(orchestral music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation here in theCUBE's Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier. Where conversation around venture capital, entrepreneurship, crypto currencies, block chain, and more, Jonathan Ebinger our friend with BRV, formerly Blue Run Ventures, but BRV for short, sounds better, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks John, looking forward to it. >> Great to see you, we've known each other for a long time and you've been a great investor, your firm has done a lot of great stuff, deals are really famous deals, but also you dig into the companies and you really stand by your portfolio companies, but you've also done a lot of work in China. >> Yes. >> So you have a good landscape of what's going on. What's the, what's going on in China? >> Well China is really expanding in ways which we had not foreseen when we first started investing there almost 15 years ago. We were really active for five to 10 years, investing in companies that initially were considered copycat companies, you can't really use that term anymore. In fact what's happening more and more, you're seeing Chinese ideas coming to the United States. Businesses like We Chat are being copied as fast as they can, you're seeing Snapchat, Messenger and so forth, they're quickly trying to amalgamate as many assets as they can within their viewership much like we're seeing in a lot of the other Chinese analogs over there. It's exciting to see, it's very much an arms race. >> It's been interesting to watch. We were at the Ali Baba Cloud Conference last year, at the end of last year, it's interesting the innovation and entrepreneurial thirst has really changed. If you go back just 10 years ago when you guys were first getting in there, I remember the conversations were what's going on in China, it's very developmental but what's going on 10 years ago, they are dominating the mobile space, they're mobile usage is really much different makeup in how they do startups, the apps. How much of that has influenced some of their success just the demand? >> Always on, location always available, it opens up a whole new level of communication services. The idea of the larger screen format, people used to think in the United States, these large devices coming out of Korea first and then China, we thought these would never play in the United States, now Apple 10, larger screen size, it makes sense, it's mobile first right from the get go for a now billion plus users. >> So BRV, how many active portfolio companies do you guys have and what's the profile that you're looking for for entrepreneurs, what are some of the kind of companies? >> We're about 45 active companies right now. We're putting about, we're putting money in about 10 new companies a year at this point. We have a very disciplined approach of investing in Series A style companies, Series A of course means a lot of different things to people, but generally, we like to put $3 to $5 million to work early on and then follow on. >> How much do take for that, just a third? >> Typical in the 20%-25% range. There's a lot of companies out there that still fit that profile. Of course you're seeing some super sized Series A's that happen, we don't play in those but for the traditional software companies, evaluations are really right in our sweet spot. >> How big is the fund now, just what's the number in terms of capital? >> We're in fund six, we're just over $150 million. >> And you got to save some for follow on rounds. >> Exactly. >> Talk about the changes in venture capital because what's interesting, I had a conversation with Greg Sands with Costanoa Ventures, another great investor, formerly I think the first employee of Netscape I think or the business plan. Great guy, he talked about the dynamics of, you don't need that much cash anymore because if you can get unit economic visibility into what the business is working, you can do so much more with that and I'm calling it the hourglass effect, you get through that visibility, you're in control, you own your own destiny, versus the old Silicon Valley model which seems to be fading away, which is hey, what do you need? $40 million, or here's $100 million. That really limits your exit options and sometimes you can drown in your own capital. Talk about that dynamic. >> You're seeing the $40 million rounds with businesses that are much more capital intensive and that's coming back in vogue now but for the most part, I agree with what Greg's saying and this whole advent of seed funds and super seed funds and angel funds and so forth has been really great for the traditional series A investor. A lot of that early fundamental and foundational work is being done and then when the series A comes, it's more about expansion so we're effectively getting what was a Series B type stage company now we're investing in Series A. We're saying hey, this product works, there's product market fit, let's put dollars to work to really grow the market. >> So you're saying Series B was a kind of prove the business model, shifted down to the A because the cost to get there is lower and hence that's opened up a seed round lower in numbers, so it just shifts down a little bit. >> It really has, it really has and that plays into our sweet spot. We really like working on business models, distribution strategies, things like that. >> And what kind of startups do you want to invest in? What are some of the categories? >> Love financial services, we like health tech, we're doing education, we're really pretty omnivorous when it comes to the sector. What we're looking for is really businesses that are using data, real time data to disrupt the numbers. >> So you're not sector driven, you're disruption oriented. >> That's right. >> Okay let's talk about disruption, my favorite trend. Obviously I love the China dynamic because you're not sure what it is, but it's really doing well so you can't ignore it and they're innovative and they're hustling hard and they've got massive numbers. Block chain, we're super excited about, we love crypto, we think it's the biggest wave coming out there, so a lot of my smart, entrepreneurial friends are jumping on their surfboards literally and jumping out into those waves and there's a lot of action there. At the same time, people are saying, stay away from that crypto thing, it's a scam. Kind of a different perspective, what's your thoughts on that? >> If you look at, you separate the cryptocurrencies from block chain, I think it becomes a lot more clear. Block chain is for real. Tracking provenance on transactions, real estate transactions, multinational transactions, makes a lot of sense, dovetails nicely with security, so there's a real business there. You saw the announcement with IBM and Mersk the other day, what they are taking enterprise level block chain into their whole supply chain. I think that's really important. We have a company in the category called pay stand which is doing the same sort of thing with smaller size businesses, just accelerating the whole process on accounts receivable, taking working capital. >> And they're doing block chain for that? >> Yes block chain is an option, we're not forcing people onto block chain, but the idea of hey, let's give people more cost effective ways to transact, get rid of the paper checks, get rid of the invoicing and just join the modern world, much like you use Venmo if you and I are going to exchange money. >> That's pay stand, that's one of your hot companies. >> Yeah it is, absolutely. >> So are they using block chain or not? >> They are, yes. >> Okay, because it's a physical asset, it's kind of a supply chain thing? >> They use it to track the funds themselves, unlike a credit card where you have to pay a big fee or ACH which you can't really get proof of funds, with their block chain technology, you can be sure that you have the funds available and you get it instantly. >> Let's talk about use cases that you think out there, I'd like you to just weigh in on use cases for block chain that a mainstream person that's not in the tech business would understand, because they say, is it real or not? I agree block chain is legit, what are some use cases that would highlight that? >> I think if you've ever been involved in real estate, bought a home, things like that, just tracking title insurance, you're going all the way back if you live in California, you're going all the way back to pre-statehood days, you have to track the provenance of that land all the way through. You're paying title insurance, title insurance is a business you don't really need if you have accurate provenance tracking through block chain. I think that's one most of us can understand. Obviously bills of weighting with things coming over on ships. That's natural and right now things get held up in port because people are trying to find a clipboard before you can sign off on who, is this bill of weighting actually clean, that stuff can be done automatically with 2D barcodes, block chain usage. >> Certainly with perishable goods too, we learned that with IBM's example. >> Sure. >> Okay let's get into the hot companies you got going on. Name some of the hot investments that you've done. >> Sure, well I talked about pay stand a minute ago, really excited about them, another one we really like is a company called aerobotics. I know you're a fan of autonomous flying. If you think about drones and everyone knows DJI and they're a great company, that's one to one, one person flying one drone, that's not scalable obviously, it scales at one to one. With autonomous flying, you can have a whole army of drones out doing your business, whether they're doing site exploration, checking for chemical spills, looking at traffic and so forth. The company is now operating in three continents, it's just, if you think about what a drone is, effectively it's a flying cell phone. It's a cell phone that goes around, takes pictures, transmits data back, we know something about cell phones at BRV, we've been investing in this category for a long time so when we say aerobotics come along, we said this is just a natural extension of real time data, cellular technology, and location based services. >> You guys don't get a lot of credit as much as you should, in my opinion on that, you guys were very early on the mobile, mobile connectivity side and mobile footprint and device and software. That's playing well into the hottest trend that we see, that's not the sexiest trend, that's IOT. >> Absolutely. >> Because drones are certainly, industrial IOT is a big one. Instrumenting physical plants, equipment, and IOT in general the edge of the network. What's your thoughts on IOT and how would you, how do you see that evolving? It's more than just the edge of the network issue, it's bigger. >> It is, well of course the devices and sensors are important. I think a lot of that's been commoditized. The business that we've been seeing develop and there's a lot of folks, they've moved from analytics of the web to analytics of IOT, so there's a lot of interesting companies coming in the analytic space. We're not playing in that as much, we tend to like to invest in companies that are big enough that you need to have analytics for them. We like companies that have proprietary control of analytics versus necessarily running analytics for company X. >> So you're not poopooing IOT per se, just that from an investment thesis standpoint, it's not on your radar yet. >> That's right, they're either too capital intensive for us as a firm or you're basically managing someone else's data. I want to be in companies that we're managing our own data for a proprietary advantage. >> That's really what I was going to get to next, the role of data driven, so we've lived in dupe world, theCUBE started in 2010 in the offices of Cloud Air actually and people don't know the history and it's been interesting, Hadoop was supposed to save the world, the data, but it really started the data trend, the data driven trend, Mike Olsen, Amar Omadala and the team over there really nailed it but it didn't turn into be just Hadoop, it's everything so we're seeing that now become a bumper sticker, data driven marketer, I'm a data driven executive, I'm a data driven interviewer, all that stuff, what does it actually mean? What does data driven mean to you? >> Data is, there's big data and then there's actionable data obviously people talk about exhaust, the data coming off, we really got started with, as you know, we were investors in Waze, awful lot of data coming out of your cell phone, extracting just the important pieces of it are really what's important. We're investors in a company called Cabbage which looks at every transaction a small business makes to determine their credit worthiness. It's really the science. People talk about data scientists, what do they actually do? What they're actually doing is separating out the wheat from the chaff because it's just a crush of data. I saw your interview with Andy Jazzy to other day from AWS, the amount of data that's being stored, it's almost unfathomable but the important people. >> They have a lot of data. You'd like to invest in them now. >> Exactly, but that's really the thing, it's being able to separate the good data from the bad. >> You look at Amazon, I was talking to Jesse and he didn't really go there because he was kind of on message but when I talked with Swami who runs the AI group over there, we were talking about, I said to him straight up, I'm like, you're running a lot of workloads on your cloud, I'm sure you have data on those workloads. Just the impact of what they could do with that data. This is the virtuous cycle that their business model is made up of, but it's changing the game for what they can become. The thing that we're seeing in the data world is, sometimes the outcome might not be what you think because if you can use the data effectively, it's a competitive advantage, not a department. >> Right and you have to really stay true to your commitment to data. What we've seen happen is when companies, if you've been around for 10 years or so, you start to trust your gut, that's important, but it can also not lead you to see obvious conclusions because the world changes. >> And also committing to data also means from a practitioner's standpoint, investing in the tech, investing in things to be data driven, not just to say it. >> Exactly. >> Okay so what's the future for you guys? What are you looking at next year, what are some of the things you'd like to accomplish for investment opportunities, besides getting all the hot deals, you did Waze, that was an amazing deal, one of my favorite products, how did that go down? How many people passed on Waze? >> I don't know how many people passed, but we were lucky, they wanted to bring us in to the initial syndicate, they wanted to have some folks who understood. >> But it wasn't that obvious though at the beginning. What was the original pitch? >> The initial pitch was that they were going to have folks have the dash devices, the product would sit on your dashboard and they were going to be using it to map Eastern Europe because Eastern Europe was just coming into the Western world and they didn't really have good roads and good maps. We thought, that's interesting but they probably also don't have smartphones, so why don't we come across the Atlantic and let's make this thing work in the US and then from there, the rest took off country by country we were the number one navigation app in I think 150 countries at one point. >> What's the biggest thing that you've learned over the past few years in the industry that's different now I mean obviously there's some context that I'll share which is obviously the big cloud players are becoming bigger, scale's a big thing, you got Google, you got Microsoft and Amazon, you've got Facebook's out there as well. Then you get the political climate. You go to Washington D.C. and New York, Silicon Valley is not really talked highly about these days on the hill in Washington, yet GovCloud is completely changing the game of how the government is going to work with massive innovations and efficiencies, literally overnight, it's almost weird. >> It is and it isn't. If you look at it through a longer term horizon, Silicon Valley is again at the forefront, we're really the first ones with more transparency in the industry, all the different movements which are really important and all the conversations that are happening are important and they're happening here first. I think you're starting to see a ripple effect, you're seeing it going through entertainment, you're going to see it in the government, industry after industry I think is going to start to have to be more open as Silicon Valley has led the way on that. >> That's a great point. Take a minute to describe the folks out there watching that aren't from here, what is Silicon Valley about in your opinion? >> Silicon Valley is, of course it's more than a mindset, but folks who are here are here on purpose. They come here intentionally. There are very few people that I know who were born and raised here, so they're coming here because they want to be part of a shared ethos around success, around success, around shared values and competition so it's a very healthy environment, I came, I used to live in Washington D.C. and I couldn't be happier to be 3000 miles away. >> If you're a technology entrepreneur, this is where all the sports and action is, as I always say, we always love sports analogies. Okay, I got to ask you about the VC situation around ICOs, initial coin offerings are being talked about as an alternative to fundraising, there's some security options on token sales as a utility, the SEC has started to put some guidelines down on what that looks like, but the general sentiment is, it's a new way to raise money and some people are doing private rounds with venture capital and doing token sales through ICOs. You see some hybrids, but for the most part, the hard core I don't want to say right or left wing, is there a wing of the political spectrum, but the hard core ICO guys are like, this is all about disrupting the VC community and you're a VC, so you got to take that a little bit personal but the point is, what do you think about that? Is that talked about? >> I think that's good salesmanship. The VC industry such as it is, you can fit every VC into one section of Stanford stadium. There just aren't that many VCs to really go after. We're a small group of folks. I think that going after maybe disrupting the way folks are raising money through Kickstarter and things like that, that's all great. We're not going to stop it, we're going to embrace it. I think that there's plenty of different ways to raise capital, I have no compunction about those things. >> Do you think it's more of a democratization trend or a new asset class, so you don't see it disrupting the VCs per se, but if it's only a handful of VCs that could fit into Stanford Stadium, for instance, then certainly there's more options, it's a dilution. >> I think you look at it as it's just an alternative financing method, do I take debt, do I take equity, do I take venture, do I take friends and family? It's just one more arrow in the quiver of the entrepreneur, I think you have to be smart about it because thinking that you're going to get the same level of attention from an investor in your ICO that you are going to get from a series A investor who owns 20% of your company, those are two very different value propositions. >> So you see a lot of pitches and sometimes, you have to say no a lot and that's the way the game is, but a lot of times, you want the best deals. But the founders' side of the table, they're looking at the VC, I need money. So that's one of the options, what they really want is a value added partner, so what's your current take on what that means these days? Sometimes it means a firm, sometimes it means a partner, sometimes it means the community. How are you guys looking at BRV as value add versus the worst case scenario which is value subtract, you just want to have that be positive. >> I see that written about venture too. >> I know, some people experienced it. >> I think it helps that we've been around now for almost 20 years, we got started in '98 so you have to look at our body of work and the continuum of investments and founders and CEOs and CTOs that we've invested in. There's hundreds and hundreds of people who have taken money from BRV, and so that's one of the real positives about this current state we're in is that there's so much transparency. The fact that we are, I like to think we're good actors and have been for a long time, that comes out, now through our words but through the words of. >> What would they say about you guys? What would your entrepreneurs say about BRV? >> Aside from using buzzwords like value add, they say, they know their industry, they're not afraid to ask for help, they try to call problems when they see it, things like that. >> You stand by your companies. >> Absolutely. >> Awesome, well what's your favorite trend that you're personally interested in? >> I think you have to go after health care right now. It is just such a big market right now. People have been nibbling all different sides of it right now, there's been folks who are trying to expedite processing, there's actual innovations happening on the medical side, I think there is just, technology is just now starting to get into that, technology has gotten into education. >> How about the startup you guys funded that's related to the health care field. >> Yes, we're in a company called Hello Heart which is really at the confluence of a number of trends. It starts off, what Hello Heart is, it's a personal blood pressure cuff for you as an employee of a big company, more and more companies are starting to self insure. If you're a big enough company, 10,000 plus employees or even fewer, you're going to want to self insure to save money but also, your employees get very much more comfortable with you as an employer, you care about my well being, so it's a very virtuous cycle for the employees. >> So companies themselves insuring their own employees. >> Absolutely. >> They have to be super big, this company. >> This is just one component of a self insured business. You also, of course you still have access to doctors and stuff, I'm not making the pitch for being self insured as a company, I'm just saying that. >> But that's a trend. >> It's absolutely a trend and you're seeing a lot of what I would call point solutions stepping in, whether it's psychiatric, whether it's opioid help, whether it's working on heart conditions, these are all different point solutions which are being amalgamated together to help companies which are self insuring. >> So is Hello Heart for consumers or for business? >> It's sold to businesses but individual employees have it so they can keep track of their blood pressure. >> But I can't buy one if I wanted one? >> Not today, but I'll make sure I can get one to you. >> I need one, get all of our employees instrumented. >> Exactly. >> Drug tested all that stuff going on. People worry about the privacy, that's something I would be concerned with, putting. >> That's taken a really fast pendulum swing. A few years ago, Generation X was privacy, there is no privacy, the default was, location is always on, that's just flipped 180 degrees in the last few years. >> Well Jonathan, thanks for coming into this CUBE conversation, I want to ask you one final question, one thing we're passionate about is women in tech and underserved minorities, obviously Silicon Valley has to do a better job, it's out on the table, and it's working but we're still seeing a lot more work to be done, we're seeing titles not being at the right level, but pay's getting there in some places but titles aren't, some paying still below for women, still a lot more to do, what are you guys doing for the women in tech trend, how are you guys looking at that? Certainly it's a sensitive topic these days, but more importantly, it's one that's super important to society. >> It is, I think like a lot of things that have long term value, it's really about your actions versus your words, so our firm has two out of the five investment professionals are female, one of the last three CEO's we've founded is a female CEO, we have technologists, we have marketing people, we have CEO's that are females it's very much of a cross the board, sex, race and so forth. >> You guys are indiscriminate, a good deal's a good deal. >> Exactly right. >> It's about making money, VC's are in the business of making money, a lot of people don't understand, you guys have a job to do but you do a good job. >> We're in the business of making money but our investors for the most part are not for profits. Large universities, our biggest investor is the Red Cross, so when we do well, the Red Cross does well and the country does well. >> You're mission driven at this point. >> Exactly. >> Is that by design or is that just, your selection? >> We're delighted with our LP's, it's important that we have synergies aside from just finances with our investors. >> That's super well, I appreciate you coming on, I think it's super great that you're tying society benefits into money making and entrepreneurship, great stuff Jonathan Ebinger here on theCUBE, BRV check them out, great VC firm here in Silicon Valley. It's a CUBE conversation, we're talking about startups and entrepreneurship I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (dramatic music)