>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, it's theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Summit Online, they're virtual. Then I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto studios for theCUBE virtual. We're remotely doing interviews during this COVID crisis. We have our quarantine crew, we're doing our best now for two and a half months getting those stories out, and today is AWS Summit. It's going to continue online, it never ends. It's virtual, it's asynchronous, but more importantly, let's get to great content. Our next guest Jimmy Chen, CEO of Propel. Great entrepreneur, vision with real impact and this is a story that is super important in my opinion, because it's a tech story and it's a social impact story. And you don't have to do one or the other, you can do both these days. This is going to be great. Jimmy, thanks for spending the time with us today. >> Yeah John, thanks for having me on the show. >> So, I want to get into the broader entrepreneurship and social impact as an entrepreneurial thing, which I think is a total awesome opportunity. But, you guys are using AWS for good, Propel, Take a minute to explain Propel the company, the things you're working and what you're passionate about. >> So Propel, we're a tech company based in Brooklyn that build software to help people navigate safety net programs like the food stamp program. There are about 40 million Americans who get their food stamp benefits on a debit card, called an EBT card, which looks kind of like a debit card or a credit card you get from a bank. But, when we spent time talking to people who use these cards to buy groceries, we actually found that it has kind of a weird quirk, which is that everyone who goes grocery shopping with an EBT card has to call the 1-800 number on the back of the card first, because that's how they can check the balance. And if you try to check-out at the grocery store you don't have enough left on your card, you get into this really embarrassing experience of having to decide, do you want three apples or two, and trying to figure out how to get your balance to be appropriate for the amount of food they're trying to buy. And so, we actually found that this pain point of needing to call the 1-800 number to go check your balance on your EBT card is a really common one that's felt by all 40 million of these Americans who use the food stamp program to put food on the table. So, what be built at Propel is really simple, it's a mobile banking app for the EBT card, the same way that you have a mobile banking app or your banking product, that we've created a digital free app that allows someone who gets their food stamp benefit on an EBT card to check their balance, to see their transaction history and more broadly actually to improve their overall financial help. >> And mends also the quality of life, knowing confidence whether whatever they're going through, that's something they're going to feel about as well. Talk about the tech piece of it. Obviously, this is a good example of something that I've been really riffing on for many years now, and just trying to get people's attention to is that cloud computing changes the game on social impact, because the time to get to the value, which is well talked about in entrepreneurial circles, later got funded, I got product market fit, applies to anything. And this is really spawning a new generation of entrepreneurship. This is a real thing and Amazon does that. What's your experience with AWS in this area? >> Well, our experience over the last month and a half in the middle of the COVID crisis I think has really driven home the value of AWS for our business, which is that, you know, at the start of COVID we had about 2 million people who used the Fresh EBT app on a monthly basis to manage their existing SNAP benefits. Unfortunately, as the economy has worsen and people's usage of safety net services as has increased, so has our userbase. And AWS has been really key to us, being able to scale our services, to be able to help an extra million people start using the Fresh EBT app essentially over the last few weeks. And so, you know, to your point about infrastructure and scale and technology, for us it's really been about, what are the best practices in the consumer tech worlds? And how do we apply those to help people that are lower-income and generally deal with experiences that are less good. >> You know, I've talked about though is something that I've been really talking a lot about, and maybe I'm a little bit older, but the younger entrepreneurs, they love to be agile and everything else. But what you're doing and what you've done is really have agility, but when you have these hard times everyone uses the word pivot. Which I hate that word pivot, it means to me like, it didn't work out, I'm going to pivot to something else. But to me, I think what's available when you're using the cloud, like what new position you're in, you built an app for a use case, you had product market fit. This COVID crisis becomes a tailwind for you, because actually your app helps people that are in need, but it also might give you an opportunity to do other things really fast, which means jump on an opportunity, not necessarily pivot. I mean is that tacking, pivot? It's kind of semantics, but it's a cultural mindset. And I want to get your thoughts Jimmy on how you see your business changing where you can actually take what you've built on the trajectory in the climbs of scale, the steep learnings. And then also take new territory down, whether it's a new service, helping people in need, 'cause that's the mission. Now you have flexibility. >> Jimmy: That's right. >> Talk about how you think about that, and what are some of your opportunities that you see. >> Jimmy: Well, the reality is that financial life for people who are low-income and using safety net services changes rapid. And there's no better example of this over the last, you know, few decades than the COVID crisis. Over the past few months, people who are using food stamp benefits have had really an unprecedented challenge over the last few months. It's been tough for everyone, but our survey data shows that for people who were getting food stamp benefits and working in early March, 86% of them have now lost some source of income, or have had their hours cut. And so I think one of the things we're starting to hear from our users is just the unprecedented type of need that they're facing and that they're turning to apps like the Fresh EBT app, to help them to navigate this particular crisis. To answer questions like, "What are the nutrition programs "through the government that are available to me? "How do I get a stimulus check? "What about the unemployment program? "And just, what are the full set of safety net resources "that are available to help someone like me "to get back on my feet and to make it through "this unprecedented financial hardship?" So, to your point about pivoting, you know, it's not necessarily, I don't think of it as pivoting, I think of it as like as responding to the real changes in user need. >> Yeah, ceasing opportunity on your position of your value proposition. Jimmy talk about the company, that your company launched a new service, Project 100. What is that about? Can you take a minute to explain that? >> Project 100 is a partnership between Propel, Stand for Children and the GiveDirectly team, which is the other two are nonprofits that are focused on different aspects of serving people that are in financial need. And it is a partnership that we've created to raise a $100 million to be able to make cash transfers to a 100,000 people who use the Fresh EBT app and are in financial need. So, Propel's role in this is that we, because our app helps people that are getting their food stamp benefits, we can certify that this is a person who is in financial need and uses, essentially, the status on the food stamp program as a proxy for, this is a family who really needs help to get through this crisis. We've been fortunate to have a lot of donors who are very generous and interested in finding ways to support, you know, people that are going through these types of financial hardships. And so, we've been fortunate to raise already about $70 million through this program. But, I think we still have a ways to go to reach this $100 million goal, where we really think that, that was a material impact on helping low-income Americans weather this financial shock. >> Well, I really appreciate what you're doing and thanks for what you're doing, it's great, and I think it's a great opportunity. Got great product market fit and you got a lot of horizontal opportunities to go after as you're more successful. I also want to get your thoughts real quick on tech entrepreneurship. It's been very glamorous over the past couple decades, to be an entrepreneur, but ultimately it's about creating value. I think, you're seeing with the cloud a lot of opportunities that aren't the traditional, you know, go public, built, raise a bunch of money, really either for profit or nonprofit, really in highly social impact situations. This is a growing field and you're doing it. Can you share what you're seeing and what advice you could give folks who are really thinking about having a mission driven opportunity. >> Jimmy: Well, I think that people solve the problems that they understand, and that traditionally tech entrepreneurs understand the very specific set of challenges, because the demographics of tech entrepreneurs are a smaller set than the overall population in the United States, right? Tech entrepreneurs tend to be male, they tend to have a college education, they tend to live in cities like San Francisco or New York City, and they tend to have a lot of money. But the reality is, that's not the demographic of people who use technology in the United States and so if people solve the problems that they understand, whose going to solve the problems that people on food stamps understand, if there are not a lot of people who are on food stamps that are starting their own software companies? And so I think the power of tools like Amazon Web Services and the cloud that allow people to be able to create new technology in a record amount of time and scale that, is the ability to democratize who gets to build the technology that people use, right? It means, both being able to help people who traditionally would not have the resources to start a new type of organization, to start a new one, but it also means being able to help companies like mine identify these types of challenges, to learn about the needs that people who are low-income have and be able to scale a product. >> Phenomenal mission Propel. Jimmy Chen, CEO of Propel. If you're designing a product, or art, or anything, you got to know who you're designing it for. And great point, and people solve problems that they understand. Thank you for what you're doing. Congratulations and continue success. We'll keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the virtual CUBE, thank you. >> Jimmy: Thank you so much for having me John. >> I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE for theCUBE virtual coverage of AWS Summit Online. A virtual conference has gone a way to virtual, so is theCUBE. Until further notice, we're going to do our part in our studio in Palo Alto, the studio in Boston. Checking in with folks and getting the updates. We're all in this together, and I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. Hey, >>I'll come back to the cube date to have our coverage of Combalt go. 19 Lisa Martin with Stu. Met a man. We are in Colorado. Please welcome to the cube Sandy Hamilton, the VP of customer success. Been a convo four and a half months. So welcome to the Q book and the call. Sandy, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to sit here with you this morning and share a little bit about what's going on at Commonwealth and it's been great. You guys are here. It's been fantastic. We had a great day yesterday. We got to speak with Sanjay, with Rob, Don foster, Mercer, a whole bunch of your customers. Well exactly the vibe, the positivity from the channel to the customer to the course. Even the OJI calm ball guys that I worked a couple of 10 years ago that are still here, it does really feel like a new combo and you're part of that on. >>Sanjay probably brought you in and the spring of 2019 and we've seen a lot of progress and a lot of momentum from comm vault in terms of leadership changes, sills structured new programs for channel. Exciting stuff. You kicked off this morning's keynote and you had the opportunity to introduce Jimmy Chen who if you haven't seen free solo, I haven't seen it. I'm watching it as soon as they get home from us. Amazing. But what a great way to introduce failure and why it's important to be prepared because it is going to happen. I just thought that was a great tone. Especially talking with you. Who leads customer success. >> Absolutely. Thank you Lisa very much and good morning Sue. Appreciate it. You know it's interesting cause when I think about customer success here at Comvalt, there's so many different facets to it. There really is all about engaging with our customers across everything that they do and we want to make sure our customers are prepared for something that will likely happen to them someday. >>Right. We have one of our customers talking about a cyber attack down there on their environment and how we were actually able to help them recover. So it's also that preparedness that Jimmy talked about, right? And making sure that you are training as much as you can, being prepared for what may come and knowing how to recover from that as he, as he talked about. I also think one of the things that we do really well is we listened to our customers when they give us feedback. So it's about how did those customers use what we did differently or how did they try it? And it wasn't exactly what they thought. And so how do we continue to innovate with the feedback from our customers? >>Sandy, one of the things we're hearing loud and clear from your customers is they're not alone. They're ready. I love, we have, Matthew is coming on a little bit later talking about, he's like, I'm here and my other person that does disaster, he's here too. So you know, I'm doing my own free solo. We've been talking about in tech, it's the technology and the people working together. You talked a little bit in your keynote about automated workflows, machine learning, talk about some of those pieces as to how the innovation that Combolt's bringing out is going to enable and simplify the lives of, >>yeah, I mean I think it, I think it does come down to how are we really taking care of the backend, if you will, from a technology perspective and what can we make more automated, you know, more secure. You know, you think about things like, I was even talking about new automated workflows around scheduling, even your backup windows, right? And if you think about, you know, the complexity that goes into scheduling all of that across all of your environments, we have the ability to actually have you just set what your windows should be and we'll manage all the complexities in the background, which allows you to go do things like this for customers to come to do things like this. >>So Sandy, I tell you, some of us, there's that little bit of nervousness around automation and even customers talking about, Oh well I can just do it over text. And I'm just thinking back to the how many times have I responded to the wrong text thread and Oh my gosh, what if that was my, you know, data that I did the wrong thing with. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things that I love about this company, and again I've been here for a short period of time, but our worldwide customer support organization is just, you know, one of the hallmarks I think of this company, right? And how we're actually there for those customers at any point in time whenever they need any type of um, you know, help and support. And it isn't just the, you know, when you actually need that, when something goes wrong, it's also proactively we have professional services people, you know, we have all kinds of folks in between. Our partners play a huge role in making sure that our customers are successful with what they have going on. Let's dig into and dissect the customer life cycle. Help us understand what that's like for one and existing combo customer. Cause we talked to a couple of yesterday who've been combo customers for you know, a decade. >>So walk us through a customer life cycle for an incumbent customer as well as a new customer who is like Sanjay said yesterday, one of the things that surprised him is that a lot of customers don't know Combolt so what's the life cycle like for the existing customers and those new ones? >> Yeah, so you know, our fantastic install base of customers that we have today, one of the things that we are striving to continue to do is to make sure we're engaged with them from the beginning to the end. And the end isn't when they end, it's when you know, we're then fully deployed helping them do what they need to go in their environment. I think one of the great things about where we are with Comvalt right now is we actually have new products, new technologies, right? Have you guys had been exposed to, how are we making sure that the customers that we've had for a while are truly understanding what those new capabilities are? >>So if you think about it for us, it's how are we helping them to actually do more with their existing Convolt investment and potentially leverage us in other ways across their environment. Um, so we have, you know, our team of, you know, great, uh, you know, sales reps as well as our fantastic, you know, sales engineers, um, all the way through. Again, you know, PS and support, those people are always in contact with our customers, helping them to understand what we can really do across that life cycle and if they need to make changes along the way, we're here to help them, you know, do that as well. For a newer customer. One of the things that we're really focused on right now is that initial sort of onboarding for them and what set experience like for those customers. So having more of a, of a programmatic touch with those customers to make sure that we're more consistent in what we're doing. So they are actually receiving a lot of the same information at the same time and we're able to actually help them actually frankly in a more accelerated fashion, which is I think really important for them to get up and running as well. >>And when we talked about metallic yesterday with Rob and some other folks and I think a gentleman from Sirius, one of your launch partners, yes, Michael Gump. And you know the fact that that technology has the ability for partners to evaluate exactly what is going on with their customers so that they can potentially be even predictive to customers in terms of whether they're backing up end points or O three 65 I thought that was a really interesting capability that Colombo now has. It's giving that insights and the intelligence even to the partners to be able to help those customers make better decisions before they even know what to do makes exactly. >>They and their son, our partners are such a key part here to everything that we're really trying to do. And especially with the metallic, it's all through partners, right? And so we're really trying to drive that behavior and that means we've really have to ensure that we are bringing all of those partners into the same fold. They should have the same, you know, capabilities that we do. It's one of the, one of the also things that I'm trying to work on right now is how are we making sure our partners are better enabled around the things that we have in the capability. So we're working on, as part of those partner programs that you mentioned is do they have the right tools, if you will, and knowledge to go do what they need to go do to help our customers as well because it really is a partnership. >>Yeah. So Sandy, we've been looking at various different aspects of the change required to deliver metallic, which is now a SAS offering from a services and from a support standpoint, I think of a different experience from SAS as opposed to enterprise software. So bring, bring us, bring us your perspective. Yeah. This >>comes back a little bit to the onboarding experience, right? Where it's got to be much more digital touch. It's gotta be much more hands off cause that's the way the are thinking about buying metallic in the first place. Right? They don't have to have a sales rep, they can go by metallic, you know, frankly on their website right now, metallic.io, you know, you can go there, you can get everything you need to get started. Um, and so we want to make sure that the customers have different ways of engaging. And so some of that could very much be digital. Some of that can be, you know, different avenues of how they're working. They're wanting to work with us. But when you also then think about that type of a model, you start to think about consumption matters, right? And how much they're using and are they using everything that they purchased. >>And so we actually have a small team of customer success managers right now in the organization that are working with all of the new customers that we have in the SAS world to say, how are you doing? How's that going? You know, how's your touch? Is there anything that's presenting a challenge for you? Making sure they really do fully understand the capabilities end to end of that technology so that we can really get them onboarded super quick. As you probably know from talking to those guys, we're not having any services really around metallic cause it's not designed to need those services, which is huge. You know, I think in not only the SAS space but for Convolt as well. I think it's a new era and it also provides, frankly an opportunity for our partners to continue to engage with those customers going forward as well. >>One of the first things that I reacted to when I saw metallic, a Combalt venture was venture. I wanted to understand that. And so as we were talking yesterday with some of the gentlemen I mentioned, it's a startup within Combalt. Yeah. So coming from puppet but shoot dead in which Sonjay Mirchandani ran very successfully. Got puppet global. Your take on going from a startup like puppet to an incumbent like convo and now having this venture within it. Yeah. You know, I think it's one of the brilliant things that Sanjay and the team did very early on to recognize what Rob Calu, Ian and the rest of the folks were doing around this idea of what is now metallic. And they had been noodling it and Sanjay's like, that's got a really good opportunity. However we got to go capitalize on that now and bring that to market for our customers now. >>And if we had continued on in the way that we were, which is where it was night jobs and we didn't necessarily have all the dedicated people to go do it, you know, we may not have metallic right now. And so it was, it was really a great thing within the company to really go pull those resources out of what they were doing and say, you guys are a little startup, you know, here you go do it. And we actually had a little celebratory toast the other night with that team because of what, just a fantastic job that they've done. And one of the common threads in something everybody said was the collaboration that it really brought, not only within that team but across Combalt because there's a singular goal in bringing this to market for our customers. So it's been a great experience. I think we're going to leverage it and do more. So Sandy, >>before we let you go, need to talk a little bit about the. >>Fabulous. If I had one here I would, but I don't. So, um, a couple of months ago at VMworld, I don't know if you guys were there, you guys were probably there. Um, we actually started this thing called the D data therapy dog park. And there we had a number of puppies and they were outside. Folks came by, you know, visited. They stopped, they distressed, they got to pet a puppy. I mean, the social media was just out of this world, right? And we had San Francisco policemen there. It was, it was, it was great. Even competitors, I will say even competitors were there. It was, it was pretty funny. But, um, by the end of it, over 50% of the dogs that were there actually got adopted out, um, you know, into homes where they otherwise wouldn't have. Um, since then there've been a couple of people that have actually copied this little idea and you know, P places are springing up. >>So we have a, what we call it, data therapy dog park here where you can go in and get your puppy fix, you know, sit with the dogs and relax for a bit. But you know, we're super excited about it as well because, you know, it's sort of a fun play on what we do, but, but it's also, I think, you know, a great thing for the community and something that is near and dear to my heart. I have four dogs. Um, and so I'm not planning on taking another one home, but I'm doing my best to get some of these adopted. So if anybody out there is interested, just let me know. >>Oh, that was adoptable. All of them cheese. I'm picking up a new puppy and about eight days. So other ones of friends. I've got to have dogs enough for you. Do you need a third? We'll have a friend that has two puppies at the same time and said it's not that much more. I have had one before. You're good to go. We can, we can hook you up. Oh no. But one of the great things is it also, first of all, imitation is the highest form of flattery or for other competitors that are doing something similar, but you also just speak to the fact that we're all people, right? We are. We're traveling, especially for people that go to a lot of conferences and it's just one of those nice human elements that similar with the stories that customers share about, Hey, this is a failure that we had and this is how it helped us to recover from that. It's the same thing with, you can't be in a bad mood with, I think puppies, cupcakes and balloons. So if there were, I know that I could finish a show today >>that's like I took one of the little puppies when I was rehearsing yesterday on main stage. I took one of them with me out there and I was just holding it the whole time, you know? It was really, >>this was great. I'm afraid to venture back into the data therapy document. You're proud taking another one home OU was. Andy. It's been a pleasure to have very much. I appreciate it. Appreciate the time. Thank you and hope you have a great rest of the event. If you need anything, let us know. I'm sure we will and I can't wait to talk to you next year when you've been a comm vault for a whole like 16 months and hearing some great stories we do as well. All right. Take care. First two men, a man, Sandy Hamilton, the puppies, and I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cue from Convault go and 19 thanks for watching.