>>Mm. >>Okay. Hello, and welcome to the Cubes Coverage of the International Women in Tech Showcase featuring National Women's Day. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We have a great guest here of any theory a PJ head of aerospace and satellite for A W S A P J s Asia Pacific in Japan. Great to have you on many thanks for joining us. Talk about Space and International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks, John. It's such a pleasure to be here with you. >>So obviously, aerospace space satellite is an area that's growing. It's changing. AWS has made a lot of strides closure, and I had a conversation last year about this. Remember when Andy Jassy told me about this initiative to 2.5 years or so ago? It was like, Wow, that makes a lot of sense Ground station, etcetera. So it just makes a lot of sense, a lot of heavy lifting, as they say in the satellite aerospace business. So you're leading the charge over there in a p J. And you're leading women in space and beyond. Tell us what's the Storey? How did you get there? What's going on. >>Thanks, John. Uh, yes. So I need the Asia Pacific business for Clint, um, as part of Amazon Web services, you know, that we have in industry business vertical that's dedicated to looking after our space and space customers. Uh, my journey began really? Three or four years ago when I started with a W s. I was based out of Australia. Uh, and Australia had a space agency that was being literally being born. Um, and I had the great privilege of meeting the country's chief scientist. At that point. That was Dr Alan Finkel. Uh, and we're having a conversation. It was really actually an education conference. And it was focused on youth and inspiring the next generation of students. Uh, and we hit upon space. Um, and we had this conversation, and at that stage, we didn't have a dedicated industry business vertical at A W s well supported space customers as much as we did many other customers in the sector, innovative customers. And after the conversation with Dr Finkel, um, he offered to introduce me, uh, to Megan Clark, who was back back then the first CEO of the Australian Space Agency. So that's literally how my journey into space started. We had a conversation. We worked out how we could possibly support the Australian Space Agency's remit and roadmap as they started growing the industry. Uh, and then a whole industry whole vertical was set up, clinic came on board. I have now a global team of experts around me. Um, you know, they've pretty much got experience from everything creating building a satellite, launching a satellite, working out how to down link process all those amazing imagery that we see because, you know, um, contrary to what a lot of people think, Uh, space is not just technology for a galaxy far, far away. It is very much tackling complex issues on earth. Um, and transforming lives with information. Um, you know, arranges for everything from wildfire detection to saving lives. Um, smart, smart agriculture for for farmers. So the time of different things that we're doing, Um, and as part of the Asia Pacific sector, uh, my task here is really just to grow the ecosystem. Women are an important part of that. We've got some stellar women out here in region, both within the AWS team, but also in our customer and partner sectors. So it's a really interesting space to be. There's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of opportunities and there's an incredible amount of growth so specific, exciting space to be >>Well, I gotta say I'm super inspired by that. One of the things that we've been talking about the Cuban I was talking to my co host for many, many years has been the democratisation of digital transformation. Cloud computing and cloud scale has democratised and change and level the playing field for many. And now space, which was it's a very complex area is being I want kind of democratised. It's easier to get access. You can launch a satellite for very low cost compared to what it was before getting access to some of the technology and with open source and with software, you now have more space computing things going on that's not out of reach. So for the people watching, share your thoughts on on that dynamic and also how people can get involved because there are real world problems to solve that can be solved now. That might have been out of reach, but now it's cloud. Can you share your thoughts. >>That's right. So you're right, John. Satellites orbiting There's more and more satellites being launched every day. The sensors are becoming more sophisticated. So we're collecting huge amounts of data. Um, one of our customers to cut lab tell us that we're collecting today three million square kilometres a day. That's gonna increase to about three billion over the next five years. So we're already reaching a point where it's impossible to store, analyse and make sense of such massive amounts of data without cloud computing. So we have services which play a very critical role. You know, technologies like artificial intelligence machine learning. Help us help these customers build up products and solutions, which then allows us to generate intelligence that's serving a lot of other sectors. So it could be agriculture. It could be disaster response and recovery. Um, it could be military intelligence. I'll give you an example of something that's very relevant, and that's happening in the last couple of weeks. So we have some amazing customers. We have Max our technologies. They use a W S to store their 100 petabytes imagery library, and they have daily collection, so they're using our ground station to gather insight about a lot of changing conditions on Earth. Usually Earth observation. That's, you know, tracking water pollution, water levels of air pollution. But they're also just tracking, um, intelligence of things like military build up in certain areas. Capella space is another one of our customers who do that. So over the last couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months, uh, we've been watching, uh, images that have been collected by these commercial satellites, and they've been chronicling the build up, for instance, of Russian forces on Ukraine's borders and the ongoing invasion. They're providing intelligence that was previously only available from government sources. So when you talk about the democratisation of space, high resolution satellite images are becoming more and more ridiculous. Um, I saw the other day there was, uh, Anderson Cooper, CNN and then behind him, a screenshot from Capella, which is satellite imagery, which is very visible, high resolution transparency, which gives, um, respected journalists and media organisations regular contact with intelligence, direct intelligence which can help support media storytelling and help with the general public understanding of the crisis like what's happening in Ukraine. And >>I think on that point is, people can relate to it. And if you think about other things with computer vision, technology is getting so much stronger. Also, there's also metadata involved. So one of the things that's coming out of this Ukraine situation not only is tracking movements with the satellites in real time, but also misinformation and disinformation. Um, that's another big area because you can, uh, it's not just the pictures, it's what they mean. So it's well beyond just satellite >>well, beyond just satellite. Yeah, and you know, not to focus on just a crisis that's happening at the moment. There's 100 other use cases which were helping with customers around the globe. I want to give you a couple of other examples because I really want people to be inspired by what we're doing with space technology. So right here in Singapore, I have a company called Hero Factory. Um, now they use AI based on Earth observation. They have an analytics platform that basically help authorities around the region make key decisions to drive sustainable practises. So change detection for shipping Singapore is, you know, it's lots of traffic. And so if there's oil spills, that can be detected and remedy from space. Um, crop productivity, fruit picking, um, even just crop cover around urban areas. You know, climate change is an increasing and another increasing, uh, challenges global challenge that we need to tackle and space space technology actually makes it possible 15 50% of what they call e CVS. Essential climate variables can only be measured from space. So we have companies like satellite through, uh, one of our UK customers who are measuring, um, uh, carbon emissions. And so the you know, the range of opportunities that are out there, like you said previously untouched. We've just opened up doors for all sorts of innovations to become possible. >>It totally is intoxicating. Some of the fun things you can discuss with not only the future but solving today's problems. So it's definitely next level kind of things happening with space and space talent. So this is where you start to get into the conversation like I know some people in these major technical instance here in the US as sophomore second year is getting job offers. So there's a There's a there's a space race for talent if you will, um and women talent in particular is there on the table to So how How can you share that discussion? Because inspiration is one thing. But then people want to know what to do to get in. So how do you, um how do you handle the recruiting and motivating and or working with organisations to just pipeline interest? Because space is one of the things you get addicted to. >>Yeah. So I'm a huge advocate for science, technology, engineering, math. We you know, we highlights them as a pathway into space into technology. And I truly believe the next generation of talent will contribute to the grand challenges of our time. Whether that climate change or sustainability, Um, it's gonna come from them. I think I think that now we at Amazon Web services. We have several programmes that we're working on to engage kids and especially girls to be equipped with the latest cloud skills. So one of the programmes that we're delivering this year across Singapore Australia uh, we're partnering with an organisation called the Institute for Space Science, Exploration and Technology and we're launching a programme called Mission Discovery. It's basically students get together with an astronaut, NASA researcher, technology experts and they get an opportunity to work with these amazing characters, too. Create and design their own project and then the winning project will be launched will be taken up to the International space station. So it's a combination of technology skills, problem solving, confidence building. It's a it's a whole range and that's you know, we that's for kids from 14 to about 18. But actually it, in fact, because the pipeline build is so important not just for Amazon Web services but for industry sector for the growth of the overall industry sector. Uh, there's several programmes that were involved in and they range from sophomore is like you said all the way to to high school college a number of different programmes. So in Singapore, specifically, we have something called cloud Ready with Amazon Web services. It's a very holistic clouds killing programme that's curated for students from primary school, high school fresh graduates and then even earlier careers. So we're really determined to work together closely and it the lines really well with the Singapore government's economic national agenda, um so that that's one way and and then we have a tonne of other programmes specifically designed for women. So last year we launched a programme called She Does It's a Free online training learning programme, and the idea is really to inspire professional women to consider a career in the technology industry and show them pathways, support them through that learning process, bring them on board, help drive a community spirit. And, you know, we have a lot of affinity groups within Amazon, whether that's women in tech or a lot of affinity groups catering for a very specific niches. And all of those we find, uh, really working well to encourage that pipeline development that you talk about and bring me people that I can work with to develop and build these amazing solutions. >>Well, you've got so much passion. And by the way, if you have, if you're interested in a track on women in space, would be happy to to support that on our site, send us storeys, we'll we'll get We'll get them documented so super important to get the voices out there. Um and we really believe in it. So we love that. I have to ask you as the head of a PJ for a W S uh aerospace and satellite. You've you've seen You've been on a bunch of missions in the space programmes of the technologies. Are you seeing how that's trajectory coming to today and now you mentioned new generation. What problems do you see that need to be solved for this next generation? What opportunities are out there that are new? Because you've got the lens of the past? You're managing a big part of this new growing emerging business for us. But you clearly see the future. And you know, the younger generation is going to solve these problems and take the opportunities. What? What are they? >>Yes, Sometimes I think we're leaving a lot, uh, to solve. And then other times, I think, Well, we started some of those conversations. We started those discussions and it's a combination of policy technology. We do a lot of business coaching, so it's not just it's not just about the technology. We do think about the broader picture. Um, technology is transferring. We know that technology is transforming economies. We know that the future is digital and that diverse backgrounds, perspective, skills and experiences, particularly those of women minority, the youth must be part of the design creation and the management of the future roadmaps. Um, in terms of how do I see this going? Well, it's been sort of we've had under representation of women and perhaps youth. We we just haven't taken that into consideration for for a long time now. Now that gap is slowly becoming. It's getting closer and closer to being closed. Overall, we're still underrepresented. But I take heart from the fact that if we look at an agency like the US Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, that's a relatively young space agency in your A. I think they've got about three or 400 people working for them at this point in time, and the average age of that cohort John, is 28. Some 40% of its engineers and scientists are women. Um, this year, NASA is looking to recruit more female astronauts. Um, they're looking to recruit more people with disabilities. So in terms of changing in terms of solving those problems, whatever those problems are, we started the I guess we started the right representation mix, so it doesn't matter. Bring it on, you know, whether it is climate change or this ongoing crisis, productive. Um, global crisis around the world is going to require a lot more than just a single shot answer. And I think having diversity and having that representation, we know that it makes a difference to innovation outputs. We know that it makes a difference to productivity, growth, profit. But it's also just the right thing to do for so long. We haven't got it right, and I think if we can get this right, we will be able to solve the majority of some of the biggest things that we're looking at today. >>And the diversity of problems in the diversity of talent are two different things. But they come together because you're right. It's not about technology. It's about all fields of study sociology. It could be political science. Obviously you mentioned from the situation we have now. It could be cybersecurity. Space is highly contested. We dated long chat about that on the Last Cube interview with AWS. There's all these new new problems and so problem solving skills. You don't need to have a pedigree from Ivy League school to get into space. This is a great opportunity for anyone who can solve problems because their new No one's seen them before. >>That's exactly right. And you know, every time we go out, we have sessions with students or we're at universities. We tell them, Raise your voices. Don't be afraid to use your voice. It doesn't matter what you're studying. If you think you have something of value to say, say it. You know, by pushing your own limits, you push other people's limits, and you may just introduce something that simply hasn't been part of before. So your voice is important, and we do a lot of lot of coaching encouraging, getting people just to >>talk. >>And that in itself is a great start. I think >>you're in a very complex sector, your senior leader at AWS Amazon Web services in a really fun, exciting area, aerospace and satellite. And for the young people watching out there or who may see this video, what advice would you have for the young people who are trying to navigate through the complexities of now? Third year covid. You know, seeing all the global changes, um, seeing that massive technology acceleration with digital transformation, digitisation it's here, digital world we're in. >>It could >>be confusing. It could be weird. And so how would you talk to that person and say, Hey, it's gonna be okay? And what advice would you give? >>It is absolutely going to be okay. Look, from what I know, the next general are far more fluent in digital than I am. I mean, they speak nerd. They were born speaking nerd, so I don't have any. I can't possibly tell them what to do as far as technology is concerned because they're so gung ho about it. But I would advise them to spend time with people, explore new perspectives, understand what the other is trying to do or achieve, and investing times in a time in new relationships, people with different backgrounds and experience, they almost always have something to teach you. I mean, I am constantly learning Space tech is, um it's so complicated. Um, I can't possibly learn everything I have to buy myself just by researching and studying. I am totally reliant on my community of experts to help me learn. So my advice to the next generation kids is always always in this time in relationships. And the second thing is, don't be disheartened, You know, Um this has happened for millennia. Yes, we go up, then we come down. But there's always hope. You know, there there is always that we shape the future that we want. So there's no failure. We just have to learn to be resilient. Um, yeah, it's all a learning experience. So stay positive and chin up, because we can. We can do it. >>That's awesome. You know, when you mentioned the Ukraine in the Russian situation, you know, one of the things they did they cut the Internet off and all telecommunications and Elon Musk launched a star linked and gives them access, sending them terminals again. Just another illustration. That space can help. Um, and these in any situation, whether it's conflict or peace and so Well, I have you here, I have to ask you, what is the most important? Uh uh, storeys that are being talked about or not being talked about are both that people should pay attention to. And they look at the future of what aerospace satellite these emerging technologies can do for the world. What's your How would you kind of what are the most important things to pay attention to that either known or maybe not being talked about. >>They have been talked about John, but I'd love to see more prominent. I'd love to see more conversations about stirring the amazing work that's being done in our research communities. The research communities, you know, they work in a vast area of areas and using satellite imagery, for instance, to look at climate change across the world is efforts that are going into understanding how we tackle such a global issue. But the commercialisation that comes from the research community that's pretty slow. And and the reason it's loads because one is academics, academics churning out research papers. The linkage back into industry and industry is very, um, I guess we're always looking for how fast can it be done? And what sort of marginal profit am I gonna make for it? So there's not a lot of patients there for research that has to mature, generate outputs that you get that have a meaningful value for both sides. So, um, supporting our research communities to output some of these essential pieces of research that can Dr Impact for society as a whole, Um, maybe for industry to partner even more, I mean, and we and we do that all the time. But even more focus even more. Focus on. And I'll give you a small example last last year and it culminated this earlier this month, we signed an agreement with the ministry of With the Space Office in Singapore. Uh, so it's an MOU between AWS and the Singapore government, and we are determined to help them aligned to their national agenda around space around building an ecosystem. How do we support their space builders? What can we do to create more training pathways? What credits can we give? How do we use open datasets to support Singaporeans issues? And that could be claimed? That could be kind of change. It could be, um, productivity. Farming could be a whole range of things, but there's a lot that's happening that is not highlighted because it's not sexy specific, right? It's not the Mars mission, and it's not the next lunar mission, But these things are just as important. They're just focused more on earth rather than out there. >>Yeah, and I just said everyone speaking nerd these days are born with it, the next generations here, A lot of use cases. A lot of exciting areas. You get the big headlines, you know, the space launches, but also a lot of great research. As you mentioned, that's, uh, that people are doing amazing work, and it's now available open source. Cloud computing. All this is bringing to bear great conversation. Great inspiration. Great chatting with you. Love your enthusiasm for for the opportunity. And thanks for sharing your storey. Appreciate it. >>It's a pleasure to be with you, John. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay. >>Thanks, Manny. The women in tech showcase here, the Cube is presenting International Women's Day celebration. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mm mm.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay thanks, Adam, and the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action, the keynotes are going on in the background. It's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante's on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE, but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, and kicking it off day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me! It's very exciting! I love what you guys have got over here, very fun! >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is, and also, Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> No, I mean, the atmosphere is absolutely palpable. Isn't it? You can just feel it. People walk in and see what the future looks like for the telecoms industry. Very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage, we're really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. After the keynotes are going on, we're going to have DR maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that out. But let's check out this videotape. This is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel, and we'll be right back, and we'll talk about it. (smooth electronic music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson space at MWC 21, and for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is their unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston, or DR, as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat instrumental music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona! I'm here for MWC 21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors, and 70 demos, to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience. We're going to talk about what's in store for the new network, and the future of work. And I'm really excited to create a community, and invite awesome telco executives to see this new feature. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC 21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get-go, we planned this amazing experience that we call Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series, where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs, and awesome vendors, talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud, hosted by John furrier and Dave Vallente. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests focused on telco in the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco, and 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, am on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements, and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested $1,000,000 in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market this week at MWC. The first is at planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement, coupling your network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement, and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing is a planetary scale BSS system, built on top of the TM Forum Open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show floor. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco! I'm super excited to bring to you the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona, and virtually around the world! (upbeat instrumental music) Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry, and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (groovy electronic music) >> Okay, thanks. Just rolling that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel, I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star. And I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision, and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there! I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, it really is. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world! She's innovative, she's exciting. And if we've learned anything over the last 18 months, it's that we need that in this industry, to grow for the future of the industry. So, so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration! >> And I love the fact that she's so takes the tiger by the tail. Because the telco industry is being disrupted, she's just driving the bus here. And I remember, I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon Web Services, she was running the public sector, and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC, and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player! And she was an exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing, and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" >> Now of course, it's always that way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time, people thinking what is going on here, we don't like change, why are being shaken up? But actually, afterwards, in retrospect, they think, "Oh, okay. I see why that happened, and we needed it." So, really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here on theCUBE. Obviously, the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you missed some of the action, this is obviously the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a hybrid event, a lot of virtual action going on. So, you got theCUBE Virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites. But in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, and what was happening around the show. Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (groovy electronic music) (cheerful instrumental music) (groovy electronic music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're on the main floor out here with Chloe, who is emceeing, hosting, and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean so far, day one, I was watching your presentations and fireside chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, no, for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage, and his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing. And in 10 years, it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So, really interesting! I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great. Everyone's excited. It's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content! It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. It's very exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event, so since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event, and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry because of COVID, and people are glad to be here. But a lot of stuff's changed! >> Yeah. It's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed! Digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though, John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> John: Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years. We know that! But what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years. >> Oh, man. That's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks, and telecom, which is basically radios, and wireless, and then mobile. But it's very global, a lot of networks. But now it's evolving! And many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting, that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe, because of all the technology from the cloud players, and from the chips, getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So people look at the chips, the hardware. It's less about the speeds and feeds, it's more about the consumer experience. We got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I went, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, you order it, you pick it up. So that's kind of what can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. So, a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry? That is, the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is there anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well, I think the incumbents are going to lose their positions. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the the company that you don't see. (audience in background applauding) And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this! We saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. >> Chloe: Yeah, for sure. >> She just walked out there, and she's not afraid. >> Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up! And you can see as soon as she walks out, that is what she intends to do today. >> I love her mojo. She's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Chloe: Yep. >> I mean, even when Apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash, when Steve Jobs brought back Apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company, the iPad was a seminal, iPod, a seminal moment. Then the iPhone, and just, the rest is history. That kind of disruption is coming. You're going to see that now. >> Oh, it's exciting though, isn't it? To be future ready, rather than future proof! But actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about wire, as you're on AWS and Google Cloud, why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity. And it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. It's almost like global warming now, the icebergs are melting, and it's going to just change. And because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing, it's not like a better phone. It's a commercial app opportunity, because it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts, or football games, or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out. Can't upload their picture to Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them on the network. That's where 5G solves a problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth, and that's going to bring the edge to life, and that's money. So when you got money, and greed, and power, changing hands, if it's on the table, and the wheel's spinning, it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know! >> Oh, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved! And I suppose it circles back to the fact that DR is really leading the charge, and they're probably thinking, "Okay, what's going on here? This is different. We want something new." You did notice it, OpenRAN is something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here at Cloud City Live mention OpenRAN. What is it all about, Don? Because why all the buzz if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we get excited about it? >> That's a great thing. The 5G certainly will drive the main trend, for sure. OpenRAN is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular, and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation, has been the driver for most of the open source software. So, they're trying to make open software, and open architectures, to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware, and around infrastructure, because we need more infrastructure, we need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices. That could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology, and you want to minimize the licensing, and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What did we look at? So on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Phillip Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud, and within telco. So you just mentioned that OpenRAN is all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easily more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it at risk? >> I think it's going to increase the value of security, and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in a sense that could be explored by hackers, but open can also protect. And I think we've seen open source, and cloud in particular, be more secure. Because everyone said, cloud is not secure, open source is insecure. And as it turns out, when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security threats, but actually I was speaking to some leaders across various industries, and particularly in tech, and they were saying, actually, there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open-source environment, we are able to track them, and measure them, and defend more efficiently. So actually, they're being batted away. But the number is probably the same as it always was, we just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats, and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so to the threats. So on a net basis, it's more, because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look it, there's money involved, they are organized. There's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank, or ransomware is at an all time high. >> Yes! >> So this is like a big problem, and it's beyond the government. It's around individual freedom. So, security is huge. And I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think, the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's, again, about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time, but without collaboration, the industries are going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I'd just say on security, don't download that PDF, if you don't know who it came from. The phishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here of Mobile World Live. We're going to show this next segment, and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience, Chloe, for people who aren't here. To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona, and all the action. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Daniel Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDR. But you can call me DR! Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time! Let's do it. Holy shit! It sure is a great time to be a tech company! I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, Door Dash, or Uber, life's pretty great! Just look at these stock prices over the past five years, with their shareholder value going up and to the right. Totally amazing! But where's telco? Dare I add our stocks to this awesome chart? Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, TIM, America Movil, and Zain Group. Huh. Not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you, senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up! Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T than to Apple, because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people! I get it. You have the security blanket. You're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network, and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network, and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things. But because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far, you haven't had to. Every Telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best. Just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat. And it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting to WeChat, WhatsApp, and the other OTT apps. But it is not just texting. The total adjustable market, or TAM, of the mobile app disruptors is huge! Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about! I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love! They look at every interaction with the customer and say, how do we make the customer love this? Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive, they must make customers love them. So, they focus on it in a big way! And it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70, and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS, and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch, and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps, and becoming customer centered! Retooling around the customer is a huge change, so let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples, and drive big shareholder value, just like the tech companies on that chart! Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies in a variety of categories vying for your subscribers' disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services. Who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high valuations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You! Hello? What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAMs they throw around, you'd be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the cap ex to build out the network, I say to myself, hell yeah! We should totally go do it, and do whatever it takes to go get it. For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a Southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focus started in Rideshare, but then leveraged its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a Telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with the valuable services that helped grow your ARPU. That would be huge! So, how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app! A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great, but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called to Totogi that is going to help carriers build world-class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users. It's not the average order value. It's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user. That's the metric that matters. How many have you used that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top-up, or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences. Like Apple credit cards, no information required application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies. Like how Door Dash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings, because they do simple things, like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app, rather than forced you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. Hm, what do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder. While you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day, you have something that's 10 times better! You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network. 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to, your crappy, over customized, on-premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it, the public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi! Totogi will leverage all those network interactions, and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions, and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network, and all the network interactions, into customer engagement. This is something that super apps don't have, but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focused to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying, massive cap ex investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps, with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day, and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100,000,000 into it. You heard me right. $100,000,000. Is this what it feels like to be SoftBank? I'm investing into Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage their network interactions into super app usage! Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience, and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those telco valuations will go from down here, (buzzes lips) to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts. And I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, "Click. Eh." Everyone says, no way. Telcos can't do it. Zero chance. Total goose egg. (egg cracking) One suggested I build a bonfire with a hundred million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well, I think those people are dead wrong! I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco, and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because Totogi takes the value of the network, and the power of the public cloud, to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focused guys, like the other telcos. Instead, you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors, they know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf, and make the customers want to choose you. You need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We'll have to give up the security blanket of the network, and change. Instead of NPS at the thirties, it needs to be in the seventies. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible! I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me, and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time, and I can't wait to see you there! >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier. Chloe Richardson's filling in for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her involving major action, major pump you up, punch in the face, "Wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here!" She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is, John, there's trillions of dollars on the table, and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in, and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> And it's not going to be, it's going to be a fight! Who will win? >> Who will win, but also who will build the next big thing? (John laughing) >> Someone needs to die in the media conversations. It's always a fight. Something's dead. Something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. Think what's happened is Telco's already acknowledged that they need to change. And the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple. They've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm. You've got all these new things. So, the chips are getting faster, and the software's more open source. And I'm telling you, the cloud is just going to drive that bus right down Cloud Street, and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peepin' on the board as it drives down. (John laughing) John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written, and one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me, what does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets, and growing markets, things behave differently, and certainly economics, and the people, and the makeup, and the mindset. So the telco has been kind of this mature market, it's been changing and growing, but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit. You know, to install a lot of cable, you got to get the rents out of that infrastructure. And that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market. And it's about building, not just operating. And you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together. Builders being software developers, new technology, and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking. But in a growth market, it's turbulent, and the ride might not be quiet, first-class ticket to paradise. It's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer? Are there parallels there? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, replatform with the cloud, and then refactor your business! If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over, or go out of business. And that's what the telcos with all these assets, they're going to get bought, rolled into a SPAC, Special Purpose Acquisition Company, which is super hot in the United States. A lot of roll-ups going on with private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor, or replatform then refactor, they're going to be toast, and they're going to get rolled up, and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad, people, process, technology, and we think, process and technology really to the forefront here. But like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously, Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday, and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations, establishments. How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about? >> Yeah. I mean, education's huge, and this highlights the change that telco's now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around, and mobile was there. But once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So, you start to see people now aware of the value. And if you look at during COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses, and everyone survived because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad Zoom meetings here and there, and some teleconferences that didn't go well, but for the most part we survived, and they really saved everybody. So, they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education. People care about that stuff, so now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why the edge has got trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, "Oh, there's no jobs." Or, "I can't work." That's a bunch of BS, because you can just get online, get on YouTube, and just get a degree. You can get a degree. You can get an Amazon job. It pays a hundred thousand dollars a year! American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds, and be unemployed six months, and then be employed. So negative unemployment means, there's more jobs than people to fill them all, in fact. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that, because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in something, I think there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity. And there's such a skill shortage. There is nobody around to fill it! So it's an interesting problem to have, isn't it? Because it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades! And obviously, telco is in the same space. But what can we do about it do you think, to actually -- >> I think it's going to take leadership, and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university if they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money, if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there. But to me, it's the relationships, the mentorship. You're starting to see a women in tech, and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear courseware. Nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate, or degree, and accreditation, no problem. But the communities are out there, so that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that. And I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills. You can get that online, so why even go to school? So, people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also, even transferring. I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't they, so we could easily be talking to people from other industries, and bringing them into telco, and saying, "Look, bring what you know from your retail background, or your healthcare background, and help us at telco to, again, drive forwards." Just like DR was saying, it's all about the next big thing. >> Well, Danielle is always also driving a lot of change. And if you think about the jobs, and the pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy Leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to the school like that, and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now the jobs that are available weren't around five years ago, so there's no like pedigree or track record. There's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now, from a job standpoint, is people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy League, or the big degree, or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emerging and making things happen. Entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas! >> It's interesting you mention that, John, because we can't have more than five years experience in this space, we know that. But in telco, there is a problem. And maybe it's, again, it's a flipped problem where telco recruiters, or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> I think that's just, I mean I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening, one. But two, I think, you know, to be like a chip engineer, (laughs) you can't learn that online. But if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So, embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely paths you can specialize. Space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on. You see Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on a virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And you know, Danielle Royston always says, "What's going to happen first, Mars colony, or telco adopting public cloud?" And some people think Mars will happen first, but. >> What do you think, John? >> I think Telco's going to get cloud. I mean first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud, and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important, because it's an architectural beachhead. And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. So, the inside baseball, and the inside money, and all the investors are focusing on the edge, because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows, it's a public secret, and it's fun to watch everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah no, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So, it's an interesting flip. And I wonder if, with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development, this efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times, John. >> John: Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So, we're the hybrid CUBE, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. That is critical dynamic! And you're seeing it. Like virtual reality, for instance, now you're seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. You got, companies like Roblox went public recently. Metaverse. It's a good time to be in that business, because experiential human relations are coming. So, I think that's going to be powered by 5G. You know, gamers. So, all good stuff. Chloe, great to be with you here on theCUBE, and we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam, and the team. We're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City. And this is theCUBE, from Cloud City, back to you, Adam, and the studio.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks Adam in the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action. The keynotes are going on in the background, it's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante is on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City, with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and kicking it up day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me. It's very exciting. I love what you guys have got over here, very fun. >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is. And also the Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> Know, I mean the atmosphere is absolutely palpable, isn't it? You can just feel as people walk in and see what the future looks like to the Telecoms industry, it's very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage. We've been really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. Actually the keynote is going on, we're going to have DR, maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that up. But let's check out this videotape of, this is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel and we'll be right back, we'll talk about it. (upbeat music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson's space at MWC21. And for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is the unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston or DR as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona. I'm here for MWC21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors and 70 demos to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience, we're going to talk about what's in store for the new network and the future of work. I'm really excited to create a community and invite awesome telco executives to see this new future. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get go we plan this amazing experience that we call, Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs and awesome vendors talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live, is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud hosted by John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests, focused on telco and the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco. And 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, I'm on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested a hundred million dollars in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market, this week at MWC. The first is a planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement coupling dual network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing, is a planetary scale BSS system built on top of the TM forum, open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show for. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco. I'm super excited to bring to you, the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona and virtually around the world. (upbeat music) >> Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks. Just roll on that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel. I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star and I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there. I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, really isn't. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world. She's innovative, she's exciting and if we've learned anything over the last 18 months is that we need to in this industry to grow and for the future of the industry. So, it's so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration. >> And I love the fact that she's so, takes a tiger by the tail, because the telco industry is being disrupted. She's just driving the bus here and I remember I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon web services, she was running the public sector and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player. And she was exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, whoa, what's going on here? >> And of course, it's always the way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time people thinking what's going, we don't like change, why are we being shaken up. But actually afterwards, in retrospect, they think, oh, okay, I see why that happened and we needed it. So really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here in theCUBE. Obviously the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you miss some of the action, this is, I'll see the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a Hybrid event. A lot of virtual action going on. So you got theCUBE virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites, but in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, what was happening around the show? Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're the main floor out here with Chloe Richardson, who is emceeing, hosting and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean, so far day one, I was watching your presentations and inspire site chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, I know for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage. And his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing and in 10 years it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So really interesting. I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great, everyone's excited, there's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content. It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. Really exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event. So since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry cause of COVID and people are glad to be here, but a lot of stuff's changed. >> Yeah, it's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed, digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years, we know that, but what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years? >> Oh man, that's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks and telecom, which is basically radios and wireless and then mobile. It's very global, a lot of networks, but now it's evolving and many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe because what's all the technology from the cloud players and from the chips, are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So if you look at the chips, the hardware, it's less about the speeds and feeds. It's more about the consumer experience. You got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I'm like, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app, driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, if you order it you pick it up. So that's kind of can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. so a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry that is the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is that anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well I think the incumbents are going to lose their position. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. >> For sure. >> And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the company that's not, that you don't see. And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this. You saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. She just walked out there and she's not afraid. >> No. Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up and you can see as soon as she worked out. That is what she intends to do. >> I love her mojo, she's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Yep. >> I mean, even when apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash. When Steve Jobs brought back apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company. The iPad was a similar moment, then the iPhone and just the rest is history. That kind of disruption's coming. You're going to see that here. >> Yeah. Oh, it's exciting though isn't it? To be future ready rather than future proof but actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about why, as you're in MWS and Google Cloud? Why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot, hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity and it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. >> Okay. >> It's almost like global warming now. The icebergs are melting and it's going to just change and because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing. It's not like a better phone, it's a commercial app opportunity cause it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts or football games or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out, can't upload their pictures on Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them in the network. That's where 5G solves the problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth and that's going to bring the edge to life and that's money. So when you got money and greed and power changing hands, it's every, it's on the table and the wheel's spinning, and it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know. >> Yeah, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved. And I suppose it circles back to the fact that, DR is really leading the charge and they're probably thinking, okay, what's going on here? This is different, we want something new. You didn't know it's an open run or something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here constantly. I've mentioned open run. What is it all about John? Because why all the bars, if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we getting excited about it? >> That's a great thing. 5G certainly is Google Drive the main trend for sure. OpenRent is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation has been the driver for most of the open source software. So they're trying to bring software and open architectures to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware and around infrastructure because we need more infrastructure. We need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices that could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology and you want to minimize the licensing and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What if we look at, so on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Philippe Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud and within telco. So you just mentioned that. Open mind, it's all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easy, more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it a risk? >> I think that's going to increase the value of security and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in sense that could be explored by hackers, but it can be open to also protect. And I think we've seen open source and cloud in particular be more secure because everyone said, "Cloud is not secure, open source is not secure." And as it turns out when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security and threats. But actually I was speaking to some leaders in across various industries and particularly in tech. And they were saying, "Actually there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open source environment. We are able to track them and measure them and defend more efficiently. So actually they're being battered away, but the number is probably the same as it always was. We just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so do the threats. So on a net basis it's more because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look at it, there's money involved, they're organized, there's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank or ransomwares at an all time high. So this is like a big problem and it's beyond the government, it's our individual freedom. So security its huge and I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's again about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time but without collaboration that the industries aren't going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I just say in security, don't download that PDF if you don't know who came from. The fishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here on Mobile World Live, we're going to show this next segment and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience Chloe, for people who aren't here, right? >> Yeah. >> To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona and all the actions. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDr, but you can call me DR. Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time, let's do it. Holy shit. It sure is a great time to be a tech company. I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, DoorDash or Uber, life's pretty great. Just look at these stock prices over the past five years with their shareholder value going up into the right. Totally amazing. But where's telco? There I add our stocks to this awesome chart. Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, Tim, America Movil and Zain group. Huh, not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up. Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T and to Apple because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth, the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people. I get it, you have the security blanket, you're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street, to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things, but because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far you haven't had to. Every telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best, just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS, is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat and it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting, to WeChat, WhatsApp and the other OTT apps, but it is not just texting. The total adjustable market or term of the mobile app disruptors is huge. Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're a network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love. They look at every interaction with the customer and say, "How do we make the customer love this?" Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies, don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive they must make customers love them. So they focus on it in a big way and it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70 and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps and becoming customer centric. Retooling around the customer is a huge change. So let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples and drive big shareholder value just like the tech companies on that chart. Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies and a variety of categories vying for your subscriber's disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services, who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high evaluations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You. Hello. What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAAMs they throw around, you'll be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the CapEx, to build out the network, I say to myself, "Hell yeah, we should totally go do it and do whatever it takes to go get." For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focused started in rideshare, but then leverage its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with a valuable services that helped grow your ARPU, that would be huge. So how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app. A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called Totogi that is going to help carriers build world class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users, it's not the average order value, it's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user, that's the metric that matters. How many of you use that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top up or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences like Apple credit cards, no information required, application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies, like how DoorDash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings because they do simple things like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app rather than force you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. What do we do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder, why you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day. You have something that's 10 times better. You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to your crappy over customized on premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it. The public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network and all the network interactions into customer engagement. This is something the super apps don't have but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focus to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying massive CapEx investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100 million into it. You heard me right, $100 million. Is this what it feels like to be soft bank? I'm investing in Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage the network interactions into super app usage. Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those Telco valuations will go from down here to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts, and I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, click, everyone says, "No way, telcos can't do it." Zero chance, total goose egg. One suggested I build a bonfire with 100 million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well I think those people are dead wrong. I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing, the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because the Totogi takes the value of the network and the power of the public cloud to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focus guys like the other telcos, instead you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors. They know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf and make the customers want to choose you, you need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We will have to give up the security blanket of the network and change. Instead of NPS of the thirties, it needs to be in the 70s. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible. I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time and I can't wait to see you there. >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier, Chloe Richardson filling it for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her and while with major action, major pump me up, punch in the face, wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here. She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is John, there's trillions of dollars on the table and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> There's not going to be, it's going to be a fight, who will win. >> Who will win but also who will build the next big thing? >> Someone needs to die in the media conversation, it's always a fight, something's dead, something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. I think what's happened is, telco's already acknowledged that they need to change in the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple, they've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm, you've got all these new things. So the chips are getting faster and the software's more open source and I'm telling you, cloud is just going to drive that bus right down clouds street and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peeping on the board as it drives down. John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written. And one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me. What does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets and growing markets things behave differently and certainly economics and the people and the makeup and the mindset. >> Okay. >> So the telco has been kind of this mature market. It's been changing and growing but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit, you know, install a lot of cable. You got to get the rents out of that infrastructure and that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market, and it's about building, not just operating and you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together, builders being software developers, new technology and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. >> Okay. >> Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking, but in a growth market, it's turbulent and ride might not be quiet, first class ticket to paradise, but it's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer and the parallels? >> Yeah. I mean, the mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, re platform with the cloud and then refactor your business. If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over or go out of business. And that's what the telco with all these assets, they're going to get bought roll into a SPAC, special purpose acquisition company was a super hot in the United States. A lot of roll ups going on with Private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor or re platform, then refactor, they're going to be toast and they're going to get rolled up and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad. People process technology, and we think process and technology really take the forefront here but like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations establishments? How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about often? >> Yeah. I mean, education is huge and this highlights the change that telcos now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around and mobile was there, but once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So you start to see people now aware of the value and if you look at the, during the COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses and everyone was, survive because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad zoom meetings here and there and some teleconferences that didn't go well but for the most part we survived and they really saved everybody, my goodness. So they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education, people care about that stuff. So now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why The Edge has checked trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, oh, there's no jobs or I can't work, that's a bunch of BS because you can just get online, get on YouTube and just get a degree. You can get a degree, you can get an Amazon job, it pays a hundred thousand dollars a year, American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds and be unemployed six months and then be employed. So negative unemployment means there's more jobs than people to fill them qualify. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in some of the things there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity and there's such a skill shortage, there is nobody around to fill it. So it's an interesting problem to have isn't it? Cause it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades and obviously telco is in the same space. What can we do about it? Do you think it will actually bring people in? >> I think it's going to take leadership and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university, they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there, but to me it's the relationships, the mentorship. You starting to see women in tech and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear course where nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate or degree and accreditation no problem, but communities are out there. So that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that and I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills, you can get that online. So why even go to school? So people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also even transferring, I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't there? So we could easily be talking to people from other industries and bringing them into telco and saying, look, bring what you know from your retail background or your healthcare background and help us at telco to again, drive forward, just like DR is saying it's all about the next big thing. >> Danielle, I was also driving a lot of change and if you think about the jobs and a pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to a school like that and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now, the jobs that are available, weren't around five years ago. So there's no like pedigree or track record, there's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now is, from a job standpoint is, people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy league or the big degree or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emergent and make things happen, entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas. >> It's interesting you mentioned that John, because we can have more than five years experience in this space, we know that but in telco there is a problem and maybe it's, again it's a flipped problem where, telco recruiters or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> Well, I mean, I think that's just, I mean, I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening one, but two, I think, you know, you've got to be like a chip engineer, you can't learn that online, but if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely parts, you can specialize, space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on, obviously Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And, you know, Danielle Royston always says, who's going to happen first, Mars, colony, or telco adopting public cloud? Some people think Mars will happen first but. >> What do you think John? >> I think telco's going to get cloud. I mean, first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important because it's an architectural beachhead. >> Yeah. >> And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. >> Of course. >> So the inside baseball and the inside money and all the investors are focusing on the edge because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows it's a public secret and it's fun to watch, everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah, know, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So it's an interesting flip and I wonder if with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development its efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times John. >> Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So it's, we're the hybrid cube, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. >> Yeah. >> That is critical dynamic, and you seeing it. Like virtual reality for instance, now you seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. >> Exactly. >> You got, like Roblox went public recently. >> Yeah. >> Metaverse is a good time to be in that business because experiential human relations are coming. So I think that's going to be powered by 5G, you know, gamers. So all good stuff, Chloe, great to be with you here in theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam and the team, we're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City and this is theCUBE, from Cloud City back to you, Adam in the studio.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Special coverage sponsored by A. W s Global Partner Network. Hello. And welcome back to the cubes Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. It's virtual this year. Normally, were there in person doing the interviews, getting the signal from the noise. I'm John for your host. And where the cube virtual Got a great guest here. Aidan McDonald, Program manager, Justice through code the center of justice at the Columbia University. Um, this is a great story, Aiden. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate you taking the time to join me. >>Thanks so much for having me, John. >>So first of all talk about the mission of justice through code. This is such an awesome program. It really is impactful. It's one of those examples where, you know, people want to change the world. This is one. You can actually do it. And with code, take us through the mission. >>Yeah, So I think to understand the mission here, you have to understand a little bit about the problem, right? So the United States has, uh, 5% of the world's population, 25% of the global prison population. When people come home from prison, they're confronted with the reality that it's just very difficult to find jobs right. We have unemployment rates that are stratospherically higher than for the general population. And so, at the core of what we're doing in our mission is really to provide a pathway to career track employment for formerly incarcerated individuals to help support them and their families, and also to begin to change the negative stereotypes that air attached to the formerly incarcerated. >>It's an upwardly mobile mindset growth mindset. Also, there's new skills, always hard to do that, given the environmental conditions, what skills are you guys delivering? Take us through how it works. Give us a feel for kind of the skill sets and what gets what happens. >>Yeah, so we focused the program kind of in two distinct ways. So we have the technical skills aspect of the curriculum and the interpersonal skills. So as far as the technical skills go, we teach a version of a course that's taught to current Columbia MBA students eso that is set up. We teach the fundamentals of programming python, what we call phase one of the program. Then we move on to a P I S and data analysis. And then from there we do a Capstone software project. And for that project, groups of two or more students come together. Really? They conceptualize the design on day execute on building this project. And during that phase, of course, we actually pair students with mentors who are season software engineers from many of the top tech companies in the US and then in terms of the story in terms of the interpersonal skills, um, you know, we really focus on the skills that are necessary to success in the tech workforce s Oh, this is, you know, resumes, cover letters, interviewing skills and also really understanding that for many of our students, they don't have the networks that so maney people are fortunate enough to have that have gone through a traditional educational pathways. We bring in guest speakers from different corporations. Um, and, you know, having the students were quick mentors there really able to start to build that network to support themselves in their career transition when they complete the program. >>You know what's really amazing about what you're doing is and this really is so timing. The timing is perfect. Um, is that with the cloud and the tech scene, where we're at now is you don't you can come out. You can level up pretty quickly with things. In other words, you know, you could have someone go to an Ivy League school and be all the pedigree, and it doesn't matter because the skills now are different. You literally could be a surfing and be a couch potato surfing TV and get online and get an Amazon degree and through educate and and come out, make six figures. I mean, so there is definitely a path here. It's not like it's a slog. It's not like it's a huge leap, so the timing is perfect. We're seeing that across the board. There's more empty jobs, opening cybersecurity, cloud computing administration and with land in all these cool services, it's just gonna get easier. We hear that we see that clearly. What are some of the examples can you share of the graduates? What have they gone on to do? You mentioned some of the big tech companies. Take us through that that tipping point when the success kicks in. >>What s so you know, as I mentioned, one of the really integral parts of our program is this mentorship, right? So students finished the program. They often continue to work on their final projects, um, in conjunction with their mentors and then really focused during that time period on developing the skill sets that they'll need to have entering into junior level software development roles a tech companies For some of our students, this means, um, they've actually found out through the course of the class that they prefer front end web development, and they start working on JavaScript and full stack. And a few of our students have gone on to work it a or enter into apprenticeships that major tech companies, um, in those roles. And then we also have students who are focused on continuing in their development of their technical skill set with Python s. So we have some students who have actually entered into the Columbia University I t department on a big project. They're working on other students that have worked with freelance Web development agencies and projects really have a very diverse, talented group of students. And so from that we see that Everybody has different interests and definitely no one specific pathway but many successful pathways. >>How is Amazon Web services helping you guys? They contributing? They're giving you credits. What's their role here? >>Yeah, so they've provided kind of their expertise and support to the program. Just really excited to be collaborating with them on really looking at, How do we take this program to scale? Right. So we know that this is a problem that affect so many Americans, right? There's 77 million Americans currently with a criminal record. And so, um, you know, with the barriers to employment that come from having been incarcerated, I came to this work because I spent four years incarcerated for my own involvement in the marijuana industry in California Prior toe legalization. And so, you know, I saw a kind of these challenges, right? Firsthand of what it's like to try to get a job. And so, you know, we're just very invested in collaborating with AWS again. Thio bring this program to scale so we can really help uplift the communities that have been impacted by mass incarceration. >>It's interesting you talk about your personal experience, talk about this stigma that comes with that and how this breaks through that stigma. And this is really not only is a self esteem issues up this Israel, you could make more money. You have a career and literally the difference between going down or up is huge. Talk about the stigma and how this program changes the lives of the individual. >>Yeah, I think one important thing Thio consider hearing before understanding is this statement right? Is that unemployment or employment should say is the number one predictor of recidivism. Right? So we see that for people that have really jobs, they don't go back to prison on DSO. You know, we're just so invested in working on that and in terms of the stigma, uh, you know, it's just so prevalent, right? I can think through myself. Before I had going thio to prison, I had started to businesses. I was actually accepted. Thio go to Columbia University when I got out and I would apply the landscaping jobs, couldn't get to the final round, and the job offer would be rescinded, right? I mean, just this automatic sense of this person is not to be trusted because they have a history of incarceration. And so what we're really working on doing with our students is first redefining what people think it's possible, right? I saw this myself coming home from prison. The constant messaging is your life is over. You're never going to accomplish anything of meaning and so just kind of accept your lot on DSO. At first, we really focus on that with students in terms of sharing stories of success. Other people that we know that have taken this pathway on been really looking at providing leadership development. So when our students do enter into these companies, they're really able to service leaders and for people to understand that while you may have these assumptions because of depictions of people that have been incarcerated in the media, the end of they formerly incarcerated people, our brothers, sisters, family members and really deserve a chance in life. >>Yeah, And I got to say, you know, as someone who loves technology and been, uh, computer science when his early days, you know, there was a ladder, you have to have a requisite level now. I mean, you literally could be six weeks in and be fluent on Cloud Computing Administration as three bucket configurations. I mean, there are so many things that so many opportunities if you have some intelligence and some drive you're in, I mean, it's just Z pretty right? It's right there. It's great. It's attainable. It's not a fantasy, it's it's doable. And programs like yours are awesome. My hat's off to you for doing that. Thanks for sharing. >>Definitely. Thank you so much for having me >>final question before we go, How does people get involved? Can you share a minute? Give a plug for what you guys are doing? How do I get involved? How do I give support? Take a minute to >>get? Definitely. I mean, I think at the core like the most important thing that anybody can dio right is to look within the organizations that they work and work at and find out what your fair chance hiring practices are and see if if there's an opportunity to hire our students or other formerly incarcerated students. E think it also were very engaged, as I mentioned in our mentorship program s so people can confined US center for Justice that, uh, Colombia dot e d u on board, you know reach out, tow us about the mentorship program and really begin toe talk about this and share the stories of those who have succeeded and provide support Thio other people that will be returning home. >>All right. And thank you very much. Just a fur coat. Check it out. Columbia University 18 McDonald, Program manager. Thanks for joining us. I'm John for here in the Cube Cube Coverage Cube. Virtual coverage of reinvent 2020. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. >>It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. It's virtual this year. Normally, were there in person doing the interviews, getting the signal from the noise. I'm Sean for your host. And where the cube virtual Got a great guest here. Aidan McDonald, Program manager, Justice through code, the center of justice at the Columbia University. Um, this is a great story, Aiden. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate you taking the time to join me. >>Thanks so much for having me, John. >>So first of all, talk about the mission of justice through code. This is such an awesome program. It really is impactful. It's one of those examples where, you know, people want to change the world. This is one. You can actually do it. And with code, take us through the mission. >>Yeah, so I think to understand the mission here, you have to understand a little bit about the problem, right? So the United States has 5% of the world's population, 25% of the global prison population when people come home from prison, they're confronted with the reality that it's just very difficult to find jobs right. We have unemployment rates that are stratospherically higher than for the general population. And so, at the core of what we're doing in our mission is really to provide a pathway to career track employment for formerly incarcerated individuals to help support them and their families, and also to begin to change the negative stereotypes that air attached to the formerly incarcerated. >>It's an upwardly mobile mindset growth mindset. Also, there's new skills always hard to do that right. Given the environmental conditions. What skills are you guys delivering? Take us through how it works. Give us a feel for kind of the skill sets and what gets what happens. >>Yeah, so we focused the program kind of in two distinct ways. So we have the technical skills aspect of the curriculum and the interpersonal skills. Soas faras. The technical skills go. We teach a version of a course that's taught to current Columbia MBA students eso that is set up. We teach the fundamentals of programming python in what we call phase one of the program. Then we move on to a P I s and data analysis. And then from there we do a Capstone software project. And for that project, groups of two or more students come together. Really? They conceptualize the design on day execute on building this project. And during that phase, of course, we actually pair students with mentors who are season software engineers from many of the top tech companies in the US And then in terms of the story in terms of the interpersonal skills, um, you know, we really focus on the skills that are necessary to success in the tech workforce s Oh, this is, you know, resumes, cover letters, interviewing skills and also really understanding that for many of our students, they don't have the networks that so maney people are fortunate enough to have that have gone through a traditional educational pathway. So we bring in guest speakers from different corporations. Um, and you know, having the students work with mentors there really able to start to build that network to support themselves in their career transition when they complete the program. >>You know what's really amazing about what you're doing is, and this really is so timing The timing is perfect. Um, is that with the cloud and the tech scene, where we're at now is you don't you can come out. You can level up pretty quickly with things. In other words, you know, you could have someone go to an Ivy League school and be all the pedigree, and it doesn't matter because the skills now are different. You literally could be a surfing and be a couch potato surfing TV and get online and get an Amazon degree and through educate and and come out, make six figures. I mean, so there is definitely a path here. It's not like it's a slog. It's not like it's a huge leap, so the timing is perfect. We're seeing that across the board. There's more empty jobs, opening cybersecurity, cloud computing administration, and with land in all these cool services, it's just gonna get easier. We hear that we see that clearly. What are some of the examples can you share of the graduates? What have they gone on to do? You mentioned some of the big tech companies take us through that, that tipping point when the success kicks in? >>Yeah, so you know, as I mentioned one of the really integral parts of our program. Is this mentorship? Right? So students finished the program. They often continue to work on their final projects, um, in conjunction with their mentors and then really focused during that time period on developing the skill sets that they'll need to have entering into junior level software development roles a tech companies For some of our students, this means, um, they've actually found out through the course of the class that they prefer front end web development and they start working on JavaScript and full stack. And a few of our students have gone on to work it a or enter into apprenticeships that major tech companies, um, in those roles. And then we also have students who are focused on continuing in their development of their technical skill set with Python s. So we have some students who have actually entered into the Columbia University I T department on a big project. They're working on other students that have worked with freelance Web development agencies and projects, um, really have a very diverse, talented group of students. And so from that we see that everybody has different interests and definitely no one specific pathway, but many successful pathways. >>How is Amazon Web services helping you guys? They contributing? They're giving you credits. What's their role here? >>Yeah, so they've provided kind of their expertise and support to the program. Just really excited to be collaborating with them on really looking at, How do we take this program to scale? Right. So we know that this is a problem that affect so many Americans, right? There's 77 million Americans currently with a criminal record. And so, um, you know, with the barriers to employment that come from having been incarcerated, I came to this work because I spent four years incarcerated for my own involvement in the marijuana industry in California Prior toe legalization. And so, you know, I saw kind of these challenges right firsthand of what it's like to try to get a job. And so, you know, we're just very invested in collaborating with AWS again. Thio bring this program to scale so we can really help uplift the communities that have been impacted by mass incarceration. >>It's interesting you talk about your personal experience, talk about this stigma that comes with that and how this breaks through that stigma and this is really not only is a self esteem issues up this Israel, you could make more money. You have a career and literally the difference between going down or up is huge. Talk about the stigma and how this program changes the lives of the individual. >>Yeah, I think one important thing Thio consider hearing before understanding is this statement, right? Is that, um, unemployment or employment should say is the number one predictor of recidivism. Right. So we see that for people that have really jobs, they don't go back to prison on dso Um you know, we're just so invested in working on that and in terms of the stigma, um, you know, it's just so prevalent, right? I could think through myself. Before I had gone thio to prison, I had started to businesses. I was actually accepted. Thio go to Columbia University when I got out and I would apply the landscaping jobs, couldn't get to the final round, and the job offer would be rescinded, right? I mean, it's just this automatic sense of this person is not to be trusted because they have a history of incarceration And so what we're really working on doing with our students is first redefining what people think it's possible, right? I saw this myself coming home from prison. The constant messaging is your life is over. You're never going to accomplish anything of meaning and so just kind of accept your lot on DSO. At first, we really focus on that with students in terms of sharing stories of success. Other people that we know that have taken this pathway on been really looking at providing leadership development. So when our students do enter into these companies, they're really able to service leaders and for people to understand that while you may have these assumptions because of depictions of people that have been incarcerated in the media, the end of they formerly incarcerated people, our brothers, sisters, family members and really deserve a chance in life. >>Yeah, And I got to say, you know, as someone who loves technology and been, uh, computer science when his early days, you know, there was a ladder, you have to have a requisite level now. I mean, you literally could be six weeks in and be fluent on Cloud Computing Administration as three bucket configurations. I mean, there are so many things that so many opportunities if you have some intelligence and some drive you're in, I mean, it's just Z pretty right? It's right there. It's great. It's attainable. It's not a fantasy, it's it's doable. And programs like yours are awesome. My hat's off to you for doing that. Thanks for sharing. >>Definitely. Thank you so much for having me >>final question Before we go, How does people get involved? Can you share a minute? Give a plug for what you guys are doing? How do I get involved? How do I give support? Take a minute to >>get? Definitely. I mean, I think at the core like the most important thing that anybody can dio right is to look within the organizations that they work and work at and find out what your fair chance hiring practices are and see if if there's an opportunity to hire our students or other formerly incarcerated students. E think also were very engaged, as I mentioned in our mentorship program s so people can confined US center for Justice that, um, Colombia dot e d u on bond, you know, reach out, tow us about the mentorship program and really begin toe talk about this and share the stories of those who have succeeded and provide support Thio other people that will be returning home. >>All right. And thank you very much. Just a fur coat. Check it out. Columbia University 18 McDonald, Program manager. Thanks for joining us. I'm John for here in the Cube Cube Coverage Cube. Virtual coverage of reinvent 2020. Thanks for watching.

>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit I wrote to you by Amazon Web services. Welcome >> back, everyone. You are watching the Cube and we are here in our nation's capital at the A. W s Public sector summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Night hosting alongside John Furrier. We're joining Cuba LEM Doug Van Dyke, CEO of Inquisitor to our show. Thanks so much for coming back on. >> Well, thank you for having me back. It's good to be here. >> So as I said, You're a Cuba LEM. You're also a nails on alum. And there's a story there, so >> we'll just do a quick rehash of last year. So I started a day ws in 2,012 with the federal business helped the federal business grow started. The eight of US nonprofit Vertical was invited by John and in stew last year to be on the Cube. The video is a great discussion. The video is seen by some of our best partners and inquisitor who happens to be one of the best partners that I had in public sector. We started some discussions and later I was hired to be the CEO. So, John, >> thank you. I didn't know this was >> going to be a career opportunity >> for you. You're the one who's got the jobs. You through the interviews? Well, political, absolutely appreciated community. Great to have you on. Good. Thank you. Thank you for meeting with Theresa. You've known Therese for many, many years. Microsoft Public Sector Game is certainly on fire. You got Andy chassis on the fireside chat. Kind of bring in. You see the frustration like he's got problems and he's never known any for many, many years. For him to be that animated with his opinion means that it's critical more more than ever. Now, where is public sector opportunity right now? Because it seems to be clouds validated, are we? There is just a turning moment for the whole public sector community, >> yet we're so we're absolutely seeing that and inquisitive fact inquisitor. One of the things I like most about inquisitor is it is focused exclusively on the public sector, so our background is in education. If you know, a student is graduating from high school now and applying to one of the many colleges and universities they use the common application We worked with the common app to help build that system that graduating students can apply to multiple universities as opposed to when I was a graduating high school student, had to fill out the form, send in a check, wait for it to come back in the mail. Now that's all done online. You can apply to multiple colleges at the same time. So I look at that as one of the first innovations that happened in the public sector on a ws inquisitor was a part of it. It was one of the things that attracted me to inquisitor, but the innovations that was in two thousand 92 1,010 it was the beginning. We are just hitting that hockey stick that Andy has talked about in public sector, where you know, the federal business. You talked a little bit about the Intel business and how when the agency moved onto a ws, it really validated security. I think we've seen the government go in. I think we've seen education and nonprofits, so I think this is the time that public sector is really going to take off in the clouds >> about the company that you're leading is the chief now, and the product is using common app. You tell what the common app that my high school's graduates had to fill out. Okay, it's send okay. Is that it? >> That's it. That's it. So I >> got some issues with this thing. >> So follow up that was >> definitely on love on different you. Heavy lifting when filling out applications. Automate is great, but it increases the MAWR schools you can apply to, so creates more inbound applications to schools. It does. I'm sure there's some challenges there that's on the horizon with you guys is solving them that creates more. I won't say span because this legit, but a lot of schools are like people throwing in 17 applications now. 20 applications. >> Well, it's automated. I >> mean technology. So, yes, there's more automation, but there's more background. There's more data and these surgeries going on database decision. So sure we'll let me start with inquisitor. You asked about inquisitive 2,000 to quiz it's started and doing application development. It was in two thousand nine that we really saw the light to move Teo a Ws, and it was through the work that we were doing with the common app that we realised the scale of handling all these applications, that the paper based way isn't an easier. In fact, it really restricts the number of colleges that students can apply, and it restricts the number of applicants that colleges get. So with more students applying to more universities and universities receiving more applications, they can be really selective. They have more data sources, more information aboutthe people. They're going to bring on and have a very inclusive and representative university. We have students applying from China and Europe, too, United States University. So we're getting a lot of diversity, and I think you know, there's probably a little bit more volume, but that's what technology >> today is the first digital data. So that's why I appreciate that. But there's gotta be more automation machine learning going in because now you have a relationship with a student and a school. What, what's next? What happens next? >> Well, it's so Sky's the limit, and you can do once you've got data. So data reporting is basically limited by the quality of the input data. So you have more students applying with more background information, and you could get really personal. So we helped a large Ivy League university in the Northeast migrate all into a ws. And this was after we worked with common app to build the common application way helped this university migrate all into a ws and we realized that there were benefits and challenges along the way. Some of the challenges we saw were repeatable, so we built a proprietary product called Sky Map. And what sky map does is it helps the full migration. So it integrates with your discovery applications like a risk network. It integrates with a ws cloud endure and we were working with cloud endure before a ws acquired them. So we have a p I's there, it manages the whole migration. And your question was, you get all this information about an organization's infrastructure, what do you do with it? Will use the next up is a M l. So we've used some of the higher level services that a bit Amazon Web services has with artificial intelligence. We were using Lambda Server lis and we could go there because I think that's and you've >> got to hand over their 80 must educate. >> Oh, yeah, >> you know, you're great. Get a common app over there. Any university coming soon >> I would Did he mention that I saw he was >> on the show before? >> And I just think that it was You got a huge inbound educational thing going on. So education seems to be a big part of the whole themes here. >> Well, that's our legacy, and we're working with a lot of universities were seeing. So you asked, Where is the cloud going? And in the future, we're seeing large universities move all in on a WS because of they're going to get more flexibility. The costs are going to go down. They're going to have more information on the students. They're going to be able to provide better learning. >> When you're talking to your client of this this big Ivy league in the Northeast, what are its pain points? Because I mean, college admissions is a controversial topic in the United States, and its been there's been scandal this year. What? When? When you were talking with this company and they said, Well, we want to do this. But what was the problem they were trying to solve? I mean, what what were they? What were their pain points. >> Well, one of the first pain points is they were located in a major city and their data center was in the major city. And this is expensive real estate. And so to use expensive real estate that you for date us, you know, for servers, etcetera for data center instead of using it for education is a cost to the university. So very simply put, moving out of that data center opening that space up for education and moving into a ws cloud saved it gave them more space for education. It helped them with cost avoidance, and way had a bunch of lessons learned along the way. So way at the time could move about five servers a week, which may seem like a good number. But now, with the automation that we get through sky map our product, we're working with the large a group of private universities as well as Wharton University. And with this large group of private universities, we found we could do on average over 20 the best week we had 37 servers migrate, hire >> a housefly. They like to be on the cutting edge, but still there public sector. Where's the modernisation Progress on that? Because now you're you've been on both sides of the table. You were Amazon Web services. Now years leading is the CEO of this company in higher ed. How's that modernization going? What's your perspective? What's your observation around? >> Sure, So you know. First of all, I had the opportunity to go work it with the university that's local here last week. And what I love seeing is with this access to the cloud you've got, everyone in the university now has access to nearly unlimited resource is for education. They were staffing their own help desk with their students. And I love seeing that kind of experience being brought from, You know, someone who used to be an IT professional is now being brought down to a student because of thes new technologies are so readily accessible to everybody. >> So so what's that? Tell us some other things that you're seeing that you're hearing. They're they're exciting innovations to you in the in the sector. >> Yeah, well, another opportunity that were working with is we worked with the Small Business Administration, and that was pretty rewarding. For us is a small business and three of the applications that we worked on their were. So we are a small a day, and it used to take our founder TC Ratna pur e about two months. Oh, and we had to hire an outside consultant to apply for our small business accreditation. So he was doing the paperwork and all the, you know, the old school application certification. After we built this application with the Small Business Administration, it took him several hours. He did it by himself. We applied. Got the accreditation. So thes modernizations air happening both in universities as well as in the federal government. >> So what's your business plan? You're the CEO now. What's the company's plan? Which your goals. >> So there's so many things I could talk about ill talk about one or two. We see in the next 1 2 3 to 5 years in public sector that these organizations are going to migrate all in on the cloud. And so we're building up a group. That's what Sky map is mainly addressing is way. Want to make sure that organizations are able tto orchestrate their move to the cloud and we're using? We're going to start exposing the tool that we use for our own internal resource is we're gonna start exposing that, leaving that with universities in the federal government and anyone else who's willing to use it to help them get all in on the cloud. Then we think there's probably going to be a wave where they're trying. Teo, learn the cloud and howto operate It will help them is a manage service provider. And then where I'm excited is you go to server lists and I mentioned were already using Lambda for our sky map product that we see in the future after the M S P V organisations. They're going to be servant lis and they'll be running into no ops environments. >> The classic example of sometimes you your business evolves areas you don't know based off on the wave You're on you guys, we're very proficient at migrating We are now You got sky map which is you're gonna take that those learnings and pay it forward bringing >> that are bringing them to the market that >> we don't have to do that themselves by build kind of thing. >> Well, and it's a little bit like you're doing here, John. And what a ws >> is the only one I get up. I tell everybody that, like >> a ws did eight of us start is away for Amazon to manage their internal servers. And, you know, eventually they realized everyone else in the market can use thes same innovations that they've got. And, >> well, I think this proves the point that if you assassin based model with open AP eyes, you Khun offer and pretty much anything is a service. If you get the speed and agility equation right, someone might say why she is not a court company. Why should I buy? I'll just use that service. I hope so. It's the sad, small hopes up. >> Yeah, and sorry. >> I was going to say you were on the inside. Now you're on the outside of that. This conference. What are your impressions? What are you What kind of conversations are you having that you are going to take back to inquisitor and say, Hey, I learned this at the summit. Are these people over here working on something cool? We got to get this in >> here. Well, it's been really fun for me is a change of perspective. For the last seven years, I've been helping plan and organize the event. Make sure it >> goes off this time. I'm a guest. You know, e I look a little bit >> more relaxed than last year is because, you know, I'm a guest now, but the takeaways are really You know, the innovation is continuing at A W s. And, you know, as a partner of Amazon Web services, I've got to make sure that my team and I stay up to date with all of the services that are being released and simplify those. And, like John was asking earlier, you know, make sure that there's a strategy for migration support and then continuing to re factor what they're doing. >> Well, congratulations on the new job. Get a great tale. When, with cloud growth adoption just early days, public sector continuing toe astonished with numbers. Next, she'll be 38,000 people. A lawsuit is like reinvent size, only 30,000 people. >> This is huge. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm sure you guys are enjoying it as well. >> Yeah, I know. It's been great, Doug. Thanks so much for returning to the Q B. I your two time >> alone. Thank you. Thank >> you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from the Amazon, Uh, a ws public sector, something coming up in just a little bit.

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. You're watching theCUBE. We're at UiPath Forward Americas. Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. TheCUBE is the leader of, what are we the leader of? (laughs) >> Live tech coverage, Dave. >> The leader in live tech coverage. I've been blowing that line every week. Thanks for watching, everybody. We've got a great segment here. Jean Younger is here. She's the vice president, Six Sigma Leader, Security Benefit. She's to my near left, and Donna O'Donnell is here, director of key accounts at UiPath all the way from New York. Donna, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to see you guys. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> All right, so we're well into day one. We're getting the Kool-Aid injection from customers and UiPath constituents, but Jean, let's start with you. Talk about your role, what's the company do, fill us in. >> Our company is an annuity company. We sell financial products for life insurance and annuities. We have about 30 billion under management, so it's a fairly large company out of Kansas. So, my role there is as a Six Sigma leader. We go in and we look at areas that need improvement or across the company, and one of the things I found, I'd been with the company almost five years now, and what I found is a lot of times, we're really good about putting manual processes in and never getting rid of 'em. We have day two issues of a tech. A tech goes live and you got a list of day two stuff that didn't get fixed, never gets fixed. It's just easier to do it, and cheaper, to leave it manual. So we have a lot of that in the company. With my job, seeing the various processes throughout the company, I was like what can we do to get rid of some of this stuff, get rid of that, get knowledge work back on the worker's plate instead of manipulating a spreadsheet or creating a report that they do every morning and it takes 'em the first 30 minutes or the first seven hours of their day is creating this one report every single day. We started looking at technology and came across UiPath. >> See, we call it GRS, getting rid of stuff. >> Jean: Yep. >> So, Donna, your job is to make these guys successful, right? >> Absolutely, so basically I just facilitate the smart people within the company. I listen to the business needs that Jean and other large clients have. We bring the resources, the products, and if we can't find it, we will absolutely find it and do everything we can to meet the needs. >> So, what's your automation story? When'd you get started? Paint a picture for us, the size, the scope. >> Okay, so last year about this time is when I started looking into it. I had just rolled out of another area that we had completely destroyed and built back up, and I was on to my next escapade in security benefit. >> Dave: Are you a silo buster, is that the new-- >> Yeah, I kind of go in and fix things. I'm kind of a fixer is basically what my job is. We'd rolled out and came back into Six Sigma to start looking and this came up. I'd seen the technology and I was like I wonder if it could work in our company. And so, we started doing kind of dog and pony show. We'd pull the different silos in, talk to 'em and say hey, here's what RPA can do for you. Is that something that you have some processes that might work? And we knew that there were processes in there, but we brainstormed with 'em for about 30 minutes. And out of that 30 minute, hour long conversation, we came out of there with about a hundred processes that people had already identified. And we kept going through there, I took that information, I built a business case, 'cause I knew to get the money, I needed to show them that there would be cost out potentially, and/or that I could take resources and move 'em into more critical areas that we didn't have the staffing. And so I had instances where, one of them that we're doing is out of our HR department. During the raise and salary time, they had two individuals that spent 60 hours a week for four months doing the same thing, same report over and over, and that's one of the processes we're actually going to implement here pretty soon. So, I came up with 'em and put the business plan together and asked for the money, and after kind of a long journey, I got the money. >> Long journey. (Jean and Donna laugh) >> It's never short enough is it? Jean, I mean, one of the things, Six Sigma is really good at measuring things. I mean, that's how you understand everything. You want to reduce variation. There was a line that really jumped out at me at the keynote is I want to go from pretty accurate to perfectly accurate, and when you were describing that there were a lot of things that were manually done. I mean, I lived in engineering for a lot of years and it was anything that somebody had to manually do, it was like oh wait, how can we change that? Because we didn't have RPA 10 years ago when I was looking at this, but how are you measuring these results? You talked about people doing repetitive tasks and the like. What other things are you finding to help get you along those reducing the variation inside the company? >> You know, it's interesting because I also teach the Six Sigma courses there, and one of my slides I've had for years teaching that class is most business processes are between 3.2 and 3.6, 3.8 sigma, which is like 95 to 98% accurate, and I said that's all the better we can usually do because of the expense that it would normally be to get us to a Six Sigma. You look at the places that have Six Sigma. It's life threatening, airplane engines. You hope they're at least Seven Sigma, those type of things, but business processes? 3.5, 3.2. But now, I get to change that because with RPA, I can make them Six Sigma very cheap, very cheaply, because I can pull 'em in, I got my bot, it comes over, pulls the information, and there's no double-keying. There's no miskeys. It's accuracy, 100% accuracy. >> So, what's the ripple effect in terms of the business impact? >> Cost savings, efficiency, customer experience. I mean, think about it. You're a customer, you get your policy, your name's wrong. How happy are you? You're not real happy. You send it back. So, no more of that. I mean, that's huge. So anything touching the customer going out of our business should be exactly how they put it on the application, especially if it was typed. Now, if it was handwritten, all hands are down on that, but if it was typed, it should be accurate. >> Donna, that's really powerful. I worked in a large corporation, we had a Six Sigma initiative and we know how much time and effort and people we were going to put in to have this little movements. >> Incremental change. >> An incremental change here to say. >> Donna: Pretty amazing. >> Blown away to tell you, Six Sigma and it's cheap. Well, what are you seeing? >> And I absolutely see. So, in addition to cost savings, it makes her more agile. But the big thing is, it makes it error free. The robots work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Runs on itself, and Jean's going to get those efficiencies that she needed. >> How about let's talk more about the business case? I'm interested in the hard dollar piece of it. I've talked to a number of people at this show and others, and they tend not to just fire people. They got to redeploy 'em. Sometimes the CFO goes well, where's my hard dollars come from? So, where did your hard dollars come from? (laughs) >> From the CFO. (laughs) And right now, I have to prove that out yet. We're just in its infancy. We're just starting to bring up processes. In fact, yesterday and today we're dealing with several processes coming up, and so realistically, right now I've got about 300 processes. We haven't timed 'em all out yet, but I know right now that's between probably 12 and 15,000 hours of time savings that we will get on an annual basis. >> Okay, what one of the customers said today is, one example they used is they actually put it in next year's budget >> Correct. >> Which I loved. In other words, we're going to do more revenue for the same headcount, or less cost or whatever it is. That's a reasonable justification, maybe even better, right? Because it's got some forward motion to it. Is that kind of discussion and thinking come up? >> Headcount is under discussion right now. We're going through budgeting right now, and so yeah, that was part of the way that we justified the less headcount. Instead of hiring to fill another position, we would remove jobs from a certain person and be able to shift them into another role. And so that savings, non-hiring, as well as one of the processes we're doing is in our investment area. They couldn't afford to get another person. They couldn't get another headcount, so I gave them a headcount with a bot. I'm doing all their processes that they've only been able to do on a monthly basis, we're doing 'em every day. It's 52 processes they're going to do every day. It's an amazing, I gave 'em a head right there, bam. >> But we're also finding that the folks that were doing the mundane and repetitive tasks can focus on more creative work, more interesting work that they believe in and that they're motivated to do. We see that happening all the time. >> What does that mean for culture inside your company? Was there resistance at first? I have to think it's got to improve morale that it's like oh wait, I'm not getting in trouble for making mistakes now and I can go focus on things that fit better. >> You know, I think ultimately it will. Initially, there was a feeling gosh, the bots are going to take my job. But that was one thing we were pretty careful about initially going out and just saying what is it that you can't do? We all work 50, 60, some of them people are working 70 hours a week, and if I can take 10 or 20 hours away from them, they are lovin' us. There's individuals that are saying come here. I'll show you what I need. They also realize the ability of the bot to do it right all the time takes a little stress off of them, because they know they're going to get the right numbers, then, to analyze, 'cause that's a big thing. In the finance area, in the close, in the accounting area, what we're doing there is we're taking a lot of those simple process that somebody has to do and do them for them so then guess what? We can close earlier, get our books closed earlier in the month, as well as allow them longer time to analyze the results. So instead of the book's closed and then we go uh-oh, found a problem. Got to reopen the ledger and make an entry, we have less and less of that. Those are expectations that are set right now for our teams is that hey, let's get rid of the stuff that we can, and then let's see what's left. >> And Dave, I used to meet with clients and they used to say wow, this is a really interesting technology. Tell me about it. And now they're like holy crap, I'm behind the eight ball with my competition. How do we get this going quick? How do we get it going fast? In 2016, it was a $250 million industry, and by 2021, it's going to be a $3 billion industry we learned today. So it's pretty powerful. >> I think those numbers are low, by the way. >> I think they're low, too. What they said today, it's going to be a $3.4 billion industry. >> I think it's a 10x factor, probably by 2023 to 2025, I think this is going to be a $10 billion business. I've done a lot of forecasting in my life. That's just a gut feel swag, but it sort of feels like that. I think there's some pieces that are, there's some blind spots in terms of use cases and applications that we can't even see yet. Culturally, the light bulb moment, just listening to you, Jean, was the, first of all you're saying, you want your weekends back? Yeah! And then the second is it sounds like the employees are involved in sort of defining those processes, so they own it. >> And that's how we're scaling. I mean, we already realized we're a bottleneck. Our COE is a bottleneck and so we're like hey, right now, finance, it's not the end of the year. It's end of quarter, but those process are lighter than end of the year. So hey, can we get anything done? They're doing our documentation for us. They're actually taping themselves doing it, they're writing up the documentation. We come in and we look at it, and then we have a programmer doing it, but we're talking about how do we move that programming piece down to them as well, so we can get our scale up? Because I can't get through 300 processes in my small COE without a lot of help from the business. >> But Dave, most of our clients, the way that they scale very quickly is through partners. So, partners can do one of many things. They can be the developers, they can be the implementers, they could create the center of excellence, or they could pick which are the low-hanging processes. When we started off with Jean while she was going through the approval process, I brought out four partners, I gave 'em my own little mini RFP. They each had a four-hour time slot. They presented in front of Jean and we narrowed it down to two, and two of the partners are here at this event today. Most clients need to depend on partners. >> Well, that's key Donna, right? And I've said before, when you start seeing the big names that are around here, you know it's an exciting space. They don't just tiptoe and play around and games. They do some serious work for businesses. We got to turn the conversation to diversity, generally, but I also want to ask you specifically about women in tech. So, Stu and I were in a conference at Splunk earlier this week. The CEO of Carnival had a great line about diversity. He said, a big believer in diversity, of course. He's African American, and he said 40 years ago when I cracked in business, there weren't a lot of people I worked with that looked like me. I thought that was striking, Stu. I think there's always been women in tech, but not enough and a lot of stories about things that have happened to women in tech. It's changing slowly. A lot of women enter the field and then leave because they don't see a path to their future in things they like. What do you guys think about the topic, two women here on the panel today, which is our pleasure to have you. You can see, we need help. We have women working for us, (Jean and Donna laugh) but there's an imbalance there. >> You're right. >> What do you tell someone like us who's trying to find more women or more diversity and bring them into their-- >> Jean has many opinions in this space. Go ahead, Jean, I love your opinions in this space. >> I told the story at one of the UiPath events. I've been, as a lawyer, chemist, I've always been in pretty much a man's world. That's been my life in corporate America, and all along as I looked back, Donna was the first woman that sat across me to negotiate a contract. The entire time that I've been in the tech world, in the business world in corporate America, I had women working for me when I was at an insurance company negotiation very large contracts and stuff. They were on my side of the table. She was the first woman that I negotiated with on the other side of the table, and I think that's really sad, and I think we all have to look and say, how can we do better than that? How can we make us diverse? I look around here and you have all colors, all sizes, it's wonderful and it energizes you. And I am really a true believer in a really diverse workforce. I look at that and I think, 'cause they bring so many cool ideas, they think differently. Young, old, you put 'em all in a room and it's just amazing what they come up with, and I think if business leaders would hear that and think about that instead of hearing the same type of person, what's that same type of person that has your same background going to give you? He's not going to give you the transformation, or he or she. It's going to be kind of the same, what you're used to. You need that jolt, and I believe the more diverse people that we have around the table trying to solve the problem, it's amazing. I sat, last week, and I had a 22-year-old woman come into my office, Shirat, who's 30-ish and from India, and I had Amy who grew up in Topeka, hasn't left Topeka, myself. We were sitting around a table and another guy came and he probably 30. So you had a big, broad range. Somebody just out of college, me that's been out of college a long time, sitting around the table and we came up with, they thought they were dead in the water, and within 30 minutes of us just throwing different ideas out, we came up with a solution that we could continue going with. I mean, their faces were downtrodden and everything when they walked in, and when they left, we were excited, we were ready to go. Now, if we don't nurture that type of conversation, we're never going to get diversity. That's what diversity's about. If you think about it that way, wow. We went from having a problem that was a total dead stop and we weren't going to be able to proceed to 30 minutes later having a great solution and keeping running. And I truly believe it was because we had a diverse group of people around that table. >> Studies have been done of the clear value of diversity, the decisions that are made are better and drive business value. One of the challenges is finding the people, and it was pointed out to me one time, it's just because you're looking inside your own network. You got to go outside your own network, and it takes longer, it's more work. You just got to allocate the time, and it's good advice. It's hard work, but you got to do it to make change. >> And sometimes you got to take a chance. Sometimes, because it is outside of your network, you're not comfortable necessarily with the answers they give you or the way they approach a subject. I mean, you've got to feel comfortable, and CEOs and CFOs and the C-suite has to start thinking about that, because if you wanted to be transforming, that's how you transform. You don't transform thinking the same way every day. You're not going to transform. >> Let me ask you a question. You said you're a fixer, so I wrote down the adjectives that I would use to describe a fixer, and I want to know if this has been the way in which people have described you. You got to be smart, you got to be a quick study, you got to be a good listener, you got to be confident, self-assured, tough, decisive, collaborative. Are those the adjectives that have described you as a fixer over the years? >> Yes, I think those are you qualities, by the way. >> I don't doubt they're your qualities. Is that how people refer to you in business? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, I've done the test where they say are you a collaborator or do you push? And I get the mix. I'm either a collaborator or I'm a person that's pushing her own belief, and I know exactly who said I was a person that was only pushing her own belief, and I know the ones that said I was a collaborator. But that is, you got to be collaborative. >> I believe you have those attributes, but the reason for my question is a lot of times when it's a woman fixer, those aren't the adjectives that they would use to describe you. It would be abrasive or combative. I mean, you hear adjectives like that. Same exactly attributes as a male fixer, just described differently. Has that changed in your view? >> I go about things probably a little bit differently than men do, and I've had to adapt. Like I said, I've been a chemist. What was I? 8% of the community of chemists is a woman, so I've had to adapt my style. And I do a lot of drive-bys, I do a lot of one-on-one discussions over the lunch, over hey, do you have a few minutes? I need to talk to you. So, I do a lot of that type of collaboration before I ever get into that big meeting where I'm pushing my one direction. I've got my buddies all lined up already, and so I don't think it feels like I'm abrasive or that I'm, because I've fought those battles privately already. So maybe I've adapted my style that I don't get those types of reactions, but that's what you got to do. You've got to learn how to work the system. >> At the same time, I think that, and this is a compliment, I think Jean on the outside, it's tough to earn her respect in the beginning, but if you do, there's nobody more fiercely loyal than Jean. So you got to earn your way in there, and that's got to be consistent, like a 15-step process to get there. (Jean laughs) >> Yeah. >> And you can't let go because if you let go-- >> Dave: They're hard to get, huh? >> She's going to make you think on number six day you're not good enough, and then you just got to keep on going. So I understand what you're stating, Dave. You have to keep on going, and if you get there there's nothing that Jean wouldn't do for you. As she's here, she's on the advisory board of UiPath. She is the most, once you prove yourself, that's it. It's going to be hard to change that, but it's not easy to get there. >> So this inherent bias, people are tribal in nature and they're biased. Does things like automation and RPA, AI, does it eliminate that bias or does it codify it? >> Wow, interesting question. I don't know, I don't know the answer to that. >> Dave: I don't think anybody knows. >> I don't know that either. >> I've never really thought about it. I mean, to me RPA is just another tool in my toolkit, you know? And if I can fix it with AI, great, or UiPath, if I can use that to fix it with RPA, great. If I need another toolkit, I'll go use that toolkit. But I do know that it's a way that individuals, you can get a lot of young people into your organization that have great ideas. I'm stocking up with interns and I'm using, like I said, woman we hired, she was my intern, graduated in May, and the next day she had a full-time job. And she's done a phenomenal job. And that's what RPA has done for our business, because it's an entree in that then they're in and they're doing this simpler technology, then people see how wonderful they are and they can go and move into bigger and better roles. And that's what I'm trying to encourage is get some really smart people in with this tool, and that's what UiPath has enabled, I think, people that maybe they're not the best coders, or maybe they're not the best BAs, but you put that together and they're knocking it out of the park. The young ones are knocking it out of the park on this technology. It's amazing. >> We did several blockchain and Crypto conferences this year, you want to talk about diversity, and I mean it's old money, it's new money, it's women, it's people in turbans, it's people with color. It's actually quite amazing, and one of the older investors, I asked him what's your secret? He said, "I surround myself with millennials." (laughs) >> Jean: Correct. >> That was good advice, but very diverse crowd in Crypto. You don't have to be Ivy League, Silicon Valley and white, Caucasian, to be successful, right? >> Dave, I was representing RPA at a Women in Tech conference last week in the FinTech environment, and I was talking, sitting next to Crypto and Bitcoin and at the end, the lines lined up for RPA. And I would say to the girls, why are you lined up for RPA? And they basically said you are the disruptor. RPA is the disruptor. There was a speaker here today that says RPA's the gateway drug to artificial intelligence, which is absolutely true. RPA is operational right now, it's working today, and there's elements of AI that are here today, but there's elements that are future technology. But RPA's completely ready to go, operational, mainstream in most enterprise companies. >> And I know we kind of went off topic there but it's relevant and it's important and it's a passion of ours, so really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Stu. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath Forward in Miami. Right back. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from Bahrain. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> And welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Bahrain for the exclusive coverage of the AWS's summit and their announcement and their execution of a new region which should be online here in early 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host with SiliconANGLE Media theCUBE, extracting the signal from the noise, meeting all the people. First time the Middle East and the region should be a big impact, having a digital footprint as size of Amazon Web Services, bringing energy and entrepreneurship and innovation and economic revitalization and enablement. We'd love the coverage, we meet a lot of great people. Our next guest is Simon Martin who's the ambassador of the British embassy here in Bahrain. Simon, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for joining us. >> My pleasure. >> So, OK, so I want, I want to just kind of get your perspective. I met the US ambassador yesterday the last night at dinner. He's kind of new to the area and the job. >> But he's already, >> You've got experience, >> But he's already well informed, I can tell you (laughs). >> He's well informed (laughs). Birth by fire, thrown in the deep end. You've been here for a few years. >> Yeah, three. >> Take a minute to talk about the environment here, because we're first time here. We're learning or observing. I'm certainly surprised. My daughter was asking me: What are the women like there? We had a women's breakfast yesterday. 70 plus people. The energy, the diversity, interesting culture. Feels like very open, what's your thoughts. >> Well, very much so, I mean, Bahrain has been at the sort of crossroads of international travel for hundreds and hundreds of years. The UK's relationship with Bahrain, the formal one, goes back just over 200. And that was all to do with trade. Manama means the place of sleep. And it was the place that people used to stop to rest on their way across the Arabian subcontinent and towards the Indian subcontinent, and so on. So, it's a place which is naturally welcoming of foreigners and outside ideas. And I think that's what Amazon have found here. So, there is an often lot of change going on in this part of the world. Bahrain is relatively small economy compared to its neighbors. It was the place that oil was first discovered in the Gulf, but, actually, once they discovered it, they realized that she had rather less than most of the neighbors and, therefore, it's an economy which has had to adapt to keep, keep growing. In contrast, >> Mainly, mainly the dependence on oil, other oil-rich areas. >> Yeah. >> Right, is that it? >> Yeah. So, that's been the main stay of the economy for some time, but there is not the, there is not yet the potential for the growth that's needed in order to help develop an economy with its, with the necessary modern infrastructure. A growing population, a need for, for quality employment for young people which is something that we've heard a lot of in the last few years. >> Talk about your history, how long have you been in the job you're in, what's the background, what are some of the things that you've done >> OK >> at the government in the UK. >> Yeah, well, Thank you, so I've been here for three years. Before that, I was working, actually, for His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. And in that role, visited this part of the world on a couple of occasions, and so, and so the impact of that very important part of our relationship, royal family's relationship with the royal families in this part of the Gulf, and it just opened my eyes a bit to the, to the importance of having multifaceted relationships. And, again, this is what we're now, this is what we are now seeing here, that Amazon Web Services with the cloud region that they are building here have brought a new dimension, >> (laughs) The fly got... >> Not surprised, to the Bahraini economy. >> So, tell me about the multifaceted piece of news. What I'm fascinated by is the Dubai dynamic, right. You know, I see Dubai, a lot of events there, Blockchain events, AI events, a lot of tech events. Feels like New York to me, using the American metaphor. It's kind of like a Silicon Valery kind of vibe. But they all work, been working together for years. What's the historical relationships, how have they changed, and how does cloud computing make up for that? How does that play into it? >> Well, of course there've been, it's been a very collaborative and yet competitive relationship between the different, particularly the finance centers of the Gulf for many years. The economic success story of Dubai is very well known. Bahrain has continued to develop, but without the resources that underpin the UAE success, has done so on a more, more progressive way. But this is always be, going to be a much smaller economy and Bahrain has to, has to compete in niches in which it has the competitive advantage. And it's this, what we have now happening here, is creating a wonderful new niche opportunity for Bahrain. But, of course, I don't think am letting out any secrets to say that each of the countries in the Gulf would love to have been hosting the new cloud region. >> Yeah. >> So Bahrain had try incredibly hard to present an environment in which to host this kind of, this kind of investment which requires regulation. It requires openness and ease of doing business and it also requires an openness to developing the labor force to support not only the Amazon, but all of the train of companies that we're expecting to invest along behind it. >> Well, Simon, I really appreciate your experience and candor here on theCUBE. Certainly, for us it's a new area and you have certainly a perspective for, for the Royal Family in the UK, and now being here. But one of the interesting things I'd like to get your perspective on is, you know, you look at globalization and you look at regulations, you look at digital, things like GDPR, you see all traditional things, you mean, you can go back when I was a young kid growing up, I remember the pound and the French franc and all the different currencies going on, and then EU comes together. And now you have Asia and cryptocurrency. So you have a whole another cloud computing generation coming where that might reimagine the political landscape, might imagine the economic relationships. These are opportunities, but also threats. And so how people handle it is interesting. So, how do you, when you look at that kind of dynamic, you got a little bit uncertainty and opportunity at the same time, depending how you look at it, it's the glass half full or the glass half empty. >> Exactly. >> How should executives and government officials start thinking about this new model, this new marketplace. London is certainly the center of the action and connects now into Bahrain, could be a different dynamic, frictionless, digital. >> Mhmm. >> People living across borders. These are new dynamics. What's your thoughts on this new melting pot of digital impact? >> Well, of course, everybody wants a piece of it, everybody wants to be at the center of a new melting pot. And for Bahrain, they're looking to be the of it within, within this region, but of course, the Dubai Finance Center and, you know, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, and so on are also, are also very keen, and no one, no one is expecting to be the dominant player. And certainly from Bahrain's perspective, it's very much about creating the environment in which companies will see, this is a good place to start. The Gulf region is a coherent region with an incipient single market, and so on, within the GCC, and so, naturally, investors from the outside are going to look at one place to start. And so what Bahrain has done, and I think it's, it's been very well founded, it's just taken place over the three years that I've been here, it's to dramatically increase the ease of doing business, and then find proportionate ways in which the government can support new companies to get them established. So, you mentioned GDPR and, you know, how's this going to affect a company in the Gulf. Well, I was at the launch of a very interesting new big data software project by one of the, in fact British owned new startups in the FinTech Bay here which is supported by the Economic Development Board. They're starting point is that the product that we are selling out of Bahrain is GDPR compliant, which gives you an idea of the way, >> Yeah. >> in which even from, from this relatively small island in the Gulf, >> Yeah. >> the global perspective has been taken. >> And certainly with, you know, digital currency, the Know Your Customer Anti Money Laundering is the big thing too, you got to get that right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, they have an opportunity with FinTech. Final question for you, as you look out and see the human capital market and the future of work. >> Yeah. >> It's a big conversation we're always having and certainly I live in Silicon Valley where everyone's, no secret that there's a migration out of Silicon Valley due to the prices of living there, but yet concentration of entrepreneurship. People are going to have engineering teams all over the world. so you have a disperse workforce now crossing borders and not just the domicile issue, that's one, you know, taxes, where to domicile, outside say the US or other countries. So, you have a combination of diverse workforces. >> Mhmm. >> This is big, this is a big opportunity too, challenge and opportunity. >> It is, it is. And, of course, there are not just big changes, now, there's constant fluctuation in the way the workforce and the populations in this part of the world and within the gulf are changing. Look at Vision 2030 in Saudi Arabia, the big increase in the Saudi workforce, both through the policy of Saudization and through the creation of many more opportunities for women in the workforce. That's affecting Bahrain. But Bahrain has always been a place where people come to work and sometimes to work remotely, sometimes to live here and work across in Saudi Arabia. So, the Bahrainis feel that they are very, very attuned to these challenges. But I might just mention as well that this is not just about economics. And what impresses me about the reform program you see going on here is that, the idea is that we will create a broader and wider spread opportunity, particularly through the opportunities for young professionals working in AWS, but also in the environment all the way around it, for all communities in Bahrain, not just the wealthy, not just the sort of Ivy league equivalent graduates. >> Yeah. >> And so that's why the academy that they're setting up here can, >> And then network does emerge in social networking is going to bring people closer together. >> Yeah. >> OK, great to have you on. Final question is, as people look at this moment in time, maybe an inflection point, shot heard around the Gulf, if you will, of Amazon, certainly they did this with CIA in our country, the said success is coming in, and kind of changing how things do, reimagining value creation and value capture. What do you see as the impact of the, a diverse region have been in this area and the geography? Just your thoughts on what the impact's going to be. >> Well, of course, this is a virtual world and a cloud region is the virtual concept, so it's easy to say, well it shouldn't take an Amazon Web Services cloud region to transform the way in which governments work here. In practice, what AWS have seen wherever they have established cloud regions, it's a magnet for other businesses to develop around it, and it provides the reassurance that governments need to take that step forward. I don't know whether you heard Max Peterson and his presentation this morning saying he was amazed at the speed with which the entire Bahraini government system has embraced the move to the cloud which, indeed, my own government is doing as we speak. And this, I think, is going to be one of the really big, the really big impacts which will allow governments to get smaller and more efficient and more transparent >> And serve their citizens in a different way, in a better way. >> But one last thing, John. Because, you may not have heard about this is, we're hearing a lot about the shift towards renewable energy in this part of the world, and people say, why on earth would we need renewable energy which is, you know, so much of the world's petrol carbon resources are based here, but, of course, if you don't burn them, you can sell them. And that's very simple economics. The fact is that it has taken longer than other parts of the world for the transition to renewable energy, even though we have so much sunshine and at times quite a lot of wind. The government here just put out a tender for a 100 megawatt solar farm. And the driving force behind that is because AWS have said: we want to power our cloud region from renewable energy. And this is an example of industry and the big investors actually applying a positive force to speed up the direction of the government policy already. And it's something that has been well. >> It's happened fast, this private partnership public relationship, that's a success story. >> And I think there are lots of other ways we will see this happening, as I say, you can't have over 2000 people here all focusing on the cloud technology without bringing an awful lot of extra attention to and focus on what else is going on in Bahrain. >> Yeah. >> From my perspective, the Bahrain government is saying we welcome, we welcome this, this publicity, and we look forward to explaining ourselves. And I think we'll see a lot of further development in this area. >> Simon that's a great point. Sustainable energy and the trade-off between industry, private industry trying to make money, but contributing technology and a co-creation with the government. >> Yeah. >> I mean, data center, it's hot here, you need cooling, you got sun power, you see, you got to have that solution. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> You can't burn it, you can sell it, so good opportunity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Simon Martin, ambassador, the British ambassador to the embassy here in Bahrain. Thank yo for sharing your insights and color commentary. >> Pleasure to meet you, John. >> Appreciate it. Okay, live coverage here. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE bringing you all the new observations. Our first time in the Middle East region well coherent structure, great economics, great society benefits, cloud computing, Amazon Web Services region opening up in 2019. Exclusive coverage. Stay with us fore more after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Chris Menard, he is the lead storage administrator at Brown University. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Chris. >> Thanks for having me. >> So in your role, you would do storage, backup recovery, and disaster recovery. I mean, I think our viewers, we have a sense of what you would do at a large Fortune 500, But what do you at an Ivy League University? What kinds of things are you working on? >> So from disaster recovery we're doing things to protect all of the data that the university has. So research data, academic data, business data. So we're making sure that if something were to happen in Providence itself, we would be covered and have access to our data, our applications. If our data center were to go away. >> So in a way your constituents are a lot larger because you're also thinking, is it student data as well? So student data, research data? >> Yes, so student data, research data, administrative data, faculty data. Any kind of data that gets generated by pretty much anybody that either works or attends the university. >> Chris, wonder if we step back for a second. We're here at Microsoft Ignite, I know that Microsoft has a strong connection with higher education. But have you been to this show before? What's the relationship between the university and Microsoft that you have interactions with? >> So this is my first time coming to Ignite with Brown. I've been to Ignite when it used to be called TechEd, so a long time ago. But we do have a pretty good relationship with Microsoft. Obviously, we have everything from Windows Operating Systems all the way up to cloud services with Azure. Something that we just kind of started delving into this year. So we're looking at running things like Remote app in the cloud. We have some of our disaster recovery data in the Azure cloud as well. And I'm sure they'll be more to come as we learn more about what we can put there and how that can help us. >> Yeah, Microsoft really sits at the center of this multi-cloud discussion. As you've said, they've got SaaS offerings. They've got public cloud. >> Yep. >> They're in your data center. How does Brown look at, kind of, cloud overall? And you said starting to look at some of the public cloud offerings. So maybe give us a little bit of what you can about this strategy today. >> Right, so, we are doing a lot with secondary backups, secondary data for our backups going to the cloud. So for disaster recovery, hopefully in the future we'll be able to use that data for test and dev or maybe moving workloads from one place to another place. We're looking at putting some actual workloads in Azure, in the cloud for bursting capabilities, things like that. >> Yeah, you look at data in a multi-cloud world, tell us, what are you looking for when you talk about how you manage your data in a multi-cloud world? Even we talk about, some people when they went to SaaS they were like, "Oh, I don't need to worry about things like "security and data protection." Well, those people might have had to learn faster or they'd be out of a job. So what do you look and how do you use? >> Right, so security is definitely one of the main concerns. So, I mean, we have a whole security team that that's all they do is look at these projects and look at what we're trying to do and say, "Wait a second, what's the security around it?" As far as the tools that we're using for security. >> Data protection. >> Data protection we're using Cohesity. We just started using them at the beginning of this year. We switched off, we were a long time Legacy backup infrastructure. So a lot of moving parts. We decided that we wanted to find something that was more streamlined and was looking to the future with the way that they did data protection and disaster recovery. >> And where do you use the Cohesity solutions? Is it in your data center, public cloud, which offerings? >> So we have a Cohesity Appliances in our data center. We protect all of our virtual machines and physical machines using Cohesity. We tier that off into Azure cloud as a secondary copy, so then we have flexibility on what we can do with that data now that it's been virtualized and sent off to the cloud. >> Great, and are you realizing any cost savings? I mean, I know it's still early yet, you've only recently gone to Cohesity. But what's the... >> We have realized a lot of cost savings. Probably about 50% reduction in costs, CapEx style costs. And we also have reduced some of our year-to-year maintenance with licensing. >> All right, maybe talk about the operational side of things too. How many people did you have managing these kind of environment before? What's it look like after? What's that change mean? >> We have the same amount of people still managing the same environment. The only difference is now we're not spending as much time. So we kind of manage it across different teams within our environment. So our systems teams will do recoveries of virtual machines or data, whereas my team will actually manage the backups and adding clients and troubleshooting and things like that. Our team probably saves 10 or 15 hours a week. And the other teams about the same, with not having to troubleshoot things that just weren't working in the old platform compared to the new platform. >> Yeah, it was actually one of the things in the keynote this morning Satya Nadella was talking about business productivity. You always say it's nice if I could shave off an hour here, five hours there. There's always fear in IT, it's like, "Oh, wait, "they're going to put me out of a job." But the reality is you've always got more projects to work on and more things to do. >> There's always something else for us to do, which we're finding there's plenty of work for everyone to do. So we don't have to spend that time doing things that we shouldn't have been doing. >> I'm curious about how you stay on the cutting edge. I mean, typically you think about academia in general as being a little slow to adopt the latest and greatest technologies. And yet, this is where the research gets done, so much of it at these top universities. So what's the balance in your experience, and how do you stay abreast of all the new gizmos? >> We're pretty lucky because we're more of the central IT for the university even though we do work with researchers in different departments. So we are always constantly out there looking for, how can we do what we're doing now better, more efficiently, maybe cheaper, maybe not? But we're constantly looking for, what's the best way we can deliver the service that all of our users need. And it's a pretty broad base of users. Like you said, from students to researchers to just regular admins. They're all very different workloads and different users. >> All right, so, Chris, as you've rolled out Cohesity and you're starting to adopt Azure, what learnings have you had? If you're sitting down with one of your peers, and you hear them said, "I'm looking at this." What was the experience? What can I do to make it a little faster, save the team some heartburn maybe? >> I would say the biggest thing is just to do your homework. Go out and look and see what are your pain points today. And talk to people like Cohesity and say, "Honestly, here's my pain points, what can "you do to help me?" Cohesity's sat with us from the very beginning and they were very open to, "We can help "you with this, this, and this. We can't do that, "but we can get it into the product down the road." And they've done with with a lot of things that we've asked for to help us with whatever our needs might have been. >> Yeah, anything particular that you're asking of Microsoft, Cohesity, or others in the ecosystem that would help you do your job better? >> Not at this exact moment. Since we started with Cohesity, we have put in some requests with them over the first couple of months. And the product has evolved, maybe not because of stuff that we only asked for. I mean, it could have been a whole hundred other customers that asked for the same thing. I'm not sure. But they're very quick to put those things into the system, and they roll out updates very, very quickly and keep it going. >> Yeah, so we talk about education might be slow to adopt things. You've got a storage group, storage is not known as the latest and greatest. How do you manage things like upgrades? I was standing in line waiting and joking, it's like, "We're in a Microsoft event, remember Patch Tuesdays?" Yeah, how do you look at the, kind of, cloud on-demand, always on the latest generation versus balancing to make sure that things are trusted, secured, and tested? >> You're exactly right. In the storage world you might only do an upgrade once or twice a year at most. With Microsoft you're doing them once a month, maybe. With Cohesity, if they tell me there's a new upgrade or a patch, I'm ready to install it on a moment's notice. It's non-disruptive and the support team they have is so very good and quick that even if something were to go wrong, I am very confident they would have it fixed in very short order. So the confidence level with doing upgrades is very high. >> In terms of one of the big buzz words we hear, at this conference as well as at other technology conferences is "digital transformation." What does that mean to Brown University? Or does it mean anything? >> Well, it does. Our CIO had put out in his last year that we were going to start working on digital transformation as one of our big projects. What that exactly means for like my group is just what we have to do to support whatever the other groups are going to do to support moving toward a digital transformation. So if that means buying some new storage, or adding more storage to what we have, or talking to them about what apps are being added and how can we back that up and how can we perform disaster recovery services for those? That's the kind of things that our group would be worried about. More so than, what's the actual digital transformation itself. So it is something that is on our plate, but it's not the actual transformation itself. >> Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a lot of fun talking to you. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Toronto, Canada, in Ontario. We are here live breaking down what's going on in the Blockchain world. It's the Untraceables event here, Tracy and team doing a great job of Untraceable. They're putting on the Blockchain Futurist conference. This is about the future, bringing the industry together. All the luminaries are here; Bounds of Ethereum, Ackerson Ecosystem influencers, original gangsters- OGs-are here, of course theCube, we got 2018 coverage breaking it down, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Wrapping up day one Dave, I know you got to take off and head back on a flight home, let's break down and analyze what's going on in the industry. Yesterday we had the first annual ever, first inaugural Cloud and Blockchain summit, global Blockchain and Cloud summit, two worlds coming together. Here it's a little bit different this is all about cryptocurrency, it's all about blockchain. Big movements, speculators versus builders is my theme and everyone's recognizing the trend of price shifts billions lost in market gap that were gained last year but still some are up. But the focus is about entrepreneurship on a global scale, this is the focus here, right? It's a lot of VIPs, a lot of players coming together. I don't see people crying in their wine about the prices- although you can see it on Anthony Di Iorio's face, probably a setback or the Ethereum community on the price but still, the long game is what they're going after. Your thoughts and analysis? >> Well you definitely seeing a lot of talk about the boom and bust cycles. And we're hearing a lot from people -but by the way, there are a couple of guys who went big, maybe hedge fund guys or other fund guys that are taking a bath, maybe they got in big in January, December, not the best time to get in. So you are seeing some long faces there, but generally the sentiment is: hey, these boom and bust cycles they come and they go we've seen them before, now's the time to hunker down and innovate, execute, and figure out how to add substance and value. Now, first of all, I would say a couple things. One is those guys probably have... a store of fiat currency that they cashed out, number one, so they're feeling pretty good. Two is, the big difference to me John, is in 2018, crypto is much more in the mainstream news. You see it on CNBC, you see it in every medium po- every day you get a medium post, everybody's blogging about it, whereas obviously we've been blogging about bitcoin for five, six years but the mainstream media has picked up on it. >> Seven years. >> Seven years, there you go. So the mainstream media has picked up on it so it's much more front and center than it ever has been in the past. So I think that's a different dynamic. There seems to be still a lot of opportunistic sentiment, people are sanguine about the future and I think that's because we're seeing some real hardcore innovation going on in real use cases. Now, having said all that, the other scenario is there's just a lot of competition for quality projects, we're hearing too many coins out there, you're seeing all these ICOs tied to Ethereum in an oversupply right now, and you're clearly seeing that affect the price of Ethereum, which has dropped, on a percentage basis, much more than bitcoin. It's down considerably this year, whereas bitcoin actually is still up. Ethereum's trading about where it was last September, Bitcoin's up considerably since last September. So you know, a lot of cycles, a lot of instability still, but a lot of optimism. >> The bottom line for me is that the big question that's coming out of this event and this whole week here in Toronto is why do cryptocurrencies matter, the mass influence and adoption of Blockchain technology, where is that on the progress bar? This is the topic, and again, a lot of people that are "poo pooing" this revolution and I'm seeing on my Facebook feed all the time, "bitcoin's at zero," there's a lot of nonbelievers. Here's what I would say, here's my analysis. I think that the comparisons to the dot-com bubble with all the irrational exuberance that was part of that phase, this ICO phase, is crashing. No doubt about them. The ICOs in the United States are down, almost to nill. Certainly a lot of action going outside the United States, still unregulated, still wild, wild, east- or west depending how you call it. So yeah, that's happening and a lot of the bad stuff's being filtered out there's an emphasis on build which you mentioned. But here's the thing that no one might not see in the mainstream. During the dot-com bubble, there was all this companies that were started to it public and that was because the market wanted it. That's what happened with the cryptocurrency ICOs, the market wanted more products, then just manufactured it and then they realized, oh shit too many tokens. But if you look at the internet revolution, and I think this is the comparison with blockchain and crypto. You got blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, which is token economics are absolute gamechangers and the demand for that is very high and there are more people coming on every day in a mass adoption basis. The internet actually never stopped, if you looked at internet penetration rates, Mary Meeker would point out at Morgan Stanley, now she's at Kleiner Perkins, that the internet adoption rate of the internet during the bubble and then post-bubble continued to accelerate. That means more people got on the internet. So therefore the population of users became larger and larger every day. That really level-setted the reality that this was not a fad, not going away. I see blockchain and token economics having the same trajectory where there'll be more people adopting the technology then putting it into use than ever before. That's the tell sign. If that trend line continues to grow, the corrections will all take place, cycles will happen, but the entrepreneurs will follow the money, they're going to follow the user experience, they're going to follow the demand for opportunity. That to me is going to be the major tell sign. I think that's the general sentiment that I'm feeling here is screw the price of the tokens, yes there's too many tokens, clear out the dead wood, get back down to building companies, that's validated by the fact that there are more deals being done from a financing standpoint that are starting to look like traditional funding structures. Security tokens, equities, starting to see people talk and fundraising, lower rounds, not the big mega rounds. Money that's going to be around 7 to 30 million, 30 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 plus. This is going to be traditional structures, not the land grab utility token which gets you into the tailspin of basically managing coins distribution, managing all these things. There'll be a balance, but that's really kind of what's happening. >> So that's great analysis John, I would add to that that the fundamentals are still in place, blockchain attacks inefficiencies. Where there's a middle man and there's inefficiencies and there are waste, blockchain is being applied to attack those inefficiencies. I think the second thing is that new capital-raising vehicles have catalyzed massive investments and are catalyzing innovation and a whole new breed of developers. The third point is a global phenomemon. You don't have to be in Silicon Valley, or New York City, or Boston, or Austin, in the United states, or from an Ivy League school, it's happening around the world, you're seeing non-US countries and island countries invite developers in, giving them tax havens, and as a result, it's becoming much more of a global phenomenon than a lot of the internet startups were. There are a lot of adoption barriers. I mean you have the cyclicality and the volatility, you've got industries that are essentially entrenched: financial services, healthcare, lots of defense and aerospace industries, very much entrenched, it's going to take a long time for that collaboration to come together. And you also have a lot of scams. >> Yeah >> There's going to be a shake out, we predicted that I think in February in the Bahamas, we predicted the flight to quality, people are trying to figure out where that quality is right now. And to your point, you're also seeing more hybrid models, more traditional equity models combined with token models, and that's not a surprise. You're going to see more and more of that as a hedge. The token model still gives people the potential for liquidity, and as long as that fundamental remains in place, I think that dynamic will- is here to stay. >> And also, you and I have seen many cycles of innovation you talk about in the industry, many waves. The people that we talked to that have been through multiple waves like Brailey Rodder, (mumbles) and others, experience, they all know what's going on. The difference here that I think is interesting is that the smart contrast, the flight to quality, the companies that have buildable products, are going to get the attention. Now the difference now in this community that I think is interesting that makes the funding dynamic different is you have now community dynamics. You've got open source software, Cloud computing, and new technology with new capital formation dynamics. I think those three things are the perfect storm of innovation that's being overlooked. and the interplay between that is going to give us a look and feel of an industry that we've never seen before. So we can compare and contrast waves "oh, BC, Client-Server, blah blah blah," I don't think this is going to look like any of those waves, it's going to look different. And that's going to be really the shake out between the pundits who claim they know what's going on, or... predictions whatnot. Talking to the people, putting the ear to the ground in the communities, that's key. And for the companies, the ones that are going to win are the ones that can build community, tap into communities, and grow communities because they're now part of the ecosystem. It's not just selling products to them, they got to be a bidirectional, symbiotic relationship between communities at large, in this ecosystem. I think these are going to be new dynamics they're going to be- impact valuation, it's going to impact time to market, time to value, and ultimately give the entrepreneurs and the investors what they need, which is good outcomes in the process. >> You know it's interesting you were saying about the waves. And the waves in the past, and certainly looking back, were quite easy to identify, they tended to be architectural, you know centralized mainframe, and they went to client server, then you went to the sort of public internet, and then this cloud of remote services. The next wave is maybe not ... blatantly architectural, but it's this blending of digital services that's ubiquitous across all industries. And I think the key is, there's an automation layer on top of these digital services, which is powered by AI and machine intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, and blockchain is part of that automation layer. And people are building new businesses on top of that and disrupting existing industries. I think there's no industry that's safe from disruption as I put it before, there are some entrenched, high-risk industries like financial services, healthcare, defense, aerospace, education, that are going to take longer but ultimately there's waste in all of those businesses and I will say I think a lot of the incumbents are going to hop on this trend and do very well picking up blockchain and defending against the disruptors. Not all will make it, but a lot of the big guys are going to put some serious resources into this and they're going to lead in to blockchain in a big way. >> Yeah and just to kind of wrap up, I think you're the fact that what we're seeing here is that engineering-led dynamics are happening, blockchain's going to lay down the plumbing, it's got to be stable, desensualized applications over the top with token economics is the business model of innovation. We got technology theater booming with innovation with engineering-led initiatives, that's got to accelerate, that's infrastructure, that's got to be more cloud-like, that's got to be much more stable, that's got to get laid down, got to put the roads down if you will, and then the business model innovation coming from the software this is the game changer so you're looking at all the smart money, smart money is saying okay, we see guys building product, let's see some unique IP, let's see some token economics that are nobel and different for what's happening, that to me is going to be the new investor algorithm if you will, for vetting. And it's been that way in a way, the smart money follows the smart engineers, what are you building? And then they vet that with other stands so again, big engineering-led focus. >> So what would you do now- okay, soyou were hearing this week, too many damn tokens, everything's tied to Ethereum, most ICOs, what would you do now if you're an entrepreneur, you have an idea, you have a potential to build a community, where would you focus, would you just try to float another token? Would you go overseas? What would you do in that situation? >> I would look at the regulatory frameworks as a way, as a guidepost to risk management, right. I think you're going to see some regulatory regimes try to manage the bridge between slow changing, old guard, to new fast, and loose. Crypto-'Cause look at it. It's fast and loose, but there's real people that are working on it. I would focus on the real people that have builders, I'd look at the mechanisms where they're domiciling, and what they do with the economics or the tokens. One thing I will tell you that is that, as an entrepreneur, this is like, a golden rule, your focus is everything: focus, focus, focus. If you're focused on managing distribution of coins, and the arbitrage of coin pricing, that takes away form the focus of engineering and building. I think that's going to be an easy binary test for an investor to say, "what are these guys working on?" Is the token working for the venture, or is the venture working for the token? That is a fundamental mindset, if that is... Not in the right position, it should be: the token works for the venture, not the venture working for the token. That to me, I would run for the hills, if I see someone working for the token, I'd say, "I don't want to fly at all at that deal." Because you could maybe pass up some money right in the short term, but you're going to miss the long game. That's the way I look at it. >> And again, I would add to that, I mean, yeah, okay, so there are a bunch of crypto-billionaires that got minted, and they got in early and good for them, but that doesn't mean there's not more opportunities. And when I think of a company like Dell Michael Dell wasn't the first in PC's, you know? Compact was the first, you know, Rod Canion, the back of the napkin, that urban legend. But what Michael Dell did is he improved on the system. He took inefficiencies out of the supply chain, and became the dominant player! So first move advantage, yes, okay, great, you missed being a billionaire potentially. But the wave tends to get bigger after the market matures. And as a result, I think my focus would be on building, to your theme, building that community, demonstrating value, and then, eventually, I think you're going to be able to use Block Chain, Crypto currencies, tokenization, crypto economics to power your business. But figure out a way to actually execute today and prove value; that's what I would do. >> Again, all great stuff, great analysis, Dave, Good to see you here, where again: this is theCUBE's coverage in Toronto for Block Chain Futurist Conference. Again, this is part of our 2018 initiating coverage of the Block Chain Industry with our video presence. Engaging the community is an upstream content project sharing the data with you, so you can make your decisions, and understand who to connect with. That's our model, we're going to do it. We've been covering BitCoin and Block Chain since 2011, on siliconangle.com, that's our journalism site. Go to theCUBE.net, that's where we have all the videos, and soon to be our CUBE token coming out, be part of our network. Join our community if you wannna get engaged, we're happy to have you. Thanks for watching Day 1 of the Futurist Conference here in Toronto, Ontario. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCube covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. We're here for Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier with my cohost Lauren Cooney. Our next guest is Sylvain Kalache, who's the co-founder of Holberton School. In the news today for big venture funding. Eight and a half million dollars, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on, we've had many conversations with some of the folks you work with at your place there. Really great mission, CloudNow Awards have been on Open Source Summit. You guys have a very special mission, certainly recognized with some good funding, congratulations, but take a minute to explain the mission of your school. >> Yes, so the mission of the school is to provide high quality education to the most. I think that's something that is very tough in the US for American people is that there is high quality education and you know, like Ivy League are, like, obviously doing a great job, but the issue with that is that it's, like, limited to an elite. But a fraction of American people can access high quality education, and so when you look at the student debt, you know, 1.4 trillion dollar, like, something is wrong with that, right? >> John: Yeah. >> And so we want to be a part of the solution and that's why we created Holberton School. >> And the interesting thing, too, about it is that what I liked about your mission, too, is that you're very transparent about what you do and... But a lot of the jobs are skills that not a lot of people have, so it's a first time skill. So, you know, as people look to hire, say, a data scientist or someone in AI or someone in machine learning or anything in tech, for instance, no one really has that many years of experience, so there's an opportunity to level up for someone who might not have gone to a fancy school. >> Exactly, so today there is more than half a million unfilled jobs that require tech skills in the US, right. And according to the previous white house CTO, it's going to grow to 1.4 million in the next decade, right. And universities are only going to train 400,000. So, there is a gap of a million skilled people within the next 10 years for software engineering type of job, right. So, my co-founder, with Julie and Bobby, we used to be head of marketing and community and I used to work for LinkedIn, would, you know, interview a lot of people who wanted to, you know, work for Docker and LinkedIn and one of the issue we saw is that a lot of out of colleges candidates will not be ready to take on a job. They were not ready. You could see they were smarter than you think but you would need to train them for six months or a year to get them ready to take on a job. >> What makes you different, what are you guys doing that's working? Can you explain the model? >> Yeah so in regular education, we bring you the knowledge right, through a lecture to share, we lecture you right. And two weeks down the road, we give you the exam to see if you memorized, you know, like the solution kind of, right? At Holberton, we've flipped the education. We give students the exam through a project, and they have to go, acquire the knowledge, learn the tool that they need to solve the thing, right. Which is very much what we do in the workplace, right. My manager at LinkedIn would coach me and say hey Sylvain you need to build this, you need to fix that, right. And then I'm paid to like find the best solution, right. So we train our students the same way. And our students come from all walks of life. Right out of high school, some started college didn't finish, some used to be barista, poker player, guitar player, artist, teacher, and some other place, right. They come with no software engineering knowledge, and we train them from zero. For two things, first one to learn a craft that's in demand in today's software engineering. So that they can find a job you know after graduation. And second to earn or to learn, to develop problem solving skills, critical thinking. So that they can continue to grow even after graduation and continue to learn after that, right. >> Is there a requirement? >> The requirement is that you have to be over 18 years old. That's it. >> John: That's it. >> That's it. >> And what does it cost? >> So the cost is none, until you find a job, right. >> Lauren: Until you find a job. And then what happens? >> So what happens, if you find a job that is over 40,000 dollar per year, then you contribute back to the school with a percentage of your salary. So we align the school success with student success. And the final contribution that students make to the school is used to finance the next generation of students. >> Lauren: Great. >> So that, you know, an organic circle where, the more students are successful through them, the more we can train other students. >> And you're investing in the outcome of the students. >> Exactly. We are investing in our students worthy of this school. But obviously we're are like investing in their success. >> Lauren: That's great >> That's the only way for us to succeed. >> Well you're certainly optimized for success. Because you're motivated to do it right. Right, so. This is interesting. >> We are, and when we say we, it's like the Holberton staff, but also the Holberton community. Which is composed of more than 150 mentors. Who are professionals in the tech industry. And they are here for two things. To guide students to enter the tech industry. They come to the school, share their experiences. What it's like to work for a startup. What it's like to work for a big company. What it's like to be a woman in tech, right. And also, they guide us on the curriculum, right. To make sure that what is being taught, like is always relevant. And that's where students find jobs in several companies including Tesla, Apple, NASA, LinkedIn, you name it. So they're competing with Ivy League type of talent. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> But they are definitely in the type of demographic that you really want... >> And they actually might win too, because they have the street smarts. And they get the hands on skills. Okay, so quick question, so. Is it the for-profit? Or non-profit? >> Sylvain: It's for-profit. >> Okay, so it's for-profit. But it's got a mission driven initiative. >> Sylvain: Yes. >> Tied to a profit objective. So you just raise some funding. How did that go? Is that use of funds to expand the scope? Or student body? I'm sure there's some constraints, in terms of, how much you can handle in terms of student body. Locations around the world. What is there an expansion strategy? Obviously you got some funding. >> Sylvain: Yes. >> What are you going to do with it? >> Yeah, so, we are a San Francisco based crew. We started three years ago with our first cohort of solid students. And with the location we had, we could train 100 students a year. Right. That's good but, in the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot. >> John: It's a prototype. >> It's a prototype. Exactly. So now that we have the students working for EnVideo, Dropbox, Apple, and like you know, the Google of the world. Alright, okay. Now we need to scale up and we move to a new location, that's seven times bigger. Where we'll be able to train 500 students per year, which... Because it's a two year program, we'd be a campus of 1000 students. Right. And to give you an idea of the scale, the largest University for software students, in the US is training 700 students a year. So we are like quickly coming up, as one of the largest trainer of 20,000 students. >> That's phenomenal. What's the curriculum? Is it mostly computer science? Is it mostly tech? I mean obviously you have the... I see any of you come in. But you do have women in tech. And you have a under represented minority kind of component, which is great. But it's open to anyone. >> It's open to anyone over 18. The application process is blind and fully automated. So there is no, human selection. >> John: No discrimination of any kind. >> No discrimination, and... >> How do you cut people off? Is it random? >> It's not random. >> And not random. I mean like, if you have like 500 spots. >> Yah. >> And you have 1000 applicants. >> Yah. >> So do you sort it? Is it like... >> Right. >> You get the lottery? I mean, is it... >> No, so there is only three percent of student who start the application process who make it. >> Okay, got it. >> And... >> So there's a selection criteria. >> There is a selection criteria. It's hard to get in. It's mostly based on motivation and talent. And by talent we mean, this ability to strive in this type of environment. Where you learn by doing and you learn by collaborating with your peers. Which is something that not everybody, you know, can do. >> So you identify success criteria, with what you think might be aligned with the culture of the curriculum. >> Yah, we believe that grit, is you know, a big element in people's success. And I think there is a lot of American people with grit. But they're born in the wrong zip code. They didn't have the right family, you know, who could support them. And to us, we don't want to select people because of their past. We want to select people because of who they are. Ultimately the application process is doing this for us. In terms of numbers, so far it's brought 35 percent woman. 50 percent of our students aren't white. And the age goes from anywhere from 17 to 56. So it's like very diverse crowd of students. That makes this community really amazing. >> Lauren: Yah. Coming from someone who paid for their own college, and then had to pay it all back... (laughing) I would have loved to have this around when I was going to school.6 >> John: And you still pay the pack. It's like you wanted it upfront for free. So what percentage of the salary is it? I mean, can you talk about numbers or... >> Yah. >> Cause I mean, cause that's always some people want to know the math in advance. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So it's a 17 percent of your income, for the first three years of employment, if you find a job that's over 40,000. So if you don't find a job then, you don't pay anything. >> John: And direct deposit probably, mostly. Do they have to be obligated to pay you? Do they usually do... direct deposit? >> Sylvain: Yah. We partner with third parties that's taking care of this. And it's basically like a monthly, you know, deposit. >> So it's automated for this candidates, for the students. >> Sylvain: It's automated, yah. >> Lauren: And do you do partnerships in any way? So like, you know, woman that are re-entering the work force. Or, you know... things along those lines. There's a lot of different programs out there that support. You know... >> Sylvain: Absolutely. So we are partnering with a lot of organizations. >> Lauren: Okay. >> We want to inspire... And the represented, you know like, demographic to, believe that they can become software engineer. They can be part of that, right. And so we partner... One of them is a clan now, with Justine Mitchell. >> Lauren: I won an award, yah. (Lauren laughing) >> And she was on theCube... >> Lauren: Yah. She's great. >> John: We cover their events. >> So with Justine we worked on fundraising, for women, for living state. And from Google extension... And Schelling, and yeah, we are going to help more students to get in the program. And also, one thing that we are doing is that we have a wall of trustees, where actually, Justine is sitting. We also have the singer, grammy award winner, Neyo. Who help's us to make sure we are doing everything we can, to communicate to this minority, right. And as you say, like the kid in the hood will come up with a different set of problems, and different set of ideas on how to build product and solve issues. And not only having a diverse work force is socially good. But it also makes sense business wise. Because your customer base is diverse by definition, right. >> John: Yah, I mean you need to have the algorithms. So the algorithms are being written by only a small percentage of the population. >> Sylvain: Yah, yah. They're inherently bias. >> Sylvain: They are. >> So we need to have that diversity, and plus diversity brings more unique perspectives. It might slow things down a bit. But you're going to get a much more broader representation. >> Sylvain: It is, and... >> And we heard with that in front with Mark Zuckerberg in front of senate yesterday. (Sylvain laughing) Questions like, you know... There's biases in there. Who's writing the algorithms? >> Yah, it's became even worse with AIM mission learning. If you feed this intelligence, that I've said is bias or discriminative, then AI will behave, like, with discrimination. >> And they're hidden bias so people might not even know that their biases is builtin. >> So it's terrible. I've arranged a number of money to take in the industry. In the valley's, 12 percent. So we really... and it's also bad for, like you know, authenticity. But also, I would say, none visual diversity, right. Like, what zip code? What background? What academic background do you come from? >> Yah. I mean it's a group thinking, mentality. "Oh we went to Harvard", "Oh you're instantly funded." >> Exactly. >> I mean that was the old way. The new way is the new generation. You do amazing work, we applaud your mission and success. We think this is the model, in fact, I'm even more aggressive, that you should get tax-deductions for contributing your time to the school. And the students should get a tax-deduction off the payment. This is a very skilled model. Congratulations. You should propose that. Get Mark Zuckerberg's in and Washington, DC. >> You should send to us. (laughing) >> Send some text messages, while you're there change some regulations. Hey, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you >> Holbertonschool.com. Check it out. Great mission, changing the education paradigm. Bringing a new paradigm for learning. Really filling the gap in the jobs front, across the world. It's theCube of course doing our part. Sharing it with you. Back with more live coverage here at Cisco DevNet Create, at the Computer History Museum. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's The Cube! Covering PolyCon 18. Brought to you by PolyMath. >> Welcome back everyone, we're live here in the Bahamas with The Cube's exclusive coverage of PolyCon 18, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, both co-founders of SiliconANGLE. We start our coverage of the crypto-currency ICO, blockchain, decentralized world internet that it is becoming. It's the beginning of our tour, 2018. Our next guest is Hartej Sawhney who's the advisor at Pink Sky Capital, but also the co-founder of Hosho.io. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Hey thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks guys. >> We had a great chat last night, and you do some real good work. You're one of the smartest guys in the business. Got a great reputation. A lot of good stuff going on. So, take a minute to talk about who you are, what you're working on, what you're doing, and the projects you're involved in. >> So first of all, thank you so much for having me, it's really exciting to see the progress of high-quality content being created in the space. So my name is Hartej Sawhney. We have a team based in Las Vegas. I've been based in Las Vegas for about five years. But I was born and raised in central New Jersey, in Princeton. And my co-founder is Yo Sup Quan. We started this company about seven months ago and my co-founder's background was he's the co-founder of Coin Sighter in Exchange out of New York, which exited to Kraken. After that he started Launch Key which exited to Iovation. And prior to this company, my previous company was Zuldi, Z-U-L-D-I .com where we had a mobile point of sale system specifically for high volume food and beverage companies and businesses. So we were focused on Fintech and mobile point of sale and payment processing. So both of us have a unique background in both Fintech and cyber-security and my co-founder Yo, he's a managing partner of a crypto hedge fund named Pink Sky Capital. And he was doing diligence for Pink Sky, and he realized that the quality of the smart contracts he was seeing for deals that he wanted to participate as an investor in, and I'm an advisor in that hedge fund, we both realized that essentially the quality of these smart contracts is extremely low. And that there was nobody in this space that we saw laser focused on just blockchain security. And all the solutions that would be entailed in there. And so we began focusing on just auditing smart contracts, doing a line-by-line code review of each smart contract that's written, conducting a GAS analysis, and conducting a static analysis, making sure that the smart contract does what the white paper says, and then putting a seal of approval on that smart contract to mitigate risk. So that the code has not been changed once we've done an analysis of it, that there's no security vulnerabilities in this code, and that we can mitigate the risks for exchanges and for investors that someone has done a thorough code analysis of this. That there's no chance that this is going to be hacked, that money won't be stolen, money won't be lost, and that there's no chance of a security vulnerability on this. And we put our company's name and reputation on this. >> And what was the problem that is the alternative to that? Was there just poorly written code? Was it updated code? Was it gas was too expensive? They were doing off-chain transactions. I mean what are some of the dynamics that lead you guys down this path? I mean this makes sense. You're kind of underwriting the code, or you're ensuring it or I don't know what you call it, but essentially verifying it. What was the problem? And what were some of the use cases of problems? >> I would say that the underlying problem today in this whole industry, of the blockchain space, is that the most commonly found blockchain is Ethereum. The language behind Ethereum is called Solidity. Solidity is a brand new software language that very few people in the world are sufficient programmers in Solidity. On top of that, Solidity is updated, as a language on a weekly basis. So there are a very limited number of engineers in the world who are full-stack engineers, that have studied and understand Solidity, that have a security background, and have a QA mindset. Everything that I just said does exist on this Earth today and if it does, there's a chance that that person has made too much money to want to get out of bed. Because Ethereum's price has gone up. So the quality of smart contracts that we're seeing being written by even development shops, the developers building them are actually not full-stack engineers, they're web developers who have learned the language Solidity and so thus we believe that the quality of the code has been significantly low. We're finding lots of critical vulnerabilities. In fact, 100% of the time that Hosho has audited code for a smart contract, we have found at least a couple of vulnerabilities. Even as a second or the third auditor after other companies conduct an audit, we always find a vulnerability. >> And is it correct that Solidity is much more easy to work with than say, Bitcoin scripting language, so you can do a lot more with it, so you're getting a lot more, I don't want to say rogue code, but maybe that's what it is. Is that right? Is that the nature of the theory? >> Compared to Bitcoin script, yes. But compared to JavaScript, no. Because Fortune 500 companies have rooms full of Java engineers, Java developers. And now the newer blockchains are being written, are being written on in block JavaScript, right? So you have IBM's Hyperledger program, you have EOS, you have ICX, Cardano, Stellar, Waves, Neo, there's so many new projects that are coming, that all of them are flexing about the same thing. Including Rootstock, RSK. RSK is a project where they're allowing smart contracts to be tied to the Bitcoin blockchain for the first time ever. Right, so Fortune 500 companies may take advantage of the fact that they have Java developers to take advantage of already, that already work for them, who could easily write to a new blockchain, and possibly these new blockchains are more enterprise grade and able to take more institutional capital. But only time will tell. And us as the auditor, we want to see more code from these newer blockchains, and we want to see more developers actually put in commits. Because it's what matters the most, is where are the developers putting in commits and right now maximum developers are on the Ethereum blockchain. >> Is that, the numbers I mean. Just take a step there. So the theory of blockchain. Percentage of developers vis-a-vis other platforms percentages-- >> By far the most is on developed on Ethereum. >> And in terms of code, obviously the efficiencies that are not yet realized, 'cause there's not enough cycles of coding going on, it's evolution, right? >> Yes. >> Seems to be the problem, wouldn't you say? So a combination of full-stack developer requirements, >> Yes. >> To people who aren't proficient in all levels of the stack. >> Yes. >> Just are inefficient in the coding. It's not a ding on the developers, it's just they're writing code and they miss something, right? Or maybe they're not sufficient in the language-- >> It's a new language. The functions are being updated on a weekly basis, so sometimes you copied and pasted a part of another contract, that came from a very sophisticated project, so they'll say to us, well we copied and pasted this portion from EOS, so it should be great. But what that's leading to is either A, they're using a function that's now outdated, or B, by copying and pasting someone else's code from their smart contract, this smart contract is no longer doing what you intended it to do. >> So now Hartej, how much of your capability is human versus machine? >> Yeah I was going to ask that. >> ML, AI type stuff? >> So we're increasingly becoming automated, but because of the over, there's so much demand in the space. And we've had so much demand to consistently conduct audits, it's tough to pull my engineers away from conducting an audit to work on the tooling to automate the audit, right? And so we are building a lot of proprietary tooling to speed up the process, to automate conducting a GAS analysis, where we make sure you're not clogging up the blockchain by using too much GAS. Static analysis, we're trying to automate that as fast as possible. But what's a bit more difficult to automate, at least right now, is when we have a qualified full-stack engineer read the white paper or the source of truth and make sure the smart contract actually does it, that is, it's a bit longer tail where you're leveraging machine learning and AI to make that fully automated. (talking over each other) >> But maybe is that, I'm sorry John. Is that the long term model or do you think you can actually, I mean there's people that say augmented intelligence is going to be a combination of humans and machines, what do you think? >> I think it's going to be a combination for a long time. Every single day that we audit code, our process gets faster and faster and faster because once we find a vulnerability, finding that same vulnerability next time will be faster and easier and faster and easier. And so as time goes on, we see it as, since the bundle of our work today is ICOs, token generation events, there are ERC 20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. And we don't know how long this party will last. Like maybe in a couple years or a couple months, we have a big twist in the ICO space that the numbers will drastically go down. The long tail of Hosho's business for us, is to keep track of people writing smart contracts, period. But we think they are going to become more functional smart contracts where the entire business is on a smart contract and they've cut out sophisticated middle men. Right and it may be less ICOs, and in those cases I mean, if you're a publicly traded company, and you're going from R&D phase where you wrote a smart contract and now actually going to deploy it, I think the publicly traded company's going to do three to five audits. They're going to do multiple audits and take security as a very major concern. And in the space today, security is not being discussed nearly as much as it should. We have the best hedge funds cutting checks into companies, before the smart contract is even written, let alone audited. And so we're trying to partner with all the biggest hedge funds and tell the hedge funds to mandate that if you cut a check into a company that is going to do a token generation event, that they need to guarantee that they're going to at least value security, both in-house for the company and for the smart contract that's going to be written. >> How much do you charge for this? I mean just ballpark. Is it a range of purchase price, sales price? What's the average engagement go for, is it on a scope of work? Statement of work? Or is it license? I mean how does it work? >> So first it depends is it a penetration test of the website or the exchange? Penetration testing of exchanges are far more complex than just a website. Or if it's a smart contract audit, is it an ICO or is it a functional smart contract? In either case for the smart contract audit, we have to build a long set of custom tooling to attack each and every smart contract. So it's definitely very case-by-case. But a ballpark that we could maybe give is somewhere around the lines of 10 to 15 thousand dollars per 100 lines of functional code. And we ask for about three weeks of lead time for both a smart contract audit and a penetration test. And surprisingly in this space, some of the highest caliber companies and high caliber projects with the best teams, are coming to us far too late to get a security audit and a penetration test. So after months of fundraising and a private pre-sale and another pre-sale, and going and throwing parties and events and conferences to increase the excitement for participating in their token sale, what we think is the most important part, the security audit for a smart contract is left to the last week before your ICO. And a ridiculous number of companies are coming to us within seven days of the token sale, >> John: Scrambling. >> Scrambling, and we're saying but we've seen you at seven conferences, I think that we need to delay your ICO by two or three weeks. We can assure you that all of your investors will say thank you for valuing security, because this is irreversible. Once this goes live and the smart contract is deployed. >> Horse is out of the barn. >> It's irreversible. >> Right right. >> And once we seal the code, no one should touch it. >> It's always the case with security, it's bolted on at the last minute. >> It's like back road recovery too, oh we'll just back it up. It's an architectural decision we should have made that months ago. So question for you, the smart contract, because again I'm just getting my wires crossed, 'cause there's levels of smart contracts. So if we, hypothetical ICO or we're doing smart contracts for our audience that's going to come out soon. But see that's more transactional. There's security token sales, >> Yes. >> That are essentially, can be ERC 20 tokens, and that's not huge numbers. It could be big, but not massive. Not a lot transaction costs. That's a contract, right? That's a smart contract? >> People are writing smart contracts to conduct a token generational event, most commonly for an ERC 20 token, that's correct. >> Okay so that's the big, I call that the big enchilada. That's the big-- >> Right now that is the most important, the most common. >> Okay so as you go in the future, I can envision a day where in our community, people going to be doing smart contracts peer-to-peer. >> Sure. >> How does that work? Is that a boiler plate? Is is audited, then it's going to be audited every time? Do the smart contracts get smaller? I mean what's your vision on that? Because we are envisioning a day where people in our audience will say hey Hartej, let's do a white paper together, let's write it together, have a handshake, do a smart contract click, click. Lock it in. And charge a dollar a download, get a million downloads, we split it. >> I envision a day where you can have a more drag and drop smart contract and not need a technical developer to be a full-stack engineer to have to write your smart contract. Yes I totally envision that day. >> John: But that's not today. >> We are very far from that today. >> Dave, kill that project. >> We're so far, we're very far from that. We're light years far from that. >> Okay well look. If we can't eliminate the full-stack engineers, I'm okay with that. Can we eliminate the lawyers? At least minimize them. >> We can minimize them possibly, but we have five stacks of lawyers for our company, I don't see them going anywhere. We need lawyers all the time. >> I see that in the press sometimes, yeah it's going to get disrupted. I don't see it happening. Okay we were having a great conversation off-camera about what makes a good ICO. You see, you have a huge observation space. And you were very opinionated. A lot of companies are out there just floating a token because they're trying to raise money. And they could do the same thing with Ethereum or Bitcoin. >> That's correct. >> Your thoughts? >> My thoughts are that it's very important for companies who are sophisticated, I think, to start by giving away a little bit of equity in the business. And that if you want to be in the blockchain space, and you really firmly believe you have a model to have a token within a decentralized application, I would still start by finding quality investors in the space, in the world. They might be still in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley didn't just disappear overnight now that the blockchain is out. I am all for the fact that Silicon Valley no longer has as much of a grip on tech because of their blockchain world. And they're not seeing as much deal flow, and there's not as much reliance on venture capitalists, that's exciting to me. But let's not forget the value, that top-tier VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Vinod Khosla. and Fintech VCs like Commerce Ventures and Nyca Partners in New York, Propel VC, these are good Fintech VC arms that continue to time and time again add immense value to companies. >> And they have networks. They add value. >> They have strong-valued networks, but they're just not going to disappear. And those VCs, if they've invested into a company, took a board seat, fostered their growth, taught them what it means to actually be a real business that's growing at 7-15% week over week, maybe two years down the line, after they've given away a board seat to someone like Nyca Partners, I would be interested in understanding what your token economics look like. Now that you have a revenue generating business, how you've placed a token model into this already running business that makes 25 to 50 grand a month and you have a team of 10, self-sustaining themselves off of revenue. Much more intriguing of a conversation. What's happening today in the space is, hey my buddy Jim and Steve and I came up with an idea for this business. There's going to be a token, and we're starting a private pre-sale tomorrow. I'm going to give you 300% bonus and will you be my advisor? And they're going to start raising capital because of an idea. You know what we used to say in the Silicon Valley startup world, you can raise on just a PowerPoint. I think in the blockchain world, you could raise on just an idea? And then maybe a white paper? And the white paper is one page? And so you've raised a bunch of capital, you have a white paper. >> Now you got to build it. >> Now you got to build, you got to write a smart contract, you got to build it, you got to do it, and then everyone loses excitement and it goes back to our previous conversation the development talent. So, another thing not being discussed in the space is company employee retention, right? So if you have a growing number of ICOs, that have very large budgets because investors have found a way to sink millions of dollars into a company early, you've got $5 million in the hands of a company to start, well this company can afford to pay someone a very ridiculous salary to come join them to write the smart contract now. So they could offer an engineer 500 Eth a month to come join them for three months. So you have good engineers just bouncing from one ICO to the next and as soon as the ICO goes live, they quit. This is a problem to companies who are-- >> It's migration, out migration. >> How do you retain, even capital? >> Companies like Hosho, ShapeShift, companies that are selling picks and shovels of the industry, that want to be household names in the space, we have to really think about how we're going to retain our employees in the space. >> So the recruitment and bringing on the new generation, we were also talking off camera about Bill Tye and the younger generation and kind of riffing on the notion that, because there is a new set of mission-driven developers and builders, on the business side as well. Your thoughts and reaction to what you see and what you see that's good and what you see that we need more of? >> So the most powerful thing in the blockchain space that I think is so exciting is that you have a lot of people between the age of 25 and 35 that don't come from money, that didn't go to Stanford, didn't go to Y Combinator, they're probably not white, from-- >> John: Ivy League schools. >> Ivy League schools. I'm not trying to make it about race, but if you're a white male and went to Stanford and went to Y Combinator, chances of you raising VC money on sand hill are a lot higher, right? And you have a guy looking like me who didn't go to Stanford, doesn't come from money, running up and down sand hill, I have personally faced that battle and it wasn't easy. And we were based in Vegas and so being based in Vegas, I'd also have to deal with so why do you live in Vegas? When are you going to move to Silicon Valley? And if we invest in you, you're going to open an office in sand hill right? And now in the blockchain world, what's exciting is you have so many heavy-hitters running as founders, some of the most successful companies in the space, who don't come from money and a big prestigious background, but they're honest, they're hard-working, they're putting in 12 to 15 hours of work every single day, seven days a week. And to space, six weeks is like six years. And we all have a level of trust that goes back to times when we were all running struggling startups. And so our bond is, to me, even more significant than what must have been between Keith Rabois and Peter Thiel in the PayPal Mafia. We have our own mafias being formed of much stronger bonds of younger people who will be able to share much more significant deal flow so if the PayPal Mafia was able to join forces to punch out companies like eBay and Square, wait 'til companies in this space, we have young, heavy-hitters right now who are non-reliant on some of the more traditional older folks. Wait 'til you see what happens in the next couple years. >> Hartej, great conversation. And I want to get one more question in. We've seen Keiretsu Forum, mafias, teams more than ever as community becomes an integral part of vetting and by the way trust, you have unwritten rules. I mean baseball, Dave and I used to do sports analogies. >> Self-governance. >> Reggie Jackson talked about unwritten rules and it works. If you beam the batter, the other guy, your best star, your side's going to get beamed. That's an unwritten rule. These are what keeps things going, balanced through the course of a season. What are the unwritten rules in the Ethos right now? >> Honesty, transparency, and that's the key. We need self-governance. This is a very unregulated market. There's rules being broken by people who are ignorant to the rules. The most common rule I've seen being broken is by people who are not broker dealers, running around fundraising capital, they don't even know what an institutional advisor license is. They don't know what a Series 7 and a Series 63 is. I asked a guy just last night, he said I'm pooling capital, I'm syndicating, let me know if you want in on the deal. And I said when did you take your Series 7? He goes what's that? Get away from me. You're an American, you need to look up what US securities laws are and make sure that you're playing by the rules and if someone who doesn't know the rules has entered our inner circle of investors, of advisors, of people sharing deal flow, we have a good network of people that are closing the loop for companies, whether it's lawyers, investors, exchanges, security auditors, people who write smart contracts, dev shops, people who write white papers, PR marketing, people who do the road show, there's a full circle-- >> So people are actually doing work to put into the community, to know your neighbor if you will, know the deals that are going down, to identify potential trip wires that are being established by either bad actors or-- >> KYC, AML, this is a new space that's also attracting people that have a criminal background. Right? And that's just a harsh reality of the space. That in the United States if you have a felony on your record, maybe getting a job has become really difficult and you figured let's do an ICO, no one's going to check my record. That is a reality of the space. Another reality is the money that was invested into this entire ICO clean. Right, that's a massive issue for the US government right now. It's been less than 15 hours since the SEC has issued actually subpoenas to people on this exact topic, today. >> This is a great topic, we'd like to do more on. >> Dozens of them. >> We'd like to continue to keep in touch with you on The Cube. Obviously you're welcome anytime, loved your insight. Certainly we'd love to have you be an advisor on our mission, you're welcome anytime. >> For sure, let's talk about it. Come out to Las Vegas. Hosho's always happy to host you. >> John And Dave: We're there all the time. >> The Cube lives at the sands. >> It's our second home. >> Come by Hosho's office and let us know. Vegas is our home. We are hosting a conference in Vegas after DEFCON. So DEFCON is the biggest security conference in the world. You have the best black hats and white hats show up as security experts in Vegas and right on the tail end of it, Hosho's going to host a very exclusive invite-only conference. >> What's it called? Just Hosho Conference? >> Just Blockchain. It'll be called the just, it'll be by the Just Blockchain Group and Hosho's the main backer behind it. >> Well we appreciate your integrity and your sharing here on The Cube, and again you're paying it forward in the community, that's great. Ethos we love that. That's our mission here, paying it forward content. Here in the Bahamas. Live coverage here at PolyCon 18. We're talking about securitized token, a decentralized future for awesome things happening. I'm Jeff Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

(digital clicking noise) >> Hi. Lisa Martin with the CUBE. On the ground at Google for the 6th annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards event. We're very excited to be here. And now to be joined by the founder of CloudNOW, Jocelyn Degance Graham. Welcome back to the CUBE. >> Lisa, we are so happy to have you and the CUBE back for the second year. So our 6th annual event and the second year that you've been broadcasting. We're just really delighted to have your team be able to shine a spotlight on the incredible accomplishments of these women in tech. >> It's always so inspiring, Jocelyn, I was telling you before we went live, that I love reading about the people that you're honoring. But you yourself have been awarded a number of times. So you're quite the women in technology as well. >> (laughs) >> I wanted to talk a little bit about CloudNOW and what you've guys have done. Two really big announcements this year. Tell us about that. >> So the big things we've really been working on for 2017 are the scholarships, Lisa. I have to say of all the professional things this year, I really am the most heartened by the work in the scholarships. It is what is most important to me. As so we start by identifying two exceptional academic partners. We had looked at a number of ... We had read the research, we've been looking at how do you most make impact. And have more women join tech, join technical ranks, right? And so there's been a lot of debate and a lot of research about that. And what we have found is that it's very important for women to have a role model in an organization. It does not necessarily even have to be a mentor. It needs to be a role model. The other piece of the equation is the ambition gap. So it's not just about getting tons of women in the pipeline It's also about getting women that really want to take it the whole way. So this kind of combination factor of that next generation of leader that's really going to be able to get to that upper echelon of office. So the academic partners that we selected, we feel like they've really have done a great job of identifying those future leaders. For us to be able to place our investments with them. To gather corporate partnerships that are willing to be able to fund that next generation of leaders. So we have exceptional partners. We have exceptional academic institutions. If I can, I'd love to tell you just a little bit about the academic partners that we've selected. >> Yes, absolutely, please do. >> Yeah, so the first one is Holberton School. And Holberton is in San Francisco. They have a really unique model. They don't charge students any kind of tuition up front. What they do is once the student has gotten their first full-time job, then they start paying back what they would have paid in tuition. And so, it's a remarkably equitable kind of format for education. >> Lisa: It is. >> It's very different than what most people are seeing for colleges and universities. The problem is in how expensive it is to live in San Francisco. >> Lisa: Right. >> So the scholarships are actually a living wage stipend. Because the school is too intensive for the students to actually be able to work. It's a very compact program. Instead of four year, the students are done in two. So that's our first academic partner. The students are getting jobs at fantastic companies like LinkedIn, and NASA. And they are actually out-competing MIT and Stanford grads for those jobs. >> That's phenomenal. >> It is phenomenal. So we are more than happy to suggest to our corporate funders that they put their money on those bets. >> Lisa: Excellent. >> So we've got Google and we've got Accenture that are funding those Holberton scholarships. And then the second academic partner is in Bangalore, India. And it's Shanti Bhavan. You might have seen this with the Netflix documentary, "Daughters of Destiny." >> Lisa: It was incredible. >> Absolutely incredible and absolutely moving. The Shanti Bhavan school, for your viewers that are unfamiliar with it, they take children from the poorest of the poor background, in rural India. They commit to educating these children from the age of four all the way through the university level. The scholarships we put together with the help of Intel and Apcera and CB Technologies are to fund girls studying STEM at the university level in Bangalore. And this is just the beginning, Lisa. We really hope that in 2018 we can increase the number of scholarships and we really hope that we'll be able to increase the number of corporate partnerships as well. Because these students are doing phenomenal things and we really believe that they're going to be taking their place along side any of what the Ivy League graduates would be doing. >> I love that. And in our last minute, talk to us about Google and Google's involvement with you. Because that's pretty remarkable what you've been able to achieve for CloudNOW with Google. >> Thank you. The Google involvement has definitely been an involving partnership. And the funding for Google actually happened ... It was a happy circumstance that I ran into Vint Serf at a party and got introduced to him. I gave him a quick 30 second overview of what CloudNOW had been doing and he handed me his business card and said, "It sounds really interesting, send me an email." >> Wow, from one of the fathers of the internet. That's pretty amazing. >> I couldn't believe how accessible or easy-going he was. But I went ahead and I emailed him. I said, "What I'm looking for is some money for a scholarship fund. I'm not asking you for it, I just know if you were to endorse this, the money would very easily be found." So I went to sleep. Woke up, the very next morning there was a response from Vint and he had sent me the money. >> Oh my goodness. >> And we were done. The fund was closed, we were on our way. >> Wow. >> And what he said in response, it was so beautiful, Lisa. He said, "One does what one can to be of service." That message, I've been really holding it with me for the last several months. "One does what one can to be of service" Because I think it's just a very inspiring message, especially as we all go into 2018 and think about what we're grateful for. I hope there are people in your audience that feel like they can do what they can and will join us in this very heart-felt mission. >> Wow. You are so inspiring Jocelyn. With what you and your partners have created with CloudNOW. We thank you so much for asking us to be here. Our second year with the CUBE. It's a great event to cover. But be proud of what you've accomplished. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Because it's incredible. >> Thank you for all of your support, it really means a lot to me. >> Excellent. We want to thank you for watching the CUBE, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at Google for the 6th annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud event. Thanks for watching. (digital beat music)