(gentle music) >> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And this is a special CUBE conversation. We've been talking a lot, of course for many years about the ascendancy of cloud. And today in 2020, multicloud is a big piece of the discussion. And we're really happy to help unveil coming out of stealth Alkira, which is helping the networking challenges when it comes to multicloud and I have the two co-founders, they are brothers. I have Amir, who is the CEO and Atif, who is the CTO, the Khan brothers, thank you so much for joining us, and congratulation on the launch of the company. >> Thank you Stu for having us on the Show. It's a pleasure to see you again. >> All right, so Amir, we've had you on the program. Your previous company that you've done was of course Viptela, the two of you have worked together at, I believe, five companies, a successful companies. Acquired the most recent one into Cisco. So, Amir, obviously, strong networking team, your brother, the CTO is going to talk to us about the engineering but give us just the story of Alkira, what you've been building and now ready to unveil to the world. >> Certainly, Stu, so when around 2018 timeframe, we started looking into the next big problem to solve in the industry, which was not only a substantial from the market size perspective, but also from the customers perspective was solving a major pain point. So when we started looking into the cloud customers and started talking to our customers, they were struggling from the cloud networking perspective, even in a single cloud, and it was a new environment for them and they had to understand all the nitty gritty details of each one of these clouds and when you go to multicloud environment, it becomes exponentially complicated to address not only connectivity, but how to deploy services like firewall and other services, including load balancers and IP address management, et cetera, and remote access. So we started digging deeper into this problem and started working with the customers and took a clean sheet of paper and came up with a very comprehensive approach to offering a solution which is as-a Service. This time, we are not shipping any hardware software it is just like any other SaaS application, you just come to our portal just drag and drop, literally draw out your network and click on provision. And come back after 40 minutes or so your whole global cloud infrastructure is up and running. >> All right, Atif your brother laid out a pretty broad vision there, any of us from the networking world, we know there's a lot of complexity there. And therefore it takes a lot of work, when I want to do things simply, as-a Service is a huge growth area bring us inside the engineering challenges that you and the team have been working on to build this solution. >> Certainly, Stu, so we've been working both Amir and myself in the networking industry for more than 25 years now. And the way we have worked and what we have believed in is that we need to solve customer problems. We never believe in doing a science project. So here also we started working with customers as we have always done in the past. We understood the customers pain points, the challenges they were facing, especially in this case and in cloud networking space, multicloud networking space, based on the user requirements, users, or the customers use cases, we started building our service. And here what we have built as a complete network as-a Service. It's a multicloud network as-a service, which not only provides connectivity to multiple clouds, but also addresses the needs for bringing in networking services, as well as security services, making sure that you have a full policy based infrastructure on top of it, you have deep visibility into the clouds as well as into on-premise end to end visibility, end to end monitoring, troubleshooting. And all of it is delivered to you as-a service. So that's what we have been doing here at Alkira. >> Excellent! So when we've looked at multicloud, of course, every cloud, they have some similar things, they have some different things. They all tend to do things a little bit differently. One of the secret sauces that have been talked about for the last few years is the SD-WAN space, like you had built with the tele to help really enable those environments. So Atif we've got a diagram here, which I think will help explain a little bit as to where out here and how it plugs into these different environments, walk us through a little bit what we're seeing here, and what you're actually doing at Alkira. >> So here we are building a global unified, multicloud network. It's consumed as a service. Think of it as consuming it just like you would consume any other SaaS, like our SaaS application. So you come to Alkira's portal, you register. And then there you go, and you start building your global multicloud unified network with integrated services. So here what you see is a Alkira's cloud services exchange which comprises of the cloud exchange points. You can bring these up these cloud exchange points up anywhere on the globe. You can decide like what networking services security services you need in these cloud exchange points, you can connect to multiple clouds. From there, you can bring your existing on-prem connectivity into the CXPs. All these CXPs have a full mesh of overlay, high speed, low latency connectivity among each other. So there is a full network which comes up between these CXPs. And the whole infrastructure scales with customers as our customers scale. So it's a horizontally scalable, very highly redundant and resilient infrastructure, which we had built. >> All right, so, Amir now that we understand the basics of the technology, you've got some strong investors including Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, give us what is being announced that you're coming out of stealth, where are you with the product? How many employees you have? And where are you with the discussion of customer adoption. >> So Stu we are obviously, bringing this to the market, and we will be announcing it on April 15. It's available for the customers to consume our solution as a service on that day. So they are welcome to reach out to us and we'll be happy to help them. And as a matter of fact, just come to our website and register for the service. And yeah, I mean you rightly said that we have a superstar team of not only the venture capital companies, but also the board members representing those companies, the Bill Coffin and Mamun Ahmed, who the leading VCs are on the board of our company, including myself and Atif. >> All right, Amir I'd love to actually bring up the second slide that we have here. Walk us through you said the service, how do people get started? How do they understand, walk us through what they do. >> So the biggest challenge when we started looking into these problems, Stu was that it was very complicated. You had to piecemeal bring up instances in the cloud and stitch them together. And when you try to integrate the services, that was a different challenge for the customers. So we want to make sure that it was so simple and clean, that the customer didn't even have to think about any underlying construct on any of the clouds, they should not have to worry about learning each individual part from the networking perspective. So here's your portal, you just come, step one is come to our portal register. Step two is you start drawing your network based on your intent, what on-prem connectivity you want to bring into this service, what type of services you need, like a lot of firewalls and then what pilots you need to connect and everything happens seamlessly, from on-prem, prem through services into the cloud, across multiple clouds. It's a seamless service that we have created and with full analytics capabilities and full governance built in. >> All right, so Atif bring us into what this means for customers, how do they manage it? Is this the networking team? Is it the cloud architects? What API's are there? How does this fit into kind of what customers are doing today? And solve some of those challenges that we laid out earlier in the discussion. >> Yes, from the customer's perspective, as I said, it's completely delivered as a service. Customers come to our portal, they draw out the network, they select the services, they click on provision and the whole network comes up within minutes. So the main thing here is that from a customer's point of view, if they are connecting to different clouds, they don't need to understand any of the underlying specifics or underlying constructs of any of the cloud in order to bring up connectivity. So what we are doing here is we are abstracting the cloud chair. So we are building a virtual cloud network. So if you think of, if you compare with what we did in the previous life, we virtualized the WAN. So here what we are doing is we are virtualizing the cloud network, so underlying doesn't matter which cloud you sit on which cloud you need to connect to, which networking services, whether a cloud native services or whether you want to consume Alkira services, or we also support like customer bringing in third party services as well. So it's all offered from our platform all offered is service to the customer. Again, no expertise required in any of the underlying networking constructs of any of these clouds. >> Give us what we should be looking at from a technology roadmap from Alkira, through the rest of 2020. >> Good question, Stu. So as I mentioned earlier, our roadmap is dictated by customer requirements, so we prioritize what customers need from us. So we have come out with a scalable platform, we have come out with a marketplace for networking services in there. In the near term, we'll be expanding our marketplace with more services. We will be addressing more use cases and when I talk about use cases, I can give you some examples. Like there's, you not just only need connectivity into cloud, you might have different requirements from throughput perspective or bandwidth perspective or different services that you need to contend your cloud when you may have certain applications such as Internet facing application where you need like traffic coming in from the internet, inbound to those applications, you might need services like a load balancer, like an external load balancer in our services exchange. You might also need like a firewall, you might need traffic engineering, or sorry, service chaining capabilities where you chain service through multiple traffic through multiple of these services like a firewall and a load balancer. So we built a platform which gives you all those capabilities going forward, we will be adding more services more use cases to it. We have a long ways ahead of us and we will be putting a lot of effort in delivering a roadmap as we go. >> All right, so Amir your technical team definitely has their hands full and robust roadmap to work on. Give us the high level, what we should be looking for Alkira, for people that are out there, multicloud and networking tends to get talked a lot. There's many big companies and small ones. What will separate Alkira from the rest of the market today? And what should we be looking to see the company's progression through 2020? >> Yeah, thanks for asking that. Yeah, certainly. I mean, from the solution perspective, Atif said that it's so fundamentally important to have a very strong basis. And that's what we have done. We are bringing out a certain number of services and now we will continue to grow on that we'll create a big marketplace. We will continue to improve on which clouds we connect to and how and we will building our own services in certain cases as well. Now, building a technology is just one piece of it, we have to go out to market with a company that the customers can trust every single department in that company, whether it's sales or how they do business with us all the business back end pieces, after we sorted out and that's what we've been working with. And then go to market partners, that is very, very important, support is very important. So let me spend a little bit of time on go to market strategy. We have been working with the service providers so that we can extend our reach not only to the large customers, but also to mid-size customers across the globe. So you will see us in the future announcing major service provider, partnerships, as well as we've been working with large SIS, WAAS and system integration partners. And also we have taking a slightly different approach this time because it's a service. So we are going with telecom master agents, which have been working with the service providers, the cloud providers, the cable providers, as a channel, and they have a huge reach into the customer base. So we have a very comprehensive strategy not only from the go to market perspective and the technology perspective, but also how we are going to support our customers and continue to build our relationship to build a lasting company. >> Yeah, Amir super important point there. Absolutely, we've seen the maturation and change in the service providers, as today they are working with many of the public cloud providers and they're, as you said, the close touch point and a trusted partner for customers. All right, so before I let you go, you two are brothers, everybody in today's day and age is spending even more time with family but your situation you've worked together for a long time. What keeps bringing the two of you together, working together and talk about that bond? >> So I mean we're a very close knit family, we have four brothers and one sister, and obviously Atif and I have been the closest because we have been working together for the longest, we've at least work in five different companies together, our families traveled together, we have three daughters each, we live about five minutes, walk from each other. And we just have this bond where we not only have the family close, but also very close knit friends circle, which we both hang out with, and we obviously have common interests in the sports as well. We play squash and tennis and workout. So Atif if you want to take a stab at that also. >> Yeah, so we've always been very close. In fact, we've been together for the last like, ever since I can remember like even college days, we were roommates for some time also, we have our circle of friends, is the same old source. So, again, we are very close. And we worked well together so we complement each other's skills. And it's worked out in the past. Hopefully it will work out again. And I look forward to working with them for many, many more years to come. >> Amir and Atif thank you so much for sharing the coming out of stealth. After all, Alkira we definitely look forward to watching your progress and seeing how you're helping customers in this multicloud world. Thank you for joining us. >> Stu thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you so much for watching this special CUBE conversation on theCUBE. (gentle music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation I am stupid a man and this is a special cube conversation we've been talking a lot of course for many years about the ascent of cloud and today in 2020 multi cloud is a big piece of the discussion and we're really happy to help unveil coming out of cell al kiram which is helping the networking challenges when it comes to multi cloud and I have the two co-founders they are brothers I have Amir who is the CEO and a DIF who is the CTO the Khan brothers thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on the launch of the company thank you sue for having us on the show it's a pleasure to see you again all right so Amir we've had you on the program your previous company that you've done was of course the fella you the two of you have worked together at I believe five companies successful companies acquired you know the most recent one into Cisco so a mirror obviously you know you know strong networking theme your brother the CTO I was going to talk to us about the engineering but give us you know just the the story of Al Kyra what you've been building and now ready to unveil to the world certainly needs to so in around 2018 timeframe we started looking into the next big problem to solve in the industry which was not only a substantial you know from the market size perspective but also from the customers perspective was solving a major pain point so when we started looking into the cloud customers and started talking to our customers they were struggling from the cloud networking perspective even in a single cloud and it was a new environment for them and they had to understand all the nitty-gritty details of each one of these clouds and when you go to multi cloud environment it becomes exponentially complicated to address not only connectivity but how to deploy services like firewall and other services including low balancers and IP address management etc and remote access so we started digging deeper into this problem and start working with the customers and took a clean sheet of paper and came up with a very comprehensive approach to offering a solution which is as a service this time we are not shipping any hardware or software it is you know just like any other SAS application you just come to our portal I just drag and drop literally draw out your network and click on provision and you know come back after 40 minutes or so your full global cloud infrastructure is up and running so out if your brother laid out a pretty broad vision there any of us from the networking world we know there's a lot of complexity there and therefore it takes a lot of work when I want to do things simply as a service is you know a huge growth area bring us inside the engineering challenges that you and the team have been working on to build this solution second let's do so we've been working both our men and myself in the networking industry for more than 25 years now and our the way we have worked and what we have believed in is that we need to solve customer problems we never believed in like doing a science project so here also we started working with customers as we have always done in the past we understood the customers pain points the challenges they were facing especially in this case and in cloud networking space multi-cloud networking space based on the user requirements users or the customers use cases we started the building a service and here what we have built is a complete network as a service it's a multi cloud met work as a service which not only provides connectivity to multiple routes but also addresses the needs for bringing in networking services as well as security services making sure that you have a full policy based infrastructure on top of it you have deep visibility into into the clouds as well as into on-premise into and visibility into and monitoring troubleshooting and all of it is delivered to you as a service so that's what we have been doing here at ELQ here excellent so when we look at multi-cloud of course you know every cloud they have some similar things they have some different things they all tend to do things a little bit differently you know one of the secret sauces that have been talked about for the last few years is ESP BAM space like you and built with Nutella to help really enable those environments so if we've got a diagram here which I think will help explain a little bit as you know we're out here it how it plugs into these different environments walk us through a little bit what we're seeing here and what you're actually doing a tell Kira so here we are building a global unifying the multi cloud Network it's consumed as a service think of it as consuming it just like you would consume any other SAS like our SAS issue so you come to lqs portal you register and then there you go and you start building your global multi-cloud unified network with integrated services so here what you see is is a Elka's cloud services exchange with comprises of cloud exchange points you can bring these up these cloud exchange points up anywhere on the globe you can decide like what networking services security services you need in these cloud exchange points you can connect the multiple clouds from there you can bring your existing on-premise connector matiee into the CX PS all these CX B's have a full mesh of overlay high speed low latency connectivity among each other so there is a full network which comes up between these CX B's and this the whole infrastructure scales with customers as as a customer scale so it's a horizontally scalable veil a very highly redundant and resilient infrastructure which we have both all right so armor now that we understand the basics of the technology you've got some strong investors including Sequoia kleiner perkins give us you know what is being announced day you're coming out of stealth where are you with the product you know how many employees you have and where are you with the discussion of customer adoption so stew we're obviously bringing this to the market and we will be announcing it on April 15th it's available for the customers to consume our solution as a service on that day so they are welcome to reach out to us and we'll be happy to help them and as a matter of fact just come to our website and register for the service and yeah we rightly said that we have a superstar team of not only the venture capital companies but also the board members representing those companies the bill Cochran and mamoon Hamid Wright who the leading VCS are on the board of our company including myself inactive all right I'm all right love to actually bring up the second slide that we have here walk us through you said you know the service you know how do people get started how do they understand you know what would walk us through what what they do so the biggest challenge when we started looking into these problems you know Stu was that it was very complicated you have to piecemeal bring up instances and the cloud and stitch them together and when you try to integrate the services that was a different challenge for the customers right so we wanted to make sure that it was so simple and clean that the customer didn't even have to think about any underlying construct on any of the clouds they should not have to worry about learning each individual power from the you know networking perspective so here's your portal you just come you know step one is come to a portal or register step two is you start drawing your network based on your intent what on-prem an activity you want to bring into this service what type of services you need like all all the firewalls and then you know what pilots you need to connect and everything happens seamlessly the from on pram pram through services into the cloud and across multiple clouds it's a seamless service that we have created and with full analytics capabilities and full governance built in alright so I'll to bring us into what this means for customers you know how do they manage it you know is this the networking team is it the cloud architects you know what api's are there how does this fit into kind of what customers are doing today and you know solve some of those challenges that we laid out earlier in the discussion yes trauma from the customers perspective it's as I said it's it's completely delivered as a service customers come to our portal they draw out the network they select the services they click on provision and the whole network comes up within minutes so the main thing here is that from a customer's point of view if they are connecting to different clouds they don't need to understand any of the underlying specifics or underlying constructs of any of the of the cloud in order to bring can I bring up connectivity so we what we are doing here is we are abstracting the clouds here so we are building a virtual cloud network so if you if you think of if you compare it with what we did in the in the previous life be virtualized the when so here would be a doing is we are virtualizing the cloud network so underlying doesn't matter which cloud you sit on which cloud you need to connect to which networking services whether cloud native services or whether you you want to consume our care services or we also support like customer bringing in third-party services as well so it's all all offered from our platform all offered is a service for to the customer again no expertise required in any of the underlying networking constructs of any of these cards give us what we should be looking at from a technology roadmap from Akira through the rest of 2020 good question as to so as I mentioned earlier our roadmap is dictated by customer requirements so we prioritize what customers need from us so we have come out with a scalable platform we have come out with a marketplace for networking services in there in the near term we'll be expanding our market place with more services we will be addressing more use cases and when I talk about use cases I can give you some examples like there's a view you not just only need connectivity into cloud you might have different requirements from from throughput perspective or bandwidth perspective or different services that you need to front-end your cloud but you may have certain applications such as internet basing application where you eat like traffic coming in from the internet inbound to those applications you might need services like a load balancer like an external load balancer in our services exchange you might also need like a firewall you might need traffic engineering or sorry service eaning capability is where you would chain service through multiple or traffic through multiple of these services like a firewall in the load balancer so we have built a platform which gives you all those capabilities going forward we will be adding more services more use cases to it we have a long ways ahead of us and we will be putting all our effort in delivering a roadmap as we go all right so Amma your technical team definitely has their hands full and uh you know robust after work on uh give us the the high-level what we should be looking for out Kira for people that are out there you know multi-cloud and networking you know tend to get talked a lot there's many big companies and some small ones what will separate al Kira from the rest of the market today and what should we be looking to see the company's progression through 2020 yeah thanks for asking that yeah certainly I mean you know from the solution perspective out it's said that you know it's so fundamentally important to have a very strong basis right and that's what we have done we are bringing out a certain number of services and now we will continue to grow on that will create a big marketplace we will continue to improve on which clouds we connect to and how and we will be building our own services in certain cases as well now building a technology is just one piece of it we have to go out to market with a company that the customers can trust every single you know the department in that company whether it's sales or how they do business with us all the business back-end pieces have to be sorted out and that's what we've been working with and you know then go to market partners that is very very important right support is very important so let me spend a little bit of time on go to market strategy we have been working with the service riders so that we can extend our reach not only to the large customers but also to midsize customers across the globe so you will see us in the future announcing major service water partnerships as well as we've been working with large sis bars and system integration in a partners and also we have taking a slightly different approach this time because it's a service so we are going with telecom master agents which have been you know working with the service providers the cloud providers the cable providers as a channel and they have a huge reach into the customer base so we we have a very comprehensive strategy not only from the go to market in the technology perspective but also how we are going to support our customers and continue to build a relationship to build a lasting company yeah I'm a super important point there absolutely we've seen the maturation and change in the service providers as today they are working with many of the public cloud providers and they're as you said a close touch point and a trusted partner of our customers all right so before I let you go you know YouTuber brothers everybody in today's day and age is spending even more time with family but you know your your situation you've worked together for a long time what keeps bringing the two of you together working together and then talk about that ball so I mean we're very close-knit family we have four brothers and one sister and obviously active and I have been the closest because we have been working together for the longest we have at least work in five different companies together our families travel together we have three daughters each we live about five minutes you know walk from each other and we you know just have this bond where we not only have you know the family close but also very close-knit friends a circle which we both hang out with and we you know obviously have common interest in the sports as well we play squash and tennis and work out so after four if they want to take a stab at it but also yeah so we've always been very close in fact we've been together for the last like ever since I can remember like even even college days he was we were roommates for for some time also he ever say we have like our circle of friends is the same also so again we're very close and we work well together so we complement each other's skills and and it's it's worked out in the past hopefully it will work out again and I look forward to working with them for many many more years to come yeah well I'm or not - thank you so much for sharing the the coming out of stealth for Al Kyra we definitely look forward to watching your progress and you know seeing how you're helping customers in this multi-cloud world thank you for joining us - thank you so much thank you for having us all right I'm Stu minimun and thank you so much for watching this special cube conversation on the cube [Music]

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 mana man and welcome to a special cube conversation talking to leaders around the globe happy to welcome to the program two guests actually one is a cube alumni the other one I believe the first time on the program the Khan brothers I have a mirror and on TIFF so gentlemen thanks so much for joining us oh thank you for having us again yeah so here you know you and your brother you're coming out of stealth al Kyra is the company you two both work together at many companies we know you most recently from Katella we're a mirror you know we've spoken with you on the cube I believe right after that acquisition proc it was another company back in the day also happened to sell to Cisco but we know that you know networking is one of the you know toughest things in our industry now everybody thinks that their environment is is something challenging but you know we know networking in the weeds there's so many protocols and while networking as a whole doesn't change really fast there have been a lot of waves of change happening most recently of course cloud having a major impact on what's happening to the networking world Amir let's start with you you're the CEO your brother a tip is the CTO you're both co-founders give us a little bit of the background and the why of Al Kyra yes but after we sold patella I was looking for the next idea and we talked to multiple customers and multiple service providers a common theme that came across was the cloud networking was complex and when it came to multiple clouds it became exponentially complex it was not only learning multiple clouds but all the underlying constructs were different in each one of us so we decided that we need to take a look at a common solution which provides one way of connecting to all clouds that exist out there and provides common services like firewall and then from the governance perspective it becomes very challenging if you have very diverse environments so we are bringing analytics a common way of monitoring and managing the networks on top of that so it's a very comprehensive solution that the industry needed and they needed it as a service so we we dug deeper and came up with this idea went to the VCS and got funded very quickly to solve the problem and very proud to say that we are the first ones were in the industry for bringing computer networking as a service for multi cloud environments to the market all right now that's a that's a big vision and definitely something you know we hear from talking to customers you know absolutely multi-cloud most of the people there trying to figure out exactly what that means to their cuspid to their companies as well as it is not simple today aught if I want to pull you in you know we've seen you know many you know groups of talented you know development engine developers and engineers sometimes they try Ville in packs so when you look at you know what Amir just talked about the challenge in front of you give our audience a little bit of the understanding of you know the history of what you've been working on and is this you know a you know just turning the crank based on the latest and greatest technologies is that the coming together of some of the pieces that you've been thinking about for many years you know help us under the hood a little bit as to you know that this problem and the talents and what you're moving forward with for the last many many years both Amma and myself and other team are other team members we've been working on large customer networks whether those are service provider networks or whether those are enterprise networks so we have a deep understanding of the challenges they have based over over time so and now as I mentioned customers are transitioning to public clouds they are transitioning to SAS environments and there are a lot of challenges with which they are running into so we decided to take this challenge on and we brought together like a stellar team we have people who joined us from from botella as well as people from other large organizations they've been working on we have people from AWS we have people from Azure via people from other large companies so we have put together a great team we are very well funded and as I mentioned our approach has always always been to work with customers always understand their pain points and solve the real issues which which are having so that's approach we took and that's what we are doing here Adele here yeah so I did if I want to dig down a little bit more and actually we've got a slide I think you'll talk to because we know in networking a lot of the words sound the same you know is this an overlay I'm your said that at the service what gets deployed where is it what are the customers need to do where does this all live so if you could explain this this this diagram here for our audience so what the buildings do is a is a service and it's a cloud services exchange if you look at it and what it is comprised off is east cloud exchange points you can think of these as virtual pops and virtual polos and you can you can decide which region in the world or on the globe you want the DC X is to be spun up you come to our portal since it's consumed as a service you decide like what needs to reside on the CX PS which networking services you need there you can bring your own services or you can consume LTS services and when I talk about services or when I say services these can mean security services other networking services such as load balancers ipam DDI whatnot from the EC XPS you're gonna connect to multiple pounds from here without you as as Enterprise know without you knowing need to know anything about the underlying cloud providers networking concerts so all you do is you give us the requirements you say that you need to connect to this cloud this this is your appointment and we we do it for you so what basically what we are doing is we are virtualizing the clouds networks it's a so in the past we virtualize the when in our previous company and patella if you look at it it's virtualizing plan over different types of transports here we are virtualizing cloud it doesn't matter which public clouds you're sitting on which public cloud you need to connect to you know one service to consume you know one way of doing about networking great III that diagram definitely helped me a lot Amir let's talk my understanding you've got some customers what are some of the early things that they're using this for is this you know hybrid cloud going from their data center to a public cloud we talked about multi cloud does that mean we're actually connecting services between some of the public clouds help us understand what what your customers are seeing and starting to use it's a very interesting questions too we've been talking to multiple customers that we said and without a doubt every single customer that we are talking to has some sort of a multi cloud strategy and the reasons for them to get into multiple clouds could be either their some teams are using some applications which are optimized for a particle cloud one of the customers that we went to they were using one cloud and then acquired a company because of which you know another cloud was brought into the environment so all of a sudden they have a need to very quickly you know integrate those two environments and then there are you know with what's going on in the market today people are going to remote access requirements you know people are working from home and they need to get onto the network very quickly and consume applications which scale much better in the cloud so there's a demand from that perspective right so and in some cases one company becomes let's say Amazon becomes a competitor somewhere and people want to move to another cloud that could be another alternative right so so without fail many people are you know getting into cloud environments and the primary reason that I'm hearing now that many more companies will move into the cloud is going to be regulatory issues right so people are starting to think about pushing all the financial companies the healthcare companies to adopt multiple clouds for redundancy for high availability etc yeah you bring up a great point one of the questions we've been asking for the last couple of years is how is multi-cloud the same or different from what we used to see with multi-vendor aught if you know I think back to you go back you know 10 15 20 years ago and some of the M&A discussions that Omer was talking about you know you know I buy another company Oh what are they doing for their network well throw out their whole network and let's standardize on the vendor of choice that we have because it's better if I can go homogeneous well it's not as easy to do that in the public cloud so help us understand you know it's not as easy as that saying oh all these clouds they have API is they all use similar type type of abstractions and the like you know where does Al Kira really help make things easy for customers when they're when they're doing multi cloud so you know every cloud is doing things differently when it comes to networking so yeah at the end of the day functionality might be the same but how to achieve that how to get that working it's very different between each plug so now what we are seeing with these enterprises is that they have to build a deep understanding of each cloud before they can take on that cloud and nowadays cloud architects are in big demand they don't come cheap either so you don't necessarily just need the personal cloud architect with expertise in one account you need like architects with the expertise and multiple thoughts so so we wanted to solve that problem that's why we took this challenge on and we wanted to make it a make it one way of working with all these clouds so from a cloud architects perspective from a enterprises perspective why can't there be just one way of connecting to all these clouds why do I have to know the details of each cloud as armor said each cloud spring brings its own own its own value in different ways and there is a multi cloud strategy out there so either customers are in multiple pounds or they're looking at at multiple doubt so that's that's a big challenge right now and since what we are offering is as a service it's a unified global multi cloud network and again we're virtualizing the cloud network all right Amir you mentioned early on in the conversation that Acura is well funded you've got Sequoia and kleiner perkins as two of your investors you know definitely companies that look closely and understand the networking space help us understand the basics of the company though coming out of stealth right now is the product available where is it available you know where are you with with customer and deployments certainly we are making our product available on April 15 and many customers are trying it right now they're in the process of deploying it in production these are across industries healthcare manufacturing high-tech you know financial industries so customers span across multiple different verticals in addition to that many service providers are working with us to offer this to extend their capabilities into the cloud so many service providers have been struggling with that and this makes it very easy for them to complement their private connectivity solutions and extend their reach deeper into the cloud so the industry is very excited right now and we are excited because this is an opportunity you know which the cloud migration has brought to the table from networking perspective and if we had thought about it 10 years ago 20 years ago it was just not possible and now we have this capability in the clouds to offer in lastik capabilities do not only provide connectivity but but integrate the services like firewalls scale them up and down and provide proper governance yeah you bring up such a such a big point there I talked before about multi vendor and today you know the network team it's not just oh well I touch all of the gear that I manage as you said it's the service providers public clouds they need to span all those environments we've definitely seen a huge shift in service riders and their relationships with the public cloud over the last five years or so atif I guess that brings up a the important point here who's gonna be managing all this when it comes to a Keira is this the traditional Network person if they've been you know doing land maybe a little bit of an are they going to be doing it is the cloud team you know where does this sit in the you know conversation and jostling of roles that we're seeing as organizations are more and more embracing public cloud so it's Stu it's still a networking solution so what we are seeing working with our customers is that it's a it's a cloud architects who are were very excited when they see our solution now they can see that the network can can can show the same agility which they have been very they're being seen with with compute and storage and and rest of the stuff moving into the cloud so network was always like behind it took a lot lot of effort a lot of work to get the network to extend into clouds meeting all the all the enterprise requirements so now network architects are excited because they it's it's become very simple for them to to move into the cloud or extend their private connectivity into the club I'll give you an example we've been working with some large enterprises and they many of them they don't need to open up a manual or documentation to use our solution so our goal was always to make it so simple that anyone should be able to connect to a cloud without knowing anything about the networking constructs of a given cloud so you just come in you should just be able to give us the requirements that you need need this much capacity you need this much throughput you need B services to front-end the clouds these are your security policies which are global and you need like a multi global transport or global network a multi-level network and you should be able to just bring it up and you should on you should not need like certifications in cloud networking or certifications in using tools to orchestrate cloud connectivity so we are built a very scalable infrastructure which allows the customers to get a service from us or use our service which which meets the requirements all right I'd like to ask both of you you know it's April 2020 you're coming out of stealth you know I'm sure the product has you know all the features that your customers are asking for today but give us a look as we go through the kind of the next six to 12 months armor first from kind of a customer standpoint not if from the technology standpoint what should people be looking at both with your product how you're working with partners and you know really this multi cloud networking landscape our focus is on mid to large size enterprises and depending on which company you talk to their strategy varies to get into the cloud somewhere some are at a very early stage others have moved significant amount of workloads into into the cloud already the reality that we are seeing out there is that the hybrid environment is going to exist for a long long time and that's why we have built a solution which seamlessly integrates their existing wide area networking infrastructure to bring traffic into our solution and then we tie them seamlessly to the cloud and provide integrated services and Governors governance on top of that and they can define their own internal policies based on you know their enterprise needs so that's what we are seeing right now and going into the future I think that industry is going to continue to evolve it's still early the solutions will evolve quite a bit we have a first mover advantage to provide networking as a service and we are so excited to just continue to you know accelerate and help customers to migrate into the cloud as quickly as possible provided with the highest resiliency and security yes so from from a technology perspective as I said like we we believe in working with the customers and solving their use cases we are innovating at a very rapid pace and there are many many different use cases which which we are working on we have some of the use cases which we are which we have delivered so far where we are going out with a certain number of use cases and we will be adding more use cases as we as we go support support for more use cases and we support like all the major clouds right now we will be adding more clouds to our offering we offer a Marketplace on our portal as well so it's a it's a it's a cloud service with a built in marketplace of network services we will be expanding that marketplace as well with more services it's all based on the on the customer requirements and and we prioritize our offerings based on the requirements and there's a there's a lot of work ahead of us also it's just the beginning and as I said we are very excited to solve all these problems and make our customers successful excellent if you're a good setup for armors last slide here so we've got a slide here is that how do customers get started walk us through yeah as I have said we've our goal is to make it as simple as possible you know we live in a different world now where things change very very quickly but the customers just come to our portal they register or our service just like any other SAS based service they you know basically are taken to a canvas where they can draw their infrastructure drop services create policies within minutes and then you know across the globe and then click on the provision button and they can go and have coffee and the full infrastructure comes up literally in less than an hour as a matter of fact in many cases we have seen a comment in around half an hour across the globe this is the type of a solution or capability that the industry has never seen before in the industries we are very proud of bringing the solution to the market well congratulations both of you a lot of work goes into bringing a company to launch before I let you go I do have one last question you two are brothers you've worked together at a number of companies so you know give our audience but you know what it's like and you know what what keeps bringing you back to working together well we are very close family we've always you know you know studied together work together and many different companies we live about five minutes away from each other our kids hang out together we travel together so you know it's kind of interesting you know we've always had a very very close relation yeah this is this is a fifth company I guess where we are working together as he said like we have always worked together we have a we we have a same circle of friends also so so we have very very close to each other so yeah this is one of the best squash players in the country and nowadays he doesn't get much time but he was ranked in the top three for a long time in amateurs in the country well that is awesome well hopefully you know you get to get a little bit of break you know once the company goes into spell they know a lot of work moving forward but I'm Erin atif congratulations and thank you so much for joining us to announce coming out of stealth thank you thank you for having us thank you it's a pleasure to talk to you alright and we definitely look forward to tracking al Kyra in the future as that they move forward with adoption with their customers and their solution I'm still minimun and as always thank you for watching the queue [Music]

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation, talking to leaders around the globe. Happy to welcome to the program two guests, actually one is a CUBE alumni and the other one, I believe is the first time on the program, the Khan brothers, I have Amir and Atif. So gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Oh, thank you for having us again Stu. >> Yeah, so Amir. >> Thank you for (mumbles). >> You know, you and your brother, you're coming out of stealth. Alkira is the company, you two have both worked together at many companies. We know you most recently from Viptela, where Amir you know, we'd spoken with you on the Cube, I believe right after that acquisition. >> Right. >> (mumbles) with another company back in the day also happened to sell to Cisco, but we know that, you know, networking is one of the, you know, toughest things in our industry. You know, everyone thinks that their environment is something challenging but you know, we know networking in the weeds, there's so many protocols and while networking as a whole doesn't change really fast, there have been a lot of waves of change happening, most recently, of course, Cloud having a major impact on what's happening to the networking world. Amir, let's start with you, you're the CEO, your brother, Atif is the CTO, you're both co-founders, give us a little bit of the background and the why of Alkira. >> Yeah, so after we sold Viptela, I was looking for the next idea and we talked to multiple customers and multiple service providers. A common theme that came across was the Cloud Networking, was complex and when it came to multiple clouds it became exponentially complex. It was not only learning multiple clouds but all the underlying constructs were different in each one of the clouds. So we decided that we need to take a look at a common solution, which provides one way of connecting to all clouds that exists out there, and provides common services like Firewall and then from the governance perspective, it becomes very challenging if you have very diverse environments. So we are bringing analytics, common way of monitoring and managing the networks on top of that. So it's a very comprehensive solution that the industry needed and they needed it at, as a service. So we dug deeper and came up with this idea, went to the VCs and got funded very quickly to solve the problem and very proud to say that we are the first ones in the industry, who are bringing computer networking as a service or multicloud environments to the market. >> All right, that's a big vision and definitely something that, you know, we hear from talking to customers, you know, absolutely multicloud, most of the people, they're trying to figure out exactly what that means to their customers, to their companies, as well as it is not simple today. Atif, I want to pull you in, you know, we've seen, you know, many, you know, groups of talented, you know, develop an engineer, developers and engineers, some, they travel in packs. So when you look at, you know, what Amir just talked about, the challenge in front of you, give our audience a little bit of the understanding of, you know, the history of what you've been working on, and is this, you know, a, you know, just turning the crank based on the latest and greatest technologies? Is it the coming together of some of the pieces that you've been thinking about for many years? You know, help us under the hood a little bit as to, you know, this problem and the talents and what you're moving forward with. >> Atif: (mumbles) Stu, (mumbles) that we, our approach has always been to work with our customers and understand the customers' real use cases as well as pain points. So for the last like many, many years, both Amir and myself and other team members, we've been working on large customer networks, whether those are service provider networks or whether those are enterprise networks, so we have a deep understanding of the challenges that they have faced over over time. So and now, as Amir mentioned, customers are transitioning to public clouds, they are transitioning to SaaS environments and there are a lot of challenges which they're running into. So we decided to take this challenge on and we brought together like the stellar team. We have people who joined us from Viptela as well as people from other large organizations, they've been working on, we have people from AWS, we have people from Azure, we have people from other large companies. So we have put together a great team. We are very well funded and as I mentioned, our approach has always been to work with customers, always understand their pain points and solve the real issues which they are having. So that's the approach we took and that's what we are doing here at Alkira. >> Yeah, so I've, Atif I want to dig down a little bit more, and actually we've got a slide I think, you'll talk to because we know in networking, a lot of the words sound the same, you know, is this an overlay? Amir though said that it's a service. What gets deployed? Where is it? What do the customers need to do? Where does this all live? So if you could explain this diagram here for our audience. >> Atif: So what they're building Stu is a service. And it's a Cloud Services Exchange, if you look at it, and what it is comprised of is these cloud exchange points. You can think of these as virtual pops or virtual portals. And you can decide which region in the world or on the globe you want the CXPs to be spun up. You come to our portal since it's consumed as a service, you decide like what needs to reside on the CXPs which networking services you need there, you can bring your own services or you can consume the Alkira services. And when I talk about services or when I say services, these can be security services, other networking services, such as load balancers, IPAM, DDI, whatnot. From these CXPs you can connect to multiple clouds from here without you as a enterprise, without you knowing, need to know anything about the underlying cloud providers networking constructs. So all you do is you give us the requirements, you say that you need to connect to this cloud, this is your requirement and we do it for you. So what basically what we are doing is we are virtualizing the cloud networks. It's a, so in the past, we virtualized WAN in our previous company in Viptela, if you look at it, it's virtualizing WAN over different types of transports. Here we are virtualizing cloud, it doesn't matter which public cloud you're you're sitting on, which public cloud you need to connect to, you have one service to consume, your one way of doing cloud networking. >> Great, I, that diagram definitely helped me a lot. Amir, let's talk, my understanding, you've got some customers, what are some of the early things that they're using this for? Is this you know, hybrid cloud going from their data center to a public cloud? We talk about multicloud, does that mean we're actually connecting services between some of the public clouds, help us understand what your customers are seeing and starting to use. >> It's a very interesting question Stu. We've been talking to multiple customers, as we said, and without doubt, every single customer that we are talking to has some sort of a multicloud strategy. And the reasons for them to get into multiple clouds could be either that there some teams are using some applications which are optimized for a particular cloud. One of the customers that we went to, they were using one cloud and then acquired a company because of which, you know, another cloud was brought into the environment. So all of a sudden they have a need to very quickly, you know, integrate those two environments. And then there are you know, with what's going on in the market today, people are going to remote access requirements, you know, people working from home, and they need to get onto the network very quickly and consume applications, which scale much better in the cloud. So there's a demand from that perspective, right, so and in some cases, one company becomes, let's say, Amazon becomes a competitor somewhere and people want to move to another cloud, that could be another alternative, right? So without fail, many people are, you know, getting into cloud environments and the primary reason that I'm hearing now that many more companies will move into the cloud is going to be regulatory issues, right? So people are starting to think about pushing all the financial companies, the healthcare companies to adopt multiple clouds, for redundancy, for high viability, et cetera. >> Yeah, you bring up a great point. One of the questions we've been asking for the last couple of years is, how is multi-cloud the same or different from what we used to see with multi-vendor? Atif, you know, I think back to, you go back, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago and some of the M and A discussions that Amir was talking about, you know, I buy another company, "Oh, what are they doing for their network? "Well throw out their whole network and let's standardize "on the vendor of choice that we have because it's better "if I can go homogeneous." Well, it's not as easy to do that in the public cloud. So help us understand, you know, it's not as easy as they're saying, "Oh, all these clouds." They have API's, they all use similar type of abstractions and the like, you know, where does Alkira really help make things easy for customers when they're doing multicloud? >> Stu you know, every cloud is doing things differently when it comes to networking, so yeah, at the end of the day, functionality might be the same but how to achieve that, how to get that working, it's very different between each cloud. So now what we are seeing with these enterprises is that they have to build a deep understanding of each cloud before they can take on that cloud. And nowadays, cloud architects are in big demand, they don't come cheap, either. So you don't necessarily just need a person, a cloud architect with expertise in one cloud, you need like cloud architects with the expertise in multiple clouds. So we wanted to solve that problem, that's why we took this challenge on and we wanted to make it one way of working with all these clouds. So from a cloud architect's perspective, from an enterprise's perspective, why can't there be just one way of connecting to all these clouds? Why do I have to know the details of each cloud? As Amir said, each cloud brings it's the, its own value in different ways and there is a multi-cloud strategy out there. So either customers are in multiple clouds or they are looking at multiple clouds. So that's a big challenge right now and since what we are offering is as a service, it's a unified, global, multicloud network and again, we're virtualizing the cloud network. >> All right, Amir, you mentioned early on in the conversation that Alkira is well funded. You've got Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins as two of your investors. >> Amir: Yes. >> You know, definitely companies that look closely and understand the networking space. Help us understand the basics of the company, though. Coming out of stealth right now, is the product available? Where's it available? You know, where are you with customer and deployments? >> Certainly, we are making our product available on April 15th and many customers are trialing it right now, they're in the process of deploying it in production. These are across industries, healthcare, manufacturing, high tech, you know, financial industries. So customers span across multiple different verticals. In addition to that many service providers are working with us to offer this to extend their capabilities into the cloud. So many service providers have been struggling with that and this makes it very easy for them to complement their private connectivity solutions and extend their reach deeper into the cloud. So the industry is very excited right now and we are excited because this is an opportunity, you know, which the cloud migration has brought to the table from networking perspective and if we had thought about it 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it was just not possible. And now we have this capability in the clouds to offer elastic capabilities to not only provide connectivity but integrate the services like Firewalls, scale them up and down and provide proper governance. >> Yeah, you bring up such a big point there. I talked before about multi-vendor and today, you know, the network team, it's not just, "Oh, well, I touch all of the gear that I manage." As you said, it's the service providers and the public clouds, they need to span all those environments. We've definitely seen a huge shift in service providers and their relationships with the public cloud over the last five years or so. Atif, I guess that brings up a really important point here, who's going to be managing all this? When it comes to Alkira, is this the traditional network person if they've been, you know, doing LAN maybe a little bit of WAN are they going to be doing it as the cloud team? You know, where does this sit in the, you know, conversation and jostling of roles that we're seeing as organizations are more and more embracing public cloud? >> So Stu, it's still a networking solution. So what we are seeing working with our customers is that it's a cloud architect so we are very excited when they see our solution. Now, they can see that the network can show the same agility, which they have been very, they've been seeing with compute and storage and rest of the stuff moving into the cloud. So network was always like behind, it took a lot of effort, a lot of work to get the network to extend into clouds, meeting all the enterprise requirements. So now, network architects are excited because they, it's become very simple for them to move into the cloud or extend their private connectivity into the cloud. I'll give you an example, where we've been working with some large enterprises and they, many of them, they don't need to open up a manual or documentation to use our solution so our goal was always to make it so simple that anyone should be able to connect to a cloud without knowing anything about the networking constructs of a given cloud. So you just come in, you should just be able to give us the requirements that you need this much capacity, you need this much throughput, you need these services to front end the clouds, these are your security policies, which are global and you need like a multi-global transport or global network or multicloud network and you should be able to just bring it up. And you should not need like certifications in cloud networking or certifications in using tools to orchestrate cloud connectivity. So we have built a very scalable infrastructure, which allows the customers to get a service from us or use our service, which meets their requirements. >> All right, I'd like to ask both of you, you know, it's April 2020, you're coming out of stealth, you know, I'm sure the product has, you know, all the features that your customers are asking for today but give us a look as we go through that kind of the next six to 12 months. Amir first, from kind of the customer standpoint, Atif from the technology standpoint, what should people be looking at, both with your product, how you're working with partners and you know, really just multicloud networking landscape? >> Our focus is on mid to large sized enterprises and depending on which company you talk to their strategy varies to get into the cloud. Some are at a very early stage, others have moved a significant amount of workloads into the cloud already. The reality that we are seeing out there is that the hybrid environment is going to exist for a long, long time and that's why we have built a solution which seamlessly integrates their existing wide area networking infrastructure to bring traffic into our solution and then we tie them seamlessly to the cloud and provide integrated services and governance on top of that and they can define their own internal policies based on, you know, their enterprise needs. So that's what we are seeing right now and going into the future, I think the industry is going to continue to evolve, it's still early, the solutions will evolve quite a bit. We have a first mover advantage to provide networking as a service, and we are so excited to just continue to, you know, accelerate and help customers to migrate into the clouds as quickly as possible and provided with the highest resiliency and security. >> Atif. >> So, from a technology perspective, as I said, like we believe in working with the customers and solving their use cases. We are innovating at a very rapid pace and there are many many different use cases which we are working on. We have some of the use cases which we are, which we have delivered so far, where we are going out with a certain number of use cases and we'll be adding more use cases as we go, support for more use cases. And we support like all the major clouds right now. We will be adding more clouds to our offering. We offer Marketplace on our portal as well, so it's a cloud service with a built in marketplace of network services, we will be expanding that marketplace as well with more services. It's all based on the customer requirements and we prioritize our offerings based on the requirements. And there's a lot of work ahead of us also, it's just the beginning and as Amir said, we are very excited to solve all these problems and make our customers successful. >> Excellent, Atif, you're a good setup for Amir's last slide here. So we've got a slide here that, how do customers get started? Walk us through. >> Amir: Yeah, as Atif said, we've, our goal is to make it as simple as possible. You know, we live in a different world now where things change very, very quickly. So the customers just come to our portal, they register for our service, just like any other SaaS based service, they, you know, basically are taken to a canvas where they can draw out their infrastructure, draw out services, create policies within minutes, and then, you know, across the globe, and then click on the, on provision button and they can go and have coffee and the whole infrastructure comes up literally in less than an hour. As a matter of fact, in many cases, we have seen it come in, in around half an hour across the globe. This is the type of a solution or capability that the industry has never seen before in the industry, so we are very proud of bringing the solution to the market. >> Well, congratulations, both of you. A lot of work goes into bringing a company to launch. Before I let you go, I do have one last question. You two are brothers, you've worked together at a number of companies so, you know, give our audience, you know what it's like and you know, what keeps bringing you back to working together? >> Well, we are very close family, we've always, you know, studied together, worked together in many different companies, we live about five minutes away from each other, our kids hang out together, we travel together (chuckles). So, you know, it's kind of interesting. You know, we've always had a very, very close relationship. >> And this is our fifth company, I guess, where we are working together. As he said, like we've always worked together. We have a same circle of friends also so we were very close to each other so. >> Amir: Yeah (mumbles) what I'm thinking about Atif is one of the best squash players in the country. Nowadays, he doesn't get much time but he was ranked in the top three for a long time in amateurs in the country (laughs). >> Well, that is awesome. Well, hopefully, you know, you get a little bit of break, you know, once the company goes in stealth, I know a lot of work moving forward, but Amir and Atif. Congratulations, and thank you so much for joining us to announce coming out of stealth. >> Amir: Thank you Stu. >> Thank you so much, thank you for having us. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure to talk to you. All right, and we definitely look forward to tracking Alkira in the future as they move forward with adoption with their customers and their solution. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back. Everyone's Cube Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS. Reinforce Amazon Web sources. First inaugural conference around security. It's not Osama. It's a branded event. Big time ecosystem developing. We have returning here. Cube Alumni Bill Jeff for VP of strategy and the partnerships that Iron Net Cyber Security Company. Welcome back. Thanks. General Keith Alexander, who was on a week and 1/2 ago. And it was public sector summit. Good to see you. Good >> to see you. Thanks for >> having my back, but I want to get into some of the Iran cyber communities. We had General Qi 1000. He was the original commander of the division. So important discussions that have around that. But don't get your take on the event. You guys, you're building a business. The minute cyber involved in public sector. This is commercial private partnership. Public relations coming together. Yeah. Your models are sharing so bringing public and private together important. >> Now that's exactly right. And it's really great to be here with eight of us were really close partner of AWS is we'll work with them our entire back in today. Runs on AWS really need opportunity. Get into the ecosystem, meet some of the folks that are working that we might work with my partner but to deliver a great product, right? And you're seeing a lot of people move to cloud, right? And so you know some of the big announcement that are happening here today. We're willing. We're looking to partner up with eight of us and be a first time provider for some key new Proactiv elves. AWS is launching in their own platform here today. So that's a really neat thing for us to be partnered up with this thing. Awesome organization. I'm doing some of >> the focus areas around reinforcing your party with Amazon shares for specifics. >> Yes. So I don't know whether they announced this capability where they're doing the announcement yesterday or today. So I forget which one so I'll leave that leave that leave that once pursued peace out. But the main thing is, they're announcing couple of new technology plays way our launch party with them on the civility place. So we're gonna be able to do what we were only wanted to do on Prem. We're gonna be able to do in the cloud with AWS in the cloud formation so that we'll deliver the same kind of guy that would deliver on prime customers inside their own cloud environments and their hybrid environment. So it's a it's a it's a sea change for us. The company, a sea change for a is delivering that new capability to their customers and really be able to defend a cloud network the way you would nonpregnant game changer >> described that value, if you would. >> Well, so you know, one of the key things about about a non pregnant where you could do you could look at all the flows coming past you. You look at all the data, look at in real time and develop behavior. Lana looks over. That's what we're doing our own prime customers today in the cloud with his world who looked a lox, right? And now, with the weight of your capability, we're gonna be able to integrate that and do a lot Maur the way we would in a in a in a normal sort of on Prem environment. So you really did love that. Really? Capability of scale >> Wagon is always killed. The predictive analytics, our visibility and what you could do. And too late. Exactly. Right. You guys solve that with this. What are some of the challenges that you see in cloud security that are different than on premise? Because that's the sea, So conversation we've been hearing. Sure, I know on premise. I didn't do it on premises for awhile. What's the difference between the challenge sets, the challenges and the opportunities they provide? >> Well, the opportunities air really neat, right? Because you've got that even they have a shared responsibility model, which is a little different than you officially have it. When it's on Prem, it's all yours essential. You own that responsibility and it is what it is in the cloud. Its share responsible to cloud provider the data holder. Right? But what's really cool about the cloud is you could deliver some really interesting Is that scale you do patch updates simultaneously, all your all your back end all your clients systems, even if depending how your provisioning cloud service is, you could deliver that update in real time. You have to worry about. I got to go to individual systems and update them, and some are updated. Summer passed. Some aren't right. Your servers are packed simultaneously. You take him down, you're bringing back up and they're ready to go, right? That's a really capability that for a sigh. So you're delivering this thing at scale. It's awesome now, So the challenge is right. It's a new environment so that you haven't dealt with before. A lot of times you feel the hybrid environment governed both an on Prem in sanitation and class sensation. Those have to talkto one another, right? And you might think about Well, how do I secure those those connections right now? And I think about spending money over here when I got all seduced to spend up here in the cloud. And that's gonna be a hard thing precisely to figure out, too. And so there are some challenges, but the great thing is, you got a whole ecosystem. Providers were one of them here in the AWS ecosystem. There are a lot here today, and you've got eight of us as a part of self who wants to make sure that they're super secure, but so are yours. Because if you have a problem in their cloud, that's a challenge. Them to market this other people. You talk about >> your story because your way interviews A couple weeks ago, you made a comment. I'm a recovering lawyer, kind of. You know, we all laughed, but you really start out in law, right? >> How did you end up here? Yeah, well, the truth is, I grew up sort of a technology or myself. My first computer is a trash 80 a trs 80 color computer. RadioShack four k of RAM on board, right. We only >> a true TRS 80. Only when I know what you're saying. That >> it was a beautiful system, right? Way stored with sword programs on cassette tapes. Right? And when we operated from four Keita 16 k way were the talk of the Rainbow Computer Club in Santa Monica, California Game changer. It was a game here for 16. Warning in with 60 give onboard. Ram. I mean, this is this is what you gonna do. And so you know, I went from that and I in >> trouble or something, you got to go to law school like you're right >> I mean, you know, look, I mean, you know it. So my dad, that was a chemist, right? So he loved computers, love science. But he also had an unrequited political boners body. He grew up in East Africa, Tanzania. It was always thought that he might be a minister in government. The Socialist came to power. They they had to leave you at the end of the day. And he came to the states and doing chemistry, which is course studies. But he still loved politics. So he raised at NPR. So when I went to college, I studied political science. But I paid my way through college doing computer support, life sciences department at the last moment. And I ran 10 based. He came on climate through ceilings and pulled network cable do punch down blocks, a little bit of fibrous placing. So, you know, I was still a murderer >> writing software in the scythe. >> One major, major air. And that was when when the web first came out and we had links. Don't you remember? That was a text based browser, right? And I remember looking to see him like this is terrible. Who would use http slash I'm going back to go for gophers. Awesome. Well, turns out I was totally wrong about Mosaic and Netscape. After that, it was It was it was all hands on >> deck. You got a great career. Been involved a lot in the confluence of policy politics and tech, which is actually perfect skill set for the challenge we're dealing. So I gotta ask you, what are some of the most important conversations that should be on the table right now? Because there's been a lot of conversations going on around from this technology. I has been around for many decades. This has been a policy problem. It's been a societal problem. But now this really focus on acute focus on a lot of key things. What are some of the most important things that you think should be on the table for techies? For policymakers, for business people, for lawmakers? >> One. I think we've got to figure out how to get really technology knowledge into the hands of policymakers. Right. You see, you watch the Facebook hearings on Capitol Hill. I mean, it was a joke. It was concerning right? I mean, anybody with a technology background to be concerned about what they saw there, and it's not the lawmakers fault. I mean, you know, we've got to empower them with that. And so we got to take technologist, threw it out, how to get them to talk policy and get them up on the hill and in the administration talking to folks, right? And one of the big outcomes, I think, has to come out of that conversation. What do we do about national level cybersecurity, Right, because we assume today that it's the rule. The private sector provides cyber security for their own companies, but in no other circumstance to expect that when it's a nation state attacker, wait. We don't expect Target or Wal Mart or any other company. J. P. Morgan have surface to air missiles on the roofs of their warehouses or their buildings to Vegas Russian bear bombers. Why, that's the job of the government. But when it comes to cyberspace, we expect Private Cummings defending us everything from a script kiddie in his basement to the criminal hacker in Eastern Europe to the nation state, whether Russia, China, Iran or North Korea and these nation states have virtually a limited resource. Your armies did >> sophisticated RND technology, and it's powerful exactly like a nuclear weaponry kind of impact for digital. >> Exactly. And how can we expect prices comes to defend themselves? It's not. It's not a fair fight. And so the government has to have some role. The questions? What role? How did that consist with our values, our principles, right? And how do we ensure that the Internet remains free and open, while still is sure that the president is not is not hampered in doing its job out there. And I love this top way talk about >> a lot, sometimes the future of warfare. Yeah, and that's really what we're talking about. You go back to Stuxnet, which opened Pandora's box 2016 election hack where you had, you know, the Russians trying to control the mean control, the narrative. As you pointed out, that that one video we did control the belief system you control population without firing a shot. 20 twenties gonna be really interesting. And now you see the U. S. Retaliate to Iran in cyberspace, right? Allegedly. And I was saying that we had a conversation with Robert Gates a couple years ago and I asked him. I said, Should we be Maur taking more of an offensive posture? And he said, Well, we have more to lose than the other guys Glasshouse problem? Yeah, What are your thoughts on? >> Look, certainly we rely intimately, inherently on the cyber infrastructure that that sort of is at the core of our economy at the core of the world economy. Increasingly, today, that being said, because it's so important to us all the more reason why we can't let attacks go Unresponded to write. And so if you're being attacked in cyberspace, you have to respond at some level because if you don't, you'll just keep getting punched. It's like the kid on the playground, right? If the bully keeps punching him and nobody does anything, not not the not the school administration, not the kid himself. Well, then the boy's gonna keep doing what he's doing. And so it's not surprising that were being tested by Iran by North Korea, by Russia by China, and they're getting more more aggressive because when we don't punch back, that's gonna happen. Now we don't have to punch back in cyberspace, right? A common sort of fetish about Cyrus is a >> response to the issue is gonna respond to the bully in this case, your eggs. Exactly. Playground Exactly. We'll talk about the Iran. >> So So if I If I if I can't Yeah, the response could be Hey, we could do this. Let them know you could Yes. And it's a your move >> ate well, And this is the key is that it's not just responding, right. So Bob Gates or told you we can't we talk about what we're doing. And even in the latest series of alleged responses to Iran, the reason we keep saying alleged is the U. S has not publicly acknowledged it, but the word has gotten out. Well, of course, it's not a particularly effective deterrence if you do something, but nobody knows you did it right. You gotta let it out that you did it. And frankly, you gotta own it and say, Hey, look, that guy punch me, I punch it back in the teeth. So you better not come after me, right? We don't do that in part because these cables grew up in the intelligence community at N S. A and the like, and we're very sensitive about that But the truth is, you have to know about your highest and capabilities. You could talk about your abilities. You could say, Here are my red lines. If you cross him, I'm gonna punch you back. If you do that, then by the way, you've gotta punch back. They'll let red lines be crossed and then not respond. And then you're gonna talk about some level of capabilities. It can't all be secret. Can't all be classified. Where >> are we in this debate? Me first. Well, you're referring to the Thursday online attack against the intelligence Iranian intelligence community for the tanker and the drone strike that they got together. Drone take down for an arm in our surveillance drones. >> But where are we >> in this debate of having this conversation where the government should protect and serve its people? And that's the role. Because if a army rolled in fiscal army dropped on the shores of Manhattan, I don't think Citibank would be sending their people out the fight. Right? Right. So, like, this is really happening. >> Where are we >> on this? Like, is it just sitting there on the >> table? What's happening? What's amazing about it? Hi. This was getting it going well, that that's a Q. What's been amazing? It's been happening since 2012 2011 right? We know about the Las Vegas Sands attack right by Iran. We know about North Korea's. We know about all these. They're going on here in the United States against private sector companies, not against the government. And there's largely been no response. Now we've seen Congress get more active. Congress just last year passed to pass legislation that gave Cyber command the authority on the president's surgery defenses orders to take action against Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. If certain cyber has happened, that's a good thing, right to give it. I'll be giving the clear authority right, and it appears the president willing to make some steps in that direction, So that's a positive step. Now, on the back end, though, you talk about what we do to harden ourselves, if that's gonna happen, right, and the government isn't ready today to defend the nation, even though the Constitution is about providing for the common defense, and we know that the part of defense for long. For a long time since Secretary Panetta has said that it is our mission to defend the nation, right? But we know they're not fully doing that. How do they empower private sector defense and one of keys That has got to be Look, if you're the intelligence community or the U. S. Government, you're Clinton. Tremendous sense of Dad about what you're seeing in foreign space about what the enemy is doing, what they're preparing for. You have got to share that in real time at machine speed with industry. And if you're not doing that and you're still count on industry to be the first line defense, well, then you're not empowered. That defense. And if you're on a pair of the defense, how do you spend them to defend themselves against the nation? State threats? That's a real cry. So >> much tighter public private relationship. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And it doesn't have to be the government stand in the front lines of the U. S. Internet is, though, is that you could even determine the boundaries of the U. S. Internet. Right? Nobody wants an essay or something out there doing that, but you do want is if you're gonna put the private sector in the in the line of first defense. We gotta empower that defense if you're not doing that than the government isn't doing its job. And so we gonna talk about this for a long time. I worked on that first piece of information sharing legislation with the House chairman, intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger from Maryland, right congressman from both sides of the aisle, working together to get a fresh your decision done that got done in 2015. But that's just a first step. The government's got to be willing to share classified information, scaled speed. We're still not seeing that. Yeah, How >> do people get involved? I mean, like, I'm not a political person. I'm a moderate in the middle. But >> how do I How do people get involved? How does the technology industry not not the >> policy budgets and the top that goes on the top tech companies, how to tech workers or people who love Tad and our patriots and or want freedom get involved? What's the best approach? >> Well, that's a great question. I think part of is learning how to talk policy. How do we get in front policymakers? Right. And we're I run. I run a think tank on the side at the National Institute at George Mason University's Anton Scalia Law School Way have a program funded by the Hewlett Foundation who were bringing in technologists about 25 of them. Actually. Our next our second event. This Siri's is gonna be in Chicago this weekend. We're trained these technologies, these air data scientists, engineers and, like talk Paul's right. These are people who said We want to be involved. We just don't know how to get involved And so we're training him up. That's a small program. There's a great program called Tech Congress, also funded by the U. A. Foundation that places technologists in policy positions in Congress. That's really cool. There's a lot of work going on, but those are small things, right. We need to do this, its scale. And so you know, what I would say is that their technology out there want to get involved, reach out to us, let us know well with our partners to help you get your information and dad about what's going on. Get your voice heard there. A lot of organizations to that wanna get technologies involved. That's another opportunity to get in. Get in the building is a >> story that we want to help tell on be involved in David. I feel passion about this. Is a date a problem? So there's some real tech goodness in there. Absolutely. People like to solve hard problems, right? I mean, we got a couple days of them. You've got a big heart problems. It's also for all the people out there who are Dev Ops Cloud people who like to work on solving heart problems. >> We got a lot >> of them. Let's do it. So what's going on? Iron? Give us the update Could plug for the company. Keith Alexander found a great guy great guests having on the Cube. That would give the quick thanks >> so much. So, you know, way have done two rounds of funding about 110,000,000. All in so excited. We have partners like Kleiner Perkins Forge point C five all supporting us. And now it's all about We just got a new co CEO in Bill Welshman. See Scaler and duo. So he grew Z scaler. $1,000,000,000 valuation he came in to do Oh, you know, they always had a great great exit. Also, we got him. We got Sean Foster in from from From Industry also. So Bill and Sean came together. We're now making this business move more rapidly. We're moving to the mid market. We're moving to a cloud platform or aggressively and so exciting times and iron it. We're coming toe big and small companies near you. We've got the capability. We're bringing advanced, persistent defense to bear on his heart problems that were threat analytics. I collected defence. That's the key to our operation. We're excited >> to doing it. I call N S A is a service, but that's not politically correct. But this is the Cube, so >> Well, look, if you're not, if you want to defensive scale, right, you want to do that. You know, ECE knows how to do that key down here at the forefront of that when he was in >> the government. Well, you guys are certainly on the cutting edge, riding that wave of common societal change technology impact for good, for defence, for just betterment, not make making a quick buck. Well, you know, look, it's a good business model by the way to be in that business. >> I mean, It's on our business cards. And John Xander means it. Our business. I'd say the Michigan T knows that he really means that, right? Rather private sector. We're looking to help companies to do the right thing and protect the nation, right? You know, I protect themselves >> better. Well, our missions to turn the lights on. Get those voices out there. Thanks for coming on. Sharing the lights. Keep covers here. Day one of two days of coverage. Eight of us reinforce here in Boston. Stay with us for more Day one after this short break.

>> Live from Mountain View, California. It's The Cube. Covering, DevNet Create 2019. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hi welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin with John Furrier. We are live, at Cisco DevNet Create 2019 in Mountain View at Computer History Museum. John this is the third DevNet Create, but DevNet started as this ground, small sort of grass roots out of Cisco Live, about five years ago now. You and I just came from the keynote, which I think is really awesome to highlight that it was kicked off by two, strong female leaders in technology, who will be on our program this week. I'd love to get your perspectives on what you saw and heard today, knowing the history of DevNet as you do. >> Yeah you mentioned strong leaders, Susie Wee has been promoted to Senior Vice President and CTO of DevNet and DevNet Create. Two communities and that's been a really an interesting ride because she's gotten real technical jobs but adds a good business acumen and saw the wave early on. I remember I met Susie Wee at I'd say almost seven years ago, in and around Palo Alto. She always had that energy, but she's super technical, great business mind. She saw the open source wave and cloud connecting. And then when she came to Cisco with DevNet, she took that open source kind of mojo, and took the developer communities, which were very centric, Cisco, plumbing, moving packets from point a to point b, configuring large scale networks to much more of a developer focus. And she's evolved that program and started DevNet create three years ago to bring in the cloud native, used to be called the hoodie crowd, you know the people who are coding in the cloud. Cloud first, and she she wanted to cross pollinate them together with DevNet. And the result of that experiment or that that kind of mechanism and community collaboration has changed the face of CisCo. >> Absolutely. >> You can see Chuck Robbins as the Ceo and others within Cisco, seeing that they're on this new wave and it's actually paying off dividens for them, it's changed their strategy, customers like it, the community has grown, the metrics are all kind of up in to the right, on terms of adoption. So, success from that experiment, their doubling down and their bringing real technology, real workshops, a real co-creation, a real community vibe and it's working. So again don't fix what's not broken. >> In terms of their community, one of the things that Susie mentioned this morning is that the DevNet community's now over 585 000 members strong. They talk about this, yes it's a conference but it's also, it's a strong community, it's hands on learning. It's code and the theme of the event: See it. Learn it. Code it. They did a great job only in the first hour of the keynote about actually showing some great examples and also how to your point, Cisco is evolving. Digitally, IT transformation and how they are really staying quite far ahead of their competition. >> It's interesting because you know, one of the things that we've been doing in theCUBE for 10 years, we seen a lot of trends come and go. This one we like a lot. We use the term builders creators, Andy Jassy used that term builders. That's what they talk about this new era of this renaissance of value creators. They're building stuff and with now Cloud Computing and with now AI and other things coming to the table, there's an unlimited tool set out there and platforms with and computing cloud cloud computing, you can now build things faster. So conceiving it, understanding and building it is critical. Now what's interesting about DevNet Create is that they're bringing in that again, that community vibe where, it's not just a bunch of hackathons and a bunch of rah rah, use our code and get developers locked into a platform. It's authentically and genuinely ripe, meaningful to the developers because they do it in a group setting. They do it with community. So the have, they do have hackathons, they've got creation tools, they've got different stations and they roll out the toys if you will. Meraki has things going on here, there's all this new technology. So Cisco's bringing the goods to the party. It's like I always say, when someone brings beer to the party, you know and we're going to have some good times. So they're bringing the technology and the tools in to the community without kind of jamming it down their throat. That creates a good vibe. That's cross-pollinating to the core Cisco with DevNet, and every year that DevNet's section within Cisco Live becomes the number one place everyone goes to because that's where the feedback is and the company's listening. And this is part of their fly wheel. So this is a game changer for Cisco because their culture was pretty much build networks, run them, lock'em down, highly secure. Everything's good but now the world's changed. They want programmability and this again, changes the culture of Cisco. So I think it's a great move and I love this, I love the vibe here and this event's popular because, there's engineers here. So you have people who are savvy with code, savvy with community and savvy with building and creating and being creators. So design thinking to hackathons to any workshop you can imagine. >> And there's engineers here to your point of all, and Susie's point to have all levels of all ages. And I'm always curious about the engineers and the folks who've been in an institution for a very long time and are very use to working in that traditional model. How do they get access to the right education tools, to start shifting their own mindset, because really, in this day and age, they don't have a choice. Whether they want to continue working at a company like a Cisco or any other company these days that has to be a tech company. So you see all levels of coding experience here. They provide education for that. You also see all levels of of the veterans, those in their early stages of their career. Those in their mid-careers. So a lot of collaboration in this community. >> And the CEO Chuck Robbins points out and always kind of gives Susie Wee call outs, because even though developer.cisco.com is the destination that you can go to learn. Go to developer.cisco.com to get kind of the goods. That's from Cisco's perspective. But what Susie and Chuck have recognized is that, the real action is out in the organic community. So the co-creation, the learnings. This is where the canary and the coal mines are. This is where, companies are getting early feedback on products. This is where peers are starting to figure out what's right. So if companies listen to their community, not just provide the goods and have, some destination urls to go to, to get onboarded. The action is in the organic communities. That's where people are developing friendships. That's where discovery's happening. People are learning and that's where the action's at. So Cisco's actually listening. So this is an interesting change for Cisco. >> And it seems like, to your point on the listening, it's almost becoming the lifeblood of Cisco and really giving them this fuel and momentum >> Yeah >> To allow any type of industry. The SVP and CT, I think CTO of Meraki was saying, we don't build specific solutions for specific verticals. This is for all types of verticals, because every industry has to transform and become a tech company. But this community really seems like it's, I don't want to say a rebirth of Cisco but it almost feels somewhat something similar, but really that lifeblood of this transforming organization. >> Well one of the things that's not going to be on, on the financial analysis in the, when you look at the 10 k's and all the Wall Street guys are going to go sprint got the numbers and look at the, the financial analysis. Try to figure out where the stock's going to be. But if you at what's going on with Cisco. If they can continue to do what they're doing. If they convert their core developers in DevNet and allow this cross-pollination and with cloud computing. You're going to start to see product transformations happen faster. You're going to start to see business results that aren't reflected at any kind of performer or forecasted financial analysis. And this is going to put pressure on Cisco. Cisco is under a lot of pressure and this old school guard managers at Cisco, are like 'no the data center, we got to hold down' and so, if you don't, if Cisco doesn't cannabilize itself by bringing in the new, faster. That's the trick of the management. This is Chuck Robbin's hardest job as the CEO. It's to understand when to start cannabilizing pre-existing businesses like data center servers, UCS and have them change over to a scalable revenue model on the cloud side. So they're in a transition. I think they're in good shape. The wave they're on is positive, but the real upside to this is, if they can convert those network engineers into coders. They would have an army of awesome, talented people setting and building out the next generation data centers to cloud computing architecture and serp. Strategic strike if they can pull it off and they continue to do it. That's what we're going to be watching. >> Well we're about six weeks or so I think, before Cisco Live, which is down in San Diego. The Cube will be there. >> Yeah. >> What are you thinking, you gave a pretty good, kind of your perspectives and what you're thinking. What are some of things that you think we're going to hear and see and feel and learn from Cisco Live ? >> I think we'll hear some more of the same of what we're seeing and hearing when we start Cisco Live. I still think that Cisco's got some internal re-organizations to do to get on this wave. There's an article in Fortune magazine this week, talking about the rise and fall of Kleiner Perkins. And the thesis was there on the wrong way, missed two generations of investments. Cisco right now has to decide what wave they're going to be riding in to the future. That's Chuck Robbins' strategic imperative, and I think we're going to start to see more and more of the Cisco ship turning to get on the wave of cloud, cloud native, hybrid cloud and I think multi-cloud is probably the biggest opportunity that Cisco has and I think in bringing multi-cloud as a multiple network, multiple programmable network. That to me is a wave worth riding. The question is, when doe he time the revenue? When doe the whole ship just go full steam ahead? I think it's still going to be in transition, but we'll probably hear more, more DevNet. More DevNet Create, more programmable networks, more use of data. A lot of multi-cloud. >> Yeah and there's, this year there are three tech tracks. One on Enterprise Transformation which is, something that we'll talk about with our guests over the next two days. And then we've got, businesses have real-time data access. AI, machine learning, infrastructures that are programmable. Now how are, what are the tools and the trends, that enterprises are using to generate business insights that actually drive outcomes. >> Yeah so I think that all these tracks kind of point to big high level pillar trends that I think Cisco has to really nail and I think, they have clear sight for this. They just got to put the wheels on the bus and get the bus rolling. And that is three areas. Application modernization. So renaissance and application development. So you're seeing a new kind of app developer emerging. We hear about that all the time. You know these guys want infrastructure's code. Those app developers are going to be coming in to the enterprise in a large scale, and they can either be hybrid and multi-cloud orient. So application modernization. A renaissance in applications. Cisco has to be on that and they got AppDynamics for that and a variety of other cool things. Hybrid and multi-cloud, absolutely is going to be the architecture for enterprises and third area is security. Those are the things I think, if Cisco could nail those three things. They would be well positioned. And they got to bring the tech to the table and their product leadership. So that to me I think that's, I think we're going to see a lot of that at Cisco Live and that's I think the core plan. >> Well we'll be listening for that over the course of the next two days. John and I are fortunate to be here for today and tomorrow with a spectrum of guests, from Cisco folks, DevNet folks, partners, users of the technology and members of, active members of the DevNet community. So John looking forward to being here the next two days. >> It's been great. >> Sick around >> John and I are going to be right back from Cisco DevNet Create 2019 with our first guest. (soft upbeat music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Toronto, Canada, in Ontario. We are here live breaking down what's going on in the Blockchain world. It's the Untraceables event here, Tracy and team doing a great job of Untraceable. They're putting on the Blockchain Futurist conference. This is about the future, bringing the industry together. All the luminaries are here; Bounds of Ethereum, Ackerson Ecosystem influencers, original gangsters- OGs-are here, of course theCube, we got 2018 coverage breaking it down, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Wrapping up day one Dave, I know you got to take off and head back on a flight home, let's break down and analyze what's going on in the industry. Yesterday we had the first annual ever, first inaugural Cloud and Blockchain summit, global Blockchain and Cloud summit, two worlds coming together. Here it's a little bit different this is all about cryptocurrency, it's all about blockchain. Big movements, speculators versus builders is my theme and everyone's recognizing the trend of price shifts billions lost in market gap that were gained last year but still some are up. But the focus is about entrepreneurship on a global scale, this is the focus here, right? It's a lot of VIPs, a lot of players coming together. I don't see people crying in their wine about the prices- although you can see it on Anthony Di Iorio's face, probably a setback or the Ethereum community on the price but still, the long game is what they're going after. Your thoughts and analysis? >> Well you definitely seeing a lot of talk about the boom and bust cycles. And we're hearing a lot from people -but by the way, there are a couple of guys who went big, maybe hedge fund guys or other fund guys that are taking a bath, maybe they got in big in January, December, not the best time to get in. So you are seeing some long faces there, but generally the sentiment is: hey, these boom and bust cycles they come and they go we've seen them before, now's the time to hunker down and innovate, execute, and figure out how to add substance and value. Now, first of all, I would say a couple things. One is those guys probably have... a store of fiat currency that they cashed out, number one, so they're feeling pretty good. Two is, the big difference to me John, is in 2018, crypto is much more in the mainstream news. You see it on CNBC, you see it in every medium po- every day you get a medium post, everybody's blogging about it, whereas obviously we've been blogging about bitcoin for five, six years but the mainstream media has picked up on it. >> Seven years. >> Seven years, there you go. So the mainstream media has picked up on it so it's much more front and center than it ever has been in the past. So I think that's a different dynamic. There seems to be still a lot of opportunistic sentiment, people are sanguine about the future and I think that's because we're seeing some real hardcore innovation going on in real use cases. Now, having said all that, the other scenario is there's just a lot of competition for quality projects, we're hearing too many coins out there, you're seeing all these ICOs tied to Ethereum in an oversupply right now, and you're clearly seeing that affect the price of Ethereum, which has dropped, on a percentage basis, much more than bitcoin. It's down considerably this year, whereas bitcoin actually is still up. Ethereum's trading about where it was last September, Bitcoin's up considerably since last September. So you know, a lot of cycles, a lot of instability still, but a lot of optimism. >> The bottom line for me is that the big question that's coming out of this event and this whole week here in Toronto is why do cryptocurrencies matter, the mass influence and adoption of Blockchain technology, where is that on the progress bar? This is the topic, and again, a lot of people that are "poo pooing" this revolution and I'm seeing on my Facebook feed all the time, "bitcoin's at zero," there's a lot of nonbelievers. Here's what I would say, here's my analysis. I think that the comparisons to the dot-com bubble with all the irrational exuberance that was part of that phase, this ICO phase, is crashing. No doubt about them. The ICOs in the United States are down, almost to nill. Certainly a lot of action going outside the United States, still unregulated, still wild, wild, east- or west depending how you call it. So yeah, that's happening and a lot of the bad stuff's being filtered out there's an emphasis on build which you mentioned. But here's the thing that no one might not see in the mainstream. During the dot-com bubble, there was all this companies that were started to it public and that was because the market wanted it. That's what happened with the cryptocurrency ICOs, the market wanted more products, then just manufactured it and then they realized, oh shit too many tokens. But if you look at the internet revolution, and I think this is the comparison with blockchain and crypto. You got blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, which is token economics are absolute gamechangers and the demand for that is very high and there are more people coming on every day in a mass adoption basis. The internet actually never stopped, if you looked at internet penetration rates, Mary Meeker would point out at Morgan Stanley, now she's at Kleiner Perkins, that the internet adoption rate of the internet during the bubble and then post-bubble continued to accelerate. That means more people got on the internet. So therefore the population of users became larger and larger every day. That really level-setted the reality that this was not a fad, not going away. I see blockchain and token economics having the same trajectory where there'll be more people adopting the technology then putting it into use than ever before. That's the tell sign. If that trend line continues to grow, the corrections will all take place, cycles will happen, but the entrepreneurs will follow the money, they're going to follow the user experience, they're going to follow the demand for opportunity. That to me is going to be the major tell sign. I think that's the general sentiment that I'm feeling here is screw the price of the tokens, yes there's too many tokens, clear out the dead wood, get back down to building companies, that's validated by the fact that there are more deals being done from a financing standpoint that are starting to look like traditional funding structures. Security tokens, equities, starting to see people talk and fundraising, lower rounds, not the big mega rounds. Money that's going to be around 7 to 30 million, 30 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 plus. This is going to be traditional structures, not the land grab utility token which gets you into the tailspin of basically managing coins distribution, managing all these things. There'll be a balance, but that's really kind of what's happening. >> So that's great analysis John, I would add to that that the fundamentals are still in place, blockchain attacks inefficiencies. Where there's a middle man and there's inefficiencies and there are waste, blockchain is being applied to attack those inefficiencies. I think the second thing is that new capital-raising vehicles have catalyzed massive investments and are catalyzing innovation and a whole new breed of developers. The third point is a global phenomemon. You don't have to be in Silicon Valley, or New York City, or Boston, or Austin, in the United states, or from an Ivy League school, it's happening around the world, you're seeing non-US countries and island countries invite developers in, giving them tax havens, and as a result, it's becoming much more of a global phenomenon than a lot of the internet startups were. There are a lot of adoption barriers. I mean you have the cyclicality and the volatility, you've got industries that are essentially entrenched: financial services, healthcare, lots of defense and aerospace industries, very much entrenched, it's going to take a long time for that collaboration to come together. And you also have a lot of scams. >> Yeah >> There's going to be a shake out, we predicted that I think in February in the Bahamas, we predicted the flight to quality, people are trying to figure out where that quality is right now. And to your point, you're also seeing more hybrid models, more traditional equity models combined with token models, and that's not a surprise. You're going to see more and more of that as a hedge. The token model still gives people the potential for liquidity, and as long as that fundamental remains in place, I think that dynamic will- is here to stay. >> And also, you and I have seen many cycles of innovation you talk about in the industry, many waves. The people that we talked to that have been through multiple waves like Brailey Rodder, (mumbles) and others, experience, they all know what's going on. The difference here that I think is interesting is that the smart contrast, the flight to quality, the companies that have buildable products, are going to get the attention. Now the difference now in this community that I think is interesting that makes the funding dynamic different is you have now community dynamics. You've got open source software, Cloud computing, and new technology with new capital formation dynamics. I think those three things are the perfect storm of innovation that's being overlooked. and the interplay between that is going to give us a look and feel of an industry that we've never seen before. So we can compare and contrast waves "oh, BC, Client-Server, blah blah blah," I don't think this is going to look like any of those waves, it's going to look different. And that's going to be really the shake out between the pundits who claim they know what's going on, or... predictions whatnot. Talking to the people, putting the ear to the ground in the communities, that's key. And for the companies, the ones that are going to win are the ones that can build community, tap into communities, and grow communities because they're now part of the ecosystem. It's not just selling products to them, they got to be a bidirectional, symbiotic relationship between communities at large, in this ecosystem. I think these are going to be new dynamics they're going to be- impact valuation, it's going to impact time to market, time to value, and ultimately give the entrepreneurs and the investors what they need, which is good outcomes in the process. >> You know it's interesting you were saying about the waves. And the waves in the past, and certainly looking back, were quite easy to identify, they tended to be architectural, you know centralized mainframe, and they went to client server, then you went to the sort of public internet, and then this cloud of remote services. The next wave is maybe not ... blatantly architectural, but it's this blending of digital services that's ubiquitous across all industries. And I think the key is, there's an automation layer on top of these digital services, which is powered by AI and machine intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, and blockchain is part of that automation layer. And people are building new businesses on top of that and disrupting existing industries. I think there's no industry that's safe from disruption as I put it before, there are some entrenched, high-risk industries like financial services, healthcare, defense, aerospace, education, that are going to take longer but ultimately there's waste in all of those businesses and I will say I think a lot of the incumbents are going to hop on this trend and do very well picking up blockchain and defending against the disruptors. Not all will make it, but a lot of the big guys are going to put some serious resources into this and they're going to lead in to blockchain in a big way. >> Yeah and just to kind of wrap up, I think you're the fact that what we're seeing here is that engineering-led dynamics are happening, blockchain's going to lay down the plumbing, it's got to be stable, desensualized applications over the top with token economics is the business model of innovation. We got technology theater booming with innovation with engineering-led initiatives, that's got to accelerate, that's infrastructure, that's got to be more cloud-like, that's got to be much more stable, that's got to get laid down, got to put the roads down if you will, and then the business model innovation coming from the software this is the game changer so you're looking at all the smart money, smart money is saying okay, we see guys building product, let's see some unique IP, let's see some token economics that are nobel and different for what's happening, that to me is going to be the new investor algorithm if you will, for vetting. And it's been that way in a way, the smart money follows the smart engineers, what are you building? And then they vet that with other stands so again, big engineering-led focus. >> So what would you do now- okay, soyou were hearing this week, too many damn tokens, everything's tied to Ethereum, most ICOs, what would you do now if you're an entrepreneur, you have an idea, you have a potential to build a community, where would you focus, would you just try to float another token? Would you go overseas? What would you do in that situation? >> I would look at the regulatory frameworks as a way, as a guidepost to risk management, right. I think you're going to see some regulatory regimes try to manage the bridge between slow changing, old guard, to new fast, and loose. Crypto-'Cause look at it. It's fast and loose, but there's real people that are working on it. I would focus on the real people that have builders, I'd look at the mechanisms where they're domiciling, and what they do with the economics or the tokens. One thing I will tell you that is that, as an entrepreneur, this is like, a golden rule, your focus is everything: focus, focus, focus. If you're focused on managing distribution of coins, and the arbitrage of coin pricing, that takes away form the focus of engineering and building. I think that's going to be an easy binary test for an investor to say, "what are these guys working on?" Is the token working for the venture, or is the venture working for the token? That is a fundamental mindset, if that is... Not in the right position, it should be: the token works for the venture, not the venture working for the token. That to me, I would run for the hills, if I see someone working for the token, I'd say, "I don't want to fly at all at that deal." Because you could maybe pass up some money right in the short term, but you're going to miss the long game. That's the way I look at it. >> And again, I would add to that, I mean, yeah, okay, so there are a bunch of crypto-billionaires that got minted, and they got in early and good for them, but that doesn't mean there's not more opportunities. And when I think of a company like Dell Michael Dell wasn't the first in PC's, you know? Compact was the first, you know, Rod Canion, the back of the napkin, that urban legend. But what Michael Dell did is he improved on the system. He took inefficiencies out of the supply chain, and became the dominant player! So first move advantage, yes, okay, great, you missed being a billionaire potentially. But the wave tends to get bigger after the market matures. And as a result, I think my focus would be on building, to your theme, building that community, demonstrating value, and then, eventually, I think you're going to be able to use Block Chain, Crypto currencies, tokenization, crypto economics to power your business. But figure out a way to actually execute today and prove value; that's what I would do. >> Again, all great stuff, great analysis, Dave, Good to see you here, where again: this is theCUBE's coverage in Toronto for Block Chain Futurist Conference. Again, this is part of our 2018 initiating coverage of the Block Chain Industry with our video presence. Engaging the community is an upstream content project sharing the data with you, so you can make your decisions, and understand who to connect with. That's our model, we're going to do it. We've been covering BitCoin and Block Chain since 2011, on siliconangle.com, that's our journalism site. Go to theCUBE.net, that's where we have all the videos, and soon to be our CUBE token coming out, be part of our network. Join our community if you wannna get engaged, we're happy to have you. Thanks for watching Day 1 of the Futurist Conference here in Toronto, Ontario. Thanks for watching.

(electronic music) >> Hello and welcome to the Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios with two great guests, Tara Chklovski, who is the founder and CEO of Iridescent and Anar Simpson, global ambassador of Technovation. First, thanks for coming in today. I appreciate moving your schedules around to come in. Thanks for coming into our studio. >> You bet, yeah. >> So Sundar Pichai was at your event. That's the big story this past week has been the Google memo from a low level employee who wrote some things that got the whole world shaking around gender biases, role of women in tech, and as we do a lot of women in tech as you know at the Cube. Hundreds and hundreds of women in over the years, friends, and also smart people. This is a pretty big moment for you guys. You had an event at Google. Sundar canceled his all hands meeting to address this under fear of retaliation and safety but came to your event on the Google campus. Surprising to many, as written up on VCode and the Verge. Pretty notable. So tell us about what happened. >> So this was the 2017 Technovation world pitch competition and the award ceremony and Sundar came and he talked to a lot of the girls who were presenting their ideas to solve problems in their community and then he had a little bit of a one on one conversation to learn a little bit more about the kinds of problems, their interest in technology, entrepreneurship, and then he addressed the crowd of 900 plus supporters and really reemphasized that there's a place for women in technology, and more importantly, for him and Google, that there's a place for these girls at Google. >> Talk about your mission. >> Right, so Technovation's mission is to empower girls to become technology entrepreneurs and it's much more than just learning how to code. It's really about telling girls that if there's a problem in their community, technology can help them have a very powerful voice. We've been running for eight years and Anar is our global ambassador who has helped us grow to more than 100 countries, but Technovation's relationship with Google is eight years long. Google has supported Technovation, was the very first technology company to support Technovation way before any other company saw the potential and since then, since 2010, Google has provided funding, mentors, spaces, not just across the U.S. but globally. >> Is it beyond entrepreneurship and beyond coding? Talk about specifically what you guys are bringing to folks outside of Silicon Valley. >> Oh, sure, so my role as the global ambassador for Technovation is really getting to girls all over the world and saying to them, you need to be engaged in technology. And what we found, as Tara mentioned, we've been doing this now, I've been doing this now for five years, is that we're building a movement. We're bringing in girls, we're bringing in mentors, we're bringing in companies and governments together to make this a reality for girls in tech careers in their own countries. >> What's some examples during your life when you had those kind of change moments? >> I think Iridescent, we are now in our 12th year, and every couple of months, it's a change moment because it's a test of grit and just believing in yourself because I started it with just an idea and grew it to be an organization that's all over the world and it doesn't come with just full hearted focus and a lot of courage is what I've seen, I think. I've also seen that how much you are passionate about an idea really swings how the other person is thinking and so the idea only matters so much, I think, of course I mean the track record and everything has to be there, but I think a lot of it depends on your own passion for it and I think I've come to realize that passion is maybe proportional to the complexity and the impact of the problem you're trying to solve, so if you're only trying to solve a small problem, you lose interest in two years. And maybe that's why, I'm always curious, like why do so many start ups fail after two or three years? It's because maybe you came in not thinking that you're going to change the world, maybe you came in because you wanted to make quick money or exit or whatever and so I think for me, it's this is my life's work and we want to bring more underrepresented communities into innovation, and so it's not something that is going to be solved easily. >> Let's get back to the Sundar event that you guys were at because I think it's a good conversation to have because one of the things that came out of the brouhaha that became that memo really was a conversation publicly. Now, it's been polarized here. There's just kind of a hate kind of mindset with it most of the time, plenty of stuff on the internet to go read through but there was actually some good conversations in the industry. What was the conversation like during the event because this was in full conversation mode while you guys were having your 2017 world pitch competition, which he presided over and had a speech to the entrepreneurs. What was it like? What were some of the conversations that were taking place? >> I think the most powerful piece of the whole evening was really the girls walking in and seeing the incredible diversity that we have in this world, right? So we had girls from and mentors and supporters from over 30 countries and just them coming and waving the flags and different faces and different cultures all trying to make the world a better place, I mean it's rare that you see that using technology and I think it's very fitting that Silicon Valley is the center of this, but I think there was not one dry eye in the group because you realize, the conversation is so much bigger than one company, one country. It is something that affects us as all human beings and you're believing in human potential so I think seeing these young girls, some of them 10 years old, there was this, I think, maybe the crowd's favorite was these 10 year old girls from Cambodia who want to improve the lives of these people working in cottage industries, right, and they created an app like say Etsy or something, but focused on Cambodian products and the courage of these little girls, I think everybody walks away feeling, okay there's hope. Even in the midst of all of this discussion. >> Yeah it creates a lightning rod in some ways and hopefully it will move on to the substantive conversations. How do you guys feel about what happened and as you take this mission forward? You guys are doing some amazing work, we'll do a whole nother segment, I think, that's on that in a minute, but given the landscape now, how do you view this and how are you talking with friends and colleagues and family members around it because I've certainly had conversations with my friends, certainly on the east coast, like no, no, that's not the way Silicon Valley is. Google actually is a very cool company, it's not exactly like what you think it is. They're very open. They support a lot of great initiatives and they're candid. And then I go on and explain, it's like a university, serene little area, have this little ecosystem, that they've kind of built a university culture, if you will. But it is open and there's things that happen that get misrepresented and that was my take. That's for the folks that filmed at Silicon Valley. But what's your take? What do you think about what's happening? >> So this is really, really good that you brought up the university campus environment. So I have two girls. They're both millennials and they're both in the tech world and we have this discussion and here is the perfect answer, right. So one of my daughters, Kat, she said that when she read that, she thought it was basically a gathering of his thoughts and it was a gathering of his thoughts because he was probably asked to adhere to I&D staff that's going on in every company right now, right, and so it was a little bit of a, wait a second, you know. He wants to sort of respond to his being asked to go to I&D staff and then Katia said, but you know mom, it was just a gathering of his thoughts and this is an essay, and it was a poorly written one, and if I was grading it, I would give him a C minus. Then my older daughter said-- >> Host: I would have given him an F on that one. She's generous. >> Because he did, he tried to make it very professional and very academic and she said but it was a first draft, he has not, he didn't proceed to toughen it up, solidify it, find more evidence, have it critiqued. It was just a gathering of his thoughts and he hasn't gone through the presses and both these girls graduated from Berkeley and so I think they would know what a C paper looks like versus an A paper. And then my older daughter said, and the other thing is, you know, it's not like I&D efforts are actually bad but what we're trying to do is we're trying to condense the time in which we're trying to get women at equal pairing in the tech world. Now, you know women have never been at equal pairing in many professions. They were not enough doctors, lawyers, accountants, you name it, right? Main Street, Wall Street has never had equality. And now we're looking at technology and the reason everything just flairs up in technology is because we live in today's world where news and information is available all the time. So there's two things going on. Information is readily available. People can come into the conversation very quickly and whenever anything happens in Silicon Valley, the effect is massive because all eyes are on Silicon Valley all the time. So it's a bit of a distorted view but we have gone through this. It took a long time for women to become astronauts. It took a long time for women to become neurosurgeons. It took a long time for women to become lawyers and dentists. It will take a little bit of time for women to become top technologists, but we're hoping that it'll shorten and things happen quickly in the valley and we're trying to get that quicker and so we're seeing a little bit of friction. This is responses from millennials so for me, it was like, yes. >> Host: Interesting perspective. >> Yes, great perspective, and when Sundar said these things at the world pitch, I was sitting in the second row and every time he said something I would clap real loud and Todd said, why are you being so good and I said I need to hear that, I need to hear him say that because-- >> Host: What did he say that moved you? >> Oh he just said, you know you have a place in technology and I said yes, we needed to hear you say that right away, all the time and especially to these girls, these eight to 18 year old girls, and all of the ones that come from 100 countries that weren't at Google but were listening to the live pitch. >> We seem to be going back to a crowd that wants to see respect for the individual and citizenship. These were company values at Hewlett Packard, when I was there, that I always remembered was unique. They go hey, you can have differences, but if you have respect for the individual and you have a citizenship mindset. That seemed to have been lost in tech. With this whole movement you see and win at all costs, being an asshole is what you got to do to be a CEO or flip it fast or bros program, so it became a very selfish environment. It seems to be shifting now, with this conversation. Your thoughts? >> So I have to say, doing a start up is not easy. Getting successful in this world is not easy. Shaking the status quo is not easy, so I have to say that the same people, and we're not going to name names, but the same people who are very arrogant and have little respect for the laws and rules, they have given us products that are changing peoples' lives. There is no question about it. Without their bravado, without their I don't care, I'm just going to go over you if you don't comply with me, a lot of ride sharing wouldn't even have happened, and to me, when you provide employment, when you provide alternative services, when you provide something that takes away the way things were, I see that as a plus. I think what we're seeing is that's needed to a certain extent and then you realize, okay now we have to get back to growing it and working it and if you keep going in that mode, you probably won't succeed. >> So being tough and determined and having grit is what you need to break through those walls as a start up. You don't need to be necessarily a jerk, but your point is if you're creating value. >> If you're creating value, and that sometimes you actually have to be a jerk because there are very few brave, non-jerk people who have gone against a big unions and big monopolies. Right, you and I, I would not be able to go against the taxi commission. You need somebody who is a complete a-hole to do that. And he did that and it made a difference. He doesn't have to continue to do that and that's the point. >> There's a meme going around on the internet, if you want to make friends, sell ice cream. >> Exactly! >> So you cannot always win friends when you're pioneering things. >> And you know, there is a balance and maybe we've fostered the fact that you need to be that attitude for everything and that's not true so the pendulum shifted a bit too much but I think that we shouldn't scorn them because really they have made a difference, let's just let everybody get back to-- >> Its a tough world out there to survive and you have to have that kind of sharp elbows to make things happen and it's the value you're providing is how you do it. >> Exactly. >> Well it's no secret to the folks that know me and watch The Cube and know the Silicon Valley that I'm a huge proponent for computer science and, you know, as someone who kind of fell into that in the '80s, it's now become very interesting in that the surface area for computer science has increased a lot and its not just coding and heads down and squashing bugs and writing code. There's been a whole nother evolution of Soft Scales, Agile, Cloud, you've seen a full transformation with the potential unlimited compute available, with mobile now 10 years plus into the iPhone you see new infrastructure developing so it creates the notion that, okay, you can bring the science of computers to a whole nother level. That must be attractive as you guys have that capability to bring that to bear in the programs. Can you guys comment on how you guys see just the role of computer science playing out and this is not a gender thing, this is more of, as I have a young daughter I try to say, it's not just writing code, you could certainly whip out a mobile app, but it's really bringing design to it or bringing a personal passion that you might have, so what are some of the patterns you're seeing in the surface area of what's now known as computer science? >> I think it's super important because as technology has progressed, we've been able to provide this program. If we were still programming in front of screens and doing the what you see is what you get kind of thing without, we would not be there. I think the big thing that's happened in the last 10 years is the mobile phone. I mean, if you find a girl anywhere today in the world, chances are she'll have a mobile phone on her and she's going to be loathe for you to take that one thing from her. You could take other things from her, but try taking that phone away from her. She will not let you. And so the fact that she's so attached to that mobile phone means that you can then tell her, hey, you don't have to be just a consumer of that thing, you can be a producer of that thing. Anything that you see on there, you can actually design. This is power. This is your thing to good and great and better. And if we can shift that in their minds that this is their link to the world that's wide open, we're seeing that. >> Well the world is consumed by it. I mean, a lot of women in the world will be consumers of product, certainly with AI, the conversation over the weekend I was having with folks as the role of women is super important not just in AI, but as software becomes cognitive, you have to align with half the audience that's out there. Must be hard for a guy to program something that's going to be more oriented towards women, but it brings up the question of application and whether it's self driving cars or utility from work to play and everything in between, software and the role of software is going to be critical and that seems to be pretty clear. Question is how do you inspire young girls. That's the question that a lot of fellow males that I talk to who are fathers of daughters and who are promoting women in tech and see that vision. What are some of the inspiration areas? How do you really shake the interest and how do you have someone really kind of dig in and enjoy it and taste it and feel it? >> So there is some research to back what the formula is that works to drive change in behavior and so there is, one of the biggest names in cognitive psychology is Albert Bandura. He's a professor at Stanford. But basically it's the same principles that drive, say, the addiction from alcohol or weight loss or any kind of new behavior change. So the first is you need to have exposure to someone whom you respect showing that this is something of meaning, and so the key words are someone you respect, right? And so media can play a very big role here, for scale, right, otherwise it's only maybe a teacher or a parent and if they're not exposed to technology they can't really affect your... And so media can play a huge role there. Second is the experience itself, like how do you make it easy to get started. And then it's like learning from video games, so you make it very, very easy, like the first step is just come over here, it'll be fun, there's pizza, come, right, like your friends are coming, but then the feedback has to be very fast, so the first step, and that's where your good curriculum matters. So that's where also working on a mobile phone is very appealing even though maybe apps is not-- >> Host: It's relatable. >> It's relatable but the feedback is instantaneous and so the programming language that the girls use is block based so even though you don't have any prior programming background, you can still build a working app, so that's critical. Then human beings get tired very easily and so the feedback needs to keep changing. It has to be unpredictable. The third piece is that of expectations. Sou have to have very high expectations and so that's why this current discussion around cognitive differences in gender, I feel is missing the point, because it's not what you're born with, what are you capable of? And so if we looked at our genetics, we would never go to space, we would never go to the deepest parts of the ocean, because we're not meant for that. But we had really high visions and expectations and so human beings rose to that. And then the last piece is less relevant in developing countries but it's still important, so it's sort of the human energy. We're not a brain disassociated from the body, we're connected, right? And so if you're hungry and tired and sleepy, not the right time to sort of make a dramatic change in you interests, so this is relevant like for us, we tried to figure out which countries are we going to work in, so post-conflict, war-torn areas are not the best areas to start a new program in. You need the right-- >> So you're saying the biological argument of, of course they're different, men and women, but it's the capability, that's where people are missing the boat. >> And the support system. So have high expectations, provide them with the right support, but the most important thing is your own beliefs in that. >> Let's get your thoughts on that 'cause I think you guys have a great program with Technovation, you mentioned mentors. Key part of the formula most likely. What we here, in the conversation I've had with women here has been, there's a real call to arms at the executive level now, folks my age in the 50s who made it, who were there, succeeding, they really want to give back and they really have recognized the value of having that peer mentorship and then inspiring the young generation, whether it's part of the things that we cover like Grace Hopper or Technovations, things that you do, or even just mentoring in their own communities. What does that mentorship look like that you guys see that you'd like to see double down on or areas you'd like to see tweaked or perceptions that need to change? What's your thoughts on mentorship and the role of inspiring young girls? >> Mentorship from men? >> Host: Men and women, I mean... >> From both? >> Well I see the mentorship with women, as that's the first step. I have a whole nother conversation, in my opinion, about the men needing training, not just like go to class and learn how to talk but how to empathize. >> Well my big thing has been that when you wanted to encourage women up the ladder in your companies or you wanted to encourage women to actually get in to technical roles, that intent should not be placed in the CSR department of your organization 'cause that speaks volumes, right? To say oh, well that's in the social responsibility department or the HR, that just says, okay, so you're not really, you don't think we're capable of helping you with your product or service, we're sort of part of this, and it's like, no. So I think you want to mainstream it, which is what a lot of I&D things are trying to do now. >> Host: Inclusion and diversity. >> Inclusion and diversity. >> To make it part of the fabric, not a department checkbox. >> Exactly. >> That's what you're getting at. >> Exactly and the involvement of these departments, to include everybody and to make it more diverse is going to be not frictionless. It will be friction until a time where it won't even be necessary. I&D departments should have one goal which is to work themselves out of a job. If they can work themselves out of a job, then the company would have done what it needs to be done, but I think-- >> Meaning it's self sufficient, it's self governing, people are humans, it's respect for individuals. I mean this just basically comes down to, if you look at it as humans, it takes it, every conversation could be tabled, that's what? There's a person on the other side, it's a human being, not a woman or a white male or whatever. They're not there yet, but I mean certainly that would be the endgame, so in that scenario, that department's out of business, the I&R, the inclusion and diversity department, has done its job. >> Exactly, you don't need one because you know you're okay. And I think capabilities is really important in corporations and this isn't anybody's fault, this is just how it's been done. This has just been the culture of it. Who gets invited to which meetings. Who gets invited to which conferences. And so we heard the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki saying, you know, she had to sort of elbow a little bit to say hey, why am I not allowed at a certain conference and it's like, maybe just wake up to that and say why aren't you involving more people at conferences and think tanks because, you know, I come from an oil and gas background and people used to do a lot of deals on the golf course 'cause oil and gas people play golf a lot and a lot of deals used to happen, well in the Valley we don't play golf a lot but we do do other things, conferences or get togethers, and if you don't include the people in your team as groups or representationally, well they're not going to be there when you make these decisions so maybe just be a little bit-- >> Exclusionary is a problem and Kleiner Perkins was taken to task, they had ski trips apparently planned and they did all mostly guys and they didn't invite the women part, there was a big scandal. This is where they make that, it's a normative thing and they've got to change the norms. >> Change the norms and if you actually want your company which is made of all kinds of people to move really far ahead, don't be like that. Include everybody because the only goodness about that is you'll go forward. If you don't include somebody, well you're going to hurt them. >> I want to add to that. So there's quite a bit of data. So the patterns are not anything different from what the message girls get from school and parents. So if you look at the data there are 100 countries that legally discriminate against women and so what message industry is telling, is really, firstly it doesn't filter through to the larger population. Silicon Valley is a completely different problem, but overall, the messages girls are given is like, this is not for you, and so especially in some of the most populous, dense countries of the world. And so we have to fight a lot of these kinds of perceptions from the ground up and the number one gatekeeper is the father and so a key part of what we've now done to date is to provide education and training to the parents because there's a very moving story that we work in a remote town in south India and a mentor who's very dedicated has been trying to get these girls to participate in Technovation. He did that and then one girl was actually offered a job but the father kept saying no, not needed, no girl in my family ever needs to work, but he fought it and so the girl actually gets a job. And then a year later, the father calls the mentor and said, you know what, I'm so grateful that you did it because a day after she got the job, I got hit in an accident and I lost my job, but it's these kinds of perceptions that have to be changed one person at a time which is what makes this very hard, unless you actually are able to get the media to change the messaging and I think in the U.S., which is, there's some very interesting studies and a question, right, like if you were to think, would there be more women in STEM in poorer, developing countries versus richer, highly developed countries. Where would you see more women in STEM? The answer is actually the women in the poorer countries like Iran, Malaysia. The reason is because in an individualistic society like in the U.S., where there's a lot of emphasis on materialistic but it's also about are you happy. The conversation has changed from parents telling children and do what makes you happy and then you are very prone to advertising and advertising works when it's highly targeted and highly gendered. And so in the 60s, there was no such thing as pink and blue. Now there is pink and blue. And so now we just made our entire society entirely susceptible to advertising. And girls are passive and complaint and boys are aggressive and so then when you're looking at the board structures, it's very, very hard to fix the problem right there. You have to go down deeper because you don't get leaders who are complaint. Maybe secretaries are compliant. But you have to fix the message that teachers give girls, that parents give their baby girls when they are born, and so industry is just sort of in the spotlight right now but the issue is not that of industry, I think it's also that of society. >> Industry, if you look at what Sundar is supporting you guys it's interesting that this industry seems to chipping and certainly Silicon Valley is a little different as you said, but in general, it is a cultural parent thing. Any plans there with Technovations to have a parent track? >> Yes, totally. I mean, I think, right now, 10% of parents actually volunteer to be mentors, kind of like girl scout troop leaders, and so we are trying to figure out, okay, what is a way to involve parents and to make them part of the discussion? >> Tara, Anar, thanks so much. This is The Cube conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat happy music) >> Hello, and welcome to a special CUBEConversations here at theCUBE Studio in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier here for a special Women in Tech and Technovation conversation with Tara Chklovski founder and CEO of Iridescent also runs TechNation and Anar Simpson global ambassador of TechNation. Great Women in Tech conversation and you guys have done amazing work, you're both rock stars. Thanks for spending the time. We just had a great chat about your event you had the 2017 World Pitch competition for girls in entrepreneurship in coding and everything else. Congratulations, so tell us about Technovation. What do you guys do and you guys are doing some amazing work. Tara start us off, where are you guys and what's going on? >> So Technovation is the world's largest technology entrepreneurship program for girls and girls aged middle school and high school are challenged that you have to find a problem in your community, to learn how to code a mobile application and learn how to start a startup from scratch all the way to the pitch video business plan. And through that process they are partnered with a woman in tech mentor and they go through a hundred hour learning experience. At the end of it they have to submit their apps and business plans for judging, and we have thousands of judges who are experts in tech from all over the world, review those and then we have a quarter final, semi final and then the big World Pitch competition that was held last week here in Silicon Valley. >> And this sounds so progressive and cutting edge. It sounds like what Palo Alto high school would do with Menlo and Sacred Heart and Castilleja, but this is not just Silicon Valley this is, I mean talk to us a little bit about the scope of the program. How do people get involved? Share some of the data. >> Yeah, totally, and so it is all over the world. We run in a hundred different countries, primarily brought and expanded through our work that our global ambassador Anar has done, and most of it is really trying to bring girls who would have never been exposed to technology entrepreneurship careers. And the way we work is really through partnerships, amazing organizations and visionary leaders who do the hard work of actually supporting these girls, getting these girls interested. So these girls would typically never go into careers in tech because they never see themselves as being interested and so the hook is that you want to find a problem in your community. You have to go out, talk to people, try to understand what is a big problem that is worth solving, and then we say, "Oh by the way, you know you could solve "this problem using technology." And so you get in a whole another group of people that would not normally access these careers. >> So is it an application process? Is it in the US? >> Anybody can. >> So anyone in the US. >> Anybody. >> So my daughter who wants to get some community hours could actually go take it to a whole other level. >> Totally, so you can just register. We haven't launched the new season yet but it'll be out live in October. Sign up, find a team of girls, and there's actually a documentary, an award-winning documentary done about the program. So the same woman who did Inconvenient Truth wanted to profile Women in Tech and she did a whole documentary about Technovation and it's called CodeGirl and you can get it on any online video platform. >> That's awesome, well congratulations. It's super impressive work, very inspirational. And Anar, you're bringing the global perspective in and we were talking before we came on camera that you had a goal. Share with us your five year goal and an update of where you are in taking this out beyond the United States. >> Sure, so you know five years ago I was a mentor for Technovation. It was my first time and it was an amazing experience, and we won in the local competition and the regional competition and then placed third in the final competition. And after that I had a conversation with Tara about the amazing experience that I had, and we were chatting and she said she'd love to take this globally. And being the type A enthusiast that I am, I said oh, well okay that's fine, you know, I come from Kenya. I've lived in Canada, so we've got three-- >> John: The perfect mix. >> Yeah, three countries already, but I'm sure we can take it global. Well in fact with our work together, I was able to take Technovation to 18 countries in the first year, 34 countries in the second year, 72 countries in the third year and this year we're at over a hundred countries. And it hasn't been an easy road. We keep saying this to each other, we just keep trying. Our focus is on getting this program. We don't get caught into anything politics or any otherwise, and we just want to get to as many girls as we can. And as Tara said, partnerships have played an immense role in getting Technovation all over the world. So initially it was just cold calls, people I knew in Kenya, people I knew in Canada, people I knew in LinkedIn, my little circle. But then my circle got bigger and bigger and then lots and lots of opportunities presented themselves and one of them was the Tech Women program that's run by the State Department. They bring in senior technical women to Silicon Valley for an internship and then I said to them, Oh and when they go back home, what do they do? Shouldn't they do Technovation? And so we've done good partnerships with them, we've done a good partnership with the UN women. We've been profiled in the United Nations high-level panel report, and these things keep happening and the... But it's not just because of the community or the relationships we're building. Our program works. It is credible. Our impact reports show that these girls end up in tech-related fields as they progress, and that's the whole point of our purpose, right? Is to say look, girls everywhere should be entering technology fields and what Technovation does it it's building a pipeline of young girls to enter these careers all over the globe. >> Well it's no secret that the folks that know me and watch theCUBE and know the show know that I'm a huge proponent for computer science and you know it's kind of similar, we kind of fell into that in the '80s. It's now become very interesting in that the surface area for computer science has increased a lot, and it's not just coding heads down and squashing bugs and writing code. There's been a whole nother evolution of soft skills, Agile, Cloud, you're seeing a full transformation with the potential unlimited compute available. With mobile now 10 years plus into the iPhone, you see new infrastructure developing. So it creates the notion that okay, you can bring the science of computers to a whole nother level. That must be attractive as you guys have that capability to bring that to bear in the programs. Can you guys comment on how you guys see just the role of computer science playing out? This is not a gender thing, just more of, as I have a young daughter I try to say it's not just writing code you can certainly whip out a mobile app but it's really bringing design to it or bringing a personal passion that you might have. So what are some of the patterns you're seeing in this surface area of what's now known as computer science? >> I think it's super important because as technology has progressed we've been able to provide this program. If we were still programming with you know, the in front of screens and doing the what you see is what you get kind of thing without, we would not be there. I think the big thing that's happened in the last 10 years is the mobile phone. I mean if you find a girl anywhere today in the world, chances are she'll have a mobile phone on her and she's going to be loathe for you to take that one thing from her. You could take other things from her, but try taking that phone away from her, she will not let you. And so the fact that she's so attached to that mobile phone means that you can then tell her, hey you don't have to be just a consumer of that thing. You can be a producer of that thing. Anything that you see on there, you can actually design. This is power. This is your thing to good and great and better, and if we can shift that in their minds that this is their link to the world that's wide open, we're seeing that. >> Well the world in consumed by it, I mean a lot of women in the world will be consumers of product. Certainly with AI, the conversation over the weekend I was having with folks is the role of women. It's super important not just in AI, but as software becomes cognitive, you have to align with half the audience that's out there. So it'd be hard for a guy to program something that's going to be more oriented towards a woman. But it brings up the question of application, and whether it's self-driving cars or utility from work to play and everything in between. Software, and the role of software's going to be critical and that seems to be pretty clear. The question is how do you inspire young girls? That's the question that a lot of fellow males that I talk to who are fathers of daughters and or are promoting Women in Tech and see that vision, what are some of the inspiration areas? How do you really shake the interest and how do you have someone really kind of dig in and enjoy it and taste it and feel it? >> Right, right. >> So there is some research to back what the formula is that works and to drive change in behavior. And so there is this, one of the biggest sort of names in cognitive psychology is Albert Bandura. He's a professor at Stanford. But basically it's the same principles that drives say the addiction from alcohol or weight loss or any kind of new behavior change. So the first is you need to have exposure to someone who you respect showing that this is something of meaning. So the key words are someone you respect, right? And so media can play a very big role here for scale, right otherwise it's only maybe your teacher or your parent and if they're not exposed to technology, they can't really affect your, and so media can play a huge role there. Second is the experience itself, right. Like how do you make it easy to get started, and then it's like learning from video games, right. So you make it very very easy, like the first step is just come over here it'll be fun, there's pizza, come right, like your friends are coming. But then the feedback has to be very fast, so the first step and that's where a good curriculum matters, right. So that's where also working on a mobile phone is very appealing even though many apps is-- >> John: It's relatable. >> It's relatable but the feedback is instantaneous, and so the programming language that the girls use is block based so even though you don't have any prior programming background you can still build a working app so that's critical. Then human beings get tired very easily and so the feedback needs to keep changing. It has to be unpredictable. The third piece is that of expectations, and so you have to have very high expectations, and so that's why this current discussion around cognitive differences in gender I feel is missing the point because it's not what you're born with, what are you capable of? And so if we looked at our genetics we would never go to space, we would never go to the deepest parts of the ocean because we are not meant for that, right? But we had really high visions and expectations and so human beings rose to that. And then the last piece is less relevant in developed countries but it's still important so, it's sort of the human energy. We are not a brain dissociated from the body. We are connected, right, and so if you're hungry and tired and sleepy, not the right time to sort of make a dramatic change in your interests. So this is relevant, if for us, we try to figure out which countries are we going to work in, so post conflict, war torn areas are not the best areas to start a new program in. You need the right partners. >> So you're saying the biological argument of, of course they're different, men and women. >> Yes. >> But it's the capability, that's where people are missing the boat. >> And the support system, right? So have high expectations, provide them with the right support, but the most important thing is your own beliefs in that. >> Let's get your thoughts on that because I think you guys have a great program with Technovation. You mentioned mentors, key part of the formula most likely. What we hear in the conversations I've had with women peers has been you know, there's a real call to arms at the executive level now, folks my age in their fifties who made it who are there succeeding. They really want to give back and they really have recognized the value of having that peer mentorship and then inspiring the young generation. Whether it's part of the things we cover like Grace Hopper or Technovation things that you do. Or even just mentoring in their own communities. What does that mentorship look like that you guys see, that you'd like to see doubled down on or areas you'd like to see tweaked or perceptions that need to change. What's your thoughts on mentorship and the role of inspiring young girls? >> Mentorship from men? >> John: Men and women, I mean. >> From both. >> John: Well I see the mentoring with women, that's the first step. >> Right. >> I have a whole nother conversation in my opinion that the men need training. Not just like go to class and learn how to talk but how to empathize. >> Well my big thing has been that you know when you wanted to encourage women up the ladder in your companies or you want to encourage women to actually get in to technical roles. That intent should not be placed in the CSR department of your organization 'cause that speaks volumes, right. To say oh, well that's in the social responsibility department or the HR, that just says okay, so you're not really, you don't think we're capable of helping you with your product or service. We're sort of part of this and it's like, no, you know. So I think you want to mainstream it, which is what a lot of I and D things are trying to do now. >> John: Inclusion and diversity. >> Inclusion and diversity techs. >> To make it part of the fabric not a department checkbox. >> Exactly, and-- >> That's what you're getting at right? >> Exactly, and you know the evolvement of these departments to include everybody and to make it more diverse is going to be not frictionless, it will be friction until a time where it won't even be necessary. I and D departments should have one goal, which is to work themselves out of a job. If they can work themselves out of a job, then the company would have done what it needs to be done. But I think-- >> John: Meaning it's self sufficient, it's self governing. People are humans, there's respect for individuals. >> Yes. >> I mean this is basically comes down to if you look at it as humans it takes, every conversation could be tabled as, what? There's a person on the other side, it's a human being. Not a woman or a white male or whatever. >> And you know-- >> There's not there yet, but I mean certainly that would be the end game, so in that scenario that department's out of business the I and R, the inclusion and diversity department has done it's job. >> You don't need one, because exactly. You don't need one because you know, you're okay, and I think capabilities is really important. In corporations, and this isn't anybody's fault. This is just how it's been done. This has just been the culture of it, right? Who gets invited to which meetings? Who gets invited to which conferences, right? And so we heard the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki saying you know, she had to sort of elbow a little bit to say why am I not allowed at a certain conference? And it's like, maybe just wake up to that and say, well why aren't you involving more people at conferences and think tanks because you know, I come from a oil and gas background, and people used to do a lot of deals on the golf course because oil and gas people play golf a lot and a lot of deals used to happen. Well in the Valley we don't play golf a lot but we do do other things, conferences or get togethers and if you don't include the people in your team as groups or representationally well then they're not going to be there when you make these decisions. So maybe just be a little bit-- >> Exclusionary is a problem and Kleiner Perkins was taken to task. They had ski trips apparently planned and they didn't, well mostly guys and they didn't invite the woman partner. It was a big scandal. This is where they kind of make that, it's a normative thing they've got to change the norms. >> It's change the norms and if you actually want your company which is made of all kinds of people, to move really far ahead, don't be like that. Include everybody because the only goodness about that is you'll go forward. You don't include somebody, well you're going to hurt them and then they won't be able to contribute because they just can't and then your product or your service is going to fail. It's really simple. >> You mentioned the Susan Wojcicki post, was an article in Fortune magazine where she wrote a guest article and she mentioned her daughter. >> Yes. >> Was feeling the narrative which by the way changed from the original Google memo to have a different meaning, but that's what she heard. So the question to you guys that I have on that is with Technovation and the work that you're doing, you're exposed to a lot of the ecosystem, across the world not just in the US from young girls. >> Yes. >> They see what's coming down from the top or the media, so certainly it's the game of telephone as things translate down to the level of the girls. Is there a pattern that you see emerging in their eyes as they look at this nonsense of narratives that are moving around. It's kind of a moving train the narrative of gender, Women in Tech but ultimately they have to internalize it and what patterns do you see and what do you guys do to either nullify that misperception and how do you amplify the real perceptions? >> Can I take that one? I was in Nairobi at the Safaricom headquarters. I don't know if you know Safaricom but these are the people who came up with M-PESA, and this is the currency that you can do on your mobile phone and Kenya uses M-PESA, like almost everybody in Kenya uses M-PESA. So Safaricom is a big tel-co and it's a big deal in Kenya, and Safaricom has taken Technovation, it has embraced Technovation in a big way. And the people who embraced Technovation at Safaricom in a big way are both male. So Josephine who is a tech woman fellow who came here and then went back and started Technovation. Her director, Clibeau Royal, he's male and the CEO of Techno, CEO of Safaricom is Bob Collymore and he's also male and these men, if I could clone these men in every country with every company you would see this sort of moving away and shifting away that women aren't good engineers or can't be good engineers. They are embracing it in such a way, not because they like Technovation because they know for their business having more women and equal women and a diverse company is making their product and their goods better. >> John: Yeah, their arbitraging the labor pool, why would you ignore talent? >> Exactly. >> Whether they're over 50 or they're women, it doesn't matter. >> I want to add to that, so there's quite a bit of data, so the pattern's are not anything different from what the message girls get from school and parents, right. So if you look at the data, there are a hundred countries that legally discriminate against women. And so what industry, what message industry is telling is really firstly doesn't filter through to the larger population. Silicon Valley is a completely different bubble. But overall the message is girls are given is like, this is not for you, right, and so especially in some of the more sort of populous dense countries in the world. And so we have to fight a lot of these kinds of perceptions from the ground up, and the number one sort of gatekeeper is the father and so a key part of what we have now done to date is to provide sort of education and training to the parents because... There's a very moving story that, we work in a remote town in South India and a mentor who's very dedicated has been trying to get these girls to participate in Technovation. He did that and then there were, one girl was actually offered a job but the father kept sort of saying no, not needed, no girl in my family ever needs to work, but he fought it. And then so then the girl actually gets a job, and then a year later the father calls the mentor and said, "You know what, I'm so grateful that you did it "because a day after she got the job I got hit in "an accident and I lost my job." But it's these kind of perceptions that have to be changed one person at a time, which is what makes this very hard. Unless you actually are able to get the media to change sort of the messaging. And I think in the US which is, there is some very interesting studies on that question, right. If you were to think, would there be more women in STEM in poorer developing countries versus richer highly developed countries, where would you see more women in STEM? The answer is actually the women in poorer countries like Iran, Malaysia. The reason is because in an individualistic society like in the US where there's a lot of emphasis on materialistic but it's also about are you happy? The conversation has changed to, from parents telling children do what makes you happy, and then you're very prone to advertising, and advertising works when it's highly targeted and highly gendered. And so in the '60s there was no such thing as pink and blue, now there is pink and blue, right? And so now we have just made our entire society entirely susceptible to advertising, and girls are passive and compliant and boys are aggressive. And so then when you are looking at the board structures, there's no, it's very very hard to fix the problem right there, right? You have to go down deeper because you don't get leaders who are compliant, maybe secretaries are compliant. But you have to fix the message that teachers give girls, that parents give their baby girls when they're born. And so industry is just sort of in the spotlight right now, but the issue is not that of industry it's also that of society. >> Industry (mumbles) are supporting you guys is interesting that this industry seems to be chipping, and certainly Silicon Valley's a little bit different as you said, but in general it is a cultural parent thing. Any plans there with Technovation to have a parent track? (laughing) >> Yes totally, I mean I think right now 10% of parents actually volunteer to be mentors, kind of like say Girl Scout troop leaders and so we are trying to figure out okay what is a way to involve parents and to make them part of the discussion. >> Well we'll keep the conversations going with Technovation you guys do incredible work. I'll just end the segment here by just telling a little bit about what you're working on right now? What are your goals? What are you passionate about? What are some of the things you'd like to do in the next half of the year, next year? What are some of the things going, Tara, you start. >> I think for us is to go deeper, so we are just launching a partnership with MIT to increase sort of the rigor of the curriculum, the rigor of the training and also provide more personalized learning and so this is the power of technology so we don't want to have girls drop out of the program because it's a hard program. So really trying to bring the best from industry to support that. >> Right and so you know my goal is to get Technovation to all the countries in the world, but keeping in mind we're making sure that it's delivered in a really good way and so girls complete the program et cetera, and the model that I hope to replicate in many other countries is the model that we're trying within Canada. So the new Canadian government is very interested in making sure that all of its citizens are you know, innovative, ready for the technology change that's coming there, and they launched a new fund called CanCode and so we have been part of that application process and we hope to have Technovation in almost every city in Canada, across Canada, and to really get this going and we, right now Canada is, everybody's like, you know, favorite country. And we hope that if we can do this in Canada, then other countries will follow and so that this program will get to as many girls as it can. >> Well you know how I feel. I feel computer science training in general should be standard in curriculums, because of all the conversation around automation. Automation is the fear is that jobs will go away. The data we have from our research over at Wikibon shows that the billions being automated away is non-differentiated labor. >> Right. >> Which implies that a working knowledge of those machines will shift to the value side. So you know I'm on the pro side of AI and automation personally. Especially I think it's great for-- >> But there's an education side too. >> There's the education side and I think this is a real fun area. You guys are at the cutting edge of it, both doing great work. I appreciate you taking the time and we'll have you back in for an update. Tara, Inar thanks so much. This is theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat happy music)

(rhythmic music) >> From Phoenix, Arizona, The Cube. At Catalyst Conference, here's your host, Jeff Frick. (rhythmic music) >> Hey, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls Who Code Catalyst Conference It's a great show, about 400 people; they're fourth year. It's going back to the Bay Area next year, so I wanted to come down, talk to some of the key notes, some of the speakers. And really give you a taste if you weren't able to make the trip to Phoenix this year of what's going on. So we're really excited to be joined by our next guest, Fran Maier, she co-founded Match, she co-founded TRUSTe. Serial entrepreneur, the start-up veteran. Fran, welcome. >> Thank you so much Jeff, It's great to be here. >> Absolutely. So you were giving a presentation on really what it is to be a woman entrepreneur. >> Yes, so I've been a internet entrepreneur for now more than twenty years going back to when we started Match.com. And I joined that in late 1994. We really launched around 1995, about 21 years ago, this month, April of 1995. >> Time flies >> And many of the things that were still very much, I think, in the early years of the impact of the internet and mobile and cloud and connectivity on our lives, but Match.com has proven to be what they call a unicorn, a very successful new business model, but more than that many, many people have found their life partner or at least a few good dates on Match.com. So I am always very happy about that. >> And you're way ahead of the curve. Now, I think, I don't know, I've been married for over twenty years, but I think a lot of people that's kind of the first way >> Yeah. to meet people. >> Not the second way. Where when you guys first made Match.com, that was a pretty novel idea. >> Well, well now they call dating where like we used to do it, where you met people at parties and bars, now that's called dating in the wild. >> In the wild (laughing) >> So the more natural thing is using Match.com. But from an entrepreneurial support, I was one of the only women who was involved in starting company in the mid-1990's, still women are less than 10% of TechFounders or venture-backed founders. Women raise a lot less money. And so one of my passions and why I am here at Girls in Tech is to try and impart some of the wisdom gleamed over twenty plus years. >> So what are some of the ways that you see that barrier starting to break down? Is it just, you just got to keep banging on it and slowly and slowly it will move and >> (murmers) >> So I think there's been some difference, I think it's a lot easier to be an entrepreneur of any kind now >> Well that's true. >> than it was twenty years ago. I mean, now having meals delivered to you and the sort of support like Girls in Tech, there was very little of that guidance or certainly there were very few role models, >> Right. >> Twenty years ago. So that certainly has changed. I think another big change, and this is probably over the last two or three years, is that now women feel they can speak out loud about some of the issues. And that there is some, men are willing to listen, >> Right >> Right >> at least some are. >> We still see things like TechCrunch a couple of years ago had a team present a new mobile app called Titstare. We still hear about things like that. We still, there was a survey called The Elephant in Silicon Valley that itemized stories and stats about women and sexual abuse, other kinds of harassment, exclusion, not being invited to sit at the table. So a lot of that stuff is still going on. But I feel like we can call it out a little bit easier. >> Right, right. And it's ... >> Without retribution potentially. >> Is there, is there, kind of a tipping point event, action, that you see potentially as to kind of accelerating ... accelerating it? >> Well I think the media, since lead-in has really kind of picked up on this and discovering it. And the Ellen Pao trial, last year; I spoke a little bit about that, where she brought suit to Kleiner Perkins. She lost the suit, but it started the dialogue. >> Right. >> So I think a lot of this is, is happening and my approach is to try and ... I see, I advise so many start ups. And I see business plans. And almost invariably the business plans from women aren't big enough. They don't say "Hey we're going to be a hundred million dollar company in five years. And we need to raise five million dollars to get there." >> Right. >> Women play it more safe, and, I don't think that, I'm trying to encourage them to take more risk, to figure out how to do it, to play to win. >> Right. Play big to win, right? Playing big. >> Play big to win, yes, swing big. >> It's interesting, on the Lean In, you know Sheryl Sandberg's, I don't know if ground breaking is the right word, but certainly ground breaking. >> Surely, yeah. >> But the Golden State Warriors right now, probably the most popular professional sports team in the country, at the zenith of their success, they have a Lean In commercial. I don't know if you've seen it in the Bay Area, >> I havent seen it! >> where all of the players talk about leaning in. And it just so happens that Steph Curry, their number one superstar, >> Sure. is very close to his wife. She has a cooking show. They're very family orientated. Green ... >> But I thought you were going to ... >> Draymond Green has his mom, who he just constantly just gushes about his mom. And so they, as a male sports team, have a whole commercial they run quite frequently on specifically Lean In. >> Well I, I appreciate that. I also, though, read the article that, that team is owned by bunch of venture capitalists. They all get together and play basketball and it reminded me of a little bit of another place where women have been excluded. And so I was talking to a venture capital friend of mine saying "Buy into the Warriors, or let's buy into a women's soccer team." And you know sports being what they are, it's almost a different thing, but the news about the women's soccer players being paid much less than the men, even though they generate more income. It's just another example, profession by profession where women are paid less or have less opportunity to advance. >> But to your point, I think people understand it, it's not right, but I think everyone pretty much knows that women aren't paid the same as men. But that was interesting about the soccer story, to your point is it was brought up. >> Yeah we could talk about it. >> It wasn't a retribution, right? It's like hey, you know, we're not getting paid and they listed the numbers in Sports Illustrated. They were dramatically different. And, in fact, you know, one of the knocks in the WNBA is that you can't make a living as a player in the WNBA. You just can't. They pay them like, I don't know >> So they should have been. Yeah. >> $60,000. Whatever it is. You know they have to go play in other places, foreign countries to make enough money to live. So I do think its interesting, your point that, you know, the exposure of the problem, the kind of acceptance that we need to do something about it, does seem to be in a much better place than it used to be. >> The other thing that I think that these things illustrate is one of the messages I try and get across, is women tend to settle for too little. You know, they don't necessarily negotiate for themselves. Out of college they don't do as well. They, I've talked to many women who they felt that when they were raising capital, or negotiating deals, that the men on the other side of the table, mostly, not always of course, it sort of said, "Hey this is great, you should be happy to get this. How many women get this?" And that's not really the issue. The issue should be, you should be getting what you deserve. I learned that the hard way, we talked about it a little bit, awhile ago, where Match.com was sold in 1998 for less than $10,000,000. And I was the general manager, I had grown it, we were number one, we were cash flow positive, although probably shouldn't have been. And I walked away with a hundred thousand dollars. And, at the time, sure that's a lot of money, but nobody seemed to encourage me that I probably could have raised the money and led the investment and had an equity round. A year later Match.com was sold from Send It to ISC for $70,000,000. And of course I didn't get anything. >> Yeah. >> So that's my big lesson. The good news is, ten years later, I took TRUSTe, which was a nonprofit, switched it to a for-profit, I raised the capital, and got my ownership in equity position. But tough lesson. >> Yeah, expensive one. >> Yeah. >> But those are the ones you learn though. (laughter) >> I could go through a few of those too. So Fran, we're running low on time. I wanted to give you the last word and get your perspective on, kind of, mentorship and sponsorship. We hear those words tossed around a lot. And that there's a significant difference between just being a mentor and actually being a sponsor, taking an active role in someone else's career. Pushing them to maybe uncomfortable places. Giving them, you know, kind of, the oomph, if you will, that, "Yes you can do this, you do belong." What are you seeing kind of the development of that as people try to help more women ascend, kind of up the line? >> Well, you know, I tend to think of mentorship as something that happens within a company and sponsorship can happen within a company, but advising, sponsoring, promoting, championing, are things that we certainly need to do within the entrepreneurial community of women. So, mentoring is, I see that as a little bit more passive, and I don't know why. But, it's important to have people to look up to and for you, role models are really important. But I think the active thing of championing or sponsoring or even being a more active coach or advisor, is a little bit more hands-on and willing to challenge, you know, you're not just a role model, you're really saying, "Tell me what you're dealing with, and let me see how I can help." I just got off a phone call from one of my advisees, she just raised the money, great news, you know, now she's freaking out about how to spend it. (laughing) >> Maybe with your next problem. >> Yeah. (laughter) >> Been there, done that. >> Right, right. >> You know. >> Well, it's good, good for helpin' them out, and Fran, thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Sure. Lot of fun. >> Absolutely. Track Fran down if you're a budding entrepreneur. She's been there, she's got the scars and the wounds from the early days, and learned from it on the success with TRUSTe. >> Thank you. >> And, some great videos on the web, by the way. I was watching them, the whole story on the Match thing was pretty funny. You'll enjoy it, so take the time ... >> There's one of them where I start to cry, I hate that, but what can you do? >> I didn't get to the crying part, but that's okay. >> Yeah, yeah, that's all right. >> That's what happens in Jerry McGuire all the time. All right, well thanks a lot Fran. >> Thanks so much. >> I'm Jeff Frick, you are watching The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. (rhythmic music)

>>Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the cube covering EMC world 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade and VCE. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas with the cube at EMC real 2015. I'm John ferry, the founder of Silicon Ang. I'm joined with two special guests. Stella Lowe. Who's the global communications at EMC runs, global communications and Amy Posey, neuro facilitator at peak teams. Welcome to the cube. >>So >>You had a session women of the world. We did it last year, but great cube session last year. Um, so I want to get a couple of quick questions. What's going on with women of the world, what you guys just came from there and you guys were on the panel and then what is a neuro facilitator? And then let's get into it. Let's talk about men and women, how we work together. >>Okay, great. So let's start with women of world. So, um, so last year we talked about the challenges that we face and how we reframe them into opportunities that we had some fantastic panelists, but this year I was really interested in the science behind men and women. So it's clear that we're different and we're all bled for success, but, but we're wired differently. And we kind of knew that already. I know we talked about it before John, but we now have the science behind it. We can look at brain scans and we can see that we, Oh, we have different brain patterns. We think differently, uh, different parts of the brain fire fire up when, in times of motivation and stress and people like Amy here, who've done lots of work into this, have having the stages. It was great to have her on the panel to discuss it. >>I'm going to give you a plug because EMC does all kinds of things with formula one cars, motorcycles, getting the data and understanding the race. But now you're dealing with people. So what is going on? Tell us what's up neuro facilitator and let's >>So a neuro facilitator is maybe the best made up job title in the world that I gave myself. So essentially what I do is I look at information about the brain and I curate the research that's out there. So there's a lot of new technology to actually read and look inside our heads. We all have a brain, but we don't necessarily all know how it works. So there's a lot more research and, and tools to read our brains and take a look inside. So what I do is I take that research and, and work with, um, neuroscientists and neurobiologist at Stanford, Columbia, UCLA, and, and reach out and figure out how do we take that information and make it easier, still attain. And I do it in the scope of leadership at organizations like EMC and other technology companies to figure out how do we work better? What information is out there? You know, soft skills and sort of relationship skills. I've always been sort of squishy, right? So now there's a lot more science and information about our brains that are informing it. The, the data's out there, what I do and what my job is, is to pull the data and figure out how do we make it into practical, useful applications for us at work at home, wherever we are. So that's essentially, I'm doing so you >>Guys discussed and how men and women are different. Actually look at the data. We have to give a lot of qualitative data. I mean, it keeps counselors in business. You know, the grant in the workforce, uh, balance is important, but we have a lot of that data, but what's the numbers. What is your findings? So >>What's interesting is looking at men and women's brains. What's fascinating is that we are more alike than dissimilar in looking at a brain. If you looked at a brain scan, one of a man and woman, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two, but they're now finding and looking at different parts of the brain in different functions. So for instance, men have approximately 6% more gray matter than women. So in terms of the gray matter, that's the thinking brain essentially, and women have more white matter than gray. Matter about 9% more than men. And the white matter is what connects the brain and communicate both front and back and side to side. And so you can make some extrapolation of that information and say, you know, men may focus more on issues, solutions, problems, whereas women sort of think more broadly or wider. >>So, I mean, there are generalities, but a lot of the sciences is fascinating. There's also some interesting science about the hippocampus, which is, um, sort of deep. If this is your brain, it's deep inside the brain and the hippocampus is the memory center. And it's what they're finding is that for women, they tend to store emotional memories more effectively. So happy, sad, fearful those types of emotions get stored more effectively in the hippocampus. Whereas men oftentimes during stress, the hippocampus actually has a challenge in making connections. So that's where, again, some of the, the focus and determination and silo viewed sometimes that men have in situations or problems comes into play. Um, there's one other piece, the anterior cingulate cortex, which is sort of within the brain and that's the brains error detector. And it turns out it's a little bit bigger in women. So women sort of tend to look for, uh, issues CA you know, problems, um, maybe less solution focused, especially under times of stress and, and a lot of this, data's interesting. >>It, it causes you to make some generalities, you know, not everybody is going to operate in that way. Your mileage may theory, but it's, it's good because it helps us inform some of the quirky behavior that we deal with at work and figuring out why, why don't you do that? Why do you do that and installed that women being better or women using more of the brain or less of the brain it's, it's, it's simply about we, we, if all brains away from differently, we both bring different things to the table. And how do you take both of those benefits and bring them forward into a better outcomes? >>Always great to talk about because in the workforce, people are different. And so differences is a term that we use, like, you know, with kids learn differently, some have evolved differently and men and women have had differences. So the data shows that that's clear. Um, I want to share a quote that my wife shared on Facebook. It says mother, um, well, a worried mother does better research than the FBI. So, um, I bring that up, you know, it's instinctual. So a lot of it's also biological and also environmental talk about the dynamics around that, that wiring, because you're wired by your upbringing too, that affects you. And what's the, what's the data show in the biology. >>So it's interesting because the, the key piece is that it's not just the biological brain differences. It's, it's a whole host of factors that leave a footprint on us, in our behavior. So it's our education, it's our, uh, you know, where we, where we grew up, our culture is part of that. It's also gender stereotypes that play a role in how we operate. And I think all of those things leave a footprint on a, an and lead us to different behaviors. And so you can't just say it's the, the, the information that's on our brains. It's a whole host of factors that influence. So my study of looking at how the brains are a little bit different and what the research is coming, it's, it's blended in with research around leadership and things like confidence and motivation in the workplace bias in the workplace. And they're, they're showing very different things. >>So for instance, if you think about confidence, we did an interesting exercise in the event at women of world. And I asked, you know, there's, there's a lot about confidence and confidence is essentially the will or motivation to act. So how many women in the room, uh, would raise the, you know, go up for a job that they were really interested in and fascinated by, but maybe weren't a hundred percent qualified for, like, how many of you have maybe turned down that job or decided not to apply because it wasn't the right time. Like you, you're pretty competent, but not a hundred percent confident in it. And it was funny because the majority, all the women's hands went up in the room. So then I asked him, I flipped the question in the room and I asked the men in the room. I said, okay, if you were only about 50% confident for a job that you were going up for, would you, of course, right. Like, yes, I >>Fabricate some stuff on their resume and you make >>Them look bigger. So, exactly. So what's interesting is testosterone plays a role in confidence and motivation at work. And it turns out men have 10 times the amount of testosterone as women do. So part of that is that aggression, but we both have it, but that, that aggressive factor, that idea to go after something, to be more confident, um, women are behind the curve in that, from the research that I've seen. So it takes more effort to, to, to be able to have the confidence, to go for it and to sort of break down those barriers that exist for women to, to go after those jobs that they want, even if it's not a hundred percent. And so we did a, an exercise in boosting confidence in testosterone called power posing. And Amy Cuddy out of Harvard does a, a whole Ted talk on it, which is fascinating. >>But the idea is that you, you know, you, you put your chest back, you put your hands on your hips and it helps boost your testosterone up to about 20%. And it reduces cortisol, which is a stress hormone. So it's a, it's a quick way. You don't do it in front of people. You do it sort of on the sly or else you kind of, you don't look very nice to others, but you, you boost your confidence doing that. And it's just a small sort of brain hack that you can do to give yourself an upper hand, knowing that knowing the science behind it. So it's a behavior changing type of research that's coming out, which I think is really, >>That's really interesting, but now it translates into leadership and execution in the workforce. So people are different than men and women are different that changes the dynamic around what good is, because if your point about women not asking for that job or having confidence to the field, like I'm not going to go for it, like a man bravado, whatever testosterone that's what mean that that's the benchmark of what drive means. So this came up with Microsoft CEO at the Anita board conferences, which we had a cube there. And, and this is a big issue. So how do HR, how do the managers, how do people recognize the differences and what does the data show, and, and can you share your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, so I think a lot of it comes down to bias and bias is essentially a shortcut that we use in our brains to take less energy. And it's not a bad thing. It's, it's something we all do. And it's conscious and it's unconscious. So bias, I think is a key piece of that. And the research on bias is fascinating. It's very, it's, it's very popular topic these days, because I think being able to do a couple of things, be aware that there are hundreds of biases and they're both conscious and unconscious, uh, acknowledge that it exists, but not legitimize it not make that. Okay. The third piece is to, to counter it and, and being able to counter bias by making sure that people have opportunities. And even though you may have re removed hypothetical barriers explicitly stating that you want people, men, or women to apply for promotions, be this type of leader, not just assume that because there are no barriers that it's okay, but really be explicit in how you give people opportunities and let them know that they're out there. I think that's really key. >>Yeah. That brings up the point around work life balance, because, you know, I have a family of four, four kids it's stressful just in and of itself to have four kids, but then I go to the workforce and the same with women too. So there's also a home dynamic with leadership and biases and roles. Um, what's your take on any data on the how of that shifting persona realities, if you will, um, shapes the data. >>It's interesting because it's, it's something that we even talked about in the session that it's a struggle and, and, um, Bev career from Intel was talking about that. There's a period of time that actually is really tough to keep women in the workforce. And it's that time where you're growing your family, you're growing your career. And oftentimes things sort of struggle. And I, I read something recently around women in STEM careers, over a 10-year period, 42% of women drop out of the workforce in comparison to 17% of men. And so I think there's a lot, a ways to go in terms of being able to set up environments where working life is integrated, because it's, it's not even balanced anymore. It's integration. And how do you set up structures so that people can do that through how they work through how they connect with others. And, and to me, that's a big piece is how do you keep people in the workforce and still contributing in that critical point in time? And, you know, Intel hasn't figured it out. It's a tough challenge, >>Stamina. We're a big fans of women in tech, obviously because we love tech athletes. We'd love to promote people who are rock stars and technology, whether it's developers to leaders. And I also have a daughter, two daughters. And so two questions. One is women in tech, anything you could share that the data can talk to, to either inspire or give some insight and to, for the young women out there that might not have that cultural baggage, that my generation, at least our worse than older than me have from the previous bias. So motivating young daughters out there, and then how you deal with the career advice for existing women. >>So the motivating young women to get into tech, um, Bev shared a really absolutely fascinating statistic that between the ages of 12 and 18, it's incredibly important to have a male support model for young girls to get into STEM careers, that it was absolutely critical for their success. And it's funny because the question came up like, why can't that be a woman too? And what's interesting. And what we find is oftentimes we give men the short shrift when they try and support women, and we don't want to do that. We want to support men supporting women because when that happens, we all win. Um, and so I think that's a big piece of it is starting young and starting with male support as well as female support. So many women who, who cite men as, as he had mental was in that gray, you know, or in their daily life. And it's pretty important that they can feel that they can do that. >>And this goes back down the wiring data that you have the data on how we're were wired. It's okay, guys, to understand that it's not an apples to apples. So to speak, men are from Mars. Women are from beans, whatever that phrase is, but that's really what the data is. >>And being explicit to men to say, we want you to support women instead of having men take a back seat feeling like maybe this isn't my battle to fight. It's, it's really important to then encourage men to speak up to in those, those situations to, to think about sort of women in tech. One of, uh, a really interesting piece of research that I've seen is about team intelligence and what happens on teams and Anita Willy from Carnegie Mellon produced this really fascinating piece of research on the three things that a team needs to be more intelligent. It's not just getting the smartest people in the room with the highest IQ. That's a part of it. You want table stakes, you want to start with smart people, but she found that having women, more women on a team actually improved the team's overall intelligence, the collective intelligence and success of a team. So more women was the first one. The second was there's this ability and women tend to be better at it, but the ability to read someone's thoughts and emotions just by looking at their eyes. So it's called breeding in the mind's eye. So just taking a look and being able to sense behavior, um, and, and what someone's thinking and feeling, and then being able to adjust to that and pivot on that, not just focusing on the task at hand, but the cohesion of a team with that skill made a difference. >>It's like if it's a total team sport, now that's what you're saying in terms of how use sport analogy, but women now you see women's sports is booming. This brings up my, my, your, uh, awesome research that you just did for the folks out there. Stella was leading this information generation study and the diversity of use cases now with tech, which is why we love tech so much. It's not just the geeky programmer, traditional nail role. You mentioned team, you've got UX design. You have, um, real time agile. So you have more of a, whether it's a rowing analogy or whatever sport or music, collaboration, collaboration is key. And there's so many new disciplines. I mean, I'll share data that I have on the cube looking at all the six years and then even women and men, the pattern that's coming up is women love the visualization. It's weird. I don't know if that's just so it's in the data, but like data scientists that render into reporting and visualization, not like just making slides like in the data. Yeah. So, but they're not writing, maybe not Python code. So what do you guys see similar patterns in terms of, uh, information generation, it's sexy to have an iWatch. It's >>Cool. So like a cry from Intel on the panel, she gave a great statistic that actually, uh, it's more it's women that are more likely to make a decision on consumer tech than men. And yet a lot of the focus is about trying to build tech for men, uh, on the, you know, if consumer tech companies want to get this right, they need to start thinking about what are women looking for, uh, because, uh, they're the ones that are out there making these decisions, the majority of those decisions. >>Yeah. I mean, it's an old thing back in the day when I was in co, um, right out of college and doing my first startup was the wife test. Yeah. Everything goes by the wife because you want to have collaborative decision-making and that's kind of been seen as a negative bias or reinforcement bias, but I think what guys mean is like, they want to get their partner involved. Yeah. So how do, how do we change the biases? And you know, where I've talked to a guy who said, the word geek is reinforcing a bias or nerd where like, I use that term all the time, um, with science, is there, I mean, we had the, the lawsuit with Kleiner Perkins around the gender discrimination. She wasn't included. I mean, what's your take on all of this? I mean, how does someone practically take the data and put it into practice? >>I think the big thing is, you know, like I said, acknowledging that it exists, right? It's out there. We've been, I feel like our brains haven't necessarily adapted to the modern workplace and the challenges that we've dealt with because the modern workplace is something that was invented in the 1960s and our brains have evolved over a long time. So being able to handle some of the challenges that we have, especially on how men and women operate differently at the workplace, I think is key, but calling it out and making it okay to acknowledge it, but then counter where it needs to be countered where it's not right. And being explicit and having the conversations I think is the big piece. And that's what struck me with the Kleiner Perkins deal was let's have the conversation it's out there. A lot of times people are reticent to, to have the conversation because it's awkward and I need to be PC. And I'm worried about things. It's the elephant in the room, right. But it actually is. Dialogue is far better than leaving it. >>People are afraid. I mean, guys are afraid. Women are afraid. So it's a negative cycle. If it's not an out in the open, that's what I'm saying. >>And the idea is it's, what can we do collectively better to, to be more positive, to, to frame it more positively, because I think that makes a bigger difference in terms, in terms of talking about, Oh, we're different. How are we the same? How can we work together? What is the, the connection point that you bring, you bring, we all bring different skills and talents to the table. I think it's really taking a look at that and talking about it and calling it out and say, I'm not great at this. You're great at this. Let's, let's work together on what we can do, uh, more effectively, >>Okay. Team sports is great. And the diversity of workforce and tech is an issue. That's awesome. So I'd ask you to kind of a different question for both of you guys. What's the biggest surprise in the data and it could be what reinforced the belief or insight into something new share, uh, a surprise. Um, it could be pleasant or creepy or share it. >>Price to me is intuition. So we always talk about women having intuitions. I've had men say, you know, well, my wife is so intuitive. She kind of, she kinda gets that and I've had that in the workplace as well. And I think the biggest surprise for me was that we can now see, we've now proved the intuition. Intuition is a thing that women have, and it's about this kind of web thinking and connecting the dots. Yeah. So we sort of store these memories deep, deep inside. And then when we see something similar, we then make that connection. We call it intuition, but it's actually something it's a kind of a, you know, super recall if you like, and, and, and replaying that situation. But that I think was the biggest surprise to me, Amy. So I would think that the thing that, that always astonishes me is the workplace environment and how we set up environments sometimes to shoot ourselves in the foot. >>So, so often we'll set up, uh, a competitive environment, whatever it is, let's let's and it's internal competition. Well, it turns out that the way that the brain chemicals work in women is that competition actually froze us into, to stress or threat cycle much more easily than it does to men, but men need it to be able to get to optimal arousal. There's a lot of interesting research from Amy Ernest in, at Yale and, and that piece of how you can manipulate your environment to be more successful together to me is absolutely key. And being able to pull out elements of competition, but also elements of collaboration, you kind of knew it, but the science validates it and you go, this is why we need to make sure there's a balance between the two. So everyone's successful. So to me, that's the aha. I could listen to Amy all day and how we apply it to the workplace. That's the next big step. Yeah. >>Yeah. You guys are awesome. And thanks so much for sharing and I wish we could go long. We're getting the hook here on time, but is there any links and locations websites we can, people can go to to get more information on the studies, the science. So I, a lot of my day curating >>And looking for more research. So peak teams.com/blog is where I do a lot of my writing and suggestions. Um, it's peak teams, P E K T E M s.com. And so I run our blog and kind of put my musings every once in a while up there so that people can see what I'm working on. Um, but they can reach out at any time. And I'm on Twitter at, at peak teams geek. Speaking of geeks, I embraced the geek mentality, right? >>Well, we have, I think geeks comment personally, but, um, final point, I'll give you the last word, Amy, if you could have a magic wand to take the science and change the preferred vision of the future with respect to men and women, you know, working cohesively together, understanding that we're different decoupled in science. Now, what would you want to see for the environment work force, life balance? What would be the magic wand that you would change? >>I think being able to make women more confident by helping reduce bias with everybody. So being more keyed in to those biases that we have in those automatic things we do to shortcut and to be more aware of them and work on them together and not see them as bad, but see them as human. So I think that's my big takeaway is remove, remove more bias. >>Fantastic. Stella Lowe, and Amy Posey here inside the cube. Thanks so much. Congratulations on your great work. Great panel. We'll continue. Of course, we have a special channel on SiliconANGLE's dot TV for women in tech. Go to SiliconANGLE dot DV. We've got a lot of cube alumni. We had another one here today with Amy. Thank you for joining us. This is the cube. We'll be right back day three, bringing it to a close here inside the cube live in Las Vegas. I'm John Forney. We'll be right back after this short break.

prepare for the extraction point we've been briefed on all the important stories and events in the world of emerging information now it's time to extract the data and turn it into action live from the silicon angle studios in the heart of Silicon Valley this is extraction point with John furrier okay we're live back in the palo alto studios i'm john furrier for the extraction point we extract the signal from the noise and my special guest today i'm excited to have here is Paul Martino who is the founder of aggregate knowledge and also storied entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who now lives in Philly with his family comes out here Paul is known for among other things being a great entrepreneur tech geek loves tech loves to build build startups started one of the first social networks with Mark Pincus called tribe started his own company funded by Kleiner Perkins with his partner Chris law called aggregate knowledge which is booming and doing great and now more famous for being the first round investor in zynga company that is exploding with revenue as Kleiner Perkins said is the of all their portfolio comes in the history more than Google's made more money faster than anybody Paul Martino welcome to the extraction point great to see you John as always awesome to see you first I got to start with your now I forgot to mention that you're actually running a venture firm so in addition to being famous with Zynga you're running bullpen capital so first give the folks out there an update and first confirm or deny you were in the first round of Zynga or not yes the the first round of Zynga there were several institutional investors and several individual investors Morocco me Reid Hoffman were individual investors Avalon Union Square accelerator ventures and foundry where the institutional investors in that first round Peter was Peter Thiel yeah Peter was also an individual investor in the first round so that's officially the first round investors of Zynga we have clarified that and that is now hot on the books but now you're you've been successfully founded aggregate knowledge you know have a CEO running that what's the update with aggregate knowledge yeah so great guy runs that company as a guy you need to meet and have on this show Dave jakubowski aggregate knowledge really went in a direction where all of the focus was on providing data and analytics to the major ad agencies and John John Nelson who started organic one of the first agencies is now the CEO of Omnicom digital joined the board and I said look we got to get a guy who's an ad heavy in here and jakubowski was previously the GM of microsoft adcenter and had a senior position at specific media and we brought him in and he's just been kickin butt our greek knowledge has really really made a significant significant contribution in the area of data and analytics for these major agencies and he was very able to bring in a crew of people know exactly how to run that business so you're a big fan of big data then mm-hmm oh yeah we just had a big special yesterday on Big Data mentioned about it so that's cool we're going to get into a lobbyist I was just kind of get the small talk out of the way here your current role is the founder of bullpen capital right so bullpen to me I'm a baseball not I love baseball bullpen means you go the bullpen for relief right yep thank God close the game out hopefully or mid-innings relief so tell us about what bullpen is it's a special fund as I know from reading talk to you to target an expansion of this new seed and explosive new funding environment Bryce plain force right I'll tell you how we got the name at the end too so here's what happened I've been investing with a lot of the so-called super angels and that's kind of a misnomer because they really are actually in some cases actual small venture firms to I've been investing with a lot of them since they got off the ground Josh Kopelman from first round is one of the first investors in aggregate knowledge mike maples was an early advisor to the company I've known Jeff claw be a who run soft tech since he was at Reuters and with the late 90s and so I've worked with these guys done a lot of investing and we were me and my buddies Duncan Davidson rich Melman were sitting around over summer of 09 doing a little bit data analysis right another big data assignment we realized that as more and more these seed funds got created they were creating an inventory of companies that weren't quite ready to go to the traditional venture guy but we're also difficult to bridge from just the seed guys because the see guys at that time didn't have really big funds so wait a minute you've got some really good companies here is to clarify the for the folks out there seed funds don't traditionally have follow-on big funds like a VC firm right that's what you're referring to yeah they tend not to have as bigger reserve so if a big fun writes you a five-million-dollar check and you stub your toe you can probably get some more money to get through the hardships but a lot of the the new super angel funds or smaller funds and you get a five hundred thousand dollar check and if you need another five hundred thousand dollars it can frequently be very difficult because they make so many investments with smaller reserves yeah and so you've got dave McClure clavey a maples first round capital true ventures made the first round truevision more traditional VC then say dave McClure and mike maples and claw VA they're out doing some really good work out their funding really good company spending a lot of time I know I've seen them working their butt off yeah they need some air support right they need some cover the little bullpen is that that's you come in and say hey for your stars they're going to rise up yep and so that's exactly right so what happens is here's what the analysis we did turned out of their portfolio thirty percent of their portfolios in aggregate quickly are really exciting companies you know and they quickly go up to a venture auction and the guys and sandhill rotor excited about it about twenty percent of their deals you know that they don't like too much it's kind of just floating there yeah that you know the entrepreneur wasn't a fit that team didn't execute that left fifty percent of their deals in the middle which they kind of were too early to tell as Mike maple sometimes says they were in an extended learning and discovery phase they hadn't quite figured out what their models yeah and this de pivoting stuff's going on right now the Marcus changes turbulence so these guys are right and so you look you look at some examples and you go well wait a minute for every zynga that goes up into the right immediately go look at the stories of chegg and modcloth and etsy and quite frankly the in-between round on twitter and for everyone Zynga that you find that just hits it out of the park the right way there were four to five companies that went through that hard intermediate round that it was difficult in the environment where you have only a potentially thinly capitalized seed fund in front of you go get through that difficult point I said guys you need a bull pen and way we came up with the name is I'm involved in a deal with Chad Durbin who used to pitch for the Phillies and now as a relief pitcher for the cleveland indians and he was in our office and we were talking about this idea and Chad said yeah it's kind of like you're building a bullpen for the seed guys I'm like that's exactly right that's the name we got to go with and so fortunately I was involved in in this company called showcase you which is actually cool cited suppose for recruiting for college scholarships for a collegiate athletes right you're a high school student you throw 80 miles an hour left hand it and you're in 10th grade how do you figure out where the right scholarships are so Durbin and some of the Phillies where the original investors in this company called showcase you it's actually a cool company as the combine work out online basically fries for the high school kids and because the high school kids sometimes are in tough geographies to get to you're in you're in a small rural area in Nebraska how do they find out that you're the guy who can throw 89 miles an hour great so I mean this VC market so basically you're referring to with bullpen right now is an innie and you've been in our sprayer so you live through classic you know classic financing your last company financed by kleiner perkins and a tribe i forget who financed tribe yet Mayfield was the lead investor may feel again another traditional VC firm all tier 1 VCS although may feel people are you now is slipped a little bit that's some of their key partners who have slipped away but they've all moved on what you're really referring to is there's a new dynamic of entrepreneurship going on now we're now there are some break outcomes that just need a little bit more time to mature in the old model they just be kind of closed down the VC guy would be on the Bora has just a pain in the ass and you know really not growing and do another round it's they get kind of lazy in a way if they got 10 10 boards are on so with the super angels and the fact that does take a lot of cash to start a company you've got more deals getting done so the the Y Combinator the Dave McClure's and chef claw va's in the mike maples and sometimes SiliconANGLE labs which we're doing here is telling you about right we're funding companies the more [ __ ] is funded a better will you come in as you keep them alive longer just wreck the pivot possibly that's right and so what happens is right now the venture industry is being disrupted the same way the venture industry has funded companies that have rupted other industries they are being disrupted in the exact same way and the disruption happened from below as always happens it started in seed stage now in order for the disruption to go all the way through there need to be companies that come after seed stage investors that have the same philosophy and mentality pro entrepreneur easy terms operating people who get their hands dirty to get deals done you need that in the B stage and in the sea stage and here's what our prediction is John our prediction is a few years from now there'll be a company that comes after bullpen that does series c and series d financing or mezzanine financing but the same philosophy is bullpen and then DST s at the end of that chain and you can imagine building companies that go all the way to liquidity that you got money from maples first bullpen second this unnamed company third and you went quasi-public with DST and you've bypassed the entire venture scheme entirely and the entire institutional public markets complete liquidity wealth creation companies creating jobs I mean this is new paradigm I mean this isn't amazing I mean this is a potentially amazing point in the history of us finance the idea that you could go two billion dollar outcomes by passing not only the public markets on the back side but the traditional venture ecosystem on the front side I mean that is a disruption if ever there was one amen I mean hi and with you a hundred percent the other some people who will argue regulation is if market forces first of all I'm a big believer in market forces so I think what you're doing is clearly identifying an opportunity that dynamics are all lying lining up entrepreneurs are validating it and so but the questions are regulations I mean first of all I'm anti-regulation but as you start to get to that liquidity and some are arguing I even wrote a blog post about saying hey you know basically Facebook's public merry go buddy what do you say to those guys this is the change in the history of this financial asustor we want the government regulating this yeah so my co-founder of both i started bullpen with two really good guys Duncan Davison who was the founder covad was advantage point for years asking them to buy government regulation would go bad i mean what happened then because of the I lack warsi like Wars but only that the some extent covet doesn't exist unless the telco 1994 happens through in some ways a creation of the government to good point it's social right but but think about it the arbitrariness of government as opposed to a well-thought-out centralized plan so anyway so Duncan sometimes uses that phrase you know he talks a lot about the way in which the government you know that the worst thing you can ever hear is I'm with the government I'm here to help right i mean that's about the way it goes but his point around the the the new quasi public markets is money we'll find a way yeah and when sarbanes-oxley happens and it's tough to go public and you're a CEO like Pincus who's running one of the great all-time companies in Silicon Valley at Zynga he says you know going public is not an entrance is not an exit it's an entrance that's that's this quote what why would I why do I need that headache I mean I was just talking with Charles beeler who sold for the hell dorado he sold to compel in one of his investments to dell for over a billion dollars and and 3 para nother firm he wasn't on that one that was sold to HP during storage wars he's talking about the lawsuits literally this shakedown of immediately filed lawsuits you know you could have got more money so this is this public markets brutal no doubt no doubt i think what you're doing is a revolution I'm all excited about this new environment again anything with his liquidity wealth creation with the engine of innovation can be powered that's fantastic look back the startups okay get back to where you're playing yeah the history of Silicon Valley was built on the notion of value add some have said over the past 10 years venture capital has not been truly value add and some were arguing value subtract and then just money so what you're talking about here is getting in and helping me stay alive what's the value added side of the equation mean I know that a lot of these folks like like like ourselves here it's looking angle McClure Xavier and maples and true ventures they roll their sleeves up first round capital right before we can only provide so much it kind of expands right you guys are filling in the capital market side right how are you guys helping out on the value add because a lot of those companies may be the next Twitter right you've got a bridge to finance that's right allow them to do the pivot or get the creative energy to grow and they hit that market if they hit that hit it going vertical you got it kind of sometimes nurture it you guys have a strategy for that talk about the so let me let me give you my perspective on that so I think 10 years ago when you're starting a company the name of the venture firm was more important than potentially the partner on your board ten years later the name of the firm matters much less and it's the name of the partner and it's the operating experience that that partner partner brought to bear and you go talk to the 24 year old entrepreneur verse the 34 year old entrepreneur the 24 entrepreneur 24 year old entrepreneur wants a guy like you or a guy like me on his board he wants have been there done that started a company was a CEO exited it got fired hired people fired other people scar tissue scars knowledge experience exactly and if a good friend of mine who's in the traditional business I'll leave his name out of it he sometimes says the following phrase the era of the gentleman VC is over and what he means by the era of the gentleman VC is over is you know if your background is you were a junior associate who came in with a finance degree in an MBA and it never started a company you're not going to get picked by the entrepreneur anymore in 10 years from now almost everyone in the business is going to have a resume that looks more like a Cristal Paul Martino a mark pincus that you name all the people who we've started our companies with if there's a lot more hochberg with track record certainly with with the kind of big companies in the valley just in our generation yet started with netscape google paypal right now i want to see facebook is and then now's inga either the ecosystem is just entered intertwined I mean for every failure that spawns more success right so that's right that's a Silicon Valley way yeah well a tribe was tribe was a perfect example of a successful failure tribe was not a successful outcome but it was in many ways a very successful way to actually pioneer what became social networking you know investments got made into Facebook as a result of that Zynga in aggregate knowledge were both the outcrops of what was learned to some extent the original business case of Zynga was remarkably simple there is a ton of time being spent on social networks and after you get done finding your buddies and looking at photos what do you do and Pincus is original vision to some extent was let's have games to play and that insight doesn't happen that way unless you don't do tribe and go into the trenches and get the scars on your back and your in your your second venture of our adventure right at the tribe was aggregate knowledge was similar concept people are connected I mean you got to be excited though I mean you know you were involved in tribes very early on all the stuff that you dealt with activity streams newsfeed connections the social science you know the one that one of the nicest pieces of validation of this recently was over in q4 of 2010 seven of the patents that me Chris law Elliot low and Brian Waller wrote got issued now they're all owned by Cisco Cisco bought tribe in the end they bought the assets in the and the patent filings but there are patent filings that go back to 2002 on the corner stones and hallmarks of what social networking really is that we wrote back then that have now issued order granted or sitting in the cisco portfolio and well that's kind of like a consolation prize and that there wasn't a big outcome for tribe it is very validating to see that those original claims on really cutting-edge stuff have been had been issued and I'm excited about that you should be proud i'm proud to know your great guy you have great integrity you're going to do well as a venture capitalist i think you people will trust you and you're fair and there's two types of people in this world people who help people people who screw people so you know you really on one side of the other you're you're not in between you're truly on the on the good side I really enjoy you know having chatting with you but let's talk about entrepreneurship from that perspective about patents you know I'm try was an outcome that we all can relate to the peplum with Facebook of what Zuckerberg and and those guys are doing over there that's entrepreneurship so talk to the entrepreneurs out there yeah hey you know what you do some good work it all comes back to you talk about the the Karma of entrepreneurship a failure is not a bad thing it's kind of a punch line these days I'll failures are stepping stone to the next thing but talk about your experience and lets you and i talk about how to deal with faith for those first-time entrepreneurs out there in their 20s what just give them a sense of how to approach their venture and if it fails or succeeds what advice would you give them yeah well like winning and losing is important part of the game I mean certain companies are going to be successful in certain ones art and if you go and start ten unsuccessful companies maybe this isn't exactly the business for you but that said how you the game is important as well and if you're a high integrity guy who gets good investors and you make quality decisions and let's say the market wasn't a fit you're going to get the money the second time because people said you know I work with that guy that guy really did a good job you know they never got it quite right but this is a guy learn the right lessons so when I'm coaching a first-time CEO and i'm the CEO coach of a couple guys now you know i'm looking for someone who's sitting there going hey i not only want to do this to win and be successful but i want to learn i I want to do this better than no one no one walks in and says I learn from my failure I hope I'm successful I mean you let it go and say hey I'm gonna be successful I want to win failure is not an option but failure happens right i mean you know it's bad breaks that mean but but here is the key less I tell this to all of the entrepreneurs I work with you will not be successful if you're making mistakes that were made by those before you if you make novel mistakes you're in good company right and so only ever make a novel mistake I made a good example this is one claw and I started Chris law and I started aggregate knowledge aggregate knowledge was the original business model was around recommendations and there were dead bodies in front of us there was net perceptions there was fire fly and she was in the office this morning with Yazdi one of the founders of [ __ ] cast with it man yeah so predictive analytics residi what did we do we went out and we I flew out and met John riedle University of Minnesota who was the founder of net perceptions I dug up yes d i got these guys on my advisory board and while aggregate knowledge was not successful in the recommendation business and pivoted into the data management thing we made novel mistakes we did not repeat the mistakes of met perceptions and firefly and so i think that's an important important lesson to an entrepreneur if you're going into an area that has dead bodies in front of you you better research them you better know who they are you better know what happened and you better make sure that if you screw it up you at least screw it up in a way which none of us could have predicted yeah that's the only way you're going to get a hall pass on that well let's talk about talk about some of the hot Renisha of activity saw so you're in that sector where you're feeding the seed the super angels in the first rounds early stage guys and it's a good fit what about some of the philosophies on like the firms out there there's of this to this two philosophies I just taught us to an entrepreneur here you met on the way out a street speaker text and there at seven you know under a million dollars in financing hmm series a yeah and then you got in the news yesterday color 41 million dollars building to win magnin flipboard a hundred million dollars i got this is these guys that we know i mean there are yep our generation and a little bit around the same time and certainly they have pedigree so remember the old days the arms race mentality right when the sector at all costs right that's kind of what's going on here i mean some of the command that kind of money there's actually an auction going on what do you make of that I mean bubble is an arms race so so rich Melman inside a bullpen de tu fascinating analysis he looked at the full portfolio of 28 took about 20 of the best super angels by the way the super angles are all different some are micro vc summer buying options etc so so first off super angel is a weird word but it's everybody from Union Square and foundry on one side first round and flooding but any take the top 20 or so of these guys and look at their portfolios what's amazing about their portfolios is the unlike 10 and 20 years ago in prior tech bubbles there are not 20 companies doing the same thing when you categorize them yeah ten percent are in ad tech ten percent our direct-to-consumer consider but like forty percent are one-offs that is this is I think one of the first times in the history of venture that forty percent of the deal flow is a one-off unique business idea that there aren't 30 guys going to do and I think that the importance of that to what happens in this next stage of the tech boom we don't know what that means yet because back in the day well we need to just we're venture firm we need to disk drive company okay so your venture firm you've got your disk drive companies and I'll 20 venture friend knows if drive out and created the herd mentality everyone talks about with venture yep mean I was an opponent on a talk on here in the cube and I don't think I actually put in a blog post but I called the era of entrepreneurship like with open sores and low cost of entry with cloud computing and now mobility the manure of innovation where you know in the manure that's being out in the mark place mushrooms are growing out of it right and these you don't know what's going to be all look the same in a way so how do you tell the good ones from the bad ones so it's hard right so you have a lot of one you have a lot more activity hence angel list hence the super in rice so so the economics and the deal flow are all there the question is how do you get them from being just a one-off looked good on paper flame out the reality yeah well look in my opinion seed stage investing is about investing in people and I think when big firms trying to seed stage investing there's an impedance mismatch a lot of times because they want more evidence they want to know did the market work to the management then this is this is an early stage venture and am I going to want to go in a foxhole with this person and in many ways the good super angels are instinctive investors who are betting on people that they want to be in the foxhole with and yeah did they do it before do they know how to hire people is the market reasonably interesting but guess what they're probably gonna pivot three times so wait a minute at the end of the day you got to invest in people later stage venture is not you can look at discounted cash flows you can look at mezzanine financing you can do traditional measures but if you're going to invest in two people who have a prototype and need five hundred thousand dollars you're investing in people at that point what do you think about the OC angel is I'm a big fan of and recently was added thanks to maybe out there but even though i'm not i don't really co-invest with anyone else other than myself maybe you guys would bullpen but but if that's a phenomenon you don't have angel list which is opening up doors for deal flow companies are getting funded navales getting yeah a ton of activity nivea doing great job with venture hacks i get y combinator which I called the community college of startups they bring in like they open the door and I mean that an actually good way don't mean that negatively I mean they're giving access to entrepreneurs that never had access to the market right and now you have Paul Graham kind of giving the halo effect or thrown the holy water on certain stars and they get magically funded but yesterday at an event and they're they're packed right I've heard from VC saying I'm not invited because I didn't wasn't part of the original investment class so it seems that Y comma day is getting full yeah so do you see that you agree is there will be an over lo y combinator you know kind of like I've TED Conference has you know Ted they'll be you know y combinator Boston little franchises will be like barcamp for sure I mean look and look at techstars they franchise they'd I was over there with Dave Tisch in New York there's TechStars New York after those TechStars older in techstars seattle there is no doubt in my mind that right now there is an over investment in the seed stage meaning that there is a little bit of a seed bubble going on that's not necessarily bad though because in terms of raw dollars there's not a bubble yet Rory who's over at rafi it smells like a bubble it looks like a bubble but when you look at the mechanic when you look at the actual total dollars it's not a bubble rory who has a hinge recent Horowitz been said that that it's a boom not a bubble yeah so don't be confused it looks like bubbles and booms kind of look together the same right I actually I'm not quite sure I had the exact data right but here's the quick summary if you take a look at venture capital investment as a percent of GDP historically it's been something like point one percent of GDP in the bubble back in 99 it went to one percent something like it went 10x higher right now we're still at point one percent but since it's very much centered around the seed stage investing you see this frothiness in the sea but until that number goes from point 1 percent of GDP back up to one percent there's no real bubble because the tonnage of money hasn't come in yet and so so it's starting but this is what a tech boom feels like the early stages are excitement and lots of ideas and lots of flowers blooming and then the big money comes in because John I'll bet you're your brother and your sister and your mom haven't invested in a tech startup back in 99 video there's no public market that supports seven in a way that's a good and bad star basement yeah there's no fraud going on and most of the companies that are out there whether their lifestyle business or seed or bullpen funded are actually generating income the entrepreneur he has any earlier Mike was saying that he could a business deal so people are kind of like saw the old bubble and said shoot I don't want to do that again I gotta have at least revenue right and so companies didn't seem to start out with cash so you know that because you invested it but you know Pincus was getting some cash flow in the door from day one that's right that company was company was profitable the first day it started basically so talk about you know so I'm with Paul Martino by the way with bullpen capital entrepreneur wrote the patents on social networking which he sold the cisco when they sold the company now with bullpen capital huge dynamic you're a company out there this is exactly the positive dynamic you want to see because mainly you know dave mcclure jeff clavier mike maples have been kind of getting their butts handed to them in the press about super angels not having the juice to kind of go anywhere and it's been kind of a negative press there so you know this is the kind of void that's been filled by you guys to show the market that look at this there's a road map here so even though that the McClure's and clubs don't have big funds that there's a path to follow on financing so that the vc's can't shut them down and i've heard some pc say that so a lot of traditional venture guys would like to say that you know this little disruption we nipped it in the butt and it stopped after the seed stage but that's not the history of disruptions the history of disruptions are they start from the bottom then they get ecosystem support and then they grow and they disrupt the incumbents and I think we're halfway there so so the Angel gate thing that Arrington reported on was interesting because you know essentially what happened there it was a lot of him fighting Ron Conway I was not happy you can't be happy about competition I mean this is competition that increases prices right so you know in the short term prices have been inflated on valuations true or false that's true but but but I think I think the whole way angel gate was reported was absurd the most Pro entrepreneurial venture people perhaps in the history of the business are the guys who were supposedly at those tables I mean mike maples Jeff claw VA josh cop and Ron Conway fired his guy that was there I I understand suppose again suppose a key are right these are the most Pro entrepreneurial venture guys in the history of the business so I think that turned into something that it never was yeah well I mean that's the thing you know good for content producers who want page views I got to create some drama and you know as you know SiliconANGLE doesn't have any banner ads on our site quick plug for us we are motivated by content not page views so thanks for coming in today no but seriously I mean there's a there's a black cloud over the super angels has been since Angel gate I've heard privately from VCS that super angels it's been kind of a scuttlebutt they're misaligned just rumors I completely overblown and you know their business model threatens the incumbents and you know someone needed someone needed a piece of fodder to start a you know start a techcrunch discussion right there's no doubt that the market is need in need of a new ecosystem for the early stage because individual angels traditionally were wealthy individuals but now you have people with more experience like yourselves and entrepreneurs from google and facebook etc coming out and doing some things okay so next topic more on a personal kind of professional note k last final question is I know you got to run appreciate your time you're a technologist a lot of folks don't know that you're hardcore computer science guy and our model southern angles computer science meet social science right in your wheelhouse so with that just kind of final parting question what gets you excited technically right now I mean I'll see you have roots in both comps I and social Iran Zynga's early investor roster you got a bullpen capital you're looking at a lot of deals outside of that you as a computer scientist geek mm-hmm what gets you jazz what do you see in the horizon that's not yet on the mega trend roster that kind of you can't put your finger on it truly we might really get a good feeling well so I think you'll be disappointed with this answer because I think it's now cross the chasm to start being one of those mega trends it's called consumerization of enterprise and that's now the buzz word for it but what is it really mean and why do I think it's for real look you've got cool self-service applications for everything you can go do home banking by logging into a portal you can go to an ATM you can go do these things but you know go bring a new laptop into your big stodgy fortune 500 company and you know it's like getting a rectal exam right you know we got to install this we got to give you this private key yet that's TSA it writes like going through TSA exact idea that IT inside of big fortune 500 companies is going to stop being this gatekeeper to new technology I think look how long do you think it'll be until pick your favorite fortune 500 company the IT people know how to deal with the ipad 2 but how many people bought an ipad 2 into the off already everyone and so this to me is going to be the big next deck the next decade are going to be self service offerings for the enterprise getting around a very frustrating gatekeepers inside of you know the IT department etc and that's going to lead to an awesome boom of everything from security to auditing to compliance etc that's the convergence question Paul Martino my friend entrepreneur great guy venture capitals now on the good side helping the seed Super Angel micro VCS great to have you consumerization of IT that hits the cloud mobile social it's everything so that I was buzzword compliant on that great job great to have you know you're busy got to have you in again thanks so much for time that's a wrap thank you very much great thank you John