>> Live from Orlando, Florida! It's theCube! Covering Enterprise Connect 2019 Brought to you by Five9. >> Welcome to theCUBE! We are live in Orlando, Florida at Enterprise Connect 2019! We're in Five9's booth. I'm Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman. And we're welcoming Fuze to theCUBE for the first time. Michael Affronti, the SVP of Product and Design. Michael, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, Lisa! Yeah, great to be here! >> So, talk to us about Fuze. Give our viewers a little bit of an opportunity to understand who you guys are. What you do in the unified communications space. >> Great, an easy start. So Fuze is a global unified communication provider. We've been around since 2006. We deliver voice, video, and messaging experiences on our cloud platform. One of the things that's unique about Fuze is that we specialize in selling to very large enterprises. So we work primarily with multi-thousand, ten-thousand seed organizations that are globally distributed. Almost half of our business comes from outside of North America. So we work really well with companies that are, you know, much like Fuze, globally distributed. Have workers scattered all over the place, and want to give them a tool and a technology that helps them come together to be more productive. >> Great. So Michael, before we get into Fuze Give us a little bit of your journey. You've been involved in this space for quite a long time. >> Yeah, absolutely. I like to joke that I've been in the cloud before there was a cloud. I've worked in unified communications my whole life. I'm very, very passionate about productivity. I like to make lists for pretty much everything I do. My wife also does, so that works out really well. But the thing is, I think that productivity at its core is really fundamental to the way that people get there job done in communication application. I've been working in communications since I graduated from college. I worked on some of the early email programs like Outlook. And then, I charted out on my own with some friends, and we did a small start-up in the communication space that helped us actually focus on blending machine learning with identity. That was called Contactive. Then, we met up with the folks working on Fuze. And decided to join forces in 2013. I've had a really great run since then, helping to build Fuze into what it is today. >> So, I just want to poke at one thing there. You talk about worker productivity. If I could look at studies the last couple of decades, the new technology wave doesn't necessarily give us better worker productivity. I'm curious to hear your viewpoint. What's working? What's not working? How can we actually as a workforce be more productive? >> I would say adoption is actually the most critical challenge that most organizations face when it comes to communication tools. Similar to what we talked about when we were chatting earlier. There's this concept of, "I know how to communicate at work. Don't change it." And when you change it, it's very disruptive. So even if the tools are actually better, like empirically better, workers' productivity would go down because they were either told to use it, or it's not as elegant to use as the thing they use on their consumer device. Which is why it's very important from Fuze's perspective that we focus on application experiences, but not only application experiences but the adoption of them through our cloud enablement and some of the practices that we put in place when we deploy to our customers. >> Let's stick into that adoption, because to your point, when everything changes, we're creatures of habit. But you guys are working with large enterprise organizations which, presumably have been around for a long time. They've got multiple generations of workers who are used to working in their own ways. What are some of the best practices that Fuze can help these large organizations employ to drive up adoption and really satisfy those workers? >> It actually starts with discovery, right? One of the first things that we do when we're working with a large enterprise is we ask them, what are the business units within your company? What are the demographics and the styles of work of the people in those different groups? And then we help, as part of our engagement plan. We actually come up with a persona map that says for these employees, even though you want to move to a full cloud solution, we recommend giving them a hard phone that goes on the desk. Because the style of their job and the ergonomics of putting a receiver on their shoulder will help them transition to using the software. As opposed to just ripping the phone off their desk and saying, "Here's a headset. Good luck." And we help the groups. The companies identify those groups, give them specific adoption patterns. Like the one I mentioned, to make the ease into using a new cloud solution, like Fuze, much easier to adopt. So that is persona based. Very, very specific with a clear plan. And we tend to see very high success in adoption rates. >> That's really interesting! Persona-based. For an average organization, how many different personas are you helping them design adoption strategies for? >> I would say, usually, less than a dozen. Depending on the size of the organization. You think about your major functions, back office, HR, finance, sales and marketing. Depending on the sales type, you'll have some others. So those are all individual personas that we'll develop a practice for. And one that's emerged recently for us, we announced our partnership with Samsung yesterday morning, and Enterprise Connect to help us target front line workers. The folks who are not in an office, who are out in the field, out in a truck, out in a manufacturing facility working with customers in a very different capacity. So we've started developing some amazing persona and enablement models, and software for them and partnership with Samsung to help them be successful and feel included with the rest of the organization. >> Michael, how are we doing with the dichotomy between what I can use, from a communication standpoint as a personal, you know when I've got my smartphone, I've got the latest apps. Millennials like to communicate a little bit differently than the boomers would, so that difference between what I do at home, versus the enterprises. Has that gap closed? Is the business user now as empowered as what the consumer could before? >> I would say the broad answer across the industry is no. I think most, if you look at most organizations and you actually stare at someone's phone, and you flip open their WhatsApp if they let you, and you ask them, "What's that group?" And they'll say, "Those are my colleagues for this project." Why do you have a WhatsApp group for that? "Eh, it's faster. One of the employees lives in Brazil." And there's always a reason. And they always default to what's easiest, and to what's probably available in an app store. So, I think the inherent challenge of communication apps in the enterprise is to engage the user in a way that they feel comfortable not going to that least common denominator, which is not secure, not protected, and none of the things that we don't want from an IT perspective. I think on a good way, what consumer experiences are doing is much like with instant messenger many years ago. They're helping to condition users to a new way of communicating, that they then bring that expectation to work. So you know, I give the example, we have an employee of one of our customers that made the joke to me. She said, "Oh, you guys still have phone calls? That's sort of like video with the screen turned off." And I said, "Yes, that's the other way to come at it. Right?" She doesn't think about it as picking up the phone. She thinks about, "I'm always going to be having a video chat with you, and sometimes you'll turn the video off." So, I think those expectations are changing, and I think our software and everyone's software has to match to adapt. >> You've talked about the frontline worker, in fact, that was addressed during the key note this morning as well. A number of the customers on the panel talking about how they have to enable those frontline workers. I'm wondering about the remote workers, because as you're working with large enterprise organizations, who have a plethora of remote workers in different cultures, different timezones. How can Fuze help bring that remote worker into the team so they really feel part of the team and are part of that actual collaboration on a daily basis? >> It's actually one critical thing that we did last year. Emoji support, right? So, emotion is really important. Getting people excited about the fact that I'm talking to you but I'm not physically next to you. When you lose the ability after a meeting to physically catch up with someone and say, "Hey, great job!' Honestly, emojis help drive emotion. One of the things we saw once we implemented that was an actual uptick in our user adoption. A small one, and when you actually ask users about it, they said, "Well, yeah. I got to send that a person a virtual high-five." So, I think remote employees yearn for the same experience you get when you physically bump into people at the office. I think the imperative for collaboration tools is to try to recreate some of that. Now, some of that is very sophisticated things with white boards and collaboration. But some of it could be as simple as sending a little smiley face or a thumbs-up. >> Yeah. Michael, I have certain friends of mine, if you don't have gif support, they're not using your engagement there. Wonder if you can help us connect the dots between the unified communication and the contact center? Which is a big theme here at the show, and obviously, our friends here at Five9 hosting us. >> Yeah, it's another great question. We have a great partnership with Five9 at Fuze. We service a lot of joint, large customers together. And I think the reason that we do that, actually, I know the reason we do that. It's because those customers have a single challenge, if you will. They want to be able to communicate to the people that they work with, which is primarily going to be through Fuze, and the people that are buying their products and services. And those people are going to be talking to them through the Five9 platform. So, it's this idea that when I need to get help from someone and I'm on the call with a customer, how do I go do that easily? How do I go find the people that I need to talk to? Those walls, I think traditionally, were very, very strict. Contact center folks had a hard time getting access to subject matter experts, or anyone they needed to talk to. But I think that's evolved a lot. >> Yeah, wondering if you can help me with reconciling some data that I heard out there. Fuze, you talked about very large scale customer deployment. Some of the vendors here are like, "Well, when you talk about cloud contact centers, they're not going to go to the largest environment." We know cloud scales pretty well. So maybe you can help us. Where does the Fuze customer base, the Five9 customer base scalability and size, Where do those intersect? >> Yeah, I think the way that we intersect is actually in a couple of places. So First and foremost, when we sell joint customers, I think it's also, I know that our definition of actually what large means can be different, right? For example, large multi-thousand seed organization that goes wall to wall with Fuze, not all of them are contact center agents. In fact, usually it's a small ratio of contact center agents. But, contact center could also mean something different per deployment. There could be externally facing contact center agents. There could be a direct sales team that uses the Five9 platform to communicate outbound or receive inbound sales lead calls. There may also be internal help desks at large organizations that use them for HR support, IT, or manufacturing services. So, I think what we see is that there's not an exact match between the two types of organizations that we service, but the ones that we work together in, there's a high overlap in need based on those personas. >> So you've been in UC for a long time, as you said. We're only half-way through stage 2 of the event, but I'm curious Michael, some of the announcements that have come out in key notes this morning, what excites you about the evolution of enterprise communications and collaborations that you've heard so far this week? >> Yeah, I think it's interesting over the years I've been at Enterprise Connect for four years in Fuze, and a few years back when I was in my old role, and I think it came from a place that was very much about speeds and feeds, and switches and hardware. To now, we're talking about frontline workers in waste removal trucks trying to make them feel included. I think the thing that excites me the most is that almost all of the technology here is focused on this idea of inclusivity, right? The idea that you're a remote worker and maybe the emoji is the thing that works for you and I. But if you're a frontline worker, or maybe you're between shifts, or you're stopped on the road. How do you bring technology to bear that helps them feel included? Helps them feel a part of the role and a part of their company? I think what's really cool too is, as opposed to speeds and feeds traditionally talked about, you're starting to hear things around the conference around the retention, employee engagement. How hard it is to hire talent in a job market like it is in North America today. Those are the things that really matter when you think about employee engagement, which is a direct function of how connected do they feel? Especially, if they're working from home at a satellite office. So, I love the change that it's now more about the person and their engagement as an employee, as opposed to, I don't know. How cool is your technology? I think that shift is really important because what we do is sort of fundamental to people getting their job done. >> There's a tremendous interest, because this is the largest event that they've done. They were saying this morning, 6,500 attendees, 140 vendors. That momentum is palpable. It's moving forward, as you say. And you can see there's a lot of excitement moving forward. But also getting to more of that personalization that, we're all consumers in every aspect. We expect it. >> Right. Yeah, yeah. >> Last question I had for you. You've got design in your title. I'm curious, are some of the generational things have to be taken into consideration as to the millennials with their mobil, they're used to that versus some of the more experienced workers in the force? Where do you see that going in the future? >> Yeah, the design of what we build at Fuze is critically important to adoption. And I always give this very basic example. How many times a day do you pick up your phone and go to check a message? Whether it be a text message, or flip through your recent calls, return a call? How many times, when you're on a call, do you hang up the call? Every time, right? Those gestures are really, really important. So one of the things that we actually stare at in Fuze is how close is the actual exit call button from the edge of the screen on most phones? And it sounds like a very nuance thing, but for actions that you do repetitively throughout the day, the ergonomics of well designed consumer applications make those things feel great. No matter if you're left or right handed. If the phone is a phablet or a small one. So, I think the design of Enterprise applications, back when I first started, were it's gray. Just use it and be quiet. Now it's much more of something where you must watch someone use your application and look at the telemetry to understand, are they having a good experience? Our software asks you after every call and meeting, "How was it? Rate it one through five stars." And that information actually helps us tune the software. I know most of our vendors in the space do similar things because we have to listen to the individual and user. We cannot rely on the abstracted opinions of stuff that comes up through surveys. >> Absolutely, listening to that voice of the customer. Well Michael, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Stu and me today about Fuze. What you guys are doing and your experience as the industry is evolving. We appreciate your time! >> Awesome! Thank you Lisa! Thank you Stu! It's been great. I appreciate it! >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin! You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering theCUBE New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE live in New York City for theCUBE NYC, #CUBENYC. This is our ninth year covering the big data ecosystem, which has now merged into cloud. All things coming together. It's really about AI, it's about developers, it's about operations, it's about data scientists. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Brent Compton, Technical Marketing Director for Storage Business at Red Hat. As you know, we cover Red Hat Summit and great to have the conversation. Open source, DevOps is the theme here. Brent, thanks for joining us, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> We've been talking about the role of AI and AI needs data and data needs storage, which is what you do, but if you look at what's going on in the marketplace, kind of an architectural shift. It's harder to find a cloud architect than it is to find diamonds these days. You can't find a good cloud architect. Cloud is driving a lot of the action. Data is a big part of that. What's Red Hat doing in this area and what's emerging for you guys in this data landscape? >> Really, the days of specialists are over. You mentioned it's more difficult to find a cloud architect than find diamonds. What we see is the infrastructure, it's become less about compute as storage and networking. It's the architect that can bring the confluence of those specialties together. One of the things that we see is people bringing their analytics workloads onto the common platforms where they've been running the rest of their enterprise applications. For instance, if they're running a lot of their enterprise applications on AWS, of course, they want to run their analytics workloads in AWS and that's EMRs long since in the history books. Likewise, if they're running a lot of their enterprise applications on OpenStack, it's natural that they want to run a lot of their analytics workloads on the same type of dynamically provisioned infrastructure. Emerging, of course, we just announced on Monday this week with Hortonworks and IBM, if they're running a lot of their enterprise applications on a Kubernetes substrate like OpenShift, they want to run their analytics workloads on that same kind of agile infrastructure. >> Talk about the private cloud impact and hybrid cloud because obviously we just talked to the CEO of Hortonworks. Normally it's about early days, about Hadoop, data legs and then data planes. They had a good vision. They're years into it, but I like what Hortonworks is doing. But he said Kubernetes, on a data show Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud concept, containers. This is really enabling a lot of value and you guys have OpenShift which became very successful over the past few years, the growth has been phenomenal. So congratulations, but it's pointing to a bigger trend and that is that the infrastructure software, the platform as a service is becoming the middleware, the glue, if you will, and Kubernetes and containers are facilitating a new architecture for developers and operators. How important is that with you guys, and what's the impact of the customer when they think, okay I'm going to have an agile DevOps environment, workload portability, but do I have to build that out? You mentioned people don't have to necessarily do that anymore. The trend has become on-premise. What's the impact of the customer as they hear Kubernetese and containers and the data conversation? >> You mentioned agile DevOps environment, workload portability so one of the things that customers come to us for is having that same thing, but infrastructure agnostic. They say, I don't want to be locked in. Love AWS, love Azure, but I don't want to be locked into those platforms. I want to have an abstraction layer for my Kubernetese layer that sits on top of those infrastructure platforms. As I bring my workloads, one-by-one, custom DevOps from a lift and shift of legacy apps onto that substrate, I want to have it be independent, private cloud or public cloud and, time permitting, we'll go into more details about what we've seen happening in the private cloud with analytics as well, which is effectively what brought us here today. The pattern that we've discovered with a lot of our large customers who are saying, hey, we're running OpenStack, they're large institutions that for lots of reasons they store a lot of their data on-premises saying, we want to use the utility compute model that OpenStack gives us as well as the shared data context that Ceph gives us. We want to use that same thing for our analytics workload. So effectively some of our large customers taught us this program. >> So they're building infrastructure for analytics essentially. >> That's what it is. >> One of the challenges with that is the data is everywhere. It's all in silos, it's locked in some server somewhere. First of all, am I overstating that problem and how are you seeing customers deal with that? What are some of the challenges that they're having and how are you guys helping? >> Perfect lead in, in fact, one of our large government customers, they recently sent us an unsolicited email after they deployed the first 10 petabytes in a deca petabyte solution. It's OpenStack based as well as Ceph based. Three taglines in their email. The first was releasing the lock on data. The second was releasing the lock on compute. And the third was releasing the lock on innovation. Now, that sounds a bit buzzword-y, but when it comes from a customer to you. >> That came from a customer? Sounds like a marketing department wrote that. >> In the details, as you know, traditional HDFS clusters, traditional Hadoop clusters, sparklers or whatever, HDFS is not shared between clusters. One of our large customers has 50 plus analytics clusters. Their data platforms team employ a maze of scripts to copy data from one cluster to the other. And if you are a scientist or an engineer, you'd say, I'm trying to obtain these types of answers, but I need access to data sets A, B, C, and D, but data sets A and B are only on this cluster. I've got to go contact the data platforms team and have them copy it over and ensure that it's up-to-date and in sync so it's messy. >> It's a nightmare. >> Messy. So that's why the one customer said releasing the lock on data because now it's in a shared. Similar paradigm as AWS with EMR. The data's in a shared context, an S3. You spin up your analytics workloads on AC2. Same paradigm discussion as with OpenStack. Your spinning up your analytics workloads via OpenStack virtualization and their sourcing is shared data context inside of Ceph, S3 compatible Ceph so same architecture. I love his last bit, the one that sounds the most buzzword-y which was releasing lock on innovation. And this individual, English was not this person's first language so love the word. He said, our developers no longer fear experimentation because it's so easy. In minutes they can spin up an analytics cluster with a shared data context, they get the wrong mix of things they shut it down and spin it up again. >> In previous example you used HDFS clusters. There's so many trip wires, right. You can break something. >> It's fragile. >> It's like scripts. You don't want to tinker with that. Developers don't want to get their hand slapped. >> The other thing is also the recognition that innovation comes from data. That's what my takeaway is. The customer saying, okay, now we can innovate because we have access to the data, we can apply intelligence to that data whether it's machine intelligence or analytics, et cetera. >> This the trend in infrastructure. You mentioned the shared context. What other observations and learnings have you guys come to as Red Hat starts to get more customer interactions around analytical infrastructure. Is it an IT problem? You mentioned abstracting the way different infrastructures, and that means multi-cloud's probably setup for you guys in a big way. But what does that mean for a customer? If you had to explain infrastructure analytics, what needs to get done, what does the customer need to do? How do you describe that? >> I love the term that industry uses of multi-tenant workload isolation with shared data context. That's such a concise term to describe what we talk to our customers about. And most of them, that's what they're looking for. They've got their data scientist teams that don't want their workloads mixed in with the long running batch workloads. They say, listen, I'm on deadline here. I've got an hour to get these answers. They're working with Impala. They're working with Presto. They iterate, they don't know exactly the pattern they're looking for. So having to take a long time because their jobs are mixed in with these long MapReduce jobs. They need to be able to spin up infrastructure, workload isolation meaning they have their own space, shared context, they don't want to be placing calls over to the platform team saying, I need data sets C, D, and E. Could you please send them over? I'm on deadline here. That phrase, I think, captures so nicely what customers are really looking to do with their analytics infrastructure. Analytics tools, they'll still do their thing, but the infrastructure underneath analytics delivering this new type of agility is giving that multi-tenant workload isolation with shared data context. >> You know what's funny is we were talking at the kickoff. We were looking back nine years. We've been at this event for nine years now. We made prediction there will be no Red Hat of big data. John, years ago said, unless it's Red Hat. You guys got dragged into this by your customers really is how it came about. >> Customers and partners, of course with your recent guest from Hortonworks, the announcement that Red Hat, Hortonworks, and IBM had on Monday of this week. Dialing up even further taking the agility, okay, OpenStack is great for agility, private cloud, utility based computing and storage with OpenStack and Ceph, great. OpenShift dials up that agility another notch. Of course, we heard from the CEO of Hortonworks how much they love the agility that a Kubernetes based substrate provides their analytics customers. >> That's essentially how you're creating that sort of same-same experience between on-prem and multi-cloud, is that right? >> Yeah, OpenShift is deployed pervasively on AWS, on-premises, on Azure, on GCE. >> It's a multi-cloud world, we see that for sure. Again, the validation was at VMworld. AWS CEO, Andy Jassy announced RDS which is their product on VMware on-premises which they've never done. Amazon's never done any product on-premises. We were speculating it would be a hardware device. We missed that one, but it's a software. But this is the validation, seamless cloud operations on-premise in the cloud really is what people want. They want one standard operating model and they want to abstract away the infrastructure, as you were saying, as the big trend. The question that we have is, okay, go to the next level. From a developer standpoint, what is this modern developer using for tools in the infrastructure? How can they get that agility and spinning up isolated, multi-tenant infrastructure concept all the time? This is the demand we're seeing, that's an evolution. Question for Red Hat is, how does that change your partnership strategy because you mentioned Rob Bearden. They've been hardcore enterprise and you guys are hardcore enterprise. You kind of know the little things that customers want that might not be obvious to people: compliance, certification, a decade of support. How is Red Hat's partnership model changing with this changing landscape, if you will? You mentioned IBM and Hortonworks release this week, but what in general, how does the partnership strategy look for you? >> The more it changes, the more it looks the same. When you go back 20 years ago, what Red Hat has always stood for is any application on any infrastructure. But back in the day it was we had n-thousand of applications that were certified on Red Hat Linux and we ran on anybody's server. >> Box. >> Running on a box, exactly. It's a similar play, just in 2018 in the world of hybrid, multi-cloud architectures. >> Well, you guys have done some serious heavy lifting. Don't hate me for saying this, but you're kind of like the mules of the industry. You do a lot of stuff that nobody either wants to do or knows how to do and it's really paid off. You just look at the ascendancy of the company, it's been amazing. >> Well, multi-cloud is hard. Look at what it takes to do multi-cloud in DevOps. It's not easy and a lot of pretenders will fall out of the way, you guys have done well. What's next for you guys? What's on the horizon? What's happening for you guys this next couple months for Red Hat and technology? Any new announcements coming? What's the vision, what's happening? >> One of the announcements that you saw last week, was Red Hat, Cloudera, and Eurotech as analytics in the data center is great. Increasingly, the world's businesses run on data-driven decisions. That's great, but analytics at the edge for more realtime industrial automation, et cetera. Per the announcements we did with Cloudera and Eurotech about the use of, we haven't even talked about Red Hat's middleware platforms, such as AMQ Streams now based on Kafka, a Kafka distribution, Fuze, an integration master effectively bringing Red Hat technology to the edge of analytics so that you have the ability to do some processing in realtime before back calling all the way back to the data center. That's an area that you'll also see is pushing some analytics to the edge through our partnerships such as announced with Cloudera and Eurotech. >> You guys got the Red Hat Summit coming up next year. theCUBE will be there, as usual. It's great to cover Red Hat. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Brent. Appreciate it, thanks for spending the time. We're here in New York City live. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vallante, stay with us. All day coverage today and tomorrow in New York City. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's the CUBE, covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (upbeat Spanish-style music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here in Puerto Rico for exclusive CUBE coverage, I'm John Furry, you're host. Here, with Blockchain Unbound, this is a global event. From everyone from Silicon Valley, New York, Miami, Russia, Eastern Europe, all over the world, and Puerto Rico coming together, talk about the future of the economy, Blockchain decentralized apps, and more. Our next guest is CUBE alumni, and part of our inaugural crypto currency coverage, from Polycon 18, back to give a command performance, Nithin Eapen Chief Investment Officer at Arcadia Crypto Ventures, good to see you. >> Good to see you too John. >> So, you had a great showing at our first crypto event, PolyCon, great to see you back in the trenches, you're out, hard-working, pounding the pavement, doing deals. What's your analysis here, I mean, you're here networking, you checked out the sessions. What's your take? >> We've met some really good founders, really good projects, so that's the key thing that we are looking for. The main idea as our tagline says, "We back Blockchain's best." We are looking for the best founders. We are looking for the teams, then for the idea. Anything that's decentralized, we are backing them. >> So, network effect has been a big part of the conference I've been having. We talked about security tokens, utility tokens. A lot of interesting things going on here, but there's a backdrop. You've got multiple events going on. You've have Blockchain Unbound, run by Blockchain Industries, great team, which put this event together in five weeks. So, shout out to those guys. >> (laughs) You have Coin Agenda, >> That's coming! going on, another event going next door, which is after this event. And then you have a lot of series of little events, meet-ups, the local community had a great crypto mixer, Puerto Rico, a lot of action. >> Too much action, and it's like at the same time, look at it, TokenFest in San Francisco, another 2,000 people over there, here people are on the waiting list, so much action. >> And that's going on this week, as well. You have anyone going to that event? >> I know, I've got a lot of friends going over there. For me, it made sense, this is closer. I thought I would meet a lot of them. Puerto Rico is better I found, you know? >> A lot of big money here, a lot of smart money. >> A lot of smart money, a lot of big money. >> John: Global? >> Global, and the greatest part of Puerto Rico is, it's bringing this concept like, they have reduced taxes for US people to zero percent for individuals, for the next, until 2036. Now that's a big difference. If you want to change your domicile to Puerto Rico, for your business it's 4% corporate taxes, and individual it's 0% now, that's... >> John: But you got to move here. >> You got to move here, okay. But you don't have to give up your US citizenship. Now, I think what's going to happen right now is they're going to be other states maybe going to compete for this, or other countries are going to compete for the capital to flow, where does capitol flow to? Capital will flow to cheaper places, or lesser taxes. >> So, I got to ask you, I was talking to you earlier this morning, here on the CUBE I said, "There's two killer apps, one of them is money." Money is the killer app. >> No doubt! >> Your reaction to that? >> It is, okay all of our lives, let's say for your son, or my kid, or for me, what my parents, when we went to school, why did they make us go to school or learn, they tell us, "Okay you got to go to college!" Why, they want us to have a better life, they want to have a better car. How do you get them, you want money for them. But in none of those years did somebody teach you, how does money originate? What is money, is it something you should buy the Garmin? So in everything that we go for, unless we're the Buddha or Jesus himself, we do it for money. >> Well you bring up a good point. I mean I have a immigrant background from my family, my wife's family as well. >> Where did you come from? >> Well I'm actually Native American, I mean American. >> Okay But two, three generations back they, Ireland, >> Ireland, okay! French Canadian, a little bit of Armenian in me but that's okay, all kind of blended. I'm in the melting pot, I'm not 1st generation but, in Boston where my parents were from, very much an immigrant town, and they didn't have any money. So if you look at now, what's gone through the financial dot-com bubble, which had some impact, but the financial crisis is 2018, if you look at what's happened since then, the generation of millennials there in more debt. They're not realizing college, it might not be the thing. So we went to school so that we can have a better life than our parents did. Now it's like everyone's realizing that, shit we're screwed. So watching as a path, of freedom. >> It is! A new way to create wealth, capture the value, but in a new way. >> Yes, because you have a chance to be a part of an economy without, a permission of a centralized organization. So, earlier if you wanted to work somewhere, you needed an organization to work. This is making it much easier to be a part of the economy. to contribute, to help people to get help, all this is happening and you don't have to go to school. Maybe school is overrated, our colleges overrated. It is too expensive, you spend 200 thousand dollars on college. What is your ROI, when is your ROI? Maybe some disciplines have it. But this is your chance to.. >> Well, you you know that we love media and our disruptive media at the CUBE is to do things differently, but lets talk about some current events that's been happening. So this week, John Oliver created a video trashing crypto currency, it was actually funny. But it got to the Brock Pierce part, and he really had it out for Brock Pierce. He absolutely destroyed him. >> He did! And since then, he lost his place EOS. They wiped away all his DNA of evidence with the company. This is a comedian, at John Oliver, you're a freaking comedian. What gives him the right to I have that kind of influence on someone's job when he's just telling a joke. There's no actually substance of any facts of any kind at what he's doing, So that's a central authority figure that took an editorial comedic routine, and put it out there, but people think that's news. >> See, >> That's not The power of media, that the power of all the old traditional media, is that they had a bigger reach. I think it's going to change, it is going to be the YouTube's. And it's going to become a decentralized YouTube equivalent, or a decentralized media equivalents. Like, a lot of people have made memes and you know, fun videos that go viral and they'll take things down. The same, John Oliver obviously, he has us laugh. >> He's funny as hell though. He is funny as hell! >> You got to admit, >> He's pretty funny! The bit was really good, >> But end of the day, but he really went after Brock Pierce. Something was going on there, he took him down. >> See the traditional industries or traditional media they want to take down everybody that they don't consider, the birds of a same feather, this is somebody weird, like Trump, they try to take down Trump. They will try to take down anything which doesn't fit their globalist, elitist agenda. End of the day, like Brock Pierce sitting on a billion, and John over with his comedy, who has the bigger laugh? I don't know, if you ask me. >> When you have F U money like Brock Pierce does, I'm sure it rolls off his shoulders. But it does impact the ecosystem a bit. Basically EOS has erased his name in any capacity. So, obviously this impacts to public opinion. So these comedians and news rep, they have an obligation to share the data. Editorializing, I mean I do it all the time, don't get me wrong. >> (laughs) But, there's a point, consensus is part of the algorithm now in these Blockchain and Crypto communities where you have Blockchain as a store, against him. >> Okay! But consensus and transparency is a huge deal. >> Nithin: Yes! >> This is part of the formula. >> I know but see, the whole thing... When John Oliver does something, it's not about consensus. He can do it, okay, it's going to change! It's like this, when Bitcoin came in 2009, the traditionalists were coming up at the story that, "it is fake money, it's not going to go anywhere." Then it became one dollar, they were just laughing at it. Then became 10 dollars, they said it's going to go down. Then it became hundred dollars, they did the same thing. And it's only after long time they will realize, "Oh my God, it's changed." The rock has been pulled under my leg. It's like when Amazon came, all the traditional retail guys said, "Nobody's going to go and buy a book without touching it." Now we have Toys "R" Us that just went bankrupt. There's no more Toys" R" Us, you know, you have to buy your toys pretty much from Amazon at this point. >> Well everything in the model of future will be all contexual so, videos, comedian, news articles, reports, editorial, all will roll into one thing. That's going to be a great thing. >> Yes! >> And media is going to take a lot of, natural language processing, it's going to get transcript link. I think you're already doing it right, you're going to take a transcript of what I speak, you're going to attach the words, you're going to attach it to brands, you can sell that, and that is going to be the future. >> Well lets get some of that intellectual property out of your head and into the camera, and for the audience. What are you hearing in the hallways here, obviously this is a great networking event here. Lot's of agendas, phenomenal, as well as we had over sold almost by double. There's people out in the hallways, it's sold out, so there's a lot of Lobby Con going on. There's a conference within the conference going on. >> Nithin: It is! We call it Lobby Con! >> (laughs) What are you hearing in the hallways, what is some of the cool things that's new to you, that you're discovering? >> So lot of people are now telling me they are very excited about security tokens. They're telling me they're buying security tokens. I asked them, which security tokens? It's not there yet, okay. See, that's where I tend to differ. If security tokens are going to be the big thing, I'm going to be buying it because we are informed. >> John: Buy everything that moves. >> We buy it as it moves, but, security token, my question is, so you're trying to make something that is a utility, now you're going to make it security? So that is equity markets, there is a CC for that. And you're going to fit this in over there, I'm like, I don't know, what are people trying achieve? This is a free market and they're trying to bring it into regulation. >> What's a red flag for you as a, security token implies directly that you're securing something. What are they, >> You're pretty much What are people securing, equity, future cash flows, dividends, what are some of the vehicles you've seen? >> At that time they are pretty much secure, or securing future cash flows as dividends. They're going to give dividends, they're saying if you're a token holder, you're going to get dividends. My question at that time is, then why do you want a token, why can't it be in equity? Oh, you think you can come with their argument that it's more liquid, but equity's a liquid. I don't think it isn't a liquid. But it is a great way to go around and secularize a lot of things. You can have a small business, think of it, you and me we have a small business, let's say we have a partnership We have a small... >> We have a small business, We have a small business, we have a partnership. It's very hard to exit out of a small business. If we can fractionalize the ownership of a business thru tokens, and there might be people are willing to buy, put thousand dollars in, and maybe I can exit at some point. Otherwise there's no exit for me. It's very hard to exit out of a small business. Now then, what's the difference between that and equity? I don't know you know, those lines are blurred but, I'm happy for the fact that something like that will give liquidity to a lot of small business owners. America is a country of small business owners. Across the globe it supports small business owners. If it brings liquidity, okay I'm happy with that. But it's really beating the purpose that we don't want a centralized power controlling us. Because now that you have Google and Facebook that banned crypto-currency ads. Why, Women's Day, all our data, they give us a free access but they hold a lot of our personal data. I'm thinking, the guy who brings in the, a decentralized search or a decentralized social media, I'm going to invest in them. I don't care if their a success or if the success will come later. There are going to be multiple libertarian investors like me that's going to invest in them. >> What I learned was that money is a killer app, and I'll stand by that. I think marketplaces are also the killer app. You ever think, >> Perfectly true! that this conference, that kind of validates where I was thinking was, the people who nailed a business model, that's the critical, critical pacing item. If you screw the business model up, you go sideways. The technology risk isn't as bad as the business model decision risk. So I'm seeing the successful ICOs, or plays, have a lock in on the structural value proposition and to be directionally correct, with an understanding of what the hedge is on the technology. >> Yep! >> So they can manage it. So it's like programmable plumbing. They're recognizing that dynamic. The other thing that I'm learning is that the money flow from other countries is massive. If you want a money launderer from Colombia, it's coming in from Metadine Narcos. It's coming in from Japan, and China. Bitcoin and Blockchain is a money transfer opportunity so, I'm seeing a massive amount of money, flowing in >> Capital is flowing, in massive waves. >> it's flowing in. >> And it's good, and even if these projects fail, it's a good thing because, you had all this money that was stuck somewhere, that flowed in, and as I said, many of those projects are going to fail. Let them fail, because this money has flowed in, you will have a lot of people come and work on these projects, and eventually the correct solution will emerge. >> And new structural dynamics are at play. And new investors are coming in. >> New investors, so many new investors. You know the funny thing John, after we met at Polycon, I think that 99% of the people I meet here are totally new. All the guys we met at Polycon in Bahamas, totally different. I only know very few people that I met over there. So that means a whole set of investors, or common people, who just want to learn about it, totally new. That's really good! And who wins here, the average citizen entrepreneur, the average citizen player that wants to start something whether it's a banking, a service provider of some sort, a entrepreneur, or a new financial instrument or firm, all have greenfield opportunity here. >> Because, see earlier when you wanted to raise money, I was talking to a founder the other day, I asked him, how hard it was for you to raise your first raise, like 10 years ago? He was telling me that he walked the doors across multiple VCs, to kind of scrap in one and a half million dollars. And then he did his second loan after eight years. >> He'd have to crawl on his knees to get that. >> And that too, you won't get the attention, you need to know reference, now you have a chance to go to the world, and monies were, so easy money coming in is a bad thing in a way that most entrepreneurs will feel the investors will lose their money. but that's different, but it at least you have access and you can try to think that you had any in mind earlier. You had no option, they would take a big stake. Now there's no dilution, this is pretty much cloud funding on steroids. You have a chance to go to market, you get the go to market money and see if it works. And if it doesn't work, let's fix it after that. >> Nithin, I got to get your thoughts on building a company, 'cause obviously, you're also not only in this as an investor, you're also doing strategic advisory work for people building the venture architecture and then the actual build up plans for their venture. So you've talked about this in the past, you have a relationship with some protocol guys, you can check with them, there's some good network there. But there's also a dynamic with this industry where the business development aspect of it is really important. People are partnering, >> Very very important. And there's a way to partner and a way not a partner. There's a way to do token economics and there's a way not to do token economics. What is your advice, to companies that have a good thing going on, they have a tail wind at their back, they got wind in their sails, but have to make some hot partnering decisions. Looking for fellows, fellowship in that ecosystem. How do you advise folks in this partnerships and then talk about token economics after? >> So the first thing I would tell founders is to reach out. This community is very very supportive. Like you can reach out to me, you can reach out to other guys, LinkedIn, Facebook, or come to these events, and in the hallways. Say your idea and you need help, because you will need help, you cannot run this alone. You are running a company, you are running your team. Have a good team, that's a first thing. Have a great team, great founders, vision, execution, you need that. The next key thing is, you have to think about marketing and how do you market, you need to get some big names on your board who can reach out to their network and tell them about your idea. And they reach out of the rest for you. >> So networks are super important. >> Super super important, like... >> So advisor, that their advisor selection should be based on their network that they bring to the table. >> Right, so the first advisor selection is the guy who will help you flush out your idea properly as tokens. The next advisor set is a marketing advisor or a technical advisor. The marketing advisers also very important because you need to market the product, get the money in, because end of the day, you need money to build it. You need to pay your employees, whether it's in Bitcoins or in fear, It doesn't matter, one of these is required. So you have these three things, then you need to build strategic partnerships in your business. Say, let's see your a loyalty points guy, like Al is doing, You know Al right? >> Al Burgio, >> From FuZe Chain now doing DigitalBits. Hot deal, hot deal! >> Hot deal, hot deal. >> Look at what Al did, he went out, he got his strategic partnerships with the loyalty guys, now he's got the brand, the strategic partnerships, he's built a product already. The money he needs is only for go to market so that he can push it to multiple companies and get them on the chain. Brilliant idea so, strategic partnerships, advisors, founding team, and then, show the idea to the people. Go out there, let them know that this is what you're doing, why this idea is great, how big is the market, there was a problem that you're solving, what is your solution. Explain yourself frankly and honestly, and I think the community will reward you, to go and find your dream. >> Great point, be honest, ask for help. Again, I can't reiterate my experience of, I'll share, is during the computer revolution, Internet revolution, Web.1.o, and now partnering in the early days when it's forming, can make or break a company. Make or break a company. >> Very True! So, note to that, okay now, token economics. >> Nithin: Sure! >> Sounds easy, but you really got to make sure that you have a good economic framework that matches the value proposition. Talk about what you advise there. >> So last day of the one founder restart to me, ICO is going on for our seventh day into the ICO. He's raised less than 300 thousand dollars. I meet him, and he needs help. After what, seven days into the ICO, all I could tell him is, shut off your ICO, it's not going to raise money. He's like, "Why," and I'm like, he said, "read this paper." I'm like, "There's nothing in this paper "I can put money into." And he's like, "Why is that?" So I asked him, so how many companies has he put his money into, how many points has he bought? Four years, he has not bought a single coin. And he's flustered something by himself. So he's never bought a coin, and he's expecting people to buy coins at his price. So I tell people, either you should notice, you should be an investor yourself. So there are different kinds of investors, there are institutional investors that are funds, family offices, and then are retail investors. If you're not any one of these, or any one of in this group, how do you know what these guys are buying it for? So reach out to them! >> That's where the advisory comes in, Know your customer! >> Know your customer! And not the KYC in a different way, but know 'em from a marketing standpoint. Know how the retail, >> Exactly! purchase is made. >> Because if... >> If you yourself are a buyer, at least you have some idea. If you've never bought a token, and if you're, I had another founder tell me that, my tokens are worth hundred million. I'm like, you don't have a user, you just have a product. You're tokens are worth shite, if you ask me. It's worth zero, I can tell my house is worth hundred million dollars. It's only worth as much as the top buyer. How much is he willing to pay for me? So I told the founder, I'll pay so much for this price because I think, if it's about that, there's a huge risk as the main investor coming in. He doesn't agree! >> So lets talk about some, how rounds are being done now. So one trend that I'm seeing, not, I shouldn't say trend, a few deals I've seen done, but it seems like a trend, I'm trying to get validation on this, Where people are avoiding the public ICO altogether, doing all privates. >> Yes! Basically over subscribed round. Trend, dynamic, real deal, what's your thoughts on reaction to that? >> It's just that the founders are adapting. Because if you go to the public, the moment you're going to the public, what's happening is, there's the SEZ component. Whether it's a utility and they can come after you, so they have made it private. And then they went after, and even further, a lot of the founders that I know, they just stopped accepting money from US entities or US individuals. Well it's a bad deal for a small investor. See the big investors are wealthy investors. They all have an external entity where they can invest into it. What about the small investor who was investing thousand dollars or 5,000 dollars? Now you have pretty much shut out his chance of getting into a great ICO. So the founder is going to raise his money from maybe Korea, Japan, China, and Singapore. He's going to form a company or a foundation in Cayman, or Lichtenstein, or Gibraltar. The small investor is a loser. The large institutional investor has no loss in this process, so, that is the founder adapting because he does not want, >> They want to manage, >> They don't want it to become lawsuits, basically. >> Compliance, audits, SEZ problems, they don't end fencing problems. >> So now let's compare, in contrast, different kind of companies. US based company, wants to raise money in the US, they do accredited. But they want to go outside, say Asia, or an Asia company wants to raise money in the US, what's that dynamic like, what are the issues? >> I think what's going to happen is they going to, some of them are going to register themselves as a security token, some of them are going to do just a reg D for very high net worth individuals. And the common, the the public round, they going to raise it from the China, the Korea, Japan, or is lobbying them. And that's what I think, multiple small countries are going to come into the space, which they know now, they can get the capital flowing into their company, and they going to allow their rules to be lax. They going to let capitol flow through. And then US will have to change, or maybe UK will have to change, whoever is against this will have to change. Capital means money, belt capital, and resource capital, like humans, we tend to move to places that are freer. Why did I move from India to US, or why did your parents or the earlier generation move to US? >> John: For a better life. >> It's a better life, the real better life is, you have the freedom over your property, the fruits of your labor. If the fruits of your labor are taxed at 50% or thirty, the more it goes up, you just don't want to work anymore, or you're going to to search for that place that will tax you less. >> Like Puerto Rico! >> Nithan: Puerto Rico! >> Are you bullish on Puerto Rico? >> I am bullish on Puerto Rico because, these, if they can sustain this, and have the rule of law, means they can protect people's wealth, like from crime and all those things, crime or being kidnapped. These two things happen, I'm telling you, most people will move or some of state will have to change their laws. >> They got to get >> the security up. Nithan, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate your insight. Thanks for sharing! >> Thank you very much. This is the CUBEs exclusive coverage from Puerto Rico where we're getting on the ground here. Getting all the data from the Blockchain Unbound Conference. Part of restart week. I'm John Furry here, we've got more coverage after this break, thanks for watching! (upbeat electronic music)