>> Voiceover: Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube. Covering QuickBooks Connect 2016, sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> Welcome back here on the Cube as we continue our coverage here at Quickbooks Connect 2016 live from San Jose at the Convention Center. 5,000 attendees, the third year of this event, more than ever, and certainly that explosive growth is personified in what's happening here. On this floor and the key note station, and of course at home, if you're a small business owner you know exactly what we're talking about. Along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls and we're joined now by probably one of the most popular authors, most widely read authors in America today. Malcolm Gladwell, five times New York Times Bestseller Author. Congratulations on that. And the Revisionist History Podcast, which we love. I love the Wilt Chamberlain podcast, Big Man Can't Shoot. Thanks for joining us. Great to have you. >> Delighted to be here. >> So, first off, tell us about, and the whole spirit of this show is about the entrepreneurial capabilities of so many people in the workplace today. What's your thought about entrepreneurism if you will, and what does it take to be a good outside the box thinker? Like so many of these folks are. >> Well there ... The explosion ... Here we are in the middle of Silicon Valley and what this part of the country has done to change the culture of the entire world's economy in the last 20 years, 25 years is nothing short of incredible. Entrepreneurship has gone from something that people thought of as the province of wackos and weirdos and strange people to a kind of thing that kids aspire to do and be. That's an amazing transformation. And I think when we ... What's happened over the course of that transformation is we've discovered that the definition of what it takes to be good is a lot broader than we thought. That many different kinds of people using many different kinds of strategies can be effective at starting businesses and achieving. I think that's been the great take home lesson of this entrepreneurial explosion of the last generation. >> I think probably in all of your works, there are pieces of it that you could extract and apply to this world, but what really struck me I think about David and Goliath, about advantages, disadvantages and making the most of your strengths basically, how do you see that translating or how would you want to communicate that to somebody, a small business owner, who thinks "Man, I'm up against the wall"? "How am I going to cut through the clutter?" "How am I going to get there?" All this sweat equity. But yet, there are advantages that they have. >> Yeah. Yeah, because this goes to this issue of learning strategies that there's a kind of learning called compensation learning, where you are learning out of weakness, not out of strength. You're learning from your failures and that kind of learning is a lot harder to do, but it's a lot more powerful. So the task of the small business owner, who is facing a whole series of disadvantages and weaknesses relative to much larger competitors, there's no question, it's a harder way to go. But, if you can pull it off, you'll end up in a much stronger position. If you can be one of those people who can do compensation learning, and in that book I talk, for example, about how many entrepreneurs are dyslexic, and that's a beautiful example of that. Some portion of people who suffer from quite a serious learning disorder, not all of them, some portion of them manage to turn that around into an advantage. To take something, to take a basic inability to read, and turn that into developing skills or delegation and leadership and problem solving and developing an incredible resilience, the ability to cope with failure. They turn a weakness into a strength and they end up being far more powerful than they would be as a result. And when I interviewed all these successful, dyslexic entrepreneurs for that book, what was amazing was that all of them said, "I did not succeed despite my disability, I succeeded because of it." And that's the crux of it. And so I think there is a silver lining to many of the clouds that small business owners face. >> It's a really powerful statement because so often, people are using drugs and medication and other things to kind of normalize people that are maybe not in the mean, that are on the fringe. But in fact, it's their ability to put a different lens, and see things differently that opens up an opportunity that the regular person just trucking down the road didn't see right in front of them. >> That's what I meant when I said earlier, talking about how our kind of definition of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur is expanding. I think we're beginning to understand that lots of traits that we once thought of as just problematic have unexpected benefits. Like I remember once reading someone who was putting out that basically, most of the great research scientists in the world have OCD. And you kind of have to have OCD if you want to be ... 'Cause what are you doing? You're spending hours and hours in the lab doing the same incredibly precise experiment over and over and over again, and measuring your results to the slightest. That's OCD behavior that has found a beautiful home. Right? Has found a world where you need to be that way, right? And I read that as like, "That's lovely." These are people who we drugged up and pushed off to the fringes two generations ago, and now we've found a home for them in labs where they're doing incredibly productive and satisfying work. >> Yeah, I think you profiled in one of the podcasts, a cancer researcher who you said nobody really likes the guy, he's kind of an ordinary guy, but he was just so laser focused on the very specific problem that he was trying to solve. He didn't really care. That's what he was all about. >> Yeah, no, this has been a lovely development in our understanding of human capacity. >> So where do the ideas come from? I'm one of the many fans and I've read, and every time I read one of your books, it never ceases to amaze me how much you make me think. Which is, I think, why we're all so attracted to it. Because it seems so obvious, right? After you present this beautiful, elegant case, like "I never thought of that." Where do those ideas come from? What motivates you to say "I'm going to write blank. I'm going to do tipping point." >> I wish I had a system, 'cause right now I'm planning the next season of my podcast, so I need 10 more ideas for that, and I'm starting to write a new book so I need 80,000 words for that. And I'm wondering, I wish I had a big bucket full of ideas. (laughter) So I'm running around with my head cut off talking to people, but I spent the summer ... I probably read 40 books this summer to do with ... Apart from, I'm not talking about novels and fillers, and serious books that I'm trying to get. And I've been going around talking to people, just talking to interesting people trying to work out what I'm interested in. And trying to just uncover interesting things that will prompt me to go in cool new directions. There is a kind of, you have to let your mind ... It's like, the farmer lets his field go fallow for a while. You've got to have a fallow period where you just let everything regenerate and then you plant the crop again. >> But somehow reading 40 books doesn't sound like, to me, you're letting your mind go fallow. >> Well I didn't have a ... I was literally just lying around reading books. It seemed pretty fallow to me. >> What was your favorite one out of that read? Or the most enlightening one out of that read? >> I got on these weird side tracks this summer. I became obsessed with Churchill's Best Friend. Churchill had a best friend who betrays him. And it's this incredibly moving story. And I don't know how it fits in what I want to do, but I want to try and make it fit, 'cause it's such a weird and troubling story about this, I mean a truly transcendent figure in history who has a best friend who stabs him in the back with consequences for the world. Anyway, so I read like seven bizarre, weird, obscure books about this guy. And I was like "There's something there I think." >> He's out there, yeah. >> Alright, so we'll pick something that was a little more topical. Last night, they had a drink making robot machine over in the corner making drinks. And it just brings up, as we get into more automation, more connected systems. We had the huge knockout of the web last week from the East coast. As you look at the future, there's the happy future, where the machines do all the hard work and we get to sit around and read books like you did, which is fantastic. And then there's the darker potential future, where the machines take everyone's jobs. What are people going to do? And if it can make drinks and it can diagnose disease and read every manual that came out. How do people fit? And then there's the middle ground, right? The best chess player is the best chess player and a machine, not either or. So I'm just curious to get your thoughts as we look to the next big wave of AI and machine learning and automation, how you see that shaking out. >> I think it's important not to overstate how much of our lives we will be willing to let machines take over. So it's been very interesting for me as a writer, to observe, for example, what happened with eBooks over the last 10 years. So eBooks come along and everyone says, "The printed book is over. It's going to all going to be on ... Why would you go and lug around a big, heavy book when you can get for a fraction of the cost something that'll be ..." And so there were all these gloom and doom, and expectations, and what happens? Well, it turns out that eBooks are still a fairly sizeable portion of the market place. But it turns out that most people actually want to read a book, a physical object, that that's more pleasurable somehow, that the interaction with this thing, this pages and paper, is pleasing. It's part of the experience. And I think that's a useful ... No, that's not a robot and that's not AI, but it's an important reminder that the interactions and the activities that make up our lives are not just functional activities. They are opportunities for enjoyment and engagement, and part of the reason you go to a restaurant is not just to eat the food, but to engage with the people in the restaurant. Part of the pleasure is the person who brings you the wine bottle and gives you a little spiel. Now, I can replace that person with a robot, but the question is do you want to? Now, you can do it. And I can imagine a future where the robot brings you the best wine in the world and does some algorithm and gives you the finest wine. But I don't know, if I'm having a nice night out and I'm paying 60 dollars a plate for my dinner, I kind of want the human interaction. I mean, it's part of the pleasure. Same thing with self-driving cars. It baffles me as a kind of car guy how everyone assumes that "Oh, well, by 2020, it'll all be self-driving cars." Wait a minute, what if I enjoy driving a car? We've forgotten this. It's actually quite a pleasant thing to go and to make decisions unconsciously and consciously and drive down the road. And I like a manual transmission, I like the feel of driving a car. I don't want to give that up. Why should I have to give that up? So it's like, we can't get ahead of ourselves. You mentioned the chess thing, which is a great example of this. Can you make a machine that will beat a person at chess? Yes, you can. But it's not chess. Chess is a gameplay between two people. That's why it's interesting. If it's played between two machines no one will watch it! So it's this absurd thing. I can also make a machine that can run faster than Usain Bolt. It's called a car. Do I want to watch a race between a car and Usain Bolt? No. Why? Because what's pleasurable is watching human beings race. >> But Jeff hit on something, and then you touched on it with the car, and I think about GPS. And how it wasn't that long ago, and I kind of sound like my grandfather now or my father, that we just drove around, right? And if you came to the traffic, "Oh God, I've hit traffic." But now we use applications that take us, and they're using their intelligence. Is it possible, can you see with this generation of kids coming up now, that artificial intelligence kind of makes our personal thinking obsolete? And we don't process like we do, we don't evaluate, we don't analyze, and so we're raising a whole different kind of human, because of the interaction with technology or what we can sign to technology, because we give up on it. >> Well it'd be different. I think that, so let's stick with cars for a moment. I think now we have a world where a whole class of people drive their car to work in the morning. And when they're driving their car, the number of things they can do with their imagination and mind is limited. They can listen to music or the news or a podcast, or they can just sit there, but they can't ... They can maybe talk on a phone even though they shouldn't, but they can't do work and they can't lie in the back and take a nap, and they can't daydream, and they can't have a meaningful interaction with more than one person. What we're going to move to is a world where some people will give up whatever kind of pleasure or interaction that came from driving a car, and replace it with another kind of interaction. So driving a car becomes ... The time that you're in a car becomes a place where an infinite number of things can happen, as opposed to five things can happen. And I sort of think that's what the world looks like, is we get this incredibly complicated mix. Medicine becomes some mixture of the computer is going to do all the easy stuff, but half of medicine is about being reassured. It's about your personal fears. It's not about the diagnosis, or which drug you take. And for that stuff, I imagine that we're going to have much longer, deeper, more meaningful conversations with our doctors 15 years from now, when the computer has taken all the easy stuff off the table, or the AI, the robot. So in many ways, that world allows for much richer, personal interactions than the one we're in now. The doctor really will have ... My doctor has no time for me now. He's like "I got to move around." >> "Got to go." >> In ten years, it's possible my doctor will be able to sit down with me for half an hour or 45 minutes twice a year and really talk about what's going on with me and that's the promise of the future. I don't think we're going to have a situation where everything's done by the robot. >> Well this is one of those occasions where I truly wish we had tons of more time, but you have a busy schedule and so we're going to allow you to go on, but thank you so much ... >> Thank you. It was super fun. >> John: For sharing this time with us. We've thoroughly enjoyed it. >> Jeff: Look forward to the KeyNote later this afternoon as well. >> And we look forward to the next 80,000 words, so good luck with that too! >> Thank you. >> Malcolm Gladwell, joining us here on the Cube. Back with more from San Jose right after this. (upbeat music)

>> Male Narrator: Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now here are your hosts Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> And welcome back inside the San Jose Convention Center here at the Cube, along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls, appreciate you joining us here as we continue our coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016, live here on SiliconANGLE TV. This is the flagship broadcast where we extract the signal from the noise. And Jeff, we're on the home stretch here through the second day, I could stay here for a few more days. Great guests, great lineups, great keynotes, and a lot of energy here on the floor I like. >> Lot of energy, I love these kinds of shows because it's really about helping people be successful and we're talking about real things, and again we keep coming back to products and solutions in technology but for most small businesses it's about cash. It's about cash flow. >> Being successful, Rania Succar, is now joining us, she's a QuickBooks Financing and Director there at QuickBooks, and we appreciate your time here, Rania. >> Great. >> So tell us about just the overarching mission, right, cause as Jeff said, helping people, giving them access to capital, badly needed, small businesses, it's a critical need, and what QuickBooks does on that, with that, on the financing platform. >> Well you guys have seen it here for the last few days. The QuickBooks team is absolutely focused on helping small businesses survive and thrive. Everyone here's trying to crack that, and you just said it, cash is one of the biggest pain points that small businesses face. Whenever we talk to small businesses, the first thing they tell us is the thing that keeps them up at night is cash flow, and we also know one of the biggest reasons that small businesses fail is they can't get access to cash flow, and to cash, and so the team a couple years back said we've got to crack this in order to help more small businesses survive past the five year mark and be able to put their dreams into action. So with that in mind, we took a look at financing and for small businesses, it's a fairly broken process, so we're working to reinvent small business lending. It's broken for a couple of reasons, one is, if you have ten businesses that go into a bank to apply for a loan, only three get approved, and it takes over 30 hours of work for a small business to do that application to a bank, so it's right for innovating and improving the experience for small businesses, so what we do, is we're hyper focused on making the experience better in three ways, first, we're trying to drive up the approval rate, and we do that with the incredible clarity and we do that with the incredible clarity with which we can understand the small business based on the data that we have. We understand the small business ecosystem better than anyone, and we understand the full picture of a small business' credit worthiness, and financial health better than everyone, anyone. We can give them access to-- we can help them get credit for all the future invoices that they have coming in, we understand the strength of their customer base, you put that together, we can drive approval rates up. The other thing we're focused on is the time it takes to apply. You need to put together tax returns, and interim financial reports if it's the middle of the year, and bank statements, it's very frustrating. We have most of that information in the Intuit space, and our vision is rather than even applying it's just available for you in QuickBooks when you need it, and the third thing, so approval rates, the time it takes, the third thing we're very focused on is the guidance. Small businesses need advice, most of them didn't get into running their own small business because they knew anything about finances, they had a dream and they wanted to put it into place, and so we're very focused on taking the insights we have about a small business to help them get lending that's right for them with confidence that they're getting the right financing for their business. So we can help them predict when they're going to need financing, and we can connect them to an accountant because we know over a million of our small businesses are connected to accountants. So that's what we do, and this week as you heard, we just announced we crossed the half a billion dollar mark in financing in small businesses. >> Now, say that again. >> Half a billion dollars. >> Half a billion dollars of financing. >> Congratulations. >> We're incredibly proud, we're incredibly proud. >> Let me ask you a couple details, so my kids are going, they're applying for college right now, so the CommonApp-- >> So, Jeff will need somewhere shy of half a million of that money. (Rania laughs) >> Do you have like a CommonApp inside QuickBooks which is a defined kind of definition that then gets shared with the lenders that want to participate in the market, or do you have like a defined QuickBooks FICO score, if you will, based on these other parameters that you have that then get shared with the lenders, how do you kind of, you've got all this data, it's my data, but I'm allowing you to use in such a way to help me get this loan in this market place. How does the actual mechanics work. >> I love that, we're a platform, almost like an Amazon in a sense, where you go to Amazon, you have one thing that you want to get and you get access to multiple different providers, so we're a platform. Right now, the way that it works, there is a CommonApp, but the amazing thing is you don't have to fill it out because we have all the information inside QuickBooks so we pre-fill it for you and ask you just for a couple of things but we do all the work and then we figure out which of our lending partners based on what you need, we've got about a dozen, are best suited for your needs, and then we send the information to the lenders with your permission and then you get all your offers right there, and the really neat thing about what we do is we compare the offers apples to apples, this is pretty incredible, we're super focused on transparency, this is a big part of our value proposition, we always disclose the APR of the loan, we always show the loan cost apples to apples so that you know exactly what you're getting, we show you things like what are the fees, what are the pre-payment penalties, so it's super clear, super transparent, and you know what you're getting. >> It's like the comparison shopping table. >> Exactly. >> You lay it all out and I can make my decisions. >> Exactly. >> And then how long does it usually take on a relatively smooth process given the fact you're already pre-populating the data, it goes out, what does it usually take? >> A lot of our lenders fund within the same day. >> Jeff: Within the same day? >> So you literally with a lot of our lenders, if everything goes right, you can apply within minutes and get funding in your bank account the same business day. >> The money goes through the same system as well. (Jeff chuckles) >> There are lenders, and we have a portfolio of offerings, so we'll work with, we have an SBA lender, we've got work in capital lenders, if you're going through the SBA process it's a lot faster through our process than it would be if you applied through a traditional bank, but it still could take a couple of months in that case, so we make that very clear, when you choose the offering that you want, if you're in need for financing right away, it can happen very quickly, if you're willing to wait a couple more months, in the worst case, in the case of an SBA loan, on average, it's less than a week. >> Well it seems like you have so many pieces in place to make it much more convenient and much more reliable and I guess much more predictable for a small business, what about approval rates then, what, you said three out of ten? >> That's the current. >> On average, is that the current, is that your average? >> Ours is better than that, it's not quite there, you know, we have a really high aspiration on that, where we'd like to be able to get, you know, we'd like to get it closer to 60 or 70 percent over time, the approval rate, so we're still moving in that direction, we've got a great team, we've got tons of innovation and R&D happening right now back in Mountain View, we've got a ton of data scientists that are combing through this data and improving the approval rates all the time, so that's an area where we're innovating and really pushing for our small businesses. >> And so, nice announcement this week, well better than nice, great announcement this week, but you're always looking, as you said, for the next best thing. >> Rania: Yep. >> And so what have you heard from your client base that says okay, we've addressed this, now this is where we need to pivot, this is where we need to go, like what's the next big hurdle or next big challenge that you think you need to handle? >> It's innovating on those three areas I told you, and on each of those three we've made quite a lot of work and quite a lot of headway in the last few years, but there's so much more room, and so like I've said we have this team of phenomenal data scientists working to find those areas of advantage for small businesses where we can help them get approved more often. We've got the team that's trying to really make it to a point where you're in QuickBooks and you can see your financing offer before you even apply. We want to get rid of the application altogether and just service the best offer for you, and then all the prediction for when you're going to need financing and that cash flow prediction, looping in the accountant so the accountant can immediately see all the options you were given and they can talk through them with you. >> And your clients can find out right away, the customers, if they did not get approved. >> Right. >> Where's the trouble area, where did the red light come on? >> That's right. >> Because of the figures you're able to consult with them and help them maybe shore up their bottom line? >> We don't do enough of that today, it's absolutely in our road map, so that's a huge opportunity because we have a relationship with small businesses, it's not like a transaction where you go to a website and you apply for a loan, we're in it for the long term to help small businesses grow and so you can imagine, and this is where we're headed, when you start, you know, you get your first financing, it could be a credit card, and then a year or two later we see that you're financials have improved and we consult you on the next offering and all the way you get better terms because you've been with us for a while and we can help make sure you're getting better financing deals over time. >> It's a really interesting situation, because, you know, hopefully over time, really it becomes, we always talk about kind of looking back, and then predictive and then prescriptive, so in theory, as you're moving down your path, as you're growing your business, it should actually flag you, right, hey, by the way you've got a big event, seasonalities coming up, oh we just noticed you just locked in a big purchase order, somebody's late to pay et cetera, it might be a good time to get actually ahead of the curve before you even know that this event is coming to go ahead and make even up to in making the offer. >> Absolutely, you know, you're getting ready to, you know, for the holidays and have you thought about making sure you've got enough financing to buy as much inventory as you want this year so you can take advantage of the seasonal trends we're seeing. Or we're seeing a lot of retailers, you know, really heavying up on inventory, have you thought about doing that as apart of your strategy, it looks like it could be a good year, so there's so much opportunity there, we can pair every small business owner with a line of credit so that they can manage payroll at any given time and never have to worry about the cash flow ups and downs that come. >> Right, and then I would imagine too, within like those different offers, not only apples to apples across the same type of loan, but maybe you should consider, you know, a factoring on your receivables, versus a capital loan that's capitalized against some equipment or something, cause there's also options within the types of financing that you may want to do. >> So on that we've done quite bit of work. We have lenders in our portfolio that do invoice financing. We've got lenders in our portfolio, Amex working capital terms, that do vendor bill payment through, you know, paying all of your bills that are coming up, we've got as I said SBA loans that will help with long term expansion, we've got that, and we're just continuing to innovate on that too. >> And from the lender point of you, you said you have about a dozen, you're bringing in more, you know, for the opportunity, cause a lot of them probably already have existing relationships with many of these clients, how do they see kind of the opportunity to interface for those clients in this different way through QuickBooks as an intermediary? >> Oh, they love it, because it's very hard for these lenders to go out and acquire new customers, often times they don't have a relationship with these existing customers and they have to go out and do the hard work to acquire customers whereas they're in the QuickBooks ecosystem and, you know, customers really love the opportunity to work with these lenders because we can provide the right advice to them paired with the loan offering, so it works out very well. >> It should be cheaper for them to actually provide those too, cause again you're taking a lot of the headache out. So, before we went live, you talked about some of the numbers, I just want to go through some of the numbers, so you shared the big number 500 million. >> Yep. >> But in terms of kind of an average loan size that you see, in a lifetime value of the loans to some of the customers, I was wondering if you could share some of those statistics. >> Sure, so we see two very different needs for financing from our customer base, there's the work and capital loans, and there's the expansion capital loans, and our customers typically are split between the need for both and at any given time, a business is actually looking for both. They need to smooth over the work and capital and then the expansion capital as well, but our average loan size is about 35,000 dollars today, and it ranges from as little as 2,500 dollars to just smooth a very small cashflow bump that you have, all the way up to 250-500 thousand dollars to do some of the all the way up to 250-500 thousand dollars to do some of the bigger expansions that small businesses are looking to do, and it's really wonderful to be able to help small businesses on both sides of the spectrum because if you're a small business owner, seasonality is really a major pain point. Often times, they'll have most of their business concentrated in the summer months, or potentially the summer months and the winter months, but not the spring and the fall, and so you need, you still have tons of bills, you have employees you need to cover in those off months, and having access to financing where you can get it fairly quickly cause you don't know when those bumps are going to hit, is incredibly valuable. On the flip side, the expansion side, every business owners dream is to expand and it's been amazing to be here over the past few days and hear these stories, you know, Alli Webb on stage yesterday, the founder of Drybar, talking about how she went from one location to 66 in 5 years, and so it's very hard to go into a bank branch in 5 years, and so it's very hard to go into a bank branch and convince them of your grand idea to expand. >> Jeff: Especially if they don't have hair. >> Especially if they don't have hair, she had a hard time... (everyone laughs) >> Her husband and her brother are business partners and they're both bald. >> Yeah, they're sitting with them, they don't have hair either, so. >> So for that reason, it's hard to convince people, and so it's wonderful to be able to help the expansion side of things too. >> Hopefully this has been, if nothing else, a great opportunity for Frick Inc. to find out about the small business college fund. >> Jeff: It's already gone through. >> That quick. >> John: Right, so we'll find out in less than 24 hours. The kids are going to Stanford. >> Alright. >> Or you're going to work at the community college for a bit. Rania we appreciate the time. >> Sure, it was great. >> Very much, thank you for being here. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations on the Amex announcement, and so many other great things you have in the pipeline now to make small business dreams come true. >> Wonderful, thank you very much, it was great to chat with you. >> Thank you very much Rania. Back with more here on the Cube from San Jose in just a moment. (hip tech music)

>>Welcome everyone to the cubes coverage of women in data science conference width 2022. Live from Stanford at the Arriaga alumni center. I'm Lisa Martin. My next guest is joined me. Sharon Hutchins is here the VP and chief of AI plus data operations at Intuit Sharon. Welcome. Thank you. >>Excited to >>Be here. This is your first woods, very first but into it in words. >>That's right. Intuitively it's goes way back. I'm relatively new to the organization, but Intuit has been a long time sponsor of woods, and we love this organization. We have a great alignment with our goals, which has a passion and commitment to advancing women in technology and data science. And we have the same goal added to it. We are at 30% women in technology with the goal of hitting 37% by 2024. And I know that widths has a great goal of 30 by 30, so that's awesome. >>30 by 30. And here we are around, I think it's still less than 25% of stem positions are filled by women. But obviously you're ahead of that on Intuit congratulate. >>I think we're ahead of that. And I think part of the reason why we're ahead of that is because we've got great programs at Intuit to support women. One of our key programs is tech women at Intuit. And so it's an internal initiative where we focus on attracting, retaining and advancing women. So it's a great way for women across technology to support one another. Sure. You've heard of the term there's power in the pack, and we believe that when we connect women, we can help elevate their voices, which elevates our business and elevates our products. >>It does. In fact, there's some stats I was looking at recently that just showed if there was even 30% females at the executive level, how much more profitable organizations can be in how much higher performance they can have. So the data is there that suggests this is a really smart business decision to be making. >>Absolutely absolutely the data is, is no lie. I see it firsthand in my own business. And in fact, at Intuit, we've got a broader initiative around diversity and inclusion. It's led from the top. We have set goals across the company and we hold ourselves accountable because we know that if there are more women at the table and more diversity at the table, all around, we make better business decisions. And if you look at our product suite, which is a terrible tax, QuickBooks, mint, credit, karma, and MailChimp, we've got a diverse customer base of a hundred thousand, sorry, a hundred million customers. And so it's a lot of diversity in our customer base and we want a lot of diversity in the company. >>Fantastic. That there's such a dedicated effort to it. You just came in here from the career panel. Talk to me about that. What were some of the key things that were discussed? Yeah, >>I have my notebook open here because there were so many great takeaways from actually just from the day in general. I'm just so at, at the types of issues that women are tackling across different industries, they're tackling bias. And we know that bias is corrected when women are at the table, but from a career perspective, some of the things that were mentioned from the panel is the fact that women need to own their own careers and they need to actively manage their careers. And there's only so much your manager can do and should do. You've got to be in the driver's seat, driving your own career. One of the things that we've done at Intuit as we've implemented sort of a self promoting process. So twice a year during our promotion period, either your manager can nominate you for a promotion or you can self promote. So it's all about you creating a portfolio of all of your great work. And of course, you know, managers are very supportive of the process and support, you know, women and, and all technologists in crafting their portfolios for a fair chance at promotion. And so we just believe that if you take bias out of a career progression, you can close that fair and equitable gap that we see sometimes across industries with compensation. >>This is, that would be great if we can ever get there. One of the things that's nice about woods, I think it was last year or the year before they opened it up to high school students. So it was so nice walking in this morning, seeing the young, fresh faces, the mature faces, but you bring up a great point of women need to be their own mini to create their own personal board of directors and really be able to, to be at the helm of their career. Do you, did you find that the audience is receptive to that? Do they have the confidence to be able to do that? >>Yeah, absolutely. And, and that was a point that was raised a couple of times this morning, there were women who talked about having great mentors, but it is more important to have a board of your personal board of directors than one mentor, because you've got to make sure that you sort of tackle all aspects of your career life. And you know, it's not all about the technology, a good portion of how you spend your time and where you spend your time is collaborating and negotiating and communicating across the company. And so that's very important. And so that was a key message that folks shared this morning. >>That's good. That's incredibly important. I wish we had more time. You've got to run to the airport. Sharon, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for sharing what Intuit and woods are doing together, your involvement and some of the great messages, inspiring messages from the career panel. >>Exactly. And for all of the young expiring high school students. Yes. We want them to check out into it. www.intuit.com, careers, >>Intuit.com. Is it slash careers slash careers slash careers perfectly. I'm an Intuit customer. I will say. Awesome. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Sharon. Bye-bye for Sharon Hutchins. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of women in data science, 2022.

(bright music) >> Hello everyone, welcome today's session for the "AWS Startup Showcase" presented by theCUBE, featuring ThoughtSpot for this track and data and analytics. I'm John Furrier, your host. Today, we're joined by Victor Chang, VP of ThoughtSpot Everywhere and Corporate Development for ThoughtSpot. Victor, thanks for coming on and thanks for presenting. Talking about this building interactive data apps through ThoughtSpot Everywhere. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure to be here. >> So digital transformation is reality. We're seeing it large-scale. More and more reports are being told fast. People are moving with modern application development and if you don't have AI, you don't have automation, you don't have the analytics, you're going to get slowed down by other forces and even inside companies. So data is driving everything, data is everywhere. What's the pitch to customers that you guys are doing as everyone realizes, "I got to go faster, I got to be more secure," (laughs) "And I don't want to get slowed down." What's the- >> Yeah, thank you John. No, it's true. I think with digital transformation, what we're seeing basically is everything is done in the cloud, everything gets done in applications, and everything has a lot of data. So basically what we're seeing is if you look at companies today, whether you are a SaaS emerging growth startup, or if you're a traditional company, the way you engage with your customers, first impression is usually through some kind of an application, right? And the application collects a lot of data from the users and the users have to engage with that. So for most of the companies out there, one of the key things that really have to do is find a way to make sense and get value for the users out of their data and create a delightful and engaging experience. And usually, that's pretty difficult these days. You know, if you are an application company, whether it doesn't really matter what you do, if you're hotel management, you're productivity application, analytics is not typically your strong suit, and where ThoughtSpot Everywhere comes in is instead of you having to build your own analytics and interactivity experience with a data, ThoughtSpot Everywhere helps deliver a really self-service interactive experience and transform your application into a data application. And with digital transformation these days, all applications have to engage, all applications have to delight, and all applications have to be self-service. And with analytics, ThoughtSpot Everywhere brings that for you to your customers and your users. >> So a lot of the mainstream enterprises and even businesses from SMB, small businesses that are in the cloud are scaling up, they're seeing the benefits. What's the problem that you guys are targeting? What's the use case? When does a potential customer or customer know they get that ThoughtSpot is needed to be called in and to work with? Is it that they want low code, no code? Is it more democratization? What's the problem statement and how do you guys turn that problem being solved into an opportunity and benefit? >> I think the key problem we're trying to solve is that most applications today, when they try to deliver analytics, really when they're delivering, is usually a static representation of some data, some answers, and some insights that are created by someone else. So usually the company would present, you know, if you think about it, if you go to your banking application, they usually show some pretty charts for you and then it sparks your curiosity about your credit card transactions or your banking transactions over the last month. Naturally, usually for me, I would then want to click in and ask the next question, which transactions fall into this category, what time, you know, change the categories a bit, usually you're stuck. So what happens with most applications? The challenge is because someone else is asking the questions and then the user is just consuming static insights, you wet their appetite and you don't satisfy it. So application users typically get stunted, they're not satisfied, and then leave application. Where ThoughtSpot comes in, ThoughtSpots through differentiation is our ability to create an interactive curiosity journey with the user. So ThoughtSpot in general, if you buy a standalone, that's the experience that we really stand by, now you can deliberate your application where the user, any user, business user, untrained, without the help of an analyst can ask their own questions. So if you see, going back to my example, if it's in your banking app, you see some kind of visualization around expense actions, you can dig in. What about last month? What about last week? Which transactions? Which merchant? You know, all those things you can continue your curiosity journey so that the business user and the app user ask their questions instead of an analyst who's sitting in the company behind a desk kind of asking your questions for you. >> And that's the outcome that everyone wants. I totally see that and everyone kind of acknowledges that, but I got to then ask you, okay, how do you make that happen? Because you've got the developers who have essentially make that happen and so, the cloud is essentially SaaS, right? So you got a SaaS kind of marketplace here. The apps can be deployed very quickly, but in order to do that, you kind of need self-service and you got to have good analytics, right? So self-service, you guys have that. Now on the analytics side, most people have to build their own or use an existing tool and tools become specialists, you know what I'm saying? So you're in this kind of like weird cycle of, "Okay, I got to deploy and spend resource to build my own, which could be long and tiresome." >> Yeah. >> "And or rely on other tools that could be good, but then I have too many tools but that creates specialism kind of silos." These seems to be trends. Do you agree with that? And if customers have this situation, you guys come in, can you help there? >> Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, if you think about the two options that you just laid out, that you could either roll your own, kind of build your own, and that's really hard. If you think about analyst industry, where 20, $30 billion industry with a lot of companies that specialize in building analytics so it's a really tough thing to do. So it doesn't really matter how big of a company you are, even if you're a Microsoft or an Amazon, it's really hard for them to actually build analytics internally. So for a company to try to do it on their own, hire the talent and also to come up with that interactive experience, most companies fail. So what ends up happening is you deliver the budget and the time to market ends up taking much longer, and then the experience is engaging for the users and they still end up leaving your app, having a bad impression. Now you can also buy something. They are our competitors who offer embedded analytics options as well, but the mainstream paradigm today with analytics is delivering. We talked about earlier static visualizations of insights that are created by someone else. So that certainly is an option. You know, where ThoughtSpot Everywhere really stands out above everything else is our technology is fundamentally built for search and interactive and cloud-scale data kind of an experience that the static visualizations today can't really deliver. So you could deliver a static dashboard purchase from one of our competitors, or if you really want to engage your users again, today is all about self-service, it's all about interactivity, and only ThoughtSpot's architecture can deliver that embedded in a data app for you. >> You know, one of the things I'm really impressed with you guys at ThoughtSpot is that you see data as I see strategic advantage for companies and people say that it's kind of a cliche but, or a punchline, and some sort of like business statement. But when you start getting into new kinds of workflows, that's the intellectual property. If you can enable people to essentially with very little low-code, no-code, or just roll their own analysis and insights from a platform, you're then creating intellectual property for the company. So this is kind of a new paradigm. And so a lot of CIO's that I talked to, or even CSOs on the security side of like, they kind of want this but maybe can't get there overnight. So if I'm a CIO, Victor, who do I, how do I point to on my team to engage with you guys? Like, okay, you sold me on it, I love the vision. This is definitely where we want to go. Who do I bring into the meeting? >> I think that in any application, in any company actually, there's usually product leaders and developers that create applications. So, you know, if you are a SaaS company, obviously your core product, your core product team would be the right team we want to talk to. If you're a traditional enterprise, you'd be surprised actually, how many traditional enterprises that been around for 50, 100 years, you might think of them selling a different product but actually, they have a lot of visual applications and product teams within their company as well. For example, you know, we have customers like a big tractor company. You can probably imagine who they might be. They actually have visual applications that they use ThoughtSpot to offer to the dealers so that they can look at their businesses with the tractors. We also have a big telecom company, for example, that you would think about telecom as a whole service but they have a building application that they offer to their merchants to track their billing. So what I'm saying is really, whether you're a software company where that's your core product, or you're a traditional enterprise that has visual applications underneath to support your core product, there's usually product teams, product leaders, and developers. Those are the ones that we want to talk to and we can help them realize a better vision for the product that they're responsible for. >> I mean, the reality is all applications need analytics, right, at some level. >> Yes. >> Full instrumentation at a minimum log everything and then the ability to roll that up, that's where I see people always telling me like that's where the challenge seems to be. Okay, I can log everything, but now how do I have a... And then after the fact that they say, "Give me a report, what's happening?" >> That's right. >> They get stuck. >> They get stuck 'cause you get that report and you know, someone else asked that question for you and you're probably a curious person. I'm a curious person. You always have that next question, and then usually if you're in a company, let's just say, you're a CIO. You're probably used to having a team of analysts at your fingertip so at least if you have a question, you don't like the report, you can find two people, five people they'll respond to your request. But if you're a business application user, you're sitting there, I don't know about you, but I don't remember the last time I actually went through and really found a support ticket in my application, or I really read a detailed documentation describing features in application. Users like to be self-taught, self-service and they like to explore it on their own. And there's no analyst there, there's no IT guy that they can lean on so if they get a static report of the data, they'll naturally always want to ask more questions, then they're stuck. So it's that kind of unsatisfying where, "I have some curiosity, you sparked by questions, I can't answer them." That's where I think a lot of companies struggle with. That's why a lot of applications, they're data intensive but they don't deliver any insights. >> It's interesting and I like this anywhere idea because you think about like what you guys do, applications can be, they always start small, right? I mean, applications got to be built. So you guys, your solution really fits for small startups and business all the way up to large enterprises which in a large enterprise, they could have hundreds and thousands of applications which look like small startups. >> Absolutely, absolutely. You know, that's a great thing about the sort of ThoughtSpot Everywhere which takes the engine around ThoughtSpot that we built over the last eight or nine years and could deliver in any kind of a context. 'Cause nowadays, as opposed to 10, 15, 20 years ago, everything does run in applications these days. We talk about visual transformation at the beginning of the call. That's really what it means is today, the workflows of business are conducted in applications no matter who you're interacting with. And so we have all these applications. A lot of times, yes, if you have big analytical problems, you can take the data and put into a different context like ThoughtSpot's own UI and do a lot of analytics, but we also understand that a lot of times customers and users, they like to analyze in the context the workflow of the application they're actually working in. And so with that situation, actually having the analytics embedded within right next to their workflow is something that I think a lot of, especially business users that are less trained, they'd like to do that right in the context of their business productivity workflow. And so that's where ThoughtSpot Everywhere, I know the terminology is a little self-serving, but ThoughtSpot Everywhere, we think ThoughtSpot could actually be everywhere in your business workflow. >> That's great value proposition. I'm going to put my skeptic hat on challenge you and say, Okay, I don't want to... Prove it to me, what's in it for me? And how much is it going to cost me, how do I engage? So, you know- >> Yeah. >> What's in it for me as the buyer? If people want to buy this, I want to use it, I'm going to get engaged with ThoughtSpot and how much does it cost and what's the engagements look like? >> So, what's in it for you is easy. So if you have data in the cloud and you have an application, you should use ThoughtSpot Everywhere to deliver a much more valuable, interactive experience for your user's data. So that's clear. How do you engage? So we have a very flexible pricing models. If your data's in the cloud, we can either, you can purchase with us, we'll land small and then grow with your consumption. You know, that's always the kind of thing, "Hey, allow us to prove it to you, right?" We start, and then if a user starts to consume, you don't really have to pay a big bill until we see the consumption increase. So we have consumption and data capacity-based types of pricing models. And you know, one of the real advantages that we have for cloud applications is if you're a developer, often, even in the past for ThoughtSpot, we haven't always made that development experience very easy. You have to embed a relatively heavy product but the beauty for ThoughtSpot is from the beginning, we were designed with a modern API-based kind of architecture. Now, a lot of our BI competitors were designed and developed in the desktop server kind of era where everything you embed is very monolithic. But because we have an API driven architecture, we invest a lot of time now to wrap a seamless developer SDK, plus very easy to use REST APIs, plus an interactive kind of a portal to make that development experience also really simple. So if you're a developer, now you really can get from zero to an easy app for ThoughtSpot embedded in your data app in just often in less than 60 minutes. >> John: Yeah. >> So that's also a very great proposition where modern leaders is your data's in the cloud, you've got developers with an SDK, it can get you into an app very quickly. >> All right so bottom line, if you're in the cloud, you got to get the data embed in the apps, data everywhere with ThoughtSpot. >> Yes. >> All right, so let's unpack it a little bit because I think you just highlighted I think what I think is the critical factor for companies as they evaluate their plethora of tools that they have and figuring out how to streamline and be cloud native in scale. You mentioned static and old BI competitors to the cloud. They also have a team of analysts as well that just can make the executives feel like the all of the reports are dynamic but they're not, they're just static. But look at, I know you guys have a relation with Snowflake, and not to kind of bring them into this but to highlight this, Snowflake disrupted the data warehouse. >> Yes. >> Because they're in the cloud and then they refactored leveraging cloud scale to provide a really easy, fast type of value for their product and then the rest is history. They're public, they're worth a lot of money. That's kind of an example of what's coming for every category of companies. There's going to be that. In fact, Jerry Chen, who was just given the keynote here at the event, had just had a big talk called "Castles In The Cloud", you can build a moat in the cloud with your application if you have the right architecture. >> Absolutely. >> So this is kind of a new, this is a new thing and it's almost like beachfront property, whoever gets there first wins the category. >> Exactly, exactly. And we think the timing is right now. You know, Snowflake, and even earlier, obviously we had the best conference with Redshift, which really started the whole cloud data warehouse wave, and now you're seeing Databricks even with their Delta Lake and trying to get into that kind of swim lane as well. Right now, all of a sudden, all these things that have been brewing in the background in the data architecture has to becoming mainstream. We're now seeing even large financial institutions starting to always have to test and think about moving their data into cloud data warehouse. But once you're in the cloud data warehouse, all the benefits of its elasticity, performance, that can really get realized at the analytics layer. And what ThoughtSpot really can bring to the table is we've always, because we're a search-based paradigm and when you think about search. Search is all about, doesn't really matter what kind of search you're doing, it's about digging really deep into a lot of data and delivering interactive performance. Those things have always... Doesn't really matter what data architecture we sit on, I've always been really fundamental to how we build our product. And that translates extremely well when you have your data in a Snowflake or Redshift have billions of rows in the cloud. We're the only company, we think, that can deliver interactive performance on all the data you have in a cloud data warehouse. >> Well, I want to congratulate you, guys. I'm really a big fan of the company. I think a lot of companies are misunderstood until they become big and there was, "Why didn't everyone else do that search? Well, I thought they were a search engine?" Being search centric is an architectural philosophy. I know as a North Star for your company but that creates value, right? So if you look at like say, Snowflake, Redshift and Databricks, you mentioned a few of those, you have kind of a couple of things going on. You have multiple personas kind of living well together and the developers like the data people. Normally, they hated each other, right? (giggles) Or maybe they didn't hate each other but there's conflict, there's always cultural tension between the data people and the developers. Now, you have developers who are becoming data native, if you will, just by embedding that in. So what Snowflake, these guys, are doing is interesting. You can be a developer and program and get great results and have great performance. The developers love Snowflake, they love Databricks, they love Redshift. >> Absolutely. >> And it's not that hard and the results are powerful. This is a new dynamic. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely believe that. I think, part of the beauty of the cloud is I like your kind of analogy of bringing people together. So being in the cloud, first of all, the data is accessible by everyone, everywhere. You just need a browser and the right permissions, you can get your data, and also different kind of roles. They all kind of come together. Things best of breed tools get blended together through APIs. Everything just becomes a lot more accessible and collaborative and I know that sounds kind of little kumbaya, but the great thing about the cloud is it does blur the lines between goals. Everyone can do a little bit of everything and everyone can access a little bit more of their data and get more value out of it. >> Yeah. >> So all of that, I think that's the... If you talk about digital transformation, you know, that's really at the crux of it. >> Yeah, and I think at the end of the day, speed and high quality applications is a result and I think, the speed game if automation being built in on data plays a big role in that, it's super valuable and people will get slowed down. People get kind of angry. Like I don't want to get, I want to go faster, because automations and AI is going to make things go faster on the dev side, certainly with DevOps, clouds proven that. But if you're like an old school IT department (giggles) or data department, you're talking to weeks not minutes for results. >> Yes. >> I mean, that's the powerful scale we're talking about here. >> Absolutely. And you know, if you think about it, you know, if it's days to minutes, it sounds like a lot but if you think about like also each question, 'cause usually when you're thinking about questions, they come in minutes. Every minute you have a new question and if each one then adds days to your journey, that over time is just amplified, it's just not sustainable. >> Okay- >> So now in the cloud world, you need to have things delivered on demand as you think about it. >> Yeah, and of course you need the data from a security standpoint as well and build that in. Chances is people shift left. I got to ask you if I'm a customer, I want to just run this by you. You mentioned you have an SDK and obviously talking to developers. So I'm working with ThoughtSpot, I'm the leader of the organization. I'm like, "Okay, what's the headroom? What's going to happen as a bridge, the future gets built so I'm going to ride with ThoughtSpot." You mentioned SDK, how much more can I do to build and wrap around ThoughtSpot? Because obviously, this kind of value proposition is enabling value. >> Yes. >> So I want to build around it. How do I get started and where does it go? >> Yeah, well, you can get started as easy as starting with our free trial and just play around with it. And you know, the beauty of SDK and when I talk about how ThoughtSpot is built with API-driven architecture is, hey, there's a lot of magic and features built into ThoughtSpot core pod. You could embed all of that into an application if you would like or you could also use our SDK and our APIs to say, "I just want to embed a couple of visualizations," start with that and allow the users to take into that. You could also embed the whole search feature and allow users to ask repetitive questions, or you can have different role-based kind of experiences. So all of that is very flexible and very dynamic and with SDK, it's low-code in the sense where it creates a JavaScript portal for you and even for me who's haven't coded in a long time. I can just copy and paste some JavaScript code and I can see my applications reflecting in real time. So it's really kind of a modern experience that developers in today's world appreciate, and because all the data's in the cloud and in the cloud, applications are built as services connected through APIs, we really think that this is the modern way that developers would get started. And analysts, even analysts who don't have strong developer training can get started with our developer portal. So really, it's a very easy experience and you can customize it in whichever way you want that suits your application's needs. >> Yeah, I think it's, you don't have to be a developer to really understand the basic value of reuse and discovery of services. I think that's one of these we hear from developers all the time, "I had no idea that Victor did that code. Why do I have to rewrite that?" So you see, reuse come up a lot around automation where code is building with code, right? So you have this new vibe and you need data to discover that search paradigm mindset. How prevalent is that on the minds of customers? Are they just trying to like hold on and survive through the pandemic? (giggles) >> Well, customers are definitely thinking about it. You know, the challenge is change is always hard, you know? So it takes time for people to see the possibilities and then have to go through especially in larger organizations, but even in smaller organizations, people think about, "Well, how do I change my workflow?" and then, "How do I change my data pipeline?" You know, those are the kinds of things where, you know, it takes time, and that's why Redshift has been around since 2012 or I believe, but it took years before enterprises really are now saying, "The benefits are so profound that we really have to change the workflows, change the data pipelines to make it work because we can't hold on to the old ways." So it takes time but when the benefits are so clear, it's really kind of a snowball effect, you know? Once you change a data warehouse, you got to think about, "Do I need to change my application architecture?" Then, "Do I need to change the analytics layer?" And then, "Do I need to change the workflow?" And then you start seeing new possibilities because it's all more flexible that you can add more features to your application and it's just kind of a virtuous cycle, but it starts with taking that first step to your point of considering migrating your data into the cloud and we're seeing that across all kinds of industries now. I think nobody's holding back anymore. It just takes time, sometimes some are slower and some are faster. >> Well, all apps or data apps and it's interesting, I wrote a blog post in 2017 called, "Data Is The New Developer Kit" meaning it was just like a vision statement around data will be part of how apps, like software, it'll be data as code. And you guys are doing that. You're allowing data to be a key ingredient for interactivity with analytics. This is really important. Can you just give us a use case example of how someone builds an interactive data app with ThoughtSpot Everywhere? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are certain applications that when naturally things relates to data, you know, I talk about bending or those kinds of things. Like when you use it, you just kind of inherently know, "Hey, there's tons of data and then can I get some?" But a lot of times we're seeing, you know, for example, one of our customers is a very small company that provides software for personal trainers and small fitness studios. You know, you would think like, "Oh well, these are small businesses. They don't have a ton of data. A lot of them would probably just run on QuickBooks or Excel and all of that." But they could see the value is kind of, once a personal trainer conducts his business on a cloud software, then he'll realize, "Oh, I don't need to download any more data. I don't need to run Excel anymore, the data is already there in a software." And hey, on top of that, wouldn't it be great if you have an analytics layer that can analyze how your clients paid you, where your appointments are, and so forth? And that's even just for, again like I said, no disrespect to personal trainers, but even for one or two personal trainers, hey, they can be an analytics and they could be an analyst on their business data. >> Yeah, why not? Everyone's got a Fitbits and watches and they could have that built into their studio APIs for the trainers. They can get collaboration. >> That's right. So there's no application you can think that's too simple or you might think too traditional or whatnot for analytics. Every application now can become a very engaging data application. >> Well Victor, it's great to have you on. Obviously, great conversation around ThoughtSpot anywhere. And as someone who runs corp dev for ThoughtSpot, for the folks watching that aren't customers yet for ThoughtSpot, what should they know about you guys as a company that they might not know about or they should know about? And what are people talking about ThoughtsSpot, what are they saying about it? So what should they know that know that's not being talked about or they may not understand? And what are other people saying about ThoughtSpot? >> So a couple of things. One is there's a lot of fun out there. I think about search in general, search is generally a very broad term but I think it, you know, I go back to what I was saying earlier is really what differentiates ThoughtSpot is not just that we have a search bar that's put on some kind of analytics UI. Really, it's the fundamental technical architecture underlying that is from the ground up built for search large data, granular, and detailed exploration of your data. That makes us truly unique and nobody else can really do search if you're not built with a technical foundation. The second thing is, we're very much a cloud first company now, and a ton of our over the past few years because of the growth of these highly performing data warehouses like Snowflake and Redshift, we're able to really focus on what we do best which is the search and the query processing performance on the front end and we're fully engaged with cloud platforms now. So if you have data in the cloud, we are the best analytics front end for that. >> Awesome, well, thanks for coming on. Great the feature you guys here in the "Startup Showcase", great conversation, ThoughtSpot leading company, hot startup. We did their event with them with theCUBE a couple of months ago. Congratulations on all your success. Victor Chang, VP of ThoughtSpot Everywhere and Corporate Development here on theCUBE and "AWS Startup Showcase". Go to awsstartups.com and be part of the community, we're doing these quarterly featuring the hottest startups in the cloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. >> Victor: Thank you so much. (bright music)

>>Hello, and welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Sean for, with the cube here in Palo Alto, California, actually coming out of the pandemic this year. Hopefully we'll be back to real life soon. Uh it's uh, in March, shouldn't it be? April spring, 2021. Got a great guest Chris Lynch, who is executive chairman, CEO of scale, who took over at the helm of this company about two and a half years ago, or so, um, lots of going on Chris. Great to see you, uh, remotely, uh, in Boston, we're here in Palo Alto. Great to see you. >>Great to see you as well, but hope to see you in person, this sprint. >>Yeah. I got to say people really missing real life. And I started to see events coming back to vaccines out there, but a lot going on. I mean, Dave and I Volante, I was just talking about how, um, you know, when we first met you and big data world was kicking ass and taking names a lot's changed at Duke went the way it went. Um, you know, Vertica coming, you led, did extremely well sold. HP continue to be a crown jewel for HPE. Now the world has changed in the data and with COVID more than ever, you starting to see more and more people really doubling down. You can see who the winners and losers are. You starting to see kind of the mega trend, and now you've got the edge and other things. So I want to get your take at scale, took advantage of that pivot. You've been in charge. Give us the update. What's the current strategy of that scale? >>Sure. Well, when I took the company over about two and a half years ago, it was very focused on accelerating the dupe instances. And, uh, as you mentioned earlier, the dupe is sort of plateaued, but the ability to take that semantic layer and deliver it in the cloud is actually even more relevant with the advent of snowflake and Databricks and the emergence of, uh, Google big query, um, and Azure as the analytic platforms, in addition to Amazon, which obviously was, was the first mover in the space. So I would say that while people present big day in as sort of a passing concept, I think it's been refined and matured and companies are now digitizing their environment to take advantage of being able to deliver all of this big data in a way that, um, they could get actionable insights, which I don't think has been the case through the early stages of the development of big data concepts. >>Yeah, Chris, we've always followed your career. You've been a strong operator, but also see things a little bit early, get on the wave, uh, and help helps companies turn around also on public, a great career. You've had, I got to ask you in your opinion and you, and you can make sense for customers and make sure customers see the value proposition. So I got to ask you in this new world of the semantic layer, you mentioned snowflake, Amazon and cloud scales. Huge. Why is the semantic layer important? What is it and why is it important for customers? What are they really buying with this? >>Well, they're buying a few things, the buying freedom and choice because we're multicloud, um, they're, they're buying the ability to evolve their environments versus your evolution versus revolution. When they think about how they move forward in the next generation of their enterprise architecture. And the reason that you need the semantic layer, particularly in the cloud is that we separate the source from the actual presentation of the data. So we allow data to stay where it is, but we create one logical view that was important for legacy data workloads, but it's even more important in a world of hybrid compute models in multi-vendor cloud models. So having one source of truth, consistency, consistent access, secure access, and actual insights to wall, and we deliver this with no code and we allow you to turbocharge the stacks of Azure and Amazon Redshift and Google big query while being able to use the data that you've created your enterprise. So, so there's a demand for big data and big data means being able to access all your data into one logical form, not pockets of data that are in the cloud that are behind the firewall that are constrained by, um, vendor lock-in, but open access to all of the data to make the best decisions. >>So if I'm an enterprise and I'm used to on-premise data warehouses and data management, you know, from whether it's playing with a dupe clusters or whatever, I see snowflake, I see the cloud scale. How do I get my teams kind of modernized if you had to kind of go in and say, cause most companies actually have a hard time doing that. They're like they got to turn their existing it into cloud powerhouses. That's what they want to do. So how do you get them there? What's the secret in your opinion, to take a team and a company that's used to doing it on prem, on premises to the cloud? >>Sure. It's a great question. So as I mentioned before, the difference between evolution and revolution today, without outscale to do what you're suggesting is a revolution. And you know, it's very difficult to perform heart surgery on the patient while he's running the Boston marathon. And that's the analog I would give you for trying to digitize your environment without this semantic layer that allows you to first create a logical layer, right? This information in a logical mapping so that you can gradually move data to the appropriate place. Without us. You're asked to go from, you know, one spot to another and do that while you're running your business. And that's what discourages companies or creates tremendous risk with digitizing your environment or moving to cloud. They have to be able to do it in a way that's non-disruptive to their business and seamless with respect to their current workflows. >>No, Chris, I got to ask you without, I know you probably not expecting this question, but um, most people don't know that you are also an investor before you as CEO, um, angel investor as well. You did an angel investment deal with a chemical data robot. We've had a good outcome. And so you've seen the wave, you've seen a kind of how the progress, you mentioned snowflake earlier. Um, as you look at those kinds of deals, as they've evolved, you know, you're seeing this acceleration with data science, what's your take on this because you know, those companies that have become successful or been acquired that you've invested in now, you're operating at scale as a company, you got to direct the company into the right direction. Where is that? Where are you taking this thing? >>Sure. It's a great, great question. So with respect to AI and ML and the investment that I made almost 10 years ago and data robot, um, I believe then, and I believe now more than ever that AI is going to be the next step function in industrial productivity. And I think it's going to change, you know, the composition of our lives. And, um, I think I have enough to have been around when the web was commercialized in the internet, the impact that's having had on the world. I think that impact pales in comparison to what AI, the application of AI to all walks of life has gone going to do. Um, I think that, um, within the next 24 months companies that don't have an AI strategy will be shorted on wall street. I think every phone, every, every vertical function in the marketplace is going to be impacted by AI. >>And, um, we're just seeing the infancy of mass adoption application when it comes to at scale. I think we're going to be right in the middle of that. We're about the democratization of those AI and machine learning models. One of the interesting things we developed it, this ML ops product, where we're able to allow you with your current BI tool, we're able to take machine learning models and just all the legacy BI data into those models, providing better models, more accurate, and precise models, and then re publish that data back out to the BI tool of your choice, whether it be Tableau, Microsoft power, BI Excel, we don't care. >>So I got to ask you, okay, the enterprises are easy targets, large enterprises, you know, virtualization of the, of this world that we're living with. COVID virtualization being more, you know, virtual events, virtual meetings, virtual remote, not, not true virtualization, as we know it, it virtualization, but like life of virtualization of life companies, small companies like the, even our size, the cube, we're getting more data. So you start to see people becoming more data full, not used to dealing with data city mission. They see opportunities to pivot, leverage the data and take advantage of the cloud scale. McKinsey, just put out a report that we covered. There's a trillion dollars of new Tam in innovation, new use cases around data. So a small company, the size of the cube Silicon angle could be out there and innovate and build a use case. This is a new dynamic. This is something that was seen, this mid-market opportunity where people are starting to realize they can have a competitive advantage and disrupt the big guys and the incumbents. How do you see this mid market opportunity and how does at-scale fit into that? >>So you're as usual you're spot on John. And I think the living breathing example of snowflake, they brought analytics to the masses and to small and medium enterprises that didn't necessarily have the technical resources to implement. And we're taking a page out of their book. We're beginning to deliver the end of this quarter, integrated solutions, that map SME data with public markets, data and models, all integrated in their favorite SAS applications to make it simple and easy for them to get EnLink insight and drive it into their business decisions. And we think we're very excited about it. And, you know, if, if we can be a fraction, um, if we can, if we get a fraction of the adoption that snowflake has will be very soon, we'll be very successful and very happy with the results this year. >>Great to see you, Chris, I want to ask you one final question. Um, as you look at companies coming out of the pandemic, um, growth strategies is going to be in play some projects going to be canceled. There's pretty obvious, uh, you know, evidence that, that has been exposed by working at remote and everyone working at home, you can start to see what worked, what wasn't working. So that's going to be clear. You're gonna start to see pattern of people doubling down on certain projects. Um, at scales, a company has a new trajectory for folks that kind of new the old company, or might not have the update. What is at scale all about what are what's the bumper sticker? What's the value proposition what's working that you're doubling down on. >>We want to deliver advanced multi-dimensional analytics to customers in the cloud. And we want to do that by delivering, not compromising on the complexity of analytics, um, and to do that, you have to deliver it, um, in a seamless and easy to use way. And we figure out a way to do that by delivering it through the applications that they know and love today, whether it be their Salesforce or QuickBooks or you name, the SAS picked that application, we're going to turbocharge them with big data and machine learning in a way that's going to enhance their operations without, uh, increase the complexity. So it's about delivering analytics in a way that customers can absorb big customers and small customers alike. >>While I got you here, one final final question, because you're such an expert at turnarounds, as well as growing companies that have a growth opportunity. There's three classes of companies that we see emerging from this new cloud scale model where data's involved or whatever new things out there, but mainly data and cloud scale. One is use companies that are either rejuvenating their business model or pivoting. Okay. So they're looking at cost optimization, things of that nature, uh, class number two innovation strategy, where they're using technology and data to build new use cases or changed existing use cases for kind of new capabilities and finally pioneers, pioneering new net, new paradigms or categories. So each one has its own kind of profile. All, all are winning with data as a former investor and now angel investor and someone who's seen turnarounds and growing companies that are on the innovation wave. What's your takeaway from this because it's pretty miraculous. If you think about what could happen in each one of those cases, there's an opportunity for all three categories with cloud and data. What's your personal take on that? >>So I think if you look at, um, ways we've seen in the past, you know, particularly the, you know, the internet, it created a level of disruption that croup that delivered basically a renewed, um, playing field so that the winners and losers really could be reset and be based on their ability to absorb and leverage the new technology. I think the same as an AI and ML. So I think it creates an opportunity for businesses that were laggerts to catch, operate, or even supersede the competitors. Um, I think it has that kind of an impact. So from my, my view, you're going to see as big data and analytics and artificial intelligence, you know, mature and coalesce, um, vertical integration. So you're going to see companies that are full stack businesses that are delivered through AI and cloud, um, that are completely new and created or read juvenile based on leveraging these new fundamentals. >>So I think you're going to see a set of new businesses and business models that are created by this ubiquitous access to analytics and data. And you're going to see some laggerts catch up that you're going to see some of the people that say, Hey, if it isn't broke, don't fix it. And they're going to go by the wayside and it's going to happen very, very quickly. When we started this business, John, the cycle of innovation was five it's now, you know, under a year, maybe, maybe even five months. So it's like the difference between college for some professional sports, same football game, the speed of the game is completely different. And the speed of the game is accelerating. >>That's why the startup actions hot, and that's why startups are going from zero to 60, if you will, uh, very quickly, um, highly accelerated great stuff. Chris Lynch veteran the industry executive chairman CEO of scale here on the cube conversation with John furrier, the host. Thank you for watching Chris. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you, John, take care. Hope to see you soon. >>Okay. Let's keep conversation. Thanks for watching.

>>live from Stanford University. It's the queue covering Stanford women in data science 2020. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Yeah. >>Hi. And welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia Category. And we're live at Stanford University for the fifth annual Woods Women in Data Science Conference. Joining us today is none. Ho, the director of data Science at Intuit None. Welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you for having me here, so yeah, >>so tell us a little bit about your role at Intuit. So I leave the >>applied Machine Learning teams for our QuickBooks product lines and also for our customer success organization within my team. We do applied machine learning. So what? We specialize in building machine learning products and delivering them into our products for >>our users. Great. Today. Today you're giving a talk. You talked about how organizations want to achieve greater flexibility, speed and cost efficiencies on. And you're giving it a technical vision. Talk today about data science in the cloud world. So what should data scientists know about data science in a cloud world? >>Well, I'll just give you a little bit of a preview into my talk later because I don't want to spoil anything. Yeah, but I think one of the most important things being a data scientist in a cloud world is that you have to fundamentally change the way you work a lot of a start on our laptops or a server and do our work. But when you move to the cloud, it's like all bets are off. All the limiters are off. And so how do you fully take advantage of that? How do you change your workflow? What are some of the things that are available to you that you may not know about? And in addition to that, some some things that you have to rewire in your brain to operate in this new environment. And I'm going to share some experiences that I learned firsthand and also from my team in into its cloud migration over the past six years. >>That's great. Excited to hear that on DSO you were getting into it into it has sponsored Woods for many years now. Last year we spoke with could be the San Juan from Intuit. So tell us about this Intuit's sponsorship. Yeah, >>so into it. We are a champion of gender diversity and also all sorts of diversity. And when we first learned about which we said, We need to be a champion of the women in data science conference because for me personally, often times when I'm in a room, um, going over technical details I'm often the only woman and not just I'm often the only woman executive and so part of the sponsorship is to create this community of women, very technical women in this field, to share our work together to build this community and also to show the great diversity of work that's going on across the field of data science. >>And so Intuit has always been really great for embracing diversity. Tell us a little bit about about bad experience, about being part of Intuit and also about the tech women part. Yeah, >>so one of the things that into it that I really appreciate is we have employees groups around specific interests, and one of those employees groups is tech women at Intuit and Tech women at Intuit. The goal is to create a community of women who can provide coaching, mentorship, technical development, leadership development and I think one of the unique things about it is that it's not just focused on the technical development side, but on helping women develop into leadership positions. For me, When I first started out, there were very few women in executive positions in our field and data science is a brand new field, and so it takes time to get there. Now that I'm on the other side, one of the things that I want to do is be able to give back and coach the next generation. And so the tech women at Intuit Group allows me to do that through a very strong mentorship program that matches me and early career mentees across multiple different fields so that I can provide that coaching in that leadership development >>and speaking about like diversity. In the opening address, we heard that diversity creates perspectives, and it also takes away bias. So why gender diversity is so important into it, and how does it help take away that bias? Yeah, >>so one of the important things that I think a lot of people don't realize is when you go and you build your products, you bring in a lot of biases and how you build the product and ultimately the people who use your products are the general population for us. We serve consumer, small businesses and self employed. And if you take a look at the diversity of our customers, it mirrors the general population. And so when you think about building products, you need to bring in those diverse perspectives so you could build the best products possible because of people who are using those products come from a diverse background as well, >>right? And so now at Intuit like instead of going from a desktop based application, we're at a cloud based application, which is a big part of your talk. How do you use data Teoh for a B testing and why is it important? >>Yeah, a B testing That is a personal passion of mine, actually, because as a scientist, what we like to do is run a lot of experiments and say, Okay, what is the best thing out there so that ultimately, when you ship a new product or feature, you send the best thing possible that's verified by data, and you know exactly how users are going to react to it. When we were on desktop, they made it incredibly difficult because those were back in the days. And I don't know if you remember those put back in the days when you had a floppy disk, right or even a CD ROM's. That's how we shipped our products. And so all the changes that you wanted to make had to be contained. In the end, you really only ship it once per year. So if there's any type of testing that we did, we're bringing our users and have them use our products a little bit and then say Okay, we know exactly what we need to dio ship that out. So you only get one chance now that we're in the cloud. What that allows us to do is to test continuously via a B, testing every new feature that comes out. We have a champion Challenger model, and we can say Okay, the new version that we're shipping out is this much better than the previous one. We know it performs in this way, and then we got to make the decision. Is this the best thing to do for a customer? And so you turn what was once a one time process, a one time change management process. So one that's distributed throughout the entire year and at any one time we're running hundreds of tests to make sure that we're shipping exactly the best things for our customers. >>That's awesome. Um, so, um, what advice would you give to the next generation of women who are interested in stem but maybe feel like, Oh, I might be the only woman. I don't know if I should do this. Yeah, I think that the biggest >>thing for me was finding men's ownership, and initially, when I was very early career and even when I was doing my graduate studies for me, a mentor with someone who was in my field. But when I first joined into it, an executive in another group who is a female, said, Hey, I'd like to take your side, provide you some feedback, and this is some coaching I want to give you, And that was when I realized you don't actually need to have that person be in your field to actually guide you through to the next up. And so, for women who are going through their journey and early on, I recommend finding a mentor who is at a stage where you want to go, regardless of which field there in, because everybody has diverse perspectives and things that they can teach you as you go along. >>And how do you think Woods is helping women feel like they can do data science and be a part of the community? Yeah, I think >>what you'll see in the program today is a huge diversity of our speakers, our Panelists through all different stages of their career and all different fields. And so what we get to see is not only the time baseline of women who are in their PhDs all the way to very, very well established women. The provost of Stanford University was here today, which is amazing to see someone at the very top of the career who's been around the block. But the other thing is also the diversity and fields. When you think about data science, a lot of us think about just the tech industry. But you see it in healthcare. You see it in academia and there's a scene that wide diversity of where data science and where women who are practicing data science come from. I think it's really empowering because you can see yourself in the representation does matter quite a bit. >>Absolutely. And where do you see data science going forward? >>Oh, that is a, uh, tough and interesting question, actually. And I think that in the current environment today, we could talk about where it could go wrong or where it could actually open the doors. And for me, I'm an eternal optimist on one of the things that I think is really, really exciting for the future is we're getting to a stage where we're building models, not just for the general population. We have enough data and we have enough compute where we can build a model. Taylor just for you, for all of your life's on for me. I think that that is really, really powerful because we can build exactly the right solution to help our customers and our users succeed. Specifically, me working in the personal friend, Small business finance lease. That means I can hope that cupcake shop owner actually manage her cash flow and help her succeed to me that I think that's really powerful. And that's where data science is headed. >>None. Thank you so much for being on the Cube and thank you for your insight. Thank you so much. I'm so sorry. Thanks for watching the Cube. Stay tuned for more. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I. F. S. >>Welcome back to Boston, everybody. You're watching The Cube. The leader in live tech coverage is Day one coverage of the I. F s World Conference. Darren Russo's here is the CEO of F S Darren. Thanks for coming back in the Cube. Great TV again. So last year was your first year. He was kind of laid out your vision at the World Conference. How's progress? >>Yeah, Look, it's going incredibly well. We were really focused on how we go from being a pretty fragment of global business to being, you know, an integrated business where we were able to operate. You know, its scale globally in a very homogenous way, where the customer experience was the same, irrespective where they engaged with us. And, you know, we've made a tremendous amount of progress with it, So you know, the business is growing really strongly. Net revenues up 22% year on year. I lost its revenues up 40% year on year are clouds up in the triple digits, so you know it's tough to be critical of how it's going so far. >>That's great, Great. You're growing faster than your peers. I think the stat was you gave us three Ex factory except in the industry would be awesome. Is that means that your primary benchmark do you want? You want to gain share? You want to go faster than the big whales, I presume. I >>think two things One is customer satisfaction, we believe, is the key indicator of long term success. S O. You know, we're the number one ranked European efforts. Salmon gotten appearance sites. That's that is and always will be my number. One metric. Can we be way the number one from a customer satisfaction perspective? And then I believe the revenue stats will follow and you know that's where we are. So certainly, if you look at our our core peers, the big G R P vendors, all of them are flat on. Dhe were growing 20 ships since >>one of the things you mentioned in your Cube interview last year was one of the things that you wanted to focus on was I'll call regional alignment. Paul and I used to work for I D. G. I worked for I. D. C. You were editor in chief of Computer World. We work for a company, had more offices overseas and IBM, and it was really hard to herd the cats. And that was one of the things that you cited. Have you been able to get people generally poor or at the same time? And how has that affected your business? Yeah. Look, I >>think the big challenge before I arrived was that there wasn't really a strategy of global strategy for the business. My face had a way of working and there was a strong culture, but there wasn't really a strategy. And obviously it's difficult to be critical of people when they not following the strategy when there isn't one s o. You know, Step one was really making sure that we had a strategy on DDE that was really about being focused on the five industries that we focused on, focused on three solutions on dhe focused on the six segments of customer, which is half a 1,000,000,000 to 5 billion. So now, globally, you know, irrespective the office that you go to, um anywhere in the world, they're focused on those five industries they focused on those three solutions and they're focused on their customer segments. So it helps me. P. M >>I said during our preview video video this morning that I've been around this industry as long as I f s has, until last year had never even heard of it. Is that just me being clueless? There's something there >>that we were just saying before we started that we're the definitely the biggest software business you've never heard of. Um, and and and that's common, I think, you know, we were There are a couple of factors. One is that the business was very European centric. Andi didn't really engaged in a tremendous amount of marketing and media prison. So, you know, those are elements that, you know, I think we're doing a better job off now, But we have a long way to go. The challenge that we have is that where we compete, we win when we get in and were able to tell our story, and we're able to show the value we win. We just don't get into as many deals as we need to. And that's the challenge we have. >>Yeah, there was a lot of talk this morning about the importance of those five pillars of those five industries. If you're going to become the next S A P, you're gonna have to branch out beyond that. What is your thinking about diversify >>becoming the next? They say he is definitely not my ambition, You know, I think way remain focused on customer satisfaction. And, you know, I think that there's a there's a difference. Whatever it is leading them, it's not customer satisfaction. You worked >>there for four years. >>I worked there for four years. I know. I think the big thing for me is is that we've got to stay focused on their customer voice. They focused on what delivers value for our customers beyond just the rhetoric and hyperbole. You know, I think when you when you listen to a lot of the complexity that our customers are facing today, any customers are facing. Companies are facing increasingly disruptive times, and the tech industry is making life more difficult for them. The more best of breed solutions get both. The more fragments that potential the landscape is, the more complex it becomes for customers if they have to try and figure out. How do we integrate these things and derive value from this highly fragmented landscape? So you know, we're trying to solve that problem. How do we make it easier for customers to challenge in their industry? And that's where this whole for the challenges has check comes from. How do we help him to be disruptive in their industry? Have competitive advantage? >>That seems to be a sort of a fundamentally different thing about your approach, though. Is this focus on those vertical industry's most e r P companies did not do that. Is that something that is core to your values? >>Look, I >>think what we recognize is that as you move to the cloud, you have to drive to standard. That's just the reality of going to the cloud on what's happening for the horizontal E. R B vendors. So the locks of ASAP and Oracle is that they have one e r P solution that fits every industry. So if it's good for health insurance and it's good for a bank, then it's difficult to really get your head around the fact that it could be good for a defense manufacturer, but the functional requirements is simply vastly different on that means that you have to customize them. If you have to customize that, they can go to the cloud. So what we believe is that you have to have this vertical specialization, the five industries that we serve us all. A lot of commonality in the process is that they use. And that's why that vertical strategy is so key to our success. So you won't see us going into financial service is, or health care or retail worth that core application. We may in time in many years to come branch out. That will be a different solutions. >>So your tailor, that app for that module for that industry, Yes, just go deep, deep functionality. You're known for that, but at the same time you're also messaging. You want your customers to be able to tailor this for their environment. So square that circle for me. >>So I think when we talk about a choice and and I think tailoring is the wrong word, we talk about choice. We're talking about choice of deployments on Prem or in the cloud choice of customer choice of partner, rather who they're going to deploy with on Dhe, then The solution is really an industry solution that comes with that functional death. And we don't we don't advocate their customers customized that all. We really don't want them to customize it. What we explain to them in some detail is that the real value comes from adopting the solution for two standard and staying on a vanilla application. Because that vanilla application, you're going to be able to withstand future upgrades, the total cost of ownership gets lower. The processes that are embedded in that application or best of breed at the box. That's what they're intended to do, and that works when you have a vertical application. When you have a horizontal application and you're trying to have a do things that it shouldn't naturally be doing, that becomes company. >>Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that essentially the message ASAP had when it went through? It's hyper growth in the late nineties. I mean, there was a Y two k thing there, too, but ah, lot of the message was around. Do it our way and and then you don't have to get stuck in a rut, >>So I think that when it came out with that generation of application. That certainly was what they had hoped would happen. But what happened in practice is that the system integrators came in and the whole business process reengineering explosion happened on Dhe. That's not how it how it manifested itself. So what you see is, you see, he's very large, monolithic ASAP applications that were customized over in some cases decades, not not. You know, if a customer is deploying for two standard, then they should be able to deploy in a period mission. In weeks, we spoke about our deployment with Racing Point. If one team and going live in 12 weeks, you know, we're a 700 million global business. We deployed a knife s in 24 weeks. You know, if a customer's deploying for two standard, it's measured in weeks. As soon as they start to talk about two years or three years or five years or seven years there, customizing the solution significantly. Yeah, I >>mean, it became just sort of a perpetual upgrade, maintenance and up for the time it had a business impact. But boy, you think a cloud today agility, you know, getting rid of waterfall approaches, Missus. Antithetical to today's Look >>what I don't point fingers here. I think that this just maturity come with experience. The line of business applications you'll see our EMS and your HR solutions have taught people that you can, if you think about this is look at sea. Are Emma's an example? You had Siebel before people would implement stable. They would customize Siebel that would take long implementations. They were highly bespoke applications and then sells. Force came along and just destroyed them, and they destroyed them. Because what people learned very quickly was that there was a really easy to consume, really easy to use application that functionally might be inferior. But the compromises that you'd make from a functionality perspective will weigh, outweighed by their time to value in ease of use. And and the learnings from CR mnh are in procurement. Those line of business applications have now being backed into in the e. R. P >>world. So in terms of capital allocation, you're owned by private equity, which is actually a public company. I'm interested in how you're allocating capital R and D, where you're where your emphasis is. You don't have to you have to do stock buy back, but, you know, describe the P relationship. >>So look, one of my learning's to see survive this is that not all private equity firms or equal they have different strategies are very fortunate to be with Ekiti, who are a growth investor. They're known as a growth investor on dhe, and they buy companies that are strong growth tech firms on dhe. They've been hugely supportive of us investing because they understand that the investment in technology is important. So, you know, just looking at some detail today we invest twice as much in R and D as we did three years ago, just to give you, you know, one data point. So there's a big focus on technology, and the thing is, is that we we have to invest in technology to drive those attributes that are discussed earlier. How do we How do we enable customers to adopt a solution? It's a standard so they can go alive quicker. How do we enable customers to be able to sit down in the front of the application like we do with the mobile phone and intuitively know how to use it? How do we reduce the total cost of ownership through automation. Those are capabilities that you know that they don't come for free. We have to invest in them. So big investments in technology. And >>I think the private equity guys, at least the modern ones, have realized Why should the V. C's have all the fun they realize? Hey, we can actually put some money in tow and the transforming we can have a bigger exit and actually make much better returns than sucking the company drive. Yeah, well, look, I think the other >>thing is is that you know, in public companies, you have the downside off. You know this this courtly metric Ondas quarterly cadence. Andi, you see very compromising decisions being made because you know, people can't afford to miss 1/4. There's no long term planning that's done on dhe. That's fundamentally not the case and the private equity world, you know, not unusual now for four p firms to hold companies for 5678 years on, and that allows you to take a very long term strategic view. If if if a shift from perpetual to subscription is the right thing to happen, they can do that without worrying that, you know, because of the definite earnings are revenue that you're going to get caned by the market next quarter. Andi. I think that that needs to, I think, better decision making for the long term. >>A lot of companies are struggling. >>If you have the right P for because you get bought by the firm of events, you want to go public. But the the you said something this morning that 50% of your customers each year or net knew, How are you pulling that off >>That 50% of our license revenue? Eso way we went about 300 odd new customers a year. Obviously, that's growing, as I said, you know, 40%. But you know, it's ah, I think, having done this for 25 years, there are companies that are or good at extracting revenue from their installed based. One of the analysts here has as a hashtag wallet Fracking is what do you think It's such a great So you know, they're good at Wallick fracking and and I think the customers that that our customers off those vendors know exactly who they are and you know I think that for us to that the fact that we're able to go out and win 50% of our license revenue from net new name customers, I think is a really strong indicator of the health of the business. It's much harder to do than just extracting revenue out of the install base. You know, we don't have a compliance practice. We've never charged a customer for you in direct access. You know, these are principles that we stand by, and it's easier to say that your customer centric on get 80% of your revenue, have your installed base because you're doing compliance rounds. But, you know, we put our money where our mouth is, and that's not that's not how we do it. >>Are these net new customers? Are they? Are they migrating from QuickBooks or they migrating from a Competitors >>know, because of the segment that we're in this half a 1,000,000,000 to 5 billion? I would say the majority of them are what I would call first generation the Rp solution. So you know you're talking about you know, the original generation of Microsoft's acquisitions, the divisions and the eggs actors and the Solomon's and so on on. And then, you know, it's a P R two and our three customers you're talking about customer sitting on, you know, the solutions that in for hoovered up the matrix B picks type customers, ace 400 customers. So they're you know, they're first generation your P solutions that simply don't have the flexibility to deal with the complexity and demands of modern business world. >>From 2009 about 2017 I f. S was pretty inquisitive and then just actually, I was gonna ask you >>when I started, you stopped >>it, right? But then, you know, today you announced an extra small acquisition, But how should we think about M and a >>look? The first year for me was really about trying to build a functional business. You know, we spoke about how fragmented this really hit to Jenna's business. Andi just occurred to me. You know, if we go out and we start to buy things, how do we integrate them into a business that's completely fragments? And you know, it had no identity or culture. So, you know, the last year has been focused on how do we build their common understanding of what it is that we're doing. We now have a very clear strategy. Five industries, three solutions, one segment. And you know, when you when you have that clarity of vision that it's really easy to guard and do him and I because you know what fits and what doesn't fit, you can understand exactly how you're gonna build value for customers on dhe. That's why the S t a deal is so good for us. Because we're now the undisputed leader in field service management, you know, 8000 our customers globally, which is way more than anybody else. Scott, Andi, you know, you should absolutely expect more from us. But it will be in the five industries, three technology segments and one customers. Isaac. >>Well, in the A p I enablement should obviously facility. >>Absolutely. I mean, I was just with a partner of ours now, and they have this amazing augmented reality solution. You know, it will be a combination of off going out there to build market, share a cz well, as finding you know, really innovative solutions that can help us advance the technology that we provide customers. >>You have a new slogan this year for the challengers, which seems to be aimed at companies that that imagine themselves as challenging the Giants, which is great. But if you're not a company that season sees themselves that way. Are the studies level home with I have s Look, >>I I think I was with a group of CEOs from one of the big analyst rooms, and they had the portfolio companies and their private equity firm and analysts that CEOs of the companies are having a conversation with him about digital transformation. And I I made a rather provocative statement which, you know, got unanimous agreement, which is that all of the CEOs there with either in an industry that was being disrupted and we're trying to figure out how they respond to that disruption or they would soon not every job and they all acknowledge that they absolutely fit into that category. In other words, all of them were being disrupted. All of them were facing a challenge. It was kind of like, you know, if it is happening to all of us at a more rapid pace than we have ever had before. So my view is, is that you know if if you're in the room and you're going, you know, if it's might not be for us because we're not a challenger. Yeah, The lights may not be on >>for Long s o double click on that. What role does I s play in terms of digital transformation? >>If I could just hold on there because the thing is, there are leaders in Mama, there challenges. And there are leaders. The leaders typically are gonna go with seif solution. They're gonna go with one of the legacy our peace. So I'm not suggesting that everybody necessarily is a challenger. There are leaders, you know, Nokia was a leader until they weren't because they were complacent. Andi, I think they you know, they didn't run on I office. So, you know, I think there are two segments. There are leaders and there are challenges, and we're there for the ones that are ready to disrupt. Sorry. >>Please clarify that. No. Good. So So get back to it. Sort of digital transformation and disruption. What do you see? Is the role of AARP generally, but specifically I f s. >>Look, I think we digital information. A lot of discussion about it on the stage this morning. I've just touched on it now. I think that it takes very different forms. What most industries are finding is that they're facing a lot of non traditional competition and they're having to innovate around their business models. They can't going to market in the same way as they did before. They're having to innovate because of this non traditional competition. Andi. Understanding your your customer's understanding, your your staff, understanding your supply chain understanding your financials are all critical parts of being able to respond to whatever their changes, and that's where the RP solution comes into it. I think there's an interesting challenge now, which is that as those applications have become more fragmented and you've got more based debris cloud applications Ah, lot of the value often E. R P was that you had this integrated set of applications that you had this one source of the truth andan. Fortunately for many customers today, they don't have that because they've got import all of these best of breed applications and they don't have one source of the truth that multiple invoices made it multiple versions of their customer in the databases. Andi we still stand for a single integrated the r p. So, you know, I think understanding those elements of your businesses key. I was with a customer of ours in Nebraska a short while ago, and they were talking about our existing office customer. They were talking about the steel import duties that were imposed through the trade war with China. And they were saying, Look, that they had been able to respond to that in a way that they had good visibility of the supply chain, who was improved, imposing the tariffs, how they were going to impact them when they were going to impact them. And because they had this integrated Siara AARP. They were able to pass those pricing changes onto their customers, and they survived this. What could have been a cataclysmic event for their business had they not had an integrated your pee? They not being able to have this visibility into the supply chain and the customer base. They may well have gone out of business just because of that one change >>to meet all day and all comes back to the data, putting their putting data at the core of their business. That integrated data pipeline is essentially what they get out of that last question. So thinking about the next 18 to 24 months, what are the milestones that observers should look for? One of the barometers that we should be watching. >>So look, in the next two years, it's it's really about us building incremental scale. We have, ah, four year plan, which I built when I came in. We're halfway through that plan. We've hit all of the metrics and exceeded most the metrics that we had on their plan. It's really continue to focus on the strategy. As I said, we focus on those five industries, continue to build market share, continue to focus on those three solution types and build market share and market dominance on those three solutions. Andi in that segment that I defined before, so no change from a strategy perspective. I think there's really value in the consistency that we bring on on their talk track and, you know, along the way we passed the $1,000,000,000 mark, which we will do, I think, in 2021 organically if we accelerate, some of the money will pass the 1,000,000,000 before, but you know business. The margins continue to expand. We focus on customer satisfaction and, you know, it's a It's a pretty straight, you know, traditional prey book that we have to execute on now. >>Well, congratulations. It's a great playbook, and you're growing very nicely. So love that. Look, we really an honor to the last couple of years. Learn a little bit about the company in your industry. So appreciate meeting you guys. Thank you. All right. And thank you for watching over right back with our next guest. Ready for this short break day Volonte with Paul Gill in. You're watching the Cube from I f s World Conference from Boston 2019 right back.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE here in Barcelona, Spain at the Fira, it's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-hosts for two days of live wall-to-wall coverage is Corey Quinn. Joining us back, we have two CUBE alums, Liz Rice, right to my right here who is a Technology Evangelist with Aqua security. Liz, thank you so much welcome back. >> Pleasure to be here. >> And Jeff Brewer, Vice President and Chief Architect, Small Business & Self-Employed Group, of Intuit. A CUBE alum since a few hours ago this morning. >> Yes, yes, thank you. >> Jeff, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> So, we've got you back with a different hat. Everybody in our industry can definitely recognize we wear lots of different hats we have lots of jobs thrown at us. Both of you are in the Technical Oversight Committee and Liz is not only a member but also the Chairperson, President. (people laughing) >> President is definitely a promotion. But, yeah, I'm Chair of the committee. >> Maybe, as it's known, the TOC. Liz, before we get there, your shirt says +1 binding. You have to explain for us and did not get a preview before the interview, so we'll see where this goes. >> It's one of the perks of being on the TOC. When we have something that comes to a vote we want to get input from the community so we ask anyone in the community to vote. But unless you're a member of the TOC your vote is non-binding. As a member of the committee, we have binding votes. And the traditional thing you write on the voting email is +1 binding. So, it's a nice surprise to get a t-shirt when I joined the TOC. >> Very nice. Can you just give us, our audience, that might not be familiar with the TOC, give us some of the key things about it. >> It's the Technical Oversight Committee for the CNCF. We are, really, the technical curation of the projects that come in to the CNCF. Which projects will get support and at what level because we have the sandbox experimentation stage then incubation and then finally graduation for the really established and kind of, de-risked projects. So, we're really evaluating the projects and kind of making a decision collaboratively on which ones we want the CNCF to support. >> All right. So Jeff, we had a great conversation with you about Intuit's cloud journey. Tell us how you got involved in the TOC. We always love the end users, not just using but participating in and helping to give some governance over what the community is doing. >> Yeah, so, about a year and a half ago we made a decision to acquire a small company called Applatix. Who was, actually, already in the end user community. And also contributors as well. Through that acquisition, I was part of that acquisition, I led that acquisition from the Intuit side and really got excited about the Kubernetes and the KubeCon story overall. Through the Kubernetes experts, I met them at a KubeCon and they introduced me to a whole lot more of the community. Just through some overall partnerships with AWS and also spending a lot of time with end-users that's how I really got to know the community a little bit. And then, was voted onto the CNCF as an end user representative in January. >> Wonderful. As far as you're concerned, as you go through this, do you find it challenging at times to separate your roles professionally from working for a large company, to whom many things matter incredibly. Again, as mentioned earlier, I am one of your customers. I care very much about technical excellence, coming out of Intuit, versus your involvement with the larger project. >> Yeah, so like most people in technology companies I'm extremely busy and I would love to spend, I would love to clone myself and spend more (laughing) more time. >> Everybody wants to submit a client project to the TOC we will prioritize that one. >> Exactly, exactly. >> The way I really balance it is that I make an explicit time carve out for those two activities. And most importantly, I attend the meetings. The TOC meetings that we have, those are extremely important. We get a lot of project reviews in those meetings. Liz chairs those meetings. That's where I always make sure that my schedule is cleared for that. >> Taking it, I guess, one step further. Do you find it challenging at all to separate out, in fact, when you're making decisions and making votes, for example, that are presumably binding, +1 binding as we've learned now, is the terminology. Do you find that you are often pulled between trying to advocate for your company and advocating for the community or are they invariably aligned in your mind? >> I mean, my job's the easiest because I come from an end user. So what I use and what I consume is likely what the community at large. There might be some niches and stuff like that. But I usually don't have that conflict. I don't know, as more of a vendor, you might have more of a conflict. >> It's something that I have be conscious of. I just try to mentally separate. I have a role with a company that pays my salary but when I'm doing open-source things if I feel conflicted about. This hasn't really come up yet, but if I do feel that there's some kind of conflict of interest I will always recuse myself. Actually, in my previous role, as the Co-Chair for the Program Committee for the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Conference, on a couple of occasions we had competitors submit, and I would always just step back from those. Because it's the right thing to do. >> All right. So Liz, there's quite a few projects now, under the umbrella of CNCF. If I've go it right, it was like, 38 different ones. When Brian went on the stage this morning, 16 in the sandbox, 16 incubating and six have graduated now. How do you manage that? You know, there's some in the community they're like, oh my gosh, reminds us of like, big tent, from some initiatives. Some other things here, how much is too much? How do you balance that and what's the input of the TOC? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we're doing with the TOC is we've just established a thing called the SIGs, the special interest groups. Very much following the same model of Kubernetes SIGs. But the idea here is that we can, kind of formalize getting experts in the community to help us with particular kind of areas. So, we've already got a storage and security SIG set up. We expect there will be probably four to six more coming on board during the year. And that helps us with things like the project reviews and the due diligence to just be able to say, we would really appreciate some help. Those groups are also really enthusiastic about kind of sharing knowledge in the form of things like white papers. I think it will be really important for end-users to be able to navigate their way around these projects. Quite often there is more than one solution for a particular thing. And being able to, in a non-vendor way, in a neutral way, express why project X is good in one circumstance and project Y would be better in a different environment. There's work to be done there and I'm hoping to see that come out. >> This is one of my passions as the end user representative, is that trail map or that road map. That's one of the reasons why we really have invested at Intuit, in the Kubernetes technology and the Cloud Native technology. We didn't just roll them out as is. We actually curate them and create, really, a paved road for our developers to navigate that space. >> Yeah, and as we heard from your story it's not always, well, if there's some overlap you use SDO and Hellman. >> Yeah. >> That there's a fit for both of those in your environment, right. >> Yeah. >> From a, I guess, an end user perspective is there a waiting difference between someone like Intuit and someone like Twitter for pets, where there's a slight revenue scale, a slight revenue difference, like scale difference, like everything difference. >> Yes. >> Certainly, there is. I think that, but that's one of the beautiful things about the Cloud Native technologies. You can consume what you need and what you want, right. It's not one size fits all. A lot of people talk about, oh, there's a paradox of choice, there's so many projects, right. Actually, that's a benefit. Really, all you need is that road map to navigate your way through that, rather than just adopting a paved road that might not work for everybody. >> It almost feels, to some extent, almost like the AWS Service Catalog. Whenever you wind up looking at all the things they offer. It feels like going out to eat at the Cheesecake Factory. Where there is 80 pages of menu to flip through with some advertisements, great. And reminding yourself, at time, that they are not Pokemon, you do not need to catch them all. It's, sometimes, a necessary step, as you start to contextualize this. >> That's one of the great things about having over 80 members in the end user is. You can find a buddy, you can find a company like you. Talk to them, get connected with them and figure out what they're doing and learn from them. The community is broad enough to be able to do that. >> All right, so Liz, let's talk about security. >> Okay. (people laughing) >> You said there's a SIG that started up. Where are we, how are things going and you can you share about where we're going in the near future? >> The SIG came together from a group of people who really wanted to make it easier for end-users to roll out their Cloud Native stacks in a secure fashion. We don't always, as a community, speak the same language about security, we don't always have the most secure settings by default. They really came together around this common interest of just making it easier for people to secure. I think a big part of that will be looking at how the different projects, are they applying best practices from a security perspective? Is there more they should do to document how to operate their particular project more securely? I think that whole initiative and that group of people who've come together for SIG security, I'm so impressed and so pleased that they have come together with that enthusiasm to help on that front. >> Any commentary on what you're seeing in this space? >> Yeah, so as an almost, a fintech company, with a lot of fintech and, you know, we're not quite a bank, but we have a lot of the same security and compliance things. That SIG is so, so important to us. And having a roadmap. I found a education is really, really a big part of it of the security experts, right. Because this is somewhat newer technology. Even though it's been in use at Google for a long time the regulator's, the compliance people, don't totally understand it, right. So you have to have a way to explain to them what's going on. So things like, open policy agent, something that we've adopted, helps us explain what's going on in our system. Once they get it, they're like, this is awesome and our end users can now, really, our end users, meaning the people that use QuickBooks and TurboTax can really trust that we have those guardrails in place. >> At Aqua, it's a huge concern from a lot of our customers. Many of whom, coming from that kind of finance industry. That they're coming to us and saying, well, how can I be PCI compliant or GDPR. How do I manage these requirements with my container based stack, with my Cloud Native stack. That's why there is this huge ecosystem quite a lot of effort around security, compliance, policy. >> It feels very much like it's two problems rolled into one. First, how do you make sure that data is secure in these things? Secondly, how do you effectively and responsibly communicate that to a regulator, who expects to be taken on a tour of a data center when they show up on site? (people laughing) I checked, they won't let you. >> There are definitely two sets of security people in my experience. There are a set of people who care about how will I get attacked. How will breaches happen. And there are other people who go, I have a checklist and I need to check the boxes in the checklist, tell me how. Sometimes those two things overlap, but not always. >> All right, Liz, lot of updates, as always. Jeff, I really appreciate your commentary there. Well, there's the paradox of choice but we have a lot of customers out there and therefore we do. (people chuckling) Any highlights you want to share with our audience? >> I think one thing that happens every year is we see more. Well, we saw Kubernetes graduate, I think, early last year, end of the previous year. Now we've got six projects into graduation. From my perspective, that says something about how mature this whole set of projects, this whole platform is becoming. Because graduation is a pretty high bar. Not least in terms of the number of end users that have to be using it in production. This is solid technology. >> Yeah, any highlights from you? >> I think, like we might have touched on a little bit this morning. But I think that usually the technologies that where you're facing the big problems is pretty obvious which one to use, right. Like serverless, you're going to go look at something like Knative or whatnot. Functions as a service. There's some open fast projects, whatnot, like that. SDO services mesh is another one where it's getting mature and it's getting to the point where you can have these ubiquitous service meshes throughout it. So, those are the areas that we're most looking at right now. >> Great, all right. Well, Liz and Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for all the work you do on the Oversight Committee and appreciate you sharing the updates with our community. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> For Cory Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back more, with theCUBE here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Hi and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Corey Quinn, and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Jeff Brewer, who's the Vice President and Chief Architect of Small Business and Self-Employed Group at Intuit. He's going to talk about your cloud journey. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. >> You're welcome, I'm glad to be here. >> All right, so, Jeff, the easy part of this is, I think, most of our audience has probably heard of Intuit, but maybe give us that first setting of, you know, the part of the group you're in, and your role, and then we want to get into that journey. >> Yeah, yeah, no, it's great. So, yeah, first of all, thanks for having me here and I'm what's called the Chief Architect of the Small Business and Self-Employed Group. Intuit is about powering prosperity around the world. That's our fairly new mission. And helping both taxpayers with TurboTax and QuickBooks is our other big project. So, think of me as the Chief Architect for the QuickBooks group. And so, mostly for small businesses, helping small businesses survive through their first year, survive and prosper continuing on, so. >> And your charter there, is that the infrastructure there, you're not trying to help the world rid those malicious attacks of like, oh no, I got the new TurboTax and it didn't work well because, disclaimer, you know, I'm not paid, I've used it for many years and it's super easy for me. >> Yeah so, as a Chief Architect, I set the technical direction of the overall QuickBooks franchise both the desktop version which is our older version that, you know, has been around for 20, 25 years, and our QuickBooks Online version, which is about, only about 15 years old and is our SAS offering. And so, I do things like choose technologies that we adopt. I do things like set what are the most important technology priorities whether it's breaking things up into microservices, our cloud strategy, Kubernetes, going to cloud native, all that kind of stuff. >> Okay, so, you are a member of the Technical Oversight Committee, but we're actually going to bring you back a little bit later to talk about that, so, we'll put a pin in that. But give us a little bit as to kind of what led to this journey towards cloud and, you know, all of those pieces that you were just talking about. >> Yes, so, like many other companies with, you know, lots of legacy and lots of code that we've developed over about 35 years of existence, we actually started out in the early 2000's with building our own data centers, right. And it's very expensive, very ambitious, but at the time, there really wasn't a public cloud. But we realized that, you know, putting servers under our desks and stuff like that, you know, we really needed to grow to a more robust data center. And, you know, as we progressed in that journey, we figured out we're not the experts at maintaining and developing all the complicated networking you have to do, reliability, resiliency. We had some outages, this is 10 years ago or so, where a truck drove into a light post outside one of our data centers and took us down for a day. And that's just not acceptable for our customers. The public cloud was just starting out, AWS was a big partner out there, and our CIO, and CEO, met with the AWS executives and really decided that we needed a great partner in public cloud that really was their technical expertise. And so, we began this journey, mostly I would describe it as lift and shift, of technologies and services that we already had. We had to rewrite a few of them to make them actually work with the cloud. But by and large, most of our code is written in Java and that ports pretty well. So, we started on that journey and really right now, we are mostly running in the public cloud. We have a few legacy systems that are still running in our private data centers, but we're planning on decommissioning those. And with the public cloud, a journey we really have seen quite a, improvement in our reliability, our downtime, we can fail over between availability zones, it's just been fantastic from our overall availability, recoverability standpoint. But what we realized during that journey was that the, that the AWS native experience for our developers, while AWS is just an amazing, amazing partner, it wasn't quite the developer experience we wanted. >> It had some sharp edges. >> Yeah, we worked with them on that, and that's why we started looking at cloud-native technologies, things already developed by the community. AWS is part of the community, as well, and so they were extremely supportive in our journey to want to, from the developer experience standpoint, really start to press on these cloud-native technologies. >> Wonderful. As you went down that entire path, whenever a company goes public and they put in their S1 that they're doing some committed level of giant deal with AWS, people immediately chime in with, oh, they could save so much money by building and running their own data centers. How do you stand on that particular perspective? >> So, what's really interesting about our, our public cloud journey, right, it's not necessarily about saving a lot of money, right? And we realized that, you know, Intuit, as a mature company, you know, we're not a start-up looking to shave every little penny off of every little server. What we really want is reliability for our customers, we want awesome operations, and so, the public cloud journey actually hasn't been a huge, huge cost savings, but it has been a huge improvement in all these other levels, so it does amazing things for our customers. And we're looking to cloud native as just another, you know, bump up in that overall thing, where we get immediate mean time to recovery, where things go down, things go wrong, and we get those pods and those services right back up and running. >> Can you elaborate a little bit about the application that you're talking about, like when I first heard you say, you know, we just lifted and shifted there, it's like, oh wait, you know, a lot of times that is when we kind of claw things back because it's costs more than I thought or it didn't run as well as I thought. >> It turns out the mainframe's hard to move because they didn't build an AWS 400 yet, something doesn't happen. >> So, the challenges there, and then, you know, connect the dots with that to what you're calling the cloud native piece of this, as to what your application development looks like. >> So, I'll use QuickBooks Online as an example. Massive property, over four million customers. >> I'm one of them. >> And it started out as a, as kind of our first really big foray into SAS, right? And luckily, at the time we wrote it, mostly in Java. But it was written as this huge, monolithic piece of code, right. And so, millions of lines of code, you can imagine, large memory footprints, all that kind of stuff. And so, during our first, for public cloud, we just looked at, well, we're not going to rewrite these millions and millions of lines of code, but we want to get into public cloud. Lucky for us, EC2 instances, things like that, can run those large memory footprints. But once there, we really started examining, okay, what does this look like as microservices? Because when you have over 400 engineers working on a single code base, imagine what doing a release, a release is a ceremony, right? It's like this huge thing, you have-- >> It takes a many page calendar in order to do those things. >> Exactly, and so, what we really wanted to do is press into the microservices journey and say, okay, what if instead of having this huge oil tanker, you know, driving down the, you know, sailing down the ocean, what if we could be a bunch of speedboats, right, and use that analogy. And that's where cloud native comes in, because that's really what it's meant to do, right? A bunch of independent teams doing dev ops, you build it, you run it, right? You write the code, you run the code. And so, it plays right into to this, this ability to be very agile, give each team, you can imagine at a scale of 4000 engineers, you want little pizza team, you know, to be independent and do their own releases, and not have to coordinate all with each other. >> So, Jeff, which of the, you know, CNTF pieces are you using at Intuit, and I would like you to go in a little bit, you know, Kubernetes, a lot of people, it's like, oh well, I want portability, and it sounds like you're all in, primarily, on one public cloud, so that's probably not the first thing on your list, so, help us understand the landscape from your eyes. >> So, really it's about, it's about developer productivity. So yes, we do have this very good, strong partnership with AWS, and that is our public cloud provider. And so, the cloud-native technology, using, obviously, Kubernetes, obviously, you know, we're running Docker in the background for running the containers and all that infrastructure. We have our own open source called Argo, which we're using for deployments in the community, so we're contributing a little bit back to community, as well. We're using Istio and Envoy as a service match to really secure the interservice communications and support all the routing and whatnot. And we're also leaning very heavily now into serverless technologies, and so, we write our app, QBO or QuickBooks Online, as a stateful application, but we're realizing the power of having these really stateless small functions, and so we want to do that, as well. And the way we look at it as, Lambda is a fantastic technology for something like that, but the developer experience, we want the same developer experience for our containers that we do from our functions, right? And if you really think about it, it's just about deploying, it's how you deploy. Do I deploy into containers and then a pod structure, like in Kubernetes? Or do I deploy to a functions as a service? It should run on the infrastructure, and so, from a developer standpoint, from the end developer that's actually developing the applications and services that our customers are using, we want the declarative infrastructure of Kubernetes, we want the ease of deployment and of operations. You can just imagine a development team not having to learn the huge depth that's behind that Kubernetes, that developer experience is just unbelievable and second to none. And you can imagine these teams sitting around, you know, at lunch time, doing their release, something goes wrong, they're on the call, they're solving the problems for their customers, in fact, doing another release, if there's any problems. And so, that's where we really, really lean in heavily to these cloud technologies, the cloud-native technologies, so we can get even faster at the developers. >> Do you find that making it more accessible and having a consistent developer experience has, I guess, broadened the ability of your developers to iterate more rapidly, or is more about ensuring consistency across the board? In other words, is it a speed value for you or is it more about just consistency, so you can wind-up up-to-point to multiple architectures? >> It's really about both. We see, you know, agility is often confused with speed and velocity, but we see that enabling a developer to release code to production in just a few minutes is extremely, extremely powerful to the overall velocity because what they're more likely to do is they're more likely to experiment, be bold, try new things, and then get immediate feedback for the customer. There's this experimentation loop that you want it to move as fast as possible. And so, not only that, but to your second part about the consistency, for a company like Intuit with 4000 developers, you want mobility in your organizations, and so, you want someone to feel very natural going from one small pizza team to another, and have the same tools, the same deployment architecture, and the same thing, right? So, you're not retraining them on a ton of different technologies. >> Alright, so, Jeff, you know, what could the ecosystem, you know, the partners you're working with, the various ecosystem, what could they do to make your life easier? I mean, the one that comes to mind for me is, you know, today, serverless, you know, Lambda, specifically, and Kubernetes. There are some ways to get them, you know, work at little bit, but, you know, is that top of your mind or are there other things? >> That is actually really top of my mind. We have a lot of teams experimenting with Lambda. We're running huge workloads in Lambda, but we're very much worried about this. If there's teams working on that and it's very, it's very fragmented. Some teams are deploying Lambdas off their laptops, other teams are, you know, using CICD processes. And so, we want that experience to be consistent, secure and everything. And so, as it moves to more production workloads, right, we would really like the Kubernetes and the CNCF Foundation to really have a story about serverless itself. I think it's probably more aptly called functions as a service or running functions. And I think a lot of thing happens is that it's treated as a versus. It's like, oh, I'm going to skip over that containers to Kubernetes thing and go to serverless, because it's versus, right? It's not versus, it's a choice for the developer about what to I want to deploy in functions, in short-running functions, or do I want to deploy in containers? Everything else up to that point is the same. And so, I'd really like to see, and that, as my role on the Technical Oversight Committee, that's something I'm really focused on for the end users 'cause I see that a lot in the end user's communities. They're dealing with the same things that we are on that functions as a service. >> Alright, so, Jeff, before I let you go, Intuit's an award winner, so, congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> I want final word from you. Talk a little bit about the award and two, talk your peers that might be, you know, they've heard about Kubernetes, but, you know, we're into the, we've crossed the chasm in the majority, but that means there's a lot of people that are still relatively early. What do you recommend to them, what tips would you give them, and start with the award though. >> Yeah, so, we're extremely honored to be the CNCF end user award winner. Our cloud journey has been a really interesting one that came really out of a, also, out of an acquisition that we did of some fantastic Kubernetes experts about 14 of them, a little company called Applatix that had this Argo project. And their mission was to make Kubernetes accessible to the overall community. And by acquiring them, we left their mission the same, but they're really helping Intuit, and we're not selling their, they're helping the community for free, when they were charging before as enterprise customers. And that's something I'd overall recommend for the peers and the companies thinking about going on a cloud native journey is it's about those people that you can find here at the conference, right, about those experts that you can hire, just a few of them, have them come into your company, explain these things, and it turns the entire company around. We now have hundreds and hundreds of teams going through and onboarding, we call it modern SAS, internally, onboarding onto this technology because they started out with that nugget or that kernel. >> Alright, well, Jeff, modern SAS, love the story, thank you so much and thanks for joining us and we will see you later to talk about the TOC. >> Glad to be here, thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. >> For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, and that was Jeff Brewer from Intuit, we'll be back with lots more coverage and thank you for watching theCUBE. (dynamic digital music)

>> From San Francisco, it's The Cube Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are at Salesforce Dreamforce, they say a hundred and seventy thousand people have descended into downtown San Francisco, it's absolutely bananas. We found a little respite, a little oasis if you will. Couple doors down to the Thirsty Bear's, the Conga Connect West event, come on down they've rented out The Thirsty Bear for three days of, I just was told, free food, free drink and a lot of entertainment, also a lot of great Conga people as well, and The Cube's here, so come on by. We're excited to have, for our next segment, people that are really getting close to the customer because at the end of the day, it's really about the customer. So we've got Natasha Reid, she is the senior product management for Conga, good to see you. And also Justin Mongroo, the VP of sales excellence from Conga, also great to see you. >> Thanks. Before we get in I got to ask you, Justin, that is a great title, VP of sales excellence. I mean there really, it says something about what you think is important which is being good at selling, not a used car sales approach at all. How did you come up with that title and what does that personify for your team? >> Yeah, well I didn't come up the title but I think for us, Conga, what it means, sales excellence is about selling with integrity, our product provides real benefits to customers and so unlike a lot of products where they can't talk about the full set, sales excellence to us is being able really let the product shine and identify how it's going to help the businesses we work with. >> Right, and Natasha that's what I hear you spend a lot of your time with customers on. You know, you're product management, but you're using a lot of customer input to drive what you prioritize how you're kind of setting out your road map, what you're working on. >> Yes, absolutely. So, from a customer perspective, we really pride ourselves on customer interviews. There's really nothing that helps you understand what customers are doing and using with your products than watching them firsthand in their own environment, and it really just provides invaluable feedback to help drive where we take our products in the future. >> It's funny, we did the Intuit Quickbooks Connect show a couple years ago, we had Scott Cook on, and he used to talk about it at Intuit, they would just go, like you said, and sit and watch people engage with the application, not even surveys but actually see how users use it and it's interesting even if you watch someone else just use Excel, we all use it in a very different way, so that must be incredibly valuable feedback. >> Yes, I mean you really see the good parts of the application, you see the parts that maybe need improvement as well, but it's feedback that you really can't gather in any way except watching somebody. >> Right, I think it also is the philosophy that's very very different than kind of looking at the competitors all the time, if you listen to Andy Jassy or Jeff Bezos at Amazon who are just kicking tail and taking names, they're maniacally focused on what the customer wants. They don't really look at the competition, they don't really talk about the competition, they're always looking at that customer. What do they need, what do they need next, and you guys continuing to evolve your product line to kind of continue to go down that path. >> Well, and the reality is is the customer defines the product in a lot of cases, right? What better way to understand your market than to talk to the people who are already working with you and finding out what they want to buy next? >> Right, right. So you guys have some exciting announcements here at Salesforce this year, Salesforce is now integrating some of the Conga functionality inside of some of their core applications if you could give us a little bit more color on that. >> Sure, so we just launched Conga invoice generation for Salesforce billing, and Conga quote generation for Salesforce CPQ. So, these two products are taking the power of the flagship document generation product Conga Composer, and we're leveraging that functionality for very purpose-specific built document generation with Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce billing. >> That's pretty awesome. >> Yes, that is pretty awesome. >> So why did pick you guys? What were some of the feature sets, or working with Conga that helped Salesforce come to this decision? >> Sure, so Conga Composer, well known for best in class document generation, pixel perfect documents, so when you need to get your formatting just right, when you need very sharp, clean lines, et cetera, leveraging things like the ability to provide more information or merge more product line items into your documents, as well as supporting the formats that people want, things like Word and PDF. >> Yeah, and I would say in addition to the functionality, Salesforce also is able to trust just by seeing our customer experience through our net promoter score and our reviews online knowing that they could partner with us and that we would take care of our joint customers they way they want them to be. >> That's a pretty significant move by them to adopt your guys' technology as part of the core within some of their offerings >> It is, it's not something that Salesforce does often, so we're very proud and we're very grateful that they looked to us to help provide these solutions. I think another component of this is just ease of use. So very easy to install, Lightning-ready, very forward thinking in that capacity. >> Yeah, the Lightning thing is interesting, you get used to the old, "Who moved my cheese?" I was the old school front end on Salesforce and they finally made me jump over to Lightning, but I'm sure that opened up all types of new opportunities for you to deliver new functionality in that. >> It does, and I'll empathize with that sentiment. I think change is always hard, right? People always struggle a little bit when they're used to doing something one way and Lightning is a very different look and feel from Salesforce Classic. I will say though that once you move to Lightning, Salesforce has done a really great job of, Lightning is more than just a CRM, It helps you do your job better. It makes suggestions, they put a lot of work into UI, user interface and user experience, you don't have to think about how to do your job better, it actually just helps you do your job better. >> Right. >> So being able to build and develop on the Lightning framework is actually a tremendous benefit. >> It has been, and in the last piece you guys are sitting on a bunch of different pieces in this document life cycle, if you will. You don't call it that, but you're into the contracts, you're into the document generation, you're into the life cycle management, so all these things too, I imagine now are coming together in a more kind of synchronized, cohesive way. >> Well I mean it's really if you think about the customer's story they need a generated document to communicate with their customers before they are a customer, and then they need to do a quote to show them how much it's going to cost, and they may or may not need to negotiate that and then they need to sign it, and every business has this sort of interaction with their customers, from, "Here's what we do." to "Do you like it "enough to buy it from us?" To, "Here's how we make it legally binding". I mean that's business, and Conga has met our customers along every stage of that journey that they go through in making a customer a customer, and doing that in a visually stimulating, professional way. >> So, fun fact about Conga Sign, our e-signature product we launched in February of this year. E-signature was the #1 feature request, or problem to solve that the conga customer base has provided in the last couple of years. So, everybody wanted e-signature. We listened, we heard, and we built you e-signature. >> So how long did it take you to get it out, from the time you decided, okay we'll go ahead? >> Well, as the original product manager I can actually answer that very specifically. So, we started building in July of last year and we launched on February thirteenth of this year. >> So, less than a year? >> Yes. >> Definitely less than a year. >> Okay, great. And just final thoughts on this event? Dreamforce, obviously a huge event for you guys, big investment in this Thirsty Bear celebration at Connect West. What do you hope to get out of this week, what are you excited to see from both the Salesforce folks across the street, as well as this kind of gathering with all your customers? >> You know, for me I hope to learn. I want to learn what our customers are interested in, I want to learn what our reps are seeing in the market as they walk around, and what other businesses are doing, and then learn from the ecosystem and what tools are available that we can use ourselves to better help our customer which is our employees. >> My favorite part of Dreamforce is actually the Conga booth at the Moscone main hall. So we actually get lots of our customers who come to find us, who come to find specific people. They'll come and ask for, "Hey, this support person "helped us", and they'll actually identify that person by name, or "Hey, this professional "service person helped us, can I meet them? "Are they here?" And it's just incredibly gratifying, like it's very difficult to describe. You have literally hundreds of people coming to find you to just say, "Thank you, we love your products, "it makes my life so much easier, "what else are you guys doing?" >> That's great, and it's always so gratifying to know that there's always someone on the other side that appreciates the work and it's always fun when you get some kind of an electronic relationship, to cement that with a face and a voice and a name and a handshake. Well, thanks again for stopping by and congratulations on the big announcement. >> [Natasha And Justin] Thank you. >> Alright, he's Justin, she's Natasha, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube. We're here at Conga Connect West at Salesforce at Thirsty bear, see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Lauren Cooney, and welcome back to theCUBE. Today we have Jeff Frick with us, who is the general manager of theCUBE, and we're here to learn about what goes on at theCUBE, what the business is like, some of the most fun aspects of what he does, and go from there. >> Jeff: Great to be here. >> Thank you so much. So, Jeff, starting out, really, when did you join theCUBE, and really what are your goals and aspirations for theCUBE as you look to business going forward now? >> My first CUBE gig was, I've known John for a long, long time, reached out. It was actually Splunk.conf 2012 in the Cosmo, I'll never forget, and they needed an extra host, we were over-subscribed, and I went and did that show. I did it with Jeff Kelley, and was really touched by this format where you've got kind of this professional looking, newsy, opportunity for people to tell their story, most people don't ever get to tell their story in that context, which I thought was pretty cool. And then also just to personalize the people behind the tech because since Steve Jobs, and that genre of people, people want to know who the people are behind the technology. So not only the people that run the companies, but who creates it. I think Open-source had a lot to do with that where people are interested in other people, not just the tech for itself. And that's what I really like. >> You bring up a great point with stories, and luminaries, and visionaries. Can you talk about some of those folks that you've had on theCUBE, some of the best guests you've ever had? >> Oh my gosh, we've had so much. People ask me this all the time, I need to prepare my answer better. But like Scott Cook, from Intuit, was just phenomenal. Tremendously successful, still focused on the same core vision that he came up with when his wife was filling out her checkbook, writing checks, about just a better way to organize and manage cash. And that show is so inspirational because it's really a small business show pretending to be an accounting show. We've had Robert Gates on, I didn't get to interview Robert Gates, but served with many, many President's. We're really fortunate, we often get the keynotes. Fred Luddy, from ServiceNow, phenomenal founder, goofy, quirky. Maria Klawe who runs Harvey Mudd College, goofy, quirky, great personality. So there's just so many great individuals and then some that you don't know. We had, an original ServiceNow we had this little older lady who had got a ServiceNow POC through, it's some ancient company, I don't even remember what company it was, and it was just fascinating to me how this, you know, she wasn't young and hip and new and on top of things, was able to kind of see the vision, get it funded, get a project underway, and then eventually build into being a customer for them. And how she was able to do that, and what was the story, and how many peers out there are curious to know how they could do that for their company. And those, I love those stories. >> Those are great. And I think one of the things that we want to look at too is that we want to understand for the most part what are some of the bloopers that you've seen out there? What are some of the things that you've noticed that are funny or were oh my gosh, you know, while you were on air, while you were thinking about different things. Can you tell me a little bit about that? >> Well, of course, the classic one that we've referenced over and over and over, and if you've seen any of our promos you see, it was John Cleese. Ironically again, at another ServiceNow keynote he was doing their CIO Summit or something, and he came on and he basically decided he wanted to rewrite the end of the, it became a sketch, not an interview. And just stood up and threw his water all over John and Dave, fried Dave's laptop, and marched off the stage. Half the people there, we had a huge live audience, were laughing hysterically. The other half were petrified. Unfortunately, a number of those were the client senior executives who didn't really know, and we had to go out and do some investigation and find out he actually does it a lot to people. And in fact the guys ran into him later that night and he said, "Wasn't that fun, wasn't that fun?" So that's one that just jumps right off the page. Another great one was Michael North from the NFL was at an IBM event talking about how they build the schedule. And while the analytics are fine, and you run an algorithm and it can plug a bunch of numbers, it's really the softer side. You know, how do you leverage at that point a Peyton Manning versus a Tom Brady match up? Do you use it to leverage an existing relationship? Do you use it to build a new network? Do you use it in your feature presentation to get the most leverage from that asset? So a whole lot of kind of soft, softer sided things in terms of the decision making. Which I think is what's really interesting. >> Yeah, I think that's great. And I want to take it a little bit further into what are the business aspects of theCUBE? What do you do on a day to day basis? What are the things that matter the most for running this business? >> Big question. So most important area is our customers. So what customer, what value does theCUBE bring to people when they take us to their conference? >> Lauren: And who are the key customers? >> Well key customers, right. IBM, and we've mentioned ServiceNow, Splunk, EMC, Dell EMC now, Vmware and their ecosystem partners. So a lot of enterprise infrastructure, a lot of opensource, and a lot of applications. But really there's three key components to why people bring theCUBE and what we deliver when we're there. One of them is just great content. The format that we have, the conversational tone, the way that it all works, we just get people to say stuff that you wouldn't ever ask them to say, especially on the customer reference ones. So the content is great and, you know, conferences are looking for more great content. The second really is our community and our distribution. You know we are a media company, we're super active in the community, we leverage a lot of social tools. We try to ask interviews and get information that's topical and evergreen and can be used often and over and over, and really run that out through a number of different channels and different formats. And then the third thing, which we didn't use to talk about as much, but we really do now, it's really the theater of our presence. There's something to bright lights and cameras when theCUBE is at an event. It's like, oh, theCUBE guys are here. And we hear it all the time, theCUBE guys are here. >> Everyone likes to be a star. >> Everybody wants to be a star. And it does a little bit of, I won't say validates for the greater good, but certainly within our community when we're at an event it's a signal that something's going on, something's exciting here, theCUBE guys are here, and we're covering it. And we hear that over and over. We have people stop us literally in an elevator to say, I look at your guys' upcoming sheet to make some decisions as to where I should plan my schedule time. And, or we've also heard, you know, I just wait and watch theCUBE all day, I can't go, I just have theCUBE running in the background. And get a taste of not necessarily what happened in all the breakouts and all the keynotes and all the other stuff, but we generally get all the same people who run all the keynotes. You're getting those same folks, but you're getting them in a conversational tone, talking often about many of the similar topics, it's just a different way to get that message across. >> So how do you grow the community further? So you talk about the community you have, you talk about the community that's at large right now. How are you looking to grow your user base and your community further? >> Right, so it's really kind of along two angles. One is kind of this natural bundling of subsets within our existing community. And that's like our Women in Tech coverage that we started years ago. Honestly, you know things were kind of slowing again in November, so we're like, you know, there's some great women, they're not getting highlighted, let's go out and do some Women in Tech interviews and integrate that. So that's kind of more of a horizontal play if you will. In terms of more vertical plays, we're trying to get a little bit out of the application infrastructure space and more into the app space. So autonomous vehicles, autonomous drones, commercial drones, we've done a lot of just app shows as companies do their own shows versus more of an industry show. So like I said, I mentioned QuickBooks Connect was fun. So really getting into some of these other areas that are more application specific and not just kind of infrastructure, per se which is the roots. >> So when you so application specific, are you looking at for example, you know Microsoft for example is a very large company. They have application space. Is that what you're looking for? >> Love to do some Microsoft shows, yeah, we have a Microsoft build and Ignite, they have a number of shows. >> What about Salesforce? Salesforce is doing some really interesting stuff around applications and community and the whole nine yards. >> Right, so before we didn't really go after Salesforce per se, 'cause it was just really big and we were just really small, we were trying to get a lot of our processes and structure in place. Since then we actually covered one Salesforce lightly a couple years back. A friend of mine, Lynn Voinovich, was a CMO and we covered the kick off. >> I love Lynn. >> You know Lynn? But we need to get back to Salesforce, that's one that we should be at, it's an important show, we should be there. >> Great, so let's have, let's kind of end here with a fun fact. So tell me a fun fact about your job or something that you do that perhaps people don't know about. >> A fun fact about my job. Just, it's just a lot. >> Lauren: Let's make it fun, not a lot of work. >> Basically our job is kind of like the proverbial duck, right? When we run production, we do about a hundred shows a year. There is, I always tell people it's like catering. There's about a thousand details that you kind of have some idea about, and there's a thousand ideas, there's a thousand issues that you have just no control. So being able to dance, being able to be like that proverbial duck that looks smooth, and cool, calm, and collected on top, but it's really pumping pretty hard underneath, you know we've got a lot of people, we've got a lot of back end processes, we have a lot of dancing that happens to try to make it really smooth for the guests, really smooth for the consumer. And we screw up and things happen. But I think we're pretty good, and we're constantly trying to improve our process. >> Great, thank you so much, and thank you for being here again. >> Thank you. >> I really appreciate your time. And we'll be back shortly on theCUBE with something that is coming up in about 15 minutes. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, California. In the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE. Covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now here're your hosts. Jeff Frick and John Walls. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back here in San Jose, we're live at the Convention Center for the second day of QuickBooks Connect 2016. A thriving community, 5000 plus attendees here enjoying where there have been some fascinating keynotes and breakout sessions. And it's our pleasure to bring you some of the brightest and best minds in the QuickBooks community. And we have that with us today in the form of Jim McGinnis, who's the Vice President of Product Management at ProConnect. Jim, thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. >> I got to tell you, I wasn't aware of your stature until Jeff informed me of last year when the two of you met. He said, "I could barley have a conversation with him because the man's a rock star". People kept coming up, they wanted to take selfies with him and it was nonstop. So apparently, your cache goes well beyond theCUBE. >> It's very kind, but the truth is, the rock stars are our 150,000 plus pro-advisors from around the world. These guys are making a huge difference in the small businesses' lives. They come here, they connect with small businesses, with each other, et cetera. Sometimes it feels a little silly, but I'm just honored to get to spend time with them. >> But they wanted the selfie so good for you. They're not asking for Jeff and John. They're asking for Jim. >> In the near future I'm sure. >> Give me an idea, first off, your feelings about the vibe. You heard us talking about, a little bit ago but your thoughts about what you're seeing here and the growth of this show over the last three years. >> I was having a conversation, you know this started on the back of a notebook three years ago where we said, "We're getting big enough that we believe we need to have a show to bring folks together". But we want to be different. We want to be about making connections. So the name QB Connect was born. We wanted to be the place where developers, small businesses, and accountants come together and meet. The vibe is phenomenal. The vibe it starts early Monday morning when we do the accountant kickoff. They go into training. A lot of them get certified in QuickBooks online and advance certifications as well. It continues the next day, yesterday, with these fabulous keynote speakers. Last night with a great band, Third Eye Blind. Sometimes these bands say, "Am I seriously playing for a bunch of accountants"? But they always come away and say, "That is one of the best "shows we've ever done because the enthusiasm, the excitement". Everybody loves to be here. And then today continued. We had fabulous speakers on the stage again. People like Tony Hawk and Simone Biles. >> Yeah, so what do you want when people leave here, and we're going to get into accounting and what's going on certainly in your world. But I'm just curious. The takeaway that you want people to have as they go back to all corners of the globe, frankly. What do you want them to do, and how do you want them to feel about QuickBooks when they go back and do their 12-hour day jobs? >> Absolutely. You know, I want them to feel empowered to really make a difference in their clients' lives, which is super fun. There was a quote yesterday from America who said, "You are modeling possibilities for someone else and you may not even realize it". And boy, our pro-advisors from around the world really model possibilities. They save small businesses all the time. In fact, 89% of small businesses say they're more successful because they work with and accountant. How do I want them to feel about QuickBooks and Intuit? I really want them to feel like we're their partners. Scott Cook founded this company believing that we're here to make a difference. To change our customer's financial lives so profoundly they can't imagine going back. When I talked to accountants last night, today, that's what they tell me. They want to change their small businesses' financial lives so profoundly, they can't imagine not working with an accountant. We're perfect partners. That's what I'd like them to take back. >> It's so funny right? The dirty little secret everyone thinks an accounting show. It's not an accounting show. >> No. >> It's a small business show. It's really a building businesses and partnerships, and really creating that foundation for other people to build from to be more successful in really pursuing their passions. I think that's why the energy is so strong. >> You said it well. It's all about possibilities and it's all about connections. >> Excellent. So lets talk about some big global trends that are not only impacting QuickBooks and Intuit, and your customers, and the accountants but everyone all over the place. The two big ones that have recently just overtaken everything, mobile and cloud. Huge impact on what you can build, how you can deliver it, how people consume it. How have those really changed what you guys have built and delivered at QuickBooks? >> That's great. I'll start with the cloud side because I think that's where it all starts. All those desktops, they're coffins. The data is buried underneath your desk and it's unusable in so many ways. When the data moves up into the cloud, now you can make connections between industries. You can do industry benchmarking. Now the data can just flow seamlessly from one application, like QuickBooks online, through trial balance to another application, like our ProConnect Tax online. We're able to connect up all these fabulous developers who are building solutions that we would never be able to build the creativity that we see and all plug in this online ecosystem. It changes everything. On the mobile side, boy isn't it fun to see all the tweets going by? Our reputations are being built for us. The best we can do is curate them at this stage. The other is it's anytime, anywhere isn't it? This idea that you can make an appointment with your accountant and he or you would drive across town to get some bit of information. It's just too slow in today's world. Mobile enables us to collaborate constantly with our accounting professionals and the accounting professionals to collaborate with their clients. >> And really in a different kind of form and function because mobile is quick. I got two minutes standing in line at the grocery store at Safeway. I got a couple of minutes while I'm filling up my car full of gas. I'm waiting for the kids to come out of the coach's meeting after the soccer games. So it's a lot more frequent little bits of connecting in the way that we use mobile apps to interact with our world. >> Absolutely. Think about all the productivity that's unlocked with mobile. Usually it's a simple question. I need something now. Make an appointment, drive across town, it's miserable. Instead you can ask a question and all that's successful because the data's in the cloud. >> Jeff: Right. >> So what do you do then in terms of, at least with a client base that has a reputation for being a bit slow to move. And there's not an enormous number of early adopters, it's almost like show me. But yet when you have these new possibilities like moving to the cloud, migration there, people are going to get left behind if they don't. How do you convey that sense of urgency and get them to convert and get them to adopt and take advantage of these great products and services that you're developing for people? >> I'm going to answer that by saying I say it ain't so. I think accountants and accounting professionals are some of the most forward people that I've known. Now, they have to be responsible. They have to look out for their clients. And they're under a lot time pressure. I think that if there's been some slowness in moving it's because we haven't gone fast enough to create applications that really save them the time. Software's a tough business, folks. Because before in my previous life I was in Proctor & Gamble. You knew the benefit up front. Software comes with immediate pain and uncertainty about whether it's really going to deliver the promise, the benefit that's there. What we have to do is we have to help show accountants that the possibilities are there and give them immediate satisfaction that the time savings that they seek is there. When we do that, we've already seen it. They move quickly. >> So you're kind of talking about, in a way I think, this firm of the future concept, right? That as far as where we're going in this 21st century. So talk a little more about that and what it means, brass tax terms. When the rubber hits the road here, in terms of the products that you're providing people and the changes you think the customer's going to have to make in order to really fulfill this vision of the firm of the future. >> That's exactly right. Sometimes our accounting professionals or pro-advisors come to us and say, "Can't you make it simpler? "Can't you break it down into a few steps "so I can follow a roadmap step-by-step "and get there?" And we've done that a little bit with our concept of firm of the future. The first step is the importance of getting online. That first client, that's a little scary. Put your next client online, see what its like, enjoy the benefits, learn the new operating systems, learn the new workflows. And then the benefits start to unlock. You can manage them all in QuickBooks online account. You can start tying in the different applications. You can see all of your clients there. And as you get your second and your third, you start to enjoy that. The second part of our pilar I would say, the firm of the future, is we do believe that the billable hour it's not scalable. Of all of the time savings that's coming by moving to an online platform, gosh, you'd have to have a lot more clients in order to make as much money as you're making today. We believe accounting professionals deserve to get paid for the value they create. And that means moving to fixed fee pricing, it means offering a range of services, that means going beyond just typing in data and compliance to actually creating more value through advisory services. And then that's the third pilar right there. Once you're online, and you're making money by creating value through advisory services, you need to get your name out there. Become a specialist in a certain vertical. Help people around the country, even around the globe, know the value that you can create. And they'll flock to you. We've seen little companies start up with two people, this one in Canada, has gone up to I think more than 500 clients in less than three years because they followed the firm of the future approach. >> That's really interesting. It was apart of the keynote too where a lot of the entrepreneurs said they started with their family accountant or family friend who didn't really have a specialization in the industries that they decided to build. Then at some point they had to flip because the value of accounting is not data entry. And it's kind of old school that automation should help you get rid of the redundant low value activity to free you up on the higher value activity which is asset planning, and tax planning, and future planning, and inventory planning, and the things where the accountant can bring much more value to the relationship that aren't tied to how many hours did it take to prepare your return. >> That's absolutely right. We say that the most important feature we can add into QuickBooks is an accountant. Sometimes there's some fear of technology, I have to share what I read recently in the Wall Street Journal which is, machines have been able to beat humans at chess. But there's a concept called centaur chess, which is half machine half human. When a chess expert is combined with a computer can beat any computer. And that's where we are in the accounting profession too. All this technology is fabulous, but where it really starts to sing is when it's combined with an accounting professional who understands it and leverages to give advice only a human being can give. >> Alright so a couple more trends now that are coming, get your reaction. Machine learning, big one, big data obviously it's been around awhile but the machine learning and the augmented intelligence, AI. Some people say artificial intelligence other people say there's nothing artificial about it. >> That's right. >> It should be augmented intelligence. The impacts of those on your software and your customers? >> Great question. Let's be specific. Things like chart of accounts. We can do a pretty good job of estimating what a chart of accounts should be for a given vertical. But they always get modified by the accountants because they know better than we do. When a few of them start to modify it and few more, pretty soon we can leverage the wisdom of the accounting profession crowd to get the very best chart of accounts for any given vertical. What a great opportunity. And then you think about benchmarks. I was talking to somebody before about when all of the plumbing industry is on QBO. And accountants can go in and say this is what accounts receivable should look like for plumbing, for a plumber. Think of the power of that. But one thing we know is every small business says the same thing, but I'm different. No problem, tell me how you're different? And in fact, we'll find 10,000 others who're different, just like you. >> Just like you, right. (all laughing) So, just going forward, you've go tax pros on one side, you've got accountants on the other, never the twain shall meet. Now you're bringing them together. And the importance of that, the value of that in terms of making sure there's an integration, there's a collaboration for small firms? >> In my new role as product manager for the ProConnect group, that's the part I'm really really excited about. Last year we launched QuickBooks online trial balance so that the data flows into the trial balance and from the trial balance mappings can be done and it flows directly into the tax software with a little modification, a click of the button, you can file right from the tax software. But our accountants told us, I don't understand. I don't want to run two different client lists when somethings going on in the tax side of it. I want to know about it where I do my work, in QuickBooks online accountants. So this year we've integrated the tax software right into QuickBooks online accountant. And now we're dreaming a little bit. Where as we talk about moving to advisory services, when it's a separate business impacts in my books, impacts in the decisions I make here, then get handed over the tax side of the shop. Now when it's all one application, those insights come back from tax and say, I wouldn't do it that way. I'd lease that. I wouldn't buy it because you're going to be in a much better position from a tax standpoint. And gosh, your business has really taken off. You need to think differently about your quarterly estimates. Because otherwise you're going to find yourself in a cash flow situation come October. >> So you're getting ahead. You're not looking after the fact and reacting. >> It's advisory service. It moves tax from being a once a year event to being an ongoing relationship. That's exciting. >> Well Jim, it's that kind of vision that I think, makes you a rock star. And if you got time for a quick selfie. (all laughing) If we all just kind of, you know... >> I'm all in. >> Jim McGinnis, Glad you could join us here. I look forward to seeing you down the road too. >> Thank you very much. >> Jeff: Best of luck to you. >> Jim: I've certainly enjoyed it. >> It's a little blurry, we'll have to do another one here. Back with more here from San Jose right after this. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, California in the heart of silicon valley, it's theCUBE! Covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now here are your hosts Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> Welcome back to San Jose, California. We continue here on theCUBE our coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016. Of course theCube is the flagship broadcast here on SiliconANGLE TV where we extract the signal from the noise and I tell you what, with our next guest, we have a lot of signal to bring you. Scott Cook, the founder and the chairman of the executive committee at Intuit. Scott, thank you for being with us. We really appreciate the time and have been looking forward to this for quite some time once we knew you were going to be on theCube. It's good to have you. >> Good to be here. >> Let's talk about just first off, look at where you are now, right? 30-some odd years. It's been quite a ride I would assume for you. >> Yeah, it started, you know Tom and I got together and then there were two of us and then we eventually had seven of us in a basement. Well they called it the garden level. But the only part of the garden you could see would be the roots and the gophers. (laughter) And then we hit bad times and the things ... We just couldn't get money. We couldn't get sales so we shrunk down to four people. Couldn't pay salaries. It was pretty ugly. And from that, to look at 5,000 people here today. 8,000 employees in the company. When I started the biggest PC software company was 160 employees, and they were huge! Oh these giants! (laughter) >> How do I manage all this? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Well a quote that we've heard a couple of times today. We heard on the keynote stage. About the corporate philosophy of we fall in love with your problems, not our solutions. And is that the driving force you think? I mean, why you've made it through 33 years? >> I think yeah. Yeah, I actually think that's pretty important not just to the success of Intuit and QuickBooks and Mint and TurboTax, but to business in general. My theory is what great entrepreneurs do is they find the intersection of two circles. So think of a Venn diagram and the intersection. One circle is what are people's biggest, most important unsolved problems? Not the problems that are already solved by someone else. Find the ones that aren't solved yet. And then look for the ones that we can solve. Cause you can't solve everything. But look where we can apply the best technologies in the world. What's in that intersection? And focus there. >> And in some of the research to get ready for this. You've talked about really focusing on the important stuff. You gave a great example in that Khan Academy talk about there's really only 1 1/2 things that you should really be focusing on to really move the ship forward. And that was a very great insight. >> Yeah, you know all of of us have the desire to do too many things. You get groups. You've got 10 people in a room, they each have their ideas and it's tempting to shoot at too many targets. And those 10 targets are not of equal importance. You got to go through and kind of rigorously and be disciplined and say what's the 1 1/2 most important? And stay relentlessly focused on that. >> And then how is your role changed? As time has passed and you're no longer the CEO. Now you're chairman head of the executive board. How have you kind of learned to still keep your hands on it but in kind of a little bit more of a distant role? >> Well, first of all, thank goodness for leaders like Brad Smith, Sasan Goodarzi who heads up our small business group, that's really the host of this show. Thank goodness for great leaders like that. So my role's changed a ton. I work really on two areas now which is strategy and coaching our entrepreneurs. So strategy over to Brad and our other leaders. I'm trying to help our leaders see the future and make the big strategic calls. What's really most important? How do we know? And then work with our entrepreneurs. We're a collection of entrepreneurs basically. We've got a couple hundred entrepreneurial projects going on inside the company at any one time. And each one of those is like a little startup. I mean, they've got a customer in mind. They've got a problem they're trying to solve to improve people's lives so fundamentally. And there are challenges. So helping grow our entrepreneurs and then grow the culture around them to allow great entrepreneurs to invent things to change the world and do that from within Intuit with a huge reach to be able to get the inventions out in the hands of millions. And change the lives of tens of millions of people. >> So, over the course of the run of the company, they haven't all been home runs. >> Scott: Oh yeah. >> Right. So how have you learned from those swings and misses? And applied them to the small businesses that you're serving? Who are swinging and missing on a regular basis and you're trying to narrow that margin, right? Trying to make them more successful. >> Scott: Yeah. >> So what did you learn you think maybe through your attempts about that culture of trying basically. >> I think maybe the most important thing really dovetails with what you just said. Early on, when the company was, before we even had our first product out, we'd build a version of it and then we would bring in test audiences of it and have them test it to see if they could figure it out without us saying anything. And they couldn't. So then we'd redesign it and then we'd test again. And then we'd redesign it and test again. Over time kind of lost some of that dedication to running experiments. And it became whose opinion? And you'd build, and it was the loudest opinion in the room. Or the boss' opinion. And that produced a number of failures. Things that just didn't work. Customers didn't buy it. Or they bought it and it didn't it didn't produce the desired effect when they bought it. So the thing I've learned about life and companies is to set up a culture where you make decisions based on fast cheap experiments. That very thing you were talking about. If you got an idea, figure out, okay, what's a leap of faith assumption, let's go try it. And don't debate it. Try it. And then we learned from trying. Oh, a bunch of those don't work. And then we learned from the things. Why didn't it work? And that teaches us something we didn't know before. That maybe the fulcrum, the pivot, to a new idea. And some of those do work or most of it worked. But other pieces didn't. And we learned by doing. Not by debating in a conference room. So to set up your company so that people throughout the company can take their idea and run the experiment. That produces great entrepreneurs and great learning. A continuous stream of learning. I guess the learning begins when you first get real people trying your idea for real. >> Let me follow up. Cause the other thing you talk about is that often comes from the youngest and the newest employees. Which is completely antithesis to a kind of hierarchical structure. Where these are the people that you should be listening and giving them the opportunity within this comfortable framework to do these experiments. >> Absolutely. Sometimes the very freshest ideas come from the people farthest from the boss. Newest in the company. Closest to the customer. But typically in a hierarchy, whose got the least clout? Whose ideas are the least listened to? It'd be the new person, the young person. >> Jeff: Right. >> And so part of the genius of running a company of decision by experiment is that everyone's ideas can be run as an experiment. The boss' idea. The CEO's idea. And the person that's new. We should be testing each of those. Except in a crisis where you got to make snap decisions. And hopefully those aren't very often. You should run the company so that each good idea can be tested, regardless of where it comes from. And then the great thing is, then you get the best ideas from all your folks and they learn from doing. If their idea doesn't work, now they learn from that. Ooh, okay. I thought it was going to do X, it did Y. Why? What didn't I know? That's where learning comes from. Learning doesn't tend to come from the successes, learning comes from the things that didn't work. >> So, I think we've all seen good executives. How they operate. They hire good people, right? That's ... You have a vision and then you hire people who surround that and amplify that vision. So when you're looking for people or when you've been looking for people to work with you. What's that common thread? Or what are the traits that you've looked for the most to think that's a good fit? Or this is the person that I want on my team. In order to carry on this vision to where it's expanded to where it is today. >> Let me break that into two buckets. There are a set of things which are unique to particular career paths. So certain things from engineers might be different than certain things from a salesperson or a marketer or a finance person. So let's set that aside. Let's cover the commonalities. I think there's a few things. When you think about the people you've most loved working with or for. There are people who are great creative problem solvers. Instead of seeing a problem or barrier and giving up or being unglued by it. Can figure out okay, how're we going to solve that problem? And then there's people who are there to serve. Where it's not all about them. I've got a thing that I tell our folks that others won't care how much you know until they first know how much you care. So if one of our speakers today said it. If your first job is to serve yourself you're not going to go very far. Because who wants to work with someone who's self serving? Who wants to buy from a company that's only looking after its own front P&L? Job one is you got to serve who you're serving. The customer or the person of the company who you serve. So we look for people who are really motivated by the outside to try to do right by the customer. I think you look for people who are achievement oriented. Who get stuff done. Who make things happen. Do you want to work with somebody who always needs to be dragged along? No. You want to work with somebody who's pulling you along. Who's getting a lot done. So you go, wow, that person gets a lot done. So I think those are pretty core. Solve the creative problems. Have the passion and energy to serve, do what's right for the customer. And then get a lot done. >> And then you've talked about the curse of success. And avoiding the curse of success. And you guys have done that, obviously. So what are the kind of the lessons to say fresh? This started as a checkbook register and now the future of payments and mobile and the options are just tremendous. Bitcoin, who knows where that's going. So, as the future keeps evolving, how do you stay fresh? How do you keep the team fresh? How do you not rest on your laurels even though you have 5,000 fans walking around San Jose convention center today? >> This is a real challenge for companies. Because success turns organizations. It makes them dumb and slow. It's tempting, the thing I would avoid is it's tempting to look at your achievements. To look through the rear view mirror. And look at boy, how much we've achieved. But that only makes you self satisfied. In fact, with an organization you need to do the opposite. Look to where we want to be. Look to where we should be. And we're here. And then say, well shoot we are not very far. So for example, and I define these in customer terms. For example, we started our first product helped somebody manage a checkbook and pay bills. If you look at it really, the problem of paying bills has gotten worse. It used to be all bills came in the mail. So you had a little physical reminder. Some come in the mail, some you get by e-mail with invoices from some people. Some you go online and find a website. You pay some at a bank website. Maybe you go to the biller, you pay some. You write checks for some. It's much harder now. We have not actually got to the point. When our nirvana is you never worry about a bill. And you're never late. And you're never overdraft. The overdraft rate in the country is around 30% of households have a late payment during the year from which they get fees. And the overdraft rates, the overdraft charges can be $30, $35. We have not solved that yet. We got to look and say with all that we've done, that's what we should have done. So we've got a team working on that right now. Because we got re-focused on it. So we'll be coming out in December with stuff in there. Look at tax. Tax many people would say is one of our best businesses. And it is. Look at all we've achieved. But, look at the reality. People are still spending a lot of time on tax. Who wants to be spending time typing stuff into tax software? Does anybody? (laughter) No. There's not an accountant, there's not a consumer. We haven't solved that yet guys. There are still a hundred million people in the country typing stuff in to systems to do taxes every February, March and April. That's where we want to be. Is ultimately there is no typing in. All that information you have that goes in your tax return goes in automatically. And if you're an accountant, it all goes in for your clients automatically. So that you can focus on the high level stuff and not the drudgery. So, viewed from the lens of really what life should be. What's our aspiration? Our ideal? Keep people focused on that. And it sure has helped motivate us. I mean, we should be finding a lot of money for small businesses. And we're launching, announcing today ways that we help small businesses find more money. We should be eliminating the drudgery of running a small business. Nobody wants to do the book work. Instead, they want to do what they love to do in business. It could be working with clients. It could be the craft of doing the business. It could be selling new business. Every business person has something they love to do. And it's not doing the books. And that yet, people still have to do it. We want to have it on your phone so you don't have to do the books. It's done automatically. And you got a question, boop boop, there's the answer. >> So you mentioned the phone. Is that the next big growth opportunity? Mobile this is top priority with so many different sectors right now. >> Yeah, yeah. It's the growth today. In fact, every new feature and new benefit that Sasan Goodarzi showed today in his keynote address. Every one of 'em, he showed it on a mobile phone. Every one. It's the fastest growing. TurboTax the great consumer business. It's the fastest growing platform by far. So yeah, if you can take stuff off a desktop and put it so automatically that you can just get on your phone, say, okay, yep, do it. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, so that's where we're aiming a lot of our innovation. And these are amazing platforms. A simple example, the fastest growing form of employment in the United States and in fact, in the world is self employed. Where you think of an Uber driver or someone like that. People who work as consultants, contractors, they work for themselves. They've got to keep track of all their business expenses. Or they lose that money on their tax returns. Money out of their pocket. They got to keep track of every individual business expense which of course, they co-mingle with their personal checking, personal credit card. And they got to keep track of every mile they drive for business. And keep it separate with contemporaneous records that the IRS requires with the starting odometer reading, the ending odometer reading, and the destination and what it was for. Well you can imagine that's such a pain in the butt. So many independent business people, freelancers fail. Or they do some but not others. And that's money right out of their pocket. Thousands of dollars they don't get. They should get that they deserve. So we've devised and a team really creative work, QuickBooks Self Employed. It sits on your phone in your pocket. It reads what's coming from your bank and your credit cards and anytime you're stopped at a stop light or you've got two minutes before a meeting starts. You can go through and say oh, that was a business expense, business, business. That was personal, personal. It's that fast. And then you get complete records for your taxes. Oh then mileage. There's lots of software out there that'll track your mileage but it does by pinging the GPS. GPS takes battery. You ping the GPS all day long, what happens? Zhoom. >> Goodbye phone. >> Bye bye phone. So it's worthless. Our guys we launched that. Quickly found out that people stopped using it because it drained their battery just like everyone else. So, three clever engineers. Together with a couple others came up with a really clever idea which we've patented now. And it tracks your location without pinging your GPS all day long. So it doesn't drain your battery. So now you had complete records. It can detect when you're driving and where you started, where you finished. How many miles. Keeps perfect record, just as the IRS requires. And then you just have to tell it which are business, which are personal. And then it learns. Which one are business trips. So that over time, it knows when you're driving on business and you don't have to do anything. You get complete tax records. We've got businesses using it who get on average $7,000 of tax deductions. $7,000 of tax deductions. Because of the way it tracks. >> And you're taking advantage of the platform. You're taking advantage of the accelerometer. >> Yes. >> More importantly I think. The thing about mobile that most people don't maybe consciously think of is the way we interact with it as you said is little bits of time here, there, and everywhere. >> Scott: Yes. >> It's not the sit down thing. But I think what I think is most exciting about this show is it's a lot of talk about technology. But at the end of the day, it's really more about business. And small business. And small medium size business. And getting business done. >> Scott: Yes. >> And letting people do those dreams like the gal that was on the keynote. >> Scott: Yes. >> Letting her build her company and her franchise. And not have to worry about am I getting all the right deductions. >> That's right. I think the technology is the enabler. But it's all to enable what? What are we trying to deliver? And you saw it, in the kind of lead of slides. We're trying to fuel the success of small business. This is all about success. The technology's an enabler but that's not the center, the star of the show. The star of the show are small businesses and how they succeed. And how the suite of things that hundreds of developers and hundreds of software entrepreneurs who all build for the QuickBooks ecosystem. The new methods, and new ways to drive small business success. And at the end of the day, we don't measure ourselves with software. We measure ourselves with how much more money did we make small businesses? How much time did we save them so they could do what they love? How did we help them grow their business? Running a small business is a, and I know from starting Intuit, it absorbs who you are. You identify with that business. It is your representation to the world. To your spouse, to your in-laws. And if that business is successful, it's something about you that's irreplaceably positive. If that business is struggling, it strikes to the core. I mean, you feel bad. You look bad. So helping businesses succeed. And move them from mediocrity to success is such a home run for the psychology of this growing part of our economy. For each individual, it's your report card on yourself. And we can help make those report cards much better. That's our mission. That's how we're going to change the world so, so dramatically. People can't imagine going back. >> I'd say that you've already changed it dramatically. And it is exciting to hear about the next steps but this whole blend of strategy and execution and culture you're being commended for. It's just a great example of all those factors coming together and make great things happen for a lot of people around the globe so congratulations for that and thank you for being with us Scott. We appreciate the time here on theCube. >> Jeff, John thank you very much. This was a pleasure. >> Jeff: Thank you. >> You bet. Back with more from San Jose in just a bit. You're watching theCube here on SiliconANGLE TV. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> And welcome back here to San Jose, the Convention Center. We're on theCUBE to continue our coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016. We're here for the rest of today and onto tomorrow for two days at this great event, third year event, that is now going on with 5,000 attendees. So record attendance, great keynotes this morning, another keynote session coming up, by the way, in just about a half hour or so. We'll have some guests after that and then continue our coverage here tomorrow on theCUBE. Along with Jeff Frick, I am John Walls. We're joined by Yumi Clark who's the SVP of product development at Capital One. And Yumi, thank you for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> First time, right? >> Yes. >> On theCUBE. >> Yes, first time. >> So Capital One, what are you doing here? In a good way, of course. But what do you find of interest from a professional standpoint with the small business crowd? >> Yes, so Capital One is here because we want to meet our customers where they are today, and many of our customers are actually here at the show, QuickBooks Connect. Whether they be accountants or small business owners themselves, we are looking to build products for them and solutions for them based off of the pains that they have and the problems that they're having. So we're here to do much of a data gathering exercise and see what we can provide to our users. >> So I assume this is an ongoing process, right? This isn't just a one-time hit. Generally speaking, what do you hear from the people with whom you work or that you're supporting, in terms of their pain points for the services you provide and what you can do from a solutions standpoint? >> Yes, well actually here at QuickBooks Connect we have been doing some informal polls with the people that have been attending, and we often hear these types of things also as we're leading the businesses within the product development space. We're seeing a lot of the people talk about the passions that they have with regards to the business, and oftentimes they start the business because of their passion. They're actually not starting it because they want to start a business itself. Because oftentimes those businesses have a lot of administrivia tied to them in process. That's not what they're doing to start that business. They want to make sure that they're creating something that really speaks to them and speaks to their passions, and because of that, they've created a small business. >> But then, unfortunately, they have to tasks and they have to do accounting and they have to do payroll, they have to pay the vendors, and they have to get up from making whatever they're making and selling whatever they're selling to deal with the reality, and that's really where the opportunity at QuickBooks has done. But part of the thing they're trying to do is build this ecosystem not only to provide the tools, but really to provide other services to enable these folks to be successful. So within the Capital One world, as you look at small businesses as kind of a category, what are some of the unique challenges that they have that you guys are trying to help them with? How do you see the small business world as an opportunity? >> Yes, so in the same way, Capital One is also looking at that ecosystem. First and foremost what we do as a financial institution is provide very competitive savings and checkings and credit cards as part of our plethora of products that we offer. From a savings perspective, we have a 1% cash back, and from a credit card perspective we have a 2% cash back rate so that we're truly competitive from that perspective. In our recent surveys and the research that we've done, we've also seen that many of these small businesses, whether they're here or somewhere else, they have more than two bank accounts in order to run their small business. Also what we see is that they have anywhere between 10 to 12 different applications that they are stitching together to get their financial health of their small business right. Knowing that that's the problem, what we're doing at Capital One is helping them stitch that together. Not only do we have a competitive checking and savings accounts so that they can actually pay their bills and do the invoicing and the payroll, we are also looking at things to help them in future. And most recently in August what we did as Capital One is launch the Spark 401k service. 50% of all Americans either own or work for a small business so it's a huge crowd that needs to be addressed. Even though it's 50%, only 13% of those small businesses are offering some type of retirement benefit. And because of that we saw that as an opportunity and challenge that we can help resolve, and that's why we've launched the Spark 401k service this past August, which is specifically targeted to those small businesses so they can help not only themselves but the employees that work for them think about the future. >> So how has this changed the way you do business? Because you're looking for new products, you're looking for new services, you're looking to be more expansive in the kinds of things that you're offering, right? >> Yumi: Yes. >> But I'm sure the migration has... sometimes it's not natural. You're introducing new concepts to your workforce and to your people and so how's this impacted what Capital One does, in terms of looking to stretch yourself? Basically to create new opportunities for your clients. >> Right. Well, there's two ways that we're addressing the client relationship. One is that we're definitely seeing that digital transformation happen. Most recently in a poll that we took there was about 30% of small businesses were using some type of mobile device, but in the most recent study that we've seen it's about 60%, it's more than doubled in terms of the mobile banking and the mobile device that they're using to run their small business. And because of it we're leaning in to many of the mobile solutions that Capital One can provide so that small businesses can do things anytime, anywhere and any place as they're trying to run their business. 'Cause the reality is is that they're not just sitting in one place nine to five running their business. They're running off, doing other things, they're doing it at home. Also we're exploring different experiments so that if we're meeting the small businesses where they are, trying out different devices and different technologies, I don't know if you've seen some of the announcements that we've made but we're also looking at IoT and some of the Alexa form factors by which you can test and see how is my daily balance, what are the transactions going through and the sort of thing as well. So we're marrying a lot of the technologies that we are seeing and helping small businesses make that transformation themselves where they are today. If they're using one type of device, we'll be helping them with that mobile device. We're helping them with Alexa, for example, as well. And the helping them make that transition. >> So many choices. >> Go ahead, Jeff. >> I was just going to say and then there's now the gig economy, right? >> Yes. >> I wonder if you guys are, I'm sure you're looking at it, how do you see that as being fundamentally different? We were at a thing at the Stanford graduate school the other day and we were talking about the gig economy. At least a small business are thinking about things like retirement and setting aside money for taxes and potentially there's all types of retirement options if you're a small, self-employed person. But then you think of the gig economy, it's a guy doing four hours of week before class to run its Uber, or Postmates or all these kind of little bits and pieces. It doesn't appear from the outside looking in, I have no data, that they're really thinking through what is their total cost? Not only for the insurance and the wear and tear on the car, but then to set aside for taxes, and then are they putting some aside for insurance? Are they putting some aside for retirement? It just feels like that's a whole different kind of category of work and yet it's the one that's growing the most rapidly. >> It is and it isn't, actually. I think that oftentimes financial institutions have been geared more towards companies, business entities and that sort of thing. If we think about the most recent Spark 401k launch that we did, we're looking at companies of one, which are actually gig economy workers, if you really think about it. And then we are able to support those types of employees or businesses as well. The second thing that we're doing in terms of the gig economy is the reality is a lot of these people are, in the same way as I was mentioning before, stitching together their work life. And stitching together their work life means that they're using multiple applications and multiple revenue streams in order to be financially stable. And because of that, one of the pain points that we wanted to address was can we make it easy for these people to stitch together? And that's why we have the aggregation of the top 12 financial institutions within Spark Business so that they can get a complete financial health history of where they are today. >> We've been speaking with different folks from Intuit today and one of the striking conversations we had was about adoption within the accountant community and the cloud migrations, and people with very traditional perspectives or very regimented viewpoints about this is how I do things and the reluctance to change. What are you seeing in terms of digital adoption, what businesses are doing, how willing are they to accept some of these new products, or understanding this is a better mousetrap? And how do you grow that to make them understand this is maximize your efficiency and lower your cost, it's all good. But it's hard to get 'em there. >> Yes. One of the things that we actually see is not solving for the sake of creating a new feature. In the same way that I would feel if I were a small business, just because there's something out there doesn't necessarily mean I want to use it. You have to show the benefit to that small business owner. And if you think about where small businesses have been, they have been going to the bank, but they become more technologically savvy using, for example, mobile deposit capture because that saves them time, and all they have to do is take a picture of the check and it just works to deposit those moneys into a financial institution. And that's what we're providing as part of Capital One. If you show the benefit first, rather than the solution first, I suspect that more people will say, I'll give it a try. And that's what we're seeing in our base as well. We're seeing people saying, I'll give it a try, I am technologically savvy, I am using my mobile device more than I was before, sure, why not, and I'll give it a try. >> John: And that works? >> It has been working for us and we're seeing definitely more people going towards our Spark ecosystem solution, and they're stitching together all of the different applications because they are definitely feeling the pain of trying to do it themselves. And it's really hard to figure out themselves. >> So what's your biggest challenge, then? In terms of, it sounds like adoption, you're working and making progress on that front, you're here surveying your customer base, trying to understand what their needs are. It sounds like everything's great, everything's good, but that isn't always the case, obviously. There are challenges. In your perspective, from your viewpoint, what is it? What's the big hurdle you think that is keeping in the way a progress for you as Capital One and for the small business owner? >> I think really honing in, I think a lot of people often talk about small business owners trying to manage their financial health and their cashflow. That's the reality of running a small business. The question is how you solve that. Is it thinking about the savings and the checking accounts? Is it about thinking about the 401k in the future? Is it about that balance? Is it about tying savings and efficiency? And there's quite a fine line between thinking about just the actual solutions themselves and really offering the benefit. And so that, for us, is kind of the biggest challenge. Meaning that as we test into all these different applications, we need to make sure that we are improving their cashflow and showing them transparency around their financial health. >> It's funny you talk about whether there's a benefit or not and I just think from your customers' point of view, the small businesses, just all these different ways to pay. They want to take that money in and put it in and put it in their Capital One account. Whether it's Google Pay or Apple Pay or they even have Samsung Pay, I don't know why I'd ever want Samsung Pay, and who knows what tomorrow pay is going to be. From your customers' point of view, what do they think of this wave of options that their customers, the end customers, want to have, they think they want to have? They got people pushing these different alternatives down their throat. Are they really necessary? Do we need Samsung Pay along with Apple Pay and Google Pay and I already have credit cards and ATM cards and chip cards and god help us if I pull the 20 out. I went to one restaurant, they wouldn't even take cash. Like, we don't take cash. What, you don't take cash? It's so much more complicated now. There's just so many options coming out. I think of driving through a snowstorm at night with your headlights on. It's just like-- What do you tell 'em? How do they navigate this way? Oh, by the way, I'm still trying to just run my business. >> Right, actually, that's one of the things that we want to do at Capital One. We wanted to give small business owners the personalized delivery of data and looking at what would help them as they're running their small business. Because there are so many choices there, we want to help them make the choices by showing them the data that nudges them towards perhaps you might want this rather than this. That's what we're doing from a short term perspective, and more longer term, what we're also looking at, what is the benefit that we can actually provide? And showing those benefits clearly and transparently to the small business owner. There are a lot of choices out there. >> A lot of choices. Well, Yumi, we've asked you a lot of questions. The one that I think we don't have to ask is what's in your wallet, right? (laughs) We know what's in your wallet. >> Yes, a Venture credit card. (laughs) >> Yumi Clark from Capital One, thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. We appreciate the time. And good luck with the rest of the surveying. I'm sure this is a pretty fertile territory for you in terms of finding out what your customers need, what they want, and what you can do for 'em. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. Back with more on theCUBE here form San Jose in just a minute. (elecronic music)

(upbeat pop music) >> Announcer: Live from San Jose, California. In the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016! Sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. (upbeat pop music) Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE. Along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls. As we continue our coverage here at QuickBooks Connect 2016. Gathering here in San Jose at the Convention Center. Third annual gathering with a record crowd of more than 5,000 attendees. (crowd noise) So the show continues to show explosive growth. Which is, I guess you can say a lot about what Intuit's doing, in terms of how it's growing its portfolio, in terms of how it serves the business ... The small business and the medium-size business communities. With us now is Sasan Goodarzi, who is the EVP of the small business group at Intuit. Sasan, good to have you with us-- >> Thank you. >> We appreciate the time. >> Thank you for having me. >> What are the keynote stars today? You were talking about some key things, big things about the company about how we're going to help save time. How we're going to have more accessibility to money. And ultimately what we could do to deliver a better proposition to small business. So talk about that, if you would, a little about that theme on the keynote stage, and how that applies to what you're doing in general with QuickBooks. >> Sure, sure. Well one of the things that our customers have taught us is, that there are three things that are important to them. One is time, so they can actually spend running their business and the product that they're passionate about; versus all the tedious, drudgery things that it takes to run your business. The second is money. It's mind boggling the effort that goes into earning money. But how hard is it for them to actually get access to their money. And then last, but not least, is ways to help them grow their business. They're experts in their industry, but where they need help is ways in which that they can drive growth. And so everything that we do is centered around those three things. And it's what inspires us when we show up to work every single day. So a lot of, obviously, what we talked about today on stage, was just very quick, we call ESPN highlight reels of here's the innovation that's coming your way to either save you time, put more money into your pocket, or help you grow your business, or your practice. >> Sure, okay. >> What's amazing is as I say, as much as they've worked to finally get that sale, a lot of times it seems all the collection side-- >> That's right. >> For small business. A huge issue, getting paid. To do all that work, sell it, have a happy customer and then, don't necessarily get their receivables in line. >> That's right. I know we threw a lot of stats out there this morning. But first of all, 80% of small businesses have some sort of a cash flow issue. And in that context about 65% of them have invoices that are 60 days overdue. And in fact, they live and die by getting paid on time. And so, obviously, the innovations that we talked about on stage today, were how do you get access to those funds right away. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> That's one element of it. The other element is we have all the data of small businesses. And so we know what they're good for. And so we can deliver loans to them on the spot. If they have payables and they want to borrow on the payable to make payroll for the week, or they want to go buy more inventory to grow their business, we can actually fund them very quickly. Literally within minutes. And so those are examples of what we showed on stage today all in service of helping them thrive and achieve their dreams. >> I love to ding into that a little bit, because growth actually exacerbates your cash flow problem if you're not managing it well. And now suddenly you're selling more and you got to buy to fulfill those obligations. But the fact that you almost have a secondary market now for people to be able to borrow money without pulling all their paper together, and trekking down to the bank and hoping they can get it, because you actually have the real data. It's updated (chuckles)-- >> That's right. >> All the time. And it's a different set of data ... Potentially more complete set of data for a lender to actually make that decision, than the stack of paper that they bring down-- >> That's right. >> to the local bank. >> That's right. Well, you know it's interesting. You just said something that triggered a thought. When you think about startups that go out and get VC money ... There's a reason why they have board of directors, 'cause the board of directors what they're looking for is one, do you have a growth plan, but then how do you manage that growth? How do you make sure you have enough money? How much money are you burning per week? And are you going to be able to maintain that growth? Small businesses don't have that. They don't have the board of directors that are actually helping them with some of those decisions. They may not be surrounded by a CFO or a finance expert in the office. And so part of what we're trying to do is just digitize and automate everything so they don't have to worry about that. And secondarily I think to the point you made, helping them with access to money at the point in which they need it. But I think even before we get to that stage, what we're trying to do is help them by being that board of directors without having to have one. Which is to helping them manage their cash flow, their inventory. Because as they're on that growth curve ... One of the main reasons why they go out of business is 'cause they're growing fast, but they're not managing their funds, and they do not have enough money sometimes to make payroll. >> Right. Well we've heard the stat from a couple of different sources but 50% of all small businesses fail in the first five years-- >> That's right. >> of operation. And the use of accounting and accountant, what that could do to increase your odds of being in business for the long term. So certainly you could see where all that is coming in play. You mentioned payments, so we're thinking about Apply Pay. That was one of the announcements-- >> Yes. >> You had. Google Calendar, talking about time. >> Sasan: Yes. >> And then AMEX with the loans. So the power of these partnerships, I'd like to hear from you on that, because, you know, big names, right (chuckles) >> Sasan: Yes, yes. >> That I ... If Jeff or I or anybody watching ran a little mom and pop operation in Morgantown, WV, I've got Apple, and I've got Google, and I've got Intuit on my side. Talk about leveraging that power for small businesses? >> Yes, actually listening to you inspires me around what Intuit is doing for these small businesses. And it starts with our vision of having an open platform. It's less about what we innovate on that platform, but our goal is to bring all of the innovation; whether it's our engineers or engineers outside of our four walls. Bring all of that innovation on our platform, so that in fact we can digitize and automate everything with Google Calendar. So we can go in and we know all of where you spent your time, and help you easily, with one click, invoice your customers. Or, as an example you used, be able to use Apple Pay Touch where you can immediately get paid. But that's because our goal is to have an open platform where we bring all the innovation of the best companies out there to you. So that you can run your business on any device, and you don't have to worry about which application it is, but that we do it all for you. >> I just love the Google Calendar example, because so many great innovations today are basically reassembling stuff that's already out there; leveraging APIs and presenting it in a different way. And so the fact that you're taking advantage of Google Calendar, which so so many people ... You probably know the numbers use ... And then have that drive your billing, have that drive your time management, and then just take advantage of the data that's there, or as Scott said, "Take advantage of the data that's in your phone." >> Sasan: That's right. >> It knows exactly how far you went on that drive to the client. It knows when you left and when you arrived-- >> That's right. >> and when you got home. So the leverage of Cloud platform with APIs, to pull that data in and drive in a seamless integration, it makes (chuckles) it makes too much sense, right? (Sasan laughs) It does, and when you think about someone like Google, where there's a billion people that use Gmail ... >> A billion. >> And most of them are using ... There's a billion people that have Gmail accounts. >> Jeff: Wow. >> And over 60% of our customers use Google Calendar to run their business. And so, it's only intuitive to figure out a way well, how do we automate all of that-- >> Jeff: Right. >> so that the customer doesn't have to use cookbooks for taxes and accounting, then go to Google Calendar to see where they spent their time so they can figure out how to invoice? >> And they type it in, right. >> Just integrate it all together so it's all in one place, yeah. >> How do you all keep focused when your market, your potential market's so big? You've got, I don't know ... I've read, was it 800 million possible businesses, right? Small businesses. >> Sasan: That's right. >> So how do you ... If you look at what would be reasonable growth trajectory and expansion, your plans ... How do you keep your eyes on the target, and how do you determine that target? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Let me start with where you just ended, which is there are 800 million self-employed and small businesses worldwide. And 97 to 8% of 'em actually are not using the Cloud to run their business, or their time. And the way we prioritize is think about the countries that are the biggest opportunity to create virility by those that are using the platform. And so we've prioritized which countries that we're going after, and really doubling down in those countries. And that's where we really are able to focus our efforts in time. 'Cause once we create this, what we call the network effect, the more small businesses and self-employed we get to use the platform, the more we get accountants to be able to see the power of the platform. The more they tell their friends. The more accountants are recommending it, you in essence create this flywheel effect of more and more going to the Cloud. And once we get that flywheel effect going, we'll think about what's that next country that we want to go into. We're not that serial about it, but our biggest focus comes from being clear which countries we're going to play in today, and which countries, for now, we're going to wait 'til we get this network effect going. >> And now you've got this whole new way to work. People that are giving up part of their house or apartment for Airbnb rentals. Or people that are driving in Uber for four hours a couple of days a week. Again, those are all based on systems that are driving that engagement. Do you see that it's just a whole new opportunity, do you see a lot of growth in ... I always forget the technical term for-- >> Sasan: The digamy ... The giga-- >> The gig. >> Sasan: The gig economy. >> The gig economy. >> That's right-- >> Which is a whole new and swelling thing. >> It is. >> And for a lot of those people, they are even less sophisticated on keeping track of their tax withdrawals than the small mom and pop store (chuckles)-- >> Sasan: That's right. >> that's at least been paying their social security for a number of years. >> Sasan: That's right. >> So another huge opportunity for you. >> It absolute is. One of the myths is most self-employed are actually not part of the gig economy. There's the photographer that you may call on to come take pictures of your family, or the landscaper that's a one-person shop. That's 90% of self-employment. About less than 10% is the Airbnbs, the Lyft, and the Ubers of the world. But that number's only going to grow over time. In fact, our view is in this day and age people will work at a company for three to four years at a time. We believe in ten years, people will work for three to four companies in a day. 'Cause they're workers, and they're outsourcing their time to different companies. >> Jeff: Three or four companies-- >> A day. >> Jeff: A day? >> A day. Because in essence, they're self-employed. Now I may work for you and do a job. I may work for you and do a job. That's actually starting to happen today. Except it's a small part of the economy. We believe ten years from now it'll be a huge part of the economy. And that creates a huge opportunity for us, 'cause they're all self-employed. >> Right. >> Before you head out, again, one of the big trend topics, artificial intelligence, machine learning. How do those come into play in your vision for the company's vision, and the products and services that you think you could develop that can be put to use? >> Yeah, in fact we think there are two core competencies that we must have. One is an open platform where we integrate all applications into the platform, whether it's ours or somebody else's. The second is being amazing at leveraging the data, whether it's data from a PayPal app, a Square app our own app. And leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, so we can do the work for our customers. So we believe when it comes to data and artificial intelligence, that is actually one of two or three primary core competencies that we are building as a company. And it's something we're not new at. We've been doing this for years. In fact, last year in TurboTax we've reduced the amount of time it took to do your taxes by 40%, by using machine learning. And we're now applying that within QuickBooks. >> I'd like you to reduce my tax liability by about 40%. (Jeff laughs) If we can (chuckles) take care of that and I'm yours. >> Or at least-- >> Well, listen-- >> Or at least get you to the July deadline. (John laughs) >> If you just make less income-- (Jeff laughing) >> That's right. >> I'm sure that's doable. (Sasan laughs) >> If you don't make it, you don't pay it. >> Sasan: That's right (chuckles). >> You mentioned ESPN earlier about the stage and all that. You made top plays today, no doubt about it with the keynotes address. >> Sasan: Oh, thank you-- >> Job very well done. >> Thank you very much. >> Jeff: Cute Kim's (mumbles) coming. >> Sasan: Thank you. >> And thank you (Jeff laughs) for joining us here on theCUBE. We appreciate the time-- >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> John: You bet. Back with more-- >> Alright, thanks. QuickBooks Connect 2016 here in San Jose. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat pop music)