>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah. Welcome to the cubes. Virtual coverage of 80 was reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host. We are the Cube virtual not there in person, but we're doing remote, as is a W s. Although there there on stage live. And we're here with Dave Brown, Vice President of the Sea, to compute. Great to see you again. Great keynote last night, kicking off everything for the opening night. Great stuff. >>Yeah, well, John, it's always good to be on the Cuban. Thanks for having me back. >>You know, you're in the hot seat these days in the sense of there's so much going on. I mean, Andy, that could do a three week announcement. Keynote. It was like in three hours of nonstop you take a break to go The bathroom. You missed two announcements, right? So, so much going on. You opened up reinvent 2020 with your announcement ec2 of mac instances. And there was a ton of compute. And the theme was really you know, reinventing and reimagining compute both. I want to get into that. But let's start with the hard news. Tell me about the Mac instances. Um, you had a great use case there, That kind of illustrated in your talk. But where is this coming from? It's obviously Mac developers are big, but is this market something that you guys saw from customers or was a necessity? Take us through the thinking around the Mac instance. Easy to for Mac instances, um are going for >>absolutely absolutely So I mean me personally Matthews, a longtime Matthews that we've often thought about. Could we ever bring Mac OS to AWS? Right This thing we've spoken about on and off for many, many years and, you know, it was about a year and a half about two years ago. You know, we're always hearing new use cases from customers, and that's kind of what we're doing. So we're saying what a customer is trying to do that we don't support today, and how would we support them in that? And we started a year from customers that they have been able to successfully migrate all of the AWS workloads to AWS. So most of the server workloads to AWS and then they've got this Mac bold workload that they just weren't able to bring to us. We just didn't support Max into. It was a great example who I had on stage with me last night where you know, they over the last couple of years have been moving Ah, lot of their workloads to AWS. And and then they had these Mac money sitting around that they had to manage themselves. And so we said, could we actually do this? And so that was the one thing the customer ask. And the other thing that we realized was with the nitro system in the work that we've been doing there over the last, you know, six years, seven years since 2012, Really? And just where we are from the From nitro system point of view, we were able to wrap a Mac money without making any changes to it with nitro cards plugging a FireWire to the thunderbolt port and and and actually control that device. And so it means that you get the best of Apple hardware, which is what Apple's all about is the hard way that they make and the way that their software works with it. together with the nitric system and the cards around that inte integrating with the rest of AWS. So we're giving you, you know, high speed secure networking. We're giving you great access to elastic block store Was just integrates natively into the magma Nias? Well, a So we realized that the technology was there, the customer asked, was there and then obviously went to Apple and worked with them very closely to make it happen. And so that's kind of how it all came together. And I was incredibly excited to announce it last night. And the feedback today has just been amazing. A lot of excitement. >>Yeah, take me through the use case because, you know, obviously there's two trends going on. There's custom chips and server list kind of thing happening where you guys, I mean, really doing a good job of the eye as layer, innovating there and then platform as a service. All that software on top. I totally get that. You could see that happening. Chips custom ships to Intel, A, M, D. And others. Now you got Mac hardware. Where's the innovation use case because one would start would say, Hey, why don't you care about whether it's Mac hardware or not. Because I'm server lists. I should be programming the infrastructure actually be getting compute generically. Where does the Mac tying come in? Because that's the first question I was thinking of was, I'm a Mac user. I love Mac, but I'm also got some windows actually going on now. And ultimately, do I really care if it's compute? What's your reaction to that? Yeah, >>absolutely. I mean, if you look at Apple's ecosystem today, right, they have millions of applications in the APP store. They have 28 million developers worldwide, actually building those applications just incredible. And many of those applications, all these millions in the In the APP store itself, there's many more applications that are both by enterprises and companies, right? We have an application that we use internally at Amazon is available on my phone. That's not in the APP store, and you know, many companies are doing that and to build applications for the ecosystem, they have to be built on Mac hardware. And that's just how Apple works, right? So if you wanna build for iPad or iPhone or even Apple TV and Apple watch, you have to build those applications on a Mac. And so what we see companies doing is, you know, the old develop a meme off. Well, it works on my computer, right when you build something, you don't wanna be bullied on your local laptop for production. So they typically have a fleet of machines that they either under somebody's desk or in a data center somewhere that they use for for building these Mac applications. And so it's not possible to build a Mac application on anything other than a Mac itself. And we when we looked at it, we really didn't feel that virtualization made sense, right? Apple? I mean, they have some some virtualization that they're able to do within Mac OS itself. But if you think about how do we solve the customer use case, it's really bringing apple hardware too easy to to solve the problem and giving customers that exactly same exact same experience that they have on prep. And if you look into it like that, models just worked right. We gave them better access. Uh, you know, they've been using that data which you normally say, Hey, don't don't run production workloads on a beta. But you know, I found out if I interview with the BPS at Intuit critique that they've actually moved 80% of their production pulled wear clothes too easy to already to run on the Mac instances. And so that, and that's in the space of two months. And so, just as seamless ability to move because it's the same hardware is kind of what we were going >>after. Great, thanks for sharing that and say, one thing I wanna point out is Mac does have their own chips as well. They're going custom chips. Amazon's going custom chips. And I think I think you nailed what I was trying to understand, which is this developer community for Mac. And there's some things that are purpose built for Mac devices. So on Mac ecosystem, get the marketplace as well as you know, that that was the hardware PCs and devices, and they're only doing more and more. So this brings me to the i o t. Um, piece of it, because Apple does make devices that people wear and I watch is, um, iPhones. I mean, they're not computers anymore. They're everything. So this kind of brings up the edge conversation. So whether it's an iPhone or a five G in a Metro or I'm a stadium watching a football game and there's some sensor camera vision industrial thing there, this is the new normal. This is where you guys are kind of eating, eating up the software side that that business, because there's new capabilities here. Can you explain how compute he's, particularly C two gets to the edges because no one wants to move data around. They wanna move, compute, not data, because data is expensive and it's and it's fat. So we we talked about that we keep on years ago, but you gotta move. Compute. So how does that work Take us through your vision? >>Absolutely. And this is This is a massively growing area for us. I mean, you mentioned Apple's new M one silicon Apple silicon that they just launched a swell, and we're super excited about Apple's been doing there. We've been doing the same thing with our grab. It's on two processor and really saving customers. An incredible amount on price performance. Tried customers moving and getting 40% improvement and price performance just by moving to grab it on too. It's just incredible. Um, in terms of the edge, you know, we started this journey. We started this journey quite some time ago and bringing, you know, Lambda functions to cloudwatch and things like that. How do we bring compute to the edge? We took a look at five G, which I think it's gonna feel a lot of this right if if we look at our cell phones today was actually just talking to the Apple team yesterday with the iPhone, only came out, you know, 13 years ago. It's kind of amazing to think just how much progress we've had and what four g did for the device that's in our pocket in terms of, you know, just how much we rely on that today and what we get. Well, five g is just a step function in both in terms of latency, but also in terms of throughput. And so, you know, one of the projects we announced last year with Verizon and we now Andy announced this morning we're also gonna be rolling out with Katy D I and SK Telecom and Vodafone next year. Um is a project always like that brings aws compute to the edge of the telco network. And so with Verizon, we now have eight locations around the U. S. Where we have AWS compute capacity. And what I mean by that is literally C five instances uh, G four GPU instances for customers that want to do influence and graphics processing on the edge. And that's embedded into the five G network on DSO customers. You know, we've got a number of customers that are doing a lot of interesting things with five G in the sports area, where they have five G cameras that are, you know, submitted directly to wavelength. We no longer need to drive a truck to a stadium to record a game. You just have five G cameras, um, to, you know, automated factories where they doing robotics in factories and yet really low latency. And they don't want the computer, the factory they wanted in five G and so just exciting area for us. That's growing really, really quickly. Thea Other thing we did is obviously with local zones. We launched our first local zones in L a X last year, Los Angeles on that's being used by the movie industry, so you know right now is a lot of exciting up and running off the covert and shut down for a period of time and filming the next release of all of our favorite episodes and across all of these various streaming platforms. And a lot of that work is actually the post production is being done on on AWS on G four instances within the Los Angeles region. So, you know, very low agency for colorization animation, special effects, all that sort of things happening there. What we heard from a lot of customers was they loved outposts as well, which is our offering to put a server into a data center. And you heard from riot games in Andy's Keynote, where they actually bought a number of outposts and put them all over the U. S. And also other places of the world to really lower the Leighton see for their latest game. And so what Andy also just announced is the availability off three additional local zones. So Atlanta, Miami and Houston Sorry, Boston Miami in Houston available today, and then additional 12 available local zones next year, and what that does is that sort of spreads AWS capacity compute capacity at the edge in all of our major metropolitan hubs all of their capacities on the AWS backbone as well, but brings customers that low latency connectivity that they're looking for. Gaming developers were, you know, every every millisecond counts in terms of gameplay on so super excited to be going after that use case, which I think, you know, it's difficult to tell what the next 10 years is gonna be like. But I think Layton's he's gonna have a big part to play in the types of applications we see on our phones going forward. >>Great stuff, final question for you as we wrap up, obviously with virtualization with virtualization. But you know, the cove it is. And he pointed out, People are gonna change, is gonna be winners and losers. He kind of clearly pointed out, But the people who do lean into the cloud who have been on the cloud or taking advantage of the tail winds of cove in because of the capabilities there are two bills air higher, and you should be happy for that. But they're also gonna have more demand for you to say, Hey, I need more services. So How do you speak to those people who are leaning in who are leveraging, more, compute? What should they be looking at? What kinds of services should be connecting into compute? How should they be thinking about the future of compute so that they can take advantage of those capabilities? The lower costs, higher performance? What things are complementary for these customers as they come in, not toe dip in the water kind of things against really driving. And what do they need? >>Yeah, absolutely. And this has been a big focus on us. You know, things has bean, as I cover in my keynote, which leadership session that I'm doing tomorrow Wednesday. You know, a lot of this year has been helping customers through covert and what covert is meant for their business. Whether that is cost savings for many of them or whether it's just demand, you know that they've never experienced are expected before. I mean, we've been incredibly hard at work in servicing those customers, right? I actually catch up with Scott Sikora. In my keynote. He leads our capacity team. We talked through what it meant and how we actually provided the capacity that our customers needed during Colbert Times. But for a customer moving to us, the first thing is obviously we wanna find ways to make them very successful in the cloud, but more importantly, lower price performance for them. So what we wanted to do is give them the best possible performance that's available at the lowest possible cost. And if you look at a number of the announcements that Andy made today, you know whether it's our latest graviton processor where you can, you know, when you move to arm. I think customers often overestimate how much work it will be to move to arm. And when I talked to them after they have moved, that's ahead. Wasn't actually that much work. We actually got it up and running relatively quickly. So what's simpler than people expect? But that's an opportunity to save 40% on price performance. You know these new newer workloads like our graphics. We just launched a new G four a D, which is an AMG based GPU solution, the first time we have had an AMG GPU on the EEC too. And that's also looking to say, if you know upwards of 40% price performance of other GPU offering so just incredibly exciting for graphics, work, clothes and then in the machine learning space. Like I think, if you know, machine learning is just become the new normal, like everybody is doing it. And you know, just three years ago, everybody was thinking about whether they should do it. How would how they would use it Now that it's a lot of companies are doing it. It's really How do you How do I use it more? And that comes down to again saving costs. And so what we know with without Inferential Chip and then the new Habbaniya chip we just announced it with with the work with Intel that we're doing and then a new trainee, um, ship for training, training. We're really working to lower the cost of machine learning. And so, like we've seen many customers like Alexa was a great use case the other day. Being able to lower the cost of inference for Alexa by 35% again just helps customers, you know, move to the cloud. But I mean, just generally, you know, we're trying to support customers everywhere where there were, you know, if there are many customers are in their own data centers looking to move to AWS. You know, we have great models that can support them with our existing compute. A new savings plan offering we announced last year just great for saving costs on getting the price down So a lot. You can look at it. You know, I could go on forever. Really. It >>Certainly it's certainly is MAWR. We'll we'll do a deeper dive follow up after reinvent, but it is a wake up call. As I wrote in my post, um, for a cloud on Finally, I've been saying this for years. Horizontal scalability is a disruption on the infrastructure side, but you've got vertical specialization with data to create great modern apse of machine learning. And I actually playing out in full display here is Andy said, um, net right now. So all this benefits and all these opportunities to disrupt horizontally and then leverage the data all tied together, all coming together. You're clear. Leading the team. Great Brown, vice president of E C. Two in charge of the team that's driving the future. Compute. Thanks for coming on The Cube Cube Live coverage. Thanks. >>Thanks for having me. >>Okay. I'm John for the Q back for more live coverage after this short break

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to the cube from our Boston area studios we've been doing a series of CXO leadership discussions talking about how everyone's dealing with the global global endemic I've been welcome program a first-time guest Katy Bullard she is the president of a tile guru of course a cloud guru a online learning company we've had on the cube many times over the years Katy thanks so much thank you so much sue for having me I really appreciate it all right so Katie I remember I saw the in I think the announce was the end of at the beginning of the year your based at the headquarters in Austin you know online you know learning is a huge topic cloud of course you know one of those mega waves that we've been walking a long time and then you know out of nowhere global pandemic you know it's striking us so you know bring us inside you know obviously you know taking a new role in a new organization as it own challenges normally it's like okay what am I going to do for the first 90 days and make that plan tell us you know how were you reacted in how the company has reacted with the koban 19 did you get a chance to look at my 90-day plan dude that was exactly where it was no well let me take you back I'll take you back to kind of why I chose to come to ECG because I think it informs actually what's happening right now as well when I when I was looking for the next opportunity what I look for is I look for two things primarily in a company one is a product that's in a market that's growing really really fast and a product that has raving customer bands and obviously ACG really you know check both of those boxes you think about this is pre Co but if you think about the cloud computing market growing you know 50 60 % a year and the number one challenge for people who are both moving to the cloud or moving to a multi cloud strategy was having enough skilled workers to to do that effectively there really wasn't a better intersection of two you know two who value propositions than what a CG offered which was serving the cloud computing market and skilling up workers in that market fast forward to February you know was interesting I actually went out to Australia offices in mid-february as this was starting to heat up came back just in time I think to not go into quarantine but we very quickly saw the impact and you know this isn't easy for anybody in in any situation but what we are hearing from our customers and from the market is that that move to the cloud is even more important now I think the latest that I saw from the the 2028 odd report said 65 percent of companies are planning a cloud migration 95 percent are of companies are employing a multi cloud strategy so that is accelerating and then of course we're all sitting at home right now and you're getting me in my in my dining room and we have the both learn online versus in person there's no longer in-person training there's no longer events for us to go to lives we're doing that online we also are seeing that you know the way that we use our time is changing so we're not spending hours anymore muting we have a lot of customers who are saying let's use that time instead of muting to learn improve ourselves improve our skills so you know everything is very unpredictable in this environment but we do feel like at ACG our fundamental mission is to help customers get through this to give them the skills that they need so that hopefully as everybody emerges from this later this year they're better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them ya know you hit on a lot of topics you know so much right now you know remote learning remote work or you know a big discussion the developer world has been looking at that for a long time and you know when I see you know the the the elementary and high school children as well as you know colleges and how they're handling distant learning I was well come on the Cronenberg's brothers you know built something in you know two or three week from your mother's basement Amazon and serverless and they framed millions of people now yeah you know good absolutely translate but it's challenging so I'm curious yes you know and you're working with the team is there anything you're doing to connect to some of the broader audience you know lessons that can be learned as I said you're you know highly scalable you know large scale and you know you have nowhere near the budget of you know these municipalities and colleges yet you do reach you know a very broad audience with some very important skill yes I mean if I think about the actual products itself and why it worked worked so well previously right why the Cronenberg brothers brought to market something that was so beloved but but more importantly why I think it's working so well now is that there was a recognition that we learn these days in bite-sized chunks right most of us don't have four hours a day or three days a week just to sit leave our job and go learn something and so from the very beginning their concept was let's break every single lesson up into these 20 minutes chunks so whether you know I'm on my commute in a previous world or whether I'm you know using some time that I used to spend on the road learning something new I can do it in very digestible forms and in a way that's really engaging to me so I think that model that they've employed from day one is even more valuable now in today's environment I think the other thing is that there was a recognition that we all have different learning styles right we all learn a little bit differently and so whether it's learning in 20 minute chunks so that's learning through video and PowerPoint or whether it's learning hands-on testing things breaking things building things the platform has evolved in a way to enable people no matter where they are in that cloud learning journey whether they're novice that's just getting started and wanting to learn kind of you know the PowerPoint basics like me when I first came on board right of the or a seasoned architect who's trying to get in and build new applications so I think those things are the things that allowed the platform to really resonate with the developer audience for so long and now as we have you know added out of the platform specifically for enterprises where previously you know is for individual developers we now have both I think that's the other thing that is really attractive to large enterprises is the fact that they now right are trying to train thousands of workers at the same time realizing again that every single one of them has a different learning style yeah Katie is as you said before there is you know a broad need or the skill set of cloud computing I'm curious have you seen anything in kind of your customer base either from the enterprise side or individuals is there are there any skill sets that are bubbling up right now that are a critical need or anything that is grown and you know we're curious we're always you know there's some people it's like oh I'm gonna come out of this you know whole experience and you know I love you know work in my home gym and you know learn new languages and become a master baker of sourdough you know me personally I've been really busy so you know I wish I had more spare time travel has definitely reduced thing but it's also given up the time that normally I was gonna you know read a book or you know catch up on raining yeah the sourdough bread is definitely not in my wheelhouse so we well we have seen some really interesting trends actually over the last few months the first one is that we've seen the percentage of our users that are logging in on a daily basis go up about 30 percent so people are taking advantage I think of a little bit of extra time to accelerate their learning the other thing that we are seeing and I was just looking at these stats last week is the kinds of courses and content that are being consumed are changing some of this was happening free covert and some of this was happening post covitz all split those up freako but what we've seen over the last order two 2/4 actually is a pretty significant increase in consumption across multi-cloud skills as you're in particular is seeing about a three times higher increase in consumption than the other two large CCS these although they're all three increasing rapidly so as we think about like the curriculum and our instructors that we're bringing on and what we're building up know historically ACG specifically had grown up in the AWS world but we are responding to that change very very late and in investing in you know a juror GCP and some of the other cloud adjacent courses so that we had been seeing happening over the last couple of quarters most recently what we're seeing is an increase in what i call our beginner or fundamental courses they think that is a direct reflection of people who are looking at this as an opportunity to rescale to set themselves up for a new career i'm so you know our introduction to AWS or introduction to Azure fundamentals or the introduction to DCP those are actually the courses that are increasing the fastest in ranking and anecdotally one of my favorite things to do is to go on LinkedIn or Twitter each day and look at you know what people are saying about ACG and over the last week especially I can't even count the number of folks who've said I'm using my lock down I'm for you know learning or I'm putting my my time and Quarantine to the best use by you know getting trained on ECG and so I think that what we are seeing there is a direct reflection of that alright yeah Katie maybe you can give us a little bit of the update on you know a cloud guru there was the Linux Academy acquisition and if you can share a little bit about this kind of the the the numbers of how many people have gone through your programmed you attract how many people actually get certifications afterwards which I know they need to go to the providers you know pay a fee for that kind of thing yeah we do yeah there's only been a few things happening over here in the last six months right I've got a small acquisition and then you know we're dealing with this now so we acquire Linux Academy in December so actually I came on board about the same time that we acquired the business one of my favorite stories is when I first started talking to Sam and team back in June a cg had about a hundred employees total by the time I was actually accepting an offer in October I think it was 200 employees in total so in a four month span the company had actually doubled we acquired Lenox Academy which was of equivalent size the ACG and so by the end of December we were a 400 person company a company that had been a hundred people know in in the middle of 2019 so 400 people now we are our biggest office is here in Austin we do have a large office in Melbourne Australia which was where the company was originally founded and where Sam is we have an office in London where Ryan is and Linux Academy was actually headquartered right outside of Fort Worth Texas so we've got an office there in Fort Worth as well so it's been amazing to see this company essentially quadruple in size over the last six months everything that goes into scaling a business like that bringing two competitors together integrating the business you know we are in the process of integrating the products and the content and the course dialogues right now so we're excited to bring that market later this year all in the midst of everyone also getting used to this very new and unprecedented environment yeah you know congratulations you know that you know always good to see great growth you know the thing I've noticed is you know ACG just as really goodwill in the community I see the orange shirts at many of the shows I you know right many of the other teams yeah we'll definitely have to get back to you about being on brain feed I was trying to coordinate with my background um one of the other things you know is some of my favorite content over the last few years that we've done the cube has been the serverless cough event so you know any discussion about you know will there be smokers to that or are we just going to need the weight or you know the physical events return before we see those so we actually have just started a new virtual event calendar actually our very first one was yesterday we had almost 3,000 people registering to attend and so it will be a series it's a series of virtual events and webinars that are done in partnership with other leading influencers and practitioners in the industry so expects if anyone's interested you can go online and register for one of the ACG webinars but we'll be having those every two week through the course of this year awesome love that and I guess the last thing Katie there's some other things you've been doing help unity in this need of the pandemic tell us a little bit about that yeah so two things in particular that we've really focused on the first one is across both the Linux Academy and the ACG platforms we have lowered permanently the price of our individual memberships so for individuals from 449 down to 379 we've seen that that has helped enable more people to be able to afford it who otherwise couldn't afford it so that's now in in market the other thing that we're really excited about that we launched this week is a free educational assistance program so we are offering 1,000 subscriptions to ACG for the year so annual subscriptions for people who have been most impacted by kovat so we have a couple of different specific criteria but if you've lost your job due to Ovid and you're in one of the the most heavily impacted industries whether that you know retail or hospitality or travel and are looking to really change careers get into the tech field get your initial certification we do now have a program for that so you go online to our website you're able to apply to that program we launched it yesterday maybe two days ago and I know we already have hundreds of applications so we're really excited to offer that all right well we'll make sure to get this out to the community is build out of that all right Katie thanks so much really pleasure to act up with you and I'm glad Congrats on all the progress thank you so much - thanks for having me alright serverless absolutely one of the topics I've been personally enjoying digging into the last couple years hope you've enjoyed I'm an attorney I'm sue minimun and as always thank you for watching thank you [Music]

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and we are here live at Magento Imagine 2019, our second time being back here with theCUBE and we're very excited to welcome Brittany Hodak to theCUBE, entrepreneur, customer engagement speaker, writer, co-founder of the Superfan Company. Brittany it's so exciting to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. >> So, you have an incredibly impressive background and I'm like where do we start? >> Thank you. >> So, here we are talking about customer experiences and how Magento and Adobe empower a lot of customer experiences. But you've written a ton of articles, over 350, you've been published in the Huff Post, Wall Street Journal, talk to us about your experiences with customer engagement, some of the things that you as a co-founder of the Superfan have discovered working with a variety of brands from Walmart to Katy Perry? >> Well, thank you so much for saying that. I always say that the biggest problem brands and entertainers have is often one that's not even on their radar at all. I talked to a lot of small and medium sized business owners and they say, You know, my big problem is people don't know who I am. I've got an awareness problem. I'm struggling to let people know who I am. And I really think my business would change if more people knew. And I said, You know, that's not the problem. You can always fix awareness. You can always spend money to get your message out there. Your big problem is apathy. Your problem is there are people who know and don't care. And you've got to figure out how to make people care. You've got to figure out how to connect your story with their story in a way that's meaningful, and in a way that's going to mean something in their lives because that's how you really start the fan engagement process. That's how you lay the groundwork for creating a culture of super fandom amongst your customers, that's really going to help you grow not just the business but a brand. >> Is it about having a more relevant messages or is it just finding those people that have a propensity to be a fan to the services that you provide? >> Well, it's understanding your uniqueness in a way that really makes your value proposition different from anybody else is. Once you understand your uniqueness and you're able to turn it into service of others, that's when you really you position yourself to be able to make the kind of difference that makes somebody want to be a super fan. And I always say, we've had the fortune of working with tons of celebrities, some of the biggest recording artists and superstars on the planet, and a lot of times people say to me, Oh, you know, it's easy when you're talking about being a super fan of Taylor Swift or being a super fan of Katy Perry, but, you know, I'm a plumber or I'm an electrician, how can I have super fans? And I say, By providing people the kindness service that changes their lives. I have an exterminator who I am a super fan of. His name is Scott and the reason I am a super fan of him is because he makes sure there are no brown recluse spiders in my house and I am absolutely terrified about recluse spiders. They are super evil creatures if you're not familiar with them, I encourage you not to google it. They're like nastiest little bug in the world. But you know to me that's super important because he's not just killing bugs, he's helping me feel safe in my home. So that's absolutely a vital service and finding the right guy to do that and the right guy to put my mind at ease and let me know there aren't going to be brown recluse spiders in my house is invaluable and because of that, like there's no way I would ever switch exterminators because Scott's my guy. And I know you know, I can text him 50 different pictures of critters and say, Is this okay, Is this okay? And he's going to get back to me and let me know. So, it's all about points of connection and finding ways to make your audience feel really valued, and connecting your story with their story. >> So, if you look at an exterminator versus a Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or Walmart, are there similarities and what they need to do to deliver this service that's impacting lives? Or are there fundamental differences? >> There are some fundamental differences, but there's more overlap than you would think. And I always say, if you think about it like a Venn diagram, you've got your brand or your business, your service, your product, whatever it is that you're providing, and you've got your customers over here. Where the magic happens is that point of intersection, where your story overlaps with their story, that intersection, that's where super fandom happens. And I like to talk about something I call the four A's of super fandom. So, you can, I see a lot of people make the mistake of trying to talk to everybody the same way. So, whether somebody is encountering your brand for the very first time or has been your customer for a long time, using the same messaging for those people and that doesn't work. So, I talk a lot about the four A's. So, the first day is awareness. That's when somebody is first uncovering your brand, first interacting with your brand. The second a is action, that's when somebody is actually interacting with your brand for the first time. The third a is affinity. Those are the people who are fans of your brand. They've sort of bought into your why, these are the satisfied customers, I would say. And a lot of businesses stop there. They say, These are the people who are satisfied. These are the people who liked what I'm doing, they're buying from me. And that's a mistake that a lot of especially small and medium sized businesses make they sort of feel like, I've got these customers, I don't have to do anything else. They're not over delivering or over serving them which is a huge missed opportunity because if you do, you're able to convert people from that third A to the fourth a which is advocacy. And advocacy is where you want to get the majority of the people because those are your superfans so to speak, those are the ones who are out there sharing your story and your why with other people, helping refer new customers and new clients to you. So, I always say if you can get past the affinity, the people who are happy with you but not really talking about it and really make them feel valued. That's how you create advocates and advocacy is really the super secret sauce when you're talking about super fandom. >> So where should people get started to try to build super fandom within their client base? Is that really with the good customers that they already have, they try to get them to be advocates or I think most people spend so much time focusing on the fat end of the funnel as opposed to on the narrow end of the funnel and converting that transaction into a fan which is what it sounds like you're suggesting? >> Yeah, well, it's important to to focus on all parts of the funnel man, like I said that that awareness, that that fat of the top, you certainly need to be dealing with those people to get them further down. But the skinny part of the funnel is really where you want to make sure that people are continuing to drip out to the other side to make those referrals for you. So, absolutely focusing on everybody. One thing that I am always shocked I when I do consulting and work with small businesses and medium sized businesses, when I asked how much referral business they get, a lot of people don't know that number off the top of your head. So, if you're not tracking the amount of referrals, you absolutely need to know that as a metric, and the number one thing that you can do to increase the amount of referral business that you're getting is by asking your customers for referrals. It's so funny the amount of people who say, I hardly get any referral business at all. And I say, Well, when's the last time you asked? When's the last time that you went to one of your clients or your customers and said, I so appreciate your business. And I wonder if you know anybody in your network who could benefit from our product or service. And they say, oh I've never done that. But yeah, they wonder why they don't have any referrals so-- >> It seems like such an easy step but to your point, you're saying they're focusing on awareness, getting my brand, my service, my name out there, getting people to take action? >> Yes. >> And building that affinity and then I'm good, but that simply asking to make it a referral whether it's a yelp or something as simple as that seems like a pretty easy step. Strategically, how do you advise customers to get from that, take that if you look at it like a funnel like Jeff saying, take that group of affinity customers and convert some percentage to advocates, what's your strategy for helping a consumer brand or even a service provider, like an exterminator for actually making those conversions and then and then having that be a really kind of engine to drive referrals, to drive more leads to the top of that funnel? >> That's a great question. So, I like to talk about something I call the high five which is knowing the five most important people that have the potential to drive your business forward for the next quarter, the next year and the next five years. So, this is an actual list of five people. And any business owner hopefully can sit down and say, Here are the people that I need to really super serve in order to move my business forward. So knowing who those five people are, it could be an advisor, it could be an investor, it could be somebody you've never even met, maybe a thought leader whose thought that you really enjoy, that you think this person could really help me and open me up to a lot of people in their network if they knew who I was. Make a list of those five people, and then figure out how often you need to be doing something staying top of mind for those people. So for me, I like to make sure it's at least once every two weeks. So, sometimes it's as simple as sending an article and saying, Hey, I came across this article, I thought you would really love it, wanted to send it your way. Now and reality, did I just come across that article? No, I spent maybe an hour looking for the right article to forward that person. It's taking the time out to show them that they matter to you, so whether that's sending them a nice gift in the mail for no reason or a handwritten thank you note after they made an introduction for you. It's checking in on things, I always say, you should know what is important to the people who are important to you. You should know the teams that they follow, you should know their spouse, their children, the things that are happening in their lives so you can check in with them. And we live in an age where it's so easy to get information about anyone because all of us are putting content out there on the internet all the time about ourselves. So take the time to figure out what matters to those people who matter to you, and then stay top of mind, letting them know that they matter to you. So, like I said, for me, it's once every two weeks and I look at my list of five about every six months in terms of adding a couple of new people on maybe cycling some people off. But I've been doing this for four years. So, I have a list of 20 people. And I those are like my alums, some of the alumni of my high five, and I'm still extremely close with all of them. I still make sure that I'm trying to add value to them because having one person who's going to advocate for you could open the door for millions of dollars of revenue for you. So, it's just identifying who those people are, because to your point, it's impossible to sort of make everyone the most important person, it's impossible to take everyone at that third step and take them to the fourth step. So, rather than holistically thinking about it. I like to really drill in and say let's start with five. And if you've got 50 employees and you assign five people to each of those 50 employees to say make sure this vendor or make sure this customer, or make sure this partner feels very appreciated by you on a regular basis. You're going to, you really start to see the ROI very, very quickly in your business. >> So some of the trends, if we look at this we're all consumers of any kind of product service, we have this expectation, this growing expectation that we're going to be able to get whatever we want whenever we want it, have it delivered in an hour or a day, or so, we want to be able to have this experience on mobile, maybe started there, maybe finish it in the store, what are some of the trends that you're seeing that you recommend that the company with any product or service needs to get on board with, for example, this morning they were talking about progressive web apps and being able to deliver an experience where the person doesn't have to leave the app, or they can transact something like through Instagram. What are some of those top tools that you recommend to your broad client base. You got to get on board with like mobile, for example, right away. >> Yes, I was going to say the PWAs are absolutely critical, because I think we've all as consumers been in the situation of trying to load something on our phone, and it's five seconds goes by six seconds, I'm like forget about it. >> We're done. >> Yeah, I'm done, I'm over it. So PWAs is super important because it's all about putting your customer first and making things simple for them. The other thing is making sure that whatever system process you're using, everything needs to be connected. You can't be managing stuff across eight different platforms and expect for things not to fall through the cracks which is I'm learning so much here at Imagine and listening to all the best practices of people who are using Magento to manage every part of their business because something is seemingly minor as sending a confirmation email twice instead of once or having eight hours go by before the customer gets that, those types of things, say to a customer on a subliminal level, I'm not important, I don't matter, they're not putting me first. >> So just fan comes from fanatic. And there's great things about fans, and some times there's less great things about fans and we've seen a little bit of that here in terms of this really passionate community around Magento. And it was independent. And then it went to eBay and then it went back out of eBay. And now it's back in Adobe. And it's funny seeing the people that have been here for the whole journey. Part of that responsibility, if you're going to invite someone to be a fan is you have to let them participate, you have to let them contribute. And often which we're seeing, I guess, in Game of Thrones, I'm not a big fan, but if you get outside of kind of the realm of where the fans want things to go, it can also cause some conflict. So, how to people manage encouraging fans, really supporting fans, but at the same time not letting them completely knock their business off or hold the business back probably from places where the entrepreneur needs to still go? >> That's a great question. There was a really fascinating study that Viacom did a couple of years ago about fans. And especially in the under 35 sets, so millennials, gen Z. And the vast majority of people felt like fans have some ownership of the thing that they're a fan of. And that's a really interesting study in psychology to think about these people who feel the ownership. But you know, it's true. You mentioned Game of Thrones, that's a great example of seeing these fan bases who come up with names for themselves, and who are tweeting in real time about things that are happening. Magento a great example because open source has been such an important part of the culture and the history of the platform. These people feel in a very real sense this ownership. And you're right, I think sometimes that scares small business owners, medium sized business owners. They say, Well, we don't want to relinquish control. We don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we're upsetting people. And I would say, You're right, fan comes from the word fanatic. And that fanaticism, that passion is something you absolutely want. Because I would argue that a greater threat than that is what I was talking about earlier, which is apathy. You don't want people to be like, I don't care. And passion is of course, the opposite of apathy. And that's what you're looking for. So I would say, are you going to put yourself in a position where sometimes there could be a disagreement, you could upset somebody? Absolutely, but you those are the people, it's like if you're in a relationship with somebody and you have a fight that passion that's there is because there's care on both sides. You're both super engaged, you're both very passionate about your position. So, having a system in place to defuse that by saying, I hear you I understand where you're coming from, let's figure this out together, is part of the customer service staff that you've just got to prepare for. >> Can you using, sorry Brittany, using all this data that's available that Magento, Adobe et cetera can deliver and enable organizations to understand that and maybe even kind of marry those behaviors with apathy on one hand passion on the other and how do we get to that happy medium? >> Exactly, how do we get to the happy medium, what are the data points that matter? How are we, the idea of super fan means something different to every organization. So, part of it is uncovering what it is that really matters to you. I always say a super fan is somebody who over indexes and their affinity for a product, service, brand, entertainer, therefore increasing the chance that they're going to advocate on its behalf. So, thinking about, there could be people who are spending a lot of money with your brand who just aren't really that passionate about it. They're not going to tell people and that's fine. But those aren't the people who would be a quote unquote superfan, even though they may be spending a lot of money with you. So, it's figuring out what the markers are that are important to your brand or service. I work with a lot of brands on this because it really is different for everyone. But figuring out who those people are and then talking to them because this is something that, there's so much psychology around the why. Like why people behave the way we do that the consumer behavior, the internal and philosophical drives that are making us make the decisions that we make and the best way to uncover that is to talk to your customers because a lot of times you'll learn so much about your brand, you'll find so many things. I always love talking to recording artists about this, they put out a new song or a new album and in the fans find all these hidden messages >> Taylor is known for that. >> Always some-- >> Taylor is one of the best in the world. And a lot of times artists will say, Oh, yeah, like, I didn't do that on purpose but I'm totally going to take credit for it because these fans found it. And oh, yeah, of course, I meant to do that. So, you'll find that some of these customers understand your brand oftentimes better than you do which is a really fun thing. >> It's also just the ecosystem. You my favorite one always reference is Harley Davidson, guess how many brands get tattooed on people's arms, and just the whole ecosystem of other products that were built up around the motorcycle, and to support kind of that community they weren't getting any nickels necessarily if somebody sold a saddle bag or a leather jacket, or whatever but it was such and it still is, I think such a vibrant community again, and as evidence by you put a tattoo on your arm that it's something to strive for, not easy to get. >> Why we always say build a brand not a business because the brand are those things that people are connecting to. We were talking about NASA before we started filming. I'm a huge space geek and Lisa loves space having worked for NASA in the past and that's one of those things, I don't know this to be true but I got to believe NASA way outpaces like every other combined government agency in licensing. I mean, people walk around wearing NASA logos on everything >> I saw at least three of them this morning. >> Yeah, I mean, I bought in the last month, probably three different NASA licensed products. So I mean that's the passion that if you can connect to somebody on an emotional level and make your story part of their story. They want to represent it, they want to get that Harley tattooed on their arm. >> That emotional connection but also that personalization that's key? >> Yes. >> What's difference in from your perspective on a superfan versus an influencer? Are they one in the same? >> It's a great question. So, they a lot of times are one in the same and that same Viacom study that I mentioned earlier. Something like two thirds of people said that they consider themselves to be pop culture influencers which sounds like a lot. But if you think about it, pretty much everyone is an influencer and that's because for Nielsen, the most trusted recommendation is or the most trusted form advertising is a recommendation from a friend or a family member, 92% of people trust a recommendation from a friend or family member, which far outpaces every other form of advertising. So in a lot of ways, these micro influencers are the next wave of advertising. These advocates or these super fans are, I think in many ways an untapped well of resources for the fans who drill in and you mentioned Taylor Swift before. How many people listen to Taylor Swift for the first time because a friend suggested they listen to Taylor Swift. I would argue that lots and lots of people and Taylor said something to me years ago that like a former manager, or someone said to her, and that was, if you want to sell half a million albums, you're going to have to meet half a million people. That was said to her when she was like, 15, 16 years old and she thought, okay, yeah, I'm going to go meet half a million people. I'm going to be befriend them, I'm going to listen to their stories, I'm going to let them know what they say matters to me. And here we are, she sold, I don't know, 50, 60 million albums, however many she sold worldwide. And but that's really where it starts, that one to one connection. >> Seems to just kind of all go back to referral. And isn't that sort of the basic human connection? It's like, are we trying to over-complicate this with all these different tools that simply, even with hiring and tech or whatever industry, referrals are so much more important because you've got some sort of connection to a brand or a person or a product or service. >> You've got that connection, you've got somebody who's already very well qualified. And I like to talk about something that I call the wave method which the wave is a ritual hello, goodbye. How many times a day do you wave at people, countless. And virtually you say hello to tons of people everyday. People who are coming to one of your social pages, people who are engaging with your website. So I say, I encourage people to think about that hello and goodbye, that interaction. Think of a wave as an acronym and ask yourself, are you making everybody who's going to come into contact with you today feel welcomed? Is there something on your virtual site or in your real storefront. If you're a brick and mortar business that's going to make people feel welcomed? How are you making them feel like they belong? The A is appreciated, how are you letting those people know that they are appreciated by your business? I think I know I have often felt like I'm a number or I don't matter. Utility companies are notorious for this for making you feel like they don't really care if they have your business or not. Or they know perhaps that they're going to because there's not like a different water company you can you can use it your home. And that sucks, like we've all been made to feel like we weren't appreciated by somebody that we were doing a financial transaction with. So ask yourself, how can you make your potential and current customers feel appreciated? The V stands for validated, and one of the best quotes that I've ever come across is from Oprah. On her last episode, she was imparting some of the lessons that she had learned over the years of hosting her shows and she said she'd interviewed something like 30,000 people over the years, and they all wanted the same thing. And that was validation. They all want it to feel like they were important and their feelings mattered. I see you, I hear you what you're saying is important to me. So, validate your customers. One big mistake that I see people make all the time in customer service is when somebody has a complaint, having your rebuttal be like, Oh, I've never heard that before. Or it's 10,000 people haven't have had great experiences. That's absolutely the worst thing that you can ever say to somebody because you're bringing in other experiences that don't matter to them. It's a one to one conversation. It's a one to one relationship. So bringing in, that's like having a fight with your significant other and saying like, Well none of the women I dated before you ever had a problem with this, like how well is that going to go over? Like you don't want to bring in other experiences. So that V and wave validated >> And the E? >> and then the E is excited, making people feel excited because that passion, having people feel like you know you're excited that they're a customer of yours and you can bring something that's going to make their lives better is the most important key. >> Brittany, thank you so much. I could keep talking to ya. I wish we didn't end but we do, for sharing your experiences, your expertise, your recommendations on becoming any kind of brand with any product or service, generating the super fans. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. It was so great speaking with you guys today. >> Ditto. >> Thanks. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this on theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas, thanks for watching.