>> Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to The Cube coverage here live in San Francisco for Google Cloud's conference Next 2018, #GoogleNext18. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, my cohost all week. Third day of three days of wall to wall live coverage. Our next guest, Carol Carpenter, Vice President of Product Marketing for Google Cloud. And Ayin Vala, Chief Data Science Foundation for Precision Medicine. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> So congratulations, VP of Product Marketing. Great job getting all these announcements out, all these different products. Open source, big query machine learning, Istio, One dot, I mean, all this, tons of products, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. It was a tremendous amount of work. Great team. >> So you guys are starting to show real progress in customer traction, customer scale. Google's always had great technology. Consumption side of it, you guys have made progress. Diane Green mentioned on stage, on day one, she mentioned health care. She mentioned how you guys are organizing around these verticals. Health care is one of the big areas. Precision Medicine, AI usage, tell us about your story. >> Yes, so we are a very small non-profit. And we are at the intersection of data science and medical science and we work on projects that have non-profits impact and social impact. And we work on driving and developing projects that have social impact and in personalized medicine. >> So I think it's amazing. I always think with medicine, right, you look back five years wherever you are and you look back five years and think, oh my god, that was completely barbaric, right. They used to bleed people out and here, today, we still help cancer patients by basically poisoning them until they almost die and hopefully it kills the cancer first. You guys are looking at medicine in a very different way and the future medicine is so different than what it is today. And talk about, what is Presicion Medicine? Just the descriptor, it's a very different approach to kind of some of the treatments that we still use today in 2018. It's crazy. >> Yes, so Presicion Medicine has the meaning of personalized medicine. Meaning that we hone it into smaller population of people to trying to see what is the driving factors, individually customized to those populations and find out the different variables that are important for that population of people for detection of the disease, you know, cancer, Alzheimer's, those things. >> Okay, talk about the news. Okay, go ahead. >> Oh, oh, I was just going to say. And to be able to do what he's doing requires a lot of computational power to be able to actually get that precise. >> Right. Talk about the relationship and the news you guys have here. Some interesting stuff. Non-profits, they need compute power, they need, just like an eneterprise. You guys are bringing some change. What's the relationship between you guys? How are you working together? >> So one of our key messages here at this event is really around making computing available for everyone. Making data and analytics and machine learning available for everyone. This whole idea of human-centered AI. And what we've realized is, you know, data is the new natural resource. >> Yeah. >> In the world these days. And companies that know how to take advantage and actually mine insights from the data to solve problems like what they're solving at Precision Medicine. That is really where the new breakthroughs are going to come. So we announced a program here at the event, It's called Data Solutions for Change. It's from Google Cloud and it's a program in addition to our other non-profit programs. So we actually have other programs like Google Earth for non-profits. G Suite for non-profits. This one is very much focused on harnessing and helping non-profits extract insights from data. >> And is it a funding program, is it technology transfer Can you talk about, just a little detail on how it actually works. >> It's actually a combination of three things. One is funding, it's credits for up to $5,000 a month for up to six months. As well as customer support. One thing we've all talked about is the technology is amazing. You often also need to be able to apply some business logic around it and data scientists are somewhat of a challenge to hire these days. >> Yeah. >> So we're also proving free customer support, as well as online learning. >> Talk about an impact of the Cloud technology for the non-proit because6 I, you know, I'm seeing so much activity, certainly in Washington D.C. and around the world, where, you know, since the Jobs Act, fundings have changed. You got great things happening. You can have funding on mission-based funding. And also, the legacy of brand's are changing and open source changes So faster time to value. (laughs) >> Right. >> And without all the, you know, expertise it's an issue. How is Cloud helping you be better at what you do? Can you give some examples? >> Yes, so we had two different problems early on, as a small non-profit. First of all, we needed to scale up computationally. We had in-house servers. We needed a HIPAA complaint way to put our data up. So that's one of the reasons we were able to even use Google Cloud in the beginning. And now, we are able to run our models or entire data sets. Before that, we were only using a small population. And in Presicion Medicine, that's very important 'cause you want to get% entire population. That makes your models much more accurate. The second things was, we wanted to collaborate with people with clinical research backgrounds. And we need to provide a platform for them to be able to use, have the data on there, visualize, do computations, anything they want to do. And being on a Cloud really helped us to collaborate much more smoothly and you know, we only need their Gmail access, you know to Gmail to give them access and things. >> Yeah. >> And we could do it very, very quickly. Whereas before, it would take us months to transfer data. >> Yeah, it's a huge savings. Talk about the machine learning, AutoML's hot at the show, obviously, hot trend. You start to see AI ops coming in and disrupt more of the enterprise side but as data scientists, as you look at some of these machine learnings, I mean, you must get pretty excited. What are you thinking? What's your vision and how you going to use, like BigQuery's got ML built in now. This is like not new, it's Google's been using it for awhile. Are you tapping some of that? And what's your team doing with ML? >> Absolutely. We use BigQuery ML. We were able to use a few months in advance. It's great 'cause our data scientists like to work in BigQuery. They used to see, you know, you query the data right there. You can actually do the machine learning on there too. And you don't have to send it to different part of the platform for that. And it gives you sort of a proof of concept right away. For doing deep learning and those things, we use Cloud ML still, but for early on, you want to see if there is potential in a data. And you're able to do that very quickly with BigQuery ML right there. We also use AutoML Vision. We had access to about a thousand patients for MRI images and we wanted to see if we can detect Alzheimer's based on those. And we used AutoML for that. Actually works well. >> Some of the relationships with doctors, they're not always seen as the most tech savvy. So now they are getting more. As you do all this high-end, geeky stuff, you got to push it out to an interface. Google's really user-centric philosophy with user interfaces has always been kind of known for. Is that in Sheets, is that G Suite? How will you extend out the analysis and the interactions. How do you integrate into the edge work flow? You know? (laughs) >> So one thing I really appreciated for Google Cloud was that it was, seems to me it's built from the ground up for everyone to use. And it was the ease of access was very, was very important to us, like I said. We have data scientisits and statisticians and computer scientists onboard. But we needed a method and a platform that everybody can use. And through this program, they actually.. You guys provide what's called Qwiklab, which is, you know, screenshot of how to spin up a virtual machine and things like that. That, you know, a couple of years ago you have to run, you know, few command lines, too many command lines, to get that. Now it's just a push of a button. So that's just... Makes it much easier to work with people with background and domain knowledge and take away that 80% of the work, that's just a data engineering work that they don't want to do. >> That's awesome stuff. Well congratulations. Carol, a question to you is How does someone get involved in the Data Solutions for Change? An application? Online? Referral? I mean, how do these work? >> All of the above. (John laughs) We do have an online application and we welcome all non-profits to apply if they have a clear objective data problem that they want to solve. We would love to be able to help them. >> Does scope matter, big size, is it more mission? What's the mission criteria? Is there a certain bar to reach, so to speak, or-- >> Yeah, I mean we're most focused on... there really is not size, in terms of size of the non-profit or the breadth. It's much more around, do you have a problem that data and analytics can actually address. >> Yeah. >> So really working on problems that matter. And in addition, we actually announced this week that we are partnering with United Nations on a contest. It's called Sustainable.. It's for Visualize 2030 >> Yeah. >> So there are 17 sustainable development goals. >> Right, righr. >> And so, that's aimed at college students and storytelling to actually address one of these 17 areas. >> We'd love to follow up after the show, talk about some of the projects. since you have a lot of things going on. >> Yeah. >> Use of technology for good really is important right now, that people see that. People want to work for mission-driven organizations. >> Absolutely >> This becomes a clear citeria. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on today. Acute coverage here at Google Could Next 18 I'm John Furrier with Jeff Fricks. Stay with us. More coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back, here, when we here live, it's theCube, here in San Francisco live for Red Hat, Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. Our next three guests is the Delisa Alexander, Executive Vice President, Chief People Officer at Red Hat. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> Zui Dighe, who's the... Did I get that right? Zz-- >> Zui, yeah, mm-hmm. >> Zui? OK, winner of the Open Source Academic Award from Duke University, Go Blue Devils (chuckles). >> Zui: Yes. >> And we have Dana Lewis, winner of Open AP with OpenAPS, which stands for? >> The Open Source Artificial Pancreas System. >> Artificial open-source Pancreas System, great stuff. So congratulations, you guys are all award winners. Before we get into some of the questions, love your applications, talk about the program. What is this about? What's the awards program here at Red Hat Summit, and why are these guys here? >> So as Red Hat, we believe, as an open-source leader, we have a responsibility to promote women in technology and particularly women in open-source. And so, one of the things we thought we could do is to create an award that really spotlights the contributions women are making in open-source to inspire future generations to consider being open-source developers or contributors. >> Congrat, Delisa, love that you're doing that. It's fantastic. We'll start with the young student gun here. What's your degree, first of all? What are you studying? >> I'm studying biomedical engineering and computer science. >> John: Tough major, huh? >> Yep, very tough. (Delisa laughing) Not easy, but I'm-- >> This is an easy-- >> First question is, how do you in a block chain impact? It's funny, Jim always asked that question on day one. No, in all serious, tell about what your application is. This is super important. >> Yeah, yeah. So I'm basically working on researching and creating a tracking system for vaccines that enter into developing countries. So through that, you're able to understand how exactly do vaccines travel through these countries as well as where does the system break. And if you can pinpoint that, you can actually solve the problem. >> And how did you get the idea? How did this all come together? >> I was in a research course at Duke, which has collaboration with the university in Uganda, and we actually got to travel to Uganda and interview various stakeholders, pharmaceutical companies, health system, and understand how does the-- We wanted to be in vaccines, but we didn't know what exactly to do. And so after interviewing, I kind of came up with the idea of why don't we actually put a tracker on these devices that gives off the GPS location and the temperature so we can actually understand the entire system. >> It's going to get that ground truth, too, and again, the local areas. >> Yeah. >> The big walk away, what, about vaccines. This is important to track it from the origination to destination and making sure it all kind of matches up. >> Making sure, first of all, you don't have any data on exactly where they're going because this box is just carried by hand. And the pharmaceutical companies, once they ship the vaccines into Uganda, after that, they don't provide any data on what's going on. So that data is also important, and it's also, you want to know when does the system break because often in last end, when the vaccines are actually administered, they've already gone out of their cold chain cycle, and so they don't work anymore. >> That's a great story. How 'about your story? This is a good one. This is a real practical one for people with diabetes. Talk about, first of all, show the product 'cause it's always good to a little live prop there. So turn, yeah, there it is. So what is that? >> So this is an open-source hardware board. It's actually got an Intel Edison on the back side. But what this does is, it talks to my insulin pump and my continuous glucose monitor, brings the data together, runs it through an algorithm, and sends commands back to the insulin pump to tell it what to do. So this is what we call a close-loop system where we have the computer doing the math instead of the human with diabetes doing the math several times throughout the day. >> And does it do auto-injections as well? So it kind of feeds the glucose levels as well? So it's data-- >> Right. So the insulin pump is automatically dosing the insulin, and we also have a continuous feed of the blood sugar every five minutes as well. >> And that's what you mean by close-loop. >> Exactly. >> For people have these monitors, they have remotes, statistics. Does it talk to a device as well? The mobile device, how does that work? >> Yeah, so I can glance down at my watch and see how I'm doing, on my phone. My loved ones, wherever they are, can see how things are going. So if they need to intervene, they're able to do that remotely. So it really provides peace of mind as well as a lot better outcomes for those of us living with Type I diabetes. >> And what was the motivation here, to get involved deeply in this project? >> It was really selfish, I wanted to sleep, and I couldn't hear my CGM alarm, my glucose alarm. And so my project actually started of, just get the data off to make a louder alarm. And then we built an algorithm that allowed us to look into the future and do proactive alarms. And then we worked with other people to actually communicate with the insulin pump, and that's how we progressed to closing the loop. And because I've been helped so much by other people in open-source, it was a no-brainer to also make our work open-source. >> And so you open-source everything. What other progress can you share? I mean, you have predictive analytics that tell you that, "OK, I'm going to go for a hike soon, "so therefore, I'm going to do this," and all kinds of cool data gathering. Does that play into it? Is it a lifestyle and-- >> Absolutely. >> So it's like a FitBit meets close-loop. (Women laugh) >> It's more like taking standard medical devices and boosting their capacities with the help of computing technologies. It's not fancy machine learning. It's the same math a person with diabetes would do, but the benefit is, it's automated to go every five minutes, and it doesn't fall asleep, it doesn't get lazy, it doesn't round up or vary down. It's going to be giving really precise increments so that when your situation changes, you skip a meal that you though you were going to eat, you're going to go hiking, for whatever reason, if you're going up or down more than expected, it can react instantaneously and much better than a human can. >> I'm so glad you're doing that, too. How does someone get involved with this project? Obviously, it's open-source software, but you have devices. Is it in market? Is there? >> So this is an open-source project because we are not a company, so we cannot distribute medical devices. That's frowned upon by the FDA. And so this is an open-source DIY project for people who want to get involved either to help with the project or build one themselves. They can go to OpenAPS.org. We've written a plain language reference design to help anybody, whether you're a person with diabetes, a loved one, a healthcare provider, a researcher or developer understand how the system works, and then that leads you to the documentation of how to build one as well as to the code where anybody can get involved and help out. >> So that's the loophole, (Dana laughs) to say it plainly, get around that whole being a company. You build your own. >> Yes. >> So that's the way, that's here. OK, great, so congratulations. So where's this all going? This is fantastic, this story. How many other people are involved in the program that you have? Share more about how people can get involved, too. >> This is our fourth year of having the program, and we're really just thrilled with the quality of the nominations. We had over 100 nominations. Our judges then narrowed the field down to 10, and then the community selected the winners. We don't really see an end to this. We just see the community adding and growing organically. So one thing we did this time is, we introduced our winners to our CO.LAB students, and so now they're creating a network. And that network density is just increasing and improving and, I think, getting stronger. >> It's really amazing. And one thing I've always loved about open-source, and you guys see the benefit of it, obviously, with winning and succeeding, is that democratization and community are coming together at a whole nother level. And I think what's interesting about the projects that you guys have is, you got good things happening with tech. So it's tech for good. But since Obama put the Jobs Act in, means fund these projects now as entrepreneurial ventures and be mission-driven OFFLEM. You don't have to do it as a non-profit. So we're seeing a huge growth in entrepreneurial activity around tech for good on projects that would never would funded before. So you're seeing a whole nother generation of great tools and technologies saying, "Hey, let's solve a problem." >> Yeah, and I think that's one of thing I love about us both being in healthcare is, it really shows that there's amazing applications. We can take this technology and apply it in healthcare and do it in different ways, and it doesn't have to be a company right away. It doesn't have to be either a for profit or non for profit. There's a lot of ways open-source is bringing people together to solve the very problems we need to be solving. >> Do you feel good that you built something great like that, and think now you got people using the software? What's the feeling like? >> Oh, it's just incredibly rewarding. I mean, myself, I just have the peace of mind to be able to go to sleep at night. That is a priceless feeling, but then when I hear other people using it, they build the project for different reasons. Some, they want to be able to remotely monitor their loved ones. Others are doing it for their children so that they have better health outcomes. But there's just these amazing stories outpouring from the community. And to me, that's the beauty of open sources. You can really apply it however you need to apply it to your lifestyle. >> Where can someone get involved in your project? Is there like a GitHub repository? >> Yep. >> Is there a site? >> Everything's on GitHub for us, but I would go to OpenAPS.org first. It links to the documentation and the code where people can connect. >> OpenAPS.org. >> That's right. >> OK, great. How 'about your project? How do people get involved with what you're doing? >> Ours is on GitHub right now, so you can get involved through there. But I guess we're kind of right now developing in the backend stages. Soon we'll be at that stage where you can contribute more. And right now, we've just been using other open-source libraries and kind of contributed in that way. But actually, we talked earlier about how do you get involved in open-source, and especially being a student, I kind of fell into coding because of open-source in a sense >> Working on your project? where, yeah, yeah, yeah. So coming into college, I wanted to apply the engineering concepts I was learning in the classroom, and I got involved in a lot of entrepreneurship on campus, and through that, I was asked to make a front-end interface, and I didn't really know how to go about doing that. So then I found an open-source library stumbling around that was doing a similar thing. And that's how I kind of taught myself, and then from there, I branched out and learned more and more. And I think for any budding student, budding entrepreneur, open-source is a great way to take your ideas further. And my interest is in healthcare, so that's where I went, but anyone could have an idea, "Oh, I want to start this business in this way." And they might not think that open-source is a way to go about doing that, but it is a great way to learn more. >> It's a good way to change a lot of things, not just career or projects. >> Yeah. >> There's a nonlinear progression of learning happening. You can come in, you're stumbling around, quote, learning. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's not like chapter one course, online course. Go to chapter two. >> Right, that is true. >> There's a YouTube, there's stuff on GitHub, open-source. There's people involved. This points to a whole new generational shift. >> It is. >> Of learning, connecting, you're tapping into it. >> It's so exciting because she's the role model we're talking about. We want girls to see that you can become a coder later. You don't have to necessarily start-- >> She's 14, she'd coding in unity. >> Yeah! >> I tell a soliloquy, great. (Delisa laughing) Do some smart contracts and get the bobchain action. (Delisa laughing) Bobchain's the future, you're the Bitcoin in intheoreum. Some cool stuff. >> Yeah. Congratulations, thanks for doing this. >> Thank you very much. >> Very inspirational, and thanks for sharing the story on theCUBE, and keep in touch, thanks for coming, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great women in tech, great leaders doing some great stuff. Award winners, celebrities here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Be back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic musical flourish)

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering Red Hat summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat okay welcome back everyone would live here in San Francisco California the Moscone West for the cubes exclusive coverage of Red Hat summit 2018 I'm John for the co-host of the cube was my closest week analyst John Troy a co-founder of tech reckoning advisory and Community Development firm our next two guests is erica kochi co-founder of unicef innovation the United Nations Children's Fund and Mike Walker director of open innovation labs at Red Hat welcome to the cube thanks for coming joining us thanks love this story so Erica take a minute to talk about what you're working on at UNICEF you guys doing a lot of great stuff you got the relationship with Red Hat innovation labs but you doing some pretty amazing things take them into explain what you're doing at UNICEF some of the projects and what we're going to talk about here with the school and the magic fox all the greatness sure so UNICEF innovation essentially what we do is take technology and apply it to the problems facing children around the world and we do that in a variety of ways I think the things that we're probably most most known for is our work in mobile technology to connect frontline health workers and young people to to governments and have let them have a say in what's happening in in you know the halls of government and we have a program called you report which has five million young people from all over the world who are talking directly to their government representatives they need that now more than ever we certainly do yeah so open source obviously with red hat big shared vision talk about the shared mission like what's going on but there where's the connection I was the open source was great for society we've seen the benefits all around the world how is this translating for you guys yeah so I've been at Red Hat for a while and obviously we're the world's largest open source enterprise open source software company and I as a consultant been able to see Red Hat open source software used for many different purposes in every vertical you can think of but this one was really unique because we found a natural partnership I think between some of UNICEF innovations vision to use open source and open principles for maximum impact for good and so when I learned about innovation at UNICEF really by chance I just ran into a colleague at a meeting in New York and and she gave me a few words about it I said this is incredible because we can leverage all of what we learned at Red Hat our knowledge of open source to impact people and culture and not just for technical reasons and and partnered with UNICEF to make maximum social impact for children that need it most and you got red house key a technology company a lot of smart people there but with open source there's been a DNA in your bloodstream of the company around democratization and now we're out in the open with everyone online and everything's good this is a democratization piece talk about some of that the things that you guys are doing with red hat what specifically are you celebrating together here so we had a great collaboration with with Red Hat there at their labs program which really took a look at our challenge of using big data to read or understand what's happening on the ground especially in schools in countries that are either coming out of emergencies or have limited access to a lot of the parts of the country and so we layered satellite imagery information on poverty other sets of data you can really get a clear picture about where we should be allocating our resources and how we should be planning for emergencies and this collaboration just just finished up a couple days ago right and it's really been great what's some of the impact give an example of some of the use cases so actually saving time money will be things around yeah what what are some of the impact things that you see with this project what are some of the things a lot of countries right now are thinking about how they can connect all of their schools and make sure all of it their schools are online and give children this access to information that's really essential to to thrive in the world of today and tomorrow and if you don't know where your schools are and you don't know if they're connected or not and you can't see you know what else is happening it's in the socio-economic way in those areas it's really hard to figure out what to do and where to start so we're really just at the beginning of that process to try to connect every school in the world and we're at the moment we're trying to lay the groundwork to understand where we're at and where we need a level of insight you're providing once you connect the schools you can get people can know what to do and how to align with what's happening it's interesting I was just in Puerto Rico a couple weeks ago and the young kids there have self formed their own blockchain network between the schools and they're teaching themselves how to program because they recognize that to get out of their world and the mess that they're challenging through now post-hurricane they want to participate in the new economy so as someone not knowing that if I know I could help you're kind of providing a window into that kind of dynamic where is that kind of the use case is that how it's working so it's but participation and contribution is absolutely participation is key you know for young people and they need to it like really learn how to acquire the skills that they're gonna need to you know become successful productive adults in the future and school is you know one of the entry points to do that so that's really important and everyone loves that - yeah I'm kind of curious about the structure of the project today in the keynote you know Jim why does she start us off by saying well you know we can't plan everything we've got to be a little bit more agile here's a framework for how to how to really approach problems when we really don't know what the outcome or even what we're gonna hit so can you talk a little bit maybe about the structure of the of the process and did you know did you start with a blank piece of paper or do you know how did how did you figure out the pathway to the ultimate outcome here yeah I can take it first um that's a great question because at labs we experiment with ways to get fast feedback and really in a very short amount of time usually one to three months and a very limited amount of funds how can we make maximum impact using open technologies and open practices so the project was already in progress like most IT projects are right Gardi been some research we have data scientists to work with and one of the first things we did was really talk about really our concerns and fears about how we might work together using an exercise called how might we we kind of came together and said how might we solve this problem or that problem and just got it out on the table one of the aspects that I think work really is dedicating a small team in a residency style engagement where we worked off premise so Red Hatters left their office UNICEF folks left their office we came together in akola works based in New York City that was fairly convenient and you know we all focused on a tough problem and we decided really early on that in order to make sure that this problem actually would be usable and in the hands of end users in the field across the world we needed to get face to face so we made a trip to Latin America to work with a UNICEF field office to get fast feet up feedback on prototypes and that helped us adjust what we ended up shipping as the product at the end of the two months cycle Erika how was the outcome for you and your game it's great I think you know one of the things that really aligns RedHat and UNICEF is not just a commitment to open source and the values around that but also this agile methodology I think that you know to really move something a product forward or sort of a program forward you need to step away from the daily part of life you know and move away from the the email and the connection to the laptop and the phone and I think we were able to do that I also think that you need to ground truth things and so that you know that trip to the field and to really understand the context and the problems that that people are facing is is completely critical to success and that's like agile programming you kind of gotta get get out in the front lines not ask about the data I'm really intrigued so you got multiple data sources coming in love the satellite thing you're changing lives but you're saving lives too is your talk about you may name real-time efforts here what's the data science thing what's the tech behind I mean is it ingesting data as a third party data Z how does it work I mean can you share some some of the mechanics on the date of data science piece er yeah I think there's probably a lot we can talk about I could talk about data all day love data but some of the things that I think were fundamentally really exciting about this project and about what UNICEF innovation has done so let's take for example Facebook they have a whole lot of data but that's one company and it's sort of one lens to the world right it's it's quite broad and we get a lot of information but it's one company what UNICEF innovation has done is found ways to partner with private and public companies and private and public data sources in a way that maintains the security and integrity of that data so that it's not exposing proprietary information but they've been able to create those that community essentially that's willing to share information to solve a really tough challenge for social good and so we have actually a really wide variety of data at our disposal and our job was to create a sandbox that allow data scientists to really both proactively plan for things that might happen and reactively plan when events occur when we don't even know what that event might be so you know I like to think back to Jim Whitehurst's speech last year at summit where I said planning is dead we've got to try learn and modify I think that's exactly what we aim to build a platform that you know hasn't been planned for any one event or action but provides the flexibility for data scientists to try experiment pull different data together learn from it sharing Maps we integrated geospatial data and maps to be able to pass this along quickly and then modify based on the results so we can more quickly achieve something with the greatest impact that's awesome yeah so for example if you take you know you take like for example epidemics right so many factors are so many different types of data are needed to really understand what's happening in an epidemic for example take Zika you have temperature right mosquitos only breed at a certain at a certain temperature you have poverty or which really indicates standing water where mosquitoes can breed you have socioeconomic factors so it does the house more likely does it have mosquito screens or not and then you have the social right what are people talking about what are they concerned about and I think like a really interesting picture emerges when you can start to layer all of these kinds of data and that really helps us see where we should be focusing it's great discovery information using the data to drive kind of we're to look at and we're to focus efforts exactly and also a global footprint right and in previous decades maybe this would have run on a piece with some sort of a proprietary GIS thing or or yeah I'm not even sure right you chip around discs maybe but I mean not not to be too product oriented right built on OpenShift we've seen a whole lot this week right these global footprint you could take it live on any cloud I assume that's a piece of it right at global accessibility now for they out for the the resulting application absolutely and we want to take you know what we've done in one scenario and apply it to many others in many other locations and so being an open source is key for this because we wouldn't be able to do this in other locations are replicated just as easily handed to local folks have them an adapted and/or take it further or have other people work on it whether it's academics other companies us nice I love the structure like how its agile I got a Eric I ought to ask you about this because we're seeing a big trend with open source obviously that's well on its way to becoming it is the standard of doing software but mission driven technology activities aren't just nonprofits anymore you starting to see collaboration the JOBS Act that Obama put in place really set the table for new kind of funding so you've seen a lot more younger people coming in and saying hey you know what I can build it on the cloud and grants aware but the code gets live on right so you seeing a new flywheel around mission driven nonprofits and for-profits a new kind of entrepreneurship culture can you share insight into how this is developer you see a lot of it you have a lot of thoughts on this your them please so I think that you know as technology companies become so much more influential in our lives you know they're not just showing you the news anymore they were they're moving into every aspect of our lives whether it's in our into our homes or even inside our bodies that they're they're occupying as so much more influential role in an individual's life with that comes a tremendous amount of responsibility and I think that while it's not enough to say you should do good because it's the right thing to do I think that employees also really demand it I think that you know and that shift will occur because employees realize that they want to they want to be doing good in the world and if they're gonna be influencing so many people's lives that's really really it's a new citizenship model for the younger generations early Millennials want to work in a company that's not just the profit hungar motive but also there's some dynamics going on with the infrastructure world you look at Facebook as a classic example you know the word weaponizing content has been a bad thing but we've been talking about in the queue there's actually a reverse of that polar opposite which is you can weaponize content for good meaning that all the same principles that do bad things can be used for good things so this is where we started to see a lot more people saying hey let's do more of the fad and punish so the new kind of rules are developing in the society so I find it fascinating and I'm just curious is this known within the societal entrepreneurship culture or what's the what's your view on how to do more how to do better I'm doing a lot of work in what AI is gonna be meaning what's what it's gonna mean for children in the world and you know there are so many opportunities we've been talking about some of them but there are also a lot of risks right what does it mean when your child's best friend is a robot what does that change about our us us you know as human beings and so I think it's you know you have to look at both sides and you have to be very conscious about designing the technology that you want to see in the world that's gonna make the world a good place to live in and I think that there definitely is an awakening and that's going and there's a lot this is a first generation set of problems that social entrepreneurship brings a just society I mean who sets the policy which side of the road the cars drive on or you know there's these new issues that are evolving that I've never been seen before you know cyber bullying - all kinds of things happening so congratulations on all those success so what's the forecast for Red Hat innovation has more of this gonna continue double down on it what are the things do you guys have going on yeah so Labs is growing quite largely we are now live in North America amia and a pack with plans to expand extend to Latin in the future and we're growing quite quickly in terms of our ability to execute I guess you know the labs team is relatively small a small number of specialists but we are all of RedHat so the way we operate is based on what we're trying to achieve together we will look at all of red hat and sometimes even outside of red hat to figure out who we can bring to the table to help solve that problem and so it allows me to work with our engineering with our business units even with our marketing so we brought marketing in to the first meeting not simply because we're creating a marketing event but we realized we need to advertise internally and externally what we build in order to gain adoption it's part of building a community and what I have found is because Labs has an injective that goes beyond you know simply a technological objective we're aiming to change ways of working and to change culture it's really easy to build a lot of interest and adoption among all Red Hatters to bring them together to solve a tough problem a really an interesting facet a lot about labs I know you do these pop-up labs and I think this was what you know you don't make necessarily make people come to you you son can come to them but I think like you said it's important to get outside your your office and your day-to-day for these focused projects you talked a little bit about your approach to yeah so we've learned a lot you know Labs is almost exactly two years old I think we launched in April of 2016 at OpenStack summit and one thing we learned is you know the world is a big place and we can't necessarily have a physical lab location everywhere so we do have first-class facilities in Boston Singapore in London but I would say the large majority of the work efforts we've done to date have been in what we call pop-up labs and what that allows us to do is create that immersion and focus on a tough challenge by getting people out of the office but also provide the ability to go home at the end of the day and have dinner at your home which a lot of people enjoy and from the red head perspective we've got a lot of folks used to travel so we can make that happen meet in the middle and and it's been a good hybrid approach that we end up doing more and more great stuff here actually is my final question for then to take from Jim Whitehouse keynote today how is blockchain changing this open for good economics that's absolutely right and I mean Erika you might want to weigh in as well but I think I love blockchain first of all I love math and I love the science behind it but I love the fact that it was developed in the open it was debated in the open it's radically transparent you can see all of the transactions of anyone in the chain and it's being used in ways that no one ever dreamed of I mean it was meant for a universal currency but you know think about this we might be able to use it as a token system so that we can actually ensure that humanitarian efforts that are done are actually recognized by people that they may not otherwise have funds right someone with very little money can still use so perhaps takers making sure the money gets put to use absolutely and endpoints we have accountability you know we're using it to exchange electronic health records securely and privately with the people that need them and only the people that need them so I don't know where blockchain will be in five years but I am optimistic that I think the mathematics and the fundamental is a blockchain or sound and I think more than anything it's the community that will drive new applications of blockchain and really define and answer that question for you well I know we'll be in New York next week with blockchain for consensus of ennum there's a lot of ents going on we've seen wealthy entrepreneurs donating Bitcoin and aetherium there's a really great project so and a lot of young people love the blockchain and crypto so who knows got to be on that labs we're definitely look you know looking into it and we have a couple experiments around the world that range from trying to do some smart contracts you know in in country environments to taking donations in in blockchain armies Arion cryptocurrencies I think that there are a lot of exciting applications for it in this due to do good space I also think that there's a tremendous amount of hype and you know you really have to ask yourself the key question of like does this need a central trusted Authority or is there one that exists that already is great um and do we need to record every transaction if you can answer those two questions then the other baby going somewhere well great point the other thing I would answer that agree hundred percent and that is is that blockchain and crypto our token economic certainty not the ico scams but is an efficiency heat-seeking missile it it targets efficiencies where there's inefficiencies announced where I see a lot of the action going on and you know efforts and for good are highly inefficient yeah so hey you knows well we'd love blockchain as you can tell we talk about all day long smart contracts token economics thanks for coming on and congratulations on your project thank you you're good to stuff their cube coverage here day two of three days live coverage here in San Francisco the Red Hat summit 2018 moved back after this short break stay with us

(dramatic music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California at theCUBE headquarters and studio. Got exciting next guest Chuck Davis, who's the CTO of Element Data doing a decision cloud, but really, the story is about the role of data in decision-making, biases, cognition, all the stuff that we love around big data. Welcome to theCUBE Conversation. >> Thank you for having me, John. >> We were talking before we came on camera about stories around how decision-making is always grounded in data, and actually, it's analog data, not a lot of digital data. With the emphasis on cloud now, we're seeing data at the center of the value proposition. In fact, at a recent event at AWS, Amazon Web Services, IBM Think a couple weeks earlier, you got blockchain, AI, and data in the middle. For IBM and Amazon, it's cloud-scale and machine learning. Obviously, this is a big part of the culture we're seeing in society globally, not just in North America and the US, but around the world. People are trying to get their handle on all this stuff, so let's have that conversation. >> Absolutely. >> Your thoughts on data science, where it is today. How far has it come over the past 20 years? >> I think it's come tremendously far. There are certain things, obviously, that have happened. These inflection points in the industry that have taken place. One of the big inflection points, obviously, was the reduction of cost of storage, which then led to the advent of big data. Now you can collect more stuff, and it was cheaper to store it. Obviously, you can transmit it much easier. But now I think we're starting to really look at the origins of data itself, and the implications of that. I think that that is really where we're going to spend the next decade or so, is really understanding the things that actually make up the data. I mean, we generate the data ourselves, and so we spent a lot of time in computer science trying to figure out ways of isolating signal and noise. The things that make us uniquely human tend to be characterized as noise, and I think we're starting to finally come around and realize, especially with the advent of AI and ML, that that's not necessarily noise, that it might be the most important signal. >> You know, when I started SiliconANGLE and theCUBE nine years ago, the slogan really was, "Extracting the signal from the noise." But our tagline was, "Where computer science intersects social science." That really wasn't that original. Steve Jobs had the technology/liberal arts kind of signs with Apple, and it was when he was turning around Apple, that was the big comeback, there. But this really was, we're seeing it now, we're seeing a lot of infrastructure shifts happening whether you look at blockchain and cryptocurrency changing the nature of money and decentralization, whether you're seeing things on social media. Data now is really going to be the key equation. You guys are doing something in your company. You've been doing this for 20 years. Take a minute to explain what you're working on. You've been doing this for 20 years, but talk about the project you're executing now. >> Sure. Element Data is concerned with creating a at scale, essentially a decision cloud. What does that really mean? Well, what it means is that if you were to, we're really focused on the psychology of data. Not just data for data's sake, but the psychology of data. What does that mean? It means the way that data is perceived and the way that human beings actually make decisions, and that tends to be based on a series of trade-offs. It's based on our cognitive experiences. It's the reason why I can present you with something, you can present me with something, and if we were to look at it from a strictly logical standpoint, in terms of science, we should come to the same conclusion. But oftentimes, we don't. Since we give rise to data, how do we maintain the integrity of that signal, that emotional intelligence that's contained within the data? That's what we're trying to do. >> Talk about the role of bias, because, to me, I like to study the social, the science aspect of technology impact, whether it's new venture creation, entrepreneurship, or just a better society impact. Everything seems to be mission-driven these days, so it's very relevant. As you get these, and certainly, the US elections have recently polarized everybody, the role of bias is actually an interesting concept. I want to get your thoughts on how bias is changing people's, either subjective or objective views of things. Is bias good, or is it bad? How should we handle biases, because everything's now contextual and there's not a lot of context. You can go to Facebook any day these days, you see all kinds of weirdness going on. But as people are connected and are sharing the same data and looking at the same signal, there's going to be biases built into everything. What's your take on bias, and from a data science and data discovery, and cognition? >> Well, I'm biased against bias. It's interesting, you can't escape bias. A bias is part of the human condition. Cognitive bias is the neurological shortcut that we take to arrive at decisions or conclusions. As a result, you want to be able to classify that and understand it, but you really can't get around it. If you have some form of classification, which is one of the things that we're working on, how do you start to classify these different biases, then you can actually start to recognize them. If you can start to recognize them in data, then you can start to figure out ways to change perception, or at least to surface that these biases are present. We all engage in them. It's just a matter of how do you effectively make people aware that these biases are present, and are present in their data sets. In order to do that, you need a classification system. >> The decision cloud concept that you guys are going down, I love that idea. You take a graph approach, it's like a social graph kind of concept, decision graphing, if you will. It's about collecting 1,000 points, a million points of light, if you will, data points, that you're collecting together to help people make better decision-making, is that right? Did I get that right? How would you describe that decision cloud, or decision graph concept? >> Right, the graph is pretty straightforward. There's a fair amount of complexity, of course, hidden in it, but nonetheless, essentially what you have is, typically for human beings, we or anyone, we really are focused on making a decision. The decision, usually options, a certain amount of criteria, and then also weights or importance that we ascribe to those. The decision cloud is about capturing those options, the criteria, and also those weights. That's the central node around an individual and/or their role within an organization. As a result of that, that's a big deal, because if you can understand how people form their decisions, then you can start to walk that graph, and you can figure out how people or an organization got to where they are. It's the why. The web and technology has been focused on who, what, when, and where, but we still have a very difficult time answering the why. The reason why we have trouble with the why is we really didn't have an ontology or a taxonomy for human decision-making. That has huge implications for the AI and the ML space. It's the reason why if you were to look at any one of the digital assistants and ask a question, and ask for help, it will specifically help you make a decision. There's not a corpus of decision data that those agents can rely on to help to surface a decision. >> Personalized medicine is something I see a lot now. There's a big, big trend towards personalized medicine where the users can be more proactive, less responding to, say, conditions. But you've seen personalization is not a new concept on digital, whether it's personalized recommendation engines and/or other personalization techniques. We see that changing now, certainly as users become in more control of their data. Is that where you guys can bring that new kind of personality behind the data, because bias will drive my selection criteria when I'm making a decision, or might hinder it. This is new ground in data science. How does the role of the person get involved in the decision-making? How do you guys handle that dynamic, because your views might be different than mine. You make different decisions based on different criteria than, maybe, me. Yeah, it's different per person, so you have almost an individualized aspect of it. How do you guys handle that in software? >> What you're really talking about is allowing for human expression, subjectivity, to be part of that algorithmic mix. That's typically missing, so a good example would be in a medical context, using a decision tool to make a treatment choice, maybe around a particular drug regimen, a surgical option, or perhaps a hospice option. Really, for me, it might come down to quality of life, but quality of life is a subjective measure. As a result, it might not even be part of the recommendation engine. Our technology allows for that type of subjective input to be present, and for you to be able to place a level of importance to it. In our world, we can actually, we refer to that as irrationality, as opposed to the rational measures. But irrationality is not bad. It's human. It's a signal, it's not noise. >> How do you know what's signal as you look at, I mean, looking at all kinds of data, there's a lot of factors. Timing, things change over time. Context changes. How do you guys look at that, 'cause this is super important. Something that might be relevant today, irrelevant tomorrow. Not understood today, understood tomorrow. There's timings and context around a lot of things that could be surfaced. Is that part of how you guys work with the decision cloud? >> It really is. I mean, there's that, and it's really interesting that you mention that, because that temporal nature, that dimensionality of time, that's one of the things that human beings aren't good at that computers happen to be very good at. From a machine learning perspective, in terms of being able to train for that temporal sensitivity, that's how we address that. What we're trying to do is we're trying to balance and leverage the strengths of machine learning along with the intrinsic understanding of psychology in coming up with a effective ontology that is represented within a decision set, and merge the two together. >> So much computer science and social science coming together. Our main tagline, 'cause this is really, you're seeing a lot of societal impact. Certainly, the JOBS Act in Washington certainly enabled non-profits to actually invest in mission-driven ventures. You're seeing a spawn of entrepreneurship go on around projects that never would've got funded before. You're seeing a lot of people doing some amazing things. How does data on a global scale, I mean, how different cultures come into play, you need a lot of computing power. What's the computer science intersection as computer science changes the world that used to be tech geeks with speeds and feeds, and now you have a human element where it's emotional. I want the app to provide value for me, I don't really care about the speeds and feeds of a product. Certainly, that is colliding. What's your view of that intersection of just computer science and social science? >> I think that it's going to become more and more prevalent as the tools get better, right? We're getting a better understanding, like NLP, I can remember 10 years ago where it was largely a bag of words. Well, for some people it probably still is a bag of words. But it's gotten so much better, and so there's so much more that you can do, but a lot of it is still slicing down into, basically, metadata. Moving beyond that, I think that as we start to look at that intersection of psychology and sociology, that becomes really, really important in terms of how the disciplines come together, because they didn't. In computer science, right, the computer scientists never talked to the linguists. Now if you're credible in this space, at least on the edge, you're working with linguists. You're understanding origin. I think that the same is now coming true of psychology. In terms of AI, when we look at it from a psychology standpoint, we're looking at it from the standpoint of needs, human needs, which is the function of psychology, as opposed to when we're looking at decision theory. That's basically understanding how the decision is made. The game theory aspect of it is how those decisions affect other people and the impact that they'll have in the interaction, their reaction to it. It's really the intersection, I think, of those specific disciplines that are going to be the most exciting area of technology going forward. >> And they're not mutually exclusive, either. There's an interplay between decision theory, gamification, and human interaction. >> I mean, the successful companies of the future and of today understand that and are fully incorporating that, and are attempting to embrace it. I think that this is exciting 'cause it's kind of like the new frontier. Anyone that tells you they understand the human mind, you know, boot 'em off the show. >> John: It's complex. >> It's incredibly complex. We don't profess to, but what we can do is we can come up with a taxonomy and an ontology for some form of classification to begin that journey. That's what we've done at Element Data. >> Talk about the wisdom of crowds and how that weaves into it. I know you have some personal stories that you had around your work with a medical school that's well-documented. I think you guys are talking about that. But people tend to care what other people think. Certainly, I noticed that on social media, and people try to think, understand, try to think that they know what I'm thinking, maybe not. There's a lot of that going on around group dynamics and around collective intelligence. Wisdom of the crowds is the big part of the gamification, which does affect decisions, and then, ultimately, how people feel. Everyone likes to be part of a group and be accepted, but also there's more data now coming out of this new dynamic. How is that data being weaved into decision-making? >> John, that's probably a whole show in and of itself, but when you're talking about the wisdom of the crowd, there are a couple things to keep in mind. First, if you look at the germination, if you will, of a particular concept, I mean, people will tend to coalesce around it, and it tends to be around the topic, people's familiarity with it, and a certain perception that they have. If you're far outside of that perception, that's where you start to actually generate this excitement, or I should say, this level of engagement. For instance, if you were to say something controversial, not necessarily expected, you're going to generate more interest. Kids do it all the time on social media, right? They do something dramatic, they say something, they know it's stupid, but they are able to generate a fair amount of interest. Hence, they have a crowd that follows them. In that case, it's kind of the school of fish type of crowd theory. I think that, fundamentally, what you'll see, though, is this rise of data moving in a different direction. I think that if you are able to expose the biases that people have, then they are, if they're aware of them, then they act differently. >> We talked about civil discourse a lot. Certainly, we did during the election process, around how can we have civil discourse amongst ourselves to have a good conversation to surface data, because there wasn't a lot of that going on. But when you get on digital, this notion of weaponizing content and creating memes, you know, we talked on theCUBE, we've said this before. Control the meme, you control the narrative. Control the narrative, you control the conversation. Control the conversation, you control the belief system, and then you own the population. That's kind of the hacker formula. Mind hacking, it's been called. This is actually a new data opportunity, to get that out. It's been arbitraged through the naivety, the newness of the web, or the new social graphs, so we see some people certainly hacking that. How do you turn that into positive data source, because if what you're saying about biases, that should be surfaced quickly so people know what the collective group is thinking. How do we turn that mind hacking gamification into a positive data set? >> I mean, it's interesting, 'cause people refer to it as weaponization, and I refer to it as PSYOPS. It's something that has been done before in a different context, and now we're starting to see it in the data context. The results are chilling, because this isn't a leaflet dropping from the sky that you read. It's really about understanding who you are at an attribute level, and understanding who you are from a perception level, and really dealing with the psychology, either to incite you or to suppress you. I think it's deeply concerning, but I also think that there are really good opportunities for us to do things that are very positive, one of which, for instance, that immediately comes to mind is the ability to allow people to understand their decision process. If you have a decision cloud, you can actually look at and see your journey, your path along your decision path. That's not something that's readily available in a-- >> The role of the community, too, we've been observing and we're digging into, I'm sure you have at some level, too, the role of community is, look at open source software, it's been a great example of successful consensus within communities. As a way to balance potential over-amplification, or overreaction, or biases that could be checked or balanced together, as an interesting new approach. Do you guys see any of that in the decision cloud where there's new data sources coming in around communities and ecosystems? >> I think that what's interesting about communities is they tend to be self-forming, right? You can try to force people together, but they tend to be self-forming. If people share a particular concept or a belief, then there's a certain amount of attraction. I think that what's interesting is the ability to try to measure that, and to try to figure out how you can then expand that community with different beliefs and different viewpoints, so that you get something that is not so homogeneous, but is more representative. And so, that's something that we hope, we can't necessarily predict it, but we hope that that's something that decision cloud would be able to influence. >> Well, Chuck, it's been great to have you on theCUBE. I want to definitely follow up on some of those deeper conversations. I got to ask you a personal question. How long have you been at this, how did you get here? I mean, you been scratching this itch for how many years? How did you get to this point, because, has it been a lot of research you've been doing, is it other ventures? Tell your story. What's motivating you to get to this point? >> Yeah, basically, the better part of 25 years. My background is both in computer science and behavioral biometrics, so I've always been interested in behavior and classification of behavior, and trying to figure out from the standpoint or the discipline of computer science, how do you effectively really integrate the two. One of the biggest riddles, if you will, which, actually, the code name of our product internally is Conundrum, is how do you solve the conundrum of decision-making? We haven't solved it. I think we have a pretty good understanding of it, but by the same token, that seems to be the last big frontier, the last big open space. That was something that I've pretty much worked my entire career to get to this point, being able to have a phenomenal team to be able to solve this problem. >> Well, we'll check out Element Data, great stuff. It's a systems problem now, you said, it's not one thing. A lot of interplay and a lot of dependencies and a lot of interaction, a lot of data. >> A lot of data. >> A lot of data. Thank you so much for coming on and spending the time. Chuck Davis is the CTO of Element Data. Check him out. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for a CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

(Latin music) >> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's the Cube, covering Blockchain Unbound, brought to you by Blockchain Industries. >> Hello, everyone and welcome back to our special, exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. I'm John Furrier, your host of the Cube. We're here getting all the action, extracting the signal from the noise. Our next guest is Sunil Verma, who's the partner of Team in Residence venture capital firm doing traditional VC as well as investing in token economics, blockchain, and decentralized applications. Sunil, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> So I got to get your perspective because you guys have done a lot of high profile deals on the venture side, Slack, Instacart and a slew of others, great portfolio. But you guys also got your eye on the prize on token economics. So explain the strategy of the investment thesis. Is it still venture, all in on token, mix, what's the makeup of the firm, what are you guys doing? >> Yeah, for sure. It's definitely a combination of both. We really feel there's opportunity in the decentralized world and we're really looking at sort of the white spaces there. So what is the LinkedIn of Blockchain look like? What does the Amazon of Blockchain look like? So those are the things we're trying to solve for. But at the same time we're really looking at companies that have the governance and the accountability, and transparency that Blockchain really locks in. That's really what we're investing in. So if there's a token or tokenomic that we really appreciate and we really understand, we'll be participating. >> That's good stuff, I want to ask you kind of the question and it's the classic Silicon Valley metaphor, but I want to put it in context of the venture architecture. How do you architect a venture in this new world? So the minimum viable product, or MVP, minimum viable, MVV, minimum viable venture architecture. What do you look for? Because you mentioned government, governance, we hear consensus, we hear transparency, we hear open source. We're seeing a new venture architecture emerging, it's not your grandfather's classic VC deal, which is team, team, team, patented technology, things are running much faster, running hotter, it's a moving train of technology, the plumbing level, but the business models as you mention are pretty clear, on some of them. What is the minimum viable architecture of a venture look like? >> Yeah, that's a really good question. I think when we were, what we're looking at is not your traditional venture companies, I think team, technology, the financials, product/market fit, all those things still apply in a big way here, and really what we're banking, what we're kind of looking at is how responsible is the team itself? I think over the last sort of 12 months, we've seen folks go out raise really big amounts of capital with no product road map, no business road map, no real way to get from zero to X, and now really what we're focusing on is is there a product that's already been built, do they really understand tokenomics, are they trying to shoehorn a regular business onto the blockchain and just assume that by adding Crypto at the end of toilet paper, they're going to get something? I think that's stuff that we have our red flags up on. >> I want to get your reaction to a comment I made earlier on the Cube, but also on this event. There's three types of profile types that we see, I want to get your reaction to this. One, the startup, we have an idea, it's going to be blockchain enabled, good vision, white paper, check. Maybe some VC might want them, but it's more token. And then the other end of the spectrum, I call the oh, shit, we're going out of business. I call that a pivot. They throw the hail Mary. Then the middle one is the growth company that's growing with token economics, all the elements are in place for a real go to market. What's your reaction to that? Do you see that's something similar and how do you identify each one and the role that you might play as an investor in that? >> No, for sure, I think that when we come at it, we're looking at it from a full stack experience so does the company need resources on blockchain developers, does the company need product and marketing support, do they need PD support? And once you've actually gone live, one of the things we're starting to realize now is you have to really approach this from both a PR standpoint as well as a hire standpoint. And you will have to sort of divorce what the company and what the employees are thinking about and what the investors really want. It's really about, and for a lot of the protocols out there, it's really about the next sort of 15 to 24 months and really getting the exposure that they need. From the early stages it is about the white paper, it is about the technology, it is about making sure you're thinking about it in the right way. >> So you just got to be cognizant what you're saying, if it's early stage, they got to have self-awareness to know that they got some work to do to build it out. >> Sunil: Yup, exactly. >> And then where's the growth elements? >> Sunil: Yeah, exactly. >> All right so I want to get your reaction to the ulity token versus the security token. Obviously a lot of people say, hey, I've got a utility token, and then basically raise money without a product, that's essentially, there's no utility yet, there's no product and people are trying to shortcut that, which is really not an optimized experience, because you've rushed the product to market, in some cases it takes a year to get there, so essentially that CC is kind of signaled against that. So, as an investor, how do you decide what's the best avenue, security token, or utility token, and why in each case would you go for either one? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I think it comes down to where they actually domiciled, where they being, and where are the customer base, right. In all honesty, the center of gravity for blockchain has shifted away from Silicon Valley. It's not Silicon Valley, itself. It definitely is around the Asian marketplace. When we look at the SEC and some of the stuff that they're kind of saying, that's great, no problem, I think we definitely need those checks and balances in place, we're investing in security tokens, that's not a problem for us, that's something that we do all day long. >> John: It's a process you know. >> Yeah, it's a process we understand, exactly. >> Credit investor, reg D, form D. >> We do KYC all day long. The thing is on the utility side, it's like, is there a utility that's broad enough that really is going to affect a billion plus people that we're actually interested in? And to your earlier point, they do have to have a product ready to go. So we're working with folks like Orchid, who have been working on their product for over a year plus. They've actually waited to do the token offering and what not, so those kinds of things, which is decentralized, those kinds of things are the ones that are really exciting to us. >> So what about the dynamic where a company might want to do a security token, raise some cash, and also have a utility token for either consensus or other things and can a company coexist with two ice deals at the same time. Have you seen that? >> You know that's a really good question. I would point you to a lot of the smaller public companies that are on the Nasdaq that are just adding Crypto to their product offering and you know seeing huge spikes. They have to manage both the public investors, and they also have to manage the token offerings, and token investors that they're doing now. I think it's, there are definitely ways to do it but at the end of the day is the team structured correctly to manage it and are we going to see a convergence of the pricing. You're not really going to get the same premium you will in the token markets as you will as on the public markets. >> Quick question on security token, what are you looking for for pledged against the security? Are you okay with future revenues, is it equity, what's your preferred, do you care, is there a preference? >> No, it definitely it's some equity in the company, I think, you know depending on the stage of the company, and the security token type that they're doing, it's equity, might be future revenue sometimes it's dividends or the opportunity to get dividends, so it's a combination of a lot of things. >> Do you have a preference, you care? >> At the end of the day, equity is always preferable. >> Okay, what are you looking at here, what deals have you seen here? Did you do any deals here? >> Yeah, we do, we have a couple, one is called, Creator.AI, they are a decentralized contact creation platform. One is iCash, which is one of the security tokens that's actually kind of out there. Another is Renovo Financial, they're actually doing a JCO, Jobs from the Jobs Act, a token offering based on that, they're actually going to be announcing some really big stuff that is coming up in the next week or so. >> I'm interest to talk about, let's talk about the Jobs Act and how instrumental that was, how that's changed the game on NGO's and mission-driven investing, which we've been covering a lot in DC. Sunil, we'd love to have you come down to our studio in Palo Alto, and talk more. Great to have you, thanks for spending the time. >> Thank you. >> Team in Residence, doing a lot of hot deals on the front end of investing. You get nervous at all, you worried about things these days, what's your mindset like, I mean, it's like white water rafting, you're in the middle of the action, what's it like? >> Oh, for sure, it's exciting, it's fast-paced. I think with the hair cut over the last few days, everyone's sort of rubbing their heads right now, but at the end of the day you have to have the stomach for it, and I think you have to be as educated as you can. >> And look for new liquidity ways. This is the key thing, new liquidities out there. >> I think we're seeing a lot of new liquidity. I think Telegram is a really good example of that. I think folks that didn't want to participate in round one are now getting sort of slugs of time tokens that are out there and they're buying it at a premium and it's all happening in the secondary market. >> That's awesome, with new infrastructure, new dynamics, new reimagining wealth, creation value caps, restore, harnessing that value is changing liquidity, changing the structure of entrepreneurship. Thanks so much, Sunil Verma, thanks for coming on the Cube, appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, more live action coming here in Puerto Rico, the Cube, be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico where we are broadcasting the Blockchain Unbound event. This is a global conference where people from around the world are coming together. From Silicone Valley, from New York, Miami, all around the world. Coming to talk about Blockchain, the disruptive nature of crypto currency and the decentralized applications and how it's changing the world, creating a lot of value. My next guest is Albert Santalo, the founder and CEO of Eight Base, the number Eight Base. Albert, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John, it's good to be here. >> So before we get into it, we'll talk on camera a little bit about what you guys are doing. I want you to take a minute to explain what Eight Base is, why, what you guys are doing? What are you disrupting and what's the value proposition? >> So Eight Base is software to build software. So if you've ever, if you're familiar with Wicks or SquareSpace for websites, we essentially do the same thing for this big category called enterprise software. And if you've every been around enterprise software project, it's no fun. It's really expensive, takes a lot of time and it's froth with danger. We make that easy and we empower a group of people called citizen developers. Basically, regular business people to build their own software without having to hire developers. >> You know, cloud computing has done a lot of great things. One of them is this notion of making coding easier. But Blockchain is now a whole new growth phase onto of cloud computing and internet of things, where you have new languages, new key for Ethereum to whatever, yet there's a demand for talent. There's now creative thinking involved. As people rethink business models, re-imagine either sovereignty or a business process, the creativity's in the people, the business model. Not necessarily the technologies, although they're involved. So there's been a challenge for how do you make it easy? So you guys are trying to do that, what's the secret sauce? Is it a tech-play, is it a business-play, cloud-play? How do you guys look at that? >> You're striking at the essence of what we do. So if you think about Blockchain, a lot of work that's been done so far has been sort of protocol level stuff and the applications that most of us see on top of it are things that don't quite look like they're finished products, right. And it has to do with the fact that it's core engineers that are really trying to bring this all to the surface. So what we are is the next layer of infrastructure on top of that protocol level. And we excel at a beautiful user interface that makes it simple for normal people to build these systems quickly and inexpensively without having to have an IQ of 140 plus which is the people that do Blockchain. >> We've seen this similar movie before and I want to get your entrepreneurial background in a separate segment but this is something that's actually happening in cloud computing and in data-science, you've seen the citizen analyst. Cause data-science you have to code python and there's like only a certain population that can do that, but what happened was people were building abstraction layers to make it really easy to wrangle data, use data-science, visualizations, whether it's tableau or whatever, that really changed the nature of what data-science became. And now the benefits in the data-analytics space is multi-fold. You're seeing examples of that. Talk about some use cases that you guys are doing and be specific with some examples of how you see it playing out. How much do they need? Is it a dashboard, how would you envision the product? What's it going to look like? >> This has an enormous democratizing effect, right. So what you're talking about is that data-science was hard to access, expensive to access, only a few people in the world really could do it and then these layers of abstractions have facilitated a much wider group of people being able to do it. So that's exactly what we're doing. We're at the same time bringing the development of software closer to where the requirements live because literally, the people finding the requirements can develop their own software. So what you're going to see is a rollout of Blockchain and non-Blockchain software just accelerated and put into the hands of more people which strikes at the heart of digital transformation. We've all heard about this theme digital transformation. It's businesses that if they don't evolve and adopt Blockchain, AI, all these other things, they have a threat of being put of business. That's where the big opportunity for Eight Base is. >> Digital transformation certainly is going to reshape things, so the idea of having a Blockchain-enabled app, you're going to make it easier for someone to do that. What use cases do you envision being the low-hanging fruit, as you guys go to the market? What are some of the use cases? Because developers still can contribute to your model. Explain how the role of true developer? I get the part of easy to program, because that's natural, leggo-blocked, making it easy. How does it grow? How does it evolve? >> So the citizen developer is what we've talked about until now. There's something called the Eight Based server-less chaise which is the heart of the system. In that part of our world, developers or core engineers can work to extend the platform. And in the process of that, they can earn tokens and basically create a business model for themselves. Either one-time payment or a recurring payment. So Eight Base will evolve very, very, rapidly. Not only through Eight Bases' development work and our development team, but through the world at large contributing new capabilities. Think of a Blockchain, a new Blockchain that comes out, that's innovative, all they have to do is create an extension to the Eight Base platform and now that's accessible to all the Eight Base users in the world, right. >> So let me get this right, see if I can unpack this, see if I can un-connect the dots. You're essentially creating software to make people that want to write software really easy. So they essentially invoke some thing and it automatically writes the software for them, so they don't have to. And then you have a development eco-system that can add more to that, much like a marketplace. Is that kind of getting it right? >> Yes, so, when you talk about writing the system, it's a yes and no. >> Okay. >> So one thing we're not, is a code generator. So the software is created but runs inside of our environment because we think the environment is also more than half of the value that we add. We have a fully fault-tolerant, scalable cloud-base environment so that the same people who want to develop don't have to worry about IT. So that's really, really important. >> You've nailed the operational piece. >> That's right and it's fully self-service, so there's no human intervention. So people can try Eight Base before they buy it without having to talk to salespeople, without having to drop a credit card and without having to have implementation people involved. >> That sounds like a great cloud solution to me. And certainly, cloud has proven that a set of services, you know, push-button, kind of capability, Amazon's been very successful, Amazon's Web Service, with their marketplace. Why even provision code, just click on and use it. >> And by the way, in talking about Amazon, what we're doing, in my opinion, wasn't even possible 15 years ago. Even though many of our competitors which date back to those days tried. Things like Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud, many of the open-source things including Blockchain are what facilitates what we do because we don't have to write it all. We can leverage these incredible underlying technologies and curate them in way that makes it accessible to people. >> So you're tailwind for your business is the open-source software market, you're differentiations, you're running all the operations for them so they don't have to and so you have an extensive, and you're also providing the value of having a Blockchain-enabled capability for someone who's not trained. >> Yes and a visual interface that normal people can understand in terms of building software. A no-code, what we called a no-code. >> Define, normal. >> Well, you know, most of the population. >> Yeah, who want Blockchain, who wants the benefits of it, you guys abstract that away, great. So ICO, you guys doing a fundraising? You guys doing an ICO? What's the plans? >> We have plans for a token sale but I can't talk about it just yet. >> Okay, I respect that, okay cool. So that sounds like it's rocking and rolling. Let's talk about you. So were just joking off camera, big Hurricane's fan from Miami. They're going to get their mojo back. >> Looks that way. >> I love the chain, the turnover chain, fantastic. Love to see the action, energy there. But you also have a lot of success in the industry. Also, you have some scar tissue as us guys, growing up in that era where you have to provision your own stuff. Go to venture capital, get the funding. It was a slog, I mean, on many levels. Some got easier overtime, certainly agile programming helped a lot, but now with cloud and now with this new marketplace where you have almost a global footprint capability. How do you talk to people and say, hey you know, I've been there. I've walked to school with no shoes, back in the day and now it's so much better. How do you talk about this wave? I mean, because it's a bigger wave than anything we've seen before, certainly, a lot of things coming together at once. >> So I love this topic. I've stood up a couple of venture-back technology companies, probably the one I'm best known for is Care Cloud which is backed by Silicone Valley VCs and, you know, I've raised a fare amount of angel investments and venture capital and I appreciate the model, right. It's got its pros and cons and when you talk about scar tissue, you know, all our entreprenuers have scar tissue, whether they were funded or not. I also had a very unique experience because I was at the signing of the Jobs Act. I was standing behind the president at the White House and at the time I was beginning to sort of imagine what could become of that and I did a PBS interview sort of like this. It was actually a debate, talking about it back then. And I never would have imagined, we were talking about things like crowd-funding and stuff like that but never in a million years could I have envisioned what Blockchain could have brought to all this and what ICOs would have looked like and what crowd-funding at a global environment. Up until that time we thought of most of entrepreneurship as a U.S. phenomenon. Now it's a very much global phenomenon. So I'm very excited about what's coming. I think it creates an incredible opportunity for entrepreneurs all over the world to sort of emerge and do what they do. Whether they know VCs personally or not, which is sort of part of the problem. As long as this industry doesn't get too crazy, we can sort of keep that under control and let it grow. >> My personal opinion, having a venture-back company in the past, my current business-looking angle, theCUBE is self-funded, no outside capital. It's interesting because there's three types of funding elements going on in this ICO bubble. The startup and then the other end of the spectrum is that, oh shit, we're going out of business, throw the hail Mary, okay. Pivot, that's what they call it now. We use to call it, shit, we're going out of business! Now it's called, accu-hire and pivoting. And then in the middle is really where the action is. Growth companies that actually have a business model and need growth capital at a scale and technology infrastructure has token economics built in. That's where I see most of the smart money going. On the startup side there's an argument for VCs because that's a good, a lot of my friends are VCs and they've been on theCUBE. They need nurturing, they need advice, they need to have the network effect, and they need to have that service provider. But some can go right to the value faster. So you see the startup category kind of bifurcate into, you know, I really want the VCs and to some, I just want to get to first base, get this thing done and I'll re-evaluate. And there's the holy-grail which is token economics already built in, growth companies. Okay, so that being said, from your perspective, when you look at the Jobs Act, you mentioned that, so I also find that there's new levels of startups coming on, not just the technological entrepreneurs. In Washington D.C. I've covered in great detail with Teresa Carlson, who's the head of Amazon's Web Services global public sector, this tsunami of societal entrepreneurship where NGOs because of the Jobs Act can now invest in mission-driven startups. So what's happening is a level of entrepreneurs coming in, solving stuff that would never get funded by a VC. Talking about a women's abuse app or missing, exploited children or solving world hunger, these used to be philanthropy missions that when there's no more funding, everything's dead. Now there's entrepreneurship going on, there are people doing stuff they know they want to do but need to code. This is kind of where you're targeting. Kind of a data-point to validate what you're doing, right? >> First of all, I love the fact that that's happening. Things that are good for a society obviously is good for everybody. But I would also say that beyond that, you know, people are sort of, if you're lucky enough in life to find out what you're really passionate about, sometimes that always doesn't align itself with profits. So we're giving them an opportunity for people to live a more fulling life by following their dreams and doing good by society, right. But at the end of the day, we have to be able to fund these things and we have to be able to support them. And things like the Jobs Act and crowd-funding and stuff have really given life to this stuff. >> Well the thing about NGOs in these new areas is that they don't have a lot of tech expertise. They have a lot of years of experience in the channels and their relationships and their mission but now there's like, oh damn I got to build something. So who do you turn to? This is kind of where the model of simplicity is really kind of key. >> Eight Base is designed for exactly that. So when we think about where's Eight Base used? First and foremost we think small to mid-sized businesses that are looking to digitally transform, okay. Then we think of large companies where departmentally people don't necessarily want to go to their IT department. They do what's called shadow-IT. They build their own stuff. Eight Base is a much more, it's a much better, much more compliant way to do that, and businesses to be able to cycle faster. But the last thing is entrepreneurs. So imagine, today we have all these platforms to make entrepreneurship easier. Well imagine if you could literally build your product very, very easily without having to hire developers? Think about how we're spawning companies left and right. So part of what we like to do is really be a catalyst for that type of economy overtime. >> Shadow-IT, I've said on theCUBE many times, has been legitimized with the cloud. It used to be kind of a, you know, quiet little secret. You go around, put the credit card down, spin up some servers, get a little prototype and then show the boss and they'll double down on that. Similar kind of concept going on in this world. Get something going, show some momentum. >> And get some money. >> You guys take care of that for everybody. Okay, so what's going on in Puerto Rico? Let's shift gears. We're here in Puerto Rico, what's your observation, what's the vibe? Obviously, they're trying to bid themselves out like they want to be a haven for entrepreneurship, bring the local culture together. What are you hearing here in the hallways here? What are you talking about? What's some of the observations? >> First of all I'm a big fan of Puerto Rico. I live in Miami so I've been to Puerto Rico many, many times and the place has been hard hit by the hurricane. I love the fact that the government was able to reform the tax situation five years ago and I think it's exactly that type of thing that will bring, sort of, that will spawn the type of innovation that we need here. All communities need to evolve, in my opinion, to technology communities. You've seen it obviously Silicone Valley is the exaggerated example but you've seen it in places like Detroit, New York, Austin, and even Miami is very important. A big, big part of the message I carry. When you live on a island, it's sort of has an even different dynamic, but there's no reason why that can't emerge here in Puerto Rico. I'm hopeful that these incentives, et cetera, will attract that kind of-- >> It's a short flight to the mainland. It's entrepreneurial center. >> It's the United States. >> It's the United States. With digital, there's no boundaries with digital cultural. Opportunity for them. >> That's right. >> Albert, thanks for spending the time. What's next for you, what are you going to do? Obviously, you've got your business you're building, can't talk about your token sale. >> Well we haven't literally launched the company yet but we're anticipating that next week or the following we're actually going to make our announcement and then they'll be lots of announcements after that. >> Come on, give us a little bit more, you're teasing us here. >> By the way, today is our birthday so we were incorporated in ides of March 2017. >> Let's hope that's good luck. (Albert laughs) Albert Santalo, founder and CEO of Eight Base, look for him. We'll be watching the news, trying to get some scoop here but he's not giving in. Good job, well done, seasoned pro. >> Thank you, John. >> We'll be back with more live coverage here in Puerto Rico for theCUBE's coverage of Blockchain Unbound. Thanks for watching, we'll be right back. (lively music)

(uptempo techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C, it's CUBE Conversations with John Furrier. >> Hello there and welcome to this special CUBE Conversations here in Washington, D.C. We're getting all the stories, we're at the Halcyon House here with Kate Goodall who is the Co-Founder and CEO of Halcyon for a CUBE Conversation. Thanks for joining me today. >> My pleasure. >> So talk about Halcyon and your mission. You're doing something really important here in societal entrepreneurship. It's a non-profit, it's a really interesting mission. You're having an impact. Talk about what you guys are doing. >> Yeah, we believe in the power of human creativity and the power of compassion to change the world for the better. And by that I mean that we take some incredible change makers with really bold ideas about how they can affect societal change through business and art, and we give them a number of supports including a free place to live in this very expensive city, a fantastic mentor, an office, a community around them, money, and we don't take equity in their ventures. >> And this house that we're here is a mansion in Washington, D.C. Talk about the story about this house and this residence. >> Yeah, it's got very revolutionary roots. It was built by Benjamin Stoddert who was the first Secretary of the Navy during the Revolutionary War. And from then it exchanged hands several times. One of them was a relative of Mark Twain. And he is responsible for most of its 30,000 square feet. And then lastly, it was in the hands of the Dreyfus family before it was bought by Dr. Kuno who is my co-founder and the chair of Halcyon. >> And the Halcyon mission, you guys have a unique formula. Talk about how the fellowships, how do you guys select the ventures, what's the program? They live here. >> Yeah. >> It's a residence. >> Yeah. >> So it's interesting. >> Yeah, we give them three things, everything thing breaks down into three things. Space, community, and access. We believe that if you give people not only physical space, which is important because we have to remember that not everyone has a parents' basement they can live in and friends and family they can go get money from. So it democratizes the playing field to just be able to select people with the best ideas and the most talent and not the best drive. But also head space. What does it mean when you give someone with a brilliant idea five months to just work on their idea? Then community is very, very important. There's a lot of atrocious analogies for entrepreneurship. People compare it to staring into the abyss or chewing glass or... It creates a lot of emotions, lots of ups and downs. So having a built in community, which we have here is very important. Then lastly access, and by that I mean there are not only investors, but these days governments, philanthropists, others that are seeking solutions to some of these very hairy 21st century problems. They want access to these ideas. And if we do our job correctly, we're creating a bridge for these entrepreneurs to those people as well. >> Yeah entrepreneurship certainly is hard. And it's even harder when you're trying to crack the code on societal problems. >> Kate: Yes. >> And so this kind of brings up an interesting trend that we've been seeing emerging really rapidly in the past few years with cloud computing and other... Big data, internet of things technologies on a global scale, is the societal entrepreneurship model where you're accelerating opening up new ways to democratize, crowd source, fund, and change the game and reimagine philanthropy, policy, education, diversity, all in one. >> Yeah. >> You guys are kind of doing that here. It really is a ground zero here in Washington, D.C because of the access and the ecosystem of governments and everything's here. So you're seeing this building up in Washington, D.C. Talk about this new force, this new driving force of change called societal entrepreneurship. >> Yeah so it's, we believe it's definitely one way to really change the game. It's a way to use business principles to attack some of these enormous social problems. Many would argue that philanthropy and perhaps government have failed at some of this recently. Philanthropy was originally designed to solve problems, not to become a charity machine. And certainly, the government finds it hard to do some of those things today as well. And so figuring out how to really attack some of these enormous, hairy 21st century problems using these business principles so that their solutions can also be scaled effectively is absolutely what we're trying to approach. >> It's interesting, you see the old guard, the old ways of doing things, policy, people just checking boxes, philanthropy a big donor kind of model. And then now with cloud computing, new things are emerging. In your mind, what's changed the most now from just even 5, 10 years ago? What's the big difference in today's culture and today's environment in the world and Washington, D.C? >> Oh my gosh, so many things I could talk about. One of the reasons I think that social enterprise really came into being, partially is because there was recession and millennials didn't have jobs. So they had to create them and they created them in a new model. They created them in a way that gave them satisfaction beyond just getting a paycheck. The Jobs Act gave foundations the ability to invest in for profits and gave us crowd sourcing and crowd funding. And these things have really made some of this cross sectoral pollenization possible for the first time. I think people genuinely are frustrated that this amazing pace of change and Internet of Things and all of this stuff still hasn't solved some of these big problems. So there's so many forces at play. And I think one thing that I'll also point to because as I explained to you, I'm an archeologist and historian by training, and if you look over the course of human history, any time when you've had rapid change in technologies or you've had vast inequalities in terms of wealth, you end up with a depression or a war, or both. And I really believe that the power of social entrepreneurship can, for once, maybe let the gas out of the balloon a little bit more gently, and I think that's something really great to be optimistic about. >> How do you see that happening? I mean, we're a connected society now. >> Yeah. >> We have our mobile devices. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We have our things on our body, Internet of Things. It's all there, is that how you see it? How do you see the relief coming so we don't have a war or a depression? >> Yeah, I think that's the point, we have tremendous power now, right? To just in our hands, to be able solve some of these problems. Human ingenuity is a great thing. I think creativity and compassion are going to be the things that machines replicate last. And so we support that wholeheartedly. And I think maybe we can talk about some examples of some of our ventures, right, and what they're doing because I think that's the best way to paint. What does this mean, what is it? One of our current fellows, Ryan Soscia has created JDoe which is a way to anonymously unite victims of sexual assaults so that they can take legal action. It has a business model, but it's been proven that victims of assault are much more effective when they go as a group instead of alone. So it's a really brilliant way to use technology. Another one from our past cohort, Brandon Anderson is using a chat bot, Raheem AI to collect better data on policing. And then is working with police departments to use that data so that they can have better community relations. So these are both very relevant and timely issues that we're approaching in a non-partisan way using technology to solve. One more I'll give in our current cohort. Pilleve, which is a company that's thinking about the Internet of Things and how it can solve for the opiate crisis. They've created a pill bottle that connects to your phone or your family's phone and can give data and control over medication so that you can really start to attack addiction. >> Kate, talk about the power of we capital, what you've been doing with women's networking in Washington DC. >> Yeah. >> Because it's not just the women in tech inclusion issue, there's a lot of disparity we've been covering certainly at Silicon Angle, but there's really a lot of powerful women and talented folks, whether it's creative or on the business side or technical side, where the societal problems, these are products that are used by the entire population and so there's an effort to have more women involved in not just designing products, but actually being part of these new re-imagined solutions and technologies. >> Yeah. >> How important do you see that here, and what are some of the hurdles and successes that you've had here? >> I agree with that analysis completely. And I'm biased, but I think that Washington is an amazing city for some incredibly smart women. And when we created Halcyon, we created a committee that was diverse and reflective of the diversity we wanted to see how cohorts. So diverse by any factor. Age, gender, race, sexual orientation and what's that resulted in happily is a housing community that has 52% of our ventures founded or co-founded by women, and 58% of our ventures founded by a person of color. But then when we looked around, the investor base didn't exactly reflect our fellows. So we started to think about how we could engender and cultivate investors that were also diverse. And one of the ways to do that was to create a group of women in D.C. that wanted to fund social impact, leaning women led ventures, and it's called the WE Capital. It's led by Dr. Kuno, who is my co-founder and chair at Halcyon, and Sheila Johnson who was one of the founders of BET and has now founded Salamander Resorts. And there's 13 other remarkable women in that contingent and they're all paying it back. But and a very smart way that gets them market rate returns. >> This is interesting, the community paying forward has been the ethos of very robust and successful communities Silicon Valley here in Washington, D.C. How do you scale that? How do you go global with this? Because now you have a global model. Silicon Valley D.C. and all around world where you now have different communities coming together, all the same mission potentially. How do you blend it all in? How do you take that to the next level? >> That's a good question. We're gradually building what I call a kind Army. Just this amazing community that has ripple effects. We don't feel that we have to own or control this in anyway. Just over 3 1/2 years, we've had 55 ventures come through here. They've raised nearly $40 million dollars. Impacted half a million people around the world in a positive way. They've created nearly 500 jobs. You start to see the exponential growth even just as we sit here in this building. But I do think that's a long way to go in terms of people understanding this social societal entrepreneurship. People have different definitions for it and it's a long way to go in term terms of government and philanthropy really being able to understand it. Because in some ways as I mentioned, they lost touch with who their customers are. >> Okay and I've always been saying in Silicon Valley and on my Facebook page and also on theCube that SiliconValley doesn't get D.C. They try to come in waves around. You don't get it and they're impatient, I would say if I categorize. They get D.C. but I don't think they have the patience for it. It's a new culture here. Also the pace of change is accelerating in D.C. but it's a formula for D.C. What is the secret to be successful in Washington, D.C if you're a tech entrepreneur or investor or someone from Silicon Valley or not from here? >> We do get the advantage of being able to see who does that well and who doesn't. And tech is obviously leading ahead of policy. Policy is trailing tech and I think that can understandably make policymakers nervous. They've got a lot of understanding to do to be able to make some policy decisions. And these tech solutions are very complicated so the people in tech that I see being successful around policy of those that will take the time to really sit down and pick through a problem with policy maker and help them to understand it. Policy makers are actually very smart but they're dealing with a lot. >> John: So education. >> Education, education absolutely. You can't come in here >> Patience. >> And be impatient that they're not getting it. But I think that's going to essential. We've got to figure out how to talk each other and how to talk across different languages, different domain, different sectors and creates some better intersectionality. >> So what's next for Halcyon? What's the vision? What's your vision of how this will go forward? Obviously you've got a great model, batches coming through cohorts, and you have demo days here. I noticed your set up downstairs for a demo day so it's very robust, classic incubator, accelerator model with the residences leading it there. What's next? Where do you go from here? >> We don't take equity in any of our ventures but we are thinking about creating a fund, because so many of our ventures are performing exceptionally well. And we're actually going to be launching a festival that really takes the power of creativity and compassion, and art and technology here in D.C. and that will be in June. And we're hoping it that way, we can reach a wide audience, and that's going to be very exciting. The long term vision really is how can we harness the power of compassionate and creativity to solve 21st century problems, and how can we do that at scale? >> The classic disruption model is gate keepers start being disrupted by the new guard as Andy Jassy would say in Amazon. These a new creative as well. I did a panel at Sundance a few weeks ago where we talked about this creative where democratization is happening at artist level, and the government maker level. And that seems to be happening across all industries. A new creative is developing. What's your view of the digital impact? Because artistry can be sculptures and painting and whatnot to classic artistry or film making but now tech's involved, digital. >> Yeah. >> It's coming together. Is the vision how you see art and science coming together? >> Yeah, artists are fantastic disrupters. Sometimes they don't even need to paint a picture. They just use their ability as an artist to do things other people can't. And that's why they're awfully fun to be round. I think that you're absolutely right. I point to Dee Rees as an great example, who didn't get her funding for her film Mudbound through the the Hollywood machine, instead she went straight to Netflix and now she's getting an Oscar. That's a new way of doing things. We have one of our fellows, DeShuna who created kweliTV which is Netflix for the African diaspora because Netflix just doesn't have the kind of black filmmaking that she wants to see. So yeah I absolutely see people using digital to do different kinds of disrupting including on the outside of things. We have another program, the Arts Lab. Very similar to this but working with excellent artists who are thinking about social justice. One of the artist, Georgia Os-acs is doing a project called Two Future Women. And she's collecting letters that women are writing to other women 19 years from now. They're being archived by the museums in D.C. and will be displayed on the eve of the Women's March. Wouldn't it be great to know what the suffragette were thinking? And that all requires technology to be able to successfully collect those, disseminate them, archive them et cetera. >> So New channels to the market place breaking down the barriers for the gate keeper seems to be the trend. How is that happening in your world, in D.C and in philanthropy? You're now creating a new model of entrepreneurship. >> Yes, yes. >> Not just philanthropy, hey nice job or policy check box, it's real change. >> And arguably a new model for philanthropy because very rarely is philanthropy so immersive where we're literally taking these people and we're in the living with them for five months, and giving them all of these supports. And I think it's also a new model and that it's risk taking. It's not a safe and secured, metric based, proven solutions. It's some of these centers are going to fail and I think that that's okay. That's just testing and trying and finding the best and moving forward. I was going to make another point. >> You guys are changing the world obviously, I made a comment on Facebook, we're saving the world at the same time because you mentioned you can actually get ahead of some of these trends with this gap. Whether it's inequity, inequality or however these gaps are causing even war or depression as history points out. Now you have an opportunity to use, not just diagnostic capability but predictive and prescriptive mechanisms. What are some of those things that someone could see and connect the dots around an example of something that's prescriptive. Say wait, wow, time out. We've got something going on over there as a problem space we can solve with a solution. What are some examples that you see playing out where this model could work? >> I'm not sure I quite understand the question. >> If you had the ability to use technology to solve some societal problems, what are some examples that you're seeing here in your incubator that are pointing to this new trend? >> Yeah, I think that our fellows are fantastic examples of that. Many of them are tech enabled whether or not they're using apps or the cloud or just a new actual technology product. One of our fellows is using, he's created a new product that disrupts the vestibular system so that you don't feel motion sickness. Now this is actually a product that is obviously very valuable for just everyday people, who are going to be in driver-less cars trying to do their work. But it turns out very useful for the military and very useful for people who are trying to create virtual reality. 40% of people can not put a virtual reality headset on and not feel nauseous. So I do think that it is tech's job to solve some of the problems that we haven't been able to solve yet. In many ways, the internet and the Internet of Things is our biggest leap forward since fire. Now how are we going to use it to create the disruption that fire did? Fire allowed us to eat more things, grow bigger then start to farm and and I think that we haven't even hit the cusp of what the internet can do yet. It can do way more things and deliver products to our doorsteps. >> Next up at the wheel, you get fired-- >> Right, what's is the tech wheel? I think it's going to be really-- >> Personal question for you, what is the big learnings that you've had over the past few years? (mumbles) say well I didn't expect that to happen or wow, that was super awesome or a failure or a success? What was your big learnings that you've come out-- >> Oh my gosh, do you have an hour? We've learnt how not to do and how to do mentorship very well. You can't take mentorship lightly. This is human chemistry we're talking about and even if you think you've got the perfect match on paper, it may not work. We have certainly learned a lot about how it is really important to have investors that reflect entrepreneurs because to your very point, that work is going to take everyone to create technologies that work for everyone. It also creates and builds even investors who look like everyone because otherwise there is an inherent bias. Really good people have inherent bias and that needs to be solved for. Because I straddle both art and entrepreneurship in my role. These some really interesting things that I've noticed in terms of how entrepreneurs see the world as infinite resource and artist see it as very finite. And how some of our systemic problems are reflected almost identically in both fields. This is an interesting statistic. 5% of venture capital goes to women, we know that and 1% to African Americans, 0.01% to Black women. In the museum world, in museums in the western hemisphere, 5% of their art collection is women artists, 1% is African American artists. That's not a coincidence, that's a clear picture of how power structures have evolved to make certain types of decisions about who should get capital, who is worth collecting, and we're definitely solving for that. >> And certainly having a lens on that and exposing that-- >> Kate: Absolutely. >> Is the way to-- >> It's very important. >> Talk about artistry, one of the things we've been talking about in the software and in the tech business is the role of artistry and craft. And that we see that swinging back with cloud computing. I would say to the craft out a software development but you're seeing these integrated solutions where craftsmanship and art are coming together. We're seeing examples, certainly in Asia, in China we're seeing examples where the development world, the technical world has come together with artistry world to create these new solutions. So you've got creative and you've got technical coming together. That's what you're doing. >> Yeah, no absolutely. >> What's the success formula? Is there one? Is it right brain, left brain, what's the-- >> I don't know. We've just got this bubbly caldron of creativity and we're pulling stuff out of it as we go, but I think it's important for us not to forget about art. Art has been at the forefront of every social change, every movement. If it does its job, it's of the moment and it tells us a lot about ourselves. But there's also that important thing about art with technology, and with consumer products. The reason that the iPhone was so successful is because it's a thing of beauty, and everyone is in awe of it. So design is critical, it's absolutely critical when you're thinking about scale or consumer products or tech that works. >> And having a good taste for a good art is also a skill. >> Yeah. >> Knowing what's beautiful. >> Of course. >> Tech guys love to have that skill. >> You could argue that that's getting democratized and disrupted as well. >> Kate, thanks so much for spending some time here. >> My pleasure, this is fun. >> Cube Conversation, Kate Goodall, co-founder and CEO of Halcyon here in Washington, D.C. Changing the world, societal entrepreneurship. A lot of great actions. This is theCube coverage. Thanks for watching. (uptempo techno music)