>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Oven Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of Amazon Web services. Eight. Of his public sector summit online. We couldn't be there in person, but we're doing remote interviews. I'm John Curry. Your host of the Cube got a great segment from Asia Pacific on the other side of the world from California about social impact, transforming, teaching and learning with cloud technology. Got three great guests. You go. Richard is the CEO and co founder of Guys Tech and Jean Te'o, CEO and founder of Solve Education Founders and CEOs of startups is great. This is squad was the AIPAC regional head. Education, health care, not for profit and research. Ray Ws, he head start big program Vincent. Thanks for coming on, Janine. And you go Thank you for joining. >>Thanks for having us, John. >>We're not there in person. We're doing remote interviews. I'm really glad to have this topic because now more than ever, social change is happening. Um, this next generation eyes building software and applications to solve big problems. And it's not like yesterday's problems there. Today's problems and learning and mentoring and starting companies are all happening virtually digitally and also in person. So the world's changing. So, um, I gotta ask you, Vincent, we'll start with you and Amazon. Honestly, big started builder culture. You got two great founders here. CEO is doing some great stuff. Tell us a little bit what's going on. A pack, >>A lot of >>activity. I mean, reinvent and some it's out. There are really popular. Give us an update on what's happening. >>Thank you. Thank you for the question, John. I think it's extremely exciting, especially in today's context, that we are seeing so much activities, especially in the education technology sector. One of the challenges that we saw from our education technology customers is that they are always looking for help and support in many off the innovation that they're trying to develop the second area off observation that we had waas, that they are always alone with very limited resources, and they usually do not know where to look for in terms, off support and in terms off who they can reach out to. From a community standpoint, that is actually how we started and developed this program called A W s. At START. It is a program specifically for education technology companies that are targeting delivering innovative education solutions for the education sector. And we bring specific benefits to these education technology companies when they join the program. Aws ed start. Yeah, three specific areas. First one is that we support them with technical support, which is really, really key trying to help them navigate in the various ranges off A W S services that allows them to develop innovative services. The second area is leaking them and building a community off like minded education technology founders and linking them also to investors and VCs and lastly, off course, in supporting innovation. We support them with a bit off AWS cop credits promotional credits for them so that they can go on experiment and develop innovations for their customers. >>That's great stuff. And I want to get into that program a little further because I think that's a great example of kind of benefits AWS provides actually free credits or no one is gonna turn away free credits. We'll take the free credits all the time all day long, but really it's about the innovation. Um, Jean, I want to get your thoughts. How would solve education? Born? What problems were you solving? What made you start this company and tell us your story? >>Thank you so much for the question. So, actually, my co founder was invited to speak at an African innovation forum a couple of years back on the topic that he was sharing with. How can Africa skip over the industrialization face and go direct to the knowledge economy? Onda, the discussion went towards in orderto have access to the knowledge economy, unique knowledge. And how do you get knowledge Well through education. So that's when everybody in the conference was a bit stuck right on the advice waas. In order to scale first, we need to figure out a way to not well, you know, engaging the government and schools and teachers, but not depend on them for the successful education initiated. So and that's was what pain walk away from the conference. And when we met in in Jakarta, we started talking about that also. So while I'm Singaporean, I worked in many developing countries on the problem that we're trying to solve this. It might be shocking to you, but UNESCO recently published over 600 million Children and you are not learning on. That is a big number globally right on out of all the SDG per se from U N. Education. And perhaps I'm biased because I'm a computer engineer. But I see that education is the only one that can be solved by transforming bites. But since the other stg is like, you know, poverty or hunger, right, actually require big amount of logistic coordination and so on. So we saw a very, um, interesting trend with mobile phones, particularly smartphones, becoming more and more ubiquitous. And with that, we saw a very, uh, interesting. Fortunately for us to disseminate education through about technology. So we in self education elevate people out of poverty, true, providing education and employment opportunities live urging on tech. And we our vision is to enable people to empower themselves. And what we do is that we do an open platform that provides everyone effected education. >>You could How about your company? What problem you're you saw And how did it all get started? Tell us your vision. >>Thanks, John. Well, look, it all started. We have a joke. One of the co founder, Matthew, had a has a child with severe learning disorder and dyslexia, and he made a joke one day about having another one of them that would support those those kids on Duh. I took the joke seriously, So we're starting sitting down and, you know, trying to figure out how we could make this happen. Um, so it turns out that the dyslexia is the most common learning disorder in the world, with an estimated 10 to 20% off the worldwide population with the disorder between context between 750 million, up to 1.5 billion individual. With that learning disorder on DSO, where we where we sort of try and tackle. The problem is that we've identified that there's two key things for Children with dyslexia. The first one is that knowing that it is dislikes. Yeah, many being assessed. And the second is so what? What do we do about it? And so given or expertise in data science and and I, we clearly saw, unfortunately off, sort of building something that could assess individual Children and adults with dyslexia. The big problem with the assessment is that it's very expensive. We've met parents in the U. S. Specifically who paid up to 6000 U. S. Dollars for for diagnosis within educational psychologist. On the other side, we have parents who wait 12 months before having a spot. Eso What we so clearly is that the observable symptom of dyslexia are reading and everyone has a smartphone and you're smart. Smartphone is actually really good to record your voice. Eso We started collecting order recording from Children and adults who have been diagnosed with dyslexia, and we then trying a model to recognize the likelihood of this lecture by analyzing audio recording. So in theory, it's like diagnosed dyslexic, helping other undiagnosed, dyslexic being being diagnosed. So we have now an algorithm that can take about 10 minutes, which require no priors. Training cost $20. Andi, anyone can use it. Thio assess someone's likelihood off dyslexia. >>You know, this is the kind of thing that really changes the game because you also have learning progressions that air nonlinear and different. You've got YouTube. You got videos, you have knowledge bases, you've got community. Vincent mentioned that Johnny and you mentioned, you know making the bits driver and changing technology. So Jeannine and Hugo, please take a minute to explain, Okay? You got the idea. You're kicking the tires. You're putting it together. Now you gotta actually start writing code >>for us. We know education technology is not you. Right? Um, education games about you. But before we even started, we look at what's available, and we quickly realize that the digital divide is very real. Most technology out there first are not designed for really low and devices and also not designed for people who do not have Internet at hope so way. So with just that assessment, we quickly realized we need toe do something about on board, but something that that that problem is one eyes just one part of the whole puzzle. There's two other very important things. One is advocacy. Can we prove that we can teach through mobile devices, And then the second thing is motivation it again. It's also really obvious, but and people might think that, you know, uh, marginalized communities are super motivated to learn. Well, I wouldn't say that they are not motivated, but just like all of us behavioral changes really hard right. I would love to work out every day, but, you know, I don't really get identity do that. So how do we, um, use technology to and, um, you know, to induce that behavioral change so that date, so that we can help support the motivation to learn. So those are the different things that we >>welcome? >>Yeah. And then the motivated community even more impactful because then once the flywheel gets going and it's powerful, Hugo, your reaction to you know, you got the idea you got, You got the vision you're starting to put. Take one step in front of the other. You got a W s. Take us through the progression, understand the startup. >>Yeah, sure. I mean, what Jane said is very likely Thio what we're trying to do. But for us, there's there's free key things that in order for us to be successful and help as much people as we can, that is free things. The first one is reliability. The second one is accessibility, and the other one is affordability. Eso the reliability means that we have been doing a lot of work in the scientific approach as to how we're going to make this work. And so we have. We have a couple of scientific publications on Do we have to collect data and, you know, sort of published this into I conferences and things like that. So make sure that we have scientific evidence behind us that that support us. And so what that means that we had Thio have a large amount of data >>on and >>put this to work right on the other side. The accessibility and affordability means that, Julian said. You know it needs to be on the cloud because if it's on the cloud, it's accessible for anyone with any device with an Internet connection, which is, you know, covering most of the globe, it's it's a good start on DSO the clock. The cloud obviously allow us to deliver the same experience in the same value to clients and and parent and teacher and allied health professionals around the world. Andi. That's why you know, it's it's been amazing to to be able to use the technology on the AI side as well. Obviously there is ah lot of benefit off being able to leverage the computational power off off the cloud to to make better, argue with them and better training. >>We're gonna come back to both of you on the I question. I think that's super important. Benson. I want to come back to you, though, because in Asia Pacific and that side of the world, um, you still have the old guard, the incumbents around education and learning. But there is great penetration with mobile and broadband. You have great trends as a tailwind for Amazon and these kinds of opportunity with Head Start. What trends are you seeing that are now favoring you? Because with co vid, you know the world is almost kind of like been a line in the sand is before covert and after co vid. There's more demand for learning and education and community now than ever before, not just for education, the geopolitical landscape, everything around the younger generation. There's, um, or channels more data, the more engagement. How >>are you >>looking at this? What's your vision of these trends? Can you share your thoughts on how that's impacting learning and teaching? >>So there are three things that I want to quickly touch on number one. I think government are beginning to recognize that they really need to change the way they approach solving social and economic problems. The pandemic has certainly calls into question that if you do not have a digital strategy, you can't You can find a better time, uh, to now develop and not just developed a digital strategy, but actually to put it in place. And so government are shifting very, very quickly into the cloud and adopting digital strategy and use digital strategy to address some of the key problems that they are facing. And they have to solve them in a very short period of time. Right? We will talk about speed, three agility off the cloud. That's why the cloud is so powerful for government to adult. The second thing is that we saw a lot of schools closed down across the world. UNESCO reported what 1.5 billion students out of schools. So how then do you continue teaching and learning when you don't have physical classroom open? And that's where education, technology companies and, you know, heroes like Janine's Company and others there's so many of them around our ableto come forward and offer their services and help schools go online run classrooms online continue to allow teaching and learning, you know, online and and this has really benefited the overall education system. The third thing that is happening is that I think tertiary education and maybe even catch off education model will have to change. And they recognize that, you know, again, it goes back to the digital strategy that they got to have a clear digital strategy. And the education technology companies like, what? Who we have here today, just the great partners that the education system need to look at to help them solve some of these problems and get toe addressing giving a solution very, very quickly. >>Well, I know you're being kind of polite to the old guard, but I'm not that polite. I'll just say it. There's some old technology out there and Jenny and you go, You're young enough not to know what I t means because you're born in the cloud. So that's good for you. I remember what I t is like. In fact, there's a There's a joke here in the United States that with everyone at home, the teachers have turned into the I T department, meaning they're helping the parents and the kids figure out how to go on mute and how toe configure a network adds just translation. If they're routers, don't work real problems. I mean, this was technology. Schools were operating with low tech zooms out there. You've got video conferencing, you've got all kinds of things. But now there's all that support that's involved. And so what's happening is it's highlighting the real problems of the institutional technology. So, Vincent, I'll start with you. Um, this is a big problem. So cloud solves that one. You guys have pretty much helped. I t do things that they don't want to do any more by automation. This >>is an >>opportunity not necessary. There's a problem today, but it's an opportunity tomorrow. You just quickly talk about how you see the cloud helping all this manual training and learning new tools. >>We are all now living in a cloud empowered economy. Whether we like it or not, we are touching and using services. There are powered by the cloud, and a lot of them are powered by the AWS cloud. But we don't know about it. A lot of people just don't know, right Whether you are watching Netflix, um Well, in the old days you're buying tickets and and booking hotels on Expedia or now you're actually playing games on epic entertainment, you know, playing fortnight and all those kind of games you're already using and a consumer off the cloud. And so one of the big ideas that we have is we really want to educate and create awareness off club computing for every single person. If it can be used for innovation and to bring about benefits to society, that is a common knowledge that everyone needs to happen. So the first big idea is want to make sure that everyone actually is educated on club literacy? The second thing is, for those who have not embarked on a clear cloud strategy, this is the time. Don't wait for for another pandemic toe happen because you wanna be ready. You want to be prepared for the unknown, which is what a lot of people are faced with, and you want to get ahead of the curve and so education training yourself, getting some learning done, and that's really very, very important as the next step to prepare yourself toe face the uncertainty and having programs like AWS EC start actually helps toe empower and catalyzed innovation in the education industry that our two founders have actually demonstrated. So back to you Join. >>Congratulations on the head. Start. We'll get into that real quickly. Uh, head start. But let's first get the born in the cloud generation, Janine. And you go, You guys were competing. You gotta get your APS out there. You gotta get your solutions. You're born in the cloud. You have to go compete with the existing solutions. How >>do you >>view that? What's your strategy? What's your mindset? Janine will start with you. >>So for us, way are very aware that we're solving a problem that has never been solved, right? If not, we wouldn't have so many people who are not learning. So So? So this is a very big problem. And being able to liberate on cloud technology means that we're able to just focus on what we do best. Right? How do we make sure that learning is sufficient and learning is, um, effective? And how do we keep people motivated and all those sorts of great things, um, leveraging on game mechanics, social network and incentives. And then while we do that on the outside way, can just put almost out solved everything to AWS cloud technology to help us not worry about that. And you were absolutely right. The pandemic actually woke up a lot of people and hands organizations like myself. We start to get queries from governments on brother, even big NGOs on, you know, because before cove it, we had to really do our best to convince them until our troops are dry and way, appreciate this opportunity and and also we want to help people realized that in order to buy, adopting either blended approach are a adopting technology means that you can do mass customization off learning as well. And that's what could what we could do to really push learning to the next level. So and there are a few other creative things that we've done with governments, for example, with the government off East Java on top of just using the education platform as it is andare education platform, which is education game Donald Civilization. Um, they have added in a module that teaches Cove it because, you know, there's health care system is really under a lot of strain there, right and adding this component in and the most popular um mitigate in that component is this This'll game called hopes or not? And it teaches people to identify what's fake news and what's real news. And that really went very popular and very well in that region off 25 million people. So tech became not only just boring school subjects, but it can be used to teach many different things. And following that project, we are working with the federal government off Indonesia to talk about anti something and even a very difficult topic, like sex education as well. >>Yeah, and the learning is nonlinear, horizontally scalable, its network graft so you can learn share about news. And this is contextual data is not just learning. It's everything is not like, you know, linear learning. It's a whole nother ballgame, Hugo. Um, your competitive strategy. You're out there now. You got the covert world. How are you competing? How is Amazon helping you? >>Absolutely. John, look, this is an interesting one, because the current competitors that we have, uh, educational psychologist, they're not a tech, So I wouldn't say that we're competing against a competitive per se. I would say that we're competing against the old way of doing things. The challenge for us is to, um, empower people to be comfortable. We've having a machine, you know, analyzing your kids or your recording and telling you if it's likely to be dislikes. Yeah, and in this concept, obviously, is very new. You know, we can see this in other industry with, you know, you have the app that stand Ford created to diagnose skin cancer by taking a photo of your skin. It's being done in different industry. Eso The biggest challenge for us is really about the old way of doing things. What's been really interesting for us is that, you know, education is lifelong, you know, you have a big part in school, but when you're an adult, you learn on Did you know we've been doing some very interesting work with the Justice Department where, you know, we look at inmate and you know, often when people go to jail, they have, you know, some literacy difficulty, and so we've been doing some very interesting working in this field. We're also doing some very interesting work with HR and company who want to understand their staff and put management in place so that every single person in the company are empowered to do their job and and and, you know, achieve success. So, you know, we're not competing against attack. And often when we talk to other ethnic company, we come before you know, we don't provide a learning solution. We provide a assessment solution on e assessment solution. So, really, John, what we're competing against is an old way of doing things. >>And that's exactly why clouds so successful. You change the economics, you're actually a net new benefit. And I think the cloud gives you speed and you're only challenges getting the word out because the economics air just game changing. Right, So that's how Amazon does so well, um, by the way, you could take all our recordings from the Cube, interviews all my interviews and let me know how ideo Okay, so, um, got all the got all the voice recordings from my interview. I'm sure the test will come back challenging. So take a look at that e. I wanna come back to you. But I wanna ask the two founders real quick for the folks watching. Okay on Dhere about Amazon. They know the history. They know the startups that started on Amazon that became unicorns that went public. I mean, just a long list of successes born in the cloud You get big pay when you're successful. Love that business model. But for the folks watching that were in the virtual garages, air in their houses, innovating and building out new ideas. What does Ed start mean for them? How does it work? Would you would recommend it on what are some of the learnings that you have from work with Head Start? >>But our relationship X s start is almost not like client supplier relationship. It's almost like business partners. So they not only help us with protect their providing the technology, but on top of that, they have their system architect to work with my tech team. And they have, you know, open technical hours for us to interact. And on top of that, they do many other things, like building a community where, you know, people like me and Google can meet and also other opportunities, like getting out the word out there. Right. As you know, all of their, uh, startups run on a very thin budget. So how do we not pour millions of dollars into getting out without there is another big benefit as well. So, um definitely very much recommend that start. And I think another big thing is this, right? Uh, what we know now that we have covert and we have demand coming from all over the place, including, like, even a lot of interest, Ally from the government off Gambia, you know? So how do we quickly deploy our technology right there? Or how do we deploy our technology from the the people who are demanding our solution in Nigeria? Right. With technology that is almost frameless. >>Yeah. The great enabling technology ecosystem to support you. And they got the region's too. So the region's do help. I love we call them Cube Region because we're on Amazon. We have our cloud, Hugo, um, and start your observations, experience and learnings from working with aws. >>Absolutely. Look, this is a lot to say, so I'll try and making sure for anyone, but but also for us on me personally, also as an individual and as a founder, it's really been a 365 sort of support. So like Johnny mentioned, there's the community where you can connect with existing entrepreneur you can connect with expert in different industry. You can ask technical expert and and have ah, you know office our every week. Like you said Jenny, with your tech team talking to cloud architect just to unlock any problem that you may have on day and you know, on the business side I would add something which for us has been really useful is the fact that when we when we've approached government being able to say that we have the support off AWS and that we work with them to establish data integrity, making sure everything is properly secured and all that sort of thing has been really helpful in terms off, moving forward with discussion with potential plant and and government as well. So there's also the business aspect side of things where when people see you, there's a perceived value that you know, your your entourage is smart people and and people who are capable of doing great things. So that's been also really >>helpful, you know, that's a great point. The APP SEC review process, as you do deals is a lot easier. When here on AWS. Vincent were a little bit over time with a great, great great panel here. Close us out. Share with us. What's next for you guys? You got a great startup ecosystem. You're doing some great work out there and education as well. Healthcare. Um, how's your world going on? Take a minute, Thio. Explain what's going on in your world, >>John, I'm part of the public sector Team Worldwide in AWS. We have very clear mission statements on by the first is you know, we want to bring about destructive innovation and the AWS Cloud is really the platform where so many off our techs, whether it's a text, healthtech golf text, all those who are developing solutions to help our governments and our education institutions or health care institutions to really be better at what they do, we want to bring about those disruptive innovations to the market as fast as possible. It's just an honor on a privilege for us to be working. And why is that important? It's because it's linked to our second mission, which is to really make the world a better place to really deliver. Heck, the kind of work that Hugo and Janina doing. You know, we cannot do it by ourselves. We need specialists and really people with brilliant ideas and think big vision to be able to carry out what they are doing. And so we're just honored and privileged to be part off their work And in delivering this impact to society, >>the expansion of AWS out in your area has been phenomenal growth. I've been saying to Teresa Carlson, Andy Jassy in the folks that aws for many, many years, that when you move fast with innovation, the public sector and the private partnerships come together. You're starting to see that blending. And you've got some great founders here, uh, making a social impact, transforming, teaching and learning. So congratulations, Janine and Hugo. Thank you for sharing your story on the Cube. Thanks for joining. >>Thank you. Thank >>you, John. >>I'm John Furry with the Cube. Virtual were remote. We're not in person this year because of the pandemic. You're watching a divest Public sector online summit. Thank you for watching

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's Virtual coverage of Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit Online. We couldn't be there in person, but we're doing remote interviews. I'm John Furrier, your host of the cube. We've got a great segment from Asia Pacific on the other side of the world from California, about social impact, transforming teaching and learning with Cloud technology we've got three great guests. Hugo Richard is the CEO and co-founder of Dystech and Janine Teo CEO and founder of Solve Education founders and CEOs of startups is great Vincent Quah is the APAC Regional Head of Education, Healthcare Not-For-Profit and Research for AWS. (indistinct) big program. Vincent, thanks for coming on Janine and Hugo thank you for joining. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Thanks John So, we're not there in person. We're doing remote interviews. I'm really glad to have this topic because now more than ever social change is happening. This next generation is building software and applications to solve big problems. And it's not like yesterday's problems, they're today's problems and learning and mentoring and starting companies are all happening virtually, digitally, and also in person. So the world's changing. So I got to ask you, Vincent we'll start with you Amazon, obviously big (indistinct) culture. You got two great founders here and CEOs doing some great stuff. Tell us a little bit what's going on at APAC, a lot of activity. I mean re-invent and the summits out there are really popular. Give us an update on what's happening. >> Thank you, thank you for the question, John. I think it's extremely exciting, especially in today's context, that we are seeing so much activities, especially in the education technology sector. One of the challenges that we saw from our education technology customers is that they're always looking for help and support in many of the innovation that they're trying to develop. The second area of observation that we had was that they are always alone with very limited resources and they usually do not know where to look for in terms of support and in terms of not who they can reach out to from a community standpoint, that is actually how we started and developed this program called AWS EdStart. It is a program specifically for education technology companies that are targeting, delivering innovative education solutions for the education sector. And we bring specific benefits to these education technology companies when they joined the program, AWS EdStart. Yeah, three specific areas, one is that we support them with technical support, which is really, really key trying to help them navigate in the various ranges of AWS services that allows them to develop innovative services. The second area is leaking them and building a community of like-minded education technology founders, and linking them also to investors and VCs. And lastly, of course, in supporting innovation, we support them with a bit of AWS Cloud credits, promotional credits for them so that they can go and experiment and develop innovations for their customers. >> That's great stuff I want to get into that program a little bit further because I think, you know, that's a great example of kind of benefits AWS provides (indistinct) free credits or, no one is going to turn away free credits. We'll take the free credits all the time, all day long, but really it's about the innovation. Janine I want to get your thoughts. How was Solve Education born? What problems were you solving? What made you start this company and tell us your story. >> Thank you so much for the question. So actually my co-founder was invited to speak at an African Innovation Forum couple of years back, and the topic that he was sharing with, how can Africa skip over the industrialization phase and go direct to the knowledge economy and that discussion went towards, in order to have access to the knowledge commonly you need knowledge and how do you get knowledge well through education. So that's when everybody in the Congress was a bit stuck, right? And the advice was in order to scale fast, we need to figure out a way to not while, you know, engaging the government and schools and teachers, but not depend on them for the success of the education initiative. So, and that's was what (indistinct) walk away from the conference. And when we met in Jakarta, we started talking about that also. So while I'm Singaporean, I worked in many developing countries. And the problem that we're trying to solve is it might be shocking to you, but UNESCO recently published over 600 million children and youth are not learning. And that is a big number globally, right? And out of all the SDGs per se, from UN, education, and perhaps I'm biased, because I'm a computer engineer, but I see that education is the only one that can be solved by transforming (indistinct) versus the other SDGs like, you know, poverty or hunger, right? Actually require big amount of logistic coordination and so on. So we saw a very interesting trend with mobile phones, particularly smart phones becoming more and more ubiquitous. And with that, we saw a very interesting opportunity for us to disseminate education through mobile technology. So we in self-education elevate people on a public through providing education and employment opportunities, (indistinct) on tech. And we.. our vision is to enable people to empower themselves. And what we do is that we build an open platform that provides everyone active education. >> Hugo How about your company? What problem are you solving? How did it all get started? Tell us your vision. >> Thanks, John. Well, look, it all started with a joke, one of the co-founder, Matthew, had a, he has a child who has severe learning disorder and dyslexia, and he made a joke one day about having (indistinct) that could support those kids. And I took the joke seriously. So we started sitting down and, you know, trying to figure out how we can make this happen. So it turns out that dyslexia is the most common learning disorder in the world. We have an estimated 10 to 20% of the worldwide population with the disorder, due to in context, that's between 750 million up to 1.5 billion individuals with that learning disorder. And so where we sort of try and tackle the problem is that we've identified that there's two key things for children with dyslexia. The first one is that knowing that it is dyslexia, meaning being assessed. And the second one is, so what, what do we do about it? And so given all expertise in data science and AI, we clearly saw an opportunity of sort of building something that could assess individual children and adults with dyslexia. The big problem with the assessment is that it's very expensive. We've met parents in the U.S. specifically who paid up to 6,000 U.S. Dollars for a diagnosis with an educational psychologist. On the other side, we have parents who wait 12 months before having a spot. So what we saw clearly is that the observable symptom of dyslexia are reading, and everyone has a smartphone and (indistinct) from smartphone is actually really good to record your voice. So we started collecting audio recordings from children and adults who have been diagnosed with dyslexia. And we then try to model and to recognize the likelihood of dyslexia by analyzing audio recording. So in theory, it's like diagnosed dyslexic, helping other undiagnosed dyslexic being diagnosed. So we have now (indistinct) them. That can take about 10 minutes, which requires no prior training costs, 20 U.S. Dollar, and anyone can use it to assess someone's likelihood of dyslexia. >> You know, this is the kind of thing that really changes the game because you also have learning for questions that are nonlinear and different. You've got YouTube, you've got videos, you have knowledge bases, you've got community. Vincent mentioned that Janine, you mentioned, you know, making the bits of driver and changing technology. This is the kind of thing that seems obvious now as look at it, but now you've got to put it into action. So, you know, one of the benefits of Cloud on AWS, we'll give a plug for Vincent's company here is that you can move faster. And that's something that Andy Jassy always talks about and Teresa Carlson, being builders and moving fast, but you got to build it. So Janine and Hugo, please take a minute to explain, okay, you got the idea, you're kicking the tires, you're putting it together. Now you've got to actually start writing code. What happens next? Janine, we'll start with you. >> Well, what happens next? Okay. So for us, we know education technology is not new, right. And education games are not new, but before we even started, we look at what's available and we quickly realized that the digital divide is very real, most technology out there first are not designed for (indistinct) devices, and also not designed for people who do not have internet at home. so with just that assessment, we quickly realized we need to do something about, and that's something that problem is. One is just one part of the whole puzzle. There's two other very important things. One is advocacy. Can we prove that we can teach through mobile devices? And then the second thing is motivation. And again, it's also really obvious, but, and people might think that, you know, marginalized communities are super motivated to learn. Well, I wouldn't say that they are not motivated, but just like all of us behavioral change is really hard, right? I would love to workout everyday, but you know, I don't really do that. So how do we use technology to, you know, to induce that behavioral change so that we can help support their motivation to learn. So those are the different things that we work on, certainly with it. >> Yeah, and then a motivated community, is even more impactful because then once the flywheel gets going, then it's powerful. Hugo your reaction to, you know, you got the idea, you got the vision, you're starting to put, take one step in front of the other. You got AWS, take us through the progression on the startup. >> Yeah, sure. I mean, what Janine said is, very likely to, to what we're trying to do, but for us, there's three key things that in order for us to be successful and help as much people as we can, it is three things. The first one is reliability. The second one is accessibility and the other one is affordability. So the reliability means that we have been doing a lot of work in the scientific approach as to how are we going to make this work And so we've.. We have a couple of scientific publications and we had to collect data and, you know, sort of publish this into AI conferences and things like that. So it makes sure that we have the scientific evidence behind us that support us. And so what that means is that we have to have a large amount of data and then put this to work, right on the other side of the accessibility and affordability means that Janine said, you know, it needs to be on the Cloud because if it's on the Cloud, it's accessible for anyone with any device, with an internet connection, which is, you know, covering most of the globe. So it's a good start. And so, the Cloud obviously allow us to deliver the same experience and the same value to clients and parent and teacher and (indistinct) professional around the world. And that's why, you know, it's been amazing, to be able to use the technology on the AI side as well obviously there is a lot of benefit of being able to leverage the computational power of the Cloud, to make better algorithm and better training. >> (indistinct) to come back to both of you on the AI question. I think that's super important. Vincent I want to come back to you though, because in Asia Pacific and that side of the world, you still have the old guard, the incumbents around education and learning, but there's great penetration with mobile and broadband. You have great trends as a tailwind for Amazon and these kinds of opportunities EdStart, what trends are you seeing that are now favoring you? Because with COVID, you know, the world is almost kind of like been a line in the sand is before COVID and after COVID, there's more demand for learning and education and community now than ever before, not just for education, the geopolitical landscape, everything around the younger generation is more channels, more data, the more engagement, how are you looking at this? What's your vision of these trends? Can you share your thoughts on how that's impacting learning and teaching? >> So there're three things that I want to quickly touch on. Number one, I think governments are beginning to recognize that they really need to change the way they approach solving social and economic problems. The pandemic has certainly calls into question that if you do not have a digital strategy, you can't find a better time to now develop and not just develop a digital strategy, but actually to put it in place. And so government are shifting very, very quickly into the Cloud and adopting digital strategy and use digital strategy to address some of the key problems that they are facing. And they have to solve them in a very short period of time. Right, We will talk about speed, the agility of the Cloud, and that's why the Cloud is so powerful for government to adopt. The second thing is that we saw a lot of schools close down across the world, UNESCO reported, what 1.5 billion students out of schools. So how then do you continue teaching and learning when you don't have physical classroom open and that's where education technology companies and, you know, heroes like Janine's company and others, there are so many of them around are able to come forward and offer their services and help schools go online, run classrooms online, continue to allow teaching and learning, you know, online. And this has really benefited the overall education system. The third thing that is happening is that I think tertiary education and maybe even (indistinct) education model will have to change. And they recognize that, you know, again, it goes back to the digital strategy that they've got to have a clear digital strategy and the education technology companies like what, who we have here today. Just the great partners that the education system need to look at to help them solve some of these problems and get to addressing giving a solution very, very quickly. >> Well, I know you're being kind of polite to the old guard, but I'm not that polite. I'll just be, say it. There's some old technology out there and Janine and Hugo, you're young enough not to know what IT means because you're born in the Cloud. So that's good for you. I remember what I teach. Like in fact, there's a, there's a joke here in the United States so with everyone at home the teachers have turned into the IT department, meaning they're helping the parents and the kids figure out how to go unmute and how to configure a network address translation if their routers don't work, real problems. I mean, this was technology, schools were operating with low tech Zoom's out there. You've got video conferencing, you've got all kinds of things, but now there's all that support that's involved. And so what's happening is it's highlighting the real problems of the institutional technology. So Vincent, I'll start with you. This is a big problem. So Cloud solves that one, you guys have pretty much helped IT do things that they don't want to do anymore by automation. This is an opportunity, not necessarily.. There's a problem today, but it's an opportunity tomorrow. Could you just quickly talk about how you see the Cloud, helping all this manual training and learning new tools. >> Absolutely. So I want to say and put forth a hypothesis and that hypothesis is simply this. We are all now living in a Cloud empowered economy, whether we like it or not, we are touching and using services that are powered by the Cloud. And a lot of them are powered by the AWS Cloud, but we don't know about it. A lot of people just don't know, right? Whether you are watching Netflix, well in the old days, you're buying tickets and booking hotels on Expedia, or now you're actually playing games on Epic Entertainment, you know, playing Fortnite and all those kinds of games you're already using and a consumer of the Cloud. And so one of the big ideas that we have is we really want to educate and create awareness of top computing for every single person. If it can be used for innovation and to bring about benefits to society that is a common knowledge that everyone needs to have. And so the first big idea is, want to make sure that everyone actually is educated on Cloud literacy. The second thing is for those who have not embarked on a clear Cloud strategy, this is the time don't wait for another pandemic to happen because you want to be ready. You want to be prepared for the unknown, which is what a lot of people are faced with. And you want to get ahead of the curve. And so education, training yourself, getting some learning done. And that's really very, very important as a next step to prepare yourself to face the uncertainty and having programs like AWS EdStart actually helps to empower and catalyze innovation in the education industry that our two founders have actually demonstrated. So back to you, John. >> Congratulation on the EdStart, we'll get into that and real quickly, EdStart but let's first get the born in the Cloud generation Janine and Hugo you guys are competing, you got to get your apps out there. You've got to get your solutions. You're born in the Cloud. You have to go compete with the existing solutions. How do you view that? What's your strategy? What's your mindset, Janine, we'll start with you. >> So for us, we are very aware that we are solving a problem that has never been solved, right? If not, we wouldn't have so many people who are not learning. So this is a very big problem. And being able to leverage on Cloud technology means that we are able to just focus on what we do best, right? How do we make sure that learning is sufficient and learning is effective. And how do we get people motivated and all those sort of great things leveraging on game mechanics, social network, and incentives. And then while we do that on the Cloud side, we can just put that almost ourselves, everything to AWS Cloud technology to help us not worry about that. And you were absolutely right. The pandemic actually woke up a lot of people and has organizations like myself. We start to get queries from governments and other, even big NGOs on, you know, because before COVID we had to really do our best to convince them until (indistinct) are dry >> (indistinct) knock on doors and convince people. >> Yes. And now we don't have to do that. It's the other way around. So we are really, you know, we appreciate this opportunity and also we want to help people realize that in order to.. By adopting either a blended approach or adopting technology means that you can do mass customization of learning as well. And that's, what we could do to really push learning to the next level. So, and, there are a few other creative things that we've done with governments, for example, with the government of East Java on top of just using the education platform, as it is an educational platform, which is education (indistinct) on our civilization, they have added in a module that teaches COVID because, you know, their health care system is really under a lot of strain there, right? And adding this component in and the most popular mini game in that component is this game called Hoax Or Not. And it teaches people to identify what's fake news and what's real news. And that really went very popular and very well in that region of 25 million people. So that became not only just boring school subjects, but it can be used to teach many different things. And following that project, we are working with the Federal Government of Indonesia to talk about (indistinct) and even a very difficult topic like sex education as well. >> Yeah. And the learning is nonlinear, it's horizontally scalable, it's network graph. So you can learn, share about news. And this is contextual data. It's not just learning, it's everything. It's not like, you know, linear learning. It's a whole nother ballgame, Hugo, your competitive strategy. You're out there now, you got the COVID world. How are you competing? How's Amazon helping you? >> Absolutely John, look, this is an interesting one because the common competitor that we have are educational psychologist, they're not at tech. So I wouldn't say that we're competing against a competitor per se. I would say that we are competing against some old way of doing things. The challenge for us is to empower people, to be comfortable with having a machine, you know, analyzing your kid's audio recording and telling you if it's likely to be dyslexia. And this concept obviously is very new. You know, we can see this in other industry with AI, you know, you have the app that Stanford created to diagnose skin cancer by taking a photo of your skin. So it's being done in different industry. So the biggest challenge for us is really about the old way of doing things. What's been really interesting for us is that you know, education is lifelong, you know, you have a big pot in school, but when you're an adult you learn and, you know, we've been doing some very interesting work with the Justice Department where, you know, we look at inmate and, and, you know, often when people go to jail, they have, you know, some literacy difficulty. And so we've been doing some very interesting work in this field. We're also doing some very interesting work with HR and company who want to understand their staff and put management in place so that every single person in the company are empowered to do the job and, you know, achieve success. So, you know, we're not competing against Ed Tech. And often when we talk to other Ed Tech company, we come before, you know, we don't provide a learning solution. We provide an assessment solution, an E assessment solution. So really John, what we competing against is an old way of doing things. >> And that's exactly why the Cloud's so successful. You change the economics. You're actually a net new benefit. And I think the Cloud gives you speed. And your only challenge is getting the word out because the economics are just game changing, right? So that's how Amazon does so well, by the way, you can take all our recordings from theCUBE interviews, all my interviews and let me know how I do, okay. So got all the, got all the voice recordings for my interview. I'm sure the test will come back challenging. So take a look at that. >> Absolutely. >> Vincent I want to come back to you, but I want to ask the two founders real quick for the folks watching okay and hear about Amazon. They know the history, they know the startups that started on Amazon that became unicorns that went public. I mean, just a long list of successes born in the Cloud. You get big pay when you're successful, love that business model. But for the folks watching that are in the virtual garages or in their houses innovating and building out new ideas, what does EdStart mean for them? How does it work? Would you would recommend it? And what are some of the learnings that you have from working with EdStart? Janine We'll start with you. >> For me. So I would, for me, I would definitely highly recommend EdStart. And the reason is because EdStart, our relationship with EdStart, is almost not like a client-supplier relationship it's almost like business partners. So they not only help us with providing the technology. But on top of that, they have their system architects to work with my tech team and they have, you know, open technical hours for us to interact. And on top of that, they do many other things like building a community where, you know, people like me and Google can meet. And also other opportunities like getting out there, right? As you know, all of the startups run on a very thin budget. So how do we not pour millions of dollars into getting all that out there is another big benefit as well. So I'll definitely very much recommend EdStart. And I think another big thing is this, right? Now that we have COVID and we have demands coming from all other places including like, even (indistinct) from the Government of Gambia, you know, so how do we quickly deploy our technology right there? Or how do we deploy our technology from the people who are demanding our solution in Nigeria, right? With technology it is almost brainless. >> Yeah. The great enabling technology ecosystem to support you. I think, at the regions too. So the regions do help. I love we call them cube regions because we're on Amazon, we have our Cloud Hugo, EdStart your observations, experience and learnings from working with AWS. >> Absolutely. Look, there's a lot to say, so I'll try and make it short for anyone, but, so for us and me personally, and also as an individual and as a founder, it's really been a 365 sort of support. So like Janine mentioned, there's the community where you can connect with existing entrepreneur. You can connect with experts in different industry. You can ask technical experts and have a, you know, office hour every week. Like you said, Janine with, your tech team talking to a Cloud architect just to unlock any problem that you may have. And, you know, on the business side, I would add something which for us has been really useful is the fact that when we've approached government, being able to say that we have the support of AWS and that we work with them to establish data integrity, making sure everything is properly secured and all that sort of thing has been really helpful in terms of moving forward with discussion with potential client and government as well. So there's also the business aspect side of things, where when people see you, there's a perceived value that, you know, your entourage is smart people and people who are capable of doing great things. So that's been also really helpful. >> You know, that's a great point. The AppSec review process as you do deals is a lot easier when you're on AWS. Vincent we're a little bit over time. What a great panel here. Close us out, share with us what's next for you guys. You've got a great startup ecosystem and doing some great work out there and education as well, healthcare, how's your world going on? Take a minute to explain what's going on in your world. >> John I'm part of the public sector team worldwide in AWS, we have very clear mission statements. And the first is, you know, we want to bring about disruptive innovation. And the AWS Cloud is really the platform where so many of our Ed Techs, whether it's (indistinct) Health Tech, Gulf Tech, all those who are developing solutions to help our governments and our education institutions, our healthcare institutions to really be better at what they do. We want to bring about those disruptive innovations to the market, as fast as possible. It's just an honor and a privilege for us to be working. And why is that important? It's because it's linked to our second mission, which is to really make the world a better place to really deliver.. The kind of work that Hugo and Janine are doing. We cannot do it by ourselves. We need specialists and really people with brilliant ideas and think big vision to be able to carry out what they are doing. And so we're just honored and privileged to be part of their work. And in delivering this impact to society. >> The expansion of AWS out in your area has been phenomenal growth. I've been saying to Teresa Carlson and Andy Jassy and the folks at AWS for many, many years, that when you move fast with innovation, the public sector and the private partnerships come together, you starting to see that blending. And you've got some great founders here making a social impact, transforming teaching and learning. So congratulations, Janine and Hugo. Thank you for sharing your story on theCUBE. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you for having us >> thanks John >> Thank you, John. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE Virtual we're remote. We're not in person this year because of the pandemic you're watching AWS Public Sector Online Summit. Thank you for watching. (soft music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nation's capital. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Co-hosting along side John Furrier. We are joined by Jamil Jaffer, he is the VP Strategy and Partnerships at IronNet. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me Rebecca. >> Rebecca: I know you've been watching us for a long time so here you are, soon to be a CUBE alumn. >> I've always wanted to be in theCUBE, it's like being in the octagon but for computer journalists. (laughing) I'm pumped about it. >> I love it. Okay, why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about IronNet and about what you do there. >> Sure, so IronNet was started about 4 1/2 years ago, 5 years ago, by General Kieth Alexander, the former director of the NSA and founding commander of US Cyber command. And essentially what we do is, we do network traffic analytics and collective defense. Now I think a lot of people know what network traffic analytics are, you're looking for behavioral anomalies and network traffic, trying to identify the bad from the good. Getting past all the false positives, all the big data. What's really cool about what we do is collective defense. It's this idea that one company standing alone can't defend itself, it's got to work with multiple companies, it's got to work across industry sectors. Potentially even with the governments, and potentially across allied governments, really defending one another. And the way that works, the way we think about that, is we share all the anomalies we see across multiple companies to identify threat trends and correlations amongst that data, so you can find things before they happen to you. And so the really cool idea here is, that something may not happen to you, but it may happen to your colleague, you find about it, you're defended against it. And it takes a real commitment by our partners, our companies that we work with, to do this, but increasingly they're realizing the threat is so large, they have no choice but to work together, and we provide that platform that allows that to happen. >> And the premise is that sharing the data gives more observational space to have insights into that offense, correct? >> That's exactly right. It's as though, it's almost like you think about an air traffic control picture, or a radar picture, right? The idea being that if you want to know what's happening in the air space, you got to see all of it in real time at machine speed, and that allows you to get ahead of the threats rather than being reactive and talking about instant response, we're talking about getting ahead of the problems before they happen so you can stop them and prevent the damage ahead of time. >> So you're an expert, they're lucky to have you. Talk about what you've been doing before this. Obviously a lot of experience in security. Talk about some about some of the things you've done in the past. >> So I have to admit to being a recovering lawyer, but you have to forgive me because I did grow up with computers. I had a Tandy TRS-80 Color computer when I first started. 4K of all more RAM, we upgraded to 16K, it was the talk of the rainbow computer club, what are you doing, 16K of RAM? (laughing) I mean, it was-- >> Basic programming language, >> That's right. (laughing) Stored on cassette tapes. I remember when you used to have to punch a hole in the other side of a 5 1/4 floppy disc to make it double sided. >> Right, right. >> John: Glory days. >> Yeah, yeah. I paid my way through college running a network cable, but I'm a recovering lawyer, and so my job in the government, I worked at the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then the Bush administration on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, both the Justice Department and the White House. >> You've seen the arc, you've seen the trajectory, the progress we're making now seems to me slower than it should be, obviously a lot of inertia as Amy Chasity said today about these public sector government agencies, what not. But a real focus has been on it, we've been seeing activity. Where are we with the state of the union around the modernization of cyber and awareness to what's happening? How critical are people taking this threat seriously? >> Well I think I variety of things to say on that front. First, the government itself needs modernize its systems, right? We've seen that talked about in the Obama administration, we've seen President Trump put out an executive order on modernization of federal infrastructure. The need to move to the cloud, the need to move to shared services, make them more defensible, more resilient long-term. That's the right move. We've seen efforts at the Department of Defense and elsewhere. They aren't going as fast as the need to, more needs to happen on that front. IT modernization can really be accelerated by shifting to the cloud, and that's part of why that one of the things that IronNet's done really aggressively is make a move into the cloud space, putting all of our back end in the cloud and AWS. And also, ability, capability to do surveillance and monitoring. When I say surveillance I mean network threat detection not surveillance of the old kind. But network threat detection in the cloud, and in cloud-enabled instances too. So both are important, right? Classic data centers, but also in modern cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, one of the things people want to know about is what your enemy looks like, and now with the democratization with open source, and democratization of tools, the enemies could be hiding through obscure groups. The states, the bad actors and the state actors can actually run covert activities through other groups, so this is kind of a dynamic that creates confusion. >> No, in fact, it's their actual mode of operating, right? It's exactly what they do, they use proxies, right? So you'll see the Russians operating, looking like a criminal hacker group operating out of the eastern Europe. In part because a lot of those Russian criminal rings, in actuality. You see a lot of patriotic hackers, right? I would tell most people, if you see a patriotic hacker there's probably a government behind that whole operation. And so the question becomes, how do you confront that threat, right? A lot of people say deterrence doesn't work in cyberspace. I don't believe that. I think deterrence can and does work in cyberspace, we just don't practice it. We don't talk about our capabilities, we don't talk our red lines, we don't talk about what'll happen if you cross our red lines, and when we do establish red lines and they're crossed, we don't really enforce them. So it's no surprise that our enemies, or advisories, are hitting us in cyberspace, are testing our boundaries. It's cause we haven't really give them a sense of where those lines are and what we're going to do if they cross them. >> Are we making an progress on doing anything here? What's the state of the market there? >> Well the government appears to have gotten more aggressive, right? We've seen efforts in congress to give the Department of Defense and the US Intelligence Committee more authorities. You can see the stand up of US Cyber Command. And we've seen more of a public discussion of these issues, right? So that's happening. Now, is it working? That's a harder question to know. But the real hard question is, what do you do on private sector defense? Because our tradition has been, in this country, that if it's a nation-state threat, the government defends you against it. We don't expect Target or Walmart or Amazon to have service to air missiles on the roof of your buildings to defend against Russian Bear bombers. We expect the government to do that. But in cyberspace, the idea's flipped on its head. We expect Amazon and every company in America, from a mom and pop shop, all the way up to the big players, to defend themselves against script kiddies, criminal hacker gangs, and nation-states. >> John: And randomware's been taking down cities, Baltimore, recent example, >> Exactly. >> John: multiple times. Hit that well many times. >> That's right, that's right. >> Talk about where the US compares. I mean, here as you said, the US, we are starting to have these conversations, there's more of an awareness of these cyber threats. But modernization has been slow, it does not quite have the momentum. How do we rate with other countries? >> Well I think in a lot of ways we have the best capabilities when it comes to identifying threats, identifying the adversary, the enemy, and taking action to respond, right? If we're not the top one, we're in the top two or three, right? And the question, though, becomes one of, how do you work with industry to help industry become that good? Now our industry is at the top of that game also, but when you're talking about a nation-state, which has virtually unlimited resources, virtually unlimited man-power to throw at a problem, it's not realistic to expect a single company to defend itself, and at the same time, we as a nation are prepared to say, "Oh, the Department of Defense should be sitting on "the boundaries of the US internet." As if you could identify them even, right? And we don't want that. So the question becomes, how does the government empower the private sector to do better defense for itself? What can the government do working with industry, and how can industry work with one another, to defend each other? We really got to do collective defense, not because it makes sense, which it does, but because there is no other option if you're going to confront nation-state or nation-state enabled actors. And that's another threat, we've seen the leakage of nation-state capabilities out to a lot broader of an audience now. That's a problem, even though that may be 2013 called and wants it's hack back, those things still work, right? What we saw in Baltimore was stuff that has been known for a long time. Microsoft has released patches long ago for that, and yet, still vulnerable. >> And the evolution of just cyber essential command, and Cyber Command, seems to be going slow, at least from my frame. Maybe I'm not in the know, but what is the imperative? I mean, there's a lot of problems to solve. How does the public sector, how does the government, solve these problems? Is cloud the answer? What are some of the things that people of this, the top minds, discussing? >> Well and I think cloud is clearly one part of the solution, right? There's no question that when you move to a cloud infrastructure, you have sort of a more bounded perimeter, right? And that provides that ability to also rapidly update, you could update systems in real time, and in mass. There's not going around and bringing your floppy disc and loading software, and it sounds like that's sort of a joke about an older era, but you look at what happened with NotPetya and you read this great Wired article about what happened with NotPetya, and you look at Maersk. And the way that Maersk brought its systems back up, was they had domain controller in Africa that had gone down due to a power surge, where they were able to recover the physical hard drive and re-image all their world-wide domain controls off of that one hard drive. You think about a major company that runs a huge percentage of the world's ports, right? And this is how they recovered, right? So we really are in that, take your disc and go to computers. In a cloud infrastructure you think about how you can do that in real time, or rapidly refresh, rapidly install patches, so there's a lot of that, that's like a huge part of it. It's not a complete solution, but it's an important part. >> Yeah, one of the things we talk about, a lot of tech guys, is that this debate's around complexity, versus simplicity. So if you store your data in one spot, it's easy to audit and better for governing compliance, but yet easier for hackers to penetrate. From an IQ standpoint, the more complex it is, distributed, harder. >> Yeah I think that's right. >> John: But what's the trade off there? How are people thinking about that kind of direction? >> No that's a great question, right? There's a lot of benefits to diversity of systems, there's a lot of benefit to spreading out your crown jewels, the heart of your enterprise. At the same time, there's real resilience in putting it in one place, having it well defended. Particularly when it's a shared responsibility and you have partial responsibility for the defense, but the provider to, I mean, Amazon, and all the other cloud providers, Microsoft and Google, all have it in their own self interest to really defend their cloud really well. Because whether or not you call it shared responsibility, it's your stock price that matters if you get hit, right? And so, instead of you, Amazon, and all the other cloud players have an incentive to do the right thing and do it really well. And so this shared responsibility can work to both side's benefits. That being said, there's an ongoing debate. A lot of folks want to do there stuff on-prem in a lot of ways. You know, a lot of us are old school, right? When you touch it, you feel it, you know it's there. And we're working through that conversation with folks, and I think that at the end of the day, the real efficiency gains and the power of having super computing power at your fingertips for analytics, for consumer purposes and the like. I really think there's no way to avoid moving to a cloud infrastructure in the long run. >> I know you said you were a recovering lawyer, but you are the founding director of the National Security Institute at the Antonin Scalia School of Law. How are you thinking about educating the next generation of lawyers who could indeed become policy makers or at least work on these committees, to think about these threats that we don't even know about yet? >> That's a great question. So one of the things we're doing, is we're working through the process with the state commission on establishing a new LLM and cyber intelligence national security law. That'll be a great opportunity for lawyers to actually get an advanced degree in these issues. But we're also training non-lawyers. One of the interesting things is, you know, One of the challenges DC has, is we make a lot of tech policy, a lot of it not great, because it's not informed by technologists, so we've got a great partnership with the Hewlett Foundation where we're bringing technologists from around the country, mid-career folks, anywhere from the age of 24 to 38. We're bringing them to DC and we're educating them on how to talk to policy makers. These are technologists, these are coders, data scientists, all the like, and it's a real opportunity for them to be able to be influential in the process of making laws, and know how to involve themselves and talk that speak. Cause, DC speak is a certain thing, right? (laughing) And it's not typically consistent with tech speak, so we're trying to bridge that gap and the Hewlett Foundation's been a great partner in that effort. >> On that point about this collaboration, Silicon Valley's been taking a lot of heat lately, obviously Zuckerberg and Facebook in the news again today, more issues around irresponsibility, but they were growing a rocket ship, I mean, company's only 15 years old roughly. So the impact's been significant, but tech has moved so fast. Tech companies usually hire policy folks in DC to speak the language, educate, a little bit different playbook. But now it's a forcing function between two worlds colliding. You got Washington DC, the Silicon Valley cultures have to blend now. What are some of the top minds thinking about this? What are some of the discussions happening? What's the topic of conversations? >> Well look, I mean, you've see it in the press, it's no surprise you're hearing this talk about breaking up big tech companies. I mean, it's astounding. We used to live in world in which being successful was the American way, right? And now, it seems like at least, without any evidence of anti-trust concerns, that we're talking about breaking up companies that have otherwise hugely successful, wildly innovative. It's sort of interesting to hear that conversation, it's not just one party, you're hearing this in a bipartisan fashion. And so it's a concern, and I think what it reveals to tech companies is, man, we haven't be paying a lot of attention to these guys in DC and they can cause real trouble. We need to get over there and starting talking to these folks and educating them on what we do. >> And the imperative for them is to do the right thing, because, I mean, the United States interest, breaking up, say, Facebook, and Google, and Apple, and Amazon, might look good on paper but China's not breaking up Alibaba anytime soon. >> To the contrary. They're giving them low-interest loans and helping them all to excel. It's crazy. >> Yeah, and they have no R&D by the way, so that's been- >> Jamil: Right, because they stole all of our IP. >> So the US invests in R&D that is easily moving out through theft, that's one issue. You have digital troops on our shores from foreign nations, some will argue, I would say yes. >> Jamil: Inside the border. >> Inside the border, inside the interior, with access to the power grids, our critical infrastructure, this is happening now. So is the government now aware of the bigger picture around what we have as capabilities and criticalities that were needed now for digital military? What is that conversation like? >> Well I think they're having this conversation, right? I think the government knows it's a problem, they know that actually in a lot of ways a partnership with tech is better than an adversary relationship. That doesn't change the fact that, for some reason, in the last three, four years, we really have seen what some people are calling a "techlash", right? A backlash against technology. It kind of strikes me as odd, because of course, the modern economy that we've so benefited from is literally built on the back of the innovations coming out of the Silicon Valley, out of the west coast, and out of the DC metro area, where a lot these tech companies are developing some of the most innovative new ideas. Now they're, frankly, helping government innovate. So Amazon's a key part of that effort, right? Here in the public sector. And so I'm hoping that education will help, I know that the arrival of tech companies here to really have that conversation in an open and sensible way, I hope will sort of waft back some of this. But I worry that for too long the tech and the policies have ignored on another. And now they're starting to intersect as you say, and it has the possibility of going wrong fast, and I'm hoping that doesn't happen. >> You know, one of the things that Rebecca and I were talking about was this talent gap between public sector and private sector. These agencies aren't going to go public anytime soon, so maybe they should get equity deals and get a financial incentive. (laughing) You know what I mean? Shrink down the cost, increase the value. But as you get the collaboration between the two parties, the cloud is attracting smart people, because it gives you an accelerant of value. So people can see some entry points to land, some value out of the gate, verus giving up and abandoning it through red tape, or in other processes. So you starting to see smart people get attracted to cloud as a tool for making change. How is that working? And how is that going to work? Cause this could be coming to the partnership side of it. People might not want to work for the government, but could work with the government. This is a dynamic that we see as real. What's your thoughts? >> I think that's exactly right. Having these cloud infrastructures gives the ability to one, leverage huge amounts of computing power, but also to leverage insights and knowledge from the private sector in ways that you never could have imagined. So I really do think the cloud is an opportunity to bring real benefits from private sector innovation into the public sector very rapidly, right? So, broad-clouded option. And that's part of why John Alexander, my boss, and I have been talking a lot about the need for broad-clouded option. It's not just innovative in technology, it's benefits to the war fighter, Right? I mean, these are real, tangible benefits pushing data in real time, the war fighter, You know John Alexander had one of the biggest innovations in modern war fighting, where he's able to take civil intelligence down from weeks and months, down to minutes and seconds, that the naval and our war fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan to really take the fight to the enemy. The cloud brings that power scaled up to a huge degree, right? By orders of magnitude. And so the government recognizes this and yet today we don't see them yet moving rapidly in that direction. So I think the EO was a good move, a good first step in that direction, now we got to see it implemented by the various agencies down below. >> Well we'll kep in touch, great to have you on. I know we're wrapping up the day here, they're breaking down, we're going to pull the plug literally. (laughing) We'll keep in touch and we'll keep progress on you. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Rebecca: Jamil, you are now a CUBE alumn, >> I love it, thank you. >> Rebecca: So congrats, you've joined the club. >> I love it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier you have been watching theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (electronic music)

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment