(lively orchestral music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California, theCUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the cofounder of SiliconANGLE Media, cohost of theCUBE. We're here with fellow cloud influencer, friend of theCUBE, Sarbjeet Johal, who's always on Twitter. If you check out my Twitter stream, you'll find out we've always got some threads. He's always jumping in the CrowdChat and I think was in the leaderboard for our last CrowdChat on multi-cloud Kubernetes. Thanks for coming in. >> Yeah, thank you for having me here. >> Thanks for coming in. So you're very prolific on Twitter. We love the conversations. We're gettin' a lot of energy around some of the narratives that have been flowing around, obviously helped this week by the big news of IBM acquiring Red Hat for, what was it, 30, what was the number, 34? >> 34, yeah. >> $34 billion, huge premium, essentially changing the game in open source, some think, some don't, but it begs the question, you know, cloud obviously is relevant. Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, actually now saying cloud is where it's at, 20% have been on the cloud, 80% have not yet moved over there, trillion-dollar market which we called, actually, I called, a few years ago when I wrote my Forbes story about Amazon, the Trillion Dollar Baby I called it. This is real. >> Yeah. So apps are moving to the cloud, value for businesses on the cloud, people are seeing accelerated timelines for shipping. Software. >> Yeah. >> Software offer is eating the world. Cloud is eating software, and data's at the center of it. So I want to get your thoughts on this, because I know that you've been talking a lot about technical debt, you know, the role of developer, cloud migration. The reality is, this is not easy. If you're doin' cloud native, it's pretty easy. >> Still pretty easy, yeah. >> If that's all you got, right, so if you're a startup and/or built on the cloud, you really got the wind at your back, and it's lookin' really good. >> Yeah. >> If you're not born in the cloud, you're an IT shop, they've been consolidating for years, and now told to jump to a competitive advantage, you literally got to make a pivot overnight. >> Yeah, actually, at high level, I think cloud consumption you can divide into two buckets, right? One is the greenfield which, as you said, it's not slam dunk, all these startups are born in cloud, and all these new projects, systems of innovation what I usually refer to those, are born in cloud, and they are operated in cloud, and at some point they will sort of fade away or die in cloud, but the hard part is the legacy applications sitting in the enterprise, right? So those are the trillion dollar sort of what IBM folks are talking about. That's a messy problem to tackle. Within that, actually, there are some low-hanging fruits. Of course, we can move those workloads to the cloud. I usually don't refer the application, the workloads as applications because people are sort of religiously attached to the applications. They feel like it's their babies, right? >> Yeah. >> So I usually say workload, so some workloads are ripe for the cloud. It's data mining, BI, and also the AI part of it, right? So but some other workloads which are not right for the cloud right now or they're hard to move or the ERP system, systems of record and systems of engagement or what we call CRMs and marketing sort of applications which are legacy ones. >> Yeah, hard-coded operationalized software frameworks and packages and vendors like Oracle. >> Yes. >> They're entrenched. >> Oracle SAP, and there's so many other software vendors that have provided tons of software to the data centers that they're sitting there, and the hard part is that nobody wants to pull the plug on the existing applications. I've seen that time and again. I have done, my team has done more than 100 data center audits from EMC and VMware days. We have seen that time and again. Nobody wants to pull the plug on the application. >> 'Cause they're runnin' in production! (laughs) >> They are running in production. And it's hard to measure the usage of those applications, also, that's a hard part of the sort of old stack, if you will. >> Yeah. So the reality is, this is kind of getting to the heart of what we wanted to talk about which is, you know, vendor hype and market realities. >> Yeah. >> The market reality is, you can't unplug legacy apps overnight, but you got a nice thing called containers and Kubernetes emerging, that's nice. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so check, I love that, but still, the reality is, is okay, then who does it? >> Yeah. >> Do I add more complexity? We just had Jerry Chen and hot startup Rockset on, they're trying to reduce the complexity by just having a more simple approach. This is a hard architectural challenge. >> It is. >> So that's one fundamental thing I want to discuss with you. And then there's the practical nature of saying assuming you get the architecture right, migrating and operating. Let's take those as separate, let's talk architecture, then we'll talk operating and migrating. >> Okay. >> Architecturally, what do people do, what are people doing, what you're seeing, what do you think is the right architecture for cloud architects, because that's a booming position. >> Yeah. >> There's more and more cloud architects out there, and the openings for cloud architects is massive. >> Yeah, I think in architecture, the microservices are on the rise. There are enabling technologies behind it. It doesn't happen sort of magically overnight. We have had some open source sort of development in that area the, the RESTful APIs actually gave the ports to the microservices. Now we can easily inter-operate between applications, right? So and our sort of, sorry I'm blanking out, so our way to divide the compute at the sort of micro-chunks from VM, virtual machine, to the container to the next level is the serverless, right? So that is giving ports to the microservices, and the integration technologies are improving at the same time. The problem of SEL lies in the data, which is the storage part and the data part and the network, and the network is closely associated with security. So security and network are two messy parts. They are in the architecture, even in the pure cloud architecture in the Kubernete world, those are two sort of hard parts. And Cisco is trying to address the network part. I speak, I spoke to some folks there, and what they are doing in that space, they are addressing the network and SCODI part, sort of deepening-- >> And it's a good time for them to do that. >> Yeah. >> Because, I mean, you go back, and you know, we covered DevNet Create, which is Susie Wee, she's a rising star at Cisco, and now she's running all of DevNet. So the developer network within Cisco's has a renaissance because, you know, you go back 20 years ago, if you were a network guy, you ran the show, I mean, everything ran the network. The network was everything. The network dictated what would happen. Then it kind of went through a funk of like now cloud native's hot and serverless, but now that programability's hitting the network because remember the holy trinity of transformation is compute, storage, and networking. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> Those aren't going away. >> Yeah, they aren't going away. >> Right, so networking now is seeing some, you know, revitalization because you can program it, you can automate it, you can throw DevOps to it. This is kind of changing the game a little bit. So I'm intrigued by the whole network piece of it because if you can automate some network with containers and Kubernetes and, say, service meshes, then it's become programmable, then you can do the automation, then it's infrastructure, it's code. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Infrastructure is code. It has to cover all three of those things. >> That is true, and another aspect is that we talk about multi-cloud all the time, which Cisco is focusing on also, like IBM, like VMware, like many other players who talk about multi-cloud, but problem with the multi-cloud right now is that you cannot take your security policies from one cloud provider to another and then just say, okay, just run there, right? So you can do the compute easy, containers, right, or Kubernetes are there, but you can't take the network as is, you cannot, you can still take the storage but not storage policies, so the policy-driven computing is still not there. >> Yeah. >> So we need, I think, more innovation in that area. >> Yeah, there's some technical issues. I talk a lot of startups, and they're jumpin' around from Azure to Amazon, and everyone comes back to Amazon because they say, and I'm not going to name names, but I'll just categorically say with what's going on is when they get to Microsoft and Oracle and IBM, the old kind of guards is they come in and they find that they check the boxes on the literature, oh, they do this, that, and that, but it's really just a lot of reverse proxies, there's a lot of homegrown stuff in there-- >> Yeah. >> That are making it work and hang together but not purely built from the ground up. >> Exactly, yeah, so they're actually sort of re-bottling the old sort of champagne kind of stuff, like they re-label old stuff and put layers of abstraction on top of it and that's why we're having those problems with the sort of legacy vendors. >> So let's get into some of the things that I know you're talking about a lot on Twitter, we're engaging on with with the community is migration, and so I want to kind of put a context to the questions so we can riff together on it. Let's just say that you and I were hired by the the CIO of a huge enterprise, financial services, pick your vertical. >> Yeah. >> Hey, Sarbjeet and John, fix my problems, and they give us the keys to the kingdom, bag of money, whatever it takes, go make it happen. What do we do, what's the first things that we do? Because they got a legacy, we know what it looks like, you got the networks, you're racking stack, top-of-rack switches, you got perimeter-based security. We got to go in and kind of level the playing field. What's our strategy, what do we what do we recommend? >> Yeah, the first thing first, right? So first, we need to know the drivers for the migration, right, what is it? Is it a cost-cutting, is it the agility, is it mergers and acquisitions? So what are the, what is the main driver? So that knowing that actually will help us like divvy up the problem, actually divide it up. The next thing, the next best practice is, I always suggest, I've done quite a few migrations, is that do the application portfolio analysis first. You want to find that low-hanging fruit which can be moved to the cloud first. The reason, main reason behind that is that your people and processes need to ease into using the cloud. I use consumption term a lot, actually on Twitter you see that, so I'm a big fan of consumption economics. So your people and processes need to adapt, like your change control, change management, ITSM, the old stuff still is valid, actually. We're giving it a new name, but those problems don't go away, right? How you log a ticket, how you how the support will react and all that stuff, so it needs to map to the cloud. SLA is another less talked about topic in our circles on Twitter, and our industry partners don't talk about, but that's another interesting part. Like what are the SLAs needed for, which applications and so forth. So first do the application profiling, find the low-hanging fruit. Go slow in the beginning, create the phases, like phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four. And it also depends number, on the number of applications, right? IBM folks were talking about that thousand average number of applications per enterprise. I think it's more than thousand, I've seen it. And that, just divvy up the problem. And then another best practice I've learned is migrate as is, do not transform and migrate, because then you're at, if something is not working over there or the performance problem or any latency problem, you will blame it on your newer architecture, if you will. Move as is, then then transform over there. And if you want me to elaborate a little more on the transformation part, I usually divide transformation into three buckets, actually this is what I tell the CIOs and CTOs and CEOs, that transformation is of three types. Well, after you move, transformation, first it is the infrastructure-led transformation. You can do the platforming and go from Windows to Linux and Linux to AIX and all that stuff, like you can go from VM to container kind of stuff, right? And the second is a process-led transformation, which is that you change your change control, change management, policy-driven computing, if you will, so you create automation there. The third thing is the application where you open the hood of the application and refactor the code and do the Web service enablement of your application so that you can weave in the systems of innovation and plug those into the existing application. So you want to open your application. That's the whole idea behind all this sort of transformation is your applications are open so you can bring in the data and take out the data as you weave. >> From your conversations and analysis, how does cloud, once migrations happen in cloud operations, how does that impact traditional network, network architecture, network security, and application performance? >> On the network side, actually, how does it, let me ask you a question, what do you mean by how does it-- >> In the old days, used a provisional VLAN. >> The older stuff? >> So I got networks out there, I got a big enterprise, okay, we know how to run the networks, but now I'm movin' to the cloud. >> Yeah. >> I'm off premises, I'm on premise, now I'm in the cloud. >> Yeah. >> How do I think about the network's differently? Whose provisioning the subnets, who's doing the VPNs? You know, where's the policy, all these policy-based things that we're startin' to see at Kubernetes. >> Yeah. >> They were traditionally like networks stuff-- >> You knew what it was. >> That's now happening at the microservices level. >> Yeah. >> So new paradigm. >> The new paradigm, actually, the whole idea is that your network folks, your storage folks, your server folks, like what they were used to be in-house, they need to be able to program, right? That's the number one thing. So you need to retrain your workforce, right? If you don't have the, you cannot retrain people overnight, and then you bring in some folks who know how to program networks and then bring those in. There's a big misconception about, from people, that the service, sorry, the service provider, which is called cloud service provider, is it responsible for the security of your applications or for the network, sort of segmentation of your network. They are not, actually, they don't have any liability over security if you read the SLAs. It's your responsibility to have the sort of right firewalling, right checks and balances in place for the network for storage, for compute, right policies in place. It's your responsibility. >> So let's talk about the, some tweets you've been doin' 'cause I've been wanting to pull the ones that I like. You tweeted a couple days ago, we don't know how to recycle failed startups. >> Yeah. (chuckles) >> Okay, and I said open source. And you picked up and brought up another image, is open source a dumping ground for failed startups? And it was interesting because what I love about open source is, in the old days of proprietary software, if the company went under, the code went under with it, but at least now, with open source, at least something can survive. But you bring up this dumping concept, that also came up in an interview earlier today with another guest which was with all this contribution coming in from vendors, it's almost like there's a dumping going on into open source in general, and you can't miss a beat without five new announcements per day that's, you know, someone's contributing their software from this project or a failed, even failed startup, you know, last hope, let's open source it. Is that good or bad, I mean, what's your take on that, what was your posture or thinking around this conversation? It is good, is it bad? >> Yeah, I believe it's, it's a economic problem, economics thing, right? So when somebody's like proprietary model doesn't work, they say, okay, let me see if this works, right? Actually, they always go first with like, okay let me sell-- >> Make money. >> Let me make money, right? A higher margin, right, everybody loves that, right? But then, if they cannot penetrate the market, they say, okay, let me make it open source, right? And then I will get the money from the support, or my own distro, like, distros are a big like open source killer, I said that a few times. Like the vendor-specific distributions of open source, they kill open source like nothing else does. Because I was at Rackspace when we open-sourced OpenStack, and I saw what happened to OpenStack. It was like eye-opening, so everybody kind of hijacked OpenStack and started putting their own sort of flavors in place. >> Yeah, yeah, we saw the outcome of that. >> Yeah. >> It niched into infrastructures of service, kind of has a special purpose-built view. >> And when I-- >> And that it comes cloud native didn't help either. Cloud grew at that time, too, talking about the 2008 timeframe. >> Yeah, yeah, and exactly. And another, why I said that was, it was in a different context, actually, I invested some money into an incubator in Berkeley, The Batchery, so we have taken what, 70-plus startups through that program so far, and I've seen that pattern there. So I will interview the people who want to bring their startup to our incubator and all that, and then after, most of them fail, right? >> Yeah. >> They kind of fade away or they leave, they definitely leave our incubator after a certain number of weeks, but then you see like what happens to them, and now also living in the Valley, you can't avoid it. I worked with 500 Startups a little bit and used to go to their demo days from the Rackspace days because we used to have a deal with them, a marketing deal, so the pattern I saw that was, there's a lot of innovation, there was a lot of brain power in these startups that we don't know what, these people just fade away. We don't have a mechanism to say, okay, hey you are doing this, and we are also doing similar stuff, we are a little more successful than, let's merge these two things and make it work. So we don't know how to recycle the startups. So that's what was on it. >> It's almost a personal network of intellectual capital. >> Yeah. >> Kind of, there needs to be a new way to network in the IP that's in people's heads. Or in this case, if it's open source, that's easy there, too, so being inaccessible. >> So there's no startup, there's no Internet of startups, if you will. >> Yeah, so there's no-- >> Hey, you start a CUBE group. (Sarbjeet laughing) You'll do it, start a CrowdChat. All right, I want to ask you about this consumption economics. >> Yeah. >> I like this concept. Can you take a minute to explain what you mean by consumption economics? You said you're all over it. I know you talk a lot about it on Twitter. >> Yes. >> What is it about, why is it important? >> Actually, the pattern I've seen in tech industry for last 25, 24 years in Silicon Valley, so the pattern I've seen is that everybody focuses on the supply side, like we do this, we like, we're going to change the way you work and all that stuff, but people usually do not focus on the consumption side of things, like people are consuming things. I'm a great fan of a theory called Jobs to Be Done theory. If you get a time, take a look at that. So what jobs people are trying to do and how you can solve that problem. Actually, if you approach your products, services from that angle, that goes a long way. Another aspect I talk about, the consumption economics, is age of micro-consumption, and again, there are reasons behind it. The main reason is there's so much thrown at us individually and and also enterprise-wise, like so much technology is thrown at us, if we try to batch, like if were ready to say, okay, we're not going to consume the technology now, and we're going to do every six months, like we're going to release every six months, or new software or new packages, and also at the same time, we will consume every six months, that doesn't work. So the whole notion when I talk about the micro-consumption is that you keep bringing the change in micro-chunks. And I think AWS has mastered the game of micro-supply, as a micro-supplier of that micro-change. >> Yeah. >> If you will. So they release-- >> And by the way, they're very customer-centric, so listening to the demand side. >> Exactly. So they kind of walk hand in hand with the customer in a way that customer wants this, so they're needing this, so let us release it. They don't wait for like old traditional model of like, okay, every year there's a new big release and there are service packs and patches and all that stuff, even though other vendors have moved along the industry. But they still have longer cycles, they still release like 10 things at a time. I think that doesn't work. So you have to give, as a supplier, to the masses of the workers of the world in HPs and IBMs, give the change in smaller chunks, don't give them monolithic. When you're marketing your stuff, even marketing message should be in micro-chunks, like or even if you created like five sort of features and sort of, let's, say in Watson, right, just give them one at a time. Be developer-friendly because developers are the people who will consume that stuff. >> Yeah, and then making it more supply, less supply side but micro-chunks or microservices or micro-supply. >> Yeah. >> Having a developer piece also plays well because they're also ones who can help assemble the micro, it's in a LEGO model of composeability. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And so I think that's definitely right. The other thing I wanted to get your thoughts on is validated by Jerry Chen at Greylock and his hot startups and a few others is my notion of stack overhaul. The changes in the stack are significant. I tweeted, and you commented on it, on the Red Hat IBM deal 'cause they were talkin' about, oh, the IBM stack is going to be everywhere, and they're talking about the IBM stack and the old full-stack developer model, but if you look at the consumption economics, you look at horizontally scalable cloud, native serverless and all those things goin' on with Kubernetes, the trend is a complete radical shifting of the stack where now the standardization is the horizontally scalable, and then the differentiations at the top of the stack, so the stack has tweaked and torqued it a little bit. >> Yeah. >> And so this is going to change a lot. Your thoughts and reaction to that concept of stack, not a complete, you know, radical wholesale change, but a tweak. >> Actually our CTO at Rackspace, John Engates, gave us a sort of speech at one of the kind of conferences here in Bay Area, the title of that was Stack, What Stack, right? So the point he was trying to make was like stack is like, we are not in the blue stack, red stack anymore, so we are a cross-stack, actually. There are a lot of the sort of small LEGO pieces, we're trying to put those together. And again, the reason behind that is because there's some enabling technology like Web services in RESTful APIs, so those have enabled us to-- >> And new kinds of glue layers, if you will. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Abstraction layers. >> Yeah, I call it digital glue. There's a new type of digital glue, and now we have, we are seeing the emergence of low code, no code sort of paradigms coming into the play, which is a long debate in itself. So they are changing the stack altogether. So everything is becoming kind of lightweight, if you will, again-- >> And more the level of granularity is getting, you know, thinner and thinner, not macro. So you know, macroservices doesn't exist. That was my, I think, my tweet, you know, macroservices or microservices? >> Yeah. >> Which one you think's better? And we know what's happening with microservices. That is the trend. >> That is the trend. >> So that is that antithesis of macro. >> Yeah. >> Or monolithic. >> Yeah, so there's a saying in tech, actually I will rephrase it, I don't know exactly how that is, so we actually tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short run and underestimate in the long term, right? So there's a famous saying somebody, said that, and that's, I think that's so true. What we actually wanted to do after the dot-com bust was the object-oriented, like the sort of black box services, it as, we called them Web services back then, right? >> Yeah. >> There were books written by IBM-- >> Service-oriented architecture-- >> Yeah, SOA. >> Web services, RSS came out of that. >> Yes. >> I mean, a lot of good things that are actually in part of what the vision is happening today. >> It's happening now actually, it just happening today. And mobile has changed everything, I believe, not only on the consumer side, even on the economic side. >> I mean, that's literally 16, 17 years later. >> Yes, exactly, it took that long. >> It's the gestation period. >> Yes. >> Bitcoin 10 years ago yesterday, the white paper was built. >> Yeah. >> So the acceleration's certainly happening. I know you're big fan of blockchain, you've been tweeting about it lately. Thoughts on blockchain, what's your view on blockchain? Real, going to have a big impact? >> I think it will have huge impact, actually. I've been studying on it, actually. I was light on it, now I'm a little bit, I'm reading on it this and I understand. I've talked to people who are doing this work. I think it will have a huge impact, actually. The problem right now with blockchain is that, the speed, right? >> It's slow, yeah. So yeah, it's very slow, doc slow, if you will. But I think that is a technical problem, we can solve that. There's no sort of functional problem with the blockchain. Actually, it's a beautiful thing. Another aspect which come into play is the data sovereignty. So blockchains actually are replicated throughout the world if you want the worldwide money exchange and all that kind of stuff going around. We will need to address that because the data in Switzerland needs to sit there, and data in the U.S. needs to stay in the U.S. That blockchain actually kind of, it doesn't do that. You have a copy of the same data everywhere. >> Yeah, I mean, you talk about digital software to find money, software to find data center. I mean, it's all digital. I mean, someone once said whatever gets digitized grows exponentially. (Sarbjeet laughing) Oh, that was you! >> Actually I-- >> On October 30th. >> That was, that came from a book, actually. It's called Exponential Organizations. Actually, they're two great books I will recommend for everybody to read, actually there's a third one also. So (laughs) the two are, one is Exponential Organizations. It's a pretty thin book, you should take, pick it up. And it talks about like whatever get digitized grows exponentially, but our organizations are not, like geared towards handling that exponential growth. And the other one is Consumption Economics. The title of the book is Consumption Economics, actually. I saw that book after I started talking about it, consumption economics myself. I'm an economics major, actually, so that's why I talk about that kind of stuff and those kind comments, so. >> Well, and I think one of the things, I mean, we've talked about this privately when we've seen each other at some of theCUBE events, I think economics, the chief economic officer role will be a title that will be as powerful as a CSO, chief security officer, because consumption economics, token economics which is the crypto kind of dynamic of gamification or network effects, you got economics in cloud, you got all kinds of new dynamics that are now instrumented that need, that are, they're throwin' off numbers. So there's math behind things, whether it's cryptocurrency, whether it's math behind reputation, or any anything. >> Yeah. >> Math is driving everything, machine learning, heavy math-oriented algorithms. >> Yeah, actually at the end of the day, economics matters, right? That's what we are all trying to do, right? We're trying to do things faster cheaper, right? That's what automation is all about. >> And simplifying, too. >> And simplifying service. >> You can't throw complexity in, more complexity. >> Yeah. >> That's exponential complexity. >> Sometimes while we are trying to simplify things, and I also said, like many times the tech is like medicine, right? I've said that many times. (laughs) Tech is like medicine, every pill has a side effect. Sometimes when we are trying to simplify stuff, we add more complexity, so. >> Yeah. What's worse, the pain or the side effects? Pick your thing. >> Yeah, you pick your thing. And your goal is to sort of reduce the side effects. They will be there, they will be there. And what is digital transformation? It's all about business. It's not, less about technology, technology's a small piece of that. It's more about business models, right? So we're trying to, when we talk about micro-consumption and the sharing economy, they're kind of similar concepts, right? So Ubers of the world and Airbnbs all over the world, so those new business models have been enabled by technology, and we want to to replicate that with the medicine, with the, I guess, education, autos, and you name it. >> So we obviously believe in microcontent at theCUBE. We've got the Clipper tool, the search engine. >> I love that. >> So the CUBEnomics. It's a book that we should be getting on right away. >> Yeah, we should do that! >> CUBEnomics. >> CUBEnomics, yeah. >> The economics behind theCUBE interviews. Sarbjeet, thank you for coming on. Great to see you, and thank you for your participation-- >> Thanks, John. >> And engagement online in our digital community. We love chatting with you and always great to see you, and let's talk more about economics and digital exponential growth. It's certainly happening. Thanks for coming in, appreciate it. >> It was great having, being here, actually. >> All right, the CUBE Conversation, here in Palo Alto Studios here for theCUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (lively orchestral music)

>> From Phoenix, Arizona, The Cube at Catalyst Contracts. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. It's funny, seems something about Phoenix that this is where all the great women in tech conferences are. We were here two years ago for our first Grace Hopper and it's really fun to return now to this one, the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, which, a little bit smaller, about 400 people, their fourth year, but again it's all about empowering girls, empowering women to think differently, to take charge and to be more successful so really excited for our next guest, Jim McCarthy, brought in to motivate the troops. >> That's right. >> So first off, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So-- >> Thanks Jeff. >> Your keynote was all about a career without regret, have a great impact on what you care about. That is so topical right now, and especially these people that talk about, you know, the millennials and you know, kind of the younger generation coming up, they want to do things that they care about >> Yeah, I think all the research indicates millennials, more than maybe prior generations, really are looking for work that has impact and has meaning. >> Is it because they can? You know, that things are a little bit easier, they know they're not necessarily y'know, suffering to get by? Why do you think there's the change and then once you've made that decision, how do you implement that in kind of your day to day life? >> Well I'm not sure I could explain how the millennials are perhaps different, maybe they just see some of the challenges in our world like climate change for example and realize wow, there's some very serious challenges we face. That might be why they're looking for more of an impact, but in terms of what to do to find more meaning in life I always encourage people to do work that they really love, that they're passionate about, and in this conference a lot of the women have talked about passion and what you're good at and really doing that 'cause that's what you're going to be most successful at. >> Right, but that's a really common theme >> Yeah. >> We've heard that forever, to close your parachute, y'know, if you could find something that you get paid well and you're passionate about, but often times there's a conflict, right? Sometimes it's just harder, people get stuck in something that they're not happy with, but they're not really willing to make the change, not really willing to make the investment or take the chance so what are some of the things you tell people that are specific actionable, that will help them y'know, make those changes to get some place where they're y'know, feeling better about what they're working on? >> Well, so for me part of my talk was I talk about how I had a career in Silicone Valley, early employee at Yahoo! and different internet companies and then about three and a half years ago I was diagnosed with cancer and that was a big wake up call for me. And even though my health seems to be okay right now, it really sort of helped me realize that wow, I'm not going to live forever and by embracing my mortality I've started living much more fully and I decided okay, if I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I always wanted to, never had the courage to do it, I thought okay, I'm not going to live forever, I might as well dive into it, have the courage to try even if I fail. But at least I'll be happy and I'm not living a life with regrets. >> Right. >> So that was part of my workshop yesterday. >> So that's really interesting and a powerful story I mean, we often hear when there's these, y'know, kind of life changing events, these big moments, y'know that is the catalyst. Does it take that to make the change? Can people do it without the change? I mean, we can't hardly get anyone to lift up their face out of email. (laughing) I mean, how do we do it without that or does it really take that? I mean, is that really what happens, whether it's yourself or a loved one or someone you care about, it's interesting 'cause that's powerful catalyst >> Yeah so, I think for some people it does take getting, y'know, hit with a ton of bricks like that in order to really realize what they need to do and have the courage to do it and just realize y'know, this may not work out but I'm just going to go for it. In part of my workshops I try to help people think about their mortality, think about if you were to die today, how would you feel about your relationships. If you were to die today, how would you feel about the work that you've done. And then I always have them write out action plans for okay, based on what I wrote, based on what we discussed, what do you want to change in your life and what's the deadline to do it? So that's kind of the process that I use in my workshops so it's not just nice story and inspiration but it's really okay, how can we bring this back to what am I going to do with my career, what am I going to do with my relationships and there's also very practical things that people can do that I think will help them a lot, one is mindfulness to reduce their stress, one is affirmation in which you can actually train your brain to be much more positive thinking and there's a lot of neuroscience behind that today which shows that you can actually sculpt your brain to have a much more positive attitude. So those are some and then the goal setting is important too. So -- and then gratitude, I'm sorry, there's another practice. So these are very, this is not just nice ideas but actually daily practices you can do, mindfulness and meditation, gratitude and affirmations, these are all things that can really have a daily impact in a very positive way. >> Right, and I'm sure people say, "Jim, that sounds great, I printed it out, it's on my fridge, but jeez, I wake up, I have 472 unread emails, the boss is calling me," how do I really actually do it? I want to do it but I'm drowning in email, whoever invented email is problematic, I'm glad that young kids don't use it 'cause it's going to die soon. (laughing) But y'know, practically, what do you tell folks? >> What I tell people is if you meditated 10 minutes a day, that's about 1% of your waking hours and that 1% would improve the other 99% of your waking hours and meditation used to be very weird and funky and new-agey and now you see more and more people saying, "No actually, 10 minutes of mindfulness or meditation or breathing or whatever can make a huge positive impact on your health both physically and mentally". There's all sorts of very serious scientific research, neuroscience, which underscores that. So if you invest 10 minutes of your day in being at peace, reducing stress, focusing on your breathing, then the other 99% of your day is going to be calmer, you're not going to be freaking out so much, you get an email in your inbox that you may not like but you can say, "okay, let me breath, okay let me think about this, okay", don't have to do an immediate flame mail response and then you're doing a lot less damage control in your life and you're being much more focused on how do I want to spend my day. And so that is one way to reduce your stress and yet still get stuff done, the most important stuff done. >> It's interesting, I have an unwritten book that I always wanted to write, kind of on some of the things you said before about y'know, don't forget your death bed, 'cause at some point you're going to be laying on your death bed-- >> That would be the title of your book? >> And you're going to have those questions. >> Yeah >> Yeah Y'know, did I do what I want to do? Did I spend too much time at the office, or too much time at the beach or too much time with the kids or not? >> Well if I can say, there's a woman who wrote a book named "The Top Five Regrets of the Dying" and regret number two was "I wish I had worked less". And every single man in her survey that she talked to said "I wish I had worked less". And these are men on their deathbeds. But it applies to a lot of women as well. >> So I want to shift gears a little bit, back to your tech days, >> Yeah (laughing) >> Just looking at your background, obviously some of our homework and you y'know, you did a summer at McKenzie, you're kind of at the leading edge of business and smart people and you -- >> You're too kind Jeff, okay? (laughing) >> No, and then you decide I haven't finished the story, and then you go to San Jose Mercury News to work in classifieds. >> Actually to do marketing. >> To do marketing >> Yeah >> But you were involved in classifieds and I only bring up the classifieds 'cause it's interesting because then you left and went to Yahoo!, right at the main, I mean really at a pivotal time in the transformation of classifieds moving from the newspaper to online. >> Yes >> So you lived kind of this digital transformation long before Uber and some of the other examples that are so often cited. >> Yeah. >> So I'd just love to get kind of your perspective on, y'know, kind of digital transformation, it happened, this was 97 so what 20 years ago, I can't believe it's 20 years ago, to now and then in the context of what you're doing now. >> So I graduated from business school in 1996, and went to the San Jose Mercury News and was doing marketing things. But right when I was graduating I was like, "Oh jeez, y'know this internet thing is going to be huge!", and after a few months at the Mercury News, I said, "Look, I really want to do something with internet", and they said, "Sorry, can't do that, keep helping us sell papers." And I said, "Well screw this!", and so I went to Yahoo! In July 1997, I was employee number 258 and I was hired to be a product manager for Yahoo! classifieds, so realizing, 'cause I remember sitting in the Mercury News at my computer and looking at, wow, Yahoo! has some like, online classifieds for autos? And careers? And this is way better than the newspaper! I can have long descriptions here and you can even see pictures of things, so I went to Yahoo! classifieds and out of that we created Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Careers Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! Real Estate. And yes, this absolutely-- And then later there was the category killers where there was Match.com, where there was Monster or Monster Board, and on down the line-- >> Monster Park, remember Monster Park, one of the first sponsored stadiums back in the day. >> Yeah, yeah. >> After 3Com. Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt. >> No it's okay. So it was an amazing transformation and it was one of these things where the internet just does things so much better and you could say it also sort of helped destroy an industry, right? I mean, I'm certainly a big believer in the power of local newspapers and investigative journalism, and that's really been damaged a lot from the last 20 years, but sometimes it's like this technological imperative where the web is so much better, people have to figure out different business models, different ways to fund their journalism, different revenue models that work. But I mean it's just amazing to see what's gone on with how classifieds has developed, e-commerce has developed. I worked later on Yahoo! Auctions and Shopping, you can talk about that more if you want. >> Yeah, a friend of mine works at the Yellow Pages, I was like dude, you probably need to get a new job. >> Really? Still? >> It's YP.com now. Well turns out they have a huge online business which is good for them. No still, I was like c'mon, (laughing) You need to get out of that. >> Gosh (laughing). >> So, anyway. It's just interesting, the digital transformation that we're under now y'know, has happened over and over again, we just happen to be kind of in the current iteration, sometimes people forget-- >> Yes, yeah. >> That there was a time before Google, it was called AltaVista (laughing) or WebCrawler if you want to go back even further. Anyway, we regress. So Jim, what're you working on now, what're you looking forward to in the next six months, any special projects? You just traveling the country and spreading good word? >> I travel the country and I travel internationally doing my workshop. So basically the workshop's where I teach companies how to build happy, high performance teams. >> Awesome. >> And in the workshop, some of them are a little bit more, much more sort of inspirational and about mortality and about what you want to do for life purpose, I have a workshop called, "Happiness Workshop: Keep Calm and Get Stuff Done" and then so there's ones which are much more goal setting, there's more which are inspirational and yeah, I travel and teach companies how to -- whether it's an hour workshop or a six hour workshop, that's what I do. >> Jim, thanks for stopping by, it's a great story and I think it's just so important, y'know there's a lot of great inspirational stories out there but really y'know, how you do you help people, give them actionable things that they can put on the fridge, put on their calender and-- >> And have in their daily routine. >> Right and do it right, and do change behavior 'cause it's hard to change attitude, really hard, and the way you do it is you change behavior, that you can actually change. Thanks for-- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Thanks for sharing a few minutes with us. >> Thank you Jeff, very kind of you. >> Absolutely >> Thank you >> Jim McCarthy, I'm Jeff Frick, we're in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, you're watching The Cube. Thanks for watching.