move it into containers and as they move it into Kubernetes. So it's a perfect opportunity to not just shift to Kubernetes, but to fix the way you build software from this, >>What'd you say is the most prevalent change mindset change of developers. Now, if you had to kind of, kind of look at it and say, okay, current state-of-the-art mindset of a developer versus say a few years ago, is it just that they're doing things modularly with more people? Or is it more new approaches? Is there a, is there a, >>I think it's just paying attention to your building release process and taking it seriously. This has been a theme for, since I've been in software, but you have these very fancy production data centers with physical security and all these levels of, uh, Preston prevention and making sure you can't get in there, but then you've got a Jenkins machine that's three years old under somebody's desk building the code that goes into there. >>It gets socially engineered. It gets at exactly. >>Yeah. It's like the, it's like the movies where they, uh, instead of breaking into jail, they hide in the food delivery truck. And it's, it's that, that's the metaphor that I like perfectly. The fence doesn't work. If your truck, if you open the door once a week, it doesn't matter how big defenses. Yeah. So that's >>Good Dallas funny. >>And I, I think too, like when I used to be an engineer before I joined Google, just like how easy it is to bring in a third party package or something, you know, you need like an image editing software, like just go find one off the internet. And I think, you know, developers are slowly doing a mind shift. They're like, Hey, if I introduce a new dependency, you know, there's going to be, I'm going to have to maintain this thing and understand >>It's a little bit of a decentralized view too. Also, you got a little bit of that. Hey, if you sign it, you own it. If it tracks back to you, okay, you are, your fingerprints are, if you will, or on that chain of >>Custody and custody. >>Exactly. I was going to say, when I saw chain guard at first of course, I thought that my pant leg riding a bike, but then of course the supply chain things coming in, like on a conveyor belt, conveyor, conveyor belt. But that, that whole question of chain of custody, it isn't, it isn't as simple as a process where someone grabs some code, embeds it in, what's going on, pushes it out somewhere else. That's not the final step typically. Yeah. >>So somebody else grabs that one. And does it again, 35 more times, >>The one, how do you verify that? That's yeah, it seems like an obvious issue that needs to be addressed. And yet, apparently from what you're telling us for quite a while, people thought you were a little bit in that, >>And it's not just me. I mean, not so Ken Thompson of bell labs and he wrote the book >>He wrote, yeah, it was a seatbelt that I grew >>Up on in the eighties. He gave a famous lecture called uh, reflections on trusting trust, where he pranked all of his colleagues at bell labs by putting a back door in a compiler. And that put back doors into every program that compiled. And he was so clever. He even put it in, he made that compiler put a backdoor into the disassembler to hide the back door. So he spent weeks and, you know, people just kind of gave up. And I think at that point they were just like, oh, we can't trust any software ever. And just forgot about it and kept going on and living their lives. So this is a 40 year old problem. We only care about it now. >>It's totally true. A lot of these old sacred cows. So I would have done life cycles, not really that relevant anymore because the workflows are changing. These new Bev changes. It's complete dev ops is taken over. Let's just admit it. Right. So if we have ops is taken over now, cloud native apps are hitting the scene. This is where I think there's a structural industry change, not just the community. So with that in mind, how do you guys vector into that in terms of a market entry? What's just thinking around product. Obviously you got a higher, did you guys raise some capital in process? A little bit of a capital raise five, no problem. Todd market, but product wise, you've got to come in, get the beachhead. >>I mean, we're, we're, we're casting a wide net right now and talking to as many customers like we've met a lot of these, these customer potential customers through the communities, you know, that we've been building and we did a supply chain security con helped with that event, this, this Monday to negative one event and solar winds and Citibank were there and talking about their solutions. Um, and so I think, you know, and then we'll narrow it down to like people that would make good partners to work with and figure out how they think they're solving the problem today. And really >>How do you guys feel good? You feel good? Well, we got Jerry Chen coming off from gray lock next round. He would get a term sheet, Jerry, this guy's got some action on it in >>There. Probably didn't reply to him on LinkedIn. >>He's coming out with Kronos for him. He just invested 200 million at CrossFit. So you guys should have a great time. Congratulations on the leap. I know it's comfortable to beat Google, a lot of things to work on. Um, and student startups are super fun too, but not easy. None of the female or, you know, he has done it before, so. Right. Cool. What do you think about today? Did the event here a little bit smaller, more VIP event? What's your takeaway on this? >>It's good to be back in person. Obviously we're meeting, we've been associating with folks over zoom and Google meets for a while now and meeting them in person as I go, Hey, no hard to recognize behind the mask, but yeah, we're just glad to sort of be back out in a little bit of normalization. >>Yeah. How's everything in Austin, everyone everyone's safe and good over there. >>Yeah. It's been a long, long pandemic. Lots of ups and downs, but yeah. >>Got to get the music scene back. Most of these are comes back in the house. Everything's all back to normal. >>Yeah. My hair doesn't normally look like this. I just haven't gotten a haircut since this also >>You're going to do well in this market. You got a term sheet like that. Keep the hair, just to get the money. I think I saw your LinkedIn profile and I was wondering it's like, which version are we going to get? Well, super relevant. Super great topic. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on. Sharing the story. You're in the queue. Great jumper. Dave Nicholson here on the cube date, one of three days we're back in person of course, hybrid event. Cause the cube.net for all more footage and highlights and remote interviews. So stay tuned more coverage after this short break.

(spirited music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in the Palo Alto Studios for a CUBE Conversation. Part of our Western Digital Data Makes Possible Series, really looking at a lot of cool applications. At the end of the day, data's underneath everything. There's infrastructure and storage that's holding that, but it's much more exciting to talk about the applications. We're excited to have somebody who's kind of on the cutting edge of a next chapter of something you're probably familiar with. He's Steven Webster, and he is the founder and CEO of Asensei. Steven, great to see you. >> Likewise, likewise. >> So, you guys are taking, I think everyone's familiar with Fitbits, as probably one of the earliest iterations of a biometric feedback, for getting more steps. At the end of the day, get more steps. And you guys are really taking it to the next level, which is, I think you call it connected coaching, so I wondered if you could give everyone a quick overview, and then we'll dig into it a little bit. >> Yeah, I think we're all very familiar now with connected fitness in hindsight, as a category that appeared and emerged, as, like you say, first it was activity trackers. We saw those trackers primarily move into smartwatches, and the category's got life in it, life in it left. I see companies like Flywheel and Peloton, we all know Peloton now. >> [Jeff] Right. >> We're starting to make the fitness equipment itself, the treadmill, the bike, connected. So, there's plenty of growth in that category. But our view is that tracking isn't teaching, and counting and cheering isn't coaching. And so we see this opportunity for this new category that's emerging alongside connected fitness, and that's what we call connected coaching. >> Connected coaching. So the biggest word, obviously, instead of fitness tracker, to the connected coaching, is coaching. >> Yeah. >> So, you guys really think that the coaching piece of it is core. And are you targeting high-end athletes, or is this for the person that just wants to take a step up from their fitness tracker? Where in the coaching spectrum are you guys targeting? >> I saw your shoe dog, Phil Knight, founder of Nike, a book on the shelf behind you there, and his co-founder, Bill Bowerman, has a great quote that's immortalized in Nike offices and stores around the world: "If you have a body, you're an athlete." So, that's how we think about our audience. Our customer base is anyone that wants to unlock their athletic potential. I think if you look at elite sports, and elite athletes, and Olympic athletes, they've had access to this kind of technology going back to the Sydney Olympics, so we're really trying to consumerize that technology and make it available to the people that want to be those athletes, but aren't those athletes yet. You might call it the weekend warrior, or just the committed athlete, that would identify, identify themselves according to a sport that they play. >> So, there's different parts of coaching, right? One, is kind of knowing the techniques, so that you've got the best practices by which to try to practice. >> [Steven] Yep. >> And then there's actually coaching to those techniques, so people practice, right? Practice doesn't make perfect. It's perfect practice that makes perfect. >> [Steven] You stole our line, which we stole from someone else. >> So, what are you doing? How do you observe the athlete? How do you communicate with the athlete? How do you make course corrections to the athlete to move it from simply tracking to coaching? >> [Steven] I mean, it starts with, you have to see everything and miss nothing. So, you need to have eyes on the athlete, and there's really two ways we think you can do that. One is, you're using cameras and computer vision. I think most of us are familiar with technologies like Microsoft Connect, where an external camera can allow you to see the skeleton and the biomechanics of the athlete. And that's a big thing for us. We talk about the from to being from just measuring biometrics: how's your heart rate, how much exertion are you making, how much power are you laying down. We need to move from biometrics to biomechanics, and that means looking at technique, and posture, and movement, and timing. So, we're all familiar with cameras, but we think the more important innovation is the emergence of smart clothing, or smart apparel, and the ability to take sensors that would have been discrete, hard components, and infuse those sensors into smart apparel. We've actually created a reference design for a motion capture sensor, and a network of those sensors infused in your apparel allows us to recover your skeleton, but as easily as pulling on a shirt or shorts. >> [Jeff] So you've actually come up with a reference design. So, obviously, begs a question: you're not working with any one particular apparel manufacturer. You really want to come up with a standard and publish the standard by which anyone could really define, capture, and record body movements, and to convert those movements from the clothing into a model. >> No, that's exactly it. We have no desire to be in the apparel industry. We have no desire to unseat Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour. We're actually licensing our technology royalty-free. We just want to accelerate the adoption of smart apparel. And I think the thing about smart apparel is, no one's going to walk into Niketown and say, "Where's the smart apparel department? "I don't want dumb apparel anymore." There needs to be a compelling reason to buy digitally enhanced apparel, and we think one of the most compelling reasons to buy that is so that we can be coached in the sport of our choice. >> [Jeff] So, then you're starting out with rowing, I believe, is your first sport, right? >> [Steven] That's correct, yeah. >> And so the other really important piece of it, is if people don't have smart apparel, or the smart apparel's not there yet, or maybe when they have smart apparel, there's a lot of opportunities to bring in other data sources beyond just that single set. >> [Steven] And that's absolutely key. When I think about biomechanics, that's what goes in, but there's also what comes out. Good form isn't just aesthetic. Good form is in any given sport. Good form and good technique is about organizing yourself so that you perform most efficiently and perform most effectively. Yeah, so you corrected a point in that we've chosen rowing as one of the sports. Rowing is all about technique. It's all about posture. It's all about form. If you've got two rowers who, essentially, have the same strength, the same cardiovascular capability, the one with the best technique will make the boat move faster. But for the sport of rowing, we also get a tremendous amount of telemetry coming off the rowing machine itself. A force curve weakened on every single pull of that handle. We can see how you're laying down that force, and we can read those force curves. We can look at them and tell things like, are you using your legs enough? Are you opening your back too late or too early? Are you dominant on your arms, where you shouldn't be? Is your technique breaking down at higher stroke rates, but is good at lower stroke rates? So it's a good place for us to start. We can take all of that knowledge and information and coach the athlete. And then when we get down to more marginal gains, we can start to look at their posture and form through that technology like smart apparel. >> There's the understanding what they're doing, and understanding the effort relative to best practices, but there's also, within their journey. Maybe today, they're working on cardio, and tomorrow, they're working on form. The next day, they're working on sprints. So the actual best practices in coaching a sport or particular activity, how are you addressing that? How are you bringing in that expertise beyond just the biometric information? >> [Steven] So yeah, we don't think technology is replacing coaches. We just think that coaches that use technology will replace coaches that don't. It's not an algorithm that's trying to coach you. We're taking the knowledge and the expertise of world-class coaches in the sport, that athletes want to follow, and we're taking that coaching, and essentially, think of it as putting it into a learning management system. And then for any given athlete, Just think of it the way a coach coaches. If you walked into a rowing club, I don't know if you've ever rowed before or not, but a coach will look at you, they'll sit you on a rowing machine or sit you on a boat, and just look at you and decide, what's the one next thing that I'm going to teach you that's going to make you better? And really, that's the art of coaching right there. It's looking for that next improvement, that next marginal gain. It's not just about being able to look at the athlete, but then decide where's the improvement that we want to coach the athlete? And then the whole sports psychology of, how do you coach his improvements? >> Because there's the whole hammer versus carrot. That's another thing. You need to learn how the individual athlete responds, what types of things do they respond better to? Do they like to get yelled? Do they like to be encouraged? Did they like it at the beginning? Did they like it at the end? So, do you guys incorporate some of these softer coaching techniques into the application? >> Our team have all coached sport at university-level typically. We care a lot and we think a lot about the role of the coach. The coach's job is to attach technique to the athlete's body. It's to take what's in your head and what you've seen done before, and give that to the athlete, so absolutely, we're thinking about how do you establish the correct coaching cues. How do you positively reinforce, not just negatively reinforce? Is that person a kinesthetic learner, where they need to feel how to do it correctly? Are they a more visual learner, where they respond better to metaphor? Now, one of the really interesting things with a digital coach is the more people we teach, the better we can get at teaching, because we can start to use some of the techniques of enlarged datasets, and looking at what's working and what's not working. In fact, it's the same technology we would use in marketing or advertising, to segment an audience, and target content. >> Right. >> [Steven] We can take that same technology and apply it how we think about coaching sports. >> So is your initial target to help active coaches that are looking for an edge? Or are you trying to go for the weakend warrior, if you will? Where's your initial market? >> For rowing, we've actually zeroed in on three athletes, where we have a point of view that Asensei can be of help. I'll tell you who the three are. First, is the high school athlete who wants to go to college and get recruited. So, we're selling to the parent as much as we're selling to the student. >> [Jeff] That's an easy one. Just show up and be tall. >> Well, show up, be tall, but also what's your 2k time? How fast can you row 2,000 meters? That's a pretty important benchmark. So for that high school athlete, that's a very specific audience where we're bringing very specific coaches. In fact, the coach that we're launching with to that market, his story is one of, high school to college to national team, and he just came back from the Olympics in Rio. The second athlete that we're looking at is the person who never wants to go on the water, but likes that indoor rowing machine, so it's that CrossFit athlete or it's an indoor rower. And again, we have a very specific coach who coaches indoor rowing. And then the third target customer is-- >> What's that person's motivation, just to get a better time? >> Interesting, in that community, there's a lot of competitiveness, so yeah, it's about I want to get good at this, I want to get better at this. Maybe enter local competitions, either inside your gym or your box. This weekend, in Boston, we have just had one of the largest indoor world, it was the World Indoor Rowing Championships, the C.R.A.S.H B's. There's these huge indoor rowing competitions, so that's a very competitive athlete. And then finally we have, what would be the master's rower or the person for whom rowing is. There's lots of people who don't identify themselves as a rower, but they'll get on a rowing machine two or three times a week, whether it's in their gym or whether it's at home. Your focus is strength, conditioning, working out, but staying injury-free, and just fun and fitness. I think Palaton validated the existence of that market, and we see a lot of people wanting to do that with a rowing machine, and not with a bike. >> I think most of these people will or will not have access to a primary coach, and this augments it, or does this become their primary coach based on where they are in their athletic life? >> [Steven] I think it's both, and certainly, and certainly, we're able to support both. I think when you're that high school rower that wants to make college, you're probably a member of either your school rowing crew or you're a member of a club, but you spend a tremendous amount of time on an erg, the indoor rowing machine, and your practice is unsupervised. Even though you know what you should be doing, there's nobody there in that moment watching you log those 10,000 meters. One of our advisors is, actually, a two-times Olympic world medalist from team Great Britain, Helen Glover. And Helen, I have a great quote from Helen, where she calculated for the Rio Olympics, in the final of the Rio Olympics, every stroke she took in the final, she'd taken 16,000 strokes in practice, which talks to the importance of the quality of that practice, and making sure it's supervised. >> The bigger take on the old 10,000 reps, right? 16,000 per stroke. >> Right? >> Kind of looking forward, right, what were some of the biggest challenges you had to overcome? And then, as you looked forward, right, since the beginning, were ubiquitous, and there's 3D goggles, and there'll be outside-in centers for that whole world. How do you see this world evolving in the immediate short-term for you guys to have success, and then, just down the road a year or two? >> That's a really good question. I think in the short-term, I think it's incumbent on us to just stay really focused in a single community, and get that product right for them. It's more about introducing people to the idea. This is a category creation exercise, so we need to go through that adoption curve of find the early adopters, find the early majority, and before we take that technology anywhere towards our mass market, we need to nail the experience for that early majority. And we think that it's largely going to be in the sport of rowing or with rowers. The cross participation studies in rowing are pretty strong for other sports. Typically, somewhere between 60-80% of rowers weight lift, bike, run, and take part in yoga, whether yoga for mobility and flexibility. There's immediately adjacent markets available to us where the rowers are already in those markets. We're going to stick there for awhile, and really just nail the experience down. >> And is it a big reach to go from tracking to coaching? I mean, these people are all super data focused, right? The beauty of rowing, as you mentioned, it's all about your 2k period. It's one single metric. And they're running, and they're biking, and they're doing all kinds of data-based things, but you're trying to get them to think really more on terms of the coaching versus just the tracking. Has that been hard for them to accept? Do you have any kind of feel for the adoption or the other thing, I would imagine, I spent all this money for these expensive clothing. Is this a killer app that I can now justify having? >> Right, right, right. >> Maybe fancier connected clothes, rather than just simply tracking my time? >> I mean, I think, talking about pricing in the first instance. What we're finding with consumers that we've been testing with, is if you can compare the price of a shirt to the price of shirt without sensors, it's really the wrong value proposition. The question we ask is, How much money are you spending on your CrossFit box membership or your Equinox gym membership? The cost of a personal trainer is easily upwards of $75-100 for an hour. Now, we can give you 24/7 access to that personal coaching. You'll pay the same in a year as you would pay in an hour for coaching. I think for price, it's someone who's already thinking about paying for personal coaching and personal training, that's really where the pricing market is. >> That's interesting, we see that time and time again. We did an interview with Knightscope, and they have security robots, and basically, it's the same thing. They're priced comparisons was the hourly rate for a human counterpart, or we can give it to you for a much less hourly rate. And now, you don't just get it for an hour, you get it for as long as you want to use it. Well, it's exciting times. You guys in the market in terms of when you're going G80? Have a feel for-- >> Any minute now. >> Any minute now? >> We have people using the product, giving us feedback. My phone's switched off. That's the quietest it's been for awhile. But we have people using the product right now, giving us feedback on the product. We're really excited. One in three people, when we ask, the metric that matters for us is net promoter score. How likely would someone recommend asensei to someone else? One in three athletes are giving us a 10 out of 10, so we feel really good about the experience. Now, we're just focused on making sure we have enough content in place from our coaches. General availability is anytime soon. >> [Jeff] Good. Very exciting. >> Yeah, we're excited. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes of your day, and I actually know some rowers, so we'll have to look into the application. >> Right, introduce us. Good stuff. >> He's Steven Webster, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE Conversation in our Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017 brought to you by Samsung. >> Welcome back, we're live here in San Francisco. We're here at the SDC, the Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE and co-host of theCUBE. My next guest, Lisa Fetterman, who is of Nomiku and she's a three-time, triple-star winner, Forbes Under 30- >> Inc 30 Under 30, and Zagat 30 under 30. That's a weird one. >> That's a great one. You're likely to get the Michelin Star soon. Tell us about your company. It's a really super story here. You have this new device you guys started. Tell the story. >> Well, speaking of Michelin Stars, I used to work under the best chefs in the nation. I worked under my Mario Batali, Jean-Georges at the three Michelin Star restaurants and I saw this huge, hulking piece of laboratory equipment. We would cook so many of our components in it and I'd lusted after one for myself, but they were $2000 and up, so that was like you know what, I'm going to save up money and then I went on a date with a plasma physicist and he said, "Hey, you know what, "we could just make it on our own." We run to the hardware store, we make a prototype. We travel all across the United States and teach people how to make their own DIY open-source sous vide kits to the point where we amassed so much attention that Obama invited us to the White House. And then we put it on Kickstarter and it becomes the #1 most-funded project in our category, and we are here today with our connected home sous vide immersion circulator that interacts with Samsung's Smart Fridge. >> That's a fantastic story of all in a very short time. Well done, so let me just back up. You guys have the consumer device that all the top chef's have. >> That's right. >> That's the key thing, right? >> It's consumable, low-priced, what's the price point? >> We do hardware, software, and goods. Right now the price of our machine is $49 on souschef.nomiku.com because it interacts with the food program. So there's food that comes with the machine. You weigh the food in front of the machine. It automatically recognizes the time and temperature. It interacts with different time and temperatures of different bags of food, and you just drop it in. In 30 minutes, you have a gourmet chef-prepared meal just the way that we would do it in Michelin Star restaurants. >> And now you're connecting it to Samsung, so they have this SmartThings Messaging. That's kind of the marketing, SmartCloud, SmartThings. What does that mean, like it's connected to the wifi, does it connect to an app? Take us through how it connects to the home. >> We're connected through Family Hub, which is the system inside of the Samsung Smart Fridge. Every single Samsung Smart Fridge ships with a Nomiku app pre-downloaded inside of it and the fridge and the Nomiku talk to each other so there's inventory management potential. There's learning consumer behaviors to help them. Let's say you cook a piece of chicken at 4:00 AM. You go to a subset of people who also do that, like wow, and then we recognize that those folks do CrossFit. They will eat again at 7:00 AM because they eat more little meals rather than full meals, and then we can recommend things for them as their day goes along, and help manage things for them, like a personal assistant. >> So it's like a supply chain of your personal refrigerator. So can you tell if the chicken's going to go bad so you cook the chicken now, kind of thing? That would be helpful. >> You can actually tell if the chicken's going to go bad. If the chicken, if there's a recall or the chicken's expired and you tap it with the machine, the machine will tell you to throw it out. >> So tell us about some of the travel's you've been under. You said you've traveled the world. You also have done a lot of writing, best-selling author. Tell us about your books and what you're writing about. >> I wrote the book called Sous Vide at Home. It's an international best-seller and it's sous vide recipes. Everybody has been lusting after sous vide since we invented the technology in 2012, so much actually that the market for it grows 2.5x every single year so the adoption rate is insane. The adoption rate for sous vide actually has surpassed that of the internet, the cell phone, and the personal computer. >> Why is the excitement on the Kickstarter, obviously, the record-breaking, and the sales, and the trend, why is it so popular? Is it 'cause it's a convenience? Is it the ease of use, all of the above? What's the main driver? >> All of the above. If you ever cooked in the kitchen and you've lost your confidence, it was mostly because you messed something up in the kitchen. This is foolproof cooking. So at 57 degrees Celsius, that's when the fat and the collagen melt into the muscle of steak, making each bite so juicy, tender, and delicious. We can set it at exactly that magic temperature, drop a steak in, and then put it in the water. When you cook it like that, there's no overcooking the muscle and it becomes effectively marbled by all that juicy, fat deliciousness. >> Aw, I'm kind of hungry already. >> Yeah. >> Lenny wants a steak. I can hear Leonard moaning over there. Okay, let's get down to the science here because a lot of people might not understand what temperatures to cook anything. Do you guys provide some best practices because this is a game-changer for my family of four. >> We want to meal cooked fast, but you want to have meals staged potentially and then recook them. How does someone use it? Is there a playbook? Is there a cookbook? >> Like we say in the industry, there's an app for that. The app is on the Smart Fridge and it's also on your smartphones. Moreover, so the machine acts as a stand-alone sous vide machine for you to cook your own recipes, and it also reads rfid tags from our meals. If you use our meals, then it's a no-brainer. You just tap and then put in the water. There's nothing more. Actually people get flustered that it's so easy. They're like, "That's it? "That was all that was?" But I hate smart devices that actually make people stupider. Being a stand-alone sous vide machine, you can create any of your recipes whether it's from my cookbook, the app, which is community-focused, so we have over 1000 recipes inside there from our community. People make it and they share it with the world. >> So with the Kickstarter, I'm just going to ask that next question. I'll say community layer. >> Sure. Kind of like is it a Reddit page? Do you have your own pages? What's going on with the community? Tell us about the community. >> Oh, the community. Everybody who has an OmniCube downloads our app called Tender and inside you can make your own-- >> Not to be confused with Tinder. >> Correct. >> Tender. >> Although I wouldn't mind if you confused it and instead of going out, I guess you're making dinner. >> Wife left for the steak and right for the chicken. >> (laughing) Exactly, exactly. We love the play on the word. >> That's great. >> When you make your own little profile, it encourages you to share. It's really fun because you can keep your recipes in there so you never have to look it up ever again. You can bing it and it goes directly to your machine. It's great for professional chefs, too 'cause you can share it with your entire team. >> So maybe we should start a Cube food channel. You can get a dedicated recipe channel. Exciting. >> That's great. Will you be my sous chef? >> (laughing) Course, I'm a great guest to have do that. If I can do it, anyone can do it. How do I get one? How do people buy? What's the deal? >> It's namiku.com for just our hardware, and in California, we've launched our food program on souschef.nomiku.com. Right now our machines for the food program are only $49. That is such a great value considering that souv vide machines are usually $200 and up right now. >> Awesome, well thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Lisa Fetterman is CEO, entrepreneur of Namiku, entrepreneur of great stuff here in the Cube. Of course, we're bringing the food, tech, and remember, farming tech is big, too, so as the culture gets connected, the food from the farm to the table is being changed with data and IT. More after this short break. (innovative tones)