(upbeat music) >> From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering the Churchills, 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back here Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Chuchill's, it's the 9th annual award celebration put on by the Churchill club and the theme is all about leadership this year. We're really excited to have a very special guest John W. Thompson, chairman of Microsoft, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures, he's been around a long time. He's known and talks to a lot of leaders. So john, great to have you on. >> Nice to be here, thank you very much for having me. >> So leadership is such an interesting topic right? You go everything from, um, West point and trying to train young men to be leaders in a military situation to a start up that starts as some small company that had some interesting idea that grows to a huge corporate thing that's changing the world. Ya know, what are some of your thoughts as Silicon Valley is going through some hiccups right now and when you look, >> [John W. Thompson] We are? >> Just a couple little ones. >> I did recognize any of those. >> Well maybe not looking at the stock market. I don't know when that thing is coming back down. But you know when you think about leaders, what are somethings people maybe don't think about and really more interestingly how should people grow or what do you look for in a board member when you're talking to some CEO of a hot rising company? >> Well I think leadership is is as much about your personality and the business that use chose to go run is anything else. And the skills and experiences that someone might need to run a, pick a business, a business the size of Microsoft are fundamentally different than what you might need to run Rubrik, which is a company whose board I serve on. But that being said, leadership has some core principles that are critical independent of the size of the company or organization you're on. First of which is, integrity, second of which is focus, third of which is follow through and execution. There is lots of things that fundamental do and do well. And those who don't do well, don't become or stay leaders very long, that's for sure. >> It's interesting to look at Microsoft cause, ya know, three big personalities. Obviously Bill got it started as a young kid, I mean he was literally a kid in college. Um, then you had Steve Ballmer come in, completely different personalities and ya know, interesting for Bill to be willing to give up their reigns and then ya know, some tough times at Microsoft little bit stagnant and then Satya came in and just has supercharged and really driven a huge transformation in a giant big company. What are some of the attributes when you look at those three as leaders and you've worked with them, that make them so successful? >> Well, I think each of them brought something fundamentally different to the table when they were in the leadership role. In the case of Bill, he clearly was a visionary. He defined a point of view about the technology industry. That had he not done that, we wouldn't be where we are in the world today. And so, Bills role was unique. In the case of Steve, the company had hit a significant bump in the road all around the anti-trust activity. And candidly, it's my impression that Bill really didn't want to be involved in that, so he turned to Steve and says tag you're it. And Steve had a very fundamental view about execution. He was very much focus on execute, execute, execute. And if you look at the way the company preformed, its revenue grew from roughly ten, fifteen billion to almost eighty billion dollars during his term as CEO. However, the stock did not perform very well. So people weren't very happy with that. Ironically enough Satya come in, Satya had run the search business, had run the cloud business, had even run the enterprise software business. So he had a very fundamental view about of what he thought the company needed to do. And there were two issues, issues number one was strategy around cloud. And on the day of his announcement, he announced mobile first, cloud first are the strategies of Microsoft. And then he quickly, quickly made it clear that the number two issue, for the company, was about its culture. And while I am unbelievably fascinated by how much progress we've made on the product front, I'm even more encouraged by what has happened on the, candidly, on the cultural front. >> Right. So on the cultural front that is, are you a harder thing to impact especially on a large global company with hundreds of thousands of employees distributed all over the world, so what are the secrets that change culture like that? >> Its fundamental, it's about openness and honesty and candor. Um, one of the things that happens here in the valley, often for some companies is when they do their quarterly or monthly employee all hands meetings, guess what? They screen and filter all of the questions. Well, we don't do that at Microsoft office. Satya does not do that. He wants to be open and honest and candid with his employees with what's going on. My gosh! That's what real leaders do. And so I think what he has done is nothing that is unique, it's just consistent. He has been very very consistent and predictable in his execution of what openness, listening rather than talking, all of the things that good leaders are able to do. >> Right, its funny the one word you haven't said since we have been sitting here, you keep saying execution of focus, which I love focus execute and delight the customer. You haven't said strategy one single time. you said vision, but not strategy. Its interesting because I think a lot of people don't put enough emphasis on, its just work, you just got to execute. >> Its one thing to have a strategy, but if you can't execute the strategy, of what value is it? So I have always had a view in my roles as leader that it's about focus and executing. Yes, you have to come up with a vision and yes you have to create ideas that employees, and partners, and customers can become excited about. But ultimately it's about execution day in and day out. 368 days of the years, not 365. >> Alright, final question I know you've got a busy night. As you look as some leaders that you look up to, maybe not of this generation that you've been working with, but maybe of a past generation, who are some of the folks that you look to for your inspiration on the leadership side? >> Well, I would have to say the first one was the former vice chairman of IBM, who I was the chief of staff to many many many years ago. His name was Paul Rizzo. Paul was probably one of the most influential people in the company during that period of time, but you'd never know it. He had a level of humility about himself. He had a level of openness and candor in his interaction with employees at all levels up and down the line. And a company of IBM's size back in those days, it was two, three hundred thousand people big. And so he would be the first leader that comes to my mind as someone who was impactful on me. Another one would have been, a guy who created Akamai. He's on the board of Oracle and he's an awesome awesome friend of mine. He was the guy that ran the America's and gave me my first really really big job. And the fact that he was willing to give a guy like me a job like that, was a pretty important move. George Conrades is his name by the way. And so those two people were very very influential as leaders. As I would look at them and try to determine whether or not can I, can I pattern myself after that? Or are there things that they do and say and execute that I should consider as I think about my evolving leadership. >> Right so important to have people that you can look up to, learn from, and to take care of ya and help you along the way. >> [John W. Thompson] I agree >> John, thanks for spending some time it's always great to sit down with you >> Nice to see you as well. >> And continue success. We'll hopefully see you next time not to long from now. >> Lets hope not. >> Alright, he's John W. Thompson and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube, were at the Churchill's in Santa Clara California. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier host like you here in our Palo Alto studio here in Palo Alto. Here with Dominic Wilde, known as Dom, CEO of SnapRoute, a hot new startup. A great venture. Backers don. Welcome to skip conversation. So love having to start ups. And so talk about Snape route the company because you're doing something interesting that we've been covering your pretty aggressively the convergence between Dev Ops and Networking. We've known you for many, many years. You were a former Hewlett Packard than you woodpecker enterprise running the networking group over there. You know, networking. And you're an operator. Snap rows. Interesting, because, um, great names back behind it. Big venture backers. Lightspeed Norwest, among others. Yes. Take a minute. Explain what? A SnapRoute. >> So SnapRoute was founded to really address one of the big, big problems we see in infrastructure, which is that, you know, essentially the network gets in the way of the deployment the rapid and angel deployment of applications. And so in the modern environment that we're in, you know, the business environment, highly competitive environment of disruption, continuous disruption going on in our industry, every company out there is constantly looking over their shoulder is, you know, making sure that they're moving fast enough there innovating fast enough that they don't want to be disrupted. They don't want to be overrun by, you know, a new upstart. And in order to do that, you know the application is is actually the work product that you really want to deploy, that you you want to roll out, and you want to be able to do that on a continuous basis. You want to be really agile about how you do it. And, quite frankly, when it comes to infrastructure, networking has been fifteen years behind the rest of the infrastructure and enabling that it's, ah, it's a big roadblock. It's obviously, you know, some of the innovations and developments and networking of lag behind other areas on what we snap Brown set out to do was to say, You know, look, if we're if we're going to bring networking forward and we're going to try and solve some of these problems, how do we do that? In a way, architecturally, that will enable networking to become not just a part of Ah, you know a cloud native infrastructure but actually enable those those organizations to drive forward. And so what we did was we took all of our sort of devops principles and Dev ups tools, and we built a network operating system from the ground up using devops principles, devops architectures and devops tools. And so what we're delivering is a cloud native network operating system that is built entirely on containers and is delivered is a micro services architecture on the big...one of the big value propositions that we deliver is what we call see a CD for networking, which is your continuous integration. Continuous deployment is obviously, you know, Big devops principal there. But doing that for networking, allowing a network to be constantly up enabling network Teo adapt to immutable infrastructure principles. You know we're just replacing pieces that need to be replaced. Different pieces of the operating system can be replaced If there's a security vulnerability, for instance, or if there's ah, bugger and you feature needed so you know we can innovate quicker. We can enable the network to be more reliable, allow it to be more agile, more responsive to the needs of the organization on all of this, fundamentally means that your Operation shins model now becomes ah, lot more unified. A lot more simple. You. Now, we now enable the net ox teams to become a sort of more native part of the conversation with devils. Reduce the tension there, eliminate any conflicts and everything. And we do that through this. You know, this innovative offices. >> Classically, the infrastructure is code ethos. >> Yeah, exactly right. I mean, it's you know, a lot of people have been talking about infrastructure is code for a long, long time. But what we really do, I mean, if if you deploy our network operating system you employ onto the bare metal switching, then you really enable Dev ops to hang have, you know, I take control and to drive the network in the way they want using their native tool chains. So, you know, Cuba Netease, for instance, ears. You know that the big growing dev ops orchestration to all of the moment. In fact, we think it's more than of the moment. You know, I've never seen in the industry that sort of, you know, this kind of momentum behind on open source initiative like there is behind Cuba. Netease. And we've taken communities and baked it natively into the operating system. Such that now our network operating system that runs on a physical switch can be a native part off that communities and develops tool >> Dom, I want to get to the marketplace, dynamics. Kind of what's different. Why now? But I think what's interesting about SnapRoute you're the chief of is that it's a venture back with big names? Yeah. Lightspeed, Norwest, among others. It's a signal of a wave that we've been covering people are interested in. How do you make developers deploy faster, more agility at scale, on premises and in clouds. But I want you to before we get there, want to talk about the origin story of company? Yeah. Why does it exist? How did it come to bear you mentioned? Operation is a big part of cloud to cloud is about operating model so much a company. Yes. This is the big trend. That's the big way. But how did it all get started? What's the SnapRoute story? >> Yeah, it's an interesting story. Our founders were actually operators at at Apple back in the day, and they were responsible for building out some of Apple's biggest. You know, data centers for their sort of customer facing services, like, you know, like loud iTunes, all those good things and you know they would. They were tasked with, sort of, you know, sort of modernizing the operational model with with those data centers and, you know, and then they, like many other operators, do you know, had a sense of community and worked with their peers. You know, another big organizations, even you know, other hyper scale organizations and wanted to learn from what they did on DH. What they recognised was that, you know, cos like, you know, Google and Facebook and Microsoft is urine things. They had done some incredible things and some incredible innovations around infrastructure and particularly in networking, that enabled them to Dr Thie infrastructure from A from a Devil ops perspective and make it more native. But those words that if you know, fairly tailored for there, if you know, for their organizations and so what they saw was the opportunity to say, Well, you know, there's there's many other organizations who are delivering, you know, infrastructure is a service or SAS, or you know, who are just very large enterprises who are acting as these new cloud service providers. And they would have a need to, you know, to also have, you know, tools and capabilities, particularly in the network, to enable the network to be more responsive, more to the devil apps like. And so, you know, they they they founded SnapRoute on that principle that, you know, here's the problem that we know we can solve. It's been solved, you know, some degree, but it's an architectural problem, and it's not about taking, You know, all of the, you know, the last twenty five years of networking knowledge and just incrementally doing a sort of, you know, dot upgrade and, you know, trying to sort of say, Hey, we're just add on some AP eyes and things. You really needed to start from the ground up and rethink this entirely from an architectural perspective and design the network operating system as on with Dev ups, tools and principles. So they started the company, you know, been around just very late two thousand fifteen early two thousand sixteen. >> And how much money have you read >> The last around. We are Siri's, eh? We took in twenty five million. >> And who were the venture? >> It was Lightspeed Ventures on DH Norwest. And we also had some strategic investment from Microsoft Ventures and from teams >> from great name blue chips. What was their interest? What was their thesis? Well, and you mentioned the problem. What was the core problem that you're solving that they were attracted to? Why would that why was the thirst with such big name VCs? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it was, you know, a zip said, I think it's the the opportunity to change the operational more. And I think one of the big things that was very different about our company is and, you know, we like to say, you know, we're building for effort. Operators, by operators, you know, I've found is, as I said, well, more operators from Apple, they have lived and breathed what it is to be woken up at three. A. M. On Christmas Eve toe. You know, some outage and have to, you know, try and figure that out and fight your way through a legacy kind of network and figure out what's going on. So you know, so they empathize with what that means and having that DNA and our company is incredibly meaningful in terms of how we build that you know the product on how we engage with customers. We're not just a bunch of vendors who you know we're coming from, you know, previous spender backgrounds. Although I do, you know, I bring to the table the ability to, you know, to deliver a package and you know, So there's just a cloud scale its clouds, Gail. It's it's but it's It's enabling a bridge if you like. If you look at what the hyper scales have done, what they're achieving and the operational models they have, where a if you like a bridge to enable that capability for a much broader set of operators and C. S. P s and as a service companies and dry forward a an aggressive Angela innovation agenda for companies, >> businesses. You know, we always discussing the Cuban. Everyone who watches the Kiev knows I'm always ranting about how cloud providers make their market share numbers, and lot of people include sass, right? I think everyone will be in the SAS business, so I kind of look at the SAS numbers on, say, it's really infrastructures service platform to service Amazon, Google, Microsoft and then, you know, Ali Baba in China. Others. Then you got IBM or one of it's kind of in the big kind of cluster there top. That is a whole nother set of business requirements that sass driven this cloud based. Yeah, this seems to be a really growing market. Is that what you're targeting? And the question is, how do you relate Visa? Visa Cooper? Netease trend? Because communities and these abstraction layers, you're starting to hear things like service mesh, policy based state Full application states up. Is that you trying to that trend explain. >> We're very complimentary, Teo. Those trends, we're, you know, we're not looking to replace any of that, really. And and my big philosophy is, if you're not simplifying something, then you're not really adding back here, you know, what you're doing is complicating matters or adding another layer on top. So so yeah, I mean, we are of value to those companies who are looking at hybrid approaches or have some on prime asset. Our operating system will land on a physical, bare metal switch So you know what? What we do is when you look at it, you know, service most is your message measures and all the other, You know, technologies you talked about with very, very complimentary to those approaches because we're delivering the on underlying network infrastructure on network fabric. Whatever you'd like to call it, that can be managed natively with class native tools, squeezing the alliteration there. But but, you know, it means that you don't need toe add overlays. We don't need to sort of say, Hey, look, the network is this static, archaic thing that's really fragile. And And I mean, if we touch it, it's going to break. So let's just leave it alone and let's let's put some kind of overlay over the top of it on do you know, run over the top? What we're saying is you can collapse that down. Now what you can say, what you can do is you can say, Well, let's make the network dynamic responsive. Let's build a network operating system out of micro services so you can replace parts of it. You can, you know, fix bugs. You can fix security vulnerabilities and you can do all that on the fly without having to schedule outage windows, which is, you know, for a cloud native company or a sass or infrastructure service company. I mean, that's your business. You can't take outage windows. Your business depends on being available all the time. And so we were really changing that fundamentals of a principle of networking and saying, You know, networking is now dynamic, you know, in a very, very native way, but it also integrates very closely with Dev ops. Operational model >> is a lot of innovation that network. We're seeing that clearly around the industry. No doubt everyone sees late and see that comes into multi Cloud was saying that the trend moving the data to the compute coyote again that's a network issue network is now an innovation opportunity. So I gotta ask you, where do you guys see that happening? And I want to ask you specifically talking about the cloud architects out in the marketplace in these enterprises who were trying to figure out about the architecture of clowns. So they know on premises there, moving that into a cloud operations. We see Amazon, they see Google and Microsoft has clouds that might want to engage with have cloud native presence in a hybrid and multi cloud fashion for those cloud architects. What are the things that you like to see them doing? More of that relates to your value problems. In other words, if they're using containers or they're using micro services, is this good or bad? What? What you should enterprise to be working on that ties into your value proposition. >> So I think about this the other way around, actually, if I can kind of turn that turn that question. But on his head, I think what you know, enterprises, you know, organization C, S. P s. I think what they should be doing is focusing on their business and what their business needs. They shouldn't be looking at their infrastructure architecture and saying, you know, okay, how can we, you know, build all these pieces? And then you know what can the business and do on top of that infrastructure? You wanna look at it the other way around? I need to deploy applications rapidly. I need to innovate those applications. I need to, you know, upgrade, change whatever you need to do with those applications. And I need an infrastructure that can be responsive. I need an infrastructure that can be hybrid. I need infrastructure that can be, you know, orchestrated in the hybrid manner on DH. Therefore, I want to go and look for the building blocks out there of those those architectural and infrastructure building blocks out there that can service that application in the most appropriate way to enable the velocity of my business and the innovation from my business. Because at the end of the day, I mean, you know, when we talk to customers, the most important thing T customers, you know, is the velocity of their business. It is keeping ahead in the highly competitive environment and staying so far ahead that you're not going to be disrupted. And, you know, if any element of your infrastructure is holding you back and even you know, you know the most mild way it's a problem. It's something you should address. And we now have the capability to do that for, you know, for many, many years. In fact, you know, I would claim up to today without snap route that you know, you you do not have the ability to remove the network problem. The network is always going to be a boat anchor on your business. It introduces extra cycles. It introduces big security, of underplaying >> the problems of the network and the consequences that prior to snap her out that you guys saw. >> So I take the security issue right? I mean, everybody is very concerned about security today. One of the biggest attack vectors in the security world world today is the infrastructure. It's it's it's so vulnerable. A lot of infrastructure is is built on sort of proprietary software and operating systems. You know, it's very complex. There's a lot of, you know, operations, operational, moves out and change it. So there's there's a lot of opportunity for mistakes to be made. There's a lot of opportunity for, you know, for vulnerabilities to be exposed. And so what you want to do is you want to reduce the threat surface of, you know, your your infrastructure. So one of the things that we can do it SnapRoute that was never possible before is when you look at a traditional network operating system. Andreas, A traditional. I mean, any operating system is out there, other you know, Other >> than our own. >> It's basically a monolithic Lennox blob. It is one blob of code that contains all of the features. And it could be, you know, architect in in a way that it Sze chopped up nicely. But if you're not using certain features, they're still there. And that increases the threat surface with our sat proud plant native network operating system. Because it is a micro services are key picture. If you are not using certain services or features, you can destroy and remove the containers that contain those features and reduce the threat surface of the operating system. And then beyond that, if you do become aware ofthe vulnerability or a threat that you know is somewhere in there, you can replace it in seconds on the fly without taking the infrastructure. Damn, without having to completely replace that whole blob of software causing, you know, an outage window. So that's just one example of, you know, the things we can do. But even when it comes to simple things, like, you know, adding in new services or things because we're containerized service is a ll boot together. It's no, eh? You know it doesn't. It doesn't have a one after the other. It it's all in parallel. So you know this this operating system comes up faster. It's more reliable. It eliminates the risk factors, the security, you know, the issues that you have. It provides native automation capabilities. It natively integrates with, You know, your Dev Ops tool chain. It brings networking into the cloud. Native >> really, really isn't in frustrations. Code is an operating system, so it sounds like your solution is a cloud native operating system. That's correct. That's pretty much the solution. That's it. How do customers engage with you guys? And what do you say? That cloud architect this is Don't tell me what to do. What's the playbook, right? How you guys advice? Because I see this is a new solution. Talk about the solution and your recommendation to architects as they start thinking about building that elastic in that flexible environment. >> Yeah. I mean, I think you know, Ah, big recommendation is, you know, is to embrace, you know, that all the all of the cloud native principles and most of the companies that were talking to, you know, definitely doing that and moving very quickly. But, you know, my recommendation. You know, engaging with us is you should be looking for the network to in naval, your your goals and your you know your applications rather than limiting. I mean, that's that's the big difference that, you know, the people who really see the value in what we do recognize that, you know, the network should be Andi is an asset. It should be enabling new innovation, new capabilities in the business rather than looking at the network as necessary evil where we you know, where we have to get over its limitations or it's holding us back. And so, you know, for any organization that is, you know, is looking at deploying, you know, new switching infrastructure in any way, shape or form. I think, you know, you should be looking at Well, how am I going to integrate this into a dev ops? You know, world, how may going to integrate this into a cloud native world. So as my business moves forward, I'm actually servicing the application in enabling a faster time to service for the application for the business. At the end of the day, that's that's everybody's going, >> you know, we've been seeing in reporting this consistently, and it's even more mainstream now that cloud computing has opened up the aperture of the value and the economics and also the technical innovation around application developers coding faster having the kind of resource is. But it also created a CZ creating a renaissance and networking. So the value of networking and application development that collision is coming together very quickly. So the intersection you guys play. So I'm sure this will resonate well with customers Will as they try to figure out the role the network because against security number one analytics all the things that go into what Sadiq they care about share data, shared coat all this is kind of coming together. So if someone hears this story, they'll go, OK, love this snap around store. I gotta I gotta dig in. How do they engage you? What do you guys sell to them? What's the pitch? Give the quick plug for the company real >> quick. Engaging with us is, you know, is a simple issue. No, come to www snapper out dot com. And you know, you know contacts are up there. You know, we were currently obviously we're a small company. We sell direct, more engaged with, you know, our first customers and deploying our product, you know, right now, and it's going very, very well, and, you know, it's a PSE faras. You know how you know what and when to engage us. I would say you can engage us at any stage and and value whether or not your architect ing a whole new network deploying a new data center. Obviously. Which is, you know, it is an ideal is built from the ground up, but we add value to the >> data center preexisting data saying that wants >> the modernizing data centers. I mean, very want >> to modernize my data center, my candidate. >> So one of the biggest challenges in an existing data center in when one of the biggest areas of tension is at the top of rack switch the top of racks, which is where you connect in your you know, your your application assets, your servers are connected. You're connecting into the into the, you know, first leap into the network. One of the challenges there is. You know, Dev ops engineers, They want Teo, you know, deploy containers. They want to deploy virtual machines they wantto and stuff move stuff, change stuff and they need network engineers to help them to do that. For a network engineer, the least interesting part of the infrastructure is the top Arax. Which it is a constant barrage day in, day, out of request. Hey, can I have a villain? Can have an i p address. Can we move this? And it's not interesting. It just chews up time we alleviate that tension. What we enable you to do is network engineer can you know, deploy the network, get it up and running, and then control what needs to be controlled natively from their box from debits tool chains and allow the devil ups engineers to take control as infrastructure. So the >> Taelon is taking the stress out of the top of racks. Wedge, take the drama out of this. >> Take that arm around the network. Right. >> So okay, you have the soul from a customer. What am I buying? What do you guys offering? Is that a professional services package? Is it software? Is it a sad solution? Itself is the product. >> It is software, you know. We are. We're selling a network operating system. It lands on, you know, bare metal. He liked white box switching. Ah, nde. We offer that as both perpetual licenses or as a subscription. We also office, um, you know, the value and services around that as well. You know, Andre, right now that is, you know, that is our approach to market. You know, we may expand that, you know, two other services in the future, but that is what we're selling right now. It is a network operating >> system down. Thanks for coming and sharing this story of SnapRoute. Final question for you is you've been in this century. While we've had many conversations we'd love to talk about gear, speeds and feeds. I'll see softwares eating. The world was seeing that we're seeing cloud create massive amounts. Opportunity. You're in a big wave, right? What is this wave look like for the next couple of years? How do you see this? Playing out as Cloud continues to go global and you start to Seymour networking becoming much more innovative. Part of the equation with Mohr developers coming onboard. Faster, more scale. How do you see? It's all playing out in the industry. >> Yeah. So I think the next sort of, you know, big wave of things is really around the operational. But I mean, we've we've we've concentrated for many years in the networking industry on speeds and feeds. And then it was, you know, it's all about protocols and you know how protocol stacks of building stuff. That's all noise. It's really about How do you engage with the network? How do you how do you operate your network to service your business? Quite frankly, you know, you should not even know the network is there. If we're doing a really good job of network, you shouldn't even know about it. And that's where we need to get to is an industry. And you know that's that's my belief is where, where we can take >> it. Low latent. See programmable networks. Great stuff. SnapRoute Dominic. While no one is dominant industry friend of the Cube also keep alumni CEO of Snapper Out. Hot new start up with some big backers. Interesting signal. Programmable networks software Cloud Global all kind of big Party innovation equation. Here in Silicon Valley, I'm showing for with cube conversations. Thanks for watching

>> From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE. Covering the Conference Boards Sixth Annual Innovation Master Class. >> Hey, welcome back here, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Innovation Mater Class at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto. Really excited to be here, never been here, surprisingly, for all the shows we do just up the hill next to VMware, and Tesla. This is kind of the granddaddy of locations and innovation centers, it's been around forever. If you don't know the history, get a couple books, you'll learn it pretty fast. So we're excited to be here and our next guess is Antony Brydon, four-time founder and CEO, which is not easy to do. Again, check the math on that, most people are successful a couple times, hard to do it four times. And now he's the co-founder and CEO of Directly. So Antony, great to see you. >> It's good to be here. >> So, Directly, what is directly all about for people aren't familiar with the company? >> Most companies are excited to, and pursuing, the opportunity of automating up to 85% of their customer service. That's the ambition, and giving customers a delightful answer in their first experience. Most of those companies are falling down out of the gates because there are content gaps, and data gaps, and training gaps, and empathy gaps in the systems. So we build a CX automation platform and it puts experts at the heart of AI, letting these companies build networks of product experts and then rewarding those experts for creating content for AI systems, for training AI systems, for resolving customer questions. >> Right. So let's back up a step. So Zendesk is probably one we're all familiar with. You send in a customer service node, a lot of the times it comes back, customer service to Zendesk. >> Yes. >> But you're not building kind of a competitor of Zendesk, you're more of a partner, if I believe, for those types of applications, to help those apps do a better job. >> We are, we're a partner for Zendesk, we're a partner for Microsoft Dynamics, for Service Cloud and the like, and, essentially, are building the automation systems that make their AI systems work and work better. >> Right. >> Those are pure technology systems that often lack the data and the content to deliver AI at scale and quality, and that's where our platform and the human network, the experts in the mix, come into play. >> We could probably go for a long, long time on this topic. So what are some of the key things that make them not work now? Besides just the fact that it's kind of like the old dial-in systems. It's like, I just want to hit 0000. I just want to talk to a person. I have no confidence or faith that going through these other steps is going to get me the solution. Do you still see that on the online world as well? >> No, there are very clear gaps. There are four or five areas where systems are falling down. AI project mortality, as I refer to it. Very few companies have the structured data that systems need to work at scale. >> On the back, to feed the whole thing. >> That's right. Labeled, structured, organized data. So that doesn't exist. Many companies don't have the content. That's a second area. They may have enterprised knowledge bases, but they're five years old, they're seven years old, they're outdated, they're not accurate. Many companies don't have the signal. When a automated answer's delivered, they have to wait for a customer to rate it, and that tends to be really poor signal on whether that answer was good or not. And then last, many companies just don't have the teams to maintain these algorithms and constantly tune them. And that is where experts at the heart of a platform can come into play, by building a network of product experts who know the products inside and out. These could be Airbnb hosts for one of our customers, these could by Microsoft Excel users in the Microsoft example. Those experts can create that content, train the data, and actually resolve questions, filling those gaps, solving those problems. >> Right. I'm just curious, on the expert side, how many--? I don't know if there's best practices or if there's kind of certain buckets depending on the industry. Of those expert answers are generated by people inside the company versus a really kind of active, engaged community where you've got third-party experts that are happy to participate and help provide that info. >> Over 99% of the answers and the content is actually generated by the external network. >> 99%? >> 99%. You start with sources of enterprise knowledge, but it's a long, hard, arduous process to create those internal knowledge bases, and companies really struggle to keep up, it's Britannica. By the time you ship it it's outdated and you have to start all over again. The external expert networks work more like Wikipedia. Content constantly being organically created, the successful content is promoted, the unsuccessful content is demoted, and it's an evergreen cycle where it's constantly refreshing. Overwhelmingly external. >> Overwhelming. I mean, I could see where there's certain types of products. I was telling somebody else the other day about Harley-Davidson, one of the all-time great brands. People tattoo it on their body. Now, there aren't very many brands that people tattoo on their body. So easy to get people to talk about motorcycles or some of these types of things, but how do you do it for something that's really not that exciting? What are some of the tricks and incentives to engage that community? Or is there just always some little corps that you may or may not be aware of that are happy to jump in and so passionate about those types of products? >> There are definitely some companies where there's very little expertise and passion in the ecosystem around it. They're few and far between. If you find a product, if you find a company, you can find people that rely, love, and depend on that company. I gave some of the B to C examples, but we've also got networks for enterprise software companies, folks like SAP, folks like Autodesk. And those networks have experts that are developers, resellers, VARs, systems integrators, and the like. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the talent and the passion exists, you just have to have a simple platform to onboard and start tapping that talent and passion. >> So if I hear you right, you use kind of your Encyclopedia Britannica because that's what you have to start, to get the fly wheel moving, but as you start to collect inputs from third-party community, you can start to refine and get the better information back. And I ask specifically that way because you mentioned the human factors, and making people part of this thing, which is probably part of the problem with adoption, as I'd want confidence that there's some person behind this, even if the AI is smart. I'd want at least feel like there's some human-to-human contact when I reach out to this company. >> Yeah, that's critically important, because the empathy gap is real in almost all of the systems that are traditionally out there, which is when an automated answer's delivered, in a traditional system, it typically has a much lower CSAT than when it comes from a human being. What we found is when you have an expert author that content, when his or her face is shown next to the answer as it's presented to the user, and where he or she is there to back it up should that user still need more help, there you retain the human elements that personalize the contact, that humanize the experience, and immediately get big gains in CSAT. So It think that empathy piece is really important. >> Right. I wondered if you could share any specific examples of a customer that had an automated, kind of dumb system, I'll just use that word, compared to what they can do today, and some of the impacts when they put in some of the AI-powered systems like you guys support. >> So one of the first immediate impacts is often when we go in, a automated or unassisted system will be handling a very small percentage of the queries, and percentage of the customer questions coming in, and-- >> And people are going straight to zero, they're just like, I got to go to a person. >> Yeah, we're mostly in digital channels, so less phone, but yes, because the content there-- >> As an analogy, right. >> Because the content isn't there, it doesn't hit and resolve the question in that frequent a rate, or because the training and the signal isn't there, it's giving answers that are a little off-base. So the first and lowest hanging fruit is with a content library that's get created that can get 10, 50, 100 times broader that enterprise content pretty quickly. You're able to hit a much broader set of questions at a much higher rate. That's the first low-hanging fruit and kind of immediate impact. >> And is that helping them orchestrate, coordinate, collect data form this passionate ecosystem that's outside the four walls? Is that, essentially, what you're doing in that step? >> It essentially is. It is about companies having these ecosystems of these users, millions of hours of expertise in their head, millions of hours free time on their hands, and the ability to tap that in a systematic way. >> Wow. Shift gears a little bit, you are participating on a panel here at the event, talking about startups working with big companies and there's obviously a lot of challenges, starting with vendor viability issues, which is more kind of selling to big customers versus, necessarily, partnering with big companies. But what are some of the themes that you've seen that make that collaboration successful? Because, obviously, you've got different cultures, you got different kind of rates of the way things happen, you've got, beware the big company who eats you up in meetings all the time when you're a little start-up, they'll kill you accidentally just by scheduling so many meetings. What are some of the secrets of success that you're going to share here at the event? >> So we've got experience in that. Microsoft is a partner of ours, Microsoft Ventures is an investor. I think the single biggest key is an aligned vision and a complementary approach. The aligned vision where both the start-up and the partner are aiming for a similar point on the horizon. For example, the belief that automation can delight a very large set of customers by providing them a good, instant answer, but complementary approaches where the core skillsets of the companies round out each other and become less competitive. In this case, we've partnered with-- Microsoft is best in class AI platform and cognitive services, and we're able to tap and leverage that. We're also able to bring something unique to the equation by putting experts at the heart of it. So I think that architectural structure, in the first place, is a great example of kind of getting it right. >> Right. And your experience, that's been pretty easy to establish at the head-end of the process, so that you have kind of smooth sailing ahead? >> No, I don't think it's easy to establish at the head of the process, and I think that's where all of the good work and investment needs to happen. Upfront, on that kind of shared vision, and on that kind of complementary approach. And I think it is probably 20% building that together, but it's also 80% just finding it. The selection criteria by which a corporate partner picks a startup and the startup partner picks the corporate partner. I think just selecting right is the majority of the challenge, rather than trying to craft it kind of midstream. >> If it doesn't feel good at the beginning, it's probably not going to to work out. >> Right, it's about finding it. It's a little bit like the Venture analogy. Do they find great companies, or do they build great companies? Probably a little of both, but that finding that great company is a large part of the equation. >> Yeah, helps. So, Antony, finally get a last question. So, again, four successful startups. That does not happen very often with the same team. And look at your background, you're a psychology and philosophy major, not an engineer. So I'd just love to get kind of your thoughts about being a non-tech guy starting, running, and successfully exiting tech companies here in silicon valley. What's kind of the nice thing being from a slightly different background that you've used to really drive a number of successes? So I think the-- I think two things, I think one, coming from a non-tech and coming from a psych background has given us an appreciation of the human elements in these systems that tech alone can't do it. I'd say, personally, one of the impacts of being a non-tech founder in this valley is a heck of a lot of appreciation for what teams can do. And realizing that what teams can do is far more important than what individuals can do. And I say that because as a non-tech founder, there's literally nothing I could accomplish without being a part of a team. So that, I think, non-tech founders have that in spades. A harsh and frank realization that it's about team and they can't do anything on their own. >> Well, Antony, thanks for taking a minute out of your time. Good luck on the panel this afternoon and we'll keep an eye, watch the story unfold again. >> Yep, I appreciate it. Thanks very much. >> He's Antony, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Master at the Master Innovation Class at Xerox PARC, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Midtown Manhattan it's theCUBE. Covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. >> OK, welcome back everyone we're here in New York City it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Big Data NYC, in conjunction with Strata Data going on right around the corner. It's out third day talking to all the influencers, CEO's, entrepreneurs, people making it happen in the Big Data world. I'm John Furrier co-host of theCUBE, with my co-host here Jim Kobielus who is the Lead Analyst at Wikibon Big Data. Nenshad Bardoliwalla. >> Bar-do-li-walla. >> Bardo. >> Nenshad Bardoliwalla. >> That guy. >> Okay, done. Of Paxata, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer it's a tongue twister, third day, being from Jersey, it's hard with our accent, but thanks for being patient with me. >> Happy to be here. >> Pranav Rastogi, Product Manager, Microsoft Azure. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. I apologize for that, third day blues here. So Paxata, we had your partner on Prakash. >> Prakash. >> Prakash. Really a success story, you guys have done really well launching theCUBE fun to watch you guys from launching to the success. Obviously your relationship with Microsoft super important. Talk about the relationship because I think this is really people can start connecting the dots. >> Sure, maybe I'll start and I'LL be happy to get Pranav's point of view as well. Obviously Microsoft is one of the leading brands in the world and there are many aspects of the way that Microsoft has thought about their product development journey that have really been critical to the way that we have thought about Paxata as well. If you look at the number one tool that's used by analysts the world over it's Microsoft Excel. Right, there isn't even anything that's a close second. And if you look at the the evolution of what Microsoft has done in many layers of the stack, whether it's the end user computing paradigm that Excel provides to the world. Whether it's all of their recent innovation in both hybrid cloud technologies as well as the big data technologies that Pranav is part of managing. We just see a very strong synergy between trying to combine the usage by business consumers of being able to take advantage of these big data technologies in a hybrid cloud environment. So there's a very natural resonance between the 2 companies. We're very privileged to have Microsoft Ventures as an investor in Paxata and so the opportunity for us to work with one of the great brands of all time in our industry was really a privilege for us. Yeah, and that's the corporate sides so that wasn't actually part of it. So it's a different part of Microsoft which is great. You have also business opportunity with them. >> Nenshad : We do. >> Obviously data science problem that we're seeing is that they need to get the data faster. All that prep work, seems to be the big issue. >> It does and maybe we can get Pranav's point of view from the Microsoft angle. >> Yeah so to sort of continue what Nenshad was saying, you know the data prep in general is sort of a key core competence which is problematic for lots of users, especially around the knowledge that you need to have in terms of the different tools you can use. Folks who are very proficient will do ETL or data preparation like scenarios using one of the computing engines like Hive or Spark. That's good, but there's this big audience out there who like Excel-like interface, which is easy to use a very visually rich graphical interface where you can drag and drop and can click through. And the idea behind all of this is how quickly can I get insights from my data faster. Because in a big data space, it's volume, variety and velocity. So data is coming at a very fast rate. It's changing it's growing. And if you spend lot of time just doing data prep you're losing the value of data, or the value of data would change over time. So what we're trying to do would sort of enabling Paxata or HDInsight is enabling these users to use Paxata, get insights from data faster by solving key problems of doing data prep. >> So data democracy is a term that we've been kicking around, you guys have been talking about as well. What is actually mean, because we've been teasing out first two days here at theCUBE and BigData NYC is. It's clear the community aspect of data is growing, almost on a similar path as you're seeing with open source software. That genie's out the bottle. Open source software, tier one, it won, it's only growing exponentially. That same paradigm is moving into the data world where the collaboration is super important, in this data democracy, what is that actually mean and how does that relate to you guys? >> So the perspective we have is that first something that one of our customers said, that is there is no democracy without certain degrees of governance. We all live in a in a democracy. And yet we still have rules that we have to abide by. There are still policies that society needs to follow in order for us to be successful citizens. So when when a lot of folks hear the term democracy they really think of the wild wild west, you know. And a lot of the analytic work in the enterprise does have that flavor to it, right, people download stuff to their desktop, they do a little bit of massaging of the data. They email that to their friend, their friend then makes some changes and next thing you know we have what what some folks affectionately call spread mart hell. But if you really want to democratize the technology you have to wrap not only the user experience, like Pranav described, into something that's consumable by a very large number of folks in the enterprise. You have to wrap that with the governance and collaboration capabilities so that multiple people can work off the same data set. That you can apply the permissions so that people, who is allowed to share with each other and under what circumstances are they allowed to share. Under what circumstances are you allowed to promote data from one environment to another? It may be okay for someone like me to work in a sandbox but I cannot push that to a database or HDFS or Azure BLOB storage unless I actually have the right permissions to do so. So I think what you're seeing is that, in general, technology is becoming a, always goes on this trend, towards democratization. Whether it's the phone, whether it's the television, whether it's the personal computer and the same thing is happening with data technologies and certainly companies like. >> Well, Pranav, we're talking about this when you were on theCUBE yesterday. And I want to get your thoughts on this. The old way to solve the governance problem was to put data in silos. That was easy, I'll just put it in a silo and take care of it and access control was different. But now the value of the data is about cross-pollinating and make it freely available, horizontally scalable, so that it can be used. But the same time and you need to have a new governance paradigm. So, you've got to democratize the data by making it available, addressable and use for apps. The same time there's also the concerns on how do you make sure it doesn't get in the wrong hands and so on and so forth. >> Yeah and which is also very sort of common regarding open source projects in the cloud is a how do you ensure that the user authorized to access this open source project or run it has the right credentials is authorized and stuff. So, the benefit that you sort of get in the cloud is there's a centralized authentication system. There's Azure Active Directory, so you know most enterprise would have Active Directory users. Who are then authorized to either access maybe this cluster, or maybe this workload and they can run this job and that sort of further that goes down to the data layer as well. Where we have active policies which then describe what user can access what files and what folders. So if you think about the entrance scenario there is authentication and authorization happening and for the entire system when what user can access what data. And part of what Paxata brings in the picture is like how do you visualize this governance flow as data is coming from various sources, how do you make sure that the person who has access to data does have access data, and the one who doesn't cannot access data. >> Is that the problem with data prep is just that piece of it? What is the big problem with data prep, I mean, that seems to be, everyone keeps coming back to the same problem. What is causing all this data prep. >> People not buying Paxata it's very simple. >> That's a good one. Check out Paxata they're going to solve your problems go. But seriously, there seems to be the same hole people keep digging themselves into. They gather their stuff then next thing they're in the in the same hole they got to prepare all this stuff. >> I think the previous paradigms for doing data preparation tie exactly to the data democracy themes that we're talking about here. If you only have a very silo'd group of people in the organization with very deep technical skills but don't have the business context for what they're actually trying to accomplish, you have this impedance mismatch in the organization between the people who know what they want and the people who have the tools to do it. So what we've tried to do, and again you know taking a page out of the way that Microsoft has approached solving these problems you know both in the past in the present. Is to say look we can actually take the tools that once were only in the hands of the, you know, shamans who know how to utter the right incantations and instead move that into the the common folk who actually. >> The users. >> The users themselves who know what they want to do with the data. Who understand what those data elements mean. So if you were to ask the Paxata point of view, why have we had these data prep problems? Because we've separated the people who had the tools from the people who knew what they wanted to do with it. >> So it sounds to me, correct me if this is the wrong term, that what you offer in your partnership is it basically a broad curational environment for knowledge workers. You know, to sift and sort and annotating shared data with the lineage of the data preserved in essentially a system of record that can follow the data throughout its natural life. Is that a fair characterization? >> Pranav: I would think so yeah. >> You mention, Pranav, the whole issue of how one visualizes or should visualize this entire chain of custody, as it were, for the data, is there is there any special visualization paradigm that you guys offer? Now Microsoft, you've made a fairly significant investment in graph technology throughout your portfolio. I was at Build back in May and Sacha and the others just went to town on all things to do with Microsoft Graph, will that technology be somehow at some point, now or in the future, be reflected in this overall capability that you've established here with your partner here Paxata? >> I am not sure. So far, I think what you've talked about is some Graph capabilities introduced from the Microsoft Graph that's sort of one extreme. The other side of Graph exists today as a developer you can do some Graph based queries. So you can go to Cosmos DB which had a Gremlin API. For Graph based query, so I don't know how. >> I'll get right to the question. What's the Paxata benefits of with HDInsight? How does that, just quickly, explain for the audience. What is that solution, what are the benefits? >> So the the solution is you get a one click install of installing Paxata HDInsight and the benefit is as a benefit for a user persona who's not, sort of, used to big data or Hadoop they can use a very familiar GUI-based experience to get their insights from data faster without having any knowledge of how Spark works or Hadoop works. >> And what does the Microsoft relationship bring to the table for Paxata? >> So I think it's a couple of things. One is Azure is clearly growing at an extremely fast pace. And a lot of the enterprise customers that we work with are moving many of their workloads to Azure and and these cloud based environments. Especially for us, the unique value proposition of a partner who truly understands the hybrid nature of the world. The idea that everything is going to move to the cloud or everything is going to stay on premise is too simplistic. Microsoft understood that from day one. That data would be in it and all of those different places. And they've provided enabling technologies for vendors like us. >> I'll just say it to maybe you're too coy to say it, but the bottom line is you have an Excel-like interface. They have Office 365 they're user's going to instantly love that interface because it's an easy to use interface an Excel-like it's not Excel interface per se. >> Similar. >> Metaphor, graphical user interface. >> Yes it is. >> It's clean and it's targeted at the analyst role or user. >> That's right. >> That's going to resonate in their install base. >> And combined with a lot of these new capabilities that Microsoft is rolling out from a big data perspective. So HDInsight has a very rich portfolio of runtime engines and capabilities. They're introducing new data storage layers whether it's ADLS or Azure BLOB storage, so it's really a nice way of us working together to extract and unlock a lot of the value that Microsoft. >> So, here's the tough question for you, open source projects I see Microsoft, comments were hell froze because LINUX is now part of their DNA, which was a comment I saw at the even this week in Orlando, but they're really getting behind open source. From open compute, it's just clearly new DNA's. They're they're into it. How are you guys working together in open source and what's the impact to developers because now that's only one cloud, there's other clouds out there so data's going to be an important part of it. So open source, together, you guys working together on that and what's the role for the data? >> From an open source perspective, Microsoft plays a big role in embracing open source technologies and making sure that it runs reliably in the cloud. And part of that value prop that we provide in sort of Azure HDInsight is being sure that you can run these open source big data workloads reliably in the cloud. So you can run open source like Apache, Spark, Hive, Storm, Kafka, R Server. And the hard part about running open source technology in the cloud is how do you fine tune it, and how do you configure it, how do you run it reliably. And that's what sort of what we bring in from a cloud perspective. And we also contribute back to the community based on sort of what learned by running these workloads in the cloud. And we believe you know in the broader ecosystem customers will sort of have a mixture of these combinations and their solution They'll be using some of the Microsoft solutions some open source solutions some solutions from ecosystem that's how we see our customer solution sort of being built today. >> What's the big advantage you guys have at Paxata? What's the key differentiator for why someone should work with you guys? Is it the automation? What's the key secret sauce to you guys? >> I think it's a couple of dimensions. One is I think we have come the closest in the industry to getting a user experience that matches the Excel target user. A lot of folks are attempting to do the same but the feedback we consistently get is that when the Excel user uses our solution they just, they get it. >> Was there a design criteria, was that from the beginning how you were going to do this? >> From day one. >> So you engineer everything to make it as simple as like Excel. >> We want people to use our system they shouldn't be coding, they shouldn't be writing scripts. They just need to be able. >> Good Excel you just do good macros though. >> That's right. >> So simple things like that right. >> But the second is being able to interact with the data at scale. There are a lot of solutions out there that make the mistake in our opinion of sampling very tiny amounts of data and then asking you to draw inferences and then publish that to batch jobs. Our whole approach is to smash the batch paradigm and actually bring as much into the interactive world as possible. So end users can actually point and click on 100 million rows of data, instead of the million that you would get in Excel, and get an instantaneous response. Verses designing a job in a batch paradigm and then pushing it through the the batch. >> So it's interactive data profiling over vast corpuses of data in the cloud. >> Nenshad: Correct. >> Nenshad Bardoliwalla thanks for coming on theCUBE appreciate it, congratulations on Paxata and Microsoft Azure, great to have you. Good job on everything you do with Azure. I want to give you guys props, with seeing the growth in the market and the investment's been going well, congratulations. Thanks for sharing, keep coverage here in BigData NYC more coming after this short break.