>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week, now here's John Furrier. (upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage here in New York City in Manhattan at the Hilton Midtown for Consensus 2018 part of Blockchain Week New York. Our next guest here is Greg Landegger who's with Smith Parsons and Whittemore also known for Bit Digest, investor in this space since the beginning, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me John. >> So I've got to ask you, you've been an investor in a lot of coins and equity deals the space is now busting out, I mean first of all are you amazed by the amount of people here? >> I'm more than amazed, it's surreal. >> And you now have an interesting culture of new investors in the space coming in. What's it like for you working with the new investors? >> So we are a single family office that started originally in 2014 and the way I describe it is for the past few years I was the loser at the lunchroom, everyone was making fun of me and then last year all the cool jocks wanted me to sit at their table. (John laughing) A lot of our bankers, all the traditional firms, started calling up saying, "What are you doing? What is this bitcoin thing that you've been spending your time on?" >> So you had a nice little cover story there for a while but can't ignore the returns, at the end of the day. >> That's exactly right, last year was too good a year. >> Alright, so talk about some of the dynamics that you're seeing here at Blockchain Week. What are you seeing? What's the top story, what's the big news that you think is most important? >> I think the news right now is that there's real development going on, I mean we're all waiting, the holy grail to me is coming up with an institutional custodial project. Ledger Wallets announced something today so we're very excited about that and there's more and more effort being done in that area. And that's really what'll bring in more people into the market. >> Big controversy yesterday in the panel about you know Blockchain washing or you know seeing blockchain, pretty heated argument there, your thoughts? I mean obviously, it's early, embryonic, it's growing really fast, I've heard the same arguments when the web came along, too slow, you know it's not fully functional, but it was still early. Same here? What's your take on all this? >> As an investor we'd like it to be must faster, but realistically everything's surpassing any expectations. I mean nobody, if you talked to people early last year we would laugh about people predicting bitcoin at 2,500. >> So with the coins, talk about the investment you're making in coins. >> So we invest it. >> 'Cause that's different than the equity. >> It is, but we had a learning experience where one of our companies ICOed, we chose not to participate in it and it was the wrong decision, it really told us we need to be on the equity side as well the coin side. >> When was that? Early on or? >> Last year. >> Last year. >> The middle of last year. >> Okay, so what kind of coin deals are you doing? What's that profile? >> So we do a little bit of everything, I mean we've come up with a term rebel coins which are the top six coins, it's Ripple, Etherium, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, and Lightcoin, we like those. Then we invest in a total of about 20 coins. >> And the blockchain doesn't bother you in the performance and all that good stuff? >> No because we're making a bet on the future of different things >> Long game. >> It's a long game for us. >> What's your criteria for investment? You obviously get the, you're kind of a rebel in yourself, but your returns are there, I've seen this movie before in the web, but everything happened in the web and the returns were made you know really before the dot com bubble popped around 2001 timeframe. But there's still great returns, but the decisions were interesting then. How do you make your choices? How do you know what a good deal is? >> It's, I'd say 80% the team. Do they have the experience? Do they have an understanding of what they're doing? I mean I have a lot of great ideas on things I know nothing about and know I'll never succeed in 'em. So if we find a team that is experienced in an area, understands it, has a real go to market story, >> Interesting enough. >> that's exciting us. >> Okay so it's the classic criteria with a twist. How about running hard? You say really you got to run hard in this game it's a fast-moving, unlike the dot com bubble, this thing is highly accelerated, you got to, you can't be sittin' on you butt on this one. >> No agreed, you've got to be very aggressive in the area, but I think with the ICOs there's more money up front than people typically had and that's really what's changed the market a lot for us, is it's not a deal where the venture capitalists go out and give a million dollars to five companies, wait to see what happens, now those five companies are able to raise a lot more money, but it doesn't guarantee they'll succeed. >> Greg you've become kind of a great known investor, certainly the Bit Digest is well-known for great following there. I got to ask you the double coin question, pun intended. There's the good and the bad, name something that's really good about this industry right now, that people should know about that might not be familiar. And what are some of the things that you're concerned with? That you want to see kind of stopped, or bad behavior eradicated? Share your perspective on the double coin side of the life if you're in the crypto world. >> So let's, starting with the bad, I think it's education, people don't understand what's going on. We keep on hearing about Mt Gox, Silk Road, that's in the past, bitcoin, and I use bitcoin as a general term at times, but you know it is not a, I mean it's a transparent currency, it's safer than a lot of other things out there, people don't understand that and I blame the media a lot for just repeating the story, maybe it sells papers, but just people aren't explaining what's really going on in the market. >> That's the Ed model for you, if it leads, if it bleeds, it leads, and that's a story. No but I think people see the ICO things too happening right? They go, "Okay, there's been some scams on the ICO-side, so I've heard that story, you know I'm worried about that." >> I mean I've spent some time in the microcap space I dealt with a lot more questionable people in microcaps than I deal in crypto. >> You mean in the traditional market? >> Traditional, pink sheets area. >> So I think what's different now, I'd love to get your perspective on that I see at least, observation wise, is you have an open source ethos kind of community model where there's a lot of self-governing going on. Are you seeing the same thing? Is there people talking, it's a tight knit community, still small, growing, is there like a special self-governance thing going on in the finance world? I mean you know there's been talk on people kind of organizing, syndicating, pooling deals together, which is natural. But how about the self-governing aspect of it? >> You know I think, I mean people, the funds or the actual token offerings themselves, that's still something that needs to be addressed, people haven't done it in the same way a typical equity raise would be done and a lot of the different fund managers, let me back up by saying this is the most open market I've ever seen where everybody is willing to talk to each other to try and share ideas and make this grow and a lot of the fund managers are now looking at it saying, "We need some more governance." There're things going on today, such as in the ICO market, if you invested in equity, you never thought that a ICO offering may occur originally and is it a liquidity event and what happens? So we're trying to come up with some governance that hasn't existed but probably needs to be, but to be fair the companies that we've been lucky enough to invest with are supporting the ideas. >> Yeah so there's liquidity going on. It's a new kind of liquidity. What is that liquidity? Where is the liquidity? It's not just a Kickstarter campaign, there's actually liquidity going on. >> There is liquidity going on and I think we're trying to figure out how to now take equity that is established in the traditional sense, we talked about security tokens, but the companies that are actually have issued ICOs are trying to determine how to give a dividend or some form of liquidity to the shareholders and that's a new market. >> Greg does the domicile matter to you? Where they are located? I mean I've heard things like special purpose vehicles have always been kind of an analogy. >> I mean traditionally I will say no, our attorneys would say yes, but if it's a Cayman, we've invested in some Cayman companies, Europe, Asian companies, so that really doesn't bother us that much, again it's the team >> It's not a deal killer. >> It's definitely not a deal killer. >> But you'd prefer, obviously, security token, in the US. >> Delaware-based would make us the happiest. But if they have a real team behind it, if they have real attorneys, real auditors, we'll look past that. >> And global reach, that's a big factor. >> Absolutely. >> How much is global impacting this world? I mean, we're in the US, we're kind of turning into it. >> It's incredibly, but I think the one area where we need to do a better job is in expanding it, I mean there are a lot of foreigners at this market today, at this event, but it's, we know the US market really well, we don't know what's going on in Asia, we read the trade magazines and that's how we know what's going on there's efforts now, I'm even, Consensus announced today they're having an event next year, or this year, in Singapore. We need to have greater reach to share what's going on around the world versus what a few people are telling us. >> John: You see that as a big issue? >> I do, we don't see what's going on in China today, we don't see what's going on in Singapore, the Philippines, and that's where a lot of the effort is going on. >> Well I think you're right, I think one of the things and that's where fake news on Facebook, you know with the whole election here in the US and now outside influence, whether it's terrorist groups or propaganda-based systems, quality of the data >> That's exactly right. >> is a really important with real time. >> And the data's limited today, I mean it's not. >> I agree, I mean we totally agree with the same thing. Okay final thought, walk away this week from big data, not big data, Blockchain Week NYC, your big walk away here this week. What's your takeaway? What do you take home? >> We went in the right direction, I mean that this is still developing, we're not there yet, there's still a lot of work to be done, but long-term whether you believe in digital currencies or not today, this is something that central governments are looking at in supporting, enterprise is getting into it, and this is the future. So we made the right choice. >> And is it only going to get better you think? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah I think stability-wise, technically, and the business models are starting to shake out. Just quickly before, I know you got to go, thank you for your time, quickly token economics, big part of the business model side of it your thoughts and reaction to how that's going and how people should start thinking about that if they could meet their criteria for some sort of de-centralized business opportunity. >> So I think, it's looking at network usage, I mean that's really the way we look at it today, the fundamental model doesn't work, or we haven't been able to determine how to do that, but adoption, it's growth, and that's how we've focused things and see where it is. >> Well congratulations for all the work and all the work you're doing and that continue to do. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to have a big-time investor on theCUBE here. Big-time investors, we had entrepreneurs, we had folks from Europe, Lithuania, all over the world here on theCUBE, we're out in the open. This is theCUBE covering Blockchain Week New York City Consensus 2018, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. Stay with us for more, after this break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by Intel. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Here, live, in Palo Alto, California, the Silicon Angle Studio for the Silicon Valley coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. I'm John Furrier. We're in theCube. We're here with Cube alumni and one of our favorite guests, Alan Cohen, the Chief Commercial Officer of Illumio, hot security startup, coming in to share his commentary on Mobile World Congress. Alan's a veteran in the industry. Great to have you. Been in the Silicon Valley Friday Show a few weeks ago. Great to see you. >> Thrilled to be back. Beautiful environment. You know, party. >> It was great to see you on the Silicon Valley Friday Show because after our segment the New York Times ran that story Friedman had that the cross where they took our content. >> We're going to Freeport next. >> Exactly. (laughing) And great content, we're serving it up. So I want to say thank you, it was great coverage. Thanks to the New York Times for picking up our content, taking it to the next level. Always great to have a conversation. You've got a good way to put the finger on the pulse. Mobile World Congress, two days of coverage for us. I'll just give you a quick Reader's Digest summary of what we're seeing. It's a bipolar show. It's a device show and a telco trying-to-figure-things-out show. Then in the middle is a lot of money to be had by whoever can help sort out the counseling of the telco business. Intel certainly is a big player in that with 5G. And there's a lot of under the covers stuff. SDN, NFV, new networks and new paradigms of how to configure these architectures. Not much mention of security, but that's essentially what's going on. You've got everyone's working out the devices, the new LG, the Yahweh, all this stuff's going on. Then you get the telcos well speeds and feeds and build out and business models. So what's your assessment? >> I've been to the Mobile World Congress 10 times. We never talked about this, but I actually worked the cellular carrier in the 90s. To me the show is the same every year. It's drones, clones, and phones. That's what people really focus on, right? So the 11,000 versions of the Android phone, even though Apple's still taking 89% of the profit at the industry so it actually only one phone you have to pay attention to on one side. Then more bits, less money side of being on the carrier, because what is being an ISP, wireless ISP or a wired ISP. Every year I give you more bits and I make less money. I'm going to make it up in volume. And I keep pouring all this capital into this. So to me, they haven't really yet completely broken out of that paradigm. The key thing is that the mobile network is the primary network. So all the profitability in telco is in the mobile network. Nobody says hey, I'm going to get up and build a wired network and pull some more copper to your house, right? So that is the principle way that people are using it and we have now an entire generation that don't know you can actually plug a phone into a wall or an ethernet connection. I think that's the kind of competitive dynamics that people go with. >> And that's under pressure though, because now the carrier's always in the operating, always controlled the relationship to the user via the contract. Did you buy an iPhone lately? There's no more relationship. You just buy whatever device you want. The subsidy ended ... I'm not talking about subsidy. I'm talking about like I have a contract with AT and T, I can certainly change it to Verizon, so I can certainly swap. But for the most part the carrier views me as a subscriber. Pretty much that's it. They bill me, I'm not really getting anything extra from AT and T. Maybe I'll get some hotspots. But I mean come on, what value? >> You are just our poo. >> Where does it go from here? We had the guys from Datatron on who had an interesting proposition. They had a ton of data. So there really has been this struggle institutionally, as you know, I mean core competency has been provisioning, truck roll, and billing. So what else can they do? What's your thoughts, okay let's change the mental, here's the exercise. We get elected to be the CEO of the biggest telco. >> You're Verizon, I'm A T and T. >> We own the telcos, and what do we do? Do we fire everybody? Do we do what Donald Trump does and just fire everyone and run it the way we want to run it? Or do we build it? What would we do seriously, what would we do if we were telcos and we want to put our business hat on? >> I think you have to kind of deconstruct the value chain of that. So what telcos do is they offer up content, for the most part. These devices, I've had to teach my kids that you can make a call with it. But aside from a call mostly what people do is use some form of internet application. They don't get any other money for the internet application. They don't get any money for hosting it, they don't get any money for managing it. They don't get very much money for making it perform. So to me, the biggest challenge of the telcos is actually Amazon because if you think about it, Amazon is now becoming the supply chain for so much internet delivery content. If the telco wants to be something other than the last mile and the wires connecting that last mile, it takes a lot of wires to build a wireless network, people forget that. They're going to have to start to figure out can I, whether it's cash and data center, can I turn profitable services to the people who are all competing at the edge of that universe and applications. I don't think they really have done that. I mean they are some of the largest data center operators in the world, but they haven't really thought it through. I was in a studio in L.A. a couple weeks ago and it's one of the large national studios. It's an Illumio customer and they've now moved all their content distribution into Amazon. So they don't send the content from their network to the affiliates. They put it in Amazon, and Amazon delivers it. How much longer is it going to before there's actually studio that works out of Amazon? >> Yeah, I mean the head end's dead. This cable is kind of changing. That's the media piece, but also you have all these new use cases, the fantasy autonomous driving cars which you can say it's a data center on wheels, yes I could buy that. Is it going to be uploading data every half mile? Where's the wire? So you have this new construction. Smart cities is another one, smart homes is an echo in there. >> I made my living out of making data centers more secure. But the data center is going to completely evolve. The share perfusion of data that's going to come out of these devices, and a lot of people have talked about the edge architecture, is going to blow up the idea of back hauling it to a centralized server. Process it in a bunch of ways and spit it back out. For me, if I wanted to write a smart or autonomous car management system, let's say I was the city of Palo Alto and I'm responsible for now instead of just the traffic lights, I'm also responsible for how autonomous cars go through Palo Alto, I'm not sending something back to some data center in Virginia for Amazon. I'm going to have to figure out how to process all that data closest to where those cars are. Make intelligent decisions about them while at local, and then send back out instructions. What I think you're going to do is you're going to see a shift from this central model to a much more distributed model and I'm going to have to have mini data centers. So instead of having 10 mega data centers I might have 1,000 mini mega data centers that's going to make all of these things happen. I don't think a lot of people have paid attention to that architectural shift. If you're in the process of, business of selling server networks you're still thinking client-server back haul it into the giant data center next to the nuclear power plant. But it's all going to have to move a lot closer to where something, because I only care about that decision right now with the 50 cars coming down middle field and the streets that feed into it. >> But there's a bigger architecture thing that the Mobile World Congress is trying to point at, which is an ecosystem. Let me take a step back. Is Mobile Congress a relevant show, or is it becoming a CES sideshow, Biz Dev show? I mean Cy Gerli was on yesterday saying look, it's where everyone goes, who's who goes there. It's essentially a Biz Dev show that happens to have a trade show running with it. >> It's the agora, right? The Greek term for marketplace. You go there to do business with people. It's like RSA two weeks ago, right? You guys were up at RSA. It's like is it really fun to walk through 14,000 vendor booths, or is it like everybody who make decisions on buying and selling security stuff happened to be in the same two-square miles of San Francisco. I don't think that part goes away, but I do think ... >> It's a super important part. >> Yeah, but I think the architecture of who plays is going to change. The the question you've got to ask is who's going to be the Amazon of the mobile world and disrupt the network model? The network is now just something glued together with software. I mean years ago they had the same thing, it didn't really work out, that they called the cloud where I would rent my access point in London to people and I'd use their wifi. The stuff that glues it together is always much more important than the infrastructure itself. So if Mobile World Congress can be important there's going to be a track on the people actually glue all of that stuff all together. >> All right, so I've got to get your take on the business conversation, the marketplace that runs there. What are some of the conversations that you could imagine that was happening at Mobile World Congress? I know we're not there, I mean we've been seeing and hearing some of the hallway conversations. Obviously 5G's the big story. What are some of the marketplace hallway conversations or business meetings that are going on in your mind's eye if you had to make a guess on what's happening? >> What are the most important content that people like to use today? Pop quiz, do you know this? >> Yeah, video. >> Video, right? So to me, one of the conversation Netflix was having and Amazon Prime was having because they're not just waiting for you to be in your TV, to consume, right? People are consuming increasing amounts of video content on mobile devices. So I think there's the Hollywood influence or the studio or what is it? The National Association of Programming Executives, NAPE right? What you're doing, if you're a content producer you're looking for eyeballs and people to pay for it. There's nothing more ubiquitous than that piece of glass we're all carrying in front of our nose 17 hours a day. I think that's a big set of business discussions. Your partner was talking about this, is okay, is there just a dramatically different way to build this network? 5G is going to give you the promise, more is a lot of work. The physics are I'm getting a lot more bandwidth. What am I going to do with it? Well people are going to fill it up. >> There's different use cases. There's the mobility and then with dense areas. Then things that are moving at a hundred miles an hour, 50 miles and hour, planes, trains. >> I think there's an element of that. I think there's the internet of things discussion. I still think five years will take the internet whatever things, right? I call the IOWT, right, because it's like nobody's, it's not really about connecting your lightbulb to the network, but there are a lot of things in motion that people want to better manage. >> We just introduced a research agenda this morning with Peter Burroughs, IOT, IOT people. Things and people. >> Have you gone back to the Furrier family and counted up how many IP addresses you have as a family? The Cohen family has 111 IP addresses. >> John: IPV6 for you. (laughing) >> Yeah, we need a gateway man for the network router that comes into the house. But that is actually ... >> We just bought the new Google access points, the ones that have that little mesh instrument. >> But yes, I'm just kidding you. So there are a lot of things. The other thing is that there is the interaction of the mobile, actually I think Google is a great example. If you think about Google produces the wifi at Starbucks and a lot of retail. They're interested in what's going on. Today we think about the mobile network as a mobile network and we think about the broadband fixed network as a different network. And like the interplay between those two, it's like there's a lot more than Foursquare and Facebook. >> Sure fibers of the home is very capital intensive. We knew it would cost us to do a truck roll, the trench, and connect to the home which we did. Overlay wireless, fixed wireless would be fantastic there. >> So you have the overlay and then when I know that you're coming by, right, because the fixed network is now actually a wifi network, I mean it has wires. So you have the mobile network, you have the wifi network, and you have people moving in and out of those environments. I think I'm seeing a lot of companies getting funded. People actually trying to say how do we monetize that experience? This is obviously was Foursquare and those other location guys started years ago. I mean, look at something like Wayce. Wayce went from a GPS app with social interaction to a car sharing, ride sharing going after Uber, this Google company. >> Well we had an NTD Delcomo VC, Chris McCoo, talk about mapping as a huge app for these telcos. >> Mapping is the killer app. Almost everything on your phone local works off a map which, by the way, is paid for by us as taxpayers. The GPS comes from the United States government. It's free. The most powerful utility in mobility is location, and GPS is free. >> All right, final question. Bumper sticker from Mobile World Congress from your perspective this year. Yawner, golf clap, or standing ovation? >> I say golf clap because more bandwidth is good and I think there's an insatiable demand. We're a long way from ending the bandwidth drought, and there is a bandwidth drought. I think the other thing is there aren't camps anymore. I think people will coalesce very quickly on 5G. So good time to be in that business. One hand clap maybe. >> Yeah, not a hole in one. Certainly more golf analogies coming on theCube. Alan Cohen here, Chief Commercial Officer, Illumio. We didn't get to security, but we'll do that next time. I'm John Furrier, I'll be right back with more Mobile World Congress coverage after this short break. (upbeat instrumental music)