from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello and welcome to this special cube conversation here in Palo Alto California cube headquarters I'm Jennifer echoes the cube our guest here is Megan Eisenberg CMO of a new hot company called trip actions formerly the CMO at MongoDB before that taki sign we've known each other some advisory boards great to see you yes great to see you as well so exciting new opportunity for you at trip actions just transitioned from MongoDB which by the way had great earnings they did what was the big secret to Mongo DB z earnings tell us well it's fresh and I think they're executing and their growth is amazing they're bringing their costs down I mean they're they've got product market fit their developers love them and so I'm proud and not surprised you're there for four years yeah transformed their go-to market so that fruits coming off the tree yes yeah it's exciting to see the you know process people technology all coming together and seeing them scale and do so well in the markets yes you know being here in 20 years living in California Palo Alto you see the rocket ships the ones that flame out the ones that make it and there's a pattern right when you start to see companies that are attracting talent ones that have pedigree VCS involved yeah raising the kind of rounds in a smart way where there's traction product market fit you kind of take special notice and one of the companies that you're now working for trip actions yes seems to have the parameters so it's off the pad it's going up its orbit or taking off you guys have really growing you got a new round of funding one hundred fifty million dollars yes unique application in a market that is waiting to be disrupted yes travel about company you work for transactions trip actions is a fast growing business travel platform we service customers like we work slack zoom box and we're growing we're adding 200 customers a month and it's amazing just to see these fast-growing companies right when they hit product market fit I think the keys are they've gotten a massive addressable market which we have 800 billion online travel they're solving a pain and they're disrupting a legacy the legacy providers that are out there we're three and a half years old and we are you know really focused on the customer experience giving you the choice that you want when you book making it easy down to six minutes not an hour to book something and we've got 24/7 support which not many can compete with you know it's interesting you know I look at these different ways of innovation especially SAS and mobile apps you know chapter one of this wave great economics yeah and once you get that unit economics visibility say great SAS efficacious happened but now we're kind of in a chapter two I think you guys kind of fit into this chapter to where it's not just SAS cuz you know we've seen travel sites get out there you book travel it's chapter two of SAS is about personalization you see machine learning you got cloud economics new ventures are coming out of the woodwork where you could take a unique idea innovate on it and disrupt a category that seems to be what you guys are doing talk about this new dynamic because this is not just another travel app when you guys are doing gets a unique angle on this applying some tech with the Corpse talked about that this chapter to kind of assess business I think when I think about chapter 2 I think about all the data that's out there I think about the machine learning I think about how we understand the user and personalize everything to them to make it frictionless and these apps that I love on my phone are because they they know what I want before I want it and I just took a trip to Dallas this week and the app knew I needed to check in it was one click told me my flight was delayed gave me options checked me in for my hotel I mean it was just amazing experience that I haven't seen before and it's really if you think about that that business travel trip there's 40 steps you have to do along the way there's got to be a way to make it easier because all we want to do is get to the business meeting and get back we don't want to deal with weather we don't want to deal with Hotel issues or flight changes and our app is specific to when you look at it you've got a chat 24/7 and someone's taking care of you that concierge service and we can do that because the amount of data we're looking at we're learning from it and we make it easier for travel manager half the people go rogue and don't even book through their travel solution it's because it's not tailored to them so this is the thing I want to get it so you guys aren't like a consumer app per se you have a specific unique target audience on this opportunity its travel management I'm I'm gonna date myself but back when I broke into the business they would have comes like Thomas Cook would handle all the travel for youlet Packard when I worked there in the 80s and you had these companies I had these contracts and they would do all the travel for the employees yes today it's hard to find that those solutions out there yes I would say it's hard to find one that you love and trip Actions has designed something that our travelers love and it is it's for business travel it's for your business trips it's taking care of your air your hotel your car your rail whatever you need and making sure that you can focus on the trip focus on getting there and not just the horrible experience we've all had it you travel a lot I traveled certainly back and forth to the East Coast and to take those problems away so I can focus on my business is what it's so just just look at this right so you guys are off to unicorn the funding great valuation growing like crazy got employees so people looking for jobs because they're hiring probably yeah but you're targeting not consumers to download the app it's for businesses that want to have company policies and take all that pressure off yes of the low so as a user can't buy myself can't just use the app or get I know you can Nano that's the the the whole thing is that as a user there's three things we're providing to one inventory and choice so you go and you know all the options you get the flight you want it's very clear and art we have a new storefront where it shows you what's in policy what's not so we've got that its ease of use it's booking quickly nobody wants to waste time dealing with this stuff right you want to go in booked quickly and then when you're on the trip you need 24/7 support because things go wrong airline travel gets cancelled weather happens you need to change something in your trip and so yes the user has the app on their phone can book it can you do it fast and can get support if they need it so stand alone usually can just use it as a consumer app but when you combine with business that's the magic that you guys see is that the opportunity yes I should say as a consumer as a business traveler so you're doing it through your company so I'm getting reimbursed for the companies the company is your customer yes the company's our customer is the traveler yes okay got it so if we want to have a travel desk in our company which we don't have yet yes it would we would sign up as a company and then all your employees would have the ease of use to book travel so what happens what's the sum of the numbers in terms of customers you have said 200 month-over-month yes we're over 1500 customers we're adding 200 a month we've got some significant growth it's amazing to see product market and the cost of the solution tell people $25 a booking and there's no add-on costs after that if you need to make as many changes as you need because of the trip calls on it you do it so basically per transaction yes well Little Feat one of our dollars yes okay so how do you guys see this growing for the company what's the some of the initiatives you guys are doing a new app yes mo what's what's the plan it's a massive market 800 billion right and we've only just started we've got a lot of customers but we've got many more to go after we are international so we have offices around the world we have an Amsterdam office we've got customers travelling all over so we're you know continuing to deliver on that experience and bringing on more customers we just on-boarded we were ten thousand travelers and will continue to onboard more and more so as head of marketing what's the current staff you have openings you mentioned yet some some some open recs yes yes hi are you gonna build out I've got 20 open Rex on the website so I'm hiring in all functions we're growing that fast and what's the marketing strategy what's your plan can you give it a little teaser on yes thinking core positioning go to market what are some of the things you're thinking about building out marketing CloudStack kind of thing what's what's going on all of these things my three top focuses are one marketing sales systems making sure we have that mark tech stack and that partnership with the sales tech stack second thing is marketing sales alignment that closed-loop we're building we're building pipeline making sure when people come in there's a perfect partnership to service what they need and then our our brand and messaging and it's the phase I love in these companies it's really building and it's the people process and technology to do that in the core positioning is what customer service being the most user-friendly what's the core position we're definitely focused on the traveler I would say we're we're balancing customer experience in making sure we get that adoption but also for the travel managers making sure that they can administer the solution and they get the adoption and we align the ascent in the incentives between the traveler and the travel manager and customer profile what small munis I business to large enterprise we have SMB and we're going all the way up to enterprise yes has it been much of a challenge out there in the business travel side I'm just don't know that's why I'm asking is like because we don't have one I can see our r-cube team having travel challenge we always do no centralizing that making that available but it'd have to be easier is it hard to get is there a lot of business travel firms out there is what are some of the challenges that you guys are going after there well I I think what matters is one picking the solution and being able to implement it quickly we have customers implementing in a week right it's understanding how we load your policies get you on board get your cut you're you're really your employees traveling and so it's pretty fast onboarding and we're able to tailor solutions to what people need what are some of the policies that are typical that might be out there that people like yeah so maybe for hotels you may have New York and your your policy is $500 a night what the I would say a normal typical behavior would someone would book it at $4.99 they go all the way up to the limit we've actually aligned our incentives with the travel managers and the employees and that if you save your company money you save and get rewards back so let's say you book it for 400 that $100 savings $30 goes back to the employee and rewards they can get an Amazon card donate to Cherry charity whatever they'd like to kind of act like an owner cuz they get a kickback yes that's the dot so that's how you an interest adoption yes what other adoption concerns you guys building around with the software and or programs to make it easy to use and we're constantly thinking about the experience we want to make sure just I mean I think about what I used to drive somewhere I'd pull out a map and map it out and then I got lucky and you could do MapQuest and now you have ways we are that ways experience when you're traveling we're thinking about everything you need to do that customer when they leave their front door all the way to the trip all the things that can hang them up along the way we're trying to remove that friction that's a very example I mean Waze is a great service yes these Google Maps or even Apple Maps ways everyone goes to backed away yes yeah I don't I mean ways did cause a lot of Street congestion the back streets of Palo Alto we're gonna expedite our travelers well it's a great utility new company what what attracted you to the opportunity when was some of the because you had a kid going over there MongoDB what it was the yeah motivation to come over to the hot startup yeah you know I love disruptive companies I love massive addressable markets good investors and a awesome mission that I can get behind you know I'm a mom of three kids and I did a lot of travel I'm your typical road warrior and I wanted to get rid of the pain of travel and the booking systems that existed before trip actions and so I was drawn to the team the market and the product that's awesome well you've been a great CMO your career has been phenomenal of great success as a CPM mother of three you know the challenges of juggling all this life is short you got to be using these apps to make sure you get on the right plane I mean I know I'm always getting back for my son's lacrosse game or yes event at school this is these are like it's like ways it's not necessary in the travel portfolio but it's a dynamic that the users care about this is the kind of thing that you guys are thinking about is that right yeah definitely I mean I always think about my mom when she worked in having three daughters and I work and have three daughters I feel like I can do so much more I've got door - I've got urban sitter I've got ways I've got Google Calendar I've got trip actions right I've got all these technologies that allow me to do more and not focus on things that are not that productive and I have no value add on it just makes me more efficient and productive how about some of the tech before we get in some of the industry questions I want to talk about some of the advantages on the tech side is there any machine learning involved what's some what's not what's some of the secret sauce and the app yeah definitely we're constantly learning our users preferences so when you go in we start to learn what you what hotels you're gonna select what where do you like to be near the office do you like to be near downtown we're looking at your flights do aisle window nobody wants middle yes but we're we're learning about your behaviors and we can predict pretty closely one if you're gonna book and two what you're gonna book and as we continue learning you that's why we make you more efficient that's why we can do it in six minutes instead of an hour that's awesome so Megan a lot of things going on you've been a progressive marker you love Terry's tech savvy you've done a lot of implementations but we're in a sea change now where you know people that think differently they gonna think okay I need to be on an app for your case with with business travel it's real policies there so you want to also make it good for the user experience again people centric this personalization has been kind of a cutting edge concept now in this chapter to a lot of CMOS are either they're they're not are trying to get there what are you finding in the industry these days that's a best practice to help people cross that bridge as they think they cracked the code on one side then realize wow it's a whole another chapter to go you know I think traditionally a lot of times we think we need we're aligning very much with sales and that matters that go to market marketing sales aligned but when it comes to products and a customer experience it's that alignment with marketing and the product and engineering team and really understanding the customer and what they want and listening and hearing and testing and and making sure we're partnering in those functions in terms of distribution getting the earned concept what's your thoughts on her and media yeah I mean I definitely think it's the direction right there's a ton of noise out there so you've got to be on topic you've got to understand what people care about you've got to hit them in the channel that they care about and very quick right is you don't have time nobody's gonna watch something that's 30 minutes long you get seconds and so part of the earned is making sure you're relevant you what they care about and they can find you and content big part of that for you guys huge part of it yes and understanding the influencers in the market who's talking about travel who's who is out there leading ahead you know leading in these areas that travel managers go and look to you know making sure we're in front of them and they get to see what we're delivering I like how you got the incentives of the employees to get kind of a line with the business I mean having that kind of the perks yes if you align with the company policies the reward could be a Starbucks card or vacation one more time oh whatever they the company want this is kind of the idea right yeah they kind of align the incentives and make the user experience both during travel and post travel successful that's right yes making sure that they are incented to go but they have a great experience okay if you explain the culture of the company to someone watching then maybe interested in using the app or buying you guys as a team what's the trip actions culture like if you had to describe it yeah I would say one we love travel too we are fast growing scaling and we're always raising the bar and so it's learning and it's moving fast but learning from it and continually to improve it's certainly about the user all of the users so not just the travel manager but our travelers themselves we love dogs if you ever come to the Palo Alto office we've got a lot of dogs we love our pups and just you know building something amazing and it's hard to be the employees gonna know that's a rocket ship so it's great get a hold on you got a run hard yes that's the right personality to handle the pace because you're hiring a lot of people and I think that's a part of the learning we need continual learning because we are scaling so fast you have to reinvent what we need to do next and not a lot of people have seen that type of scale and in order to do it you have to learn and help others learn and move fast well great to see you thanks for coming in and sharing the opportunity to give you the final plug for the company share what who you what positions you're hiring for what's your key hires what are you guys trying to do give a quick plug to the company yeah so I mean we've grown 5x and employees so we're hiring across the board from a marketing standpoint I'm hiring in content and product marketing I'm hiring designers I'm hiring technical I you know I love my marketing technology so we're building out our tech stack our website pretty much any function all right you heard it here trip actions so when you get the product visibility those unit economics as they say in the VC world they've got a rocket ship so congratulations keep it up yeah now you're in palo alto you can come visit us here anytime yes love to Meagen Eisenberg CMO trip access here inside the cube I'm John Ferrier thanks for watching you [Music]

(stirring music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from theCUBE Studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. Got a great conversation today. We're going to be talking about some of the new advances that are associated with big data analytics and improving the rate at which human beings, people who actually work with data, can get more out of their data, be more certain about their data, and improve the social system that actually is dependent upon data. To do that, we've got Aaron Kalb of Alation here with us. Aaron is the co-founder and is VP of design and strategic initiatives. Aaron, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thanks so much for having me, Peter. >> So, then, let's start this off. The concern that a lot of folks have when they think about analytics, big data, and the promise of some of these new advanced technologies is they see how they could be generating significant business value, but they observe that it often falls short. It falls short for technological reasons, you know, setting up the infrastructure is very, very, difficult. But we've started solving that by moving a lot of these workloads to the cloud. They also are discovering that the toolchains can be very complex, but they're starting to solve that by working with companies with vision, like Alation, about how you can bring these things together more easily. There are some good things happening within the analytics space, but one of the biggest challenges is, even if you set up your pipelines and your analytics systems and applications right, you still encounter resistance inside the business, because human beings don't necessarily have a natural affinity for data. Data is not something that's easy to consume, it's not something easy to recognize. People just haven't been trained in it. We need more that makes it easy to identify data quality, data issues, et cetera. Tell us a little bit about what Alation's doing to solve that human side, the adoption side of the challenge. >> That's a great point and a great question, Peter. Fundamentally, what we see is it used to be a problem of quantity. There wasn't enough ability to generate data assets, and to distribute them, and to get to them. Now, there's just an overwhelming amount of places to gather data. The problem becomes finding development data for your need, understanding and putting it into context, and most fundamentally, trusting that it's actually telling you a true story about the world. You know, what we find now is, as there's been more self-service analytics, there's more and more dashboards and queries and content being generated, and often an executive will look at two different answers to the same question that are trending in totally different directions. They'll say, "I can't trust any of this. "On paper, I want to be data-driven, "but in actuality, I'm just going to go back to my gut, "'cause the data is not always trustworthy, "and it's hard to tell what's trustworthy and what's not." >> This is, even after they've found the data and enough people have been working on it to say, to put it in context to say, "Yes, this data is being used in marketing," or, "This data has been used in operations production." there's another layer of branding or whatnot that we can put on data that says, "This data is appropriate for use in this way." Is that what we're talking about here? >> Absolutely right. To help with finding and understanding data, you can group it and make it browsable by topic. You can enable keyword search over it in that natural language. That's stuff that Alation has done in the past. What we're excited to unveil now is this idea of trust check, which is all about saying, wherever you're at in that data value chain of taking raw data and schematizing it and eventually producing pretty dashboards and visualizations, that at every step, we can ensure that only the most trustworthy data sets are being used, because any problem upstream flows downstream. >> So, trust check. >> Trust check. >> Trust check, it's something that comes out of Alation. Is it also being used with other visualization tools or other sources or other applications? >> That's a great question. It's all of the above. Trust check starts with saying, if I'm an analyst who wants to create a dashboard or a visualization, I'm going to have to write some SQL query to do that. What we've done in that context with Alation Compose, is our home-grown SQL tool, is provided a tool, and trust check kind of gets its name from spell check. It used to be there was a dictionary, and you could look it up by hand, and you could look it up online, but that's a lot of work for every single word to check it. And then, you know, Microsoft, I think, was the first innovative saying, "Oh, let's put a little red squiggle that you can't miss "right in your workflow as you're writing, "so you don't have to go to it, it comes to you." We do the exact same thing. I'm about to query a table that is deprecated or has a data quality issue. I immediately see bright red on my screen, can't miss it, and I can fix my behavior. That's as I'm creating a data asset. We also, through our partnerships with Salesforce and with Tableau, each of whom have very popular visualization tools, to, say. if people are consuming a dashboard, not a SQL query, but looking at a Tableau dashboard or a visualization in Salesforce Einstein Analytics, what would it mean to badge right there and then, put a stamp of approval on the most trustworthy sources and a warning or caveat on things that might have an upstream data quality problem? >> So, when you say warning or caveat, you're saying literally that there are exceptions or there are other concerns associated with the data, and reviewing that as part of the analytic process. >> That's exactly right. Much like, again, spell check underlines, or looking at, if you think about if I'm driving in my car with Waze, and it says, "Oh, traffic up ahead, view route this way." What does it mean to get in the user interface where people live, whether they're a business user in Salesforce or Tableau, or a data analyst in a query tool, right there in their flow having onscreen indications of everything happening below the tip of the iceberg that affects their work and the trustworthiness of the data sets they're using. >> So that's what it is. I'll tell you a quick story about spell check. >> Please. >> Many years ago, I'm old enough that I was one of the first users of some of these tools. When you typed in IBM, Microsoft Word would often change it to DUM, which was kind of interesting, given the things that were going on between them. But it leads you to ask questions. How does this work? I mean, how does spell check work? Well, how does trust check work, because that's going to have an enormous implication. People have to trust how trust check works. Tell us a little bit about how trust check works. >> Absolutely. How do you trust trust check? The little red or yellow or bright, salient indicators we've designed are just to get your attention. Then, as a user, you can click into those indicators and see why is this appearing. The biggest reason that an indicator will appear in a trust check context is that a person, a data curator or data steward, has put a warning or a deprecation on the data set. It's not, you know, oh, IBM doesn't like Microsoft, or vice versa. You know, you can see the sourcing. It isn't just, oh, because Merriam-Webster says so. It emerges from the logic of your own organization. But now Alation has this entire catalog backing trust check where it gives a bunch of signals that can help those curators and stewards to decide what indicators to put on what objects. For example, we might observe, this table used to be refreshed frequently. It hasn't in a while. Does that mean it's ripe for getting a bit of a warning on it? Or, people aren't really using this data set. Is there a reason for that? Or, something upstream was just flagged having a data quality issue. That data quality issue might flow downstream like pollution in a creek, and that can be an indication of another reason why you might want to label data as not trustworthy. >> In Alation context with Salesforce and Tableau partners, and perhaps some others, this trust check ends up being a social moniker for what constitutes good data that is branded as a consequence of both technological as well as social activities around that data captured by Alation. I got that right? >> That's exactly right. We're taking technical signals and social signals, because what happens in our customers today before we launched trust check, what they would do is, if you had the time, you would phone a friend. You'd say, "Hey, you seem to be data-savvy. "Does this number look weird to you? "Do you know what's going on? "Is something wrong with the table that it's sourced from?" The problem is, that person's on vacation, and you're out of luck. This is saying, let's push everything we know across that entire chain, from the rawest data to the most polished asset and have all that information pushed up to where you live in the moment you're making a decision, should I trust this data, how should I use it? >> In the whole, going back to this whole world of big data and analytics, we're moving more of the workloads to the cloud to get rid of the infrastructure problems. We're utilizing more integrated toolchains to get rid of the complexity associated with a lot of the analytic pipelines. How does trust check then applied, go back to this notion of human beings not being willing to accept somebody else's data. Give us that use case of how someone's going to sit down in a boardroom or at a strategic meeting or whatever else it is, see trust check, and go, "I get it." >> Absolutely, that's a fantastic question. There's two reasons why, even though all organizations, or 80% according to Gartner, claim they're committed to being data-driven. You still have these moments, people say, "Yeah, I see the numbers, "but I'm going to ignore them, or discount them, "or be very skeptical of them." One issue is just how much of the data that gets to you in the boardroom or the exec team meeting is wrong. We had an incredibly successful data-driven customer who did an internal audit and found that 1/3 of the numbers that appeared in the PowerPoint presentations on which major business decisions were being made, a full 1/3 of them were off by an extraordinary amount, an amount so big that it would, the decision would've cut the other way had the number been accurate. The sheer volume of bad data coming in to undermine trust. The second is, even if only 5% of the data were untrustworthy, if you don't know which is which, the 95% that's trustworthy and the 5% that's not, you still might not be able to use it with confidence. We believe that having trust check be at every stage in this data value chain will solve, actually, both problems by having that spell-check-like experience in the query tool, which is where most analytics projects start. We can reduce the amount of garbage going into the meeting rooms where business choices are being made. And by putting that badge saying "This is certified," or, "Take this with a grain of salt," or, "No, this is totally wrong," that putting that badge on the visualizations that business leaders are looking at in Salesforce and Tableau, and over time, in ideally every tool that anybody would use in an enterprise, we can also help distinguish the wheat from the chaff in that context as well. We think we're attacking both parts of this problem, and that will really drive a data-driven culture truly being adoptable in an organization. >> I want to tie a couple things that you said here. You mentioned the word design a couple times. You're the VP of design at Alation. It also sounds like when you're talking about design, you're not just talking about design of the interface or the software. You're talking about design of how people are going to use the software. What is the extent to which design, what's the scope of design as you see it in this context of advanced analytics, and is trust check just a first step that you're taking? Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, that's a great set of questions, Peter. Design for us means really looking at humans, and starting by listening and watching. You know, a lot of people in the cataloging space and the governance space, they list a lot of should statements. "People should adopt this process, "because otherwise, mistakes will be made." >> Because Gartner said 80% of you have! >> Right, exactly. We think the shoulds only get you so far. We want to really understand the human psychology. How do people actually behave when they're under pressure to move quickly in a rapidly changing environment, when they're afraid of being caught having made a mistake? There's all these pressures people are under. And so, it's not realistic to say, again, you could imagine saying, "Oh, every time before you go out the door, "go to MapQuest or some sort of traffic website "and look up the route and print it out, "so you make sure you plot correctly." No one has time for that, just like no one has time to look up every single word in their essay or their memo or their email and look it up in the dictionary to see if it's right. But when you have an intervention that comes into somebody's flow and is impossible to miss, and is an angel on your shoulder keeping you from making a mistake, or, you know, in-car navigation that tells you in real time, "Here's how you should route." Those sort of things fit into somebody's lifestyle and actually move impact. Our idea is, let's meet people where they are. Acknowledge the challenges that humans face and make technology that really helps them and comes to them instead of scolding them and saying, "Oh, you should change your flow in this uncomfortable way "and come to us, "and that's the only way "you'll achieve the outcome you want." >> Invest the tool into the process and into the activity, as opposed to force people to alter the activity around the limitations or capabilities of the tool. >> Exactly right. And so, while design is optimizing the exact color and size and UI/UX both in our own tools and working with our partners to optimize that, it's starting at an even bigger level of saying, "How do we design the entire workflow "so humans can do what they do best "and the computer just gives them "what they need in real time?" >> And as something as important, and this kind of takes it full circle, something as important and potentially strategic as advanced analytics, having that holistic view is really going to determine success or failure in a lot of businesses. >> That is absolutely right, Peter, and you asked earlier, "Is this just the beginning?" That's absolutely true. Our goal is to say, whatever part of the analytics process you are in, that you get these realtime interventions to help you get the information that's relevant to you, understand what it means in the context you're in, and make sure that it's trustworthy and reliable so people can be truly data-driven. >> Well, there's a lot of invention going on, but what we're really seeking here is changes in social behavior that lead to consequential improvements in business. Aaron Kalb, VP of design and strategic initiatives at Alation, thanks very much for talking about this important advance in how we think about analytics. >> Thank you so much for having me, Peter. >> This is, again, Peter Burris. This has been a CUBE Conversation. Until next time. (stirring music)

hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we're at the mill pedis at an interesting event is called the auto tech council innovation in motion mapping and navigation event so a lot of talk about autonomous vehicles so it's a lot of elements to autonomous vehicles this is just one small piece of it it's about mapping and navigation and we're excited to have with us our first guest again and give us a background of this whole situation just Derick Curtin and he's the founder and chairman of the auto tech council so first up there welcome thank you very much good to be here absolutely so for the folks that aren't familiar what is the auto tech council autofit council is a sort of a club based in Silicon Valley where we have gathered together some of the industry's largest OMS om is mean car makers you know of like Rio de Gono from France and a variety of other ones they have offices here in Silicon Valley right and their job is to find innovation you find that Silicon Valley spark and take it back and get it into cars eventually and so what we are able to do is gather them up put them in a club and route a whole bunch of Silicon Valley startups and startups from other places to in front of them in a sort of parade and say these are some of the interesting technologies of the month so did they reach out for you did you see an opportunity because obviously they've all got the the Innovation Centers here we were at the Ford launch of their innovation center you see that the tagline is all around is there too now Palo Alto and up and down the peninsula so you know they're all here so was this something that they really needed an assist with that something opportunity saw or was it did it come from more the technology side to say we needed I have a new one to go talk to Raja Ford's well it's certainly true that they came on their own so they spotted Silicon Valley said this is now relevant to us where historically we were able to do our own R&D build our stuff in Detroit or in Japan or whatever the cases all of a sudden these Silicon Valley technologies are increasingly relevant to us and in fact disruptive to us we better get our finger on that pulse and they came here of their own at the time we were already running something called the telecom Council Silicon Valley where we're doing a similar thing for phone companies here so we had a structure in place that we needed to translate that into beyond modem industry and meet all those guys and say listen we can help you we're going to be a great tool in your toolkit to work the valley ok and then specifically what types of activities do you do with them to execute division you know it's interesting when we launched this about five years ago we're thinking well we have telecommunication back when we don't have the automotive skills but we have the organizational skills what turned out to be the cases they're not coming here the car bakers and the tier 1 vendors that sell to them they're not coming here to study break pad material science and things like that they're coming to Silicon Valley to find the same stuff the phone company two years ago it's lookin at least of you know how does Facebook work in a car out of all these sensors that we have in phones relate to automotive industry accelerometers are now much cheaper because of reaching economies of scale and phones so how do we use those more effectively hey GPS is you know reach scale economies how do we put more GPS in cars how do we provide mapping solutions all these things you'll set you'll see and sound very familiar right from that smartphone industry in fact the thing that disrupts them the thing that they're here for that brought them here and out of out of defensive need to be here is the fact that the smartphone itself was that disruptive factor inside the car right right so you have events like today so gives little story what's it today a today's event is called the mapping and navigation event what are people who are not here what's what's happening well so every now and then we pick a theme that's really relevant or interesting so today is mapping and navigation actually specifically today is high definition mapping and sensors and so there's been a battle in the automotive industry for the autonomous driving space hey what will control an autonomous car will it be using a map that's stored in memory onboard the car it knows what the world looked like when they mapped it six months ago say and it follows along a pre-programmed route inside of that world a 3d model world or is it a car more likely with the Tesla's current they're doing where it has a range of sensors on it and the sensors don't know anything about the world around the corner they only know what they're sensing right around them and they drive within that environment so there's two competing ways of modeling a 3d world around autonomous car and I think you know there was a battle looking backwards which one is going to win and I think the industry has come to terms with the fact the answer is both more everyday and so today we're talking about both and how to infuse those two and make better self-driving vehicles so for the outsider looking in right I'm sure they get wait the mapping wars are over you know Google Maps what else is there right but then I see we've got TomTom and meet a bunch of names that we've seen you know kind of pre pre Google Maps and you know shame on me I said the same thing when Google came out with a cert I'm like certain doors are over who's good with so so do well so Eddie's interesting there's a lot of different angles to this beyond just the Google map that you get on your phone well anything MapQuest what do you hear you moved on from MapQuest you print it out you're good together right well that's my little friends okay yeah some people written about some we're burning through paper listen the the upshot is that you've MapQuest is an interesting starting board probably first it's these maps folding maps we have in our car there's a best thing we have then we move to MapQuest era and $5,000 Sat Navs in some cars and then you might jump forward to where Google had kind of dominate they offered it for free kicked you know that was the disruptive factor one of the things where people use their smartphones in the car instead of paying $5,000 like car sat-nav and that was a long-running error that we have in very recent memory but the fact of the matter is when you talk about self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles now you need a much higher level of detail than TURN RIGHT in 400 feet right that's that's great for a human who's driving the car but for a computer driving the car you need to know turn right in 400.000 five feet and adjust one quarter inch to the left please so the level of detail requires much higher and so companies like TomTom like a variety of them that are making more high-level Maps Nokia's form a company called here is doing a good job and now a class of car makers lots of startups and there's crowdsource mapping out there as well and the idea is how do we get incredibly granular high detail maps that we can push into a car so that it has that reference of a 3d world that is extremely accurate and then the next problem is oh how do we keep those things up to date because when we Matt when when a car from this a Nokia here here's the company house drives down the street does a very high-level resolution map with all the equipment you see on some of these cars except for there was a construction zone when they mapped it and the construction zone is now gone right update these things so these are very important questions if you want to have to get the answers correct and in the car stored well for that credit self drive and once again we get back to something to mention just two minutes ago the answer is sensor fusion it's a map as a mix of high-level maps you've got in the car and what the sensors are telling you in real time so the sensors are now being used for what's going on right now and the maps are give me a high level of detail from six months ago and when this road was driven it's interesting back of the day right when we had to have the CD for your own board mapping Houston we had to keep that thing updated and you could actually get to the edge of the sea didn't work we were in the islands are they covering here too which feeds into this is kind of of the optical sensors because there's kind of the light our school of thought and then there's the the biopic cameras tripod and again the answers probably both yeah well good that's a you know that's there's all these beat little battles shaping up in the industry and that's one of them for sure which is lidar versus everything else lidar is the gold standard for building I keep saying a 3d model and that's basically you know a computer sees the world differently than your eye your eye look out a window we build a 3d model of what we're looking at how does computer do it so there's a variety of ways you can do it one is using lidar sensors which spin around biggest company in this space is called Bella died and been doing it for years for defense and aviation it's been around pointing laser lasers and waiting for the signal to come back so you basically use a reflected signal back and the time difference it takes to be billows back it builds a 3d model of the objects around that particular sensor that is the gold standard for precision the problem is it's also bloody expensive so the karmak is said that's really nice but I can't put for $8,000 sensors on each corner of a car and get it to market at some price that a consumers willing to pay so until every car has one and then you get the mobile phone aside yeah but economies of scale at eight thousand dollars we're looking at going that's a little stuff so there's a lot of startups now saying this we've got a new version of lighter that's solid-state it's not a spinning thing point it's actually a silicon chip with our MEMS and stuff on it they're doing this without the moving parts and we can drop the price down to two hundred dollars maybe a hundred dollars in the future and scale that starts being interesting that's four hundred dollars if you put it off all four corners of the car but there's also also other people saying listen cameras are cheap and readily available so you look at a company like Nvidia that has very fast GPUs saying listen our GPUs are able to suck in data from up to 12 cameras at a time and with those different stereoscopic views with different angle views we can build a 3d model from cheap cameras so there's competing ideas on how you build a model of the world and then those come to like Bosh saying well we're strong in car and written radar and we can actually refine our radar more and more and get 3d models from radar it's not the good resolution that lidar has which is a laser sense right so there's all these different sensors and I think there the answer is not all of them because cost comes into play below so a car maker has to choose well we're going to use cameras and radar we're gonna use lidar and high heaven so they're going to pick from all these different things that are used to build a high-definition 3d model of the world around the car cost effective and successful and robust can handle a few of the sensors being covered by snow hopefully and still provide a good idea of the world around them and safety and so they're going to fuse these together and then let their their autonomous driving intelligence right on top of that 3d model and drive the car right so it's interesting you brought Nvidia in what's really fun I think about the autonomous vehicle until driving cars and the advances is it really plays off the kind of Moore's laws impact on the three tillers of its compute right massive compute power to take the data from these sensors massive amounts of data whether it's in the pre-programmed map whether you're pulling it off the sensors you're pulling off a GPS lord knows where by for Wi-Fi waypoints I'm sure they're pulling all kinds of stuff and then of course you know storage you got to put that stuff the networking you gotta worry about latency is it on the edge is it not on the edge so this is really an interesting combination of technologies all bring to bear on how successful your car navigates that exit ramp you're spot-on and that's you're absolutely right and that's one of the reasons I'm really bullish on self-driving cars a lot more than in the general industry analyst is and you mentioned Moore's law and in videos taking advantage of that with a GPUs so let's wrap other than you should be into kind of big answer Big Data and more and more data yes that's a huge factor in cars not only are cars going to take advantage of more and more data high definition maps are way more data than the MapQuest Maps we printed out so that's a massive amount of data the car needs to use but then in the flipside the cars producing massive amounts of data I just talked about a whole range of sensors I talked lidar radar cameras etc that's producing data and then there's all the telemetric data how's the car running how's the engine performing all those things car makers want that data so there's massive amounts of data needing to flow both ways now you can do that at night over Wi-Fi cheaply you can do it over an LTE and we're looking at 5g regular standards being able to enable more transfer of data between the cars and the cloud so that's pretty important cloud data and then cloud analytics on top of that ok now that we've got all this data from the car what do we do with it we know for example that Tesla uses that data sucked out of cars to do their fleet driving their fleet learning so instead of teaching the cars how to drive I'm a programmer saying if you see this that they're they're taking the information out of the cars and saying what are the situation these cars are seen how did our autonomous circuitry suggest the car responds and how did the user override or control the car in that point and then they can compare human driving with their algorithms and tweak their algorithms based on all that fleet to driving so it's a master advantage in sucking data out of cars massive advantage of pushing data to cars and you know we're here at Kingston SanDisk right now today so storage is interesting as well storage in the car increasingly important through these big amount of data right and fast storage as well High Definition maps are beefy beefy maps so what do you do do you have that in the cloud and constantly stream it down to the car what if you drive through a tunnel or you go out of cellular signal so it makes sense to have that map data at least for the region you're in stored locally on the car in easily retrievable flash memory that's dropping in price as well alright so loop in the last thing about that was a loaded question by the way and I love it and this is the thing I love this is why I'm bullish and more crazier than anybody else about the self-driving car space you mentioned Moore's law I find Moore's law exciting used to not be relevant to the automotive industry they used to build except we talked about I talked briefly about brake pad technology material science like what kind of asbestos do we use and how do we I would dissipate the heat more quickly that's science physics important Rd does not take advantage of Moore's law so cars been moving along with laws of thermodynamics getting more miles per gallon great stuff out of Detroit out of Tokyo out of Europe out of Munich but Moore's law not entirely relevant all of a sudden since very recently Moore's law starting to apply to cars so they've always had ECU computers but they're getting more compute put in the car Tesla has the Nvidia processors built into the car many cars having stronger central compute systems put in okay so all of a sudden now Moore's law is making cars more able to do things that they we need them to do we're talking about autonomous vehicles couldn't happen without a huge central processing inside of cars so Moore's law applying now what it did before so cars will move quicker than we thought next important point is that there's other there's other expansion laws in technology if people look up these are the cool things kryder's law so kryder's law is a law about storage in the rapidly expanding performance of storage so for $8.00 and how many megabytes or gigabytes of storage you get well guess what turns out that's also exponential and your question talked about isn't dat important sure it is that's why we could put so much into the cloud and so much locally into the car huge kryder's law next one is Metcalfe's law Metcalfe's law has a lot of networking in it states basically in this roughest form the value of network is valued to the square of the number of nodes in the network so if I connect my car great that's that's awesome but who does it talk to nobody you connect your car now we can have two cars you can talk together and provide some amount of element of car to car communications and some some safety elements tell me the network is now connected I have a smart city all of a sudden the value keeps shooting up and up and up so all of these things are exponential factors and there all of a sudden at play in the automotive industry so anybody who looks back in the past and says well you know the pace of innovation here has been pretty steep it's been like this I expect in the future we'll carry on and in ten years we'll have self-driving cars you can't look back at the slope of the curve right and think that's a slope going forward especially with these exponential laws at play so the slope ahead is distinctly steeper in this deeper and you left out my favorite law which is a Mars law which is you know we underestimate in the short term or overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long term that's all about it's all about the slope so there we could go on for probably like an hour and I know I could but you got a kill you got to go into your event so thanks for taking min out of your busy day really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to our next one my pleasure thanks all right Jeff Rick here with the Q we're at the Western Digital headquarters in Milpitas at the Auto Tech Council innovation in motion mapping and navigation event thanks for watching