>> Live, from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE! Covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018, brought to you by theCUBE. >> So, welcome to the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit. I'm about to hand you over to John Furrier, who is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media and Executive Editor at theCUBE, he's about to do a Fireside Chat with Al and Mathew, I'll let him introduce you to them as well. He's also involved in a major blockchain project himself, so he's going to get into that with those guys as well. So, and tomorrow we start at nine, in the meantime, enjoy the evening, enjoy the food, enjoy the chat, and I'll let you go. >> Okay. Hello? Thank you Ruth, appreciate it, thanks everyone for being part of this panel, Fireside Chat, want to make it loose, but high impact for you guys, I know, having some cocktails, having a good time. If there's any questions during, then at the end we'll pass the mic around, but. We want to have a conversation, kind of like we always do down in the lobby bar, just talking about crypto and cloud, and we ended up talking about cloud computing and crypto a lot because those are two areas that are kind of converging, and the purpose of this event. So we really wanted to share some thoughts around those two massively growing markets, one is already growing, it's continuing to be great: the cloud, and blockchain certainly is changing everything. These two important topics, we want to flesh them out, Al Burgio is the Serial Entrepreneur/Founder of DigitalBits, he's founded companies both in cloud and blockchain, so he brings a great perspective. And Matt Roszak, leading crypto investor, entrepreneur and advocate, well known in the crypto space for goin' way back, I think you gave a couple bitcoins to some very famous people early on, we'll get into that a little bit later. So guys, thanks for being part of the panel and Fireside. First question is: we know how big the money is, I mean the money is crypto is is flowin' around the world, and cloud computing we've seen specifically, and certainly in coverage now with Amazon's success, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft and others. Trillions of dollars being disrupted in the traditional kind of the enterprise, data center area, and blockchain is doing that too, so we want to get into that. But first, before we get into it, I want you guys to take a minute to explain for the folks, just to set the context, the kinds of projects you're working on. Now Al, you have DigitalBits, Matt you're investing and you're finding a lot of interesting token dynamics. So just take a minute. Al, start. >> (mic off) So-- Everybody hear me okay? Alright, perfect. Well thanks for that lovely intro. Yes, my name is Al Burgio, I'm, I've founded a few companies, as John mentioned. Before the cloud there was internet, (light laugh) and so it started for me in the late '90s in the e-commerce era. But more recently I pioneered what's known as Interconnection 2.0, and I did that with the company called Console, for those that may know PCCW, recently it was acquired by PCCW. And with that we disrupted the way networks at the core of the internet were connected together More recently I've founded the DigitalBits project, and now DigitalBits blockchain network, and with that, you can kind of think of that as the trading and transaction layer for the points economy and other digital assets, and you can do a lot of really interesting thing with that, it's really about bringing blockchain to the masses. >> Matt, what're you workin' on? >> So, Matthew Roszak, Co-Founder and Chairman of Bloq. Bloq is a enterprise software company, we do two things, the premise is the tokenization of things, so we think the money identity, new layers of the internet are going to be tokenized. And so, we go to market in two ways, one is through Bloq Enterprise, and these are all the software layers you need to to connect to tokenized networks, so think a wallet, a node, a router, etc. And then Bloq Labs we build, and partner with, some of the leading tokenize networks and applications, so we build a connective tissue and then we actually build these new networks. I started this space as an investor over five/six years ago, investing in some of the best entrepreneurs and technologists in the space build a great network. But I love building companies, and so my Co-Founder and I, Jeff Garzik, built Bloq two and a half years ago. And then lastly, also serve of Chairman of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, so, so if you believe in these new tokenized money layers, identity layers, etc, regulation comes into play. Certainly today from an institutional adoption level, and so if you care about this space, you need to spend time to kind of help that dialogue improve; this technology moves way faster than folks in DC and elsewhere, so. >> And the project that we're workin' on at SiliconANGLE, is we've tokenized our media platform, and we're opening it up to a token model, and have kind of changed the game. So all three of us have projects, want to put those in context, we build everything on Amazon Web Services, so, the view of the cloud, we also cover it. The cloud computing market is booming, we see that Amazon Web Services numbers empower the earnings for Amazon's company, obviously Apple's trillion dollar evaluation those are clear case studies; but blockchain could potentially disrupt it all, and Al, I want to get your thoughts, because even today in the news at Microsoft Azure, which is their big cloud provider, announced blockchain as a service. And folks that are in either the data center business or in cloud know the shift that's happening in the IT world, but no ones really connected the dots on where blockchain intersects, and also, is it an opportunity for the cloud guys, what's the landscape look like, so. What's your thoughts on that, how are they connected, what does it mean, how does a cloud company maintain their relevance and competitiveness with blockchain? >> Well, just pointing on the fact that, you know, today we had that new Microsoft, the Azure cloud, their support and evangelism for blockchain. You know, a company, I think it's very important that this isn't an ICO, two kids in a garage saying their doing something blockchain this is a massive, multi-billion dollar company; and making a decision like that is not trivial, it's many, many departments, a lot of resources, before such a thing's announced. So, that's, not only is it validation, but it's a leading indicator as to this trend, that this is clearly something that's important. And a lot of people, if you're not paying attention, you need to be paying attention, including if you're in the cloud industry, 'cause many companies obviously do compete with, with Microsoft and AWS, so. It may be still early, but it's not that early, in light of the news that we saw today. With that, I would say that, a lot of the parallels I like to kind of, if I was an infrastructure provider I'd look at this from the standpoint of the emergence of Linux when it first came on the scene. What was important for companies like Red Hat to be successful, they had competition at the time, and you had shortages of Linux, let's say engineers, and what have you. And so, a company like Red Hat built a business around that, and they did that by how they kind of surfaced and validated themselves to the enterprise of that era, was partnering with hardware companies, so, it was Intel, IBM, and then Dell, HP, and they all followed, and then all of a sudden, which version of Linux do you want to use? It's Red Hat, you're paying for that support, you're paying Red Hat. And, you know, then they had their hockey stick moment. Today, you know, it's not about hardware companies per se, it's about the cloud, right? So cloud is the new hardware per se, and many enterprises obviously are looking at cloud computing companies and cloud computing providers, infrastructure providers, as the company that they need to support them with the infrastructure that they use, or sorry the technologies that they use, right? Because they're not necessarily supporting these things and making sure that they're always on within the basement of that enterprise, they're depending, or outsourcing, to depending on these managed IT providers. This was very important that whatever technologies they're using in the lab, that ultimately their infrastructure partners are able to support the implementation, the integration, the ongoing support of these technologies. So if you think of blockchain like an operating system or a database technology, or whatever you want to call it, it's important that you're able to really identify these key trends, and be able to support your customer and what they're going to need, and ultimately for them, they can't have a clog in their digital supply chain, right? So, it's clearly emerging. Microsoft is validating that today, you know, clearly they have the data, that they're seeing for their existing enterprise customers, and they don't want to lose them. >> Yeah, but remember when cloud came out; you and I have talked about this many times Al that it wasn't easy to use, I remember when Amazon Web Services came out, it was just basically, it was hard to command line, basically you had to use it, so, it became easier now, it's so easy and consumable. Blockchain, similar growing pains, but, we don't want to judge it too early with the opportunity that it has, it's going to get easier, what're your thoughts? And it has to scale by the way, Amazon, at a large scale. >> Yeah, I mean-- >> So blockchain has to scale and be easier, your thoughts? >> Another kind of way to think of it is, to not necessarily think of cloud computing, but the evolution the internet went, you know, in Internet 1.0, you know, we went through this dial-up modem era, things were very raw back then; great visions we had of the future, like, it's going to be amazing for video one day! But, not during dial-up modem era, and eventually, you know, it eventually happened. And user interfaces improved, and tool sets improved and so forth. You know, fast forward to today, we have all of that innovation to leverage, so things will move a lot faster with blockchain, it did start very raw, but it's, it's moving much faster than anything we've seen definitely in the '90s and in the last decade, so. It's just, you know, it's a matter of moments, not years. >> And I think Al brings up a great point on leverage, because Amazon leverages infrastructure to a point where it's larger than Google, Azure, and IBM's public cloud combined, and so yeah, massive leverage there. And so, when these big cloud providers provide this blockchain as a service, it is instrumented and built on top of their existing infrastructure, not necessarily on blockchain infrastructure. So, it's an interesting dynamic where they're putting it on top of existing infrastructure that's there, but what's being build right now is the decentralized Amazon Web Services. So you have every layer of Amazon being re-imagined, like, and incentivized so you have distributed compute and access and storage and database. And so, what will be interesting to see is that, given this massive opportunity, will Amazon and some of these other incumbent cloud providers become the provisioning networks of the future? Of all this new decentralized resources that get, again, if you want storage, you have to start having smarts to say: if I'm going to go to Sia or Filecoin or Genaro or Storj, compute, etc; you have to start being a provisioning layer on top of that to kind of, you know, make that blockchain essentially work. So, it'll be interesting to see the transition 'cause today the lightweight versions to say yeah, I have a blockchain as a service strategy, and that's like, well done, and check the box. Now, the question is how far in this new world will they go down? And, as it gets more decentralized, as universities and governments, corporations, plug their access utility into these networks, and to see how that changes. That is much bigger than the Amazon of today. >> I think that's an interesting point, I want to just drill down on that if you don't mind, 'cause I think that's a fundamental observation that every layer's going to be decentralized. The questions I think I'm asking and I'm seeing is: How does it all work together? And then what's the priorities? And the old model was easy; got to get the infrastructure, got to get servers, (laughs lightly) and you know, work your way up to the top of the stack. What cloud brings also is that: a software developer can whip up an application, maybe a dApp on a test network and go viral, and the next thing you know they have a great opportunity, and then they got to build down. So the question is: What are you seeing in terms of priorities on stacks, portions of the stack that are being decentralized and tokenized, do you see patterns, trends, as an investor, is there a hotter (laughs) area than others, how do you look at that? >> Well, I think it's, it's in motion right now it's, like I said, every layer of AWS is getting thought through in how to create these digital cooperatives, I have excess storage, I'm going to contribute it to this network, and I'm going to get paid in tokens when a user uses that storage network, and pays for it in those native tokens and so that, coupled with all the other layers, is happening. From a user perspective, we may not want to be going to pick a database provider, a storage, a compute, etc, we're likely going to say: I want a provisioning layer, and provision this and execute this, much like if we, you know, there'll be new provisioning layers for moving money, I don't care if routes through Lightning or Litecoin or Doge or whatever, as long as the value gets across the pond or the app gets provisioned appropriately based on you know, time, security, and cost, and whatever other tendance are important, that's all I care about, but; given the depth and the market for all that, I think it'll be interesting to see how these are developed with the provisioning layers, and I would think Amazon or Azure, the future of that is, is more provisioning than actually going and doing all that at the end of the day. >> That's great. I want to get your thoughts guys on innovation. My good friend Andy Kessler wrote an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal around, an article around the government, the US government getting involved. You know, there's Twitter, Facebook, the big platforms, in terms of how they're handling their media, but it brings up a good point that with more regulation, there's less innovation. You mentioned some things outside the United States, it's a global cloud, cloud's operating globally with regions, it's a global fabric. Startups are really hot in this area so; how do you view the ecosystems of startups, in terms of being innovative, things happening that you think that're good, and things that aren't good, obviously I'm not a big of the government getting involved, and managing startups, the ecosystems but, blockchain has a lot of alpha entrepreneurs jumping in, you've looked at all the top ventures, the legit ventures, they're all alpha entrepreneurs, multi-time serial entrepreneurs, they see the opportunity and they go for it. Is the startup environment good, is there enough innovation opportunities, what're you thoughts on the opportunity to be innovative? >> Yeah, Al and I were just talking about this before the panel here, and were talking about our travels in Asia, and when we go there it is 10, 100 X of energy and get-it factor, and capital, and the markets are just wildly more vibrant than you know, going to some typical markets here in San Fran and New York in North America, and, so it's interesting to see that when you heat map the world, what's really happening. And you know, people are always saying: oh well this, this FinTech, or InsurTech, or whatever tech, is going to make a dent in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. This technology, this new frontier, is definitely going to do that. I think some of that will get put into more focus based on regulation, and there's two things that will happen; there's obviously a lot of whippersnapper countries that are promoting a safe place to innovate with crypto, I think Malta, Gibraltar, Barbados, etc, and there were-- >> Even Bermuda's getting in on the mix now. >> Yeah! I mean so there's no shortage of that, and so, and obviously this ecosystem outpaces the pace of regulation and then we'll see like the US doing something, or you know, other fast followers to try and catch up, and say hey, we're going to do the cryptocurrency act of 2022, miners get free power, tax-free, you know crypto trading, you know just try and play catch up. 'Cause it's kind of hard in the last year or 18 months we've seen this ecosystem go from this groundswell to this now institutional discussion; and how do you back end the the banking, the custody, all these form factors that are still relatively absent. And so, you know, we're right in the middle of it. >> It's a whole new way, you got to follow the money, right? Al, you and I talked about this; capital markets, you know entrepreneurs need to raise money and that's a good thing, you need to get capital to do stuff. >> Yeah, this is a new phenomenon that the world has never experienced before, it's awesomeness when it comes to capital formation; you know, without capital formation there is no innovation. And so the fact that more capital can be raised, it's the ultimate crowd sourcing in such an efficient period of time, capital being able, the ability to track capital from various different corners of the world, and deploy that capital to try to fuel innovation. Of course, you know, not all startups or what have you succeed, but that was true yesterday, right? You know, 90% of startups fail, but they all will give it some meaningful amounts of checks, people were employed and innovation was tried; and every once in a while something emerges that's amazing. If you can do that faster, right, when you have the opportunity to produce more and more innovation. And, of course with something so new as cryptocurrency, things like ICOs and what have you, people may kind of refer to it as the wild wild West, it's not, it's an evolution. And you have-- >> It's still the wild west though, you got to admit. (laughs) >> Well, it is but, we're getting better at it, right? As a world, this isn't the Silicon Valley community getting better at venture capital or some other part of the United States or Canada getting better at venture capital; this is the world as a whole getting better at capital formation. >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> In the new way of capital formation. >> And I wanted to just get an observation on that. I moved to Silicon Valley 20 years ago, and I love it there, for venture capital and new startups, it's the best place in the world. And I've seen people try to replicate Silicon Valley, we're the Silicon Valley of Canada, we're the Silicon Valley of the East or Europe, and it's always been hard to replicate, because it was a venture model, and you needed venture capitalists and you need money, you need a community, the culture, the failure, the starting over, and just, you know, gettin' back on the horse kind of thing. Crypto is the first time that I've seen the replica of that Silicon Valley dynamic, in a new way, because the money's flowing, (laughs) and there's community involved in crypto, crypto has a big community aspect to it. Do you guys see that as well? I mean I'm seeing, outside the United States, a lot of activity. Is that something that you're seeing? >> So, the first time we saw, well, last time we saw everybody trying to replicate Silicon Valley was first internet, you know, there was Silicon Swamp, there was Silicon Alley, there was silicon this-- >> Prairie. >> Every city was >> Silicon Beach. >> A silicon version of something, and then the capital evaporated, right? We had a mass correction happen. What wasn't being disrupted was value exchange, right, and so this is being created now, it is now possible for this to happen, and it's happening, we're seeing amazing things, Matt said, you know, in Asia. It's a truly awesome force, if anybody has an opportunity to go, they should go, it's unbelievable to experience it, and it really opens your eyes. >> And you've lived through a lot of investments during those .com days and through history now, you've seen a lot of different things. Your observations with the current state of the capital formation, startup landscapes, the global ecosystem around crypto and how it's different from say venture or classic rolling up companies and those kinds of things? >> Yeah, you hear a lot of this, you know, we're in a bubble, it's speculative, etc. And I think that when you look back at history of infrastructure, whether it's railroads, telephony, internet, and now crypto and blockchain, it's interesting, like, if you said: it would take this amount of money to innovate and come out the other end of internet with this kind of infrastructure, these kinds of applications, with these kinds of lessons learned, nobody would sign up for that number, right? It needs this fear, and greed, and all the other effervescence of markets to kind of come out the other end and have innovation. I think we're going through a very similar dynamic here with crypto and blockchain where you know, everything's getting tokenized, everything's getting decentralized. We're talking about fundamental things like money, you know, it's not like we're talking about pet food and women's shoes and airline tickets, we are talking about money, identity, things that will enable like other curves to really come into focus like in and out of things and the kind of compounding of intersections when some of these things get right is pretty extraordinary. And so, but I like what Al said in terms of capital formation and that friction to get from, you know, idea to capital to building, is getting compressed Yes, there will be edge cases of people taking advantage of that, but at the other end of this flow will be some amazing innovation. >> What do you guys think about the, if you had to answer the question with one answer, of what is the high order bit of why blockchain's so important? For me, I see it, from my standpoint, I'll just start, I see it making inefficient things more efficient for any use case, and that's being re-imagined, which is everything from IOT or whatever. Efficiency is a big thing, at least I see that. What do you guys see as a high order bit in terms of you know, the one thing that you'd say blockchain really impacts the world in terms of you know, impact, financial, etc? >> Well, I think with decentralization and all these things that we're seeing it's kind of evened the playing field. It's allowing for participation where parts of the world were unable to participate. And it's doing a whole lot of things in that area. And that's truly awesome, to really grow the economy, grow the global market, and the number of participants in that market in all areas. That's the ultimate trend at what's happening here. >> And your information? >> Absolutely, and I think there's two things, there's this blockchain dialogue, and then there's this crypto decentralization, tokenization dialogue, and on the blockchain side you have lots of companies engaging in blockchain and trying to figure out how it applies to their business, and you hear everything from McKinsey and Goldman saying financial services will save 100 billion dollars in operating expenses by applying blockchain technology, and that's great. That is probably low in terms of what they'll save, it's, to me, is just not the point of the technology, I think that when you kind of distill that down to say hey, for a group of folks to use this technology as a shared services thing to lower opex a trading settlement and decrease that, that's great, that is a step stone to creating these tokenized economies, these digital cooperatives. Meaning you contribute something and then you get something back, and it's measured in the value that this token is, like a barometric kind of value of how healthy that ecosystem is. And so, regulated public enterprises, and EC consortiums around insurance and financial services and banking, that is all fantastic, and that gets them in the pool, gets them exercising on what blockchain is, what it isn't, how they apply it, but it's, at the end of the day for them it's cost reduction The minute there's growth or IP, or disruption on the table, they're all going back to their boardrooms to say: hey let's do this, this, or that, but, if there's a way, my favorite class in college was industrial organization, and it sounds weird but, it was, it kind of told ya like how to dissect an industry, you know, what makes them competitive, who the market leaders are, and then, if you overlay like blockchain networks with tokens, with incentives, interesting things could happen, right? And so that future is going to be real interesting to see how market leaders think about how to tokenize their network, how to be, how to say: no I don't want to own this whole industrial network, I have to engage with some other participants and make sure everybody is incentivized to climb on board. So that I think is going to be more of the interesting part than just blockchain-ifying a workflow. >> Well let's just quickly drill down on that, token economics, what you're getting to. So let's assume blockchain just happens, as evolution of technology, let's just assume for a second that it's going to happen in a big way, it's private, public, hybrid chains, with all that good stuff happening, but the token economics is where the business value starts to be extracted, so the question for you is: How do you describe that to someone to look for, what are the key elements of token economics? When does it matter, when is it in play, and how should they be thinking about it? >> Yeah, I mean token economic design and getting a flywheel going to create a network and network effects is really important. You could have great technology, but Al could be a better marketer, and he gets tokens adopted better, and his network will do better because, you know, he was better able to get people to adopt and market a particular, you know, layer application. And so, it's really important to think about how you get that flywheel going, and how you get that kindling going on a particularly new ecosystem, and get users adoption and growth. That is really hard to do these days because some people don't even know what Bitcoin is, let alone to say I'm going to tokenize this layer, and every time you contribute, every time you take an action, you're going to get rewarded for it, and you're share the value of this network. >> Can you give me a good example of what's happening today that you can point to and say: that's a great example of token economics? >> Well, you see, I mean the most basic one is shared file storage, right? You know, it's like the Filecoin, Sia, Genaro model where, you know, you contribute you know, the unused storage in your laptop or your university data center or a corporate data center, and you say I'm going to contribute this, and when it's used I get these tokens and, you know at the end of the day or week or year you see what these tokens are worth, and was that worth your contribution? And so as these markets develop, and as utility develops, we'll see what that holds. >> Al, you got an example you could share? DigitalBits is a good use case obviously. >> Actually, I'm not going to use DigitalBits (John laughs) just to be neutral. This is one that Matt will know very well, definitely better than I, but one that I've-- the simpler something is, the easier it is for people to understand, and its like oh that makes sense, you know. You know, Binance is one that's very simple, you know it's a payment token, if you pay with some other currency, you pay, you know, Pricex, if you pay in the next few years with their token, you'll get the service at a discount. And in addition to that, they're using a percentage of profits, I think it's every quarter, to buy back up to, ultimately up to, 50% of tokens that are in circulation. So, you know, it's driving value, and driving return, in essence, if I can use that word. So for a user it's simple to understand, for someone that likes to speculate it's easy for someone to understand in terms of how the whole model works, so it's not some insanely complicated mathematical equation, that we can yes we can trust the math. And so in some cases, some adoption is going to just be, you know, attract participants based on simplicity. In other cases the math is important, and people will care about that, so, you know not all things are necessarily equal, and not necessarily one method is right, but there are some simple examples out there that that have proven to be successful. >> That's awesome, one last question, before we open it up if anyone has any questions. If anyone has any questions, if they want to come up, grab the microphone, and ask the three of us if you've got anything on your mind. And while you're thinking about that I'll get the final question for these guys is: A lot of people ask me hey, I want to be on the right side of history, what side of the street should I be on when the reality comes down that decentralization, blockchain, token economics, decentralized applications, becomes the norm, and that re-imagining actually happens? I don't want to be on the wrong side of history. What should I be doing, how should I be thinking differently, who should I be following, what should I be paying attention to? How do you answer that question? >> I think, at the basic level, you know, turn off your phone, lock your door, and study this technology for a day, it's the best advice I could give. Two: buy some crypto. Once you kind of have crypto on your phone, in your wallet, something changes in your brain, I think you just feel like you-- >> You check the prices every day. (all laugh) >> You lose a lot of sleep. And then after that, you know, I think you start engaging in this space in a very different way. So I think starting small, starting basic, is an important tenet. And then, what's amazing about this space is that it attracts the best and brightest out of industry, and law, and government, and technology, and you name it, and I'm always fascinated the people that show up and they're like yeah, I'm in a 20 year, you know, veteran in this space and I want to get into blockchain, it just attracts some of the best and brightest. And, I think we're going to see a lot of experience coming into the space, you know, this has been a, what I'd say a bottoms up groundswell of crypto and blockchain and the evolution of the space. And I think we're starting to see more some more mature folks come in the space to to add some history and perspective and helpin' the build out of this, and to build a lot of these networks. I think that the kind of intersection of both is going to be very healthy for the space. >> Al, your thoughts? >> Definitely agree with Matt. Definitely to lock yourself up and just try to absorb information, everyone has access to the internet, there's plenty of information. If you don't like to read go watch a few YouTube videos, just people explaining the stuff, it's really fascinating, the various different use cases and so forth. You definitely have to buy some, and, you know, whether it's five dollars worth, just go through the whole experience of being able to trade something of value that a few years ago didn't exist, and be able to trade it for something else of value is a pretty phenomenal experience. Then trying to go buy something with it, it's even more of a fascinating experience, I just bought something that used, again, something that didn't exist a few years ago. But, what I would add to that as well, you really have to get out there; if you keep surrounding yourself with people saying aw, this is, eh, whatever, >> It's never going to work. >> It's crazy, it's for criminals, and all that fun stuff. You're going to be last place. So coming to conferences, obviously future's conference you're going to meet a lot of interesting, great people, and that consistent experience, you'll learn something every time. You know, at the end of the day, I remember, I'm sure all three of us remember, with the birth of the internet there was many people that said you know the internet thing, it's crap, it's for kids, you know. And we had first movers, we had willing followers, and then the unwilling followed, you don't want to end up being-- >> The unwilling followers. >> Yeah, the unwilling. >> Alright. Does anyone have any questions they'd like to ask? Come on up. Yeah. We're recording, so we want to get it on film. >> So I have two questions. The first one is for you, Al: Two years ago I interviewed with IIX before it was Console, and I want to know why you didn't hire me? (Sparse laughs) No I'm kidding! That was a joke. Actually, I thought each of you brought up some good points, minus you Al. (chuckles) I'm just kidding. But what I really wanted to ask you guys is: so you talk a lot about this, the tokenized economy and kind of the roadmap and the things to get there, you talk about sediment layer, right, Fiat to crypto, sediment layer, your identity protocols, your dApps, X, Y, Z, right? The whole web 3.0 stack, I want each of you, or I want at least input from both of you or all of you, what are the hurdles to getting to a full adoption of web 3.0 stack, and make a bold prediction on the timing before we have a full web 3.0 stack that we use every day. >> That is a awesome question actually, timelines. You could be, being in technology, being in venture, you could be right, and you could be off by three, five, seven, 10 years, and be so wrong, right? And then at your retirement dinner you could say: I was right, but Tommy wasn't right. So, this is really hard technology, in terms of building systems that are distributed, creating the economic models, the incentive models, it takes a lot to go right in the intersection of all this. But it's not a question like is this happening? No, this is happening, this is like, it's in motion. The timelines are going to be a little elusive, I'm way more pragmatic, I was one of the early guys in the early internet, and you know everything was going to be .com and awesome and fantastic. But the timelines were a little elusive then, right? You know, it's like when was, people are thinking of today's Amazon was going to be the 2005 Amazon, you know, it's like, that took about another decade to get there, right? And people could easily just buy stuff and a drone or a UPS guy would just deliver it, and so, similar things apply today. And you know at the same time we all have a super computer in our pocket, and so it's a lot different. At the same time we're dealing with trusted mediums right? The medium of money, the medium of identity, all these different things they're, they're things that you know if I say download Instagram, and let's share cat pictures or whatever, it's not a big deal, our trust is really low for that, let's do it. For money, it's a different mental state, it's a different dynamic, especially if you're an individual, a government, or an enterprise, you go through a whole different adoption curve on that, so, you know, it is at grand scale five to 10 years, right? In any meaningful way. And so we still have a lot of work to do. >> My answer to that question, it's a good one, your question was a good one, my answer's a little bit weird because it's multi-generational. The first generation pivot was when the internet was born was because of standards, right? The government had investment. The OSI model, open system interconnect, actually never happened, the seven layers didn't get standardized, only a few key ones did; that created a lot of great things. And then when the we came out, that was very interesting protocol development there, the TCP/IP stuff, I mean HTP stuff. I don't see the standardization happening, because cloud flipped the stack model upside down because Amazon and these guys let the software developers drive the value. It used to be infrastructure drove the value of what software could do, then software became so proliferated that that drove the value of the infrastructure, so the whole cloud computing equation is making the infrastructure programmable for the first time, not the other way around, so. The cloud phenomenon's all about software driving the value, and that's happening, so. It's interesting because with blockchain you can almost do levels of services in a cloud-like way with crypto, I mean with blockchain and token economics, and have a partial stack. So think that this whole web 3.0 might be something that no one's every seen before. So, that's kind of my answer, I don't really know if that's going to be right or not, but just looking at the future, connecting the dots, it's probably not going to look like what we've seen before, and if the cloud's an indicator it's probably going to be some weird looking stack where certain sections are working, and then evolution might fill in the other ones, so. I mean, that's my take, I mean, but standards will play a role, the communities will have to get involved around certain things, and I think that's a timeless concept. >> Timing. >> Oh, timing. I think it's going to be pretty quick, I think if you look at the years it took for internet, and then the web, everything's being compressed down, but I think it's going to be much shorter. If it was a 20 year cycle in the past, that gets shortened down to 15 with the internet, and this could be five years. So five to 10 years, that could be the impact in my mind. The question I always ask is: what year will banks no longer be involved in anything? Is that 20 years or 10 years? (laughs) Exactly, so, yeah, follow the money. >> So I would say that in terms of trying to keep your finger on the pulse with things and how you kind of things, see things evolve; things are definitely moving a lot faster, you know in the past you would probably say seven to 10, I'm not sure if I would say five, sorry five to 10, it definitely feels to me that it's five max til we could start to see some of these key things fall into place, so. >> So could you answer the first question? >> What was the first question? >> Why didn't you hire me? (audience cringes) >> We've met before? Sorry. (all laugh) >> I have a question, this is Dave Vellante, Co-Host of theCUBE. And I want to pick up on something John you just said, and Matt you were talking about Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, it's not about them saving hundreds of millions of dollars, it's really about them transforming business, so. And John, you just asked the question about banks, I want to actually get your answer to this: Will traditional banks, in your opinion, lose control of payment systems? Not withstanding your bias. (laughter) >> Yeah, I am definitely biased on this. But, I mean, I've been in front of the C-suite of banks, credit card companies, etc, and I said, you know, in about a decade, the center of what you do and how you make money is going to be zero. And, 'cause there'll be networks, and ways to transmit money that'll be by far cheaper, or will be subsidized by other networks, meaning, and those networks are Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, you know, Tencent, whatever networks that're out there, that're engaging in collaboration and commerce and everything else, they will give away payments as just a courtesy, like people give away messaging or email or something, as a courtesy to that network, and will harden that network, and it'll be built and based on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, so they don't necessarily have to worry about, you know, kind of subtle payments. But these new networks will start to encroach on banks, the banks are not worried about other banks today, the banks should be worried about these new networks that're being developed. >> How many people still have a home phone line? >> That was elegant, I like that. >> You know, I mean there's a generation of people that still like going to banks, they'll keep them in business for a while. But I think that comes to an end. >> I mean, when we covered a lot of the big data market when it started, the argument was mobile will kill the banks outlets, and now with ATMs there's more bank, more baking branches than ever before, so I think the services piece is interesting. >> And also, if you look at even the cloud basis, the software as a service, SaaS space, a decade, decade and a half ago, you would ask SAP, Oracle, what have you, what's your cloud strategy? And they'd be like cloud? That's just more efficient delivery model, not interested. 90 some billion dollars of M and A later, SAP, Oracle, etc, are cloud companies, right? And so, if banks kind of get into that same mode to say well, yeah, we need to play catch up and buy digital currency exchanges and multi-currency wallets, and this infrastructure and plumbing to be relevant in the next world, that would be interesting. But I think technology companies have as much an advantage to do that as as financial services companies, so it'll be interesting to see who kind of goes into that, goes into the crypto ecosystem to make that their own. >> It's interesting. We were talking before we came on and the OSS market, operational support systems is booming, and that's traditionally been these big operational outsource companies would manage big projects, but, if you look at in the first half of 2018, there's been a greater than 20 billion dollar commercial exits of companies through private equity merchants, IPOs, around OSS, and that's where we see operational things happening, CoreOS, Alfresco, MuleSoft, Pivotal went public, Magneto, GitHub, Treasure Data, Fastly, Elastic, DataStax, they're all in the pipeline. These are all companies that aren't cloud, they're like running stuff in cloud, so, this could be a tell sign that potentially the the blockchain operating market is going to be potentially a big one. >> Yeah, and then even look at BitMate, the world's largest miner in crypto. So, they did about a billion dollars in profit last year, did about a billion dollars in profit just in the first quarter going public, just raised a billion dollars last month, at a reportedly 50 to 70 billion dollar evaluation in Hong Kong in the next month, and the amount of money they'll raise will eclipse what Facebook raised. And so I think the institutional, the hardware, the cloud computing, the whole ecosystem starts to like resonate and think about this space a lot differently, and we need these milestones, we need these, whether they're room huddles or data points to kind of like think about how this is going to affect your business and what you do tomorrow morning. >> Any more questions from the crowd? Audience? Okay, great, well thanks for attending, appreciate you guys watching and listening, and guys thanks for the conversation; cloud and blockchain convergence. Collision course, or is it going to happen nicely, Al? >> Yeah, I think it's going to be a convergence, I don't see it necessarily as a collision course. >> And a lot of money to be made on this opportunity these days, and cloud convergence with blockchain. >> I concur with Al, I think there's going to be convergence, I think us most smarter players will engage and figure out their models in this new crypto and tokenized era. >> Thanks so much guys, appreciate it, give these guys a round of applause. (audience applause) Thank you very much. (bubbly music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. (lively electronic music) Hello everyone and welcome to special Cube coverage here in San Francisco, California. We're at VMware's Radio 2018 event. This is their annual R&D event where all the best people, smartest people, come together to collaborate on new projects, new innovations. Not imitation, innovation. Had great speakers up there. They had Steve Herrick, Cube alumni, now a venture capitalist, formerly CTO of VMware. And our first guest here today is Ray O'Farrell, executive vice president and CTO of VMware, been on theCUBE before. Great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Great to see you, good morning. >> So I love this event 'cause it's, like you mentioned before we came on camera, Steve Herrick said it's like a sales kick-off for engineers. >> Correct yeah, yep. >> Which is like a rah, rah but also, you know, really motivating, but also putting out the north star. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Which is the innovation message. >> [Ray] Correct. >> So take minute to talk about what this event is. Explain to the folks, what is Radio 2018? There's a lot of history involved here. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Behind us is a t-shirt row of, you know, key milestones of VMware history. You know, think inside the box, now it's, think inside the cloud. What's this event about? >> So, um, the event has quite a few years. This is like the 14th year we've done this, right? And when it started, what it was really focused on was, in some ways, a recognition that, as the company begins to grow, as you begin to build new products and engage in new partnerships, In order to keep innovation alive, you almost need to manage it. The problem is you can't manage innovation. Almost by, you know, by definition it's something chaotic. It's an inspirational idea. It's something that was not expected. That's what makes it innovation. But what you can do, is you can create a culture which promotes that innovation or creates opportunities for those ideas to emerge. Or when those ideas do emerge, make sure there's a place for them to be heard and there's an opportunity for a network to build around them. And Radio is a part of that. We have lots of other programs in VMware to help keep driving that culture of innovation, but Radio is probably the primary one. >> Talk about some of the history from this event. What has come out of these events? 'Cause I wanna get into some of the specific questions around how R&D works these days vis-a-vis how it used to work. But, specifically, what has come out of these events? Can you point to any things that kind of popped out? Because R&D, I won't say hit or miss, but it's the idea is to experiment and try new things and nail it. What has come out of VMware's Radio years of history? >> Yeah, so, very practically, we get a lot of patents out of Radio. That's just a very practical sense. As people are building up the papers, as they're looking at the ideas they want to drive, as they work with different teams to build prototypes. Quite a few times people do that at Radio when they're making a presentation. They'll generate ideas, invention disclosures, which generate new patents. This show alone, even though we just actually entering the show at this stage, has already generated about nearly 240 IDFs. A lot of those have the potential to become patents. So it's very, very practical and pragmatic about the generation of patents and new ideas. When you look at the products side of things, quite often what you see at Radio is not necessarily a new product in a whole new area. What you tend to see is, we have existing technologies bubbling in different spaces and now, because you're able to bring these teams together, somebody gets an idea that says, Oh, I can combine machine learning with what we're doing in terms of logging and now I've got an interesting product to help support our customers, you know, deal with real world problems. >> So, it's not take that hill, build me a blockchain product, it's more of, take a step back, zoom back, look at the big picture, understand the fusion of where things are coming together, look at architecture. Is that kind of the-- >> Yeah, actually, sometimes there is the, take that hill, take the blockchain product, but quite often, it starts as something small. You have a Radio event where somebody will say blockchain is cool and interesting. Here's how you run it in a more efficient fashion on vSphere, something like that. And that would be a poster session. And it's only then when somebody sees that that says, I can really run blockchain on vSphere? Can I do it better even now it's physical in some way? And that's when the story emerges. So you don't necessarily see the product announcement coming from Radio itself. What you see is the core of that idea and then a few months later, or the next major VMWorld, or two VMWorlds out, you begin to see these things emerging. >> It's like you're creating sparks of innovation, throw onto the fire, create some action. >> That's exactly the way it works. You know, things like, a lot of stuff what we do in containers. You know, the VMware integrated containers, the combination of containers and VMs from a security point of view. You can trace a lot of that back to ideas that were generated for Radio. And it's pretty rigorous. People have to go through, submit papers, there's a submit ideas. And, you know, our most senior engineers crawl all over those and critique them and so, you know-- >> So it's competitive? >> Oh, it's very competitive. That it is, in many ways, it's a mark of honor to be invited to Radio or to present a paper and so people fight very hard to do so. >> Built in gamifications called just be smart and show some good papers. >> Yes, it's a little bit tougher today. >> How much goes into the prep for this? Because obviously that's a great bar. You guys set a high bar, high is great. And it's a great place here for people to stretch and flex their technical muscle. >> Yep. >> What's the process? How do people get to that bar? Do they collaborate? Is there meet-ups? Is there organic processes of top-down? How do you guys handle it? >> So we've a lot of different processes or programs around driving innovation, but when you look at Radio itself, and it leverages some of those others, but when you look at Radio itself, basically we create a Radio committee. The one for next year will be starting somewhere in the next couple of weeks, right? We create a Radio committee. It is typically driven by members of the office of the CTO, but works and pulls in our fellows, our principle engineers, and we form a committee which really splits into two different directions. One of which is all around the technical papers, the presentations which are gonna be presented later here today. And another one which focuses around how do you do the keynotes? How do you get invited speakers? How do you create this inspirational, you know pervasive sense of innovation. And so you have those two groups working, while cooperating somewhat independently of each other. And it takes a long time. So for instance, only about 15% of the papers which are actually submitted are presented here. So there's a lot of work going through, scanning those, combining those. One of the most exciting things you can do at VMware is, if you go back somewhere in around the February timeframe, all of our most senior engineers sit in one of our largest conference rooms with a bunch of engineers submitting papers and so on, and there is a lively debate working through paper after paper, idea after idea, and saying is this a good thing for Radio? Is this original? Hey, nobody else thought of that. What we gonna be able to do to do that? Or, in some cases, saying these two people, one from Bangalore, one from Bulgaria, we've earned these sites all over the world, these ideas look similar. Can we get those guys to talk to each other? And see what comes out of that. >> So it's kind of a team-building exercise. At the same time, pre-innovation, but it's interesting. You've mentioned you've got the challenge of the papers, which is, you know, get the accuracy on the facts, original content, original ideas. >> [Ray] Correct. >> And then the content program for the event has to be inspiring and motivating at the same time Two different things, but two design standards for you guys. >> Yeah. And, you know, we need to combine them both and, 80% to 90% of the people who are here are hardcore R&D engineers. Their day job is to write code, produce product, archetype product, right? And, you know, if you haven't worked with a group of senior engineers, they are not going to be tolerant of presentations which, oh, we saw that before-- >> [John] Or fluff. >> Or fluff, right. They want to get hardcore into the meat. In fact, the presentations that you see that get some of the highest ratings, tend to be those that are deeply technical in nature. You know VMware's software base is primarily systems software, systems engineering. They expect to see deeply technical solutions to how to attack some real world problems. >> You guys do have some smart people. It's great to have you on theCUBE. This is our ninth year doing VMWorld. Great to start coming in to the more technical events. It's fantastic. The question I gotta ask for you is, Pat Gelsinger always says on theCUBE, he's says on theCUBE a few times, but consistent theme, you gotta get out in front of that next wave or you're driftwood. To the point of, don't just take that point product at view, jump on the wave. And the wave is all about the next 10 years or 20 years. What is the wave that you guys are, that you would categorize, obviously Cloud is key, but as you have the hyper-convergence and the on-premise private cloud boom and VSAN's great. We've seen great results from that. The cloud's right there. You've got Amazon, you got Microsoft, kicking butt on the numbers. As the R&D tries not to get caught up into the fashionable day to day, you can have the long view. >> [Ray] Yeah. >> What's the wave for the long view? >> So I think there's two waves we're looking at. One of them is you need to spend a lot of time with customers and understand what their agenda is. What their innovation agenda is. You look at that, you see, you know, products popping up. How will I leverage AI in a new and interesting way? How will I do something with Blockchain? You know, I want to run AI algorithms, I need different hardware and different management software to do that. So we focus on those and make sure we're doing that. But perhaps, more importantly, I think when you begin to look at what's happening with the industry right now, you know, you saw private cloud, you saw public cloud, you see how you connect these together. It's actually that connectivity is going to be important. You know, I believe you're going to see the emergence of Edge infrastructure, but isolated? That's not powerful. Now combine that Edge infrastructure with how you can leverage what's going into the public cloud or how you're going to be able to secure all these in a way that falls back into, you know, even Teleco in some way. You're now beginning to see this synergy across all of those things. And I think, you know, that's where our sweet spot is. We know how to deal with those hard, how do I connect things together? How do I manage complex different piece of systems software? So that's where we're gonna see it. >> Well, it's great stuff. One of the benefits of being so close to VMware over the past nine years, and I was showing you some of our online data analysis. When I look at the VMware ecosystem, the interesting see the evolution and kind of the journey, 14 years. And looking at the milestones. Clearly, infrastructure, on-premise data center. And then you saw that emergence of clouds. You start to see these markets emerge. Cloud, big data comes on the scene. Data warehouse in the infrastructure. Now, that's AI, cloud is bigger. All kind of taking a little bit off the infrastructure, kind of squeezing that down, but it moves up into the Cloud. And now you've got that, over the top, Blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralized applications. In the middle of these circles, is security, IOT, and data. >> Correct. >> You guys are right there, so I have to ask you, because they're all, the confluence of all of those are coming together. You're not up here playing Blockchain, although there's some stuff we can get into. You got some AI influencing. So, in the center of infrastructure, Cloud, AI, and Blockchain, etc. is security data, IOT. How is that coming together? What's the R&D task? >> So, actually, I think the key word you used there was confluence. You cannot really look at these as independent things. And, you know, so our focus is what does it mean to be, essentially, the infrastructure. The infrastructure management story for that new form of multi-Cloud, Edge, IOT type of narrative. So our role there is, we believe security is one of the key things to focus on. And we believe that, in that new world, connectivity is a key part of what goes on. The Edge was taught to the Cloud. The Cloud was taught to the Teleco. The Teleco was taught to the IOT. >> [John] They need power. >> Right. They need power, they need communication. They need those things. So a lot of the time, a lot of where we focus comes back to intersects. We do believe that software-defined networking is a key way of being able to deliver a new fluidity of when you get that confluence. And intersects very quickly brings you into security. That's how you begin to understand how you isolate those components, understand what you need to do to detect. When that Edge IOT device is not even the device you think it is. Somebody might have replaced it. That's where you begin to be able to see the communications as a result sort of from that. So security is key, interconnectivity is key, and you know, when we speak about IOT itself, I've got kind of a dual role at VMware. While I'm the CTO at VMware, I also focus on IOT for Dell Technologies. And when we look at that, you know, today many of the examples of IOT are very narrow, almost point, solutions. The real power will come when you begin to combine across those solutions. You know, the thing that tells you the weather, the thing that tells you the traffic, and then the thing that tells you, you know, what's the best way to get there in your car, or whatever it is. Combine those things, now you gotta secure all that. 'Cause you're sharing information. >> [John] It's super exciting. It's probably the best time to be doing R&D because Dave Vellante and I always talk about on theCUBE all the time, that, you know, if everything was Cloud operations, because the confluence is happening, what is IOT? >> [Ray] Yep. >> You have a thin Edge, could be a windfarm, traffic signal, sensor network, or it could be a data center. The data center could be an Edge. I mean, you could look at it any way, it depends on how you look at it. >> One of the biggest questions that comes up all the time is what exactly is the edge, right? And I think, you know, it means different things within different industries. It's very clear on the extreme edge. That's a device, it's a windfarm, it's measuring the behavior of a robot, or something like that. And it's very clear on the other side. That's a Cloud, I run a bunch of analytics over there. It's the interesting piece in the middle where it is both, you know, a lot of opportunity and a lot of, you know, difficulty defining it. Is the SD1 server inside of an office, is that edge? Yeah, that looks like edge, it's at the edge of the network. But it's not controlling something physical. But that SD1 server inside in a retail store, may well also be doing something with the refrigerators or the cold chain or something in that store. And now you begin to see it more as kind of an IOT device. >> That's awesome, and it's great conversation. Certainly fodder for more R&D and more innovation and the management site's key. And, I think the holy grail on all this is programmable networks, right? Come on, we've been waiting. How fast is that coming, pedal harder, come on. I know you've got to go thanks for coming on. >> But I do wanna ask you, you guys are, I wanna give you some props and just get your thoughts on obviously Blockchain. We see things like Filecoin had a very huge ICO on the IPFs side, but, you know, they didn't really have a product, but they're promising, hey, store using decentralized, we have them in the Blockchain. Obviously, it's a network storage infrastructure, it's not so much selling tokens with token economics, although it does have a piece of it. That's gonna impact you guys on the horizon. What's the current state of you guys view, your view, the team's view of Blockchain-- >> Of Blockchain? Obviously, a lot of the hype and even some of the valuations and things you see are tied to what's happening on the financial side. Bitcoin, and so on. We're not focused on that at all. What we're saying is Blockchain, or more specifically, a distributed hyper-ledger, forms the basis of a community of companies or organizations being able to, essentially, look at trust as a service. I've got a contract with you, we're now able to look across a group of companies and say we all agree, that contract is valid because of our leverage of this blockchain. That then becomes an application story. How do I run it more efficiently? How do I make sure I run it securely? How do I make sure that that community is able to leverage that service in a shared fashion? And that's what we're focused on. In fact, one of the more interesting things is when you look at things like Blockchain, when it's used in the context of something like Bitcoin, there's a degree what people value is an anonymity. We don't know who bought it, but somebody bought it. But when you look at it from a trust point of view, we actually want to be able to see who exactly did the contract. I agree that you put the contract, we worked the contract together, and we're all agreeing with that. So you see these changes when you begin to bring these technologies into enterprise. >> Efficiencies come, big time-- >> Correct. >> On supply chain. >> Exactly. Actually, we've put a lot of focus on efficiencies. We've got a research team whose job has been very focused on, given Blockchain, how do I improve the core algorithms? How do I make them more applicable to something that'd be run by a typical enterprise, or by a group of enterprises? And, you know, that's a little bit unusual for us because we're entering a kind of an application space, but what's good about this application space, it is hard systems engineering. And that's what we know how to do and that's why we think this is a great application space for us to be able to deliver real value. >> And the key word is engineering, you also mentioned earlier, community. Open Source has brought this community dynamic together where there's no middle men. This is the beautiful thing of the future infrastructure. How do you manage it? How do you make it secure trust as a service. >> Yes. >> You guys are doing a great job. Based on our data, you are on the ecosystem. You guys have all the waves covered. >> Okay. >> Ray thanks for coming on. >> Great, thank you very much. >> I appreciate the conversation. I'm John Furrier, here in San Francisco for VMware's Radio 2018. 14th year of their annual engineering kick-off, motivation, hardcore engineering critique, and also collaboration where the sparks of innovation are happening. Be right back with more. Thanks for watching. (lively electronic music)

>> Narrator: From Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live finishing up our first day of three days of coverage on theCUBE. From the inaugural IBM Think event I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante talking about snow conditions, we're in Vegas, though. It's a beautiful day, so we'll leave the snow to California and the east coast that's again getting slammed. Dave and I are joined by Mark Bregman, the SVP and CTO of NetApp. Great to have you on the show. >> Thank you. >> So what's new? I was talking about, before we started, that I was formerly at NetApp in marketing a few years ago. What's new at NetApp? What's going on with NetApp and IBM? >> Well first of all if you'd been at NetApp a few years ago you probably thought of us as a storage company but increasingly we think about ourselves as a data company because it's really all about the data and so we're doing a lot of work with IBM in a couple of different areas. One of those is extending our data fabric which is really the software capability to manage and move data across different types of storage, moving in and out of the Cloud and it's absolutely crucial, when you look at some of the things that IBM is trying to do with the IBM Cloud and with a lot of the machine learning applications. >> So Mark what's the difference between a storage company and a data company? >> Well, I think about it as, sort of, think about banking. 150 years ago if you wanted to get a bank you would probably go in and inspect whether they had a good solid vault to store your money. I guess when you opened your bank account you didn't do that. You just take that for granted but you want to know if they have the services to access my money, move my money, inspect my money and do those kind of things and the same thing is happening in our industry. Storage is still important, just as the vault is still important but it's not the first thing you think about. So the more important thing, the thing you do think about is what can I do with my data, how can I move my data, how can I get access to it, how do I protect it? And the actual storage is critical as an enabler but it's not what most people are focused on. >> So those activities that you just mentioned, those adjacent value producers, those are services that NetApp provides that it didn't use to provide or it provides them in a different way. How are things changing? >> Well, from the very beginning NetApp started as, actually, a software defined storage business long before that was a term. The first capabilities that NetApp delivered were software based on commodity hardware and over the years we had to also get into the hardware business. But most of our value historically has always been in the software and it's really been, how do we ensure the data doesn't get lost, how do we move the data efficiently, how do we make copies, and all of those things which are frankly more data oriented than storage oriented although they were sold with the storage systems. What's changed now is branching out beyond just the NetApp system, to be able to carry that capability to the Cloud and to other places that people want to keep their data. >> So what does that mean from a... Put your CTO hat on for a minute. It used to be it was WAFL and it was the operating system and that was sort of the core focus of the company, the products, still, I'm sure, great products. But it sounds like from a technical perspective you've had to evolve. Could you talk about that? >> Well we have. We've had to take those capabilities which we used to tightly integrate with hardware and build an appliance and sort of peel them apart and say we can take this capability and put it somewhere else. For example in the Cloud and that same capability in the cloud now allows us to essentially treat that element, from a data point of view treat the Cloud just like another NetApp target and that's what allows us to rapidly and easily move data back and forth. >> Talk to us about from an evolution perspective. I'm glad you brought that term Dave. How has NetApp's customer base helped facilitate this evolution to be able to give them the values that they're demanding in terms of Multi-Cloud, different vendors, What's that as a CTO that presumably meets up with your customers? >> I think it's been a very synergistic sort of thing which is, our customers as they move to the Cloud almost force us to figure out how can we continue to help them as they move their data to the Cloud and as we do that the customers and new customers say, oh that capability I didn't realize I could leverage and they find new ways to leverage their data in the Cloud and on traditional hardware in this kind of emerging hybrid environment and that's very crucial for a lot of our customers. >> So I want to go back to something you said before about you were always a software defined company. 10 years ago if you looked at it hardware companies, storage companies would sell a product. It would mark up a C8 disk drive 10X. But the real value was in the software wasn't it? >> Right. >> I don't know how many hardware versus software engineers work at NetApp but I'm guessing there's way more software engineers than there are hardware engineers. So is that essentially what you're doing to change your business? You're now selling software function? >> We are and we're doing it in two different ways. We sell software that you, a customer can put on their own hardware, sort of traditional software defined storage but increasingly we also sell software as essentially sell storage or data management as a service in a Cloud platform and then the customer doesn't have to even think about the software. The Cloud provider may have to think about it and we have a lot of relationships with cloud providers to do that but at that point it just becomes a service to the developer or the user that's building on that platform. >> Some of the announcements coming out this week with IBM with respect to Cloud, AI for example. What are some of the things that excites NetApp about what you're going to be able to help your customers achieve based on some of these new innovations? >> Well I think that the work that IBM is doing in the whole area of AI and machine learning is tremendous and we're benefiting in many ways. One is we are a user of that technology ourselves. We are increasingly using machine learning to analyze mass amounts of data from our customer base so that we can get, we have a solution called Active IQ which collects that data, 70 billion data elements, and allows us then to understand the behavior of our systems and our software in the field, make recommendations proactively to customers, for example, a single customer may have a configuration that isn't optimal. We know that because we see all the other customers. We can see that their configurations are getting better results and so that allows the whole marketplace to benefit and that's leveraging a lot of the AI and machine learning technologies. That is one of the areas where there's a lot of synergy between, in our work with IBM, we're often the storage that's underlying the machine learning and we're using the machine learning at the same time. >> So as you sort of go to market or partner with IBM. NetApp actually, people maybe don't know this, has always had a long relationship with IBM. IBM for years resold your filers and probably still does for all I know but how is that relationship evolving and changing? >> Well I would say it's mostly evolving in the sense that it's not just at the level of storage. It really is moving to this data layer as IBM is defining their platform we're a key partner in helping understand how to bring new capabilities in storage and data management to support their new capabilities in cognitive computing, AI, and machine learning. >> How does that change the way in which you develop products? Do you have to be more API friendly? >> Absolutely. As we build our products today we have to think about how to make our products at each layer a kind of platform for the next layer. So even though IBM is building a platform, at a lower layer they're also accessing our capabilities through API's and you could argue we're turning our data fabric into a platform. >> Does it change? You know people use the word future proof. How do you future proof your products in that world? >> Well I think the beauty of API's is that allows you to continually innovate just below the API's without having to disrupt everything above it and that's why this sort of layered approach between API's allows innovation at the storage layer, innovation in the data management layer, innovation in the AI and machine learning layers, all the way up to the end user application. Without the old world model where everything was monolithically built but if you make one change everything breaks. And so it's allowing us to move much more quickly with our rates of innovation independently of the other layers, the other players who are innovating as well. >> So NetApp has reinvented itself a number of times. >> Yeah. >> You've done it again. I remember NetApp when it started out it was like work station storage and then it was internet storage and then after the dot.com bubble blew up it was enterprise storage and then you changed your name. >> And we started with just filers as you said earlier. >> Right. >> And then we expanded into unified storage doing both NAS and SAN. We also supported initially just NFS and then we supported SIFs. We supported a huge transformation as we went into the virtualization world of VMware. So we've continually evolved and we're doing it again. >> And so how would you characterize the current wave? You said before it's about the data. >> I think the current wave is really, if you think about out traditional or our historical businesses being the appliance business I think we're going in three directions right now. One of which is extending away from the integrated appliance to the software defined, put the software on your own storage or your own system. We're also moving in a direction to put it on the Cloud and partnering with Cloud vendors and we're moving in a third direction which is moving higher up in value to data management, not just the storage elements. So certainly a customer could take our software today and use it purely for storage in the Cloud or on a WhiteBox but what they find is there's a lot of value in the higher value data management and that's where we're working with IBM and others. >> Now you've always focused on the data management piece of it. NetApp, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're kind of reluctant to go out and, for instance, buy a backup software company. You'd rather partner with folks like that, Is that-- >> We do that through partnerships, and we'll-- >> That philosophy has not changed, is that correct? >> It hasn't changed dramatically. There may be some areas where we have deep expertise and we extend a little further and there will be other areas where, frankly, we don't have that deep domain expertise and we provide the capability for others to extend that into broader data management. >> So as we've kind of touched on the evolution of NetApp we talked with a number of folks today alone, Dave, about this spirit of innovation as a culture within an organization. Is there a programatized innovation group or lab within NetApp that really helps to drive those three directions that you talked about? >> Well, yes and no. I have a small advanced technology group that experiments and looks at things well beyond the roadmaps, but really innovation is done across the company. Every engineering team is thinking about how to go beyond their road map, their driving innovation. We have a lot of communication across the company between my advanced technology groups and the individual business unit development of the teams because in many cases those feed each other. We find new challenges talking to the current business unit developers and they find new ideas talking to some of my team might be looking three or four years out into the future. A great example of that is a very hot topic right now is Blockchain and we're looking very hard at how could we use Blockchain to, again, rethink the way that you handle and manage data through its life cycle? Could you use this as a way to organize data management so that we know the authenticity of the data, we know who's seen the data, we know who's touched the data, and once you can do that you can think of lots of applications in data security, in data life cycle management, in data prominence, across the whole spectrum. >> So as a multi-multi-billion dollar company storage company, software defined, whatever you want to call it, when you see a company like Filecoin get launched, you know, cryptocurrency, peer-to-peer storage, the tendency of established, very credible players might be to laugh that off but we've laughed off a lot of folks, right? We've learned our lesson there but what do you make of a company like that trying to disrupt S3 for example. >> I think it's very interesting and we look at those very carefully. We try to understand what's the unique proposition that has value? Sometimes there's a unique proposition that just has visibility, let's say. Maybe that's not as valuable and sometimes there is really no uniqueness, they're just playing the game a slightly different way. My own personal view is that all of the excitement about, and whenever you put the name coin in it, that's always disturbing right now. All the excitement about the cryptocurrency relationship to Blockchain, I don't think is going to, in the long term matter that much. On the other hand these distributed ledger technologies which Blockchain has won I think are going to be fundamentally important and I think that we're going to find them turning up in core elements. You mentioned WAFL early on, if you think about, several years ago there was a lot of discussion about log-structured file systems. Could you use something like a distributed ledger technology to create that log in an immutable, distributed way where I don't have to trust any individual system, I don't have to worry about availability the same way because there are multiple copies. The Blockchain or the distributed ledger manages that. It could change fundamentally the way we architect these systems. It's not going to happen overnight but that's what we're looking at. We are looking at every one of these little startups that have new ideas. >> Well what I'm fascinated about, Filecoin is interesting because they raise 250 million dollars in like 30 minutes which is, forget about the crypto craze, that's more than a Series A for a storage company. So seemingly some smart guys, we'll see what happens with the innovation piece. The other interesting thing to me about Blockchain is there's these whole new sets of protocols being built out and there's an incentive for developers to actually develop them versus the government who years and years ago developed SNTP and DNS and IP, etc. >> Well to be fair, the government funded that but it was done by the same developers but this way there's a different source of money. >> Yeah but those guys didn't make any money. >> No, that's true. >> Nobody made any money off of Linux really. >> Yeah, you're right. >> So now there's a huge incentive for developers to do that so I'm really curious as to where the next wave of innovation is going to come from as a advanced technologist you got to look at that and say hmmm, I want to keep an eye on that. >> Oh absolutely, I mean that's why we're watching it. >> Do you think Blockchain, I know we got to go, but a lot of concerns about scaling. >> Well that's why I try to distinguish between Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. There are a lot of emerging technologies that are fundamentally similar to very abstract level to Blockchain but are implemented differently. You have to remember Blockchain was built for cryptocurrency and it was built to be inefficient by design. >> Yes, right. >> And so taking that same idea and saying we're going to use it for these high performance applications is probably not the right approach but going back to the idea that I can have a distributed, fundamentally untrusted network and I can create a trusted ledger, that's pretty interesting and there are a lot of interesting emerging technologies that I think some of those will become the core. >> Dave: In use cases for sure. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Distributed databases have never been easy. >> Yeah. >> It's always been challenging for scale, performance, latency, etc., I wonder can those problems be solved? >> You think about the challenge of data prominence and in the world of GDPR and all of these things, the ability to say I know where all the data is, I know where it came from, I know who's touched it, all of the discussion going on, probably here at this conference about GANs where you can make video that looks just like you but you weren't in it, for example. How do you keep track of the data so I know this really came from that camera, it was really you and not a video reproduction, that's going to become more and more important and that's where I think these technologies could become really valuable. Something we've talked about, data prominence, for twenty years but we've never really been able to implement it at scale. >> Well, and you see the explosion of fake news and the like. Facebook is now more powerful than the UN and the 2020 election is going to be about fake news and so things like that are really technologies that could solve that problem, hopefully have legs. >> Mark: I think so. >> Awesome. Thank you. >> Great. Thank you. >> Mark, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing what's going on at NetApp, kind of walking us through you're evolution and some of the exciting things coming. We wish you a great rest of your fiscal year. >> Great, thank you very much. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you've been watching theCUBE live from day one of IBM's inaugural Think event. Check out thecube.net where you can find all of the replays of our videos today and check over to siliconangle.com for the written articles about that. We want to thank you for sticking with us and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Thanks. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE, covering Polygon 18, brought to you by Polyman. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live with theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Polycon '18. We're in the Bahamas, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, co-founders and co-hosts of theCUBE. We're here with special guest Halsey Minor, entrepreneur, serious serial entrepreneur here on theCUBE. Halsey, great to have you. You're the founder and CEO of VideoCoin, a successful ICO. You had an event last night, kind of an investor thank you event out in the Bahamas Country Club, there, you're here. Man, you're a pro, you're back in the game with this crypto. This is the wave, I mean, I want to get your perspective 'cause you see waves. You've seen CNET, you started that from scratch before online news was anything, you were the pioneer in that. First investor, first operator in salesforce.com, a variety of other successful entrepreneurial adventures. You've got a nose for the waves. So just put it in perspective, what is this wave? >> Yeah, so I actually have an interesting story because I've actually started around 2012, and I launched my first business in 2013. So, the first problem that I saw was, how do you get your money from your bank account and buy Bitcoin? Still a problem, hasn't been fixed, right? So I tried to fix that. Oh well, I did to a certain extent, I did fix the problem. So what I did was created effectively a coin-based converter, and I started out and was going to make it very easy for you to take your bank account, connect it up, seemed logical, and then buy, you know, the currency. The company was called Bit Reserve at the time. So, no bank would touch anybody named Bit in their name. And it was even worse than that, all of us who put our company name into our bank account, we had our bank accounts basically shut down, right? So, I started getting an idea how difficult this was going to be, you know, Coinbase getting a Silicon Valley bank account early on to become a conduit, was very fortuitous. It ultimately took two and a half years and buying a big chunk of New Jersey Bank before we were able to allow you to connect your US bank and your European bank into Uphold to buy currency. So it's really Uphold, Coinbase, maybe like Gitbit, very, very few who've been able to crack that problem. We literally had to buy part of a bank to do it. So that's where I started. So I really looked at it very much as money, as a new monetary system. And I still see unlimited opportunities in that area. It wasn't until really a couple years later that I saw the block chain as the new architecture for the computer, and what I mean by that, is what Bitcoin proved was that if you gave people software and they ran it on their computer and they got paid in some funny kind of digital money, they would convert that money back into fee hock, you know, dollars, and they go buy more computers. And nobody asks anybody to be a Bitcoin miner, they just come and showed up the more, the bigger it got, the bigger the opportunity. And what's most interesting is when you make money or lose money, depends on your cost of power. So for most of these Bitcoin miners, they're near hydroelectric dams. So what I realized, and VideoCoin is in the area of video. It's a direct competitor with Amazon web services, everything they do in video. So there's, it's called encoding which is compress it, there's storage and there's streaming, three basic pieces. So what I realized was, two things: first of all, 20% of servers and data centers are not used at all. They're called zombies, right? So all of these people, the Airbnb, Uber model, they can all of a sudden start earning on assets that are doing nothing. But even if you look out into the future, if video mining, which is what we call it, ends up being like bitcoin mining, then what happens is that the whole thing works on the cost of power. It's not good for Amazon, if they have to be competitive solely based on the cost of power. >> Dave, so he's got an ICO going on, we looked Filecoin, right? So Filecoin was storage and that's infrastructure. You go to VideoCoin, we're streaming right now, we've got video. This is kind of like an interesting digital media infrastructure ... >> Well ... >> What's your take compared to Filecoin? >> What's interesting to me is that I'd love to get Halsey's input on, because you've got the full spectrum here. You started in publishing and now-- >> With five TV shows. >> Dave: Okay. >> Yeah, CNET had five TV shows. >> So right, and so very digital from the beginning and relatively ripe for disruption and then now into banking, which really hasn't been disrupted, but we all think it's coming. So that's an interesting spectrum. It's not Negroponte, I don't think, bits versus atoms, because you've seen, you know tax season get disrupted. That's atoms. So what are the factors that make an industry ripe for disruption? >> Well, I mean the obvious thing is really disruptive technologies, right? And so for the Internet, for me, it was, I started the company in '93 to be on commercial online services like AOL and I saw, I guess, the first browser in '93 and, actually at Sun, and it made me believe the Internet was going to be this incredible thing. And it was really seeing information coming in, and, you know, the Internet wasn't that big back then but I watched a gif of a storm, you know, from one of the weather centers, and so I realized that this information thing was incredibly interesting. And so what all of us did, the way I thought about it and seen it, is we're cracking open databases and we're just letting people have the information. And it was silly things like the ability for me to live in San Francisco but know what the weather was in New York and pack appropriately. This was the magic, I mean, we take all of this for granted. This was magic, right, at the time. You had to go out and buy a USA Today-- >> Check the stock price. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Call your friends in New York. >> Yeah, that was magic. So at a very high level, it was just access to information. At a very high level, what this is is combining information and money into a packet. Right? So now what we can do is, I can gather information from servers about what they're really doing and I can also be paying them at the same time. So you know, it would have actually solved a lot of problems around the Internet, because on the Internet getting paid was hard. And there were so many times we'd go into a meeting and we'd agree on the partnership but we didn't know who was paying who. You know? (laughing) Am I paying you for traffic or are you paying me for content or you know, how is that going? So this kind of comes with a built-in payment system, which I think is what makes it so incredible as a system. >> So we're-- >> And more stable, I am inferring, long-term anyway. Because that whole system that you just described on the Internet all blew up when the funding dried up. >> It blew up and I think, you know, I think there are certainly a lot of risks. The number one thing I would tell everybody in this area is, you know, be very cautious about what in you invest in. There were a lot of companies that, uh-- so my whole description was sort of the Internet bubble was that people say that, well, you know, nine trillion dollars was lost in investing. >> With everything that happened though. >> And when I-- >> The plus.com happened, everything happened. >> And what I said to the people is that it would be great if people had just invested in the survivors, but who knew what they were? The only reason the United States emerged, with, you know, with Salesforce and Ebay and Amazon, etc., the only reason that we emerged dominating the world was 'cause we invested in them all. Right? And so-- >> Even all those things that were called silly ideas actually happened. >> And they ended up happening. It was all a matter of timing, yeah. So you know, what's happening now is very much the same thing. You know, a lot of people are going to invest in a lot of bad ideas, right? But this is all necessary for the good ideas to get funding and for something big to come out of this. >> So I want to get your take on with the VideoCoin and in comparison, you mentioned Amazon, right? So our observation, obviously we're recording all these shows, Amazon web service, among others, the big guys are sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Look at the big whales, Google, Facebook, Amazon, I mean, we can't even run any ads on our site. We actually prefer to just push the content all over the world because it's hard to build a destination site. I mean, people going out of business in the media business. Video, your choices are Ustream now owned by IBM, Twitch TV became Amazon which was Ustream before that. Build your own custom player, set up a CDN, which is actually hard and expensive. Okay, so do I do Facebook live, again controlled by Facebook? So there's an opportunity that you're pursuing. Did you have that in mind? I mean, we see it every day and we know this, but luckily we have a good deal with Ustream, but the point is that is going to be up too. What's the alternative producers, content producers who have streaming, whether it's a pro set like this or someone who's going to have unlimited access to video streaming? >> So the real issues are cost and innovation, okay? And so Hanno Basse, who's the CTO of 20th Century Fox and one of our advisors, right? And all these media companies have the same problem. Nobody is watching broadcast anymore that'll cost them nothing and everybody's now streaming in, which is one-to-one and has a cost associated with it. So that's why, and even worse, videos going to 4k, 8k, VR, data that's going up like this-- >> Data isn't growing as fast either. >> So all these companies are confronted with all these costs and they can't monetize them. Google can monetize it, Amazon can monetize it. >> Tel cos ... >> Netflix, yeah. >> Ouch. >> But they can't monetize it, so it's all cost effectively and no revenue. So the one thing that we offered to VideoCoin by using all this research is we cut the cost 60 to 80%, so that's huge. The other thing is, in the early days, everybody bought Salesforce because it was cheaper. It was 1/10th of the cost. And I used to say to people, in the long run, it's going to be way more innovation, right? Because they're constantly, every quarter, rolling out a new version, right? And they're going to have the ability to connect, an API effectively, and the ability to connect, and the whole ecosystem can arise around that. And that's why their conference has 140,000 people, Dreamforce, because there's a whole ecosystem. >> It's sticky as hell too. >> That's right. >> Hard to get out. >> That's right. So while we are 60 to 80% lower cost, we're also effectively open source at the same time. So the ability to have a community arise and develop software. And so right now, you've seen this huge consolidation because it's actually kind of hard to build new kinds of apps on top of Amazon web services, right? But if you have this open system, and you have all these people are contributing code to it, all of a sudden, there are apps, video apps, that they'll be literally a whole new-- >> So you're going to have an open source contribution piece to your ... ? >> Yeah, I mean basically, everything we build is open source, right, so you know, all the way through to the network. So it creates a palate for people to start innovating in video. Because really what's happening is a lot of innovation is getting hurt by the fact these big guys totally dominate it, right? They don't want to see any innovation outside of the funds they bring you, right? >> Right, so you've heard my rap on this. I'd love to get Halsey's thoughts. So the big guys, you're right, have won. It's like centralization and victory. People here are saying, "No, we want to take it back." The premise that I hear a lot is there's been no innovation in protocols in, you know ... Google built gmail on SMPT, HTTP, DNS, it's all government-funded or academia. >> Yeah. >> And it's just a lack of innovation. >> That's right. >> And now, this is why I counter Warren Buffet and Charlie Monger, is no, we're building out a new set of infrastructure. >> That's right. >> Okay, so where do you guys fit into that? What are your thoughts, first of all, on that premise? And where do you guys fit? >> Yeah, I mean, look, you've got these huge companies that are totally dominant and even though they are, in fact, you know, innovative Silicon Valley companies by label, okay, they have all the same issues-- like I say to people, nobody today believes that anybody can put Amazon web services at risk. If I went to somebody and said, "You know Amazon web services which are worth 3/4 "of the value of the company, or 5/6, "depending on who you talk to, "there's going to be something after that." It would literally be a new concept because everybody's convinced this is Amazon's-- >> John: The winner. >> Yeah, this is their big, this is the way they make all their money-- >> Alright it's over-- >> Right, and if you say to somebody there is going to be a next thing, they would look at you like, you know, like you're foolish. But the reality is when you start changing some basic, underlying infrastructure in the Internet and you start doing things, decentralization, this is the word we're going to be using, you know, we're going to see it in solar power. And solar power is, you know, on a cost to benefit like this so, you know, it isn't going to be long before we're going to have power in our house legitimately, not like, you know, some science-fiction thing, we'll be legitimately powering most of our needs with solar that we connect because the cost is coming down so much. So we're going to see all of this decentralization happening. And in the world of computing, decentralization means that this is going to be the most efficient that computing can ever be. Because just compare using the Uber and Airbnb model of saying anything that's excess, let's turn into value. And I've heard that for every Uber driver, 15 cars go away, right? So the decentralization is going to have a profound effect on the economy and it's going to have a profound effect on these big guys. >> Oh, even those guys are going to get disrupted. >> They're going to get disrupted. And they're 20 years old, it's time for them to get disrupted, I mean, you know ... >> E-commerce is a 20, 30-year-old stack, some say 20, 20-year-old stack on e-commerce, all these things are ready, even what we would consider modern, you know, the miracle of saying oh the weather in New York. I mean that magic is here now in a new way. So I got to ask you the question-- >> Taken for granted. >> I got to ask you a question because you brought up that point. In your history of your career as an entrepreneur because you're doing stuff that's always new and cool, and probably before anyone else sees it, can you talk about some of the ideas that you've seen, not necessarily your ideas, as well others, where the investor said, "That's the dumbest idea "I ever heard"? What billion dollar opportunities have you seen emerge that investors have said, "That's the dumbest idea "I've ever heard"? >> Well, actually, the one that is Salesforce. No VC would put money in. It was really kind of backed by Larry Ellison and me early on. And what's so-- >> John: Google was a dumb idea. We want portals, not search. >> Yeah, so the bet that nobody would take in 2000 was that companies would take their sales information and they would put it in the cloud. Nobody would believe that. Not anyone. And so I used to joke, I used to say the only way it's going to happen is if the sales guy's been waiting two years to get his sales management system in place actually runs over the head of security in the parking lot. That's what it's going to take because it's outsourcing and, you know, the security guys say, "Oh, no, no, no, "we're going to lose all of our data", right? It didn't matter that Salesforce had way more security guys, you know, than these guys had and better, you know, working internally. Nobody believed in it. Literally nobody believed in it. >> This is your point about the decentralization, no one's going to believe, "Wait a minute, "that could never happen." So, in a way, the investor thesis should be, "I want to invest in the dumbest ideas," because that might be the best idea. >> It is. I mean the big, obvious ones that attract billions and billions of dollars, I mean, how many of those end up actually not turning into anything? Right? A lot of them, right? So CDAT was profitable on nine million dollars. I believe that Yahoo was profitable on three million dollars. I think Google was somewhere around 12 to 15 million dollars, right? So there are a lot of these business-- Amazon's obviously the outlier. >> John: It's still not profitable. >> Yeah, it's the outlier. But you know, a lot of these businesses were started by people who used a relatively small amount of money and were very creative. You know, you're going to hear this over and over again. Microsoft never needed any money. They accepted five million dollars from-- >> John: (mumbles) >> Yeah, so this happens a lot. And in fact, I think it's very dangerous when in year five, you're losing three hundred million dollars, right? I mean, five hundred, or whatever it is. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. >> What's the role of community? Because we heard the guy from Locktower Capital say something I thought was really profound, "I don't need VC because, if you're a startup, "you don't have to waste your energy on board meetings "and other things, you can build your business "and use the community as your benchmark." So this plays to your whole picking up the slack kind of thing in efficiency. So entrepreneurs can be more efficient in these communities. This is where the cryptocurrency Blockchain is thriving. What's your thoughts to that and how do you see that community interaction progressing? >> In my career, there's been a sea change in sort of the culture of technology and really everything, right? You know, when I started out, everything was very hierarchical. You know, it's like how far up the chain you got that measured how successful you were. Now it's how big is your network, right? And you know, I was talking to somebody the other day who said VCs are going in and they're measuring these companies' success by how many Instagram and Twitter accounts they have and there's massive fraud going on because people are buying these accounts to pump up their numbers, right? So people are starting to value by the breadth of your network. >> John: Reputable network. >> Reputable, yeah. >> John: Not fake network. >> Yeah, but what I heard is there's actually a Twitter application which I haven't seen that'll go in and tell how many of 'em are real and how many of 'em are not now. So really the community becomes almost the measuring stick for your value. You know, before I'd seen it, I had users. Today, everybody has community members. And so, it becomes sort of, kind of like everything I guess. >> And our media model is all community-based which is, we just naturally go there because that's where the data is. >> That's right. >> That's where the feedback is. >> That's right. >> I mean, I can't get feedback from Facebook and Google, they own the data, right? There's no letters to the editor on Facebook. There's only hate comments. >> But you know before Microsoft and all these came, you know, IBM dominated the world. Nobody ever thought they would go away. AT&T dominated the world and nobody ever thought that they would go away, you know. >> Alright, personal question for you, I got to wrap because I know you got to go. Appreciate your time, by the way. Great story, we could go on for another hour. Personal note, what is the most compelling thing that's moved you, as an entrepreneur, in the crypto market? Like, something that, it could be an anecdote, it could be a situation. When you look at this opportunity, as the world's going to eventually be re-instrumented with data, with new open source and community, what's something that's surprised you or moves you as an entrepreneur saying, "This is freakin' awesome"? >> So this hasn't been done yet but it will be done. So this is what actually motivated me to start Uphold was the ability to turn your phone into your bank and to be able to exchange money and primarily really solving the ability for the poor to be able to move money around without having 10 to 20 to 30% of it taken away. Everybody's talked about this, remittance, and so far, nobody has actually solved that problem. That problem is going to get solved. I mean it's inevitable that the phone becomes the bank. There are so many regulations that are designed to stop that and it's extraordinary. Once you get into it and you see all the ways that have been set up-- >> Byzantine system. >> this problem should have been solved long ago, right? And every phone should be a bank. I mean, it can be connected to a bank, but every phone should have my money in it. I should be able to send it to you instantaneously. >> It shouldn't be like getting into Fort Knox. >> Yeah. I mean, computers, banks have computers, they could make this happen today. They just don't want to. So I think the most profound thing for me is the problem is still not solved, that the problem I set out to solve, which is really creating a more equitable financial system. And we live in a country where the banks make about 37 billion dollars a year in bounced check fees. Think about that. Thirty-seven billion dollars in bounced check fees. So if you just take that out, you just take out, 'cause it all affects people in the lower socioeconomic scale, you create a revolution. Just getting rid of the bank fees that you'll pay for bouncing checks. >> Well, I mean the narratives, like the narrative of taking down gatekeepers or central authorities, is the premise of this ecosystem and you could take that example and apply it to thousands of use cases. >> And banks are rapacious, flat out. American banks are the most rapacious 'cause no other country would allow 37 billion dollars to be taken away in bounced check fees. >> Halsey, congratulations on your success again and great to see you on theCUBE. You're now a Cube alumni, so ... >> Congratulations. >> We hope you'll come back again. >> Yeah, thank you guys. >> We're going to get you in our telegram group, now you'll be 42 members, we just turned on last night. (everyone laughs) We appreciate it and congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for your insight and experience and commentary. Halsey Minor, experienced entrepreneur, pro, here in the trenches, establishing a great new venture. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)