(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special Cube Conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California with a special guest. Dialing in remotely Paul Martino, the founder of Bullpen Capital and also the producer of an upcoming film called The Inside Game. It's a story about a true story about an NBA betting scandal. It's really, it's got everything you want to know. It's got sports, it's got gambling, it's got fixing of games. Paul Martino, known for being a serial entrepreneur and then an investor, investing in some great growth companies, and now running his own firm called Bullpen Capital, which bets on high-growth companies and takes them to the next level. Paul, great to see you. Thanks for spending the time. Good to see you again. >> John, always good to see you. Thanks for having me on the show. >> So, you're a unique individual. You're a computer science whiz, investor, entrepreneur, now film producer. This story kind of crosses over your interests. Obviously in Philly, you're kind of like me, kind of a blue collar kind of guy. You know hot starters when you see it. You also were an investor in a lot of the sports, gambling, betting, kind of online games, we've talked about in the past. But now you're crossing over into filming movies. Which is, seems like very cool and obviously we're living in a date of digital media where code is software, code is content, obviously we believe that. What's this movie all about? All the buzz is out there, Inside Game. You get it on sports radio all the time. Give us the scoop. Why Inside Game? What's it about? Give us the 411. >> Yeah, so John, I mean, this is a story that picked me. My producing partner in this is a guy named Michael Pierce who made a bunch of great movies, including The Cooler, one of the best gambling movies, with William H Macy. And he says sometimes the movie picks you and sometimes you pick the movie. And I wasn't sitting around one day going wow I want to be a movie producer, it was just much more that my cousin is the principal in the story. My cousin was the go-between between the gambler and the referee. The three of them were friends ever since they were kids. And when they all got out of jail Tommy called me, Tommy Martino. He said hey Paulie, you're about the only legitimate business guy I know. Could you help me with my life rights? And that's how this started almost six years ago. >> And what progressed next? You sat down, had a couple cocktails, beers, said okay here's how we're going to structure it. Was it more brainstorming and then it kind of went from there? Take us through that progression. >> It was a pure intellectual property exercise, and this is where being a startup guy was helpful. I was like, Tommy, I'll buy your life rights. Maybe we'll get a script written, we'll put it on the shelf, so that if anybody ever wants to make this story they have to go through us. Almost like a blocking patent or a copyright. And he's like okay cool. And so I said I have no delusions of ever making this movie. I actually don't know that, I don't know anybody to make a movie. This is not my skill set. But if anybody ever wants to make the movie, they're going to have to come deal with us. And then the lucky break happens, like anything in a startup. I have this random meeting with a guy named Michael Pierce, who was at a firm called WPS Challenger out of London. And we're down in Hillstone in Santa Monica, and I say to him, I say I've got this script written about this NBA betting scandal, would you do me a favor? He literally laughs in my face. He goes a venture guy from Silicon Valley is going to hand me a script. What a bad, anyway, I was like look dude, I'm a good guy to have owe you a favor so just read this dang thing. About 8 hours later my phone rings, he says who the hell is Andy Callahan? This is the best script I've ever read in my entire life. Let's go make a movie. Andy Callahan was a friend of a friend from high school who wrote the script. He actually once beat Kobe Bryant when he was a center at Haverford when Kobe Bryant played at Lower Merion here in the Philly suburbs. So, it's kind of this local Philly story. I'm a local Philly blue collar guy, we put the pieces together, and I'll be danged and now six years later the film is in the can and you're probably going to see it during the NBA finals this year in June. >> All right, so there's some news out there it's on the cover on ESPN Magazine, the site is now launched. I've been hearing buzz all morning on this in the sports radio world. A lot of buzz, a lot of organic virality around it. Reminds of the Crazy, Rich Asians, which kind of started organically, similar kind of community behind it. This has really got some legs to it. Give us some taste of what's some of the latest organic growth here around the buzz. >> Yeah so, think about this. This happened in, primarily '06 and '07. They were sentenced in 2010 and were in jail in 2011. It is 2019 and the front page story on ESPN is What Tim, Tommy, and Jimmy Battista Did. Those were the three guys, the gambler, the ref, and the go-between. And this is a front page story on ESPN all these years later. So we know this story has tremendous legs. We know this movie has a tremendous built-in audience. And so now it's just our job to leverage all those marketing channels, places we pioneered, like Zynga and FanDuel to get people who care about the story into the theaters. And we're hoping we can really show people how to do a modern way to market a film using those channels we've pioneered at places like FanDuel and Zynga. >> You and I have had many conversations privately and here on the Cube in the past around startups disruption, and it's the same pattern right? No one thinks it's a great idea, you get the rights to it, and you kind of got to find that inflection point, that magical moment which comes through networking and just hard work and hustle. And then you've got everything comes together. And then it comes together. And then it grows. As the world changes, you're seeing digital completely change the game on Hollywood. For instance, Netflix, you've got Prime, you've got Hulu. This is, essentially, a democratization, I'm not saying, well first of all you've made some money so you had some dough to put into it, but here's a script from a friend. You guys put it together. This is now the new startup model going to Hollywood. Talk about that dynamic, what's your vision there? Because this, I think, is an important signal in how digital content, whether it's guys in the Cube doing stuff or Cube Studios, which we'll, we have a vision for. This is something that's real. Talk about the dynamic. How do you see the entrepeneurial vision around how movies are made, how content's made, and then, ultimately, how they're merchandised in the future. >> Right, there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of buckets. There's the intellectual property bucket of the story, the script, etc. Then there's the bucket of getting the movie made. You know, that's the on the set and that's the director and that's post-production, and then there's the marketing. And what was really interesting is even though I'd never made a movie, two of those three buckets I knew a tremendous amount about from my experience as a startup investor. The marketing and the IP side I understood almost completely, even though I'd never made a film. And so all of the disruptive technologies that we learn for doing disruptive things like marketing a new thing called Daily Fantasy Sports, we were able to bring to bear to this film. Now, I had fun on the set and meeting all the actors, etc. But I had no delusion that I knew about the making of the movie part. So I plead ignorance there, but of the three buckets that you need to go make something in the media space 66% of what I knew as a startup guy overlapped and I think this is what the future of the media is. Because guys like me and you, John, we actually know a lot about this because we're startup people as opposed to we have to learn about it in terms of how to market and how to get an audience. I mean, my last company Aggregate Knowledge designs custom audiences for ad targeting. So we know how to find gamblers to go see this movie. That's literally the company I started. And so that's a thing that I'm very, very comfortable with and it's exciting to then work with the producer who did the creative and the director and I say hey guys, I've got this marketing thing under control, I know how to do it, oh by the way, the old Head of Marketing from FanDuel, he's a consultant to the project. Right, so, we got that. >> You got that, and the movie's being made. That's also again, back to entrepreneurship, risk. You got to take risks, right? This is all about risk management at the end of the day and you know, navigating as the lead entrepreneur, getting it done, there's heavy lifting and costs involved in making the movie, >> Right >> How did you, that's like production, right? You got to build a product. That is ultimately the product when it has to get to market. How did that go, what's your thoughts on your first time running a movie like this, from a production standpoint, learnings, observations? >> I learned a tremendous amount. I must admit, I was along for the ride on that piece of the puddle, puzzle. The product development piece of this was all new to me. But then again, I mean think about it, John, I started four companies, a social network, an ad targeting company, a game company, and a security company. I didn't know anything about those four companies when I started them either in terms of what the product needed to do. So learning a new product called make a movie was kind of par for the course, even though I didn't really know anything about it. You know, if you're going to be a startup person you got to have no fear. That's the real attribute you need to have in these kinds of situations. >> So I got to >> And so, witnessed that first-hand and, you know what, now, if I ever make a movie again I kind of know how to make that product. >> Yeah, well looking forward. You've got great instincts as an entrepreneur. I love hanging out with you. I got to ask you a question. I talk to a lot of young people, my son and his friends and I see people coming out of business school, all this stuff. You know, every college has an entrepreneurial program. Music, film, you know, whatever, they all have kind of bolted on entrepreneurship. You're essentially breaking down that kind of dogma of that you have to have a discipline. Anyone can do this, right? So talk about the folks that are out there, trying to be entrepreneurial, whether you're a musician. This is direct to consumer. If you have skills as an entrepreneur it translates. Talk about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, if you're a musician or someone who has, say, content rights or has content story. What do they do? What's your advice? >> We have lived through, perhaps the most awesome period of the last five to 10 years, where it got cheap to do a startup. You know, when we're doing our first startups 20 years ago, it cost 5 million bucks to go get a license from Oracle and go hire a DBA and do all that stuff. You know what, for 5 grand you can get your website up, you can build, you can use your iPhone, you can film your movie. That's all happened in the last five to 10 years. And what it's done is exactly the word you used. It's democratized who can become an entrepreneur. Now people who never thought entrepreneurship was for them, are able to do it. One of our great examples of this is Ipsy, our cosmetics company. You know, Michelle Phan was a cocktail waitress working in Florida, but she had this YouTube following around watching her videos of her putting her makeup on. And you know when we met her, we're like you know what? You're the next generation of what entrepreneurs look like. Because no, she didn't go to Stanford. She didn't have a PhD in computer science, but she knew what this next generation of content marketing was going to look like. She knew what it was to be a celebrity influencer. You know, that company Ipsy makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year now, and I don't think most people on Sand Hill would've necessarily given Michelle the chance because she didn't look like what the traditional entrepreneur looked like. So it's so cool we live in a time where you don't need to look like what you think an entrepreneur needs to look like or went to the school you had to think you'd go to to become an entrepreneur. It's open to everybody now. >> And the key to success, you know, again, we've talked about those privately all the time when we meet, but I want to get your comment on the record here. But I mean, there's some basic blocking and tackling that's independent of where you went to school that's being creative, networking, networking, networking, you know, and being, good hustle. And being, obviously good judgment and being smart. Do your thoughts on the keys to success for as those folks saying hey you know I didn't have to go to these big, fancy schools. I want to go out there. I want to test my idea. I want to go push the envelope. I want to go for it. What's the tried and true formula from your perspective? >> So when you're in the early stage of hustling and you want to figure out if you're good at being an entrepreneur, I tell entrepreneurs this all the time. Every meeting is a job interview. Now, you might not think it's a job interview, but you want to think about every meeting, this might be the next person I start my company with. This might be the person I end up hiring to go run something at my company. This might be the person I end up getting money for, from to start my company. And so show up, have some skills, have some passion, have a vision, and impress the person on the other side of the table. Every once in a while I get invited to a college and they're like well Paul, life's easy for you, you started a company with Mark Pinkus and you're friend with Reid Hoffman and this... Well how the hell do you think I met those people? I did the same thing I'm telling you to do. When I was nobody coming out of school, I went and did stuff for these guys. I helped them with a business plan. I wrote the code of Tribe, and then now all of the sudden we've got a whole network of people you can go to. Well, that didn't happen by accident. You had to show up and have some skills, talent, and passion and then impress the person on the other side of the table. >> Yeah >> And guess what? If you do that enough times in a row, you're going to end up having your own network. And then you're going to have kids come in and say, wow, how can I impress you? >> Be authentic, be genuine, hustle, do networking, do the job interview, great stuff. All right, back to final point I want to get your thoughts on because I think this is your success and getting this movie out of the gate. Everyone, first, everyone should go see Inside Game. Insidegamemovie.com is the URL. The site just went up. This should be a great movie. I'm looking forward to it, and knowing the work that went in, I followed your journey on this. It should be great. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Uh, digital media, um, your thoughts because we're seeing a direct to consumer model. You've got the big companies, YouTube, Amazon, others. There's kind of a, a huge distribution of those guys. The classic Web 2.0 search kind of paradigm and portal. But now you've got a whole 'nother set of distribution or network effects. Your thoughts, because you were involved in, again, social networking before it became the monster that it is now. How is digital media changing? What's your vision of how that's happening and how does someone jump on that wave and be successful? >> Yeah, we're in the midst of disruption. I mean, I'm in the discussions and final negotiations right now on how we're going to end up ultimately doing the film distribution. And I am very disappointed with the quality of the thinking of the people on the other side of the table. Because they come from very traditional backgrounds. And I'm talking to them about, I want to do a site takeover across Zynga. I want to do a digital download on FanDuel of a 20 minute clip of the film. And they're like what's FanDuel? Who's Zynga? And I'm sitting there, I'm like guys, this is the new media. Oh, by the way, there's a sports app called Wave and Wave is where the local influencers in the markets who want to write the stories are, and we want to do a deal with those guys. And oh, by the way, the CEO of that company is a buddy of mine I met years ago, right? One of those kids I gave advice to, and now I'm going to ask him for a favor from, right, that's how it works. But, it's amazing when you have these conversations with traditional old line media companies. They don't understand any of the words coming out of your mouth. They're like Paul, here's how much I'll give you for your film. Thank you, we'll go market it. I'm like, really? Seriously? I got the former CMO of FanDuel going to help out on this. You don't want to talk to him? >> Yeah >> And so this is where the industry is really ripe for disruption. Because the people from the startup world have already disrupted the apple cart and now we've just got to demonstrate that this model is going to continue to work for the future and be ready when the next new kind of digital transmedia thing comes along and embrace that, as opposed to be scared to death of it or not even know how to talk the language of the people on it. >> Well, you're doing some amazing venturing in your, kind of, unique venture capital model on Bullpen Capital. Certainly isn't your classic venture capital thing, so I'm sure people are going to be talking to you about oh, Paul, are all VCs going to be doing movies? I'm sure that's a narrative that's out there. But you're not just a normal venture capital. You certainly invest. So, venture capitals have reputation issues right now. People talk about, well, you know, they're group think. You know, they only invest in who they see themselves. You mentioned that comment there. The world's changing in venture. Your thoughts on that, how you guys started your firm, and your evolution of venture capital. And is this a sign that you'll see venture capitalists go into movies? >> Well, I don't know about that part. There have been a couple venture people who have done movies. But the part I will talk about is the you got to know somebody, it's an inside game, ha ha, we'll play double entendre on Inside Game here. You know, 20% of the deal we've done at Bullpen, we've done over 100. 20% of them were cold emails on something like LinkedIn or business plans at bullpen.com. 20%, now there's this old trope in venture if you don't get a warm intro I won't even talk to you. Well 20% of our deals came in and we had no idea who the person on the other side was. That's how we run the firm. And so if you're out there going I'm one of those entrepreneurs in the Midwest and no one, I don't know anyone. I'm not in a network, send me a plan. I'm someone who's going to look at it. It doesn't mean I'm going to be an investor, but you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to give you a shot. And I don't care where you're from or what school you went to or what social clique you're in or what your political persuasion is. Matter of fact, I literally don't care. I'm going to give you a shot. Come into my office and that, I think, is what was missing in a lot of firms, where it's a we only do security and we only look at companies that spun out of Berkeley and Stanford. And yeah, there can be an old boys network in that. But you know what, we like to talk to everybody. And the more blue collar the CEO is, the more we love them at Bullpen. >> That's awesome. Talk about the movie real quick on terms of how Hollywood's handling it. Um, expectations, in terms of reaction, was it positive, is it positive, what's the vibe going on in Hollywood, is this going to be a grassroots kind of thing around the FanDuels and your channels? What's your plan for that and what's the reaction of Hollywood? >> So it's going to be a lot of all of the above. But PR is going to be a huge component, I mean, part of the reason we're on today is there's a huge front page story on ESPN about Tim Donaghy and the NBA betting scandal of 2007. And so the earned media is going to be a huge component of this. And I think this is where the Hollywood people do understand the language we're speaking. We're like, look, we have a huge built-in audience that we know how to market to. We have a story. Actually, in the early days, you asked about risk? Back when I was thinking about if I would do this project I would do the following little market research. I'd walk into a sports bar, it didn't matter what town I was in. I could be in Dallas, I could be in Houston, I could be in Boston. I would literally walk up to the bar and say, hey, uh, six of you at the bar, ever hear of Tim Donaghy? It'd be amazing. About seven out of 10 people would go yeah he was the referee, crooked referee in the NBA. I'm like, this is amazing. Seven out of 10 people I meet in a bar know about the story I want to go tell. That sounds like a good chance to make a movie, as opposed to a movie that has no built-in audience. And so, a built-in audience with PR channels that we know work, I think we can really show Hollywood how to do this in a different way if this all works. >> And this comes back to my point around built-in audiences. You know, YouTube has got a million subscribers. That's kind of an old metric. That means they, like an RSS feed kind of model. That's a million people that are, could be, amplifying their network connections. It is a massive built-in audience. The iteration, the DevOps kind of mindset, we talk about cloud computing, can be applied to movies. It's agile movie making. That's what you're talking about. >> Yeah, and by the way, so we have a social network of all the actors and people in the film. So when it's ready, let's go activate our network of all the actors that are in the film. Each of them have a couple million followers. So let's go be smart. Let's, two weeks before the movie, let's send some screenshots. A week before the movie let's show some exclusive videos. Two days before the film, go see it, it's now out in the theaters. You know what, that's pretty, that's 101. We've got actors. We've got producers. Like, let's go use the influencer network we built that actually got the movie made. Let's go on Sports Talk, talk about the movie. Let's go on places like this and talk about how a venture guy made a movie. This is the confluence of all of the pieces all coming together at once. And I just don't think enough people in the film business or in the media business think big enough about going after these audiences. It's oh, we're going to take ads out on TV and I'm going to see my trailer and we're going to do this and that's how we do it. There's so many better ways to get your audience now. >> And this is going to change, just while I've got you here, it's just awesome, awesome conversation. Bringing it back to kind of the CMO in big companies, whether it's consumer or B to B or whatever, movies, the old model of here's our channels. There's certainly this earned media kind of formula and it's not your classic we've got a website, we're going to do all this instrumentation, it's a whole 'nother mechanism. So talk about, in your opinion, the importance of earned media, vis a vis the old other buckets. Owned media, paid media, well-defined Web 1.0, Web 2.0 tactics, earned media is not just how good is our PR? It's actually infrastructure channels, it's networks, a new kind of way to do things. How relevant and how important will this be going forward? Because there's no more website. It's a, you're basically building a media company for this movie. >> That is exactly right. We're building an ad hoc media business. I think this is what the next generation of digital agencies are going to look like. And there are some agencies that we've talked to that really understand all of what you've just said. They are few and far between, unfortunately. >> Yeah, well, Paul, this was theCube. We love talking to people, making it happen. Again, our model's the same as yours. We're open to anyone who's got signal, and you certainly are doing a great job and great to know you and follow your entrepreneur journey, your investment journey, and now your film making journey. Paul Martino, General Pen on Bullpen Capital, with the hot film Inside Game. I'm definitely going to see it. It should be really strong and it's going to be one of those movies like Crazy, Rich Asians, where not looking, not really well produced, I mean not predicted to be great and then goes game buster so I think this is going to be one of those examples. Paul, thanks for coming on. >> Love it, thank you! >> This Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California, bringing ya all the action. Venture capitalist turned film maker Paul Martino with the movie Inside Game. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (triumphant music)

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

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBEConversation. >> Hi everyone, welcome to the special CUBEConversation. We're in Palo Alto, California, at theCUBE studio. I'm John Furrier, co-host of the CUBE. We're here with Chris Yeh. He's the co-founder and general partner of Blitzscaling Ventures, author of the book Blitzscaling with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and a variety of other ventures, also a partner at Greylock Partners. Chris, great to see you. I've known you for years. Love the book, love Reid. You guys did a great job. So congratulations. But the big news is you're now a TV star as one of the original inaugural contestants on the Mental Samurai, just premiered on Fox, was it >> On Fox. >> On Fox, nine o'clock, on which days? >> So Mental Samurai is on Fox, Tuesdays at 9 p.m. right after Master Chef Junior. >> Alright. So big thing. So successful shows. Take us through the journey. >> Yeah. >> It's a new show, so it's got this kind of like Jeopardy vibe where they got to answer tough questions in what looks like a roller coaster kind of arm that moves you around from station to station, kind of jar you up. But it's a lot of pressure, time clock and hard questions. Tell us about the format. How you got that. Gives all the story. >> So the story behind Mental Samurai is it's from the producers of American Ninja Warrior, if you've ever seen that show. So American Ninja Warrior is a physical obstacle course and these incredible athletes go through and the key is to get through the obstacle course. If you miss any of the obstacles, you're out. So they took that and they translated it to the mental world and they said, okay, we're going to have a mental obstacle course where you going to have different kinds of questions. So they have memory questions, sequence questions, knowledge questions, all these things that are tapping different elements of intelligence. And in order to win at the game, you have to get 12 questions right in five minutes or less. And you can't get a single question wrong. You have to be perfect. >> And they do try to jar you up, to kind of scrabble your brain with those devices, it makes it suspenseful. In watching last night at your watch party in Palo Alto, it's fun to watch because yeah, I'm like, okay, it's going to be cool. I'll support Chris. I'll go there, be great and on TV, and oh my, that's pretty interesting. It was actually riveting. Intense. >> Yeah. You have that element of moving around from station to station and it's dramatic. It's kind of a theater presence. But what's it like in there? Give us some insight. You're coming on in April 30th so you're yet to come on. >> Yes. >> But the early contestants, none of them made it to the 100,000. Only one person passed the first threshold. >> Right >> Take us through the format. How many thresholds are there? What's the format? >> Perfect, so basically when a competitor gets strapped into the chair, they call it Ava, it's like a robot, and basically they got it from some company in Germany and it has the ability to move 360 degrees. It's like an industrial robot or something. It makes you feel like you're an astronaut or in one those centrifugal force things. And the idea is they're adding to the pressure. They're making it more of a challenge. Instead of just Jeopardy where you're sitting there, and answering questions and bantering with Alex Trebek, you're working against the clock and you're being thrown around by this robot. So what happens is first you try to answer 12 questions correctly in less than five minutes. If you do that, then you make it through to the next round, what they call the circle of samurai and you win $10,000. The circle of samurai, what happens is there are four questions and you get 90 seconds plus whatever you have left over from your first run, to answer those four questions. Answer all four questions correctly, you win $100,000 and the official title of Mental Samurai. >> So there's only two levels, circle of samurai but it gets harder. Now also I noticed that it's, their questions have certain puzzles and there's certain kinds of questions. What's the categories, if you will, what's the categories they offer? >> Yes, so the different categories are knowledge, which is just classic trivia, it's a kind of Jeopardy stuff. There's memory, where they have something on screen that you have to memorize, or maybe they play an audio track that you have to remember what happened. And then there's also sequence where you have to put things in order. So all these different things are represented by these different towers which are these gigantic television screens where they present the questions. And the idea is in order to be truly intelligent, you have to be able to handle all of these different things. You can't just have knowledge. You can't just have pop culture. You got to have everything. >> So on the candidates I saw some from Stanford. >> Yeah. >> I saw an athlete. It's a lot of diversity in candidates. How do they pick the candidates? How did you get involved? Did your phone ring up one day? Were you identified, they've read your blog. Obviously they've, you're smart. I've read your stuff on Facebook. How did you get in there? (laughs) >> Excellent question. So the whole process, there's a giant casting department that does all these things. And there's people who just cast people for game shows. And what happened with me is many years ago back in 2014, my sister worked in Hollywood when I was growing up. She worked for ER and Baywatch and other companies and she still keeps track of the entertainment industry. And she sent me an email saying, hey, here's a casting call for a new show for smart people and you should sign up. And so I replied to the email and said hey I'm Chris Yeh. I'm this author. I graduate from Stanford when I was 19, blah blah blah blah. I should be on your show. And they did a bunch of auditions with me over the phone. And they said we love you, the network loves you. We'll get in touch and then I never heard. Turns out that show never got the green light. And they never even shot that show. But that put me on a list with these various casting directors. And for this show it turns out that there was an executive producer of the show, the creator of the show, his niece was the casting director who interviewed me back in 2014. And she told her uncle, hey, there's this guy, Chris Yeh, in Palo Alto. I think would be great for this new show you're doing. Why don't you reach out to him. So they reached out to me. I did a bunch of Skype auditions. And eventually while I was on my book tour for Blitzscaling, I got the email saying, congratulations, you're part of the season one cast. >> And on the Skype interviews, was it they grilling you with questions, or was it doing a mock dry run? What was some of interview vetting questions? >> So they start off by just asking you about yourself and having you talk about who you are because the secret to these shows is none of the competitors are famous in advance, or at least very few of them are. There was a guy who was a major league baseball pitcher, there's a guy who's an astronaut, I mean, those guys are kind of famous already, but the whole point is, they want to build a story around the person like they do with the Olympics so that people care whether they succeed or not. And so they start off with biographical questions and then they proceed to basically use flash cards to simulate the game and see how well you do. >> Got it, so they want to basically get the whole story arc 'cause Chris, obviously Chris is smart, he passed the test. Graduate when he's 19. Okay, you're book smart. Can you handle the pressure? If you do get it, there's your story line. So they kind of look from the classic, kind of marketing segmentation, demographics is your storylines. What are some of the things that they said to you on the feedback? Was there any feedback, like you're perfect, we like this about you. Or is it more just cut and dry. >> Well I think they said, we love your energy. It's coming through very strongly to the screen. That's fantastic. We like your story. Probably the part I struggle the most with, was they said hey, you know, talk to us about adversity. Talk to us about the challenges that you've overcome. And I tell people, listen, I'm a very lucky guy. A lot of great things have happened to me in life. I don't know if there's that much adversity that I can really complain about. Other people who deal with these life threatening illnesses and all this stuff, I don't have that. And so that was probably the part I struggled the most with. >> Well you're certainly impressive. I've known you for years. You're a great investor, a great person. And a great part of Silicon Valley. So congratulations, good luck on the show. So it's Tuesdays. >> 9 p.m. >> 9 p.m. >> On fox. >> On Fox. Mental Samurai. Congratulations, great. Great to be at the launch party last night. The watch party, there'll be another one. Now your episode comes out on April 30th. >> Yes. So on April 30th we will have a big Bay area-wide watch party. I'm assuming that admission will be free, assuming I find the right sponsors. And so I'll come back to you. I'll let you know where it's going to be. Maybe we should even film the party. >> That's, well, I got one more question on the show. >> Yeah. >> You have not been yet on air so but you know the result. What was it like sitting in the chair, I mean, what was it personally like for you? I mean you've taken tests, you've been involved with the situation. You've made some investments. There's probably been some tough term sheets here and there, board meetings. And all that experience in your life, what was it compared to, what was it like? >> Well, it's a really huge adrenaline rush because if you think about there's so many different elements that already make it an adrenaline rush and they all combine together. First of all, you're in this giant studio which looks like something out of a space-age set with this giant robotic arm. There's hundreds of people around cheering. Then you're strapped into a robotic arm which basically makes you feel like an astronaut, like every run starts with you facing straight up, right? Lying back as if you're about to be launched on a rocket. And then you're answering these difficult questions with time pressure and then there's Rob Lowe there as well that you're having a conversation with. So all these things together, and your heart, at least for me, my heart was pounding. I was like trying very hard to stay calm because I knew it was important to stay clam, to be able to get through it. >> Get that recall, alright. Chris, great stuff. Okay, Blitzscaling. Blitzscaling Ventures. Very successful concept. I remember when you guys first started doing this at Stanford, you and Reid, were doing the lectures at Stanford Business School. And I'm like, I love this. It's on YouTube, kind of an open project initially, wasn't really, wasn't really meant to be a book. It was more of gift, paying it forward. Now it's a book. A lot of great praise. Some criticism from some folks but in general it's about scaling ventures, kind of the Silicon Valley way which is the rocket ship I call. The rocket ship ventures. There's still the other venture capitals. But great book. Feedback from the book and the original days at Stanford. Talk about the Blitzscaling journey. >> And one of the things that happened when we did the class at Stanford is we had all these amazing guests come in and speak. So people like Eric Schmidt. People like Diane Greene. People like Brian Chesky, who talked about their experiences. And all of those conversations really formed a key part of the raw material that went into the book. We began to see patterns emerge. Some pretty fascinating patterns. Things like, for example, a lot of companies, the ones that'd done the best job of maintaining their culture, have their founders involved in hiring for the first 500 employees. That was like a magic number that came up over and over again in the interviews. So all this content basically came forward and we said, okay, well how do we now take this and put it into a systematic framework. So the idea of the book was to compress down 40 hours of video content, incredible conversations, and put it in a framework that somebody could read in a couple of hours. >> It is also one of those things where you get lightning in a ball, the classic and so then I'd say go big or go home. But Blitzscaling is all about something new and something different. And I'm reading a book right now called Loonshots, which is a goof on moonshots. It's about the loonies who start the real companies and a lot of companies that are successful like Airbnb was passed over on and they call those loonies. Those aren't moonshots. Moonshots are well known, build-outs. This is where the blitzscaling kind of magic happens. Can you just share your thoughts on that because that's something that's not always talked about in the mainstream press, is that a lot of there blitzscaling companies, are the ones that don't look good on paper initially. >> Yes. >> Or ones that no one's talking about is not in a category or herd mentality of investors. It's really that outlier. >> Yes. >> Talk about that dynamic. >> Yeah, and one of the things that Reid likes to say is that the best possible companies usually sound like they're dumb ideas. And in fact the best investment he's been a part of as a venture capitalist, those are the ones where there's the greatest controversy around the table. It's not the companies that come in and everyone's like this is a no-brainer, let's do it. It's the companies where there's a big fight. Should we do this, should we not? And we think the reason is this. Blitzscaling is all about being able to be the first to scale and the winner take most or the winner take all market. Now if you're in a market where everyone's like, this is a great market, this is a great idea. You're going to have huge competition. You're going to have a lot of people going after it. It's very difficult to be the first to scale. If you are contrarian and right you believe something that other people don't believe, you have the space to build that early lead, that you can then use to leverage yourself into that enduring market leadership. >> And one of the things that I observed from the videos as well is that the other fact that kind of plays into, I want to get your reaction, this is that there has to be a market shift that goes on too because you have to have a tailwind or a wave to ride because if you can be contrarian if there's no wave, >> Right. >> right? so a lot of these companies that you guys highlight, have the wave behind them. It was mobile computing, SaaSification, cloud computing, all kind of coming together. Talk about that dynamic and your reaction 'cause that's something where people can get confused on blitzscaling. They read the book. Oh I'm going to disrupt the dry cleaning business. Well I mean, not really. I mean, unless there's something different >> Exactly. >> in market conditions. Talk about that. >> Yeah, so with blitzscaling you're really talking about a new market or a market that's transforming. So what is it that causes these things to transform? Almost always it's some new form of technological innovation, or perhaps a packaging of different technological innovations. Take mobile computing for example. Many of the components have been around for a while. But it took off when Apple was able to combine together capacitative touchscreens and the form factor and the processor strength being high enough finally. And all these things together created the technological innovation. The technological innovation then enables the business model innovation of building an app store and creating a whole new way of thinking about handheld computing. And then based on that business model innovation, you have the strategy innovation of blitzscaling to allow you to grow rapidly and keep from blowing up when you grow. >> And the spirit of kind of having, kind of a clean entrepreneurial segmentation here. Blitzscaling isn't for everybody. And I want you to talk about that because obviously the book's popular when this controversy, there's some controversy around the fact that you just can't apply blitzscaling to everything. We just talk about some of those factors. There are other entrepreneurialship models that makes sense but that might not be a fit for blitzscaling. Can you just unpack that and just explain, a minute to explain the difference between a company that's good for blitzscaling and one that isn't. >> Well, a key thing that you need for blitzscaling is one of these winner take most or winner take all markets that's just enormous and hugely valuable, alright? The whole thing about blitzscaling is it's very risky. It takes a lot of effort. It's very uncomfortable. So it's only worth doing when you have those market dynamics and when that market is really large. And so in the book we talk about there being many businesses that this doesn't apply to. And we use the example of two companies that were started at the same time. One company is Amazon, which is obviously a blitzscaling company and a dominant player and a great, great company. And the other is the French Laundry. In fact, Jeff Bezos started Amazon the same year that Thomas Keller started the French Laundry. And the French Laundry still serves just 60 people a day. But it's a great business. It's just a very different kind of business. >> It's a lifestyle or cash flow business and people call it a lifestyle business but mainly it's a cash flow or not a huge growing market. >> Yeah. >> Satisfies that need. What's the big learnings that you learned that was something different that you didn't know coming out of blitzscaling experience? Something that surprised you, something that might have shocked you, something that might have moved you. I mean you're well-read. You're smart. What was some learnings that you learned from the journey? >> Well, one of the things that was really interesting to me and I didn't really think about it. Reid and I come from the startup world, not the big company world. One of the things that surprised me is the receptivity of big companies to these ideas. And they explained it to me and they said, listen, you got to understand with a big company, you think it's just a big company growing at 10, 15% a year. But actually there's units that are growing at 100% a year. There's units that are declining at 50% a year. And figuring out how you can actually continue to grow new businesses quicker than your old businesses die is a huge thing for the big, established companies. So that was one of the things that really surprised me but I'm grateful that it appears that it's applicable. >> It's interesting. I had a lot of conversations with Michael Dell before, and before they went private and after they went private. He essentially was blitzscaling. >> Yeah. >> He said, I'm going to winner take most in the mature, somewhat declining massive IT enterprise spend against the HPs of the world, and he's doing it and VMware stock went to an all time high. So big companies can blitz scale. That's the learning. >> Exactly. And the key thing to remember there is one of the reasons why somebody like Michael Dell went private to do this is that blitzscaling is all about prioritizing speed over efficiency. Guess who doesn't like that? Wall street doesn't like because you're taking a hit to earnings as you invest in a new business. GM for example is investing heavily in autonomous vehicles and that investment is not yet delivering cash but it's something that's going to create a huge value for General Motors. And so it's really tough to do blitzscaling as a publicly traded company though there are examples. >> I know your partner in the book, Reid Hoffman as well as in the blitzscaling at Stanford was as visible in both LinkedIn and as the venture capitalist of Greylock. But also he was involved with some failed startups on the front end of LinkedIn. >> Yeah. >> So he had some scar tissue on social networking before it became big, I'll say on the knowledge graph that he's building, he built at LinkedIn. I'm sure he had some blitzscaling lessons. What did he bring to the table? Did he share anything in the classes or privately with you that you can share that might be helpful for people to know? >> Well, there's a huge number of lessons. Obviously we drew heavily on Reid's life for the book. But I think you touched on something that a lot of people don't know, which is that LinkedIn is not the first social network that Reid created. Actually during the dot-com boom Reid created a company called SocialNet that was one of the world's first social networks. And I actually was one of the few people in the world who signed up and was a member of SocialNet. I think I had the handle, net revolutionary on that if you can believe that. And one of the things that Reid learned from his SocialNet experience turned into one of his famous sayings, which is, if you're not embarrassed by your first product launch, you've launched too late. With SocialNet they spent so much time refining the product and trying to get it perfectly right. And then when they launched it, they discovered what everyone always discovers when they launch, which is the market wants something totally different. We had no idea what people really wanted. And they'd wasted all this time trying to perfect something that they've theoretically thought was what the market wanted but wasn't actually what the market wanted. >> This is what I love about Silicon Valley. You have these kind of stories 'cause that's essentially agile before agile came out. They're kind of rearranging the deck chairs trying to get the perfect crafted product in a world that was moving to more agility, less craftsmanship and although now it's coming back. Also I talked to Paul Martino, been on theCUBE before. He's a tribe with Pincus. And it's been those founding fathers around these industries. It's interesting how these waves, they start off, they don't get off the ground, but that doesn't mean the category's dead. It's just a timing issue. That's important in a lot of ventures, the timing piece. Talk about that dynamic. >> Absolutely. When it comes to timing, you think about blitzscaling. If you start blitzscaling, you prioritize speed over efficiency. The main question is, is it the right time. So Webvan could be taken as an example of blitzscaling. They were spending money wildly inefficiently to build up grocery delivery. Guess what? 2000 was not the right time for it. Now we come around, we see Instacart succeeding. We see other delivery services delivering some value. It just turns out that you have to get the timing right. >> And market conditions are critical and that's why blitzscaling can work when the conditions are right. Our days back in the podcast, it was, we were right but timing was off. And this brings up the question of the team. >> Yeah. >> You got to have the right team that can handle the blitzscaling culture. And you need the right investors. You've been on both sides of the table. Talk about that dynamic because I think this is probably one of the most important features because saying you going to do blitzscaling and then getting buy off but not true commitment from the investors because the whole idea is to plow money into the system. You mentioned Amazon, one of Jeff Bezos' tricks was, he always poured money back into his business. So this is a capital strategy, as well financial strategy capital-wise as well as a business trait. Talk about the importance of having that stomach and the culture of blitzscaling. >> Absolutely. And I think you hit on something very important when you sort of talk about the importance of the investors. So Reid likes to refer to investors as financing partners. Or financing co-founders, because really they're coming on with you and committing to the same journey that you're going on. And one of the things I often tell entrepreneurs is you really have to dig deep and make sure you do more due diligence on your investors than you would on your employees. Because if you think about it, if you hire an employee, you can actually fire them. If you take money from an investor, there's no way you can ever get rid of them. So my advice to entrepreneurs is always, well, figure out if they're going to be a good partner for you. And the best way to do that is to go find some of the entrepreneurs they backed who failed and talked to those people. >> 'Cause that's where the truth will come out. >> Well, that's right. >> We stood by them in tough times. >> Exactly. >> I think that's classic, that's perfect but this notion of having the strategies of the elements of the business model in concert, the financial strategy, the capital strategy with the business strategy and the people strategy, all got to be pumping that can't be really any conflict on that. That's the key point. >> That's right, there has to be alignment because again, you're trying to go as quickly as possible and if you're running a race car and you have things that are loose and rattling around, you're not going to make it across the finish line. >> You're pulling for a pit stop and the guys aren't ready to change the tires, (snapping fingers) you know you're out of sync. >> Bingo. >> Chris, great stuff. Blitzscaling is a great book. Check it out. I recommend it, remember blitz scale is not for anyone, it's for the game changers. And again, picking your investors is critical on this. So if you picked the wrong investors, blitzscaling will blow up in a bad way. So don't, don't, pick properly on the visa and pick your team. Chris, so let's talk about you real quick to end the segment and the last talk track. Talk about your background 'cause I think you have a fascinating background. I didn't know that you graduated when you're 19, from Stanford was it? >> Yes. >> Stanford at 19, that's a great accomplishment. You've been an entrepreneur. Take us through your journey. Give us a quick highlight of your career. >> So the quick highlight is I grew up in Southern California and Santa Monica where I graduated from Santa Monica High School along with other luminaries such as Rob Lowe, Robert Downey, Jr., and Sean Penn. I didn't go at the same time that they did. >> They didn't graduate when they were 17. >> They did not, (John laughing) and Charlie Sheen also attended Santa Monica High School but dropped out or was expelled. (laughing) Go figured. >> Okay. >> I came up to Stanford and I actually studied creative writing and product design. So I was really hitting both sides of the brain. You could see that really coming through in the rest of my career. And then at the time I graduated which was the mid-1990s that was when the internet was first opening up. I was convinced the internet was going to be huge and so I just went straight into the internet in 1995. And have been in the startup world ever since. >> Must love that show, Halt and Catch Fire a series which I love reminiscing. >> AMC great show. >> Just watching that my life right before my eyes. Us old folks. Talk about your investment. You are at Wasabi Ventures now. Blitzscaling Ventures. You guys looks like you're going to do a little combination bring capital around blitzscaling, advising. What's Blitzscaling Ventures? Give a quick commercial. >> So the best way to think about it is for the entrepreneurs who are actually are blitzscaling, the question is how are you going to get the help you need to figure out how to steer around the corners to avoid the pitfalls that can occur as you're growing rapidly. And Blitzscaling Ventures is all about that. So obviously I bring a wealth of experience, both my own experience as well as everything I learned from putting this book together. And the whole goal of Blitzscaling Ventures is to find those entrepreneurs who have those blitzscalable opportunities and help them navigate through the process. >> And of course being a Mental Samurai that you are, the clock is really important on blitzscaling. >> There are actually are a lot of similarities between the startup world and Mental Samurai. Being able to perform under pressure, being able to move as quickly as possible yet still be accurate. The one difference of course is in our startup world you often do make mistakes. And you have a chance to recover from them. But in Mental Samurai you have to be perfect. >> Speed, alignment, resource management, capital deployment, management team, investors, all critical factors in blitzscaling. Kind of like entrepreneurial going to next level. A whole nother lesson, whole nother battlefields. Really the capital markets are flush with cash. Post round B so if you can certainly get altitude there's a ton of capital. >> Yeah. And the key is that capital is necessary for blitzscaling but it's not sufficient. You have to take that financial capital and you have to figure out how to combine it with the human capital to actually transform the business in the industry. >> Of course I know you've got to catch a plane. Thanks for coming by in the studio. Congratulations on the Mental Samurai. Great show. I'm looking forward to April 30th. Tuesdays at 9 o'clock, the Mental Samurai. Chris will be an inaugural contestant. We'll see how he does. He's tight-lipped, he's not breaking his disclosure. >> I've got legal requirements. I can't say anything. >> Just say he's sticking to his words. He's a man of his words. Chris, great to see you. Venture capitalist, entrepreneur, kind of venture you want to talk to Chris Yeh, co-founder, general partner of blitzscaling. I'm John Furrier for theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBEConversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this CUBEConversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here in theCUBE Studios here with Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CUBE alumni. Great to see you again. I think this is your eighth time on theCUBE chatting. Always great to get the update. Thanks for spending the time. >> My pleasure, and it's a joy to drive down to your actual studios. >> (laughs) This is where all happens Wednesdays and Thursdays when we're not on the road doing CUBE events. I think we'll have over 120 events this year. We'll certainly see you at a bulk of them. Cloud Foundry, give us the update. Yeah, we took 'em joking before we came on camera. Boy this cloud thing is kind of working out. I mean, I think IBM CEO calls it chapter two. I'm like, we're still in chapter one, two, three? Give us the update Cloud Foundry, obviously open-source. Things are rocking. Give us the update. >> I do feel like we're moving into chapter two. Chapter one was a really long chapter. (laughs) It spanned about 10 years. But I do think we're starting to see actual growth and actual usage. And I think a lot of people are like, no, there's actually been usage for a while. Me, no no no not on a real scale. And we haven't seen any of the workloads for organizations running at massive scale. At the scale that we know that they can run at. But we're starting to see interesting scale. Like 40, 50 thousand applications, you know. Billions of transactions now passing through. A lot of cloud native technology. So we're starting to see real interesting volume. And so that's going to actually dictate how the next five years unfold because scale is going to dictate how the technologies unfold, how they're used. And they're going to feed into this virtuous cycle of how the technologies unfold, and how they're going to be used, which feedback into how enterprises are using them, and you know, and the cycle continues. >> Give us the update on the foundation. What's going on with the foundation, status, momentum, clouds out there. Obviously open-source continues to drive however we saw a lot of acquisitions and fundings around people who are using open-source to build a business around that. >> I love that. >> Your favorite conversation. But, I mean you know the technical challenges with open-source allow for technical challenges but also the people side is they're learning. What's the update with the foundation? >> Well open-source is really tricky, and I think there is a lot of people that are really enthusiastic as it is a because model. I mean last year 2018 was a pretty substantial year for open-source. The year ended with Red Hat's acquisition by IBM. One of their biggest acquisitions, $34 billion. But we saw in December alone, we also saw Heptio get picked up by VMware which is a services company which is really based on Kubernetes on an open-source technology. But we also saw HashiCorp get another round of funding. And then earlier in the year, Pivotal IPO'd. And so if you look at 2018 at a bigger level, you saw a lot of momentum around open-source and how it's actually being commercialized. Now you and I were talking a little bit prior and I'm a big believer that open-source has the potential and is going to change fundamentally how technology is used and consumed. But at the end of the day for the commercial aspects of it you still have to have a business around that. And I think there's always going to be that fine line. And that line is actually always be going to be moving because how you provide value in, around, and on top of open-source, has to evolve with both the market and your customer needs. >> Yeah and where you are on that wave, whatever wave that is, is it an early wave or is it more mature so the metrization certainly matters? >> Sure. >> You could be early on setting the table or if it's growing when there's some complexity. So it kind of depends, it's always that depends is it the cloud air or is it the Red Hat? There's different approaches and people kind of get confused on that and your answer to that is just pick one that works for, that's a good business model. Don't get hung up on kind of the playbook if you will, is that kind of what you're saying? >> Well I think we're seeing this play out this week with AWS's Elastic announcement, right? And there's been a lot of conversation around how do we think about open-source. Who has access to it? Who has the right to commercialize it? What does commercialization look like? And I think, I've always cautioned people that are proceeding down the path to open-source is really be thoughtful about why you're doing open-source. Like what is your, what are you hoping to achieve? There's a lot of potential that comes with open sourcing your technology. You gain ecosystem, community, momentum. There's a lot of positives that come with that but there's also a lot of work that comes with that too. Managing your community. Managing a much more varied share of stakeholders and people that are going to have thoughts and opinions around how that technology unfolds. And then of course it's because it's open-sources there's more opportunity for people to use that and build their own ideas and their own solutions on top of that. And potentially their own commercial products. And so really figuring out that fine line and what works best for your business. What works best for the technology. And then what your hopes are at the end of the day with that. >> And what are some of the momentums or points for the Foundation, with Cloud Foundry, obviously seeing Pivotal went public, you mentioned that VMWare, I talk to Michael Dell all the time, the numbers are great coming from that operation. Pat Kelson near the Amazon deal think that clear and where VMWare was. But still you have a lot more cloud, multi-cloud conversations happening than ever before. >> Well, for sure I mean at Cloud Foundry, we've actually been talking about multicloud since 2016. We saw that trend coming based on user behavior. And now you've seen everyone is multicloud, even the public clouds are multicloud. >> I think you had the first study out on that, too on multicloud. We did. We were we were firm believers in multicloud. Last year we've actually moved more broadly to multi-platform. Because at the end of the day there isn't one technology that solves all of these problems. Multicloud is you know is pervasive and at the end of the day multicloud means a lot of different things to a lot of people. But for many enterprises what it gives is optionality. You don't want to be locked into a single provider. You don't want to be locked into a single cloud or single solution because you know if I'm an enterprise, I don't know where I'm going to be in five years. Do I want to make a five year or a 10 year or a 20 year commitment to a single infrastructure provider when I don't know what my needs are going to be. So having that optionality and also being able to use the best of what clouds can provide, the best services, the best outcomes. And so for me, I want to have that optionality. So I'm going to look at technologies that give me that portability and then I'm going to use that to allow me to choose the best cloud that I need for right now for my business and maybe again a different one in the future. >> I want to get your thoughts on this. I just doubled down on this conversation because I think there's two things going on that I'm saying we'll get your reaction to. One is I've heard things like pick the right cloud for the right workload and I heard analogies. Hey, if you got an airplane you need to have two engines. You have one engine if it works for that plane, but your whole fleet of planes could be other clouds. So, pick the right cloud for the right workload. Meaning workload is defined spec. >> Yeah. >> I've also heard that the people side of the equation, where people are behaving like they are comfortable with API's tooling is potentially a lock-in, kind of by default. Not a technical lock-in, but people are comfortable with the API's and the tooling. >> Yeah. >> And the workloads need a certain cloud. Then maybe that cloud would be it. That's not saying pick that cloud for the entire company. Right, so certainly that the trend seems to be coming from a lot of people in the news saying hey, this whole sole-cloud, multi-cloud thing argument really isn't about one cloud vs. multiple clouds. It's workload cloud for the use case in the tooling, if it fits and the people are there to do it. Then you can still have other clouds and that's in the multi-cloud architecture. So is that real? What's your thoughts on that? >> Let's dissect that 'cause I think that's actually solving for two different outcomes. Like one multi-cloud for optionality's purpose and workload specific. I think it's a great one. There's a lot of services that are native to certain clouds that maybe you really would like to get greater access to. And so I think you're going to choose the best. You know that's going to drive your workload. Now also factoring in that you know you're going to have a much more mediated access to cloud based on what people are comfortable with. I do think it's at some point as an organization you want to have a better control over that. You know historically over the last decade what we've seen. Shadow IT really dictates your Cloud spend right. You know everyone's got a credit card. I got I've got access to AWS. >> And they got most of that business. Amazon did. >> Yes and that served them quite well. If I am an organization that's trying to digitally transform, I'm also trying to get a better handle on what we're spending, how we're spending it and frankly, now if I have compliance requirements, where's my data? These are going to be important questions for you when you're starting to run production workloads at scale on multiple clouds and so, I predict we're going to see a lot more tension there in internal organizations. Like, hey I'd love for you to use cloud, you know? Where this no longer needs to be a shadow thing, but let's figure out a way to do it that's strategically and intentional versus just random pockets. Choosing to do cloud because of the workflow that they like. >> Well you bring up a good point. The cost thing was never a problem, but then you have sprawl and you realize there's a cost to Optimizer component which means you might be overpaying because as you think about the system aspects, you got networking and you got Cloud management factors. So you start as you get into that Shadow IT expansion. You got to realize, wait a minute, I'm still spending a lot of cash here. >> This adds up really really quickly. I mean, I think the information piece a couple weeks ago where they talked about the Pinterest bill, this stuff, it starts adding up. And for organizations, this is like not just thousands of dollars. It's now hundreds of thousands of dollars. If not you know, tens of millions of dollars. And so, if I'm trying to figure out ways to optimize my business and my scale, I'm going to look at that because that is not an insignificant amount of money. And so if I'm in it, that's money that could be better invested in more developers, better outcomes, a better alignment with my business, then that's where I want to spend my time and money, and so, I'm going to spend more time being really thoughtful about what clouds we're using, what infrastructure we're using, and the tools we're using to allow us to have that optionality. >> So you would agree with the statement if I said, generally, multi-cloud is here, it already exists. >> Yes. >> And that multi-cloud architecture thinking is really the conversation that needs to be had. Not so much cloud selection, per say. It's not a mutually exclusive situation. Meaning, I'm not all in on Amazon. I'm going to have clouds plural? >> Well, yeah you are. Like we have already seen as of early last year over half of our users. Which right now over half the Fortune 500 are multi-cloud already, and that number has gone up since last year I'm for sure. Some workloads were on-prem and some are in a public cloud. Be it GCP, AWS, Azure, or AliCloud. And so that is a statement of fact. And I have every executive that I've talked to with every enterprise has been like, yes, we're doing multi-cloud. >> Yeah, they're going to have some kind of on-prem anyway, So we know that's there. That's not going to go away. >> No, PRIM is not going to go away. >> Then an IOT edge, and an Enterprise Edge, SDWAN comes back into vogue as people start using SAS across network connections. >> Yeah. >> I mean, SDWAN is essentially the internet basically. >> I feel like the older I get the more I'm like, wow, didn't I have this conversation like, 20 years ago? (laughs) >> I was talking about something earlier when I came in. The old becomes the new again. It's what's happening, right? Distributor computing now goes to cloud, you got the Enterprise. What are the big players doing? Google Next is coming up next month, big event. >> It is the week after Cloud Foundry Summit. >> They got Amit Zavery, big news over there they poached from Oracle. So Thomas Kurian brought in his Oracle, who is Cube alumni as well. Really smart guy. Diane is not there. What do you expect from Google Next for the week? What are we going to see there? What's the sentiment? What's the vibe? What do you see happening? >> Well, I think it's going to be all about the Enterprise right. That's why Thomas was brought in. And then I think they really give Google that Enterprise focus and say, how do we end up? As it's not just about I'm going to sell to enterprises. That's not, you know, when you're selling to an enterprise there is a whole different approach and you have to write how to the teams, the sales teams. You have to write how to the ecosystem, the services, the enablement capabilities, the support, the training, the product strategy? All of that takes a very different slant when you're thinking about an enterprise. And so I'm sure, that's going to be front-and-center for everything that they talk about. >> And certainly he's very public about, you know, the position Oracle Cloud, he knows the Enterprise Oracle was the master of enterprise gamesmanship for sure. >> Yes, for sure. You don't get a whole lot more enterprising than Oracle. >> What's going on in the CNCF any news there? What's happening on the landscape? What's the Abby take on the landscape of cloud? >> Well, speaking as someone that does not run CNCF. >> Feel free to elaborate. >> Cloud Native Computing Foundation, for those of you that aren't aren't, you know, aren't familiar is a sister open-source organization that is a clearing house or collective of cloud made of technologies. The anchor project is the very well-known Kubernetes, but it also spans a variety of technologies from everything from LINKerD to SEDA to Envoy, so it's just a variety of cloud-native technologies. And you know they're continuing to grow because obviously cloud-native is becoming you know it's coming into its own time right now. Because we're starting to really think about how to do better with workloads. Particularly workloads that I can run across a cloud. I mean and that seems pretty pedantic but we've been talking about Cloud since 2007. And we were talking about what cloud brings. What did cloud bring, it brings resiliency. You can auto-scale. You can burst into the cloud, remember bursting? Now all the things we talked about in 2007 to 2008 but weren't really reality because the applications that were written weren't necessarily written to do that. >> And that's exactly the point. >> So now we're actually seeing a lot more of these applications written we call them microservices, 12 Factor apps, serverless apps. What have you but it's applications written to run and scale across the cloud. And that is a really defining point because now these technologies are actually relevant because we're starting to see more of these created and run and now run at scale. >> Yeah, I think that's the point. I think you nailed it. The applications are driving everything And I think that's the chapter two narrative. In my opinion, chapter one was, let's get infrastructures code going. And chapter two is apps dictating policy and then you're going to see microservices start to emerge. Kind of new different vibe in terms of like what it means for scale as less of about, hey, I'm doing cloud, I got some stuff in the public cloud. Here the conversation is around apps, the workloads and that's where the business value is. It's not like people who is trying to do transformation. They're not saying hey I stood up a Kubernetes Cluster. They're saying I got to deploy my banking app or I got to do, I got to drive this workload. >> And I have to iterate now. I can't do a banking app and then update it in a year. That's not acceptable anymore. You are constantly having to update. You're constantly having to iterate, and that is not something you can do with a large application. I mean the whole reason we talk a lot about monolithic vs 12 factor or cloud in a box is because it isn't that my monolithics are inherently bad, it's just they're big and they're complex. Which means in order to make any updates it takes time. That's where the year comes in, the 18-months come in. And I think that is no longer acceptable you know. I remember the time and I'm going to date myself here, but I remember the time when you know banks would or any e-commerce site would be down. They'd have what they call the orange page. But the orange page would come up, site down tonight 'cause we're doing maintenance for the weekend, right? >> Under construction. >> Under construction. Okay, well I'll just come back on Monday. That's fine. And now, you're like, if it's down for 5 minutes you're like what is actually happening right now. Why is this not here. >> Yeah like when Facebook went down the other day. I was like, what the hell? Facebook sucks. >> You know, the internet blows up if Instagram is down. Oh my God, my life is over and I think our our expectation now is not only constant availability. So you know always available. But also our expectation is real-time access to data transparency and a visibility into what's actually happening at all times. That I've said something that a lot of organizations are really having to figure out. How to develop the applications to expose that. And that takes time and that takes change. And there's a ton of culture change. it has to happen and that is the more important thing if I'm a business I care more about how do I make that a reality and I should care a lot less about the technologies that you use. >> It's interesting you mention about the monolith versus the decomposed application of being agile. Because if you don't have the culture and the people to do it it's still a monolithic effort in the sense of the holistic thinking and the architectural, it's a systems architecture. You have to look at it like a system and that's not easy either. Once get that done the benefits are multifold in terms of like what you can do. But its it's that systems thinking setup is becoming more of an architectural concept that's super important. >> For sure if I have a microservice app, but it takes a 150 people to get that through change management and get it into production well that will still take me a year. Does it matter if there's maybe 12 lines of code in that application? It doesn't matter and so, you know I spend a lot of time. Even though I run Cloud Foundry, I spend a lot of time talking about culture change. All the writing I do is really around cultural change and what does that look like. Because at the end of the day if you're not willing to make those changes, you're not willing to structure your teams and allow for that collaboration and if you're doing iterative work, feedback loops from your customers. If you're not willing to put those pieces into place there is no technology that's going to make you better. >> I totally agree, so let me ask you a question on that point, great point, by the way. Most followed your you're writing your blog posts in the links, but I think that's the question. When do you know when it's not working? So I've seen companies that are rearranging the deckchairs, if you will, to use an analogy with all the culture rah, rah! And then nothing ever happens right? So they've gone into that paralysis mode. When do you look at a culture? When does the executive, what should they be thinking about because people kind of aspire to do this execution that you said is critical? When do you know it's not working or what should they be doing? What's the best practice? How does someone say hey you know what I really want is to be more holistic in my architecture. I don't want to spend two years on that the architecture and then find out it's now just starting. I want to get an architecture in place. I want to hit the ground running. >> I mean it's twofold, one, start small. I mean you're not going to change you know if you're an 85 year old company with 200,000 people you're not going to change that overnight and you should expect that's going to be an 8 to 10 year process now what that's also going to mean is you're going to have to have a really clear vision and you're going to have to be really committed like this is going to be a hard road but conversely when someone says what does success look like, when you're looking at a variety of companies how do you know which ones which ones you think are going to be the most successful at the end of the day because no one's ever actually done any of this before there's no one that's ever gone through this digital transformation and it should have come out on the other side no one. There isn't and so I think what does success look and I said well for me, what I look for are companies that are investing and re-skilling their workforce. That's what I'm looking for. I get real excited when companies talk about their internal boot camps or their programs to rescale or upscale their teams because it's not like you're going to lay off 20,000 people and hire 20,000 cloud native developers, they don't exist and they're certainly not going to exists for thousands of companies to go and do that so you know how are you investing in re-skilling because-- >> It's easy to grow your own internally from pre-existing positions. >> Well sure, they know your business. >> Rather than go to a job board that has no one available. >> And you know at the end of the day that needs to be your new business model what is digital transformation actually it's just a different way of working and there isn't, there is no destination to the digital trend. This isn't a journey that has an end and so you need to really think about how are you going to invest differently in your people so that they can continuously learn continuously learning needs to be part of your model and your mantra and that needs to be in everything you do from hiring to HR to MBO's to you know how do you how do you structure your teams like how do you make sure that people can constantly learn and evolve because if that's not happening it doesn't you know everything else is going to fall by the wayside >> Is the technology gap easy to fill? Lot of tech out there. Talent gap hard to fill. >> For sure. >> That's the real challenge. >> If you have all the best tech in the world but you don't have the right people or the right structure are you going to be successful, probably not. >> Yeah, that's a challenge. Alright, so final question for you where are you going to be, what's your schedule look like, where can people find you, what events going to be at? You guys have an event coming up? >> April 2nd through 4th in Philly. We're going to have a summit you want to see some people that are actually running cloud at scale that's the place to go >> April 5th? >> 2nd through 4th. First week of April Philly, fingers crossed good weather lots of cloud talk and it's a great way. >> City of Brotherly Love >> Yes, we're bringing it. >> Philadelphia. The Patriots couldn't make it to the playoffs last year but love the Philly fans down there Paul Martino and friends down there. Abby thanks for coming on. Appreciate it-good to see you. Thanks for the update. We'll see you around the events, I won't be able to make your event I'll be taking the week off skiing. >> Well one of us has to. >> First vacation of the year, two years. Thanks for coming in. >> You should do that. >> Abby Kearns here inside theCUBE for CUBEConversation I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching (funky music)

(bright music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to a special Cube Conversation here, in the Palo Alto studios, for theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconeANGLE Media and theCUBE, and cohost of theCUBE. My next guest is Adrian Scott, who is the CEO of Soma Capital and Head of Technology of decent.bet. You can get the idea of that going to be all about, but, industry legend-- >> Yeah. >> Star of the big screen, good to see you, thanks for comin' in. >> Thank you John, it's great to see you. >> I'm glad I wanted to talk to you, because I know you've been doing a lot of traveling, you've been living in Panama, and overseas, outside the US, mainly around the work you've been doing on the crypto side, obviously Blockchain and with the start of decent.bet, lot of great stuff, but congratulations on a successful initial coin offering! >> Thank you. >> Great stuff, but you're also notable in the industry, initial investor in Napster, our generation, first P2P, the first renegade, you know, break down the movie business, but the beginning of what we're now seeing as that decentralized revolution. But you've seen many waves of innovation. You've seen 'em come and go. But this one in particular, Blockchain, decentralized internet, decentralized applications, crypto. Pretty awesome, and lot of young guns are coming in, a lot of older, experienced, alpha entrepreneurs are coming in like yourself, and, we're lookin' at it too. What's your take on it? I mean, how do you talk people that are like, "Well, hey, this is just a scam on the ICS site, "is this real, is it a bubble?" Share your vision on what this is all about, this whole mega-trend, crypto, decentralized. >> And I'll also add, in addition to what you mentioned, the other neat thing here is just the global nature of it. Because we're so used to being Silicon Valley-centric, and having to dig around for funding here, and also, looking only at talent that would move here, whereas with this whole new industry, it's very global, there's global teams, international teams, and, some of the Silicon Valley folks are just struggling to stay relevant, and stay in the game, so that's a fascinating aspect to this new revolution as well. >> And also, the thing I love about this market, it's very efficient, it takes away inefficiencies, in venture capital right now, and private equity being disrupted, that's where the arbitrage is, hence the ICO bubble, but, there is real, legit opportunities, you have Soma Capital, you're an investment fund, that you're doing token investments on. The global nature is interesting, I want to just ask here about this, because, my view is, it changes valuation, it changes valuation mechanisms, it changes the makeup of the venture architecture, it makes up on how people recruit teams, the technology used, and with open source, I mean, this is a first-time view at a new landscape. You can't take a pattern match, model, to this, your thoughts. >> Agree completely, and the efficiency you mentioned, applied to teams, and surfacing engineering talent, and the mathematical minds that can handle crypto internationally, the formation of teams internationally online is actually something special as well, so, with Decent Bet, our team, our founding team includes folks from the US, Panama, Australia, as well, who met up, in a Facebook chat group! And that's how they initially connected, and they didn't know each other physically, before this connection online, and that led to this project, Decent Bet, and ICO, and so on. So it's-- >> You created value from essentially a digital workforce, but, I mean, it reminds me of, like in the old days, you'd chat, and it wasn't a lot of face-to-face, but then now there's video gaming culture, you know, you come in, "Hey, you want to play a game," people don't even know each other, and get a visual, and also an immersive experience with each other. This is now the application for entrepreneurial equations, so this kind of gaming, the game is startups! So how are you looking at this, and how are you investing in it, what are some of the things, and what can people learn from what we're seeing in this new game-ified, if you will, you know, world of starting companies? >> I think one of the things you alluded to there has really become visible, which is the importance of video, as a medium, and I'm still, absorbing and adjusting to that myself. For example, we do video communications, we do conversations at Decent Bet, of the founding team, and, it really connects to the community, and it's so important, and I'm still absorbing it, like I mentioned, 'cause I'm just so used to publishing articles that are very clearly written, and detailed, and so on. We just did an AMA video, an Ask Me Anything video, in Las Vegas, with the executive team, and it went for 80 minutes, answering the questions, that the community had all submitted! And I just try and imagine that five years ago, it's new way of relating-- >> 'Cause there was no blogging, link back, the only thing you could do in blogging. >> Yeah. >> And then write a perfect blog post, or white paper. >> Exactly. >> And that was who you were. >> Yeah. >> Not anymore, it's more community driven. >> Exactly, and that video as a piece of it, has become so, so important, as a way of communicating the character of the team, and-- >> Before we get into decent.bet, I want to drill those, I think it's a great use case, and again, congratulations on great work there. I want to ask you about something that I've been fascinated with, because I obviously, our generation, we grew up on open source when it was second-class citizen, now it runs the whole world, as first-tier, first-class citizen in software world. The role of the community was really important in software development, 'cause that kept a, it kept a balance, there was governance, was consensus, these are words that you hear in the crypto world. And now, whether it's content and or ICO, the role of the community, and certainly, areas that's out of control in the ICO site, people are cracking down on certainly, like you see Facebook and Twitter trying to do something, but you can't stop the wisdom of the crowd. The role of the community in this crypto, decentralized market, ICOs and whatnot, is super important. Can you share your thoughts, and color commentary on why the community's so important, how do you deal with it (laughs), any best practices, either through scar tissue, or successes, share your thoughts on this. >> Oh yeah, it's totally become a factor, and it's 24/7, right? So, when you are running a crypto project, you need your community management team to be there, in the community channels, 24/7, you need to have somebody there, and they need to be at a certain level that they can handle the challenging questions! And we've definitely had moments where, we have people who try to create FUD, potentially, you know, and bring up stuff, and bring it up again later and whatnot, and we need to be proactive, so when questions come up, we were there to be able to explain, "Okay, here's where you can see this on the Blockchain. "You can verify it yourself." And sometimes, it happens when the team is just about to get on a plane (laughs), and be out of internet communication for a while, so, it's a real challenge, and there's been the voice of experience, on that. >> So talk about how you guys connect, because obviously, being connected is important with community access, but also, with connection, increases the service area for hacks, are you guys carrying five burner phones each, how do you handle email, how have you guys dealt with the whole, you know, there is a lot of online activity, certainly, people trying to do some spear phishing, or whatever tactics there are. Telegram has been littered with a lot of spoofing, and what not, so, all this is going on, that you got to have access communication. But there's a safety component that could have really big impacts to these businesses, that aren't tokeners, because, hacking can be easy if you don't protect yourself. >> We really like Signal app, as a communications medium, there's a new one, starting to grow now, called Threema, which is pretty interesting. Telegram, is just a real challenge, and it's unfortunate, because it's now become this metric. >> How many people are active on your channels-- >> That investors like to look at the size of the Telegram group, but we don't actually have a Telegram group for Decent Bet. And we've used Slack, we are going to be rolling out a internally hosted Slack replacement soon based on Rocket.Chat, we really like Rocket.Chat. As you mentioned, there are spear phishing, we do see that, and, one of the nice things is, a few years ago, you had trouble convincing a team to take security seriously! But you know, when you have team members who may have lost $10,000 in a hack-- >> Or more! >> Or more, you know, there's no question that this needs to be a priority, and everybody buys in on it. So that is one net positive out of this. >> Well let's talk about Decent Bet, fascinating use case, it's in the gaming area, gaming as in like betting, my friend Paul Martino invested I think in DraftKings, one of those other companies, I forget which one it was. In the US, there was regulatory issues, but, you know, outside the US where I think you guys are, there's not as much issue. Perfect use case for tokens, in my opinion. So, take a minute to explain Decent Bet, what you guys are all about, and talk about the journey of conception, when you guys conceived it, to ICO. >> Yeah. Decent Bet was founded about a year ago, by the CEO Jedidiah Taylor, who developed an interesting idea, and plan, so, the neat thing about Decent Bet is, first of all, you have all the benefits of the Ethereum Blockchain, in terms of verifying, transactions, and verifying the house's take. Additionally, what Decent Bet does is distributes all the profits of the casino back to the token-holders. 95% goes as proportionally, and then 5% is awarded in a lottery, so there's no profit for any Decent Bet entity, it all goes back to the tokenholders. So you use the token to play, by gambling, but you can also use your token to convert into house shares, for a quarter, and participate in-- >> So the house always wins, that a good model, right? >> Yes. >> You could become the house, through the tokens. >> Exactly, so, the motto we use is our house is your house (laughs). >> Don't bet against the house. >> Yeah. >> Alright so, I love the gambling aspect of it, I think that's going to be a winner. Tech-involved, ICO process bumps, learnings, things you could share with folks? >> Yeah, so, on the technology, one of the neat things we are doing is, we do offer a slots game, which is a primary component of online gambling, and casinos, a pretty dominant piece of the action. But, if you are going to do a simple slots game on the Blockchain, and wait around for blocks to be mined, you're not going to have a great experience. 'Cause you're going to be waiting around, more than you're going to be clicking that button. So, what we use is a technology called state channels, which allows us to do a session, kind of on a side channel, so to speak, and through this state channel, at the end of the session, you post back the results. So you get the verifiability of the Blockchain, but without the delay. So that's a major difference. >> That's off chain, right? >> Yeah. >> Or the on chain is off chain. >> It's kind of-- >> So you're managing the league, to see the chain, so you still experience, and then get to preserve it on the chain. >> Exactly-- >> Okay. >> In terms of the ICO experience, we initiated the ICO end of September, ran for a month, raised more than 52,000 Ether, so very productive ICO process, but with actually some interesting details, so, the ICO structure limited the amount that a particular address could purchase, in the first phases, to 10,000 worth, and then 20,000 dollars worth, with the idea of getting the tokens into the hand of, of people who are going to potentially use them for betting, not just-- >> The more the merrier for you, not, no one taking down allocations, big players. >> Exactly. >> Or whales. >> Not just for the whales, take all, kind of thing. So, that was a interesting structure, and-- >> And that worked well? >> Yeah! >> Alright, talk about the dynamic of post-ICO, because now you guys are building, can you give an update on the state of where you guys are at with the product, availability, how that's going, 'cause obviously you raised the capital through the ICO, democratize it if you will through clever mechanism, which is cool, thanks for sharing that, now what happens? Now, what's going on? >> Yeah, I mean, I think we're doing pretty well in terms of hitting milestones, and showing progress compared to a lot of projects, we released our test net, with slots, and then sportsbook, at the beginning of January, and mid-January, for sportsbook. And, we also did some upgrades with our wallet, we released that, for some enhanced usability, and handling during high peaks on the Ether network, Ethereum network. And then, also, our moving to main net. So we did some newer versions of the test net-- >> When did the main net come in? >> Main net is coming out end of April, and we're on track with that. >> Great, awesome. Congratulations, congratulations on a great job, 52,000 Ether, great raise there, and awesome opportunity. Soma Capital. >> Mm-hmm. >> You're investing now, what do you look for for deals, there's more money chasing good deals now, as we can see, has been a flight to quality obviously. Great global landscape still, what are you looking for? And advice to folks who are looking to do a token, sale, what's your-- >> Big thing we look for are real projects, so (laughs), and they're not that many out there, so we do look for a real use case that makes sense, because, there's a lot of folks out there just sticking Blockchain tag onto anything. And it's not just-- >> Like Kodak for instance. >> Yeah. >> Kodak's the prime example. >> Yes. There are projects out there doing interesting things, Guardium is doing some neat things in terms of 911 response, and opening that up, and creating an alternative to government services. There's WorkCoin, which is-- >> Do you invest in Guardium? >> Yeah, in Guardium, yeah. >> I interviewed them in Puerto Rico. >> Okay, great. >> Great project. >> So very interesting, I was recently giving a talk at a university in Guatemala, and, the students there at business school, it really resonated, the message there, to them, about okay, government 911 is maybe not the ultimate solution for getting help when you need it. >> Well I think, there's a lot of this AI for a good concept, going to Blockchain for good, because, you're seeing a lot of these easy, low-hanging fruit applications around these old structural intuitions. And that's where the action is, right, I mean, do you agree? >> Yeah, yes. And the other thing we're looking at is not just Blockchain. So I really like talking about the field more as crypto, and, I have a little video I did on calling it kind of decentralized, crypto-enabled applications, or platforms. So, beyond Blockchain, we have DAGs, Directed Acyclic Graphs, one interesting-- >> Like Hashgraph. >> Yeah, Ha-- >> Hashgraph's a DAG, isn't it? It's kind of a DAG, Hashgraph? >> Yeah, so, I'm not a huge fan of Hashgraph, one that I do like is called Guld, G-U-L-D, which is, again, thinking beyond the Blockchain. 'Cause we get so tied into Blockchain, Blockchain, Blockchain-- >> What does beyond the Blockchain mean to you? Thinking beyond the Blockchain, what does that mean to you? >> So, the proof of work process, the mining process, the creating new blocks process, is one way of doing things. But we have all these other things going on in crypto, like the signing process, and so on, and so, you can use those in a DAG, a different architecture than just this mining new blocks, you know, mental model. And so, that can be used for different use cases, for publishing, for group consensus, and so on. And so, Guld is an example of a project where it looks like there is something real there, and that's a very interesting product. >> Advice for folks that are looking at tokeneries, because, again, we've said this on theCUBE many times, people know, I'm beating this drum, you got the startups, that see an opportunity, which is fantastic, and then on the end of the spectrum, you got the, "Oh, shit, we're out of business, "let's pivot, throw the Hail Mary, put Blockchain on it, "crypto, and get an ICO, and get some going." And then you've got these growth companies that are, either self funded and or growing, that have decentralized kind of feel to it, it has an architecture that's compatible with tokenization. >> Yeah. >> So we see those three categories. Do you agree, am I missing anything? In terms of the profile? And which ones do you like? >> Well, I think one thing that we need to look at, in each of those cases, is decentralization actually happening, in the project? And are people actually thinking about decentralization. Because, it can be scary for a traditional company! Because, if it truly becomes decentralized, you're not controlling it anymore. And so, that is-- >> If you're based on control, then it's incompatible. >> And that's the real Hail Mary, right? (laughs) When you give up that control, if you give it up, so, we have examples coming out, where, you know, Ripple is running just a few nodes, Neo's running a few more, and you know, things that are not really decentralized, and they're saying, "Well, we're going to be," (laughs) you know? >> Will they ever? >> Is it going to be in the future-- >> Yeah, that's always the question, will they ever be? They've already made their money, well certainly Ripple's done well, but, I mean, what's the incentive to go-- >> Yeah. >> Decentralized. >> Yeah, so if, if you are creating a new project, the benefit from this architecture, beyond the money, is to think about it in that decentralized way, and figure out token economics that work, in that context, in that paradigm! And that's really where the challenge is, but also really where some of the benefits can rise, because, that is what enables truly new ways of doing things. >> Talk about the dynamic, because I actually, I live in Silicon Valley, I've been here 19 years, going on 20, you know, I moved from the east coast, and basically, if you weren't here, this is where the action is. If you're in the sports of tech, this is where all the athletes are. That's now changed, as you mentioned earlier, when we started, it's everywhere. Now, also there's jurisdictional issues, I mean the US, one guy's told me, the US is turning into Europe, all these regulations, it's not as much free capital as you think, and then, we certainly know that. With FCC, and others are putting the clamp down. But, structuring the token, is a concern, right? Or consideration. >> Yes. >> And a concern, so, you know, US entrepreneur, what should they do in your opinion, and if someone's outside the US, what do they do? What's the play book, or, not play book, what's the best path right now? >> Leave the US (laughs). Move out of the US. >> Tell that, wife and four kids. See you later. Yeah, but that's real legit, that's-- >> Come and check out Panama, one of my friends is building a Blockchain incubator, crypto-incubator, I mean I think if you're-- >> What's it like to move out of the United States, I know you just recently went to Panama for this, but, what's it like? Is it scary down there, I mean, is it entrepreneurially friendly? What's the vibe, what's the scene like, take a minute to explain that. >> So I've actually been out there 12 years now, in Panama. One of the neat things, you want a place that has an international outlook, international perspectives, so, you want to think in terms of a Dubai, a Singapore, a Hong Kong. And so, Panama has some aspects of that, it's not perfect, but it does have that international perspective thanks to the Canal! So it has, you know, a hundred years! (laughs) >> It also has the Panama papers, which is a negative blowback for those guys, so it's a safe place to do commerce, in your opinion? >> Um, it is a nice geographic base to do international commerce. >> Got it. >> So, you don't necessarily want to rely on the local jurisdiction, but, in terms of a geographic base, that is US time zone, US dollar, no hurricanes, it's a very interesting place. >> Puerto Rico's got the hurricanes, we know that. >> Yeah. >> Final thoughts, just overall perspective, you've been around the block, we've been around the block, both of us have, I mean, I kind of have these pinch me almost like, "Damn, this is great time, "I wish I was 22," I mean, do you have those? What's it like, how you explain this environment? If people ask you, "Hey, what was it like in the old days?" You know, when you have to provision all your own stack, and do all the stuff, it's pretty interesting right now. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I mean, I think we're going through an interesting moment right now, where, we are getting to a point where the forces of centralization are coming against the forces of decentralization, and that includes from the regulatory, as well as the business side, and so, I think it is important, as we look where to dedicate our efforts to, to really find ways to increase the decentralization as a factor that encourages creativity, and entrepreneurship. >> Yeah, it really is a personal, I think it's a great environment. Decent.bet, bet, make your bets, any updates on how to get tokens, what people can expect, a quick plug-in for Decent. >> Yeah, check out our website, we've got links to exchanges, the token is currently listed on Cryptotopia, HitBTC, and a couple other exchanges, and, yeah! Please check out the test net, please check out the white paper, and just learn about how this protocol works, this platform works. I think it is very inspiring, as a structure. >> Adrian Scott here, inside theCUBE, Soma Capital, also experienced entrepreneur himself, technologist, and has been through the ICO process, head of technology at decent.net, we'll be checkin' it out, it's theCUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Narrator: It's theCUBE covering Sapphire Now 2017 brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome back everyone to our special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage in our Palo Alto Studios. We have folks on the ground in Orlando. It's the third day of Sapphire Now and we're bringing our friends and experts inside our new 4500 square foot studio where we're starting to get our action going and covering events anywhere they are from here. If we can't get there we'll do it from here in Palo Alto. Our next guest is Satyen Sangani, CEO of Alation. A hot start-up funded by Custom Adventures, Catalyst Data Collective, and I think Andreessen Horowitz is also an investor? >> Satyen: That's right. >> Satyen, welcome to the cube conversation here. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we are doing this special coverage, and I wanted to bring you in and discuss Sapphire Now as it relates to the context of the biggest wave hitting the industry, with waves are ones cloud. We've known that for a while. People surfing that one, then the data wave is coming fast, and I think this is a completely different animal in the sense of it's going to look different, but be just as big. Your business is in the data business. You help companies figure this out. Give us the update on, first take a minute talk about Alation, for the folks who aren't following you, what do you guys do, and then let's talk about data. >> Yeah. So for those of you that don't know about what Alation is, it's basically a data catalog. You know, if you think about all of the databases that exist in the enterprise, stuff on Prem, stuff in the cloud, all the BI tools like Tableau and MicroStrategy, and Business Objects. When you've got a lot of data that sits inside the enterprise today and a wide variety of legacy and modern tools, and what Alation does is, it creates a catalog, crawling all of those systems like Google crawls the web and effectively looks at all the logs inside of those systems, to understand how the data is interrelated and we create this data social graph, and it kind of looks >> John: It's a metadata catalog? >> We call you know, we don't use the word metadata because metadata is the word that people use when you know that's that's Johnny back in the corner office, Right? And people don't want to talk about metadata if you're a business person you think about metadata you're like, I don't, not my thing. >> So you guys are democratizing what data means to an organization? That's right. >> We just like to talk about context. We basically say, look in the same way that information, or in the same way when you're eating your food, you need, you know organic labeling to understand whether or not that's good or bad, we have on some level a provenance problem, a trust problem inside of data in the enterprise, and you need a layer of you know trust, and understanding in context. >> So you guys are a SAS, or you guys are a SAS solution, or are you a software subscription? >> We are both. Most of this is actually on Prem because most of the people that have the problem that Alation solves are very big complicated institutions, or institutions with a lot of data, or a lot of people trying to analyze it, but we do also have a SAS offering, and actually that's how we intersect with SAP Altiscale, and so we have a cloud base that's offering that we work with. >> Tell me about your relation SAP because you kind of backdoored in through an acquisition, quickly note that we'll get into the conversation. >> Yeah that's right, So Altiscale to big intersections, big data, and then they do big data in the cloud SAP acquired them last year and what we do is we provide a front-end capability for people to access that data in the cloud, so that as analysts want to analyze that data, as data governance folks want to manage that data, we provide them with a single catalog to do that. >> So talk about the dynamics in the industry because SAP clearly the big news there is the Leonardo, they're trying to create this framework, we just announced an alpha because everyone's got these names of dead creative geniuses, (Satyen laughs) We just ingest our Nostradamus products, Since they have Leonardo and, >> That's right. >> SAP's got Einstein, and IBM's got Watson, and Informatica has got Claire, so who thought maybe we just get our own version, but anyway, everyone's got some sort of like bot, or like AI program. >> Yep. >> I mean I get that, but the reality is, the trend is, they're trying to create a tool chest of platform re-platforming around tooling >> Satyen: Yeah. >> To make things easier. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> You have a lot of work in this area, through relation, trying to make things easier. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> And also they get the cloud, On-premise, HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAV cloud platform, meaning developers. So the convergence between developers, cloud, and data are happening. What's your take on that strategy? You think SAP's got a good move by going multi cloud, or should they, should be taking a different approach? >> Well I think they have to, I mean I think the economics in cloud, and the unmanageability, you know really human economics, and being able to have more and more being managed by third-party providers that are, you know, effectively like AWS, and how they skill, in the capability to manage at scale, and you just really can't compete if you're SAP, and you can't compete if your customers are buying, and assembling the toolkits On-premise, so they've got to go there, and I think every IT provider has to >> John: Got to go to the cloud you mean? >> They've got to go to the cloud, I think there's no question about it, you know I think that's at this point, a foregone conclusion in the world of enterprise IT. >> John: Yeah it's pretty obvious, I mean hybrid cloud is happening, that's really a gateway to multi-cloud, the submission is when I build Norton, a guest in latency multi-cloud issues there, but the reality is not every workloads gone there yet, a lot of analytics going on in the cloud. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> DevTest, okay check the box on DevTest >> Satyen: That's right. >> Analytics is all a ballgame right now, in terms of state of the art, your thoughts on the trends in how companies are using the cloud for analytics, and things that are challenges and opportunities. >> Yeah, I think there's, I think the analytics story in the cloud is a little bit earlier. I think that the transaction processing and the new applications, and the new architectures, and new integrations, certainly if you're going to build a new project, you're going to do that in the cloud, but I think the analytics in a stack, first of all there's like data gravity, right, you know there's a lot of gravity to that data, and moving it all into the cloud, and so if you're transaction processing, your behavioral apps are in the cloud, then it makes sense to keep the data in an AWS, or in the cloud. Conversely you know if it's not, then you're not going to take a whole bunch of data that sits on Prem and move it whole hog all the way to the cloud just because, right, that's super expensive, >> Yeah. >> You've got legacy. >> A lot of risks too and a lot of governance and a lot of compliance stuff as well. >> That's exactly right I mean if you're trying to comply with Basel II or GDPR, and you know you want to manage all that privacy information. How are you going to do that if you're going to move your data at the same time >> John: Yeah. >> And so it's a tough >> John: Great point. >> It's a tough move, I think from our perspective, and I think this is really important, you know we sort of say look, in a world where data is going to be on Prem, on the cloud, you know in BI tools, in databases and no SQL databases, on Hadoop, you're going to have data everywhere, and in that world where data is going to be in multiple locations and multiple technologies you got to figure out a way to manage. >> Yeah. I mean data sprawls all over the place, it's a big problem, oh and this oh and by the way that's a good thing, store it to your storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, data legs are popping out, but you have data links, for all you have data everywhere. >> Satyen: That's right. >> How are you looking at that problem as a start-up, and how a customer's dealing with that, and what is this a real issue, or is this still too early to talk about data sprawl? >> It's a real issue, I mean it, we liken it to the advent of the Internet in the time of traditional media, right, so you had you had traditional media, there were single sort of authoritative sources we all watched it may be CNN may be CBS we had the nightly news we had Newsweek, we got our information, also the Internet comes along, and anybody can blog about anything, right and so the cost of creating information is now this much lower anybody can create any reality anybody can store data anywhere, right, and so now you've got a world where, with tableau, with Hadoop, with redshift, you can build any stack you want to at any cost, and so now what do you do? Because everybody's creating their own thing, every Dev is doing their own thing, everybody's got new databases, new applications, you know software is eating the world right? >> And data it is eating software. >> And data is eating software, and so now you've got this problem where you're like look I got all this stuff, and I don't know I don't know what's fake news, what's real, what's alternative fact, what doesn't make any sense, and so you've got a signal and noise problem, and I think in that world you got to figure out how to get to truth, right, >> John: Yeah. And what's the answer to that in your mind, not that you have the answer, if you did, we'd be solving it better. >> Yeah. >> But I mean directionally where's the vector going in your mind? I try to talk to Paul Martino about this at bullpen capital he's a total analytics geek he doesn't think this big data can solve that yet but they started to see some science around trying to solve these problems with data. What's your vision on this? >> Satyen: Yeah you know so I believe that every I think that every developer is going to start building applications based on data I think that every business person is going to have an analytical role in their job because if they're not dealing with the world on the certainty, and they're not using all the evidence, at their disposable, they're not making the best decisions and obviously they're going to be more and more analysts and so you know at some level everybody is an analyst >> I wrote a post in 2008, my old blog was hosted on WordPress, before I started SilicionANGLE, data is the new developer kid. >> That's right. >> And I saw that early, and it was still not as clear to this now as obvious as least to us because we're in the middle, in this industry, but it's now part of the software fabric, it's like a library, like as developer you'd call a library of code software to come in and be part of your program >> Yeah >> Building blocks approach, Lego blocks, but now data as Lego blocks completely changes the game on things if you think of it that way. Where are we on that notion of you really using data as a development component, I mean it seems to be early, I don't, haven't seen any proof points, that says, well that company's actually using the data programmatically with software. >> Satyen: Yeah. well I mean look I think there's features in almost every software application whether it's you know 27% of the people clicked on this button into this particular thing, I mean that's a data based application right and so I think there is this notion that we talked a lot about, which is data literacy, right, and so that's kind of a weird thing, so what does that exactly mean? Well data is just information like a news article is information, and you got to decide whether it's good or it's bad, and whether you can come to a conclusion, or whether you can't, just as if you're using an API from a third-party developer you need documentation, you need context about that data, and people have to be intelligent about how they use it. >> And literacies also makes it, makes it addressable. >> That's right. >> If you have knowledge about data, at some point it's named and addressed at some point in a network. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> Especially Jada in motion, I mean data legs I get, data at rest, we start getting into data in motion, real-time data, every piece of data counts. Right? >> That's exactly right. And so now you've got to teach people about how to use this stuff you've got to give them the right data you got to make that discoverable you got to make that information usable you've got to get people to know who the experts are about the data, so they can ask questions, you know these are tougher problems, especially as you get more and more systems. >> All right, as a start up, you're a growing start-up, you guys are, are lean and mean, doing well. You have to go compete in this war. It's a lot of, you know a lot of big whales in there, I mean you got Oracle, SAP, IBM, they're all trying to transform, everybody is transforming all the incumbent winners, potential buyers of your company, or potentially you displacing this, as a young CEO, they you know eat their lunch, you have to go compete in a big game. How are you guys looking at that compass, I see your focus so I know a little bit about your plan, but take us through the mindset of a start-up CEO, that has to go into this world, you guys have to be good, I mean this is a big wave, see it's a big wave. >> Yeah. Nobody buys from a start-up unless you get, and a start-up could be even a company, less than a 100-200 people, I mean nobody's buying from a company unless there's a 10x return to value relative to the next best option, and so in that world how do you build 10x value? Well one you've got to have great technology, and then that's the start point, but the other thing is you've got to have deep focus on your customers, right, and so I think from our perspective, we build focus by just saying, look nobody understands data in your company, and by and large you've got to make money by understanding this data, as you do the digital transformation stuff, a big part of that is differentiating and making better products and optimizing based upon understanding your data because that helps you and your business make better decisions, >> John: Yeah. >> And so what we're going to do is help you understand that data better and faster than any other company can do. >> You really got to pick your shots, but what you're saying, if I hear you saying is as a start-up you got to hit the beachhead segment you want to own. >> Satyen: That's right. >> And own it. >> Satyen: That's exactly. >> No other decision, just get it, and then maybe get to a bigger scope later, and sequence around, and grow it that way. >> Satyen: You can't solve 10 problems >> Can't be groping for a beachhead if you don't know what you want, you're never going to get it. >> That's right. You can't solve 10 problems unless you solve one, right, and so you know I think we're at a phase where we've proven that we can scalably solved one, we've got customers like, you know Pfizer and Intuit and Citrix and Tesco and Tesla and eBay and Munich Reinsurance and so these are all you know amazing brands that are traditionally difficult to sell into, but you know I think from our perspective it's really about focus and just helping customers that are making that digital analytical transformation. Do it faster, and do it by enabling their people. >> But a lot going on this week for events, we had Informatica world this week, we got V-mon. We had Google I/O. We had Sapphire. It's a variety of other events going on, but I want to ask you kind of a more of a entrepreneurial industry question, which is, if we're going through the so-called digital transformation, that means a new modern era an old one movie transformed, yet I go to every event, and everyone's number one at something, that's like I was just at Informatica, they're number one in six squadrons. Michael Dell we're number in four every character, Mark Hurr at the press meeting said they're number one in all categories, Ross Perot think quote about you could be number one depends on how you slice the market, seems to be in play, my point is I kind of get a little bit, you know weirded out by that, but that is okay, you know I guess theCUBE's number one in overall live videos produced at an enterprise event, you know I, so we're number one at something, but my point is. >> Satyen: You really are. >> My point is, in a new transformation, what is the new scoreboard going to look like because a lot of things that you're talking about is horizontally integrated, there's new use cases developing, a new environment is coming online, so if someone wanted to actually try to keep score of who number one is and who's winning, besides customer wins, because that's clearly the one that you can point to and say hey they're winning customers, customer growth is good, outside of customer growth, what do you think will be the key requirements to get some sort of metric on who's really doing well these are the others, I mean we're not yet there with >> Yeah it's a tough problem, I mean you know used to be the world was that nobody gets fired for choosing choosing IBM. >> John: Yeah. >> Right, and I think that that brand credibility worked in a world where you could be conservative right, in this world I think, that looking for those measures, it is going to be really tough, and I think on some level that quest for looking for what is number one, or who is the best is actually the sort of fool's errand, and if that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for, you know what's the best answer for me based upon social signal, you know it's kind of like you know I'm going to go do the what the popular kids do in high school, I mean that could lead to you know a path, but it doesn't lead to the one that's going to actually get you satisfaction, and so on some level I think that customers, like you are the best signal, you know, always, >> John: Yeah, I mean it's hard, it's a rhetorical question, we ask it because, you know, we're trying to see not mystical with the path of fact called the fashion, what's fashionable. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> That's different. I mean talk about like really a cure metro, in the old days market share is one, actually IDC used a track who had market shares, and they would say based upon the number of shipments products, this is the market share winner, right? yeah that's pretty clean, I mean that's fairly clean, so just what it would be now? Number of instances, I mean it's so hard to figure out anyway, I digress. >> No, I think that's right, I mean I think I think it's really tough, that I think customers stories that, sort of map to your case. >> Yeah. It all comes back down to customer wins, how many customers you have was the >> Yeah and how much value they are getting out of your stuff. >> Yeah. That 10x value, and I think that's the multiplier minimum, if not more and with clouds and the scale is happening, you agree? >> Satyen: Yeah. >> It's going to get better. Okay thanks for coming on theCUBE. We have Satyen Sangani. CEO, co-founder of Alation, great start-up. Follow them on Twitter, these guys got some really good focus, learning about your data, because once you understand the data hygiene, you start think about ethics, and all the cool stuff happening with data. Thanks so much for coming on CUBE. More coverage, but Sapphire after the short break. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone we are here in Palo Alto for the special CUBE coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. In our studio breaking down all the action happening in Barcelona, for the next two days, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, and our next guest is Michael Foran, who's a product manager at SAP, formerly HANA Cloud, now called SAP Cloud. They renamed it, part of the big news at Mobile World Congress. Michael, thanks for stopping in and sharing your thoughts on SAP Cloud and the impact at Mobile World Congress. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you guys have, we've been following, obviously your Cloud game since the initiative started, the announcement, and then kind of like the slow start, but last Sapphire, SAP Sapphire in Orlando, which we had theCUBE there live, really was the release of the cloud, the announcement of the Apple deal. Now that's going to be the big news here at Mobile World Congress this week is the shipping of that general availability of the iOS developer kit. Once you guys hit the market with the product, it's just been rolling, incrementally getting better. And you changed the name from HANA Cloud to just SAP cloud. I interviewed Dan Lahl earlier about what that means. I don't want to get into that, but it means that SAP's now sassifying all their products. As the project manager, you got to put the roadmap together with the team, so I'm sure you have to balance really two camps, right? You got the SAP installed base which SAP, in my many conferences with Bill McDermott, the CEO, it's you guys run, the biggest businesses are running on SAP. So you have a huge install base. At the same time, the cloud brings Greenfield developers, cloud native, which don't have any SAP in it. So it's the merging of the best of both worlds. That's a product challenge, so I want to get your thoughts. What's the key thing for folks to be aware of at Mobile World Congress this year about the aha moment for SAP cloud? What is that key product feature that bridges the cloud native with the pre-existing SAP? >> Well, that's one of the benefits of having the cloud platform like ours, right John? Because we wanted to support this concept of the bimodal IT because we recognize that a lot of our existing customers really wanted to leverage their existing investments, but at the same time be able to address a lot of the upcoming innovations and being able to address even their change in work force, for example. They want to be able to utilize and adapt, I guess, to a key word that people kind of throw around there as being agile. And being agile means helping the customer be able to adapt efficiently and economically to the changes, whether it's user expectations. I read somewhere like some of the workforce by 2020's going to be 75% millennials, and their expectations of their product experience is going to be much different than what traditional users have been. And at the same time you have a business that you've kept running for a long time and you don't want to just change the way that they've been doing things. You want to have those things there but at the same time bring new innovations. And with the HANA cloud platform, you're going to be given a set of tools and services, as you've probably heard from Dan already, that's going to enable you to do that, bringing new innovations like IoT and machine learning, and so forth. >> And you got the use cases, you got people who actually are building apps, and just last Friday on my Silicon Valley Friday show I interviewed Paul Martino, who had probably one of the best quotes He's also an investor in Bullpen Capital, he does a lot of startup action. But there's been a democratization of entrepreneurship because it's so easy to build apps. Could be a 16 year old in the basement to the dorm room to the old age home where guys my age are building apps. So this is kind of like an app tsunami happening. So that's cool, that's cloud native, great market for that. But then this integration that's really big, because now apps are great by themselves, but if you look at Mobile World Congress, the key theme is 5G and 10, so apps got to start playing well with others. You hear microservices, talk about machine learning, these are now the new tools of the trade to bring that building block approach. Do you guys agree with that, and what are you guys doing specifically to facilitate that seamless integration, the building blocks, is it microservices, is it servantless architecture? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, and this is where businesses have come. And helping enterprises grow, you mentioned starting with small companies and so forth, but as they grow, what we recognize from customers is that their landscape becomes really heterogeneous. They're trying to integrate best of breed software and so forth, and having a platform like ours that's able to integrate into those things is the perfect utility and the perfect platform for doing that in the essence that we are able to. Let's look at it from the end consumer experience or the end business user. If we do technology right, the technology that's underlying it should be almost invisible. It doesn't matter that they're accessing five, six different systems in order to do their job. With the cloud platform we have a way of being able to integrate all those systems and be able to present it as one experience, one UI, friendly, user-friendly UI and using like, for example, our Fiori user experience and paradigm. >> What's the integration point? Because I think this is something that the developer, developers are fickle, right? I mean, developers are great, but also they wield a lot of power and they're moving to the front lines with their apps, but at the end of the day, the business outcomes are really where the holy grail is. And that's where the developers are getting close to, they're getting close to the outcomes and they're part of that process. So they're out developing, they're slinging their code around, slinging their APIs around, doing all this great stuff with microservices, but sometimes they don't really think about the integration. That's why DevOps was so good. They let the infrastructures be programmable. Some of the times it's not that easy to program integration. Sometimes you have to really understand that. Are we going to have programmable integration playbooks and templates, how is that evolving? Because this seems to be the hot area where, okay, infrastructure is code, I can see that, that's working great, how do you connect down and make it work so that the integration works better? >> Kind of the approach we've kind of taken is that when you're doing integration between systems and so forth, it's best to do it through well-defined APIs, that where there's a decoupling of the system. That way the systems that you're interacting with are not so dependent upon each other. So if one piece changes, the others can still run, as long as that API, or that handshake, if you will, doesn't change. And you brought up a another good point as far as having the developers and business people work in a more collaborative fashion. Because at the end of the day this is what we want to target, we want to enable the business users to be able to have applications that they're comfortable with, that they're able to be efficient with. And the way we're doing that is, we're putting services on top of the platform that's going to allow them to be really, the guys who are actually designing the applications at the end of the day, that they're ones that they're going to be using. Because we in the past have made some bad compromises when you're designing software because you got the business person saying, hey this I want to see and then you got the developer saying, this is actually what I can achieve. But through the platform we offer this service called our build service, which basically allows the business analyst to essentially be the ones who become-- >> They're composing, not necessarily coding. >> Yeah, they're composing, but at the end of that composing, they're able to get that user feedback and go through the rounds of saying, is this the software that I really want to use? And when they're done with that, they're able to pass that along to developers and say, okay, great, I know exactly what you're using it for, now let me be the ones that help you tie into the various systems that perhaps I actually need to integrate with. >> Okay, Michael, tell us the big things that people should pay attention to this week during Mobile World Congress from the cloud. Is it the updates, what are the key news that gets your attention that you want people to look at and take notice of? >> I'm sorry. >> Okay, well, you guy had the, there's been some good proof points You guys had the new capabilities, got the iOS native kit. Is there any machine learning going on in the cloud? Can you share some insights? Because AI is certainly the hype factor right now. But machine learning and IoT, that kind of connects the dots on some of the cool features of what's going on now. >> That's absolutely right, John. In terms of machine learning, here's the thing, once we start integrating all these systems, we have a lot of information that's rolling into the system, essentially. How do you actually make use of that information? Part of it is, we're only human. What we would like to do with the technology is, give you some superpowers with the technology. The technology that we work with is not meant to replace you, but meant to augment what you're able to do. And machine learning's a great vehicle to do that in. This is one of the areas that I think you should be paying attention to. There's going to be a lot of stuff coming out on the platform in terms of services that's meant to aid you, meant to aid the developer and seeing how they can actually do their task a lot better. For example, some of the stuff that's coming to be coming down in the future on top of our platform is, we have this service called the CoPilot, which if you could imagine, it's a digital assistant. So if you're performing a task that you have somebody, have somebody sitting there next to you reminding you perhaps things to be cognizant of. For example, if you're trying to create a purchase requisition or what not and the system already knows that perhaps you're low on budget, these are things you need to be wary of, that's something that you can then act on right away without having to wait for that process of submitting the purchase requisition, getting it back and saying we can't approve this because of budgetary reasons. >> That's the speed of big data. You actually get the software working on new work flows. I want to get your take on, anecdotally speaking, you're the product guy, so you get to see what's going on with the requirements, the roadmaps, this is kind of the keys to the kingdom. I love talking to product guys because I used to be a product guy myself back in the old days. But you got think holistic, you got to look 20 miles down the road and think about those tradeoffs you mentioned earlier. What anecdotal things can you point to from customers that you see that seem to pop out as a trend that you guys are doubling down on? What's the key customer requirements that's the focus? >> Well, a lot of the things that we tend to see from customers these days is a trend actually back towards being able to use standard products. They don't want to do these hypercustomizations on the products themselves because we've seen where it's taken them, and that is -- >> Mean one offs, basically. >> Yeah. One offs and just changes to their system where they're so dependent on the customizations they're afraid to do these upgrades. So it makes them really slow to react and be agile in their business. So this is where having the SAP cloud platform, they're able to keep those things running and then being able to do the new innovations. It's really, from the customer's perspective, they're really asking us to-- >> Scale. >> Be able to scale. >> Is it scalability? >> It is scale. >> Okay, so scale seems to be. So talk about the Google Next coming up. I know you guy got announcements. I'm trying to get the news, although it's under a lot of confidentiality. You got Google, you got Amazon, you got Microsoft out there. Oracle has a cloud. I mean, we're living in a multi-cloud world. And it's pretty clear from our reporting and our analysis, Amazon is obviously doing very well, but it's not going to be a winner take all. Customers want to have multicloud. How do you guys view that conceptually and philosophically from the customer standpoint? >> The SAP cloud platform is a very open platform. We recognize this from the customer's perspective as well as that they don't want to be tied into any one vendor, they want to be able to do what they need to do without being tied to any specific one, and certainly with SAP cloud platform we're adopting that. You've heard of the announcements of the availability of us using Cloud Foundry on top of our platform as well and being able to bring in those Community Source and Open Source type products into the platform. And that also leverages existing investments from the customer's developer workforce. >> So you guys are open cloud, basically. You support open all the way. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, my final question for you, what's the most exciting thing that gets you jazzed up about the SAP cloud? >> I think the most exciting thing about my work and being able to do this stuff is really enabling and empowering people to do their jobs more efficiently. Because at the end of the day, none of us are really the people that want to just be administrators. And some of the applications, some of the things that we do make us administrators versus being a recruiter versus being an interviewer or whatnot. And we want to make software that really fits your needs and really helps you be what you're supposed to be doing and not an administrator. >> The best software is invisible, as I always say. Making it happen, Michael, thanks so much for spending the time here in theCUBE, appreciate it. You're watching two days of wall-to-wall coverage of theCUBE, covering Barcelona, Spain, covering Mobile World Congress 2017 from Palo Alto, analyzing and opining on all the news and commentary. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)