(upbeat techno music) >> From Mountain View California, it's the Cube covering the 15th Annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with the Cube on the ground at the Computer History Museum for the 15th annual ACG SV Awards. And in Mountain View California excited to welcome to the Cube for the first time, John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet and the co-founder of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. JOHN, it's truly a pleasure to have you on the Cube today. >> Well delighted to be here, Lisa. >> So I was doing some research on you. And I see Marc Andreessen has called you the godfather of Silicon Valley. >> Marc very generous (loughs) >> so I thought I was pretty cool I'm going to sit down with the godfather tonight. (loughs) >> I have not done that yet. So you are keynoting the 15th Annual ACG SV Awards tonight. Talk to us a little bit about the takeaways that the audience is going to hear from you tonight. >> Well, they're going to hear some things about leadership the importance of leadership, obviously the importance of innovation. We're in the middle of Silicon Valley innovation is a big thing. And the role that technology plays in our lives and how we should be thinking about that, and how do we ensure the technology is something that serves the public good. >> Definitely. So there's about I think over 230 attendees expected tonight over 100 sea levels, the ACG SV Is has been it's it's much more than a networking organization. there's a lot of opportunities for collaboration for community. Tell me a little bit about your experience with that from a collaboration standpoint? >> Well, I think collaboration is a critical ingredient. I mean, for so many years, you look at the collaboration is gone. Just take between between the universities, my own Stanford and Silicon Valley and how that collaboration has developed over time and lead the founding of great companies, but also collaboration within the valley. This is the place to be a technology person in the whole world it's the best place partly because of this collaboration, and this innovative spirit that really is a core part of what we are as a place. >> I agree. The innovative spirit is one of the things that I enjoy, about not only being in technology, but also living in Silicon Valley. You can't go to a Starbucks without hearing a conversation or many conversations about new startups or cloud technology. So the innovative spirit is pervasive here. And it's also one that I find in an in an environment like ASG SV. You just hear a lot of inspiring stories and I was doing some research on them in the last 18 months. Five CEO positions have been seated and materialized through ACG SV. Number of venture deals initiated several board positions. So a lot of opportunity in this group here tonight. >> Right, well I think that's important because so much of the leadership has got to come by recruiting new young people. And with the increase in concerned about diversity and our leadership core and our boards, I think building that network out and trying to stretch it a little bit from the from perhaps the old boys network of an earlier time in the Valley is absolutely crucial. >> Couldn't agree more. So let's now talk a little bit about the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. Tell us a little bit about it. When was it founded? >> So we are we are in our very first year, actually, this year, our first year of scholars, we founded it in 2016. The motivation was, I think, an increasing gap we perceived in terms of the need for great leadership and what was available. And it was in government. It was in the nonprofit world, it was in the for profit world. So I being a lifelong educator said, What can we do about this? Let's try to recruit and develop a core of younger people who show that they're committed to the greater good and who are excellent, who are innovative, who are creative, and prepare them for leadership roles in the future. >> So you're looking for are these undergraduate students? >> They are graduate students, so they've completed their undergraduate, it's a little hard to tell when somebody's coming out of high school, what their civic commitment is, what their ability to lead is. But coming out of coming out of undergraduate experience, and often a few years of work experience, we can tell a lot more about whether somebody has the potential to be a future leader. >> So you said, found it just in 2016. And one of the things I saw that was very interesting is projecting in the next 50 years, there's going to be 5000 Knight-Hennessy scholars at various stages of their careers and government organizations, NGOs, as you mentioned, so looking out 50 years you have a strong vision there, but really expect this organization to be able to make a lasting impact. >> That's what our goal is lasting impact over decades, because people who go into leadership positions often take a decade or two to rise to that position. But that's what our investment is our investment is in the in the future. And when I went to Phil Knight who's my co-founder and donor, might lead donor to the program, he was enthusiastic. His view was that we had a we had a major gap in leadership. And we needed to begin training, we need to do multiple things. We need to do things like we're doing tonight. But we also need to think about that next younger generation is up and coming. >> Some terms of inspiring the next generation of innovative diversity thinkers. Talk to me about some of the things that this program is aimed at, in addition to just, you know, some of the knowledge about leadership, but really helping them understand this diverse nature in which we now all find ourselves living. >> So one of the things we do is we try to bring in leaders from all different walks of life to meet and have a conversation with our scholars. This morning, we had the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in town, Michelle Bachelet, and she sat down and talked about how she thought about her role as addressing human rights, how to move things forward in very complex situations we face around the world with collapse of many governments and many human rights violations. And how do you how do you make that forward progress with a difficult problem? So that kind of exposure to leaders who are grappling with really difficult problems is a critical part of our program. >> And they're really seeing and experiencing real world situations? >> Absolutely. They're seeing them up close as they're really occurring. They see the challenges we had, we had Governor Brown and just before he went out of office here in California, to talk about criminal justice reform a major issue in California and around the country. And how do we make progress on that on that particular challenge? >> So you mentioned a couple of other leaders who the students I've had the opportunity to learn from and engage with, but you yourself are quite the established leader. You went to Stanford as a professor in 1977. You are a President Emeritus you were president of Stanford from 2000 to 2016. So these students also get the opportunity to learn from all that you have experienced as it as a professor of Computer Science, as well as in one of your current roles as chairman of Alphabet. Talk to us a little bit about just the massive changes that you have seen, not just in Silicon Valley, but in technology and innovation over the last 40 plus years. >> Well, it is simply amazing. When I arrived at Stanford, there was no internet. The ARPANET was in its young days, email was something that a bunch of engineers and scientists use to communicate, nobody else did. I still remember going and seeing the first demonstration of what would become Yahoo. Well, while David Filo and Jerry Yang had it set up in their office. And the thing that immediately convinced me Lisa was they showed me that their favorite Pizza Parlor would now allow orders to go online. And when I saw that I said, the World Wide Web is not just about a bunch of scientists and engineers exchanging information. It's going to change our lives and it did. And we've seen wave after wave that with Google and Facebook, social media rise. And now the rise of AI I mean this this is a transformative technology as big as anything I think we've ever seen. In terms of its potential impact. >> It is AI is so transformative. I was I was in Hawaii recently on vacation and Barracuda Networks was actually advertising about AI in Hawaii and I thought that's interesting that the people that are coming to to Hawaii on vacation, presumably, people have you know, many generations who now have AI as a common household word may not understand the massive implications and opportunities that it provides. But it is becoming pervasive at every event we're at at the Cube and there's a lot of opportunity there. It's it's a very exciting subject. Last question for you. You mentioned that this that the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program is really aimed towards graduate students. What is your advice to those BB stem kids in high school right now who are watching this saying, oh, John, what, what? How do you advise me to be able to eventually get into a program like this? >> Well, I think it begins by really finding your passion, finding something you're really dedicated to pushing yourself challenging yourself, showing that you can do great things with it. And then thinking about the bigger role you want to have with technology. In the after all, technology is not an end in itself. It's a tool to make human lives better and that's the sort of person we're looking for in the knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, >> Best advice you've ever gotten. >> Best advice ever gotten is remember that leadership is about service to the people in the institution you lead. >> It's fantastic not about about yourself but really about service to those. >> About service to others >> JOHN, it's been a pleasure having you on the Cube tonight we wish you the best of luck in your keynote at the 15th annual ACG SV Awards and we thank you for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. I've enjoyed it. Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube on the ground. Thanks for watching. (upbeat tech music)

(upbeat techno music) >> From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Hello, everyone, I'm John Furrier the co-host on theCUBE, founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We are here at Sand Hill Road, at Mayfield for the 50th anniversary celebration and content series called The People First Network. This is a co-developed program. We're going to bring thought leaders, inspirational entrepreneurs and tech executives to talk about their experience and their journey around a people first society. This is the focus of entrepreneurship these days. I'm here with Navin Chaddha who's the managing director of Mayfield. Navin, you're kicking off the program. Tell us, why the program? Why People First Network? Is this a cultural thing? Is this part of a program? What's the rationale? What's the message? >> Yeah, first of all I want to thank, John, you and your team and theCUBE for co-hosting the People First Network with us. It's been a real delight working with you. Shifting to people first, Mayfield has had a long standing philosophy that people build companies and it's not the other way around. We believe in betting on great people because even if their initial idea doesn't pan out, they'll quickly pivot to find the right market opportunity. Similarly we believe when the times get tough it's our responsibility to stand behind people and the purpose of this People First Network is people like me were extremely lucky to have mentors along the way, when I was an entrepreneur and now as a venture capitalist, who are helping me achieve my dreams. Mayfield and me want to give back to other entrepreneurs, by bringing in people who are luminaries in their own fields to share their learnings with other entrepreneurs. >> This is a really great opportunity and I want to thank you guys for helping us put this together with you guys. It's a great co-creation. The observation that we're seeing in Silicon Valley and certainly in talking to some of the guests we've already interviewed and that will be coming up on the program, is the spirit of community and the culture of innovation is around the ecosystem of Silicon Valley. This has been the bedrock. >> Mm-hmm. >> Of Silicon Valley, Mayfield, one of the earliest if not the first handful of venture firms. >> Mm-hmm. >> Hanging around Stanford, doing entrepreneurship, this is a people culture in Silicon Valley and this is now going global. >> Mm-hmm. >> So great opportunity. What can we expect to see from some of the interviews? What are you looking for and what's the hope? >> Yeah, so I think what you're going to see from the interviews is, we are trying to bring around 20 plus people, and they'll be many John on the interview besides you. So there will be John Chambers, ex-chairman and CEO of Cisco. There'll be John Zimmer, president and co founder of Lyft. And there also will be John Hennessy who will be our first interview, with him, from Stanford University. And jokes apart, there'll be like 20 plus other people who will be part of this network. So I think what you're going to see is, goings always don't go great. There's a lot of learnings that happen when things don't work out. And our hope is, when these luminaries from their professions, share their learnings the entrepreneurs will benefit from it. As we all know, being an entrepreneur is hard. But sometimes, and many times, actually it's also a lonely road and our belief is, and I strongly personally also believe in it, that great entrepreneurs believe in continuous learning and are continuously adapting themselves to succeed. So our hope is, this People First Network serves as a learning opportunity from entrepreneurs to learn from great leaders. >> You said a few things I really admire about Mayfield and I want to get your reaction because I think is a fundamental for society. Building durable companies is about the long game because people fail and people succeed but they always move on. >> Mm-hmm. >> They move on to another opportunity. They move on to another pursuit. >> Mm-hmm. >> And this pay it forward culture has been a key thing for Silicon Valley. >> It absolutely has been. >> What's the inspiration behind it, from your perspective? You mentioned your experiences. Tell us a story and experience you've had? >> Yeah, so I would say, first of all, right, since we strongly believe people make products and products don't make people, we believe venture capital and entrepreneurship is about like running a marathon, it's not a sprint. So if you take a longterm view, have a strong vision and mission which is supported with great beliefs and values? You can do wonders. And our whole aim, not only as Mayfield but other venture capitalists, is to build iconic companies which are built to last which beyond creating jobs and economic wealth, can give back to the society and make the world a better place to work, live and play. >> You know one of the things that we are passionate about at theCUBE, and on SiliconANGLE Media is standing by our community. >> Mm-hmm. >> Because people do move around and I think one of the things that is key in venture capital now, than ever before is not looking for the quick hit. >> Mm-hmm. >> It's standing by your companies in good times and in bad. >> Mm-hmm. >> Because this is about people and you don't know how things might turn out, how a company might end up in a different place. We've heard some of your entrepreneurs talk about that, that the outcome was not how they envisioned it when they started. >> Mm-hmm. >> This is a key mindset for a business. >> It absolutely is, right? Let's look at a few examples. One of our most successful companies is Lyft. When we backed it at Series A, it was called Zimride. They weren't doing what they were doing, but the company had a strong vision and mission of changing the way people transport and given that, they were A plus people, as I mentioned earlier. The initial idea wasn't going to be a massive opportunity. They quickly pivoted to go after the right market opportunity. And hence, again and again, right? Like to me, it's all about the people. >> Navigating those boards is sometimes challenging and we hope that this content will help people, inspire people, help them discover their passion, discover people that they might want to work with. We really appreciate your support and thank you for contributing your network and your brand and your team in supporting our mission. >> Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure and we hope the viewers and especially entrepreneurs can learn from the journeys of many iconic people who have built great things in their careers. >> Were here at Sand Hill Road, at Mayfield's venture capital headquarters in sunny Silicon Valley, California, Stanford, California, Palo Alto California, all one big melting pot of innovation. I'm here with John Hennessy, who's the Stanford President Emeritus, also the director of the Knight Hennessy Scholarship. Thanks for joining me today for this conversation. >> Delighted to be here, John. >> So I wanted to get your thoughts on the history of the valley. Obviously, Mayfield, celebrating their 50th anniversary and Mayfield was one of those early venture capital firms that kind of hung around the barbershop, looking for a haircut. Stanford University was that place. Early on this was the innovation spark that created the valley. A lot of other early VCs as well, but not that many in the early days and now 50 years later, so much has changed. What's your thoughts on the arc of entrepreneurship around Stanford, around Silicon Valley? >> Well, you're right, it's been an explosive force. I mean, I think there were a few companies out here on Sand Hill Road at that time. Now nearly the number of venture firms there are today. But I think the biggest change has been the kinds of technologies we build. You know, in those days, we built technologies that were primarily for other engineers or perhaps they were tandem computers being built for business interest. Now we build technologies that change people's lives, every single day and the impact on the world is so much larger than it was and these companies have grown incredibly fast. I mean, you look at the growth rate? We had the stars of the earlier compared to the Googles and Facebooks of today, it's small growth rates, so those are big changes. >> I'm excited to talk with you, because you're one of the only people that I can think of that has seen so many different waves of innovation. You've been involved in many of them yourself, one of the co-founders of MIPS, chairman of the board of Alphabet, which is Google, Google's holding company, the large holdings they have and just Stanford in general has been, you know, now with CAL, kind of the catalyst for a lot of the change. What's interesting is, you know, the Hewlett-Packards, the birthplace of Silicon Valley, that durable company view. >> Mm-hmm. >> Of how to build a company and the people that are involved is really a, still, essential part of it. Certainly happening faster, differently. When you look at the waves of innovation, is there anything that you could look at and say, hey, this is the consistent pattern that we see emerging of these waves? Is it a classic formula of engineers getting together trying to solve problems? Is it the Stanford drop out PH.d program? Is there a playbook? Is there a pattern that you see in the entrepreneurship over the years? >> You know, I think there are these waves that are often induced by big technology changes, right? The beginning of the personal computer. The beginning of the internet. The world wide web, social media. The other observation is that it's very hard to predict what the next one will be. (laughing) If it was easier to predict, there would be one big company, rather than lots of companies riding each one of these waves. The other thing I think that's fascinating about them is these waves don't create just one company. They create a whole new microcosm of companies around that technology which exploit it and bring it to the people and change people's lives with it. >> And another thing is interesting about that point is that even the failures have DNA. You see people, big venture backed company, I think Go is a great example, you think about those kinds of companies. The early work on mobile computing, the early work on processors that you were involved in MIPS. >> Mm-hmm. >> They become successful and/or may/may not have the outcomes but the people move on to other companies to either start companies. This is a nice flywheel, this is one of the things that Silicon Valley has enjoyed over the years. >> Yeah, and just look at the history of RISC technology that I was involved in. We initially thought it would take over the general purpose computing industry and I think Intel responded in an incredible way and eventually reduced the advantage. Now here we are 30 years later and 95%/98% of the processors in the world are RISC because of the rise of mobile, internet of things, dramatically changing where the processors were. >> Yeah. >> They're not on the desktop anymore, they're scattered around in very different ways. >> It's interesting, I was having a conversation with Andy Kessler, who used to be an analyst back at the time for Morgan Stanley. He then became an investor. And he was talking about, with me, the DRAM days when the Japanese were dumping DRAMs and then that was low margin business, and then Intel said, "Hey, no problem. "We'll let go of the DRAM business." but they created Pentium and then the micro processor. >> Right. >> That spawned a whole nother wave, so you see the global economy today, you see China, you see people manufacturing things at very low cost, Apple does work out there. What's your view and reaction to the global landscape? Because certainly things are changed a bit but it seems to be some of the same? What's your thoughts on the global landscape and the impact of entrepreneurs? >> It certainly is global. I mean, I think in two ways. First of all, supply chains have become completely global. Look at how many companies in the valley rely on TSMC as their primary source of silicon? It's a giant engine for the valley. But we also see, increasingly, even in young companies a kind of global, distributed engineering scheme where they'll have a group in Taiwan, or in China or in India that'll be doing part of the engineering work and they're basically outsourcing some of that and balancing their costs and bringing in other talent that might be very hard to hire right now in the valley or very expensive in the valley. And I think that's exciting to see. >> The future of Silicon Valley is interesting because you have a lot of the fast pace, it seems like ventures have shrink down in terms of the acceleration of the classic building blocks of how to get a company started. You get some funding, engineers build a product, they get a prototype, they get it out. Now it seems to be condensed. You'll see valuations of a billion dollars. Can Silicon Valley survive the current pace given the real estate prices and some of the transportation challenges? What's your view on the future of Silicon Valley? >> Well my view is there is no place like the valley. The interaction between great universities, Stanford and Cal, UCSF if you're interested in biomedical innovation and the companies makes it just a microcosm of innovation and excellence. It's challenges, if it doesn't solve it's problems on housing and transportation, it will eventually cause a second Silicon Valley to rise and challenge it and I think that's really up to us to solve and I think we're going to have to, the great leaders, the great companies in the valley are going to have to take a leadership role working with the local governments to solve that problem. >> On the Silicon Valley vision of replicating it, I've seen many people try, other regions try over the years and over the 20 years, my observation is, they kind of get it right on paper but kind of fail in the execution. It's complicated but it's nuanced in a lot of ways but now we're seeing with remote working and the future of work changing a little bit differently and all kinds of new tech from block chain to, you name it, remote working. >> Right. >> That it might be a perfect storm now to actually have a formula to replicate Silicon Valley. If you were advising folks to say, hey, if you want to replicate Silicon Valley, what would be your advice to people? >> Well you got to start with the weather. (laughing) Always a challenge to replicate that. But then the other pieces, right? Some great universities, an ecosystem that supports risk taking and smart failure. One of the great things about the valley is, you're a young engineer/computer scientist graduating, you come here. You go to a start up company, so what it fails? There's 10 other companies you can get a job with. So there's a sense of this is a really exciting place to be, that kind of innovation. Creating that, replicating that ecosystem, I think and getting all the pieces together is going to be the challenge and I think the area that does that will have a chance at building something that could eventually be a real contestant for the second Silicon Valley. >> And I think the ecosystem and community is the key word. >> And community, absolutely. >> So I'll get your thoughts on your journey. Take us through your journey. MIPS co-founder, life at Stanford, now with the Knights Scholarship Program that you're involved in, the Knight Hennessy Scholarship. What lessons have you learned from each kind of big sequence of your life? Obviously in the start up days. Take us through some of the learnings. >> Yeah. >> Whether it's the scar tissue or the success, you know? >> Well, no, the time I spent starting MIPS and I took a leave for about 18 months full-time from the university, but I stayed involved after that on a part time basis but that 18 months was an intensive learning experience because I was an engineer. I knew a lot about the technology we're building, I didn't know anything about starting a company. And I had to go through all kinds of things, you know? Determining who to hire for CEO. Whether or not the CEO would be able to scale with the company. We had to do a layoff when we almost ran out of cash and that was a grueling experience but I learned how to get through that and that was a lesson when I came back to return to the university, to really use those lessons from the valley, they were invaluable. I also became a much better teacher, because here I had actually built something in industry and after all, most of our students are going to build things, they're not going to become future academics. So I went back and reengaged with the university and started taking on a variety of leadership roles there. Which was a wonderful experience. I never thought I'd be university president, not in a million years would I have told you that was, and it wasn't my goal. It was sort of the proverbial frog in the pot of water and the temperature keeps going up and then you're cooking before you know it. >> Well one of the things you did I thought was interesting during your time in the 90's as the head of the computer science department is a lot of that Stanford innovation started to come out with the internet and you had Yahoo, you had Google, you had PH.ds and you guys were okay with people dropping out, coming back in. >> Yeah. >> So you had this culture of building? >> Yup. >> Tell us some of the stories there, I mean Yahoo was a server under the desk and the web exploded. >> Yeah, it was a server under the desk. In fact, Dave and Jerry's office was in a trailer and you go into their room and they'd have pizza boxes and Coke cans stacked around because Yahoo use was exploding and they were trying to build this portal out to serve this growing community of users. Their machine was called Akebono because they were both big sumo wrestling fans. Then eventually, the university had to say, "You guys need to move this off campus "because it's generating 3/4 of the internet traffic "at the university and we can't afford it." (laughing) So they moved off campus and of course figured out how to use advertising as a monetization model. And that changed a lot of things on the internet because that made it possible for Google to come along years later. Redo search in a way that lots of us thought, there's nothing left to do in search, there's just not a lot there. But Larry and Sergey came up with a much better search algorithm. >> Talk about the culture that you guys fostered there because this, I think, is notable, in my mind, as well as some of the things I want to get into about the interdisciplinary. But at that time, you guys fostered a culture of creating and taking things out and there was an investment group of folks around Stanford. Was it a policy? Was it more laid back? >> No, I think-- >> Take us through some of the cultural issues. >> It was a notion of what really matters in the world. How do you get impact? Because in the end that's what the university really wants to do. Some people will do impact by publishing a paper or a book but some technologies, the real impact will occur when you take it out into the real world. And that was a vision that a lot of us had, dating back to Hewlett-Packard, of course but Jim Clark at Silicon Graphics, the Cisco work, MIPS and then, of course, Yahoo and Google years later. That was something that was supported by both the leadership of the university and that made it much easier for people to go out and take their work and take it out to the world. >> Well thank you for doing that, because I think the impact has been amazing and had transcended a lot of society today. You're seeing some challenges now with society. Now we have our own problems. (laughing) The impact has been massive but now lives are being changed. You're seeing technology better lives so it's changing the educational system. It's also changing how people are doing work. Talk about your current role right now with the Knight Hennessy Scholarship. What is that structured like and how are you shaping that? What's the vision? >> Well our vision, I became concerned as I was getting ready to leave the president's office that we, as a human society, were failing to develop the kinds of leaders that we needed. It seemed to me it was true in government. It was true in the corporate world. It was even true in some parts of the nonprofit world. And we needed to step back and say, how do we generate a new community of young leaders who are going to go out, determined to do the right thing, who see their role as service to society? And their success aligned with the success of others? We put together a small program. We put together a vision of this. I got support from the trustees. I went to ask my good friend Phil Knight, talked to him about it, and I said, "Phil I have this great idea," and I explained it to him and he said, "That's terrific." So I said, "Phil I need 400 million dollars." (laughing) A month later he said, "Yes," and we were off and running. Now we've got 50 truly extraordinary scholars from around the world, 21 different birth countries. Really, some of them have already started nonprofits that are making a big difference in their home communities. Others will do it in the future. >> What are some of the things they're working on? And how did you guys roll this out? Because, obviously, getting the funding's key but now you got to execute. What are some of the things that you went through? How did you recruit? How did you deploy? How did you get it up and running? >> We recruited by going out to universities around the world, and meeting with them and, of course, using social media as well. If you want get 21 year and 22 year olds to apply? Go to social media. So that gave us a feed on some students and then we thought a lot, our goal is to educate people who will be leaders in all walks of life. So we have MBAs, we have MDs, we have PH.ds, we have JDs. >> Yeah. >> A broad cohort of people, build a community. Build a community that will last far beyond their time at Stanford so they have a connection to a community of like minded individuals long after they graduate and then try to build their leadership skills. Bringing in people who they can meet with and hear from. George Schultz is coming in on Thursday night to talk about his journey through government service in four different cabinet positions and how did he address some of the challenges that he encountered. Build up their speaking skills and their ability to collaborate with others. And hopefully, these are great people. >> Yeah. >> We just hope to push their trajectory a little higher. >> One of the things I want you is that when Steve Jobs gave his commencement speech at Stanford, which is up on YouTube, it's got zillions and zillions of views, before he passed away, that has become kind of a famous call to arms for a lot of young people. A lot of parents, I have four kids and the question always comes up, how do I get into Stanford? But the question I want to ask you is more of, as you have the program, and you look for these future leaders, what advice would you give? Because we're seeing a lot of people saying, hey you know people build their resume, they say what they think people want to hear to get into a school, you know Steve Job's point said, "Follow your passion, don't live other people's dogma" these are some of the themes that he shared during that famous commencement speech in Stanford. Your advice for the next generation of leaders? How should they develop their skills? What are some of the things that they can acquire? Steve Jobs was famous to say in interviews, "What have you built?" >> Yeah. >> "Tell me something that you've built." It's kind of a qualifying question. So this brings up the question of, how should young people develop? How should they think about, not just applying and getting in but being a candidate for some of these programs? >> Well I think the first thing is you really want to challenge yourself. You really want to engage your intellectual passions. Find something you really like to do. Find something that you're also good at because that's the thing that'll get you out of bed on weekends early, and you'll go do it. I mean, if you asked me about my career? And asked me about my number one hobby for most of my career? It was my career. I loved being a professor. I loved research, I love teaching. That made it very easy to do it with energy and excitement and passion. You know there's a great quote in Steve Job's commencement speech where he says, "I look in the mirror every morning "and if too many days in a row I find out "I don't like what I'm going to do that day, "it's time for a change." Well I think it's that commitment to something. It's that belief in something that's bigger than yourself, that's about a journey that you're going to go on with others in that leadership role. >> I want to get your thoughts on the future for young people and society and business. It's very people centric now. You're seeing a lot of the younger generation look for mission driven ventures, they want to make a difference. But there's a lot of skills out there that are not yet born, yet. There's jobs that haven't been invented yet. Who handles autonomous vehicles? What's the policy? These are societal and technology questions. What are some of things that you see that are important to focus on for some of these new skills? There's a zillion new cyber security jobs open, for instance. >> Right. I mean there's thousands and thousands of openings for people that don't have those skills. >> Well I think we're going to need two different types of people. The traditional techno experts that we've always had but we're also going to need people that have a deep understanding of technology but are deeply committed to understanding it's impact on people. One of the problems we're going to have with the rise of artificial intelligence is we're going to have job displacements. In the longterm, I'm a believer that the number of opportunities created will exceed those that get destroyed but there'll be a lot of jobs that are deskilled or actually eliminated. How are we going to help educate that cohort of people and minimize the disruption of this technology? Because that disruption is really people's live that you're playing with. >> It's interesting, the old expression of ATMs will kill the bank branch but yet, now there's more bank branches than ever before. >> Than ever before, right? >> So, I think you're right on that, I think there'll be new opportunities. Entrepreneurship certainly is changing and I want to get your thoughts. This is the number one question I get from young entrepreneurs is, how should I raise money? How should I leverage money investors and my board? As you build your early foundational successes whether you're an engineer or a team, putting that E team together, entrepreneurial team is critical and that's just not people around the table of the venture. >> Correct. >> It's the support service providers and advisors and board of directors. How should they leverage their investors and board? How should they leverage that resource and not make it contentious, make it positive? >> Make is positive, right? So the best boards are collaborative with the management team, they work together to try to move the company forward. With so many angels now investing in these young companies there's an opportunity to bring in experience from somebody who's already had a successful entrepreneurial venture and looking for really deciding who do you want your investor to be? And it's not just about who gives you the highest valuation. It's also about who'll be there when things get tough? When the cash squeeze occurs and you're about to run out of money and you're really in a difficult situation? Who will help you build out the rest of your management team? Lots of young entrepreneurs, they're excited about their technology. >> Yeah. >> They don't have any management experience. (laughing) They need help. >> Yeah. >> They need help building that team and finding the right people for the company to be successful. >> I want to get thoughts on Mayfield. The 50th anniversary, obviously, they've been around longer than me, I'm going to be 53 this year. I remember when I first pitched Yogan DeGaulle in 1990, my first venture, he passed, but, Mayfield's been around for a while. I mean, Mayfield was the name of the town around here? >> Right. >> And has a lot of history. How do you see the relationship with the ventures and Stanford evolving? Are they still solid? They're doing well? Is it evolved? There's a new program going on? I see much more integration. What's the future of venture? >> Well I think the university's still a source of many ideas, obviously the notion of entrepreneurship has spread much more broadly than the university. And lots of creative start ups are spun out of existing companies or a group of young entrepreneurs that were in Google or Facebook early and now decide they want to go do their own thing. That's certainly happens but I think that ongoing innovation cycle is still alive. It's still dependent on the venture community and their experience having built companies. Particularly when you're talking about first time entrepreneurs. >> Yeah. >> Who really don't have a lot of depth. >> My final question I want to ask you is obviously one relating, pure to my heart, is computer science. I got my degree in the 80's during the systems revolution. Fun time, a lots changed. Women in computer science, the surface area of what computer science is. >> Mm-hmm. >> It was interesting, there was a story in Bloomberg that was debunked but people were debating if the super micros was being hacked by a chip in the system. >> Right. >> And more people don't even know what computer architecture is, I was like, hey now, the drivers might able to inject malware. So you need computer architecture, a book you've written. >> Mm-hmm. >> Academically, to programming so the range of computer science has changed. The diversity has changed. What's your thoughts on the current computer science curriculums? The global programs? Where's it going and what's your perspective on that? >> So I think computer science has changed dramatically. When I was a graduate student, you could arguably take a full set of breadth courses across the discipline. Maybe only one course in AI or one course in data base if you were a hardware or systems person but you could do everything. I could go to basically any Ph.d defense and understand what was going on. No more, the field has just exploded. And the impact? I mean you have people who do bio computation, for example, and you have to understand a lot of biology in order to understand how computer science applies to that. So that's the excitement. The excitement of having computer science have this broad impact. The other thing that's exciting is to see more women, more people of color, coming into the field, really injecting new energy and new perspective into the field and I think that will stand the discipline well in the future. >> And open source has been growing. I mean if you think about what it's like now to write software, all this goodness coming in with open source, it just adds over the top. >> Yeah. >> More goodness. >> I think today a, even a young undergraduate, writing in Python, using all these open libraries, could write more code in two weeks than I could have written in a year when I was graduate student. >> If we were 21 together, sitting here you and I, today, we're 21 years old, what would we do? What would you do? >> Well I think the opportunity created by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence is just unrivaled. This is a technology which we have invested in for 50 or 60 years, that was disappointing us for 50 or 60 years, in terms of not meeting it's projections and then, all of a sudden, turning point. It was a radical breakthrough and we're still at the very beginning of that radical breakthrough so I think it's going to be a really exciting time. >> Diane Green had a great quote at her last Google Cloud conference. She said, "It's like butter, everything's great with it." (laughing) AI is the-- >> Yeah, it's great with it. And of course, it can be overstated but I think there really is a fundamental breakthrough in terms of how we use the technology. Driven, of course, by the amount of data available for training these neural networks and far more computational resources than we ever thought we'd have. >> John it's been a great pleasure. Thanks for spending the time with us here for our People First interview, appreciate it. >> My pleasure, John. >> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we are here in Sand Hill Road for the People First program, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(spirited music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in the Palo Alto Studios for a CUBE Conversation. Part of our Western Digital Data Makes Possible Series, really looking at a lot of cool applications. At the end of the day, data's underneath everything. There's infrastructure and storage that's holding that, but it's much more exciting to talk about the applications. We're excited to have somebody who's kind of on the cutting edge of a next chapter of something you're probably familiar with. He's Steven Webster, and he is the founder and CEO of Asensei. Steven, great to see you. >> Likewise, likewise. >> So, you guys are taking, I think everyone's familiar with Fitbits, as probably one of the earliest iterations of a biometric feedback, for getting more steps. At the end of the day, get more steps. And you guys are really taking it to the next level, which is, I think you call it connected coaching, so I wondered if you could give everyone a quick overview, and then we'll dig into it a little bit. >> Yeah, I think we're all very familiar now with connected fitness in hindsight, as a category that appeared and emerged, as, like you say, first it was activity trackers. We saw those trackers primarily move into smartwatches, and the category's got life in it, life in it left. I see companies like Flywheel and Peloton, we all know Peloton now. >> [Jeff] Right. >> We're starting to make the fitness equipment itself, the treadmill, the bike, connected. So, there's plenty of growth in that category. But our view is that tracking isn't teaching, and counting and cheering isn't coaching. And so we see this opportunity for this new category that's emerging alongside connected fitness, and that's what we call connected coaching. >> Connected coaching. So the biggest word, obviously, instead of fitness tracker, to the connected coaching, is coaching. >> Yeah. >> So, you guys really think that the coaching piece of it is core. And are you targeting high-end athletes, or is this for the person that just wants to take a step up from their fitness tracker? Where in the coaching spectrum are you guys targeting? >> I saw your shoe dog, Phil Knight, founder of Nike, a book on the shelf behind you there, and his co-founder, Bill Bowerman, has a great quote that's immortalized in Nike offices and stores around the world: "If you have a body, you're an athlete." So, that's how we think about our audience. Our customer base is anyone that wants to unlock their athletic potential. I think if you look at elite sports, and elite athletes, and Olympic athletes, they've had access to this kind of technology going back to the Sydney Olympics, so we're really trying to consumerize that technology and make it available to the people that want to be those athletes, but aren't those athletes yet. You might call it the weekend warrior, or just the committed athlete, that would identify, identify themselves according to a sport that they play. >> So, there's different parts of coaching, right? One, is kind of knowing the techniques, so that you've got the best practices by which to try to practice. >> [Steven] Yep. >> And then there's actually coaching to those techniques, so people practice, right? Practice doesn't make perfect. It's perfect practice that makes perfect. >> [Steven] You stole our line, which we stole from someone else. >> So, what are you doing? How do you observe the athlete? How do you communicate with the athlete? How do you make course corrections to the athlete to move it from simply tracking to coaching? >> [Steven] I mean, it starts with, you have to see everything and miss nothing. So, you need to have eyes on the athlete, and there's really two ways we think you can do that. One is, you're using cameras and computer vision. I think most of us are familiar with technologies like Microsoft Connect, where an external camera can allow you to see the skeleton and the biomechanics of the athlete. And that's a big thing for us. We talk about the from to being from just measuring biometrics: how's your heart rate, how much exertion are you making, how much power are you laying down. We need to move from biometrics to biomechanics, and that means looking at technique, and posture, and movement, and timing. So, we're all familiar with cameras, but we think the more important innovation is the emergence of smart clothing, or smart apparel, and the ability to take sensors that would have been discrete, hard components, and infuse those sensors into smart apparel. We've actually created a reference design for a motion capture sensor, and a network of those sensors infused in your apparel allows us to recover your skeleton, but as easily as pulling on a shirt or shorts. >> [Jeff] So you've actually come up with a reference design. So, obviously, begs a question: you're not working with any one particular apparel manufacturer. You really want to come up with a standard and publish the standard by which anyone could really define, capture, and record body movements, and to convert those movements from the clothing into a model. >> No, that's exactly it. We have no desire to be in the apparel industry. We have no desire to unseat Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour. We're actually licensing our technology royalty-free. We just want to accelerate the adoption of smart apparel. And I think the thing about smart apparel is, no one's going to walk into Niketown and say, "Where's the smart apparel department? "I don't want dumb apparel anymore." There needs to be a compelling reason to buy digitally enhanced apparel, and we think one of the most compelling reasons to buy that is so that we can be coached in the sport of our choice. >> [Jeff] So, then you're starting out with rowing, I believe, is your first sport, right? >> [Steven] That's correct, yeah. >> And so the other really important piece of it, is if people don't have smart apparel, or the smart apparel's not there yet, or maybe when they have smart apparel, there's a lot of opportunities to bring in other data sources beyond just that single set. >> [Steven] And that's absolutely key. When I think about biomechanics, that's what goes in, but there's also what comes out. Good form isn't just aesthetic. Good form is in any given sport. Good form and good technique is about organizing yourself so that you perform most efficiently and perform most effectively. Yeah, so you corrected a point in that we've chosen rowing as one of the sports. Rowing is all about technique. It's all about posture. It's all about form. If you've got two rowers who, essentially, have the same strength, the same cardiovascular capability, the one with the best technique will make the boat move faster. But for the sport of rowing, we also get a tremendous amount of telemetry coming off the rowing machine itself. A force curve weakened on every single pull of that handle. We can see how you're laying down that force, and we can read those force curves. We can look at them and tell things like, are you using your legs enough? Are you opening your back too late or too early? Are you dominant on your arms, where you shouldn't be? Is your technique breaking down at higher stroke rates, but is good at lower stroke rates? So it's a good place for us to start. We can take all of that knowledge and information and coach the athlete. And then when we get down to more marginal gains, we can start to look at their posture and form through that technology like smart apparel. >> There's the understanding what they're doing, and understanding the effort relative to best practices, but there's also, within their journey. Maybe today, they're working on cardio, and tomorrow, they're working on form. The next day, they're working on sprints. So the actual best practices in coaching a sport or particular activity, how are you addressing that? How are you bringing in that expertise beyond just the biometric information? >> [Steven] So yeah, we don't think technology is replacing coaches. We just think that coaches that use technology will replace coaches that don't. It's not an algorithm that's trying to coach you. We're taking the knowledge and the expertise of world-class coaches in the sport, that athletes want to follow, and we're taking that coaching, and essentially, think of it as putting it into a learning management system. And then for any given athlete, Just think of it the way a coach coaches. If you walked into a rowing club, I don't know if you've ever rowed before or not, but a coach will look at you, they'll sit you on a rowing machine or sit you on a boat, and just look at you and decide, what's the one next thing that I'm going to teach you that's going to make you better? And really, that's the art of coaching right there. It's looking for that next improvement, that next marginal gain. It's not just about being able to look at the athlete, but then decide where's the improvement that we want to coach the athlete? And then the whole sports psychology of, how do you coach his improvements? >> Because there's the whole hammer versus carrot. That's another thing. You need to learn how the individual athlete responds, what types of things do they respond better to? Do they like to get yelled? Do they like to be encouraged? Did they like it at the beginning? Did they like it at the end? So, do you guys incorporate some of these softer coaching techniques into the application? >> Our team have all coached sport at university-level typically. We care a lot and we think a lot about the role of the coach. The coach's job is to attach technique to the athlete's body. It's to take what's in your head and what you've seen done before, and give that to the athlete, so absolutely, we're thinking about how do you establish the correct coaching cues. How do you positively reinforce, not just negatively reinforce? Is that person a kinesthetic learner, where they need to feel how to do it correctly? Are they a more visual learner, where they respond better to metaphor? Now, one of the really interesting things with a digital coach is the more people we teach, the better we can get at teaching, because we can start to use some of the techniques of enlarged datasets, and looking at what's working and what's not working. In fact, it's the same technology we would use in marketing or advertising, to segment an audience, and target content. >> Right. >> [Steven] We can take that same technology and apply it how we think about coaching sports. >> So is your initial target to help active coaches that are looking for an edge? Or are you trying to go for the weakend warrior, if you will? Where's your initial market? >> For rowing, we've actually zeroed in on three athletes, where we have a point of view that Asensei can be of help. I'll tell you who the three are. First, is the high school athlete who wants to go to college and get recruited. So, we're selling to the parent as much as we're selling to the student. >> [Jeff] That's an easy one. Just show up and be tall. >> Well, show up, be tall, but also what's your 2k time? How fast can you row 2,000 meters? That's a pretty important benchmark. So for that high school athlete, that's a very specific audience where we're bringing very specific coaches. In fact, the coach that we're launching with to that market, his story is one of, high school to college to national team, and he just came back from the Olympics in Rio. The second athlete that we're looking at is the person who never wants to go on the water, but likes that indoor rowing machine, so it's that CrossFit athlete or it's an indoor rower. And again, we have a very specific coach who coaches indoor rowing. And then the third target customer is-- >> What's that person's motivation, just to get a better time? >> Interesting, in that community, there's a lot of competitiveness, so yeah, it's about I want to get good at this, I want to get better at this. Maybe enter local competitions, either inside your gym or your box. This weekend, in Boston, we have just had one of the largest indoor world, it was the World Indoor Rowing Championships, the C.R.A.S.H B's. There's these huge indoor rowing competitions, so that's a very competitive athlete. And then finally we have, what would be the master's rower or the person for whom rowing is. There's lots of people who don't identify themselves as a rower, but they'll get on a rowing machine two or three times a week, whether it's in their gym or whether it's at home. Your focus is strength, conditioning, working out, but staying injury-free, and just fun and fitness. I think Palaton validated the existence of that market, and we see a lot of people wanting to do that with a rowing machine, and not with a bike. >> I think most of these people will or will not have access to a primary coach, and this augments it, or does this become their primary coach based on where they are in their athletic life? >> [Steven] I think it's both, and certainly, and certainly, we're able to support both. I think when you're that high school rower that wants to make college, you're probably a member of either your school rowing crew or you're a member of a club, but you spend a tremendous amount of time on an erg, the indoor rowing machine, and your practice is unsupervised. Even though you know what you should be doing, there's nobody there in that moment watching you log those 10,000 meters. One of our advisors is, actually, a two-times Olympic world medalist from team Great Britain, Helen Glover. And Helen, I have a great quote from Helen, where she calculated for the Rio Olympics, in the final of the Rio Olympics, every stroke she took in the final, she'd taken 16,000 strokes in practice, which talks to the importance of the quality of that practice, and making sure it's supervised. >> The bigger take on the old 10,000 reps, right? 16,000 per stroke. >> Right? >> Kind of looking forward, right, what were some of the biggest challenges you had to overcome? And then, as you looked forward, right, since the beginning, were ubiquitous, and there's 3D goggles, and there'll be outside-in centers for that whole world. How do you see this world evolving in the immediate short-term for you guys to have success, and then, just down the road a year or two? >> That's a really good question. I think in the short-term, I think it's incumbent on us to just stay really focused in a single community, and get that product right for them. It's more about introducing people to the idea. This is a category creation exercise, so we need to go through that adoption curve of find the early adopters, find the early majority, and before we take that technology anywhere towards our mass market, we need to nail the experience for that early majority. And we think that it's largely going to be in the sport of rowing or with rowers. The cross participation studies in rowing are pretty strong for other sports. Typically, somewhere between 60-80% of rowers weight lift, bike, run, and take part in yoga, whether yoga for mobility and flexibility. There's immediately adjacent markets available to us where the rowers are already in those markets. We're going to stick there for awhile, and really just nail the experience down. >> And is it a big reach to go from tracking to coaching? I mean, these people are all super data focused, right? The beauty of rowing, as you mentioned, it's all about your 2k period. It's one single metric. And they're running, and they're biking, and they're doing all kinds of data-based things, but you're trying to get them to think really more on terms of the coaching versus just the tracking. Has that been hard for them to accept? Do you have any kind of feel for the adoption or the other thing, I would imagine, I spent all this money for these expensive clothing. Is this a killer app that I can now justify having? >> Right, right, right. >> Maybe fancier connected clothes, rather than just simply tracking my time? >> I mean, I think, talking about pricing in the first instance. What we're finding with consumers that we've been testing with, is if you can compare the price of a shirt to the price of shirt without sensors, it's really the wrong value proposition. The question we ask is, How much money are you spending on your CrossFit box membership or your Equinox gym membership? The cost of a personal trainer is easily upwards of $75-100 for an hour. Now, we can give you 24/7 access to that personal coaching. You'll pay the same in a year as you would pay in an hour for coaching. I think for price, it's someone who's already thinking about paying for personal coaching and personal training, that's really where the pricing market is. >> That's interesting, we see that time and time again. We did an interview with Knightscope, and they have security robots, and basically, it's the same thing. They're priced comparisons was the hourly rate for a human counterpart, or we can give it to you for a much less hourly rate. And now, you don't just get it for an hour, you get it for as long as you want to use it. Well, it's exciting times. You guys in the market in terms of when you're going G80? Have a feel for-- >> Any minute now. >> Any minute now? >> We have people using the product, giving us feedback. My phone's switched off. That's the quietest it's been for awhile. But we have people using the product right now, giving us feedback on the product. We're really excited. One in three people, when we ask, the metric that matters for us is net promoter score. How likely would someone recommend asensei to someone else? One in three athletes are giving us a 10 out of 10, so we feel really good about the experience. Now, we're just focused on making sure we have enough content in place from our coaches. General availability is anytime soon. >> [Jeff] Good. Very exciting. >> Yeah, we're excited. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes of your day, and I actually know some rowers, so we'll have to look into the application. >> Right, introduce us. Good stuff. >> He's Steven Webster, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE Conversation in our Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(mumbling) >> Voiceover: Covering Sapphire now. Headline sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Console Inc., the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> We are here live at SAP Sapphire. This is SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal to noise and want to do a shoutout to our sponsors SAP HANA Cloud and Console Inc. at console cloud, connecting the clouds together. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. Our next guest is Reggie Jackson, winner, athlete, tech athlete now, entrepreneur, overall great guy, and a cube alumni. Four years ago, we interviewed him here at SAP Sapphire. Welcome back, Reggie, to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. John, thank you very much. It's good to be here with old friends. We were havin' a little conversation about baseball there, but good to see you guys. Yeah, and obviously, the baseball, we were just talkin' about the whole fisticuffs and the glee of the grand slam walk-off. >> Reggie: Good stuff, good stuff. >> It's a good pivot point in some of the things that you're workin' on in here, the conversations in the tech world, which is social media and that notion of celebrating in a world of Instagram and Snapchat and social media. Certainly, ya flip the bat, the views go up. But then, baseball has these (laughing) unwritten rules, right. So does corporations. And so we're now a new era. Is baseball safe now with these unwritten rules and should they maintain those, certain things that have kept the game in balance? But yet with social media, the players are their own brand. And you certainly were a brand, even back in your day, which is a pioneer. What's your thoughts on that? >> You know John, Peter, I don't like the idea of someone going out of their way to promote their brand. Some of the great brands to me in history, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, the great Jim Brown, Joe Montana, Michael Jordan. And Michael Jordan would be a prominent example where technology and TV enhanced who he was. And he had someone behind him to enhance his brand, Nike, Phil Knight, who was a real pioneer. I'm not so in favor, I'm not in favor at all of someone manufacturing themselves as a brand. And I hear players talk about their brand and about trying to create something. If you're great, if you deserve it, I don't think Stephen Curry works on his brand. I think he works on bein' a great player. I think he works on bein' a great teammate. I think he does his best to maximize his skill set. And he's nothing but a gentleman along the way. He'll celebrate with joy once in awhile, with the Curry moves, which we've come to recognize. But for guys that talk about the manufacturing of their brand, there's something about it that's manufactured. It's not real, it's false. And I don't like it. I think it's okay, the Snapchats and the Google+ and all of the stuff, Twitter and Facebook and all that stuff, all of the things that go along with trying to create some hubbub, etc. I'm okay with that. >> So you're saying if it's not deserved. People are overplaying their hand before earning it. >> A lot of it, John, a lot of it. Joe Montana didn't work on his brand, he was great. Jim Brown didn't work on his brand, he was great. I don't want to use Jimmy Brown. I want to use Montana because even young people today will know Joe Montana. Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, they're not about their brand. They're about being classy, being great, being part of a team, being a leader, presenting themselves as something that's respected in the NFL, across the United States. Go ahead, Pete. >> So even though it's cheaper to get your name out there, you still believe in let your performance speak for itself. >> You got to be real about it. Ya got to be who you are. If you're not a great player, get out of the way. Get out of the space. So manufacturing your brand. I played with the Yankees. I was in the era of Cosell and Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner. We won championships with the team. I was part of something that helped me become recognized. And so in our era, the Sandy Koufax's became brands because they were associated with greatness around them. They stood out and so they earned that tremendous brand. >> We were just watching Graig Nettles gettin' taken out by George Brett in that big game and also the pine tar, we kind of gettin' some good laughs at it. You look at the balance of personalities. Certainly, Brett and Nettles and your team and you had a great personality, winning championships. Worked together as a team. And so I want to ask you that question about the balance, about the in baseball, certainly, the unwritten rules are a legacy and that has worked. And now in a era of personalities, in some cases, people self-promoting themselves, people are questioning that. Your thoughts on that because that applies to business too 'cause tech athletes or business athletes have a team, there are some unwritten rules. Thoughts on this baseball debate about unwritten rules. >> Pete and John, I'll try to correlate it between some tech giants that have a brand. I just left a guy with a brand, Bill McDermott, that runs SAP. Even Hasso, the boss. The face now of SAP is Bill McDermott. Dapper, slender, stylish, bright. It comes across well. So maintaining that brand, to me, relates to SAP, bills a great image for it. He's stylish, he's smooth, he's smart. He's about people. He presents himself with care. So that is a brand. I don't think it's manufactured. That's who he is in real life. If you take a look, and I'll go back to Steph Curry because that name resonates and everyone recognize it. That style of cool, that style of control, that style of team and care. And he presents to us all that he cares about us, the fan, his team, his family. And so those are things and I think you can go from the tech world. Bill Gates had a brand. Brilliant, somewhat reclusive, concerned about the world, concerned about the country, concerned about his company. And so that resonated it Microsoft because that's who he really was. Some of the people today don't really recognize that Jobs was thrown out of Apple. He was pushed out. All of his brilliance, which was marketing. And the gentleman there that really was the mind for the company, Steve Wozniak, happens to be here at SAP Sapphire. Today, I think he speaks. But those brands were real, not manufactured. And so, in today's world, I think you can manufacture a brand. And then all of a sudden, it'll crumble. It'll go away in the future. But the great brands of whether it's Jackie Robinson or whether it's Jack Welch or whether it's George Steinbrenner and the Yankee brand, those brands were real. They were not manufactured. Those guys were eccentric. They were brilliant. Go ahead. >> And also, they work hard. And I want to point out a comment you made yesterday here at the event. You were asked a question up on stage about that moment when you hit the home runs. I think we talked about it last time. I don't necessarily want to talk about the home runs. But you made a comment I'd like you to expand on and share with the audience. 'Cause you said, "I worked hard," but that day during warm-ups, you had batting practice. You made a comment that you were in the zone. So working hard and being great as it leads up to that. But also, in the moment, 'cause that's a theme these days, in the moment, being ready and prepared. Share your thoughts on what you meant by you had a great batting practice and you just felt it. >> I'm going to take it to what you say is in the moment. I remember when I was talkin' about it yesterday, which you reference to, when I had such a fantastic batting practice. I walked by a coupla sports writers in that era. Really well-known guys, Dave Anderson, New York Times. I can't think of his name right now, but it'll come to me, of the Daily News. It was like hey man. >> John: You were rockin' it out there. >> I kind of hope I didn't leave it out here. (laughing) That was in the moment and at the same time, >> I mean, you were crushing it. >> Yes, when the game started, I got back in that moment. I got back in what was live, what was now, what was going on. Certainly, I think our world now with the instant gratification of sending out a message or tweeting to someone or whatever certainly in the moment is about what our youth is and who we are today as a country, as a universe. >> But you didn't make that up. You worked hard, but you pulled it together in the moment. >> A comment with that is I went and did something with ESPN earlier this year in San Francisco, in Oakland with Stephen Curry. They said, "Reggie, we want ya to come up "and watch his practice, his pre-game." And it was very similar to your batting practice, where people come out and watch, etc. And so I was looking forward to it and I like to go to the games about an hour and a half or two hours early so I can see warm-up and see some of the guys and say hello. And I got a chance to watch Steph Curry. I know his dad. And happened to be the first time I went this year, the dad, Carolina, the Panthers were in town. Not the Panthers. Come on, help me, help me, help me. >> Peter: The Wizards? >> No, no, no, the Carolina. >> Peter: Carolina Panthers. >> The Carolina Hornets. >> John: Hornets. >> Were there and I know his dad, Dell Curry. And we talked a little bit. But then, Steph came out and I watched him. And I watched the dribbling exhibition. I watched the going between the legs and behind the back and the fancy passing, etc. And I watched the shots, the high-arcing threes, the normal trajectory threes, the high shots off the backboard and things like that that he did. The left-handed shots, the right-handed shots. And the guy asked me what I thought of the show. And I said, "Well, it's a cool show, "but I'm going to see all that tonight." And me watching him, the behind the backs, the between the legs, the passes, the high-arching shots from three, the high-arching touches off the glass. He does all that. >> John: He brought it into the game. >> Yeah, I said so, (laughing) >> Peter: That is his game. >> It's not a show, but that's his game. >> So Reggie, you did an interesting promotion, Reggie's Garage, where you bought a virtual reality camera and you created a really nice show of your garage demonstrating your love >> Reggie: 360. >> Peter: of cars, 360. Talk a little bit about that. And then if ya get a second, imagine what baseball's going to be like as that technology becomes available and how some of the conversation that we're having about authenticity, the fan coming into the game. >> An experience. >> Is going to change baseball. Start with the garage and how that went and then how ya think that's going to translate into baseball, if you've had any thoughts on that. >> In the technology that was used, certainly I enjoyed it. While I was doing it, I noticed where the cameras were in different spots. There was one on the floor of my car. There was one in the backseat. And then there was someone following us as closely as they could. But you could see everything. You'd see the shift and you could see my feet. It was like you were with me. When we did the 360 inside the garage as well, you could listen to me and then you could use your finger and spin around. And they had these special headset and special glasses that you could look around, just with your headset on, and see all around the room. Behind you, in front of you. And so it's an experience that I think is going to become part of who we are as a nation, who we are as a people watching television, that you're going to really feel like you're in the room. I think it's going to be exciting. And I think it's going to be fun. And when you're talking about products, when you're talking about my website, if you will, with the focus on automotive parts, where a guy can go in and shop and get any part he wants for a vehicle, you really can build a complete car from my website. You can buy a frame. You can buy body parts. You can buy a horn, an engine, brakes, tires, grills, turn signals, the whole nine yards. And it gives you an experience through 360 video of really walking into the store, walking into the building, walking into the stadium and looking around to see the hot dog stand, see the dugout, see the pitcher and the hitter, to see the parts in the garage, to see the cars and take a look and view at everything that's there. >> How are players going to react to havin' the fans virtually right there with them? >> I don't think it bothers you. I don't think ya notice. I don't think they'll show anything that will affect the player that he's going to be concerned about. I think you'd have to be sensitive if they start microphoning, start micing up and then the looseness of the language would impact. So I don't think they'll go that far. But I do think the more that you can see, the more attractive the game becomes, the more interested that you can get people. When I broadcast baseball for ABC back in the 80's, I always tried to broadcast for the lady of the house, while she worked, while she cooked the meal, she didn't have time to think about a backup slider or the fastball that painted the outside corner, the changeup, etc., the sinker. I tried to broadcast for her interpretation so I could attract another fan to the game. So I think that the technology and the viewing that you'll see from behind home plate, from under the player's feet while he's running down the bases and the slides and things of that nature, Pete, I think are going to be exciting for the fan and it'll attract more fans, attract a new type of television it's going to produce, etc. So it's exciting. >> Reggie, thanks for comin' on The Cube again. Appreciate your time. I ask ya final two questions that I want to get your thoughts on. One is obviously the cars. Reggie's Garage is goin' great. And you shared with us last time on The Cube, it's on YouTube, about you when you grew up and decide football and baseball. But when you were growin' up, what was your favorite car? What was that car that you wanted that was out of reach? That car that was your hot rod? And then the second question is, we'll get to the second question. Answer that one first. What was you dream car at the time? How did ya get >> Reggie: The dream car >> John: hooked on this? >> at the time. I had a '55 Chevrolet that I bought from a buddy by the name of Ronny Fog. I don't even know if he's still around anymore. Out of Pennsylvania. I had $300 and my dad gave me $200. I'd saved up mine from workin' for my dad. But my dream car was I went to school with a guy named Wayne Gethman and another guy named Irwin Croyes. I don't know Wayne Gethman anymore. But from the age of 16, I reengaged with Irwin Croyes, who happens to be a business investing type guy in the city of Philadelphia, right where we're still from. He's a car collector. And he drove a '62 Corvette and so did Wayne Gethman. And I always wanted one. And I now happen to have four. (laughing) >> He who get the most toys wins. Final question, 'cause you're such a legend and you're awesome and you're doin' so much work. And you're very active, engaged, appreciate that. Advice to young athletes coming up, whether they're also in business or a tech athlete or a business athlete. But the sports athletes today got travel ball, you got all this stuff goin' on. The idols like Stephen Curry are lookin' great. Great role models now emerging. What advice do you give them? >> John's got a freshman in high school. I got a junior in high school. What would ya say to 'em? >> You know, I'll tell ya. When you're young, the people you want to listen to are Mom and Dad. No one, and I'll say this to any child from the age of eight or nine years old, five, six years old to 17, 18, 19, 20, all the way up, now my daughter's 25. All the way up to the end of your parents' days. No one cares for you more than your mother or your father. Any parent, whether it's a job or whether their success in life, number one in that man or woman, mom or dad, number one in their life is their children. And so for kids, I say if there's any person you're going to listen to for advice in any path you want to walk down, it's the one that your parents talk to you about or how they show you. That is what I would leave as being most important. For kids, anything, idea that you have that you believe you can do, whether it's the athlete like Stephen Curry that has created shots and done things on the basketball court that he envisioned, that he thought about. Or whether it's the next Steve Jobs who happens to be Mark Zuckerman, who I don't know Mark is 30 years old yet. >> John: He just turned 30. >> It's an idea. He's born around the same time. He's born this week. His birthday is in this week. My birthday's tomorrow. >> John: Happy birthday. >> But thank you. Anything that you can think of in today's world of technology. With places like Silicon Valley where they take dreams and create foundations for them. I had a dream about a website that would sell automotive parts and you could go to my site and buy anything for your car. We've got about 75,000 items now. We'll get to 180,000 in a few months. We'll get to a half a million as soon as my technology is ready for it. But we have things to pay attention to and look into and issues to make sure that we iron out that aren't there for our consumer, for ease of navigation, ease of consumption and purchasing. Any idea that you have, take time to dream. It's much more so than taking time to dream when I was a young kid. Because my father would say, "Stop daydreamin' "and wastin' time." >> John: Get to work. >> Reggie: In today's world, for our children, I say take time to create a vision or to create something new. And go to someone that's in the tech world and they'll figure out a way of helping you manifest it into something that's a reality. >> Listen to your parents, kids. And folks out there, dream, build the foundation, go for it. Reggie Jackson, congratulations for being a Cube alumni again, multi-return. >> Peter: Thank you very much. >> John: Appreciate it. Congratulate on all your continued success. You're a legend. Great to have you on. And thanks so much for comin' on The Cube. >> Peter: And happy 70th birthday. >> John, Pete, always a pleasure. >> John: Happy birthday. >> Thank you very much. >> Have some cake for Reggie. It's The Cube, live here in Orlando. Bringin' all the action here on The Cube. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris with Reggie Jackson. We'll be right back. (electronic music)