(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE, "Unstoppable Domains Showcase." I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on Web 3.0. And also this new sea change, cultural change around this next generation, internet, web, cloud, all happening, Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst and Founding Part of Kaleido Insights. Jeremiah, great to see you thanks for coming on I appreciate it. Ren Besnard, Vice President of Marketing and Unstoppable Domains in the middle of all the action. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on theCUBE for this showcase. >> Wow, my pleasure. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Jeremiah, I want to start with you. You've seen many ways refer in all of your work for over a decade now. You've seen the Web 2.0 wave now the Web 3.0 is here. And it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up it's really just ramping up. And you're seeing real practical examples. You're in the middle of all the action. What is this Web 3.0, can you frame for us? I mean, you've seen many webs. What is Web 3.0 mean, what is it all about? >> Well John, you and I worked in the Web 2.0 space and essentially that enabled peer-to-peer media where people could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos without having to rely on centralized media. Unfortunately, that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platform which are the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities, and could not really monetize or make decisions. So Web 3.0 which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto, blockchain and sometimes the metaverse. Is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again. And in this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it, and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's Web 3.0. Without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >> Yeah, it's great. And Ren, we're talking about on theCUBE many times and one notable stat I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into to crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups. Which means that there's a big wave coming in of talent. You're seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation, you're seeing a lot more, I would say it's kind of ramping up of real people, not just people with dream is actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the Web 3.0 movement with all this kind of change happening from people and also the new ideas being refactored? >> I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats, we see that there is an enormous draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of Web 3.0. And at this stage I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions, you know, marketing being one of them, sales, business development are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid 2000s, you know. When I started working with Google, at that point in time the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that were passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely similar except faster. >> Yeah, Jeremiah, you've seen the conversations of the cloud, I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007. But you got Amazon Web Services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movements. So you've got cloud which is kind of classic today, state of the art enterprise and or app developers. And you've got now decentralized wave coming, okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that architecture. Data is central in all this, right. So how, how do you view this as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data I mean, LinkedIn, Facebook. They're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as- >> That's right. >> They can control back comes to the forefront. How do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >> So the thing that we seen out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing. (Jeremiah coughing) Are the ones that have been easier to move across. Have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central, frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts, the blockchain ledgers, those have decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with (indistinct). So they're still using the Web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other forms like IPFS where the data could be spread across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what Web 2.0. So the vision and the promise Web 3.0 when it to full decentralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a Web 2.25. >> Pre-Web 3.0 no, but actions there. How do you guys see the dangers, 'cause there's a lot of negative press but also there's a lot of positive press. You're seeing a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positive. It's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is. But what are the dangers, how do you guys educate people, what should people pay attention to, what should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >> Yes, so we've learned a lot from Web 1.0, Web 2.0, the sharing economy. And we are walking into Web 3.0 with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Also the architecture breaks DAOn in some periods and there's a lack of regulation. This is something different though. In the last periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was going to happen. And we walked and think this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media's going to change the world around. It's very different now. People are a little bit jaded. So I think that's a change. And so I think we're going to see that sorted out in suss out just like we've seen with other trends. It's still very much in the early years. >> Ren, I got to get your take on this whole should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be docs out there? You saw the board, eight guys that did that were kind of docs a little bit there. And that went viral. This is an issue, right? Because we just had a problem of fake news, fake people, fake information. And now you have a much more secure environment imutability is a wonderful thing. It's a feature, not a bug, right? So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with NFTs as authentication. Take us, what's your take on this because this is a big issue. >> Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. So I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it to, you know. If you think about every Fortune 500 company there is always training required by all employees on internet safety, reporting of potential attacks and so on. In Web 3.0, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of Web 3.0 of crypto basically. Whether you're talking about hacks or online safety, the need for hardware, wallet, impersonators on discord, you know, security storing your seed phrase. So every actor influencer or else has got a role to play. I think that in that context to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be anonymous, oxydemous or fully docked. The decentralized nature of Web 3.0 will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels so to speak. And the movements that we've seen around some influencers identities become public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of Web 2.O and Web 3.0 at play here, you know. Maybe occurring on the notion of 2.5. But for now I think in Web 2.0, all business founders and employees are known and they held accountable for their public comments and their actions. If Web 3.0 enables us to be anonymous, if DAOs have voting control, you know. What happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are, basically. What if the DAO doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self-regulate themselves and will create natural boundaries around what can be said or not said. >> I think that's a really good point about influencers and reputation because. Jeremiah, does it matter that you're anonymous have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture. But if I have an ongoing reputation I have trust, to this trust there. It's not like just a bot that was created just to spam someone. You know I'm starting to getting into this new way. >> You're right, and that word you said trust, that's what really this is about. But we've seen that public docs, people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in the, that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerge even for pseudonym and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their potential wallet, address a series of numbers and letters. That form might take a new form of a Web 3.0 FICO Score. And you could look at their behaviors. Did they transact, you know, how did they behave? Were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that. We might see a new form of a scoring emerge, of course. Who controls that scoring? That's a whole nother topic gone on controling and trust. So right now, John we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFT projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and in their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of products or platforms that require KYC, you know, your customers. So that's self-identification often with a government ID or credit card in order to bridge out your coins and turn that into fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a collision here between our full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >> That's awesome. And I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance. Ren, you mentioned some comments about DAO. I want to get your thoughts again. You know, Jeremiah we've become historians over the years. We're getting old I'm a little bit older than you. (Jeremiah laughs) But we've seen the- >> You're young men. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic and then they became much more of a, kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved, the standards organization just to slow things DAO and mark things up a little bit. So, you know, you look at DAOs like, hmm, is DAO a good thing or a bad thing. The answer is from people I talk to is, it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition, vis-a-vis just a DAO for the sake of having a DAO. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade offs. Can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a DAO and when not to do a DAO and the benefits and trade offs of that? >> Sure, maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to, Ren. So a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this It's a digital cooperative. and we've heard of worker cooperatives before. The difference is that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do three things, identity, governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on Web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and Telegram and social networks to communicate. And as a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal. Ren, what's your take, that's the setup. >> So, you know for me when I started my journey into crypto and Web 3.0, I had no idea about what DAO actually meant. And an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a DAO and perhaps a more traditional company structure, you know. In the traditional company structure, you have (indistinct), the company's led by a CEO and other executives. The DAO is a flat structure, and it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a cooperative type of structure. The decision making is very different, you know. We're talking about a super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and voting systems using (indistinct) as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently very interesting moments in Web 3.0 culture. And we have seen how DAO suddenly have to make certain decisions and come to moments of claiming responsibility in order to police behavior of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that particularly new governance models. And I think it's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >> Yeah and that's a great point. >> Go ahead, Jeremiah. >> That's a great point, Ren. Around the transparency for governance. So, John you post the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now in the most doubts are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar? Or you can appoint delegates and use tokens to vote for them and they have a decision power. Almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there sometimes are hierarchy except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens. But that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures. >> You know, Ren I was talking with Matt G, the Founder of Unstoppable. And I was telling him about the Domain Name System. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the US government 'cause the internet was started by the US. The Department of Commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, 'cause the innovation yet was isn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus melding with it. So there's certain technologies that require, Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community let's not formalize anything. Like the government did with the Domain Name System. Let's keep it tight and then finally released it. I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the ITU. But this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation can't go. What's you guys reaction to that? >> So I think, you know to take the stab at it. We have as a business, you know, thinking of Unstoppable Domains, a strong incentive to innovate. And this is what is going to be determining long-term value growth for the organization, for partners, for users, for customers. So you know the degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to DAO, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the DAO is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove buyers quite effectively and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and own the upside in many ways. You know as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very diverse and part-time workforce in a very you a different way. And we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be inherent to some form of extreme decentralization. So there is a balance from an organizational structure that comes either side. >> Awesome. Jeremiah, I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you've been involved in, we've both been involved in. And you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of the role of an influencer. It's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared, created content enabled things to much more of a vanity. You update the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. So is there a new influencer model with Web 3.0 or is it, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? 'Cause as Web 3.0 comes you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects. Influencers, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that? Because this has been a conversation. People have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >> Sure, the influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to Web 3.0. In this market, I mean there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFT projects. So, Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved. They are also doing theirs as well. Steve Aok, famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And their communities are coming around them and they're building economy. Now the difference is it's not I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they literally hold and own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a big difference as well. >> Can you see- >> Lastly, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are air dropping NFTs, branded NFTs influencers wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Back to you. >> That's super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of how engagement's happening, how people are closed looping their votes, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. And the brands which are artists now influencers. I mean, this is a whole game changing instrumentation level. >> I think that what we are seeing right now is super reinvigorating as a marketeer who's been around for a few years, basically. I think that the shift in the way brands are going to communicate and engage with their audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences. There are many levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advance the message and the mission because the explosion of content on Web 3.0 has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto. Because as Jaremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects. Holders of an NFT are also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a fly wheel which is pretty unique of people that are hyping their project and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem with IP right being given to NFT holders. You're going to see people promote brands instead of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands are gaining and delivering elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think again, we have hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that particular space. >> That's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here. Jeremiah, the old days the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic. And they didn't really know what to do they called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with authenticity and environment like Web 3.0 where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >> That's right, and be because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody's behaved with their economic behavior in the past. Of course, big corporations aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But individuals and executives who participate in this market might be. And we'll also see new types of affinity. Do executives do they participate in these NFT communities, do they purchase them or numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, you know, different NFT projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course you could talk to, Ren about that because it's owning your own name is a part of this trust and being found. >> That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to share your thoughts on what you think is happening now where it goes, all right, where's it going to go? Jeremiah, we'll start with you. >> Sure, I think the vision of Web 3.0 where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach Web 2.5. And I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power's going to shift completely to of the end, it just doesn't. In part there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the programs in the first place. And secondly, the startups themselves end up becoming the one-percenter. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenter now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >> Awesome, Ren final comments. >> I'm fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notion of control being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains that we are going to see and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness two parallel movements of expansion. One that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and Web 3.0 essentially you think of a few 100 tribes. And I think that more projects are going to be a more coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see, you know, an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low 100 millions of crypto and NFT holders into the big hands basically. And that's going to be extreme interesting. I think that the next waves of crypto users, NFT fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology adoption curves. I think the demographics are going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >> All right, Ren and Jeremiah, thank you both for that great insight great segment breaking down Web 3.0 or Web 2.5 as Jeremiah says but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers. As part of theCUBE and the Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to the cube unstoppable Doneen showcase. I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on in web three and also this new sea change cultural change around this next generation, internet web cloud, all happening, Jeremiah yang industry analyst, and founding part of the cleaner insights. Share my great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Uh, registered vice-president of marketing at unstoppable domains in the middle of all the actions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on the cube for this showcase. >>My pleasure. So I think it was done >>At Jeremy. I want to start with you. You've seen many ways, but fallen all of your work for over a decade now. Um, you've seen the web 2.0 wave. Now the web three's here. Um, and it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up. It's really just ramping up and you're seeing real practical examples. Uh, you're in the middle of all the action. What is this web three? Can you frame for us that mean you've seen many waves? What is web three mean? What is it? What is it all about? >>Well, John, you and I worked in the web to space and essentially that enabled peer to peer media where people could, could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos, um, without having to rely on centralized media. And unfortunately that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platforms or the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities and could not really monetize or make decisions. So web three is what is, which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto blockchain. And sometimes the metaverse is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again, and then this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways, it's, it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's web three without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >>Yeah, that's great. And ran. We were talking about, on the cute many times and one notable stat, I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the, um, Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups, which means that this there's a big wave coming in of talent. You seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation. You're seeing a lot more, I would say, kind of ramping up of real people, not just, you know, people with a dream it's actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the web three, moving with all this kind of change happening, uh, from people and also the new ideas being refactored. >>I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats. We see that there is an draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of web three. And at this stage, I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions know marketing, being one of them, sales, business development, uh, are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid two thousands. You know, when I started, uh, working with Google at that point in time, the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that are passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely dissimilar, except >>Yeah, Jeremiah. You've seen the conversations over the cloud. I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007, but then you got Amazon web services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movement. So you've got cloud, which is kind of classic today. State-of-the-art, you know, enterprise and or app developers and you've got now decentralized wave coming. Okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that, that architecture data is central in all of this, right. So how do you view this? As, as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data. I mean, LinkedIn Facebook, they're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as they can control back, comes to the forefront, how do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >>So the thing that we've seen and out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing, the ones that have been easier to move across have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central. Frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts to block blockchain ledgers to those of decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with Stelara. So they're still using the web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other farms like IPFS, where the data could be to spread it across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what we're to point out. So the vision and the problem with 3.0, when it comes to full de-centralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a web 2.2, five, >>Pre-web 3m, no actions there. What do you guys, how do you guys see the, um, the dangers? Cause there's a lot of negative press, but also is a lot of positive press. You seeing, you know, a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positives, it's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is, but what are the dangers? How do you guys educate people? What should people pay attention to? What should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >>Yes. So we've learned a lot from web one, we to the sharing economy and we are walking into two and three with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining, the, um, the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Um, also the architecture breaks down in certain periods and there's a lack of regulation. Um, this, this is something different though in the last, uh, uh, periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was gonna happen. And we walked in big, this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media is going to change the world. Hurrah is very different. Now people are a little bit jaded. So I think that's the big change. And so I think we're going to see that, uh, you know, soar it out and suss out just like we've seen with other prints. It's still very much in the early years, >>Right. I got to get your take on this whole, uh, should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be doxed out there? You saw the board eight guys that did, that were kind of docs a little bit there and that went, went viral. Um, this is an issue, right? Because we, we just had a problem of fake news, uh, fake people, fake information, and now you have a much more secure environment. Immutability is a wonderful thing. It's, it's a feature, not a bug, right. So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with, uh, NFTs as, as authentication tickets. What's your take on this because this is a big issue. >>Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. Uh, so I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it too. You know, if you think about every fortune 500 company, there is always training required by all employees on internet safety reporting of potential attacks. And so on in web three, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet, uh, for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about, uh, the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of web three, uh, of crypto basically, uh, whether you're talking about hacks online safety, the need for hardware impersonators on discord, uh, security, uh, storing your, your seed phrase. >>So every actor in France or ELs has got a role to play. I think that, uh, in that context, to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be, uh, anonymous, opposite inverse or footy dogs. The decentralized nature of web three will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels, um, so to speak, um, and the, uh, movements that we've seen around some influencers, identities becoming public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of web two and web three at play here. You know, maybe a on the notion of 2.5 for, I think in way to all business founders and employees are known and they're held accountable for their public comments and actions. Um, if web three enables us to be anonymous, if dials have 14 control, you know, what happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are basically, uh, what if the dowel doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be, uh, acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self regulate themselves and we'll create natural boundaries around what can be said or not. >>I think that's a really good point about, um, influencers and reputation because Jeremiah doesn't matter that you're anonymous. I have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture, but if I have an ongoing reputation, I have trust there's trust there. It's not like a, you know, just a bot that was created just to spam someone. It was just, you know what I'm saying? They getting into you getting into this new way. >>You're right. And that, that word you said, trust, that's what really, this is about. But we've seen that public docks people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces in and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in it that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerged even for pseudonyms and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their a potential, a wallet address, a series of numbers and letters. Um, that form might take a new form of a web 3.0 FICO score, and you can look at their behaviors. Did they transact? You know, how do they behave? Do they, were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that we might see a new form of, of, of a scoring emerge. >>Of course, who controls that scoring that's a whole nother topic, gong on control and trust. So right now, John, we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFG projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of, um, uh, products or platforms that require KYC, know your customer so that self-identification often with a government ID or a credit card in order to bridge out your, your coins and turn that into a Fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a coalition here between, uh, full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >>That's awesome. And that, and I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance ran. You mentioned some comments about Dow. So I want to get your thoughts again, you know, Jeremiah, we become historians over the years. We're getting old, I'm a little bit older than you, but we've seen the movie war. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic, and then they became much more of a kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved the standards organization just to slow things down and muck things up a little bit. Um, so you know, you look at Dallas like, Hmm, is a Dal, a good thing, or a bad thing that the answer is from people I talked to, is it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition. Vis-a-vis just adapt for the sake of having a doubt. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade-offs, can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a Dow and when not to do a Dow and the benefits and trade-offs of that? >>Sure. Maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to rent. So a Dao, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this. It's a digital cooperative and we've heard of worker cooperatives before the differences that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do the three things, identity governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and telegram and social networks to communicate. And there's a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal, um, Ren, but what's your take, that's the setup? >>So, you know, for me, when I started my journey into crypto and web tree, I had no idea about, you know, what that actually meant and, uh, an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a dowel and perhaps a more traditional company structure. Um, you know, in a traditional company structure, you have a Yorkie, the company is led by a CEO and other executives, uh, that that was a flat structure. And it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So, uh, to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a co-operative, uh, type of structure. The decision-making is very different. You know, we're talking about a hot, super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and, and voting systems, using applications, as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. >>I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently, uh, very interesting moments in web tree culture. And we have seen how that was suddenly have to make certain decisions and then come to moments of claiming responsibility, uh, in order to, uh, put his behavior, uh, of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that, particularly new governance models. And I think he's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >>That's a great point, ran around the transparency for governance. So John, you posed the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now most dowels are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that, they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar where you can appoint a delegates and use tokens to vote for them? And they have a decision power, almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there are some times our hierarchies, except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens, but that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures, >>You know, rent. I was talking with Matt G the founder of, and I was telling him about the domain name system. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the U S government cause unit it was started by the U S the department of commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications union wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, because the innovation yet wasn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus meddling with it. So there's certain technologies that require Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community. Let's not formalize anything like the government did with the domain name system. Let's keep it tight. And then finally released it, I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the, to the ITU, but this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation, can't go, what you guys' reaction to that. >>So I think to take a stab at it, um, we have as a business, you know, thinking of unstoppable domains, a strong incentive to innovate, uh, and this is what is going to be determining longterm value growth for the organization for, uh, partners, for users, for customers. So, you know, that degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to Dows, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the Dow is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove bias quite effectively, and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and all the upside in many ways. Um, you know, as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very, uh, diverse and part-time workforce in a very, uh, you know, different way. Um, and we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be, you never run to some form of extreme decentralization so that those are balanced from an organizational structure, uh, that comes, uh, either side >>Sharon. I want to get your thoughts on, on, on a trend that you've been involved in. We both been involved in, and you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of a role of an influencer it's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared graded content, um, enabled things to much more of a vanity that the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. Um, so is there a new influencer model with web three or is it, is it the, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or, or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? Because as web three comes, you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects, influences, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that because there's been a conversation with people who have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >>Sure. The influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to at three, this market, I mean, there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are in investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator, there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFC projects. Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved and they are also doing this as well. Steve Aoki, a famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And there are communities are coming around them and they're building economies. Now the difference is it's not, I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they hold, they literally holding own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a, that's a big difference as well. Lastly, there's, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are airdropping in FTS, branded NFTs influencers with wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Yes. >>Super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of, of how engagement's happening, how people are closed, looping their, their votes, their, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. Um, and some brands which are artists now, influencers. I mean, this is a whole game-changing instrumentation level. >>I think that's what we are seeing right now is super re invigorating as a marketeer who has been around for a few years, basically. Um, I think that the shift in the web brands are going to communicate and engage with our audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for, uh, brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and, and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences, um, dominate levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advanced the message and the mission because the explosion of content on web tree has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto, because as Jeremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects, holders of an NFTA, also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a flywheel, which is pretty unique of people that are hyping the project, and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem, uh, with IP rights, being given to NFT holders, you're going to see people pull a brand since then of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands, again, judging and delivering, you know, elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think, again, we've hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that. >>It's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here, Jeremiah, the old days, the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic and they didn't really know what to do. They called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with aura authenticity and environment like web three, where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >>That's right. And because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody is behave with their economic behavior. In the past, of course, big corporations. Aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But the individuals and executives who participate in this market might be, and we'll also see a new types of affinity. Do you executives, do they participate in these NFT communities? Do they purchase them? We're seeing numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, uh, you know, different MTV projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course, you can talk to rant about that because it's owning your own name as a part of this trust and being >>That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to give, share your thoughts on what you think is happening now, where it goes. All right, where's it going to go, Jeremy, we'll start with you. >>Sure. Um, I think the vision of web three, where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach web 2.5 and I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power is going to shift completely to the end. It just doesn't, there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the pro programs in the first place. And secondly, the, the startups themselves end up becoming the one percenters. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenters now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >>Right. And final, final comments, >>Um, fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notions of control, being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains, uh, uh, that we are going to see. And, and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness to palliate movements of expansion, one that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and web three, essentially you think of a few hundred tribes. Uh, and I think that more projects are going to appear more, uh, coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low hundred millions of people and an FTE holders into the billions perfectly. Uh, and that's going to be extremely interesting. I think that the next wave of crypto users and Ft fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology, adoption curves. I think the demographics going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >>All right, Ron, Jeremy, thank you both for that great insight, great segment, uh, breaking down web three or web 2.5 as Jeremiah says, but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers as part of the cubes and the unstoppable domain showcase. Um, John for your hosts. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live, from the Moscone Center it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit San Francisco, 2018. Brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman and this theCUBE's live coverage from AWS Summit San Francisco. Happy to have two industry analysts here. Also, they are founding partners of Kaleido Insights Jeremiah Owyang and Jessica Groopman. Join me and help me extract the signal from the noise that is our industry today. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here. >> Jessica it's actually the first time I've met you. Why don't you give our audience a little bit about your background and what led to the finding of Kaleido Insights. >> Of course, so I have been covering Internet of things, IOT for many years, and also in the last couple of years have gone very deep in both AI and blockchain. So, have this sort of umbrella category, which we call automation at Kaleido, that I cover and basically we formed the firm because what we saw was companies pursuing single technologies. What's your AI strategy, what's your IOG strategy what's your AR strategy? When in reality, all of these things are impacting each other. so we take a kaleidoscopic sort of converged lens. >> I love that, so Jeremiah, I can't believe it's your first time on our program, John Furrier's taking photos. You're one of the first people I followed on Twitter when I got on, I've known you for many years, so thanks. You've watched so many of these waves. Give us your take as to how you fit into the Kaleidoscope of what's happening. >> Yeah thanks a lot, so I've been in Silicon Valley for over 20 years, and I've seen threewaves.com, social media, collaborative, and now autonomous is the fourth wave that we're seeing right now. And, it's just amazing to see. I see the frequency of technologies is happening at a faster pace, and the impacts they're having to business models and what companies have to do to keep up, so it is a really exciting time. A few years ago, Uber and Airbnb were really hot and I was focused in on that topic. And now, it seems like that is a lifetime ago. We're focused on autonomous technologies; blockchain, IOT. And the things that Amazon announced today on stage like machine learning and drones and self-driving cars. It's a dizzying pace on what's going on it's like it explodes. >> Just in the last couple of weeks, look what happened to Facebook and Amazon with some of the internal and external pressures on those companies. I like what you say, we get excited by the new shiny. It was like, oh everything that was big data is now kind of AI well, IOT and ML. At WikiBound, on our research side, we say it's data at the center of it, data data data. And we've been talking about this for years. Jeremiah and I worked in the boring old storage industry. Which was never about storing the information, it was, how do I allow it to be shared and leverage it. So it's like it's maturation, you know, what's your take what's at the center over here, what are some of the biggest challenges, what's real what's not, and you know, doing it in under a minute. >> It continues to be the central focus, I mean it's been very interesting watching in the IOT space for the past couple of years where we've been fixated on things, right, the objects. But in reality it's about extracting data either between or about or in aggregate or about individuals sensor data, around those things. So the same is true, now we're seeing this shift into cognitive IOT, where devices themselves can analyze and process at the edge, or send learnings across a whole fleet of vehicles or a whole ray of devices about a given environment. Same story, different technologies continuing the cycle. >> Jeremiah, you know, that pace of change you talked about is so challenging, how do you go from I've got an idea to I'm going to start rolling it out by the time I use it, aren't I out of date? What do you see, how do you help customers look at this holistically and not constantly be tripping over themselves? >> And for the bigger the company the harder it is for them to keep up. The technology paces are coming faster, so one trend that we're seeing is corporations are launching innovation programs. It's an actual team, they have a dotted line to the CEO or the Chief Product Officer, and they're responsible for testing all of these new technologies. Maybe in a secluded area or tying it back to a business unit but their job is to experiment like a startup in the big company. So that's what we're seeing right now, these innovation programs that are merging. >> Why don't you tell us, we're here at the Amazon show. How are they doing, what's good? Where are some of the competitors leading them, you know? What are customers asking for? >> It's fascinating to see how Amazon is effectively taking different strategies at every single part of the stack. I believe this morning Verner said, offering egalitarian access to data storage, to data compute to machine learning algorithms. Effectively, it makes the company's only job to have a great idea and then sort of bringing in Amazon to do the rest. What I also see is that it's shifting the Venn diagrams or the complex diagrams of who's competitive and where. Competitive landscapes are shifting all the time at each of these new announcements. >> It's like the only thing you need from IT is bandwidth, the pipe. And Amazon is promising to do just about all the rest of that. >> Yeah, but the challenges. Remember when cloud computing was supposed to be simple and now it's like, oh okay. I'm going to build a database on Amazon. Well which one of the 15 do you want? All the languages, all the choices. >> 125 products, they listed on stage. >> Yeah, there are over 1,000 releases every year. They have two to three new products almost every day. When they do this Summit and they did a bunch of announcements most of those weren't planned for this it just happened to be what's coming out of the CIDC pipeline, if you will from them. >> Imagine being a salesperson for Amazon just to sell the products. >> Or imagine being a customer trying to figure out just what to use in the architecture. >> Unfortunately we don't have a lot more time to talk. Give us some of the things your firm is looking at what we look to see in this year from you. >> Yeah, so broadly speaking, we're really focused on these different technology convergences. Just published new research on where IOT and blockchain are coming together, that's a space we're following very closely. The next report working on right now is around AI readiness. There's much ado about data pipelines and data preparedness as there should be, but there's a whole realm of people process, governance, leadership preparedness. So we're really focused on how companies can prepare for this new technology. >> I'm also looking at how the new business models from automation will impact different enterprise business units. And our other partners are looking at content and automation in the marketing side, and we just had a report released from Jaime Szymanski on how virtual reality and mixed reality is going to impact enterprise. And there's six used cases for the business and Rebecca is working on the marketing report. >> Jeremiah and Jess, hope we can get back with you soon to discuss all this, you hit a whole bunch of things. You mentioned blockchain, so we'll get 10X of the views of what we would have had otherwise. We'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks to Kaleido Insights for joining us on this segment. We'll be back with lots more. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. >> Man: Thank you. (digital music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> As you know by now, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is stepping aside from his CEO role and AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, is being promoted to head all of Amazon. Bezos, of course, is going to remain executive chairman. Now, 15 years ago, next month, Amazon launched it's simple storage service, which was the first modern cloud offering. And the man who wrote the business plan for AWS, was Andy Jassy, and he's navigated the meteoric rise and disruption that has seen AWS grow into a $45 billion company that draws off the vast majority of Amazon's operating profits. No one in the media has covered Jassy more intimately and closely than John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And John joins us today to help us understand on theCUBE this move and what we can expect from Jassy in his new role, and importantly what it means for AWS. John, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. >> Hey, great day. Great to see you as always, we've done a lot of interviews together over the years and we're on our 11th year with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. But I got to be excited too, that we're simulcasters on Clubhouse, which is kind of cool. Love Clubhouse but not since the, in December. It's awesome. It's like Cube radio. It's like, so this is a Cube talk. So we opened up a Clubhouse room while we're filming this. We'll do more live hits in studio and syndicate the Clubhouse and then take questions after. This is a huge digital transformation moment. I'm part of the digital transformation club on Clubhouse which has almost 5,000 followers at the moment and also has like 500 members. So if you're not on Clubhouse, yet, if you have an iPhone go check it out and join the digital transformation club. Android users you'll have to wait until that app is done but it's really a great club. And Jeremiah Owyang is also doing a lot of stuff on digital transformation. >> Or you can just buy an iPhone and get in. >> Yeah, that's what people are doing. I can see all the influences are on there but to me, the digital transformation, it's always been kind of a cliche, the consumerization of IT, information technology. This has been the boring world of the enterprise over the past, 20 years ago. Enterprise right now is super hot because there's no distinction between enterprise and society. And that's clearly the, because of the rise of cloud computing and the rise of Amazon Web Services which was a side project at AWS, at Amazon that Andy Jassy did. And it wasn't really pleasant at the beginning. It was failed. It failed a lot and it wasn't as successful as people thought in the early days. And I have a lot of stories with Andy that he told me a lot of the inside baseball and we'll share that here today. But we started covering Amazon since the beginning. I was as an entrepreneur. I used it when it came out and a huge fan of them as a company because they just got a superior product and they have always had been but it was very misunderstood from the beginning. And now everyone's calling it the most important thing. And Andy now is becoming Andy Jassy, the most important executive in the world. >> So let's get it to the, I mean, look at, you said to me over holidays, you thought this might have something like this could happen. And you said, Jassy is probably in line to get this. So, tell us, what can you tell us about Jassy? Why is he qualified for this job? What do you think he brings to the table? >> Well, the thing that I know about Amazon everyone's been following the Amazon news is, Jeff Bezos has a lot of personal turmoil. They had his marriage fail. They had some issues with the smear campaigns and all this stuff going on, the run-ins with Donald Trump, he bought the Washington post. He's got a lot of other endeavors outside of Amazon cause he's the second richest man in the world competing with Elon Musk at Space X versus Blue Origin. So the guy's a billionaire. So Amazon is his baby and he's been running it as best he could. He's got an executive team committee they called the S team. He's been grooming people in the company and that's just been his mode. And the rise of AWS and the business performance that we've been documenting on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, it's just been absolutely changing the game on Amazon as a company. So clearly Amazon Web Services become a driving force of the new Amazon that's emerging. And obviously they've got all their retail business and they got the gaming challenges and they got the studios and the other diversified stuff. So Jassy is just, he's just one of those guys. He's just been an Amazonian from day one. He came out of Harvard business school, drove across the country, very similar story to Jeff Bezos. He did that in 1997 and him and Jeff had been collaborating and Jeff tapped him to be his shadow, they call it, which is basically technical assistance and an heir apparent and groomed him. And then that's how it is. Jassy is not a climber as they call it in corporate America. He's not a person who is looking for a political gain. He's not a territory taker, but he's a micromanager. He loves details and he likes to create customer value. And that's his focus. So he's not a grandstander. In fact, he's been very low profile. Early days when we started meeting with him, he wouldn't meet with press regularly because they weren't writing the right stories. And everyone is, he didn't know he was misunderstood. So that's classic Amazon. >> So, he gave us the time, I think it was 2014 or 15 and he told us a story back then, John, you might want to share it as to how AWS got started. Why, what was the main spring Amazon's tech wasn't working that great? And Bezos said to Jassy, going to go figure out why and maybe explain how AWS was born. >> Yeah, we had, in fact, we were the first ones to get access to do his first public profile. If you go to the Google and search Andy Jassy, the trillion dollar baby, we had a post, we put out the story of AWS, Andy Jassy's trillion dollar baby. This was in early, this was January 2015, six years ago. And, we back then, we posited that this would be a trillion dollar total addressable market. Okay, people thought we were crazy but we wrote a story and he gave us a very intimate access. We did a full drill down on him and the person, the story of Amazon and that laid out essentially the beginning of the rise of AWS and Andy Jassy. So that's a good story to check out but really the key here is, is that he's always been relentless and competitive on creating value in what they call raising the bar outside Amazon. That's a term that they use. They also have another leadership principle called working backwards, which is like, go to the customer and work backwards from the customer in a very Steve Job's kind of way. And that's been kind of Jobs mentality as well at Apple that made them successful work backwards from the customer and make things easier. And that was Apple. Amazon, their philosophy was work backwards from the customer and Jassy specifically would say it many times and eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That was a key principle of what they were doing. So that was a key thesis of their entire business model. And that's the Amazonian way. Faster, cheaper, ship it faster, make it less expensive and higher value. While when you apply the Amazon shipping concept to cloud computing, it was completely disrupted. They were shipping code and services faster and that became their innovation strategy. More announcements every year, they out announced their competition by huge margin. They introduced new services faster and they're less expensive some say, but in the aggregate, they make more money but that's kind of a key thing. >> Well, when you, I was been listening to the TV today and there was a debate on whether or not, this support tends that they'll actually split the company into two. To me, I think it's just the opposite. I think it's less likely. I mean, if you think about Amazon getting into grocery or healthcare, eventually financial services or other industries and the IOT opportunity to me, what they do, John, is they bring in together the cloud, data and AI and they go attack these new industries. I would think Jassy of all people would want to keep this thing together now whether or not the government allows them to do that. But what are your thoughts? I mean, you've asked Andy this before in your personal interviews about splitting the company. What are your thoughts? >> Well, Jon Fortt at CNBC always asked the same question every year. It's almost like the standard question. I kind of laugh and I ask it now too because I liked Jon Fortt. I think he's an awesome dude. And I'll, it's just a tongue in cheek, Jassy. He won't answer the question. Amazon, Bezos and Jassy have one thing in common. They're really good at not answering questions. So if you ask the same question. They'll just say, nothing's ever, never say never, that's his classic answer to everything. Never say never. And he's always said that to you. (chuckles) Some say, he's, flip-flopped on things but he's really customer driven. For example, he said at one point, no one should ever build a data center. Okay, that was a principle. And then they come out and they have now a hybrid strategy. And I called them out on that and said, hey, what, are you flip-flopping? You said at some point, no one should have a data center. He's like, well, we looked at it differently and what we meant was is that, it should all be cloud native. Okay. So that's kind of revision, but he's cool with that. He says, hey, we'll revise based on what customers are doing. VMware working with Amazon that no one ever thought that would happen. Okay. So, VMware has some techies, Raghu, for instance, over there, super top notch. He worked with Jassy, directly in his team Sanjay Poonen when they went to business school together, they cut a deal. And now Amazon essentially saved VMware, in my opinion. And Pat Gelsinger drove that deal. Now, Pat Gelsinger, CEO, Intel, and Pat told me that directly in candid conversation off theCUBE, he said, hey, we have to make a decision either we're going to be in cloud or we're not going to be in cloud, we will partner. And I'll see, he was Intel. He understood the Intel inside mentality. So that's good for VMware. So Jassy does these kinds of deals. He's not afraid he's got a good stomach for business and a relentless competitor. >> So, how do you think as you mentioned Jassy is a micromanager. He gets deep into the technology. Anybody who's seen his two hour, three hour keynotes. No, he has a really fine grasp of the technology across the entire stack. How do you think John, he will approach things like antitrust, the big tech lash of the unionization of the workforce at Amazon? How do you think Jassy will approach that? >> Well, I think one of the things that emerges Jassy, first of all, he's a huge sports fan. And many people don't know that but he's also progressive person. He's very progressive politically. He's been on the record and off the record saying things like, obviously, literacy has been big on, he's been on basically unrepresented minorities, pushing for that, and certainly cloud computing in tech, women in tech, he's been a big proponent. He's been a big supporter of Teresa Carlson. Who's been rising star at Amazon. People don't know who Teresa Carlson is and they should check out her. She's become one of the biggest leaders inside Amazon she's turned around public sector from the beginning. She ran that business, she's a global star. He's been a great leader and he's been getting, forget he's a micromanager, he's on top of the details. I mean, the word is, and nothing gets approved without Andy, Andy seeing it. But he's been progressive. He's been an Amazon original as they call it internally. He's progressive, he's got the business acumen but he's perfect for this pragmatic conversation that needs to happen. And again, because he's so technically strong having a CEO that's that proficient is going to give Amazon an advantage when they have to go in and change how DC works, for instance, or how the government geopolitical landscape works, because Amazon is now a global company with regions all over the place. So, I think he's pragmatic, he's open to listening and changing. I think that's a huge quality >> Well, when you think of this, just to set the context here for those who may not know, I mean, Amazon started as I said back in 2006 in March with simple storage service that later that year they announced EC2 which is their compute platform. And that was the majority of their business, is still a very large portion of their business but Amazon, our estimates are that in 2020, Amazon did 45 billion, 45.4 billion in revenue. That's actually an Amazon reported number. And just to give you a context, Azure about 26 billion GCP, Google about 6 billion. So you're talking about an industry that Amazon created. That's now $78 billion and Amazon at 45 billion. John they're growing at 30% annually. So it's just a massive growth engine. And then another story Jassy told us, is they, he and Jeff and the team talked early on about whether or not they should just sort of do an experiment, do a little POC, dip their toe in and they decided to go for it. Let's go big or go home as Michael Dell has said to us many times, I mean, pretty astounding. >> Yeah. One of the things about Jassy that people should know about, I think there's some compelling relative to the newest ascension to the CEO of Amazon, is that he's not afraid to do new things. For instance, I'll give you an example. The Amazon Web Services re-invent their annual conference grew to being thousands and thousands of people. And they would have a traditional after party. They called a replay, they'd have a band like every tech conference and their conference became so big that essentially, it was like setting up a live concert. So they were spending millions of dollars to set up basically a one night concert and they'd bring in great, great artists. So he said, hey, what's been all this cash? Why don't we just have a festival? So they did a thing called Intersect. They got LA involved from creatives and they basically built a weekend festival in the back end of re-invent. This was when real life was, before COVID and they turned into an opportunity because that's the way they think. They like to look at the resources, hey, we're already all in on this, why don't we just keep it for the weekend and charge some tickets and have a good time. He's not afraid to take chances on the product side. He'll go in and take a chance on a new market. That comes from directly from Bezos. They try stuff. They don't mind failing but they put a tight leash on measurement. They work backwards from the customer and they are not afraid to take chances. So, that's going to board well for him as he tries to figure out how Amazon navigates the contention on the political side when they get challenged for their dominance. And I think he's going to have to apply that pragmatic experimentation to new business models. >> So John I want you to take on AWS. I mean, despite the large numbers, I talked about 30% growth, Azure is growing at over 50% a year, GCP at 83%. So despite the large numbers and big growth the growth rates are slowing. Everybody knows that, we've reported it extensively. So the incoming CEO of Amazon Web Services has a TAM expansion challenge. And at some point they've got to decide, okay, how do we keep this growth engine? So, do you have any thoughts as to who might be the next CEO and what are some of their challenges as you see it? >> Well, Amazon is a real product centric company. So it's going to be very interesting to see who they go with here. Obviously they've been grooming a lot of people. There's been some turnover. You had some really strong executives recently leave, Jeff Wilkes, who was the CEO of the retail business. He retired a couple of months ago, formerly announced I think recently, he was probably in line. You had Mike Clayville, is now the chief revenue officer of Stripe. He ran all commercial business, Teresa Carlson stepped up to his role as well as running public sector. Again, she got more power. You have Matt Garman who ran the EC2 business, Stanford grad, great guy, super strong on the product side. He's now running all commercial sales and marketing. And he's also on the, was on Bezos' S team, that's the executive kind of team. Peter DeSantis is also on that S team. He runs all infrastructure. He took over for James Hamilton, who was the genius behind all the data center work that they've done and all the chip design stuff that they've innovated on. So there's so much technical innovation going on. I think you still going to see a leadership probably come from, I would say Matt Garman, in my opinion is the lead dog at this point, he's the lead horse. You could have an outside person come in depending upon how, who might be available. And that would probably come from an Andy Jassy network because he's a real fierce competitor but he's also a loyalist and he likes trust. So if someone comes in from the outside, it's going to be someone maybe he trusts. And then the other wildcards are like Teresa Carlson. Like I said, she is a great woman in tech who's done amazing work. I've profiled her many times. We've interviewed her many times. She took that public sector business with Amazon and changed the game completely. Outside the Jedi contract, she was in competitive for, had the big Trump showdown with the Jedi, with the department of defense. Had the CIA cloud. Amazon set the standard on public sector and that's directly the result of Teresa Carlson. But she's in the field, she's not a product person, she's kind of running that group. So Amazon has that product field kind of structure. So we'll see how they handle that. But those are the top three I think are going to be in line. >> So the obvious question that people always ask and it is a big change like this is, okay, in this case, what is Jassy going to bring in? And what's going to change? Maybe the flip side question is somewhat more interesting. What's not going to change in your view? Jassy has been there since nearly the beginning. What are some of the fundamental tenets that he's, that are fossilized, that won't change, do you think? >> I think he's, I think what's not going to change is Amazon, is going to continue to grow and develop their platform business and enable more SaaS players. That's a little bit different than what Microsoft's doing. They're more SaaS oriented, Office 365 is becoming their biggest application in terms of revenue on Microsoft side. So Amazon is going to still have to compete and enable more ecosystem partners. I think what's not going to change is that Bezos is still going to be in charge because executive chairman is just a code word for "not an active CEO." So in the corporate governance world when you have an executive chairman, that's essentially the person still in charge. And so he'll be in charge, will still be the boss of Andy Jassy and Jassy will be running all of Amazon. So I think that's going to be a little bit the same, but Jassy is going to be more in charge. I think you'll see a team change over, whether you're going to see some new management come in, Andy's management team will expand, I think Amazon will stay the same, Amazon Web Services. >> So John, last night, I was just making some notes about notable transitions in the history of the tech business, Gerstner to Palmisano, Gates to Ballmer, and then Ballmer to Nadella. One that you were close to, David Packard to John Young and then John Young to Lew Platt at the old company. Ellison to Safra and Mark, Jobs to Cook. We talked about Larry Page to Sundar Pichai. So how do you see this? And you've talked to, I remember when you interviewed John Chambers, he said, there is no rite of passage, East coast mini-computer companies, Edson de Castro, Ken Olsen, An Wang. These were executives who wouldn't let go. So it's of interesting to juxtapose that with the modern day executive. How do you see this fitting in to some of those epic transitions that I just mentioned? >> I think a lot of people are surprised at Jeff Bezos', even stepping down. I think he's just been such the face of Amazon. I think some of the poll numbers that people are doing on Twitter, people don't think it's going to make a big difference because he's kind of been that, leader hand on the wheel, but it's been its own ship now, kind of. And so depending on who's at the helm, it will be different. I think the Amazon choice of Andy wasn't obvious. And I think a lot of people were asking the question who was Andy Jassy and that's why we're doing this. And we're going to be doing more features on the Andy Jassy. We got a tons, tons of content that we've we've had shipped, original content with them. We'll share more of those key soundbites and who he is. I think a lot of people scratching their head like, why Andy Jassy? It's not obvious to the outsiders who don't know cloud computing. If you're in the competing business, in the digital transformation side, everyone knows about Amazon Web Services. Has been the most successful company, in my opinion, since I could remember at many levels just the way they've completely dominated the business and how they change others to be dominant. So, I mean, they've made Microsoft change, it made Google change and even then he's a leader that accepts conversations. Other companies, their CEOs hide behind their PR wall and they don't talk to people. They won't come on Clubhouse. They won't talk to the press. They hide behind their PR and they feed them, the media. Jassy is not afraid to talk to reporters. He's not afraid to talk to people, but he doesn't like people who don't know what they're talking about. So he doesn't suffer fools. So, you got to have your shit together to talk to Jassy. That's really the way it is. And that's, and he'll give you mind share, like he'll answer any question except for the ones that are too tough for him to answer. Like, are you, is facial recognition bad or good? Are you going to spin out AWS? I mean these are the hard questions and he's got a great team. He's got Jay Carney, former Obama press secretary working for him. He's been a great leader. So I'm really bullish on, is a good choice. >> We're going to jump into the Clubhouse here and open it up shortly. John, the last question for you is competition. Amazon as a company and even Jassy specifically I always talk about how they don't really focus on the competition, they focus on the customer but we know that just observing these folks Bezos is very competitive individual. Jassy, I mean, you know him better than I, very competitive individual. So, and he's, Jassy has been known to call out Oracle. Of course it was in response to Larry Ellison's jabs at Amazon regarding database. But, but how do you see that? Do you see that changing at all? I mean, will Amazon get more publicly competitive or they stick to their knitting, you think? >> You know this is going to sound kind of a weird analogy. And I know there's a lot of hero worshiping on Elon Musk but Elon Musk and Andy Jassy have a lot of similarities in the sense of their brilliance. They got both a brilliant people, different kinds of backgrounds. Obviously, they're running different things. They both are builders, right? If you were listening to Elon Musk on Clubhouse the other night, what was really striking was not only the magic of how it was all orchestrated and what he did and how he interviewed Robin Hood. He basically is about building stuff. And he was asked questions like, what advice do you give startups? He's like, if you need advice you shouldn't be doing startups. That's the kind of mentality that Jassy has, which is, it's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart, but Elon Musk is a builder. Jassy builds, he likes to build stuff, right? And so you look at all the things that he's done with AWS, it's been about enabling people to be successful with the tools that they need, adding more services, creating things that are lower price point. If you're an entrepreneur and you're over the age of 30, you know about AWS because you know what, it's cheaper to start a business on Amazon Web Services than buying servers and everyone knows that. If you're under the age of 25, you might not know 50 grand to a hundred thousand just to start something. Today you get your credit card down, you're up and running and you can get Clubhouses up and running all day long. So the next Clubhouse will be on Amazon or a cloud technology. And that's because of Andy Jassy right? So this is a significant executive and he continue, will bring that mindset of building. So, I think the digital transformation, we're in the digital engine club, we're going to see a complete revolution of a new generation. And I think having a new leader like Andy Jassy will enable in my opinion next generation talent, whether that's media and technology convergence, media technology and art convergence and the fact that he digs music, he digs sports, he digs tech, he digs media, it's going to be very interesting to see, I think he's well-poised to be, and he's soft-spoken, he doesn't want the glamorous press. He doesn't want the puff pieces. He just wants to do what he does and he puts his game do the talking. >> Talking about advice at startups. Just a quick aside. I remember, John, you and I when we were interviewing Scott McNealy former CEO of Sun Microsystems. And you asked him advice for startups. He said, move out of California. It's kind of tongue in cheek. I heard this morning that there's a proposal to tax the multi-billionaires of 1% annually not just the one-time tax. And so Jeff Bezos of course, has a ranch in Texas, no tax there, but places all over. >> You see I don't know. >> But I don't see Amazon leaving Seattle anytime soon, nor Jassy. >> Jeremiah Owyang did a Clubhouse on California. And the basic sentiment is that, it's California is not going away. I mean, come on. People got to just get real. I think it's a fad. Yeah. This has benefits with remote working, no doubt, but people will stay here in California, the network affects beautiful. I think Silicon Valley is going to continue to be relevant. It's just going to syndicate differently. And I think other hubs like Seattle and around the world will be integrated through remote work and I think it's going to be much more of a democratizing effect, not a win lose. So that to me is a huge shift. And look at Amazon, look at Amazon and Microsoft. It's the cloud cities, so people call Seattle. You've got Google down here and they're making waves but still, all good stuff. >> Well John, thanks so much. Let's let's wrap and let's jump into the Clubhouse and hear from others. Thanks so much for coming on, back on theCUBE. And many times we, you and I've done this really. It was a pleasure having you. Thanks for your perspectives. And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft ambient music)

>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering Machine Learning Everywhere: Build Your Ladder to AI, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to New York City. theCUBE continue our coverage here at IBM's event, Machine Learning Everywhere: Build Your Ladder to AI. And with us now is Rob Thomas, who is the vice president of, or general manager, rather, of IBM analytics. Sorry about that, Rob. Good to have you with us this morning. Good to see you, sir. >> Great to see you John. Dave, great to see you as well. >> Great to see you. >> Well let's just talk about the event first. Great lineup of guests. We're looking forward to visiting with several of them here on theCUBE today. But let's talk about, first off, general theme with what you're trying to communicate and where you sit in terms of that ladder to success in the AI world. >> So, maybe start by stepping back to, we saw you guys a few times last year. Once in Munich, I recall, another one in New York, and the theme of both of those events was, data science renaissance. We started to see data science picking up steam in organizations. We also talked about machine learning. The great news is that, in that timeframe, machine learning has really become a real thing in terms of actually being implemented into organizations, and changing how companies run. And that's what today is about, is basically showcasing a bunch of examples, not only from our clients, but also from within IBM, how we're using machine learning to run our own business. And the thing I always remind clients when I talk to them is, machine learning is not going to replace managers, but I think machine learning, managers that use machine learning will replace managers that do not. And what you see today is a bunch of examples of how that's true because it gives you superpowers. If you've automated a lot of the insight, data collection, decision making, it makes you a more powerful manager, and that's going to change a lot of enterprises. >> It seems like a no-brainer, right? I mean, or a must-have. >> I think there's a, there's always that, sometimes there's a fear factor. There is a culture piece that holds people back. We're trying to make it really simple in terms of how we talk about the day, and the examples that we show, to get people comfortable, to kind of take a step onto that ladder back to the company. >> It's conceptually a no-brainer, but it's a challenge. You wrote a blog and it was really interesting. It was, one of the clients said to you, "I'm so glad I'm not in the technology industry." And you went, "Uh, hello?" (laughs) "I've got news for you, you are in the technology industry." So a lot of customers that I talk to feel like, meh, you know, in our industry, it's really not getting disrupted. That's kind of taxis and retail. We're in banking and, you know, but, digital is disrupting every industry and every industry is going to have to adopt ML, AI, whatever you want to call it. Can traditional companies close that gap? What's your take? >> I think they can, but, I'll go back to the word I used before, it starts with culture. Am I accepting that I'm a technology company, even if traditionally I've made tractors, as an example? Or if traditionally I've just been you know, selling shirts and shoes, have I embraced the role, my role as a technology company? Because if you set that culture from the top, everything else flows from there. It can't be, IT is something that we do on the side. It has to be a culture of, it's fundamental to what we do as a company. There was an MIT study that said, data-driven cultures drive productivity gains of six to 10 percent better than their competition. You can't, that stuff compounds, too. So if your competitors are doing that and you're not, not only do you fall behind in the short term but you fall woefully behind in the medium term. And so, I think companies are starting to get there but it takes a constant push to get them focused on that. >> So if you're a tractor company, you've got human expertise around making tractors and messaging and marketing tractors, and then, and data is kind of there, sort of a bolt-on, because everybody's got to be data-driven, but if you look at the top companies by market cap, you know, we were talking about it earlier. Data is foundational. It's at their core, so, that seems to me to be the hard part, Rob, I'd like you to comment in terms of that cultural shift. How do you go from sort of data in silos and, you know, not having cloud economics and, that are fundamental, to having that dynamic, and how does IBM help? >> You know, I think, to give companies credit, I think most organizations have developed some type of data practice or discipline over the last, call it five years. But most of that's historical, meaning, yeah, we'll take snapshots of history. We'll use that to guide decision making. You fast-forward to what we're talking about today, just so we're on the same page, machine learning is about, you build a model, you train a model with data, and then as new data flows in, your model is constantly updating. So your ability to make decisions improves over time. That's very different from, we're doing historical reporting on data. And so I think it's encouraging that companies have kind of embraced that data discipline in the last five years, but what we're talking about today is a big next step and what we're trying to break it down to what I call the building blocks, so, back to the point on an AI ladder, what I mean by an AI ladder is, you can't do AI without machine learning. You can't do machine learning without analytics. You can't do analytics without the right data architecture. So those become the building blocks of how you get towards a future of AI. And so what I encourage companies is, if you're not ready for that AI leading edge use case, that's okay, but you can be preparing for that future now. That's what the building blocks are about. >> You know, I think we're, I know we're ahead of, you know, Jeremiah Owyang on a little bit later, but I was reading something that he had written about gut and instinct, from the C-Suite, and how, that's how companies were run, right? You had your CEO, your president, they made decisions based on their guts or their instincts. And now, you've got this whole new objective tool out there that's gold, and it's kind of taking some of the gut and instinct out of it, in a way, and maybe there are people who still can't quite grasp that, that maybe their guts and their instincts, you know, what their gut tells them, you know, is one thing, but there's pretty objective data that might indicate something else. >> Moneyball for business. >> A little bit of a clash, I mean, is there a little bit of a clash in that respect? >> I think you'd be surprise by how much decision making is still pure opinion. I mean, I see that everywhere. But we're heading more towards what you described for sure. One of the clients talking here today, AMC Networks, think it's a great example of a company that you wouldn't think of as a technology company, primarily a content producer, they make great shows, but they've kind of gone that extra step to say, we can integrate data sources from third parties, our own data about viewer habits, we can do that to change our relationship with advertisers. Like, that's a company that's really embraced this idea of being a technology company, and you can see it in their results, and so, results are not coincidence in this world anymore. It's about a practice applied to data, leveraging machine learning, on a path towards AI. If companies are doing that, they're going to be successful. >> And we're going to have the tally from AMC on, but so there's a situation where they have embraced it, that they've dealt with that culture, and data has become foundational. Now, I'm interested as to what their journey look like. What are you seeing with clients? How they break this down, the silos of data that have been built up over decades. >> I think, so they get almost like a maturity curve. You've got, and the rule I talk about is 40-40-20, where 40% of organizations are really using data just to optimize costs right now. That's okay, but that's on the lower end of the maturity curve. 40% are saying, all right, I'm starting to get into data science. I'm starting to think about how I extend to new products, new services, using data. And then 20% are on the leading edge. And that's where I'd put AMC Networks, by the way, because they've done unique things with integrating data sets and building models so that they've automated a lot of what used to be painstakingly long processes, internal processes to do it. So you've got this 40-40-20 of organizations in terms of their maturity on this. If you're not on that curve right now, you have a problem. But I'd say most are somewhere on that curve. If you're in the first 40% and you're, right now data for you is just about optimizing cost, you're going to be behind. If you're not right now, you're going to be behind in the next year, that's a problem. So I'd kind of encourage people to think about what it takes to be in the next 40%. Ultimately you want to be in the 20% that's actually leading this transformation. >> So change it to 40-20-40. That's where you want it to go, right? You want to flip that paradigm. >> I want to ask you a question. You've done a lot of M and A in the past. You spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley obviously very, very disruptive, you know, cultures and organizations and it's always been a sort of technology disruption. It seems like there's a ... another disruption going on, not just horizontal technologies, you know, cloud or mobile or social, whatever it is, but within industries. Some industries, as we've been talking, radically disrupted. Retail, taxis, certainly advertising, et cetera et cetera. Some have not yet, the client that you talked to. Do you see, technology companies generally, Silicon Valley companies specifically, as being able to pull off a sort of disruption of not only technologies but also industries and where does IBM play there? You've made a sort of, Ginni in particular has made a deal about, hey, we're not going to compete with our customers. So talking about this sort of dual disruption agenda, one on the technology side, one within industries that Apple's getting into financial services and, you know, Amazon getting into grocery, what's your take on that and where does IBM fit in that world? >> So, I mean, IBM has been in Silicon Valley for a long time, I would say probably longer than 99.9% of the companies in Silicon Valley, so, we've got a big lab there. We do a lot of innovation out of there. So love it, I mean, the culture of the valley is great for the world because it's all about being the challenger, it's about innovation, and that's tremendous. >> No fear. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, we work with a lot of different partners, some who are, you know, purely based in the valley. I think they challenge us. We can learn from them, and that's great. I think the one, the one misnomer that I see right now, is there's a undertone that innovation is happening in Silicon Valley and only in Silicon Valley. And I think that's a myth. Give you an example, we just, in December, we released something called Event Store which is basically our stab at reinventing the database business that's been pretty much the same for the last 30 to 40 years. And we're now ingesting millions of rows of data a second. We're doing it in a Parquet format using a Spark engine. Like, this is an amazing innovation that will change how any type of IOT use case can manage data. Now ... people don't think of IBM when they think about innovations like that because it's not the only thing we talk about. We don't have, the IBM website isn't dedicated to that single product because IBM is a much bigger company than that. But we're innovating like crazy. A lot of that is out of what we're doing in Silicon Valley and our labs around the world and so, I'm very optimistic on what we're doing in terms of innovation. >> Yeah, in fact, I think, rephrase my question. I was, you know, you're right. I mean people think of IBM as getting disrupted. I wasn't posing it, I think of you as a disruptor. I know that may sound weird to some people but in the sense that you guys made some huge bets with things like Watson on solving some of the biggest, world's problems. And so I see you as disrupting sort of, maybe yourselves. Okay, frame that. But I don't see IBM as saying, okay, we are going to now disrupt healthcare, disrupt financial services, rather we are going to help our, like some of your comp... I don't know if you'd call them competitors. Amazon, as they say, getting into content and buying grocery, you know, food stores. You guys seems to have a different philosophy. That's what I'm trying to get to is, we're going to disrupt ourselves, okay, fine. But we're not going to go hard into healthcare, hard into financial services, other than selling technology and services to those organizations, does that make sense? >> Yeah, I mean, look, our mission is to make our clients ... better at what they do. That's our mission, we want to be essential in terms of their journey to be successful in their industry. So frankly, I love it every time I see an announcement about Amazon entering another vertical space, because all of those companies just became my clients. Because they're not going to work with Amazon when they're competing with them head to head, day in, day out, so I love that. So us working with these companies to make them better through things like Watson Health, what we're doing in healthcare, it's about making companies who have built their business in healthcare, more effective at how they perform, how they drive results, revenue, ROI for their investors. That's what we do, that's what IBM has always done. >> Yeah, so it's an interesting discussion. I mean, I tend to agree. I think Silicon Valley maybe should focus on those technology disruptions. I think that they'll have a hard time pulling off that dual disruption and maybe if you broadly define Silicon Valley as Seattle and so forth, but, but it seems like that formula has worked for decades, and will continue to work. Other thoughts on sort of the progression of ML, how it gets into organizations. You know, where you see this going, again, I was saying earlier, the parlance is changing. Big data is kind of, you know, mm. Okay, Hadoop, well, that's fine. We seem to be entering this new world that's pervasive, it's embedded, it's intelligent, it's autonomous, it's self-healing, it's all these things that, you know, we aspire to. We're now back in the early innings. We're late innings of big data, that's kind of ... But early innings of this new era, what are your thoughts on that? >> You know, I'd say the biggest restriction right now I see, we talked before about somehow, sometimes companies don't have the desire, so we have to help create the desire, create the culture to go do this. Even for the companies that have a burning desire, the issue quickly becomes a skill gap. And so we're doing a lot to try to help bridge that skill gap. Let's take data science as an example. There's two worlds of data science that I would describe. There's clickers, and there's coders. Clickers want to do drag and drop. They will use traditional tools like SPSS, which we're modernizing, that's great. We want to support them if that's how they want to work and build models and deploy models. There's also this world of coders. This is people that want to do all their data science in ML, and Python, and Scala, and R, like, that's what they want to do. And so we're supporting them through things like Data Science Experience, which is built on Apache Jupiter. It's all open source tooling, it'd designed for coders. The reason I think that's important, it goes back to the point on skill sets. There is a skill gap in most companies. So if you walk in and you say, this is the only way to do this thing, you kind of excluded half the companies because they say, I can't play in that world. So we are intentionally going after a strategy that says, there's a segmentation in skill types. In places there's a gap, we can help you fill that gap. That's how we're thinking about them. >> And who does that bode well for? If you say that you were trying to close a gap, does that bode well for, we talked about the Millennial crowd coming in and so they, you know, do they have a different approach or different mental outlook on this, or is it to the mid-range employee, you know, who is open minded, I mean, but, who is the net sweet spot, you think, that say, oh, this is a great opportunity right now? >> So just take data science as an example. The clicker coder comment I made, I would put the clicker audience as mostly people that are 20 years into their career. They've been around a while. The coder audience is all the Millennials. It's all the new audience. I think the greatest beneficiary is the people that find themselves kind of stuck in the middle, which is they're kind of interested in this ... >> That straddle both sides of the line yeah? >> But they've got the skill set and the desire to do some of the new tooling and new approaches. So I think this kind of creates an opportunity for that group in the middle to say, you know, what am I going to adopt as a platform for how I go forward and how I provide leadership in my company? >> So your advice, then, as you're talking to your clients, I mean you're also talking to their workforce. In a sense, then, your advice to them is, you know, join, jump in the wave, right? You've got your, you can't straddle, you've got to go. >> And you've got to experiment, you've got to try things. Ultimately, organizations are going to gravitate to things that they like using in terms of an approach or a methodology or a tool. But that comes with experimentation, so people need to get out there and try something. >> Maybe we could talk about developers a little bit. We were talking to Dinesh earlier and you guys of course have focused on data scientists, data engineers, obviously developers. And Dinesh was saying, look, many, if not most, of the 10 million Java developers out there, they're not, like, focused around the data. That's really the data scientist's job. But then, my colleague John Furrier says, hey, data is the new development kit. You know, somebody said recently, you know, Andreessen's comment, "software is eating the world." Well, data is eating software. So if Furrier is right and that comment is right, it seems like developers increasingly have to become more data aware, fundamentally. Blockchain developers clearly are more data focused. What's your take on the developer community, where they fit into this whole AI, machine learning space? >> I was just in Las Vegas yesterday and I did a session with a bunch of our business partners. ISVs, so software companies, mostly a developer audience, and the discussion I had with them was around, you're doing, you're building great products, you're building great applications. But your product is only as good as the data and the intelligence that you embed in your product. Because you're still putting too much of a burden on the user, as opposed to having everything happen magically, if you will. So that discussion was around, how do you embed data, embed AI, into your products and do that at the forefront versus, you deliver a product and the client has to say, all right, now I need to get my data out of this application and move it somewhere else so I can do the data science that I want to do. That's what I see happening with developers. It's kind of ... getting them to think about data as opposed to just thinking about the application development framework, because that's where most of them tend to focus. >> Mm, right. >> Well, we've talked about, well, earlier on about the governance, so just curious, with Madhu, which I'll, we'll have that interview in just a little bit here. I'm kind of curious about your take on that, is that it's a little kinder, gentler, friendlier than maybe some might look at it nowadays because of some organization that it causes, within your group and some value that's being derived from that, that more efficiency, more contextual information that's, you know, more relevant, whatever. When you talk to your clients about meeting rules, regs, GDPR, all these things, how do you get them to see that it's not a black veil of doom and gloom but it really is, really more of an opportunity for them to cash in? >> You know, my favorite question to ask when I go visit clients is I say, I say, just show of hands, how many people have all the data they need to do their job? To date, nobody has ever raised their hand. >> Not too many hands up. >> The reason I phrased it that way is, that's fundamentally a governance challenge. And so, when you think about governance, I think everybody immediately thinks about compliance, GDPR, types of things you mentioned, and that's great. But there's two use cases for governance. One is compliance, the other one is self service analytics. Because if you've done data governance, then you can make your data available to everybody in the organization because you know you've got the right rules, the right permissions set up. That will change how people do their jobs and I think sometimes governance gets painted into a compliance corner, when organizations need to think about it as, this is about making data accessible to my entire workforce. That's a big change. I don't think anybody has that today. Except for the clients that we're working with, where I think we've made good strides in that. >> What's your sort of number one, two, and three, or pick one, advice for those companies that as you blogged about, don't realize yet that they're in the software business and the technology business? For them to close the ... machine intelligence, machine learning, AI gap, where should they start? >> I do think it can be basic steps. And the reason I say that is, if you go to a company that hasn't really viewed themselves as a technology company, and you start talking about machine intelligence, AI, like, everybody like, runs away scared, like it's not interesting. So I bring it back to building blocks. For a client to be great in data, and to become a technology company, you really need three platforms for how you think about data. You need a platform for how you manage your data, so think of it as data management. You need a platform for unified governance and integration, and you need a platform for data science and business analytics. And to some extent, I don't care where you start, but you've got to start with one of those. And if you do that, you know, you'll start to create a flywheel of momentum where you'll get some small successes. Then you can go in the other area, and so I just encourage everybody, start down that path. Pick one of the three. Or you may already have something going in one of them, so then pick one where you don't have something going. Just start down the path, because, those building blocks, once you have those in place, you'll be able to scale AI and ML in the future in your organization. But without that, you're going to always be limited to kind of a use case at a time. >> Yeah, and I would add, this is, you talked about it a couple times today, is that cultural aspect, that realization that in order to be data driven, you know, buzzword, you have to embrace that and drive that through the culture. Right? >> That starts at the top, right? Which is, it's not, you know, it's not normal to have a culture of, we're going to experiment, we're going to try things, half of them may not work. And so, it starts at the top in terms of how you set the tone and set that culture. >> IBM Think, we're less than a month away. CUBE is going to be there, very excited about that. First time that you guys have done Think. You've consolidated all your big, big events. What can we expect from you guys? >> I think it's going to be an amazing show. To your point, we thought about this for a while, consolidating to a single IBM event. There's no question just based on the response and the enrollment we have so far, that was the right answer. We'll have people from all over the world. A bunch of clients, we've got some great announcements that will come out that week. And for clients that are thinking about coming, honestly the best thing about it is all the education and training. We basically build a curriculum, and think of it as a curriculum around, how do we make our clients more effective at competing with the Amazons of the world, back to the other point. And so I think we build a great curriculum and it will be a great week. >> Well, if I've heard anything today, it's about, don't be afraid to dive in at the deep end, just dive, right? Get after it and, looking forward to the rest of the day. Rob, thank you for joining us here and we'll see you in about a month! >> Sounds great. >> Right around the corner. >> All right, Rob Thomas joining us here from IBM Analytics, the GM at IBM Analytics. Back with more here on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(click) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Moscone West at the Professional BusinessWomen of California Conference. 6,000 women, this thing's been going on for 28 years. It's a pretty amazing show. We see a lot of big women in tech conferences, but this is certainly one of the biggest and it's all about diversity, not just women. And of course, if there's a women in tech event, who are we going to see? Sandy Carter. >> Woo hoo! (laughs) >> Sandy, so great to see you. CEO of Silicon Blitz and been involved with PBWC for a while. >> I had suggested to Congresswoman Jackie when I saw her about three or four years ago about doing something special for the senior women. I proposed this leadership summit, and you know what they always say, if you suggest something, be prepared to execute it. She said, "Would you help us get this going?" Three years ago, I started the Senior Leaders Forum here, and yesterday we had that forum. We had 75 amazing women from all the great companies of California Chevron, Clorox, IBM, Microsoft Intel, Amazon, you name it all the great companies here in the Bay. Oh, Salesforce, Airbnb, all goes on. >> That was like a little conference in the conference? >> It was for C-Suite only and it was about 75 women. We do three TED Talks. We pick out talks that are hot but that are very actionable for companies. So yesterday, Jeff, we talked about millennials how to have inclusion of millennials in your workforce. 50% of the workforce by 2020 will be millennials. >> Is that a harder challenge than just straight-up diversity? >> This is really important. (laughs) It may be. But I had Allison Erwiener and Erby Foster from Clorox come and speak and they did a TED talk. Then we actually do little workshops to action. What would a millennial program look like? Our second topic was around innovation. How do you link diversity to innovation? There are so many studies, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, Harvard, DeLoy that shows there is a linkage but how do you get the linkage? For all these amazing diverse- >> The linkage between better business outcomes, correct? >> That's right. >> Better outcomes. >> That's right. In fact, the latest study from Harvard came out at the end of 2016 that showed not only with diverse teams do you get more innovation but more profitable innovation which is everybody's bailiwick today. We had Jeremiah Owyang of Crowd Companies who's a innovation expert come and really do that session for us. Then last but not least we talked about diversity and inclusion, primarily inclusion in the next century. What is that going to look like? We saw some facts about what's going on in changes in population, changes in diversity and then how we as companies should manage programs in order to tap into those changes. It was an awesome, awesome session. Then of course we had Pat Waters from Linkedin. She is chief talent officer there. She came and closed it out with her definition of inclusion. It was powerful. >> You won an award. >> I won an award, yes. >> Congratulations, what did you win? >> Game Changer for PBWC, and I'm really proud of it because last year we had Serena Williams speak and she was the first recipient so I guess you'd say I'm in great company because it's now Serena and I with this great award. >> Absolutely. Before we went on air we were talking about some of this next-gen diversity and thinking about getting that into programming languages and you brought up, there was some conversation around bots and obviously chat bots are all the rage and AI and ML is driving a lot of this but ultimately someone's got to write the software to teach these things how to behave so you're going to run into the same types of issues if you don't have a diversity of the thinking of the way the rules and those bots work as you have in any other situation where you have singular thinking. >> I think Jeff, you're right on. In fact, I think it's really going to accelerate the desire for diverse teams. If you think about artificial intelligence machine learning, and bots you have to train the computer. The computer's not naturally smart. There is a team that actually uses a corpus of knowledge and trains the bot. If the data that goes in my dad always said, "Garbage in, garbage out." If the data that goes in is biased then the output is biased and we're seeing that now. For instance, I was just looking at some VR headsets and people are now looking at virtual reality. You know you get a little nauseous. They've been tweaking it with artificial intelligence so that you don't get as nauseous but it was done by all men. As a result, it greatly improved the nauseousness of men but not women. That's just one example. You want your product to go for 100% of the world. >> That's weird, you'd think that would be pretty biological and not so much gender-specific. >> You would, but there are apparently differences. We talked to a doctor yesterday. There's apparently differences in motion-sickness between the two and if you only have one set of data you don't have the other. >> But then there's this other kind of interesting danger with machine learning and I think we see it a lot in what's going on in the news and causing a lot of diversion within the country in that the algorithms are going to keep feeding you more of that which you already have demonstrated an affinity to. It's almost like you have to purposefully break the things or specifically tell it, either through active action or programming that no, please send me stuff that I'm not necessarily seeing all the time. Please give me stuff that's going to give me a diversity of points of view and opinion and sources because it feels like with your basic recommendation engine it's going to keep sending you more of the same and rat hole you down one little track. >> That is true, and that's why today we have a panel and we're going to be talking about especially for AI and bots you must have diverse teams. From the session this morning I really loved one of the speakers, Kim Rivera, from HP and she said, "It's hard, but we just said 'Look, we've got to have 50% women on the board. We've got to do this.'" I think the same thing's going to be true for AI or bots Jeff, if you don't have a diverse team, you will not get the right answer from a bot. Bots are so powerful, and I was just with a group of nine year old girls and we had a coding camp and I asked them, "What do you want to do?" All of them wanted to do bots. >> Really. >> They had all played with- >> What kind of bots- >> The Zootopia- >> Did they want to do? >> They all had played with a Zootopia bot from Disney. I don't know, did you see Zootopia? >> I did not see it. I heard it was a great movie. >> It's a great movie, animated movie of the year. >> Bunnies, bunnies, bunnies as cops, right? >> That's right. In fact, the bunny is what they made into a chat bot. 10 million kids use that chat bot to get a little badge. Now all the kids are into bots. They used bots to remind them to brush their teeth to do their homework. In fact, there was a chat bot written by a 14 year old boy in Canada that's a homework reminder. It's actually really quite good. >> Also I'm thinking of is the Microsoft little kid that didn't, I guess timing is everything. >> Timing is everything, that's right. >> That one didn't work so well. >> But I guess what I would just leave with people is that when you're looking at this great, great new technology for AI and bots in particular, you must have a diverse team. You must look at your data. Your data's got to be unbiased. Like you said, if you just keep doing the same old thing you're going to get the same old answer. You've got to do something different. >> You're doing all kinds of stuff. You're working with Girls in Tech on the board there. I think you're doing some stuff with the Athena Alliance who's driving to get more women on >> Boards. >> Boards. You're really putting your toes in all kinds of puddles to really help move this thing because it also came up in the keynote. It's not a strategy problem. It's an execution problem. >> That's right, and because I'm so passionate about tech I love tech and I see this linkage today that is been never really been there that strong before but now it's almost like if you don't have diversity your AI and bots are going to fail. Forester just said that AI and bots is the future so companies have to pay attention to this now. I really think it's the moment of time. >> We're running out of time. I'm going to give you the last word. What are one or two concrete things that you've seen in your experience that leaders can do, like came up today in the keynote tomorrow to really help move the ball down the field? >> I think one is to make sure you have a diverse team and make sure that it represents diversity of thought and that could be age, it could be gender it could be sexual orientation, race you got to look at that diversity of team, that's one. Secondly, just by having a diverse team doesn't mean you're going to get great output. You've got to be inclusive. You've got to give these folks great projects. Like millennials, give them a passion project. Let them go and do something that can really make a difference. Then third, I think you have to test and make sure what you're delivering out there represents that cognitive diversity of thought so make sure that you're not just putting stuff out there just to get it out there but really double-checking it. I think those are three actionable things that you can do tomorrow. >> That's great, Sandy. Thank you very much. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Thanks for stopping by. We just checked Sandy's calendar and there we know where to take theCUBE because she's all over the place. She's Sandy Carter, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from the Professional BusinessWomen of California conference in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (synth music)