(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE, "Unstoppable Domains Showcase." I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on Web 3.0. And also this new sea change, cultural change around this next generation, internet, web, cloud, all happening, Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst and Founding Part of Kaleido Insights. Jeremiah, great to see you thanks for coming on I appreciate it. Ren Besnard, Vice President of Marketing and Unstoppable Domains in the middle of all the action. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on theCUBE for this showcase. >> Wow, my pleasure. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Jeremiah, I want to start with you. You've seen many ways refer in all of your work for over a decade now. You've seen the Web 2.0 wave now the Web 3.0 is here. And it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up it's really just ramping up. And you're seeing real practical examples. You're in the middle of all the action. What is this Web 3.0, can you frame for us? I mean, you've seen many webs. What is Web 3.0 mean, what is it all about? >> Well John, you and I worked in the Web 2.0 space and essentially that enabled peer-to-peer media where people could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos without having to rely on centralized media. Unfortunately, that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platform which are the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities, and could not really monetize or make decisions. So Web 3.0 which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto, blockchain and sometimes the metaverse. Is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again. And in this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it, and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's Web 3.0. Without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >> Yeah, it's great. And Ren, we're talking about on theCUBE many times and one notable stat I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into to crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups. Which means that there's a big wave coming in of talent. You're seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation, you're seeing a lot more, I would say it's kind of ramping up of real people, not just people with dream is actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the Web 3.0 movement with all this kind of change happening from people and also the new ideas being refactored? >> I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats, we see that there is an enormous draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of Web 3.0. And at this stage I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions, you know, marketing being one of them, sales, business development are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid 2000s, you know. When I started working with Google, at that point in time the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that were passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely similar except faster. >> Yeah, Jeremiah, you've seen the conversations of the cloud, I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007. But you got Amazon Web Services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movements. So you've got cloud which is kind of classic today, state of the art enterprise and or app developers. And you've got now decentralized wave coming, okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that architecture. Data is central in all this, right. So how, how do you view this as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data I mean, LinkedIn, Facebook. They're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as- >> That's right. >> They can control back comes to the forefront. How do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >> So the thing that we seen out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing. (Jeremiah coughing) Are the ones that have been easier to move across. Have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central, frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts, the blockchain ledgers, those have decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with (indistinct). So they're still using the Web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other forms like IPFS where the data could be spread across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what Web 2.0. So the vision and the promise Web 3.0 when it to full decentralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a Web 2.25. >> Pre-Web 3.0 no, but actions there. How do you guys see the dangers, 'cause there's a lot of negative press but also there's a lot of positive press. You're seeing a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positive. It's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is. But what are the dangers, how do you guys educate people, what should people pay attention to, what should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >> Yes, so we've learned a lot from Web 1.0, Web 2.0, the sharing economy. And we are walking into Web 3.0 with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Also the architecture breaks DAOn in some periods and there's a lack of regulation. This is something different though. In the last periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was going to happen. And we walked and think this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media's going to change the world around. It's very different now. People are a little bit jaded. So I think that's a change. And so I think we're going to see that sorted out in suss out just like we've seen with other trends. It's still very much in the early years. >> Ren, I got to get your take on this whole should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be docs out there? You saw the board, eight guys that did that were kind of docs a little bit there. And that went viral. This is an issue, right? Because we just had a problem of fake news, fake people, fake information. And now you have a much more secure environment imutability is a wonderful thing. It's a feature, not a bug, right? So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with NFTs as authentication. Take us, what's your take on this because this is a big issue. >> Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. So I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it to, you know. If you think about every Fortune 500 company there is always training required by all employees on internet safety, reporting of potential attacks and so on. In Web 3.0, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of Web 3.0 of crypto basically. Whether you're talking about hacks or online safety, the need for hardware, wallet, impersonators on discord, you know, security storing your seed phrase. So every actor influencer or else has got a role to play. I think that in that context to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be anonymous, oxydemous or fully docked. The decentralized nature of Web 3.0 will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels so to speak. And the movements that we've seen around some influencers identities become public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of Web 2.O and Web 3.0 at play here, you know. Maybe occurring on the notion of 2.5. But for now I think in Web 2.0, all business founders and employees are known and they held accountable for their public comments and their actions. If Web 3.0 enables us to be anonymous, if DAOs have voting control, you know. What happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are, basically. What if the DAO doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self-regulate themselves and will create natural boundaries around what can be said or not said. >> I think that's a really good point about influencers and reputation because. Jeremiah, does it matter that you're anonymous have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture. But if I have an ongoing reputation I have trust, to this trust there. It's not like just a bot that was created just to spam someone. You know I'm starting to getting into this new way. >> You're right, and that word you said trust, that's what really this is about. But we've seen that public docs, people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in the, that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerge even for pseudonym and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their potential wallet, address a series of numbers and letters. That form might take a new form of a Web 3.0 FICO Score. And you could look at their behaviors. Did they transact, you know, how did they behave? Were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that. We might see a new form of a scoring emerge, of course. Who controls that scoring? That's a whole nother topic gone on controling and trust. So right now, John we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFT projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and in their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of products or platforms that require KYC, you know, your customers. So that's self-identification often with a government ID or credit card in order to bridge out your coins and turn that into fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a collision here between our full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >> That's awesome. And I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance. Ren, you mentioned some comments about DAO. I want to get your thoughts again. You know, Jeremiah we've become historians over the years. We're getting old I'm a little bit older than you. (Jeremiah laughs) But we've seen the- >> You're young men. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic and then they became much more of a, kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved, the standards organization just to slow things DAO and mark things up a little bit. So, you know, you look at DAOs like, hmm, is DAO a good thing or a bad thing. The answer is from people I talk to is, it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition, vis-a-vis just a DAO for the sake of having a DAO. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade offs. Can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a DAO and when not to do a DAO and the benefits and trade offs of that? >> Sure, maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to, Ren. So a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this It's a digital cooperative. and we've heard of worker cooperatives before. The difference is that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do three things, identity, governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on Web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and Telegram and social networks to communicate. And as a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal. Ren, what's your take, that's the setup. >> So, you know for me when I started my journey into crypto and Web 3.0, I had no idea about what DAO actually meant. And an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a DAO and perhaps a more traditional company structure, you know. In the traditional company structure, you have (indistinct), the company's led by a CEO and other executives. The DAO is a flat structure, and it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a cooperative type of structure. The decision making is very different, you know. We're talking about a super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and voting systems using (indistinct) as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently very interesting moments in Web 3.0 culture. And we have seen how DAO suddenly have to make certain decisions and come to moments of claiming responsibility in order to police behavior of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that particularly new governance models. And I think it's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >> Yeah and that's a great point. >> Go ahead, Jeremiah. >> That's a great point, Ren. Around the transparency for governance. So, John you post the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now in the most doubts are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar? Or you can appoint delegates and use tokens to vote for them and they have a decision power. Almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there sometimes are hierarchy except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens. But that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures. >> You know, Ren I was talking with Matt G, the Founder of Unstoppable. And I was telling him about the Domain Name System. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the US government 'cause the internet was started by the US. The Department of Commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, 'cause the innovation yet was isn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus melding with it. So there's certain technologies that require, Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community let's not formalize anything. Like the government did with the Domain Name System. Let's keep it tight and then finally released it. I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the ITU. But this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation can't go. What's you guys reaction to that? >> So I think, you know to take the stab at it. We have as a business, you know, thinking of Unstoppable Domains, a strong incentive to innovate. And this is what is going to be determining long-term value growth for the organization, for partners, for users, for customers. So you know the degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to DAO, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the DAO is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove buyers quite effectively and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and own the upside in many ways. You know as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very diverse and part-time workforce in a very you a different way. And we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be inherent to some form of extreme decentralization. So there is a balance from an organizational structure that comes either side. >> Awesome. Jeremiah, I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you've been involved in, we've both been involved in. And you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of the role of an influencer. It's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared, created content enabled things to much more of a vanity. You update the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. So is there a new influencer model with Web 3.0 or is it, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? 'Cause as Web 3.0 comes you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects. Influencers, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that? Because this has been a conversation. People have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >> Sure, the influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to Web 3.0. In this market, I mean there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFT projects. So, Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved. They are also doing theirs as well. Steve Aok, famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And their communities are coming around them and they're building economy. Now the difference is it's not I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they literally hold and own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a big difference as well. >> Can you see- >> Lastly, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are air dropping NFTs, branded NFTs influencers wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Back to you. >> That's super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of how engagement's happening, how people are closed looping their votes, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. And the brands which are artists now influencers. I mean, this is a whole game changing instrumentation level. >> I think that what we are seeing right now is super reinvigorating as a marketeer who's been around for a few years, basically. I think that the shift in the way brands are going to communicate and engage with their audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences. There are many levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advance the message and the mission because the explosion of content on Web 3.0 has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto. Because as Jaremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects. Holders of an NFT are also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a fly wheel which is pretty unique of people that are hyping their project and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem with IP right being given to NFT holders. You're going to see people promote brands instead of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands are gaining and delivering elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think again, we have hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that particular space. >> That's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here. Jeremiah, the old days the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic. And they didn't really know what to do they called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with authenticity and environment like Web 3.0 where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >> That's right, and be because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody's behaved with their economic behavior in the past. Of course, big corporations aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But individuals and executives who participate in this market might be. And we'll also see new types of affinity. Do executives do they participate in these NFT communities, do they purchase them or numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, you know, different NFT projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course you could talk to, Ren about that because it's owning your own name is a part of this trust and being found. >> That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to share your thoughts on what you think is happening now where it goes, all right, where's it going to go? Jeremiah, we'll start with you. >> Sure, I think the vision of Web 3.0 where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach Web 2.5. And I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power's going to shift completely to of the end, it just doesn't. In part there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the programs in the first place. And secondly, the startups themselves end up becoming the one-percenter. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenter now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >> Awesome, Ren final comments. >> I'm fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notion of control being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains that we are going to see and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness two parallel movements of expansion. One that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and Web 3.0 essentially you think of a few 100 tribes. And I think that more projects are going to be a more coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see, you know, an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low 100 millions of crypto and NFT holders into the big hands basically. And that's going to be extreme interesting. I think that the next waves of crypto users, NFT fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology adoption curves. I think the demographics are going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >> All right, Ren and Jeremiah, thank you both for that great insight great segment breaking down Web 3.0 or Web 2.5 as Jeremiah says but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers. As part of theCUBE and the Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to the cube unstoppable Doneen showcase. I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on in web three and also this new sea change cultural change around this next generation, internet web cloud, all happening, Jeremiah yang industry analyst, and founding part of the cleaner insights. Share my great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Uh, registered vice-president of marketing at unstoppable domains in the middle of all the actions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on the cube for this showcase. >>My pleasure. So I think it was done >>At Jeremy. I want to start with you. You've seen many ways, but fallen all of your work for over a decade now. Um, you've seen the web 2.0 wave. Now the web three's here. Um, and it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up. It's really just ramping up and you're seeing real practical examples. Uh, you're in the middle of all the action. What is this web three? Can you frame for us that mean you've seen many waves? What is web three mean? What is it? What is it all about? >>Well, John, you and I worked in the web to space and essentially that enabled peer to peer media where people could, could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos, um, without having to rely on centralized media. And unfortunately that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platforms or the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities and could not really monetize or make decisions. So web three is what is, which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto blockchain. And sometimes the metaverse is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again, and then this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways, it's, it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's web three without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >>Yeah, that's great. And ran. We were talking about, on the cute many times and one notable stat, I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the, um, Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups, which means that this there's a big wave coming in of talent. You seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation. You're seeing a lot more, I would say, kind of ramping up of real people, not just, you know, people with a dream it's actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the web three, moving with all this kind of change happening, uh, from people and also the new ideas being refactored. >>I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats. We see that there is an draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of web three. And at this stage, I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions know marketing, being one of them, sales, business development, uh, are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid two thousands. You know, when I started, uh, working with Google at that point in time, the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that are passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely dissimilar, except >>Yeah, Jeremiah. You've seen the conversations over the cloud. I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007, but then you got Amazon web services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movement. So you've got cloud, which is kind of classic today. State-of-the-art, you know, enterprise and or app developers and you've got now decentralized wave coming. Okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that, that architecture data is central in all of this, right. So how do you view this? As, as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data. I mean, LinkedIn Facebook, they're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as they can control back, comes to the forefront, how do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >>So the thing that we've seen and out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing, the ones that have been easier to move across have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central. Frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts to block blockchain ledgers to those of decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with Stelara. So they're still using the web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other farms like IPFS, where the data could be to spread it across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what we're to point out. So the vision and the problem with 3.0, when it comes to full de-centralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a web 2.2, five, >>Pre-web 3m, no actions there. What do you guys, how do you guys see the, um, the dangers? Cause there's a lot of negative press, but also is a lot of positive press. You seeing, you know, a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positives, it's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is, but what are the dangers? How do you guys educate people? What should people pay attention to? What should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >>Yes. So we've learned a lot from web one, we to the sharing economy and we are walking into two and three with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining, the, um, the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Um, also the architecture breaks down in certain periods and there's a lack of regulation. Um, this, this is something different though in the last, uh, uh, periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was gonna happen. And we walked in big, this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media is going to change the world. Hurrah is very different. Now people are a little bit jaded. So I think that's the big change. And so I think we're going to see that, uh, you know, soar it out and suss out just like we've seen with other prints. It's still very much in the early years, >>Right. I got to get your take on this whole, uh, should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be doxed out there? You saw the board eight guys that did, that were kind of docs a little bit there and that went, went viral. Um, this is an issue, right? Because we, we just had a problem of fake news, uh, fake people, fake information, and now you have a much more secure environment. Immutability is a wonderful thing. It's, it's a feature, not a bug, right. So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with, uh, NFTs as, as authentication tickets. What's your take on this because this is a big issue. >>Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. Uh, so I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it too. You know, if you think about every fortune 500 company, there is always training required by all employees on internet safety reporting of potential attacks. And so on in web three, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet, uh, for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about, uh, the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of web three, uh, of crypto basically, uh, whether you're talking about hacks online safety, the need for hardware impersonators on discord, uh, security, uh, storing your, your seed phrase. >>So every actor in France or ELs has got a role to play. I think that, uh, in that context, to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be, uh, anonymous, opposite inverse or footy dogs. The decentralized nature of web three will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels, um, so to speak, um, and the, uh, movements that we've seen around some influencers, identities becoming public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of web two and web three at play here. You know, maybe a on the notion of 2.5 for, I think in way to all business founders and employees are known and they're held accountable for their public comments and actions. Um, if web three enables us to be anonymous, if dials have 14 control, you know, what happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are basically, uh, what if the dowel doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be, uh, acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self regulate themselves and we'll create natural boundaries around what can be said or not. >>I think that's a really good point about, um, influencers and reputation because Jeremiah doesn't matter that you're anonymous. I have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture, but if I have an ongoing reputation, I have trust there's trust there. It's not like a, you know, just a bot that was created just to spam someone. It was just, you know what I'm saying? They getting into you getting into this new way. >>You're right. And that, that word you said, trust, that's what really, this is about. But we've seen that public docks people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces in and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in it that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerged even for pseudonyms and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their a potential, a wallet address, a series of numbers and letters. Um, that form might take a new form of a web 3.0 FICO score, and you can look at their behaviors. Did they transact? You know, how do they behave? Do they, were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that we might see a new form of, of, of a scoring emerge. >>Of course, who controls that scoring that's a whole nother topic, gong on control and trust. So right now, John, we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFG projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of, um, uh, products or platforms that require KYC, know your customer so that self-identification often with a government ID or a credit card in order to bridge out your, your coins and turn that into a Fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a coalition here between, uh, full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >>That's awesome. And that, and I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance ran. You mentioned some comments about Dow. So I want to get your thoughts again, you know, Jeremiah, we become historians over the years. We're getting old, I'm a little bit older than you, but we've seen the movie war. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic, and then they became much more of a kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved the standards organization just to slow things down and muck things up a little bit. Um, so you know, you look at Dallas like, Hmm, is a Dal, a good thing, or a bad thing that the answer is from people I talked to, is it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition. Vis-a-vis just adapt for the sake of having a doubt. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade-offs, can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a Dow and when not to do a Dow and the benefits and trade-offs of that? >>Sure. Maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to rent. So a Dao, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this. It's a digital cooperative and we've heard of worker cooperatives before the differences that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do the three things, identity governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and telegram and social networks to communicate. And there's a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal, um, Ren, but what's your take, that's the setup? >>So, you know, for me, when I started my journey into crypto and web tree, I had no idea about, you know, what that actually meant and, uh, an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a dowel and perhaps a more traditional company structure. Um, you know, in a traditional company structure, you have a Yorkie, the company is led by a CEO and other executives, uh, that that was a flat structure. And it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So, uh, to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a co-operative, uh, type of structure. The decision-making is very different. You know, we're talking about a hot, super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and, and voting systems, using applications, as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. >>I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently, uh, very interesting moments in web tree culture. And we have seen how that was suddenly have to make certain decisions and then come to moments of claiming responsibility, uh, in order to, uh, put his behavior, uh, of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that, particularly new governance models. And I think he's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >>That's a great point, ran around the transparency for governance. So John, you posed the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now most dowels are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that, they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar where you can appoint a delegates and use tokens to vote for them? And they have a decision power, almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there are some times our hierarchies, except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens, but that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures, >>You know, rent. I was talking with Matt G the founder of, and I was telling him about the domain name system. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the U S government cause unit it was started by the U S the department of commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications union wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, because the innovation yet wasn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus meddling with it. So there's certain technologies that require Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community. Let's not formalize anything like the government did with the domain name system. Let's keep it tight. And then finally released it, I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the, to the ITU, but this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation, can't go, what you guys' reaction to that. >>So I think to take a stab at it, um, we have as a business, you know, thinking of unstoppable domains, a strong incentive to innovate, uh, and this is what is going to be determining longterm value growth for the organization for, uh, partners, for users, for customers. So, you know, that degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to Dows, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the Dow is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove bias quite effectively, and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and all the upside in many ways. Um, you know, as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very, uh, diverse and part-time workforce in a very, uh, you know, different way. Um, and we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be, you never run to some form of extreme decentralization so that those are balanced from an organizational structure, uh, that comes, uh, either side >>Sharon. I want to get your thoughts on, on, on a trend that you've been involved in. We both been involved in, and you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of a role of an influencer it's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared graded content, um, enabled things to much more of a vanity that the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. Um, so is there a new influencer model with web three or is it, is it the, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or, or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? Because as web three comes, you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects, influences, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that because there's been a conversation with people who have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >>Sure. The influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to at three, this market, I mean, there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are in investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator, there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFC projects. Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved and they are also doing this as well. Steve Aoki, a famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And there are communities are coming around them and they're building economies. Now the difference is it's not, I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they hold, they literally holding own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a, that's a big difference as well. Lastly, there's, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are airdropping in FTS, branded NFTs influencers with wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Yes. >>Super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of, of how engagement's happening, how people are closed, looping their, their votes, their, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. Um, and some brands which are artists now, influencers. I mean, this is a whole game-changing instrumentation level. >>I think that's what we are seeing right now is super re invigorating as a marketeer who has been around for a few years, basically. Um, I think that the shift in the web brands are going to communicate and engage with our audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for, uh, brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and, and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences, um, dominate levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advanced the message and the mission because the explosion of content on web tree has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto, because as Jeremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects, holders of an NFTA, also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a flywheel, which is pretty unique of people that are hyping the project, and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem, uh, with IP rights, being given to NFT holders, you're going to see people pull a brand since then of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands, again, judging and delivering, you know, elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think, again, we've hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that. >>It's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here, Jeremiah, the old days, the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic and they didn't really know what to do. They called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with aura authenticity and environment like web three, where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >>That's right. And because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody is behave with their economic behavior. In the past, of course, big corporations. Aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But the individuals and executives who participate in this market might be, and we'll also see a new types of affinity. Do you executives, do they participate in these NFT communities? Do they purchase them? We're seeing numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, uh, you know, different MTV projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course, you can talk to rant about that because it's owning your own name as a part of this trust and being >>That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to give, share your thoughts on what you think is happening now, where it goes. All right, where's it going to go, Jeremy, we'll start with you. >>Sure. Um, I think the vision of web three, where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach web 2.5 and I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power is going to shift completely to the end. It just doesn't, there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the pro programs in the first place. And secondly, the, the startups themselves end up becoming the one percenters. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenters now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >>Right. And final, final comments, >>Um, fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notions of control, being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains, uh, uh, that we are going to see. And, and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness to palliate movements of expansion, one that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and web three, essentially you think of a few hundred tribes. Uh, and I think that more projects are going to appear more, uh, coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low hundred millions of people and an FTE holders into the billions perfectly. Uh, and that's going to be extremely interesting. I think that the next wave of crypto users and Ft fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology, adoption curves. I think the demographics going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >>All right, Ron, Jeremy, thank you both for that great insight, great segment, uh, breaking down web three or web 2.5 as Jeremiah says, but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers as part of the cubes and the unstoppable domain showcase. Um, John for your hosts. Thanks for watching.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of PagerDuty summit 22. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm here with one of our alumni. Jonathan Ren joins me the SVP of products at PagerDuty. Jonathan. Great to have you on the program. >>It's wonderful to be here. Thank you, Lisa. >>It's great to be back at PagerDuty summit. So much news this morning. So much buzz and excitement. Talk to me about some of the things that you are most excited about as we are in such a massively different work environment these days. >>Yeah, so much has been going on and we've been innovating in so many areas. Uh, I think you heard in the keynote this morning, automation is such a foundational part of PagerDuty now, and that comes to us via the Rundeck acquisition from a couple of years ago. And we've also extended a PagerDuty to new audiences. So we've been a big part of the back office for a long time with SREs and developers and it ops. And we've really come to realize that, you know, the front office is so important. And one of the, the leading departments there that we can make an impact and extend into with our solution is customer service. >>Customer service is absolutely critical these days, as we all know, one of the things that was in very short supply the last couple of years is patients patients when you're a consumer patients, when you're a business person. And so the, the, the voice of the customer being able to get things escalated quickly and resolve quickly to those customer service folks is critical for any organization without that people easily go to Twitter or Reddit and escalate problems publicly. And suddenly that becomes a brand reputation problem for the organization. >>Yeah, you you're you're spot on, I mean, expectations are at an all time high people's tolerance is at an all time low and that gets translated. I always think to the front door of the organization when there is something that doesn't go right, and that's typically the poor customer service agents who have to deal with that kind of feedback and open up cases and deal with it. And, you know, unfortunately they're not armed a lot of times with the information that could help them not only be better reactive, but be better proactive and have information to actually turn what could be a bad experience into a really good one. >>You mentioned something really interesting. Jonathan had a great fireside chat this morning that I was able to watch. And you said it takes for every negative experience that a customer or consumer has. It takes seven additional positive experiences to turn them back around. And I thought, wow, do we even have the patience or the tolerance to your point to give a business seven more options to turn our experience around? >>Yeah, it's tough. And it's it, it's very, very hard for a lot of organizations and nobody's exempt from it. Um, the connection between the front office and the back office, there is no real gold standard for that. And, and, and so like, is there, is there a path forward? Is there a way forward? We believe there is, and we believe there's a way to help, but teams really need to focus on getting information to those folks so that these very negative kind of situations can become a customer satisfaction, can become something where a customer feels like, wow, I didn't expect that. Um, there was another statistic that, uh, we, we heard about the other day, which is, you know, greater than 50% of issues are often identified from customers, not from the monitoring products. So, you know, whether it's 50 or 40 or 30, it doesn't really matter. The customer is a signal and it's so important to be attentive to that signal. >>What are some of the, well, the, the LA you'd rather have that found out before the customer even notices? Talk to me about some of the things that PagerDuty just announced that are gonna help, not just the front office back office kind of blurred, um, blurred lines there, but also to ensure that the incident response is smarter, it's faster and it's being able to detect things before the customer even notices. >>Yeah. So the, the trick, the, the $64,000 question, however you want to phrase it or characterize it is all about getting teams ahead of problems. And while I think it's unrealistic to ever like every single customer get ahead of any issue that any customer could see, it's so important that the first customer that comes in with an issue becomes near to the last customer that comes in with an issue, meaning that one, everybody knows about that, and they know how it's related to existing issues. That's important so that other customers can be preemptively explained, but then given what PagerDuty's always done, sometimes we know about issues on the back end that may be impacting customers that they don't know about yet. So a shopping cart may not be working correctly, but before somebody hits it, if the customer service team knows about that right away, they can proactively get ready for communication to their customers to let them know, Hey, there might be an issue here we know about it, we're working on it. Please stay tuned or direct them to something else that can help them. >>I can imagine that goes a long way to, um, CSAT scores, NPS scores, brand reputation, reducing churn, >>Oh, big time, big time, whether it's CSAT or NPS. You know, everybody is familiar on that big shopping day of the year of getting that big sale, going to wanting to order that. And then either not being able to complete the order or having to wait too long for it to be delivered. And then you end up having to go to a brick and mortar, uh, outlet to buy it there anyway. So there's so many opportunities and those situations will happen. Outages will occur. It's just a matter of when those can be avoided in those bad situations, via the use of other discounts, coupons, other Jo you know, uh, customer satisfaction areas. You can turn those bad experiences into really good ones. >>Definitely. And I think we all, we all have that expectation that that's gonna happen when things do when outages do happen, cuz to your point that's, those are the things that's not, is it gonna happen? It's when and how quickly can we recover from that? So it's, we minimize the impact on everybody else. Couple the things that you announced this morning, incident objects and service cloud. Talk to me about what that is. It looks like a deeper partnership integration with Salesforce. What are some of the benefits that your customers can expect? >>Yeah, so we have several partners in the front office and one of, one of the biggest, uh, known to the world is Salesforce. And so we've been working with the service cloud team there for going on a couple of years now, uh, better integrating our platform into what they're doing. And we've actually built an app that runs inside of service cloud. So a customer service agent doesn't need to swivel chair around and look at other products in order to understand what's going on in the back office, it's all built into their experience. That's one number one, number two, uh, we've upped that relationship and invested more where service cloud Salesforce has come out with a new incident capability. And so we're integrating directly to that. So we can sync up with that system of record from PagerDuty. So wherever the issues are found, whether it's in distributed DevOps teams or whether it's in a central team or whether it's a case agent working on the front end, everything will be kept in sync. So we're really excited about that. Bidirectional direct, uh, integration >>That bidirectional sync is critical. We have, you know, one of the biggest challenges we've been talking about it since we were back at HP days back in the day, Jonathan silos, right? That's one of the biggest challenges is there's still silos between teams and systems, which impacts, you know, time to identify an incident, time to repair that incident. And then of course, let alone repair the relationship with the customer on the other end. >>Yeah. Yeah. And there's some great examples working with our own customers that we run into where when we can make that golden connection between the front office and the back office and sync up customer cases with incidents magic starts to happen. So, uh, we've seen situations where the back office team working on an incident, uh, doesn't realize that the issue is customer impacting. They don't realize that there were three and then four, and then five case tickets opened up that it's really impacting customers. And when they see that rise in customer impact, they change the priority. They get other people involved. The urgency changes on that issue. Imagine working in a world where that visibility doesn't exist, people continue to work at their own pace and who suffers the customer, the customer experience >>Without that visibility so much can suffer. And, and quickly, we also had this expectation. I, I mentioned one of the things that was in short supply in the pandemic as patients and tolerance. But another thing is we expect things in real time, real time, access to data, real time access to the customer to a product or service is no longer a nice to have it is business critical for organizations in every industry. >>Yeah. Yep. And you know, the customer service is such a obviously service centered activity that it can be, you know, death by a thousand paper cuts to a customer experience. And to the point that you're raising, nobody likes to contact finally, someone in as an agent and then get passed to another agent who gets passed to another agent and have to repeat the problem that you're having so many times what if we could capture all that context together. What if we could empower that agent to be able to manage that case from beginning to end more effectively? Like what would the reflection be on the customers who are calling in, they would feel taken care of. They would feel like they were heard. Yeah. They wouldn't feel ignored, so to speak. So all of that is a part of our solution that we're partnering, not only with Salesforce, but also with Zendesk and others to deliver, >>Talk about the automation in CSOPs and some of the main benefits. Obviously you mentioned this a minute ago, but the ability to empower those agents to have that context is night and day compared to, you know, the solutions from back in the >>Day. Yeah. Automation is so fundamental and foundational to everything we do at PagerDuty. And if you look at all the audiences that make use of PagerDuty today, whether it's developers, whether it's, uh, it operations and now customer service agents, it's no surprise that, you know, everyone has to do more with less everyone's working in a more siloed, disconnected manner. So the amount of potential toil, potential manual steps, uh, having to open up a system to get the status of something and then pivot over to my other system or do research or ask a customer multiple times when it could automatically be captured, what their problem is, what the environment is. And all that information from an agent could be automatically inserted into the case. How valuable is that? Not only for the case, but then the teams on the back end that that helps them diagnose and fix those problems. So the amount of automation that we've built and now just announced and made available as a part of customer service ops, just like in DevOps with our automation actions, really important to automating some of those manual toil steps for those agents where again, um, 50, 60% of their time is spent doing manual activities. We can get rid of that. We can empower them to do more, to do more with less, >>To do more with less and, and do more faster and make such a huge difference there. Talk a little bit about the, the DevOps CS ops relationship. You know, one of the, one of the things that's kind of ironic is here we are in, in 2022, we have so many tools to collaborate and connect yet. There's still so many silos and that can either break trust between a customer and a, and a vendor or a solution provider, or it can really facilitate trust. And that was a big theme of, uh, the keynote this morning is that trust. But talk about the trust that is you PagerDuty really things essential between the DevOps folks and the CS ops folks. >>Yeah. It's, it's, it's critical. As I kind of mentioned before, there really isn't a golden path, a golden connection, uh, a standard that's been set between CS, the customer service organizations and the back office and how I like to characterize it. And what I've seen over the years, working with customers is frequently. It's, it's almost like when I was a little kid, I lived nearby a, um, a semi-pro baseball team and I could never get tickets and I would ride my bike to the back of the fence. And I would look at the game through a little knot hole in the fence and I'd be like, man, that would be so great to be in there. That's essentially customer service sitting there looking at the game happening constantly, like trying to interrupt the teams and saying, Hey, what about us? Like, and so by making that a seamless connection by making customer service a part of the solution, a part of the team in a non impactful intrusive way, everybody gets what they need. No one's interrupted. And now those customer service agents they're sitting in the stands. They're not looking through the little knothole at the back of the center field. >>Well, you gotta tell, did you ever get tickets? Can you go to pro games now? >>Uh, no. No. Oh, still waiting. >>Oh man. Talk to me last question here. I asked you before we, we started filming if you had a crystal ball or, or a magic eight ball. So next time at least bring me a magic eight ball. What are some of the predictions that you have is as you see where we are in now, half of calendar, 22, almost gone. The announcements coming from PagerDuty today, the synergy is between PagerDuty. It's what 21,000 plus customers, your partners. What are some of the things that you're excited about that are coming? >>So a couple things. One is, I, I really think the first example we talk about the operations cloud, what PagerDuty is. And to me, what it really is, is it's not just the DevOps audiences and the it ops and the SRE teams in the back office back offices that have to deal with interrupted, um, real time work, but it's other parts of the organization as well, um, that have to get proactive versus reactive. And the first of those that the, the first step that kind of personifies the operations cloud outside of that back office is customer service. But there will be more, there will be more whether it's security or other teams. So it's the audiences that can participate and engage in like real time work. That's one. And then I think in the area of customer service and customer service operations, where we are, what we've been doing and what we've been so focused on is making sure that those agents can start to get proactive and start to get to the next step. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could help them proactively in a targeted way, talk to their customers, uh, and provide that as an automated part of the process today, that's very manual so we can empower them with information, but a lot of their communication with their customers is manual. What if we could automate that? And that's our plans, and that's what I'm really excited about >>Doing. Can you imagine that the trust built between an empowered, proactive CS agent and a customer on the other end that there's the sky is the limit on that one? >>Uh, if I'm a platinum customer or I'm a silver customer on paying for a certain level of customer service, how great would it be if based on the extra that I'm paying, I'm actually getting that service right. Proactively and I'm hearing about issues long before I see them. That to me is building trust. >>Absolutely. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on the cube today. Great to see you back in person. Great to hear some of the things coming down the road for PagerDuty, and we're excited to, to see your predictions come true. <laugh> thanks for your time. >>Likewise, Lisa, thank you very much. >>My pleasure for Jonathan Ren. I'm Lisa Martin covering the cube on the ground at PagerDuty summit 22, stick around of your rack back with my next guest.

>> Sue: Hello everybody. Thank you for joining us today for the Virtual Vertica BDC 2020. Today's breakout session in entitled Extending Vertica with the Latest Vertica Ecosystem and Open Source Initiatives. My name is Sue LeClaire, Director of Marketing at Vertica and I'll be your host for this webinar. Joining me is Tom Wall, a member of the Vertica engineering team. But before we begin, I encourage you to submit questions or comments during the virtual session. You don't have to wait. Just type your question or comment in the question box below the slides and click submit. There will be a Q and A session at the end of the presentation. We'll answer as many questions as we're able to during that time. Any questions that we don't get to, we'll do our best to answer them offline. Alternatively, you can visit the Vertica forums to post you questions after the session. Our engineering team is planning to join the forums to keep the conversation going. Also a reminder that you can maximize your screen by clicking the double arrow button in the lower right corner of the slides. And yes, this virtual session is being recorded and will be available to view on demand later this week. We'll send you a notification as soon as it's ready. So let's get started. Tom, over to you. >> Tom: Hello everyone and thanks for joining us today for this talk. My name is Tom Wall and I am the leader of Vertica's ecosystem engineering team. We are the team that focuses on building out all the developer tools, third party integrations that enables the SoftMaker system that surrounds Vertica to thrive. So today, we'll be talking about some of our new open source initatives and how those can be really effective for you and make things easier for you to build and integrate Vertica with the rest of your technology stack. We've got several new libraries, integration projects and examples, all open source, to share, all being built out in the open on our GitHub page. Whether you use these open source projects or not, this is a very exciting new effort that will really help to grow the developer community and enable lots of exciting new use cases. So, every developer out there has probably had to deal with the problem like this. You have some business requirements, to maybe build some new Vertica-powered application. Maybe you have to build some new system to visualize some data that's that's managed by Vertica. The various circumstances, lots of choices will might be made for you that constrain your approach to solving a particular problem. These requirements can come from all different places. Maybe your solution has to work with a specific visualization tool, or web framework, because the business has already invested in the licensing and the tooling to use it. Maybe it has to be implemented in a specific programming language, since that's what all the developers on the team know how to write code with. While Vertica has many different integrations with lots of different programming language and systems, there's a lot of them out there, and we don't have integrations for all of them. So how do you make ends meet when you don't have all the tools you need? All you have to get creative, using tools like PyODBC, for example, to bridge between programming languages and frameworks to solve the problems you need to solve. Most languages do have an ODBC-based database interface. ODBC is our C-Library and most programming languages know how to call C code, somehow. So that's doable, but it often requires lots of configuration and troubleshooting to make all those moving parts work well together. So that's enough to get the job done but native integrations are usually a lot smoother and easier. So rather than, for example, in Python trying to fight with PyODBC, to configure things and get Unicode working, and to compile all the different pieces, the right way is to make it all work smoothly. It would be much better if you could just PIP install library and get to work. And with Vertica-Python, a new Python client library, you can actually do that. So that story, I assume, probably sounds pretty familiar to you. Sounds probably familiar to a lot of the audience here because we're all using Vertica. And our challenge, as Big Data practitioners is to make sense of all this stuff, despite those technical and non-technical hurdles. Vertica powers lots of different businesses and use cases across all kinds of different industries and verticals. While there's a lot different about us, we're all here together right now for this talk because we do have some things in common. We're all using Vertica, and we're probably also using Vertica with other systems and tools too, because it's important to use the right tool for the right job. That's a founding principle of Vertica and it's true today too. In this constantly changing technology landscape, we need lots of good tools and well established patterns, approaches, and advice on how to combine them so that we can be successful doing our jobs. Luckily for us, Vertica has been designed to be easy to build with and extended in this fashion. Databases as a whole had had this goal from the very beginning. They solve the hard problems of managing data so that you don't have to worry about it. Instead of worrying about those hard problems, you can focus on what matters most to you and your domain. So implementing that business logic, solving that problem, without having to worry about all of these intense, sometimes details about what it takes to manage a database at scale. With the declarative syntax of SQL, you tell Vertica what the answer is that you want. You don't tell Vertica how to get it. Vertica will figure out the right way to do it for you so that you don't have to worry about it. So this SQL abstraction is very nice because it's a well defined boundary where lots of developers know SQL, and it allows you to express what you need without having to worry about those details. So we can be the experts in data management while you worry about your problems. This goes beyond though, what's accessible through SQL to Vertica. We've got well defined extension and integration points across the product that allow you to customize this experience even further. So if you want to do things write your own SQL functions, or extend database softwares with UDXs, you can do so. If you have a custom data format that might be a proprietary format, or some source system that Vertica doesn't natively support, we have extension points that allow you to use those. To make it very easy to do passive, parallel, massive data movement, loading into Vertica but also to export Vertica to send data to other systems. And with these new features in time, we also could do the same kinds of things with Machine Learning models, importing and exporting to tools like TensorFlow. And it's these integration points that have enabled Vertica to build out this open architecture and a rich ecosystem of tools, both open source and closed source, of different varieties that solve all different problems that are common in this big data processing world. Whether it's open source, streaming systems like Kafka or Spark, or more traditional ETL tools on the loading side, but also, BI tools and visualizers and things like that to view and use the data that you keep in your database on the right side. And then of course, Vertica needs to be flexible enough to be able to run anywhere. So you can really take Vertica and use it the way you want it to solve the problems that you need to solve. So Vertica has always employed open standards, and integrated it with all kinds of different open source systems. What we're really excited to talk about now is that we are taking our new integration projects and making those open source too. In particular, we've got two new open source client libraries that allow you to build Vertica applications for Python and Go. These libraries act as a foundation for all kinds of interesting applications and tools. Upon those libraries, we've also built some integrations ourselves. And we're using these new libraries to power some new integrations with some third party products. Finally, we've got lots of new examples and reference implementations out on our GitHub page that can show you how to combine all these moving parts and exciting ways to solve new problems. And the code for all these things is available now on our GitHub page. And so you can use it however you like, and even help us make it better too. So the first such project that we have is called Vertica-Python. Vertica-Python began at our customer, Uber. And then in late 2018, we collaborated with them and we took it over and made Vertica-Python the first official open source client for Vertica You can use this to build your own Python applications, or you can use it via tools that were written in Python. Python has grown a lot in recent years and it's very common language to solve lots of different problems and use cases in the Big Data space from things like DevOps admission and Data Science or Machine Learning, or just homegrown applications. We use Python a lot internally for our own QA testing and automation needs. And with the Python 2 End Of Life, that happened at the end of 2019, it was important that we had a robust Python solution to help migrate our internal stuff off of Python 2. And also to provide a nice migration path for all of you our users that might be worried about the same problems with their own Python code. So Vertica-Python is used already for lots of different tools, including Vertica's admintools now starting with 9.3.1. It was also used by DataDog to build a Vertica-DataDog integration that allows you to monitor your Vertica infrastructure within DataDog. So here's a little example of how you might use the Python Client to do some some work. So here we open in connection, we run a query to find out what node we've connected to, and then we do a little DataLoad by running a COPY statement. And this is designed to have a familiar look and feel if you've ever used a Python Database Client before. So we implement the DB API 2.0 standard and it feels like a Python package. So that includes things like, it's part of the centralized package manager, so you can just PIP install this right now and go start using it. We also have our client for Go length. So this is called vertica-sql-go. And this is a very similar story, just in a different context or the different programming language. So vertica-sql-go, began as a collaboration with the Microsoft Focus SecOps Group who builds microfocus' security products some of which use vertica internally to provide some of those analytics. So you can use this to build your own apps in the Go programming language but you can also use it via tools that are written Go. So most notably, we have our Grafana integration, which we'll talk a little bit more about later, that leverages this new clients to provide Grafana visualizations for vertica data. And Go is another rising popularity programming language 'cause it offers an interesting balance of different programming design trade-offs. So it's got good performance, got a good current concurrency and memory safety. And we liked all those things and we're using it to power some internal monitoring stuff of our own. And here's an example of the code you can write with this client. So this is Go code that does a similar thing. It opens a connection, it runs a little test query, and then it iterates over those rows, processing them using Go data types. You get that native look and feel just like you do in Python, except this time in the Go language. And you can go get it the way you usually package things with Go by running that command there to acquire this package. And it's important to note here for the DC projects, we're really doing open source development. We're not just putting code out on our GitHub page. So if you go out there and look, you can see that you can ask questions, you can report bugs, you can submit poll requests yourselves and you can collaborate directly with our engineering team and the other vertica users out on our GitHub page. Because it's out on our GitHub page, it allows us to be a little bit faster with the way we ship and deliver functionality compared to the core vertica release cycle. So in 2019, for example, as we were building features to prepare for the Python 3 migration, we shipped 11 different releases with 40 customer reported issues, filed on GitHub. That was done over 78 different poll requests and with lots of community engagement as we do so. So lots of people are using this already, we see as our GitHub badge last showed with about 5000 downloads of this a day of people using it in their software. And again, we want to make this easy, not just to use but also to contribute and understand and collaborate with us. So all these projects are built using the Apache 2.0 license. The master branch is always available and stable with the latest creative functionality. And you can always build it and test it the way we do so that it's easy for you to understand how it works and to submit contributions or bug fixes or even features. It uses automated testing both for locally and with poll requests. And for vertica-python, it's fully automated with Travis CI. So we're really excited about doing this and we're really excited about where it can go in the future. 'Cause this offers some exciting opportunities for us to collaborate with you more directly than we have ever before. You can contribute improvements and help us guide the direction of these projects, but you can also work with each other to share knowledge and implementation details and various best practices. And so maybe you think, "Well, I don't use Python, "I don't use go so maybe it doesn't matter to me." But I would argue it really does matter. Because even if you don't use these tools and languages, there's lots of amazing vertica developers out there who do. And these clients do act as low level building blocks for all kinds of different interesting tools, both in these Python and Go worlds, but also well beyond that. Because these implementations and examples really generalize to lots of different use cases. And we're going to do a deeper dive now into some of these to understand exactly how that's the case and what you can do with these things. So let's take a deeper look at some of the details of what it takes to build one of these open source client libraries. So these database client interfaces, what are they exactly? Well, we all know SQL, but if you look at what SQL specifies, it really only talks about how to manipulate the data within the database. So once you're connected and in, you can run commands with SQL. But these database client interfaces address the rest of those needs. So what does the programmer need to do to actually process those SQL queries? So these interfaces are specific to a particular language or a technology stack. But the use cases and the architectures and design patterns are largely the same between different languages. They all have a need to do some networking and connect and authenticate and create a session. They all need to be able to run queries and load some data and deal with problems and errors. And then they also have a lot of metadata and Type Mapping because you want to use these clients the way you use those programming languages. Which might be different than the way that vertica's data types and vertica's semantics work. So some of this client interfaces are truly standards. And they are robust enough in terms of what they design and call for to support a truly pluggable driver model. Where you might write an application that codes directly against the standard interface, and you can then plug in a different database driver, like a JDBC driver, to have that application work with any database that has a JDBC driver. So most of these interfaces aren't as robust as a JDBC or ODBC but that's okay. 'Cause it's good as a standard is, every database is unique for a reason. And so you can't really expose all of those unique properties of a database through these standard interfaces. So vertica's unique in that it can scale to the petabytes and beyond. And you can run it anywhere in any environment, whether it's on-prem or on clouds. So surely there's something about vertica that's unique, and we want to be able to take advantage of that fact in our solutions. So even though these standards might not cover everything, there's often a need and common patterns that arise to solve these problems in similar ways. When there isn't enough of a standard to define those comments, semantics that different databases might have in common, what you often see is tools will invent plug in layers or glue code to compensate by defining application wide standard to cover some of these same semantics. Later on, we'll get into some of those details and show off what exactly that means. So if you connect to a vertica database, what's actually happening under the covers? You have an application, you have a need to run some queries, so what does that actually look like? Well, probably as you would imagine, your application is going to invoke some API calls and some client library or tool. This library takes those API calls and implements them, usually by issuing some networking protocol operations, communicating over the network to ask vertica to do the heavy lifting required for that particular API call. And so these API's usually do the same kinds of things although some of the details might differ between these different interfaces. But you do things like establish a connection, run a query, iterate over your rows, manage your transactions, that sort of thing. Here's an example from vertica-python, which just goes into some of the details of what actually happens during the Connect API call. And you can see all these details in our GitHub implementation of this. There's actually a lot of moving parts in what happens during a connection. So let's walk through some of that and see what actually goes on. I might have my API call like this where I say Connect and I give it a DNS name, which is my entire cluster. And I give you my connection details, my username and password. And I tell the Python Client to get me a session, give me a connection so I can start doing some work. Well, in order to implement this, what needs to happen? First, we need to do some TCP networking to establish our connection. So we need to understand what the request is, where you're going to connect to and why, by pressing the connection string. and vertica being a distributed system, we want to provide high availability, so we might need to do some DNS look-ups to resolve that DNS name which might be an entire cluster and not just a single machine. So that you don't have to change your connection string every time you add or remove nodes to the database. So we do some high availability and DNS lookup stuff. And then once we connect, we might do Load Balancing too, to balance the connections across the different initiator nodes in the cluster, or in a sub cluster, as needed. Once we land on the node we want to be at, we might do some TLS to secure our connections. And vertica supports the industry standard TLS protocols, so this looks pretty familiar for everyone who've used TLS anywhere before. So you're going to do a certificate exchange and the client might send the server certificate too, and then you going to verify that the server is who it says it is, so that you can know that you trust it. Once you've established that connection, and secured it, then you can start actually beginning to request a session within vertica. So you going to send over your user information like, "Here's my username, "here's the database I want to connect to." You might send some information about your application like a session label, so that you can differentiate on the database with monitoring queries, what the different connections are and what their purpose is. And then you might also send over some session settings to do things like auto commit, to change the state of your session for the duration of this connection. So that you don't have to remember to do that with every query that you have. Once you've asked vertica for a session, before vertica will give you one, it has to authenticate you. and vertica has lots of different authentication mechanisms. So there's a negotiation that happens there to decide how to authenticate you. Vertica decides based on who you are, where you're coming from on the network. And then you'll do an auth-specific exchange depending on what the auth mechanism calls for until you are authenticated. Finally, vertica trusts you and lets you in, so you going to establish a session in vertica, and you might do some note keeping on the client side just to know what happened. So you might log some information, you might record what the version of the database is, you might do some protocol feature negotiation. So if you connect to a version of the database that doesn't support all these protocols, you might decide to turn some functionality off and that sort of thing. But finally, after all that, you can return from this API call and then your connection is good to go. So that connection is just one example of many different APIs. And we're excited here because with vertica-python we're really opening up the vertica client wire protocol for the first time. And so if you're a low level vertica developer and you might have used Postgres before, you might know that some of vertica's client protocol is derived from Postgres. But they do differ in many significant ways. And this is the first time we've ever revealed those details about how it works and why. So not all Postgres protocol features work with vertica because vertica doesn't support all the features that Postgres does. Postgres, for example, has a large object interface that allows you to stream very wide data values over. Whereas vertica doesn't really have very wide data values, you have 30, you have long bar charts, but that's about as wide as you can get. Similarly, the vertica protocol supports lots of features not present in Postgres. So Load Balancing, for example, which we just went through an example of, Postgres is a single node system, it doesn't really make sense for Postgres to have Load Balancing. But Load Balancing is really important for vertica because it is a distributed system. Vertica-python serves as an open reference implementation of this protocol. With all kinds of new details and extension points that we haven't revealed before. So if you look at these boxes below, all these different things are new protocol features that we've implemented since August 2019, out in the open on our GitHub page for Python. Now, the vertica-sql-go implementation of these things is still in progress, but the core protocols are there for basic query operations. There's more to do there but we'll get there soon. So this is really cool 'cause not only do you have now a Python Client implementation, and you have a Go client implementation of this, but you can use this protocol reference to do lots of other things, too. The obvious thing you could do is build more clients for other languages. So if you have a need for a client in some other language that are vertica doesn't support yet, now you have everything available to solve that problem and to go about doing so if you need to. But beyond clients, it's also used for other things. So you might use it for mocking and testing things. So rather than connecting to a real vertica database, you can simulate some of that. You can also use it to do things like query routing and proxies. So Uber, for example, this log here in this link tells a great story of how they route different queries to different vertical clusters by intercepting these protocol messages, parsing the queries in them and deciding which clusters to send them to. So a lot of these things are just ideas today, but now that you have the source code, there's no limit in sight to what you can do with this thing. And so we're very interested in hearing your ideas and requests and we're happy to offer advice and collaborate on building some of these things together. So let's take a look now at some of the things we've already built that do these things. So here's a picture of vertica's Grafana connector with some data powered from an example that we have in this blog link here. So this has an internet of things use case to it, where we have lots of different sensors recording flight data, feeding into Kafka which then gets loaded into vertica. And then finally, it gets visualized nicely here with Grafana. And Grafana's visualizations make it really easy to analyze the data with your eyes and see when something something happens. So in these highlighted sections here, you notice a drop in some of the activity, that's probably a problem worth looking into. It might be a lot harder to see that just by staring at a large table yourself. So how does a picture like that get generated with a tool like Grafana? Well, Grafana specializes in visualizing time series data. And time can be really tricky for computers to do correctly. You got time zones, daylight savings, leap seconds, negative infinity timestamps, please don't ever use those. In every system, if it wasn't hard enough, just with those problems, what makes it harder is that every system does it slightly differently. So if you're querying some time data, how do we deal with these semantic differences as we cross these domain boundaries from Vertica to Grafana's back end architecture, which is implemented in Go on it's front end, which is implemented with JavaScript? Well, you read this from bottom up in terms of the processing. First, you select the timestamp and Vertica is timestamp has to be converted to a Go time object. And we have to reconcile the differences that there might be as we translate it. So Go time has a different time zone specifier format, and it also supports nanosecond precision, while Vertica only supports microsecond precision. So that's not too big of a deal when you're querying data because you just see some extra zeros, not fractional seconds. But on the way in, if we're loading data, we have to find a way to resolve those things. Once it's into the Go process, it has to be converted further to render in the JavaScript UI. So that there, the Go time object has to be converted to a JavaScript Angular JS Date object. And there too, we have to reconcile those differences. So a lot of these differences might just be presentation, and not so much the actual data changing, but you might want to choose to render the date into a more human readable format, like we've done in this example here. Here's another picture. This is another picture of some time series data, and this one shows you can actually write your own queries with Grafana to provide answers. So if you look closely here you can see there's actually some functions that might not look too familiar with you if you know vertica's functions. Vertica doesn't have a dollar underscore underscore time function or a time filter function. So what's actually happening there? How does this actually provide an answer if it's not really real vertica syntax? Well, it's not sufficient to just know how to manipulate data, it's also really important that you know how to operate with metadata. So information about how the data works in the data source, Vertica in this case. So Grafana needs to know how time works in detail for each data source beyond doing that basic I/O that we just saw in the previous example. So it needs to know, how do you connect to the data source to get some time data? How do you know what time data types and functions there are and how they behave? How do you generate a query that references a time literal? And finally, once you've figured out how to do all that, how do you find the time in the database? How do you do know which tables have time columns and then they might be worth rendering in this kind of UI. So Go's database standard doesn't actually really offer many metadata interfaces. Nevertheless, Grafana needs to know those answers. And so it has its own plugin layer that provides a standardizing layer whereby every data source can implement hints and metadata customization needed to have an extensible data source back end. So we have another open source project, the Vertica-Grafana data source, which is a plugin that uses Grafana's extension points with JavaScript and the front end plugins and also with Go in the back end plugins to provide vertica connectivity inside Grafana. So the way this works, is that the plugin frameworks defines those standardizing functions like time and time filter, and it's our plugin that's going to rewrite them in terms of vertica syntax. So in this example, time gets rewritten to a vertica cast. And time filter becomes a BETWEEN predicate. So that's one example of how you can use Grafana, but also how you might build any arbitrary visualization tool that works with data in Vertica. So let's now look at some other examples and reference architectures that we have out in our GitHub page. For some advanced integrations, there's clearly a need to go beyond these standards. So SQL and these surrounding standards, like JDBC, and ODBC, were really critical in the early days of Vertica, because they really enabled a lot of generic database tools. And those will always continue to play a really important role, but the Big Data technology space moves a lot faster than these old database data can keep up with. So there's all kinds of new advanced analytics and query pushdown logic that were never possible 10 or 20 years ago, that Vertica can do natively. There's also all kinds of data-oriented application workflows doing things like streaming data, or Parallel Loading or Machine Learning. And all of these things, we need to build software with, but we don't really have standards to go by. So what do we do there? Well, open source implementations make for easier integrations, and applications all over the place. So even if you're not using Grafana for example, other tools have similar challenges that you need to overcome. And it helps to have an example there to show you how to do it. Take Machine Learning, for example. There's been many excellent Machine Learning tools that have arisen over the years to make data science and the task of Machine Learning lot easier. And a lot of those have basic database connectivity, but they generally only treat the database as a source of data. So they do lots of data I/O to extract data from a database like Vertica for processing in some other engine. We all know that's not the most efficient way to do it. It's much better if you can leverage Vertica scale and bring the processing to the data. So a lot of these tools don't take full advantage of Vertica because there's not really a uniform way to go do so with these standards. So instead, we have a project called vertica-ml-python. And this serves as a reference architecture of how you can do scalable machine learning with Vertica. So this project establishes a familiar machine learning workflow that scales with vertica. So it feels similar to like a scickit-learn project except all the processing and aggregation and heavy lifting and data processing happens in vertica. So this makes for a much more lightweight, scalable approach than you might otherwise be used to. So with vertica-ml-python, you can probably use this yourself. But you could also see how it works. So if it doesn't meet all your needs, you could still see the code and customize it to build your own approach. We've also got lots of examples of our UDX framework. And so this is an older GitHub project. We've actually had this for a couple of years, but it is really useful and important so I wanted to plug it here. With our User Defined eXtensions framework or UDXs, this allows you to extend the operators that vertica executes when it does a database load or a database query. So with UDXs, you can write your own domain logic in a C++, Java or Python or R. And you can call them within the context of a SQL query. And vertica brings your logic to that data, and makes it fast and scalable and fault tolerant and correct for you. So you don't have to worry about all those hard problems. So our UDX examples, demonstrate how you can use our SDK to solve interesting problems. And some of these examples might be complete, total usable packages or libraries. So for example, we have a curl source that allows you to extract data from any curlable endpoint and load into vertica. We've got things like an ODBC connector that allows you to access data in an external database via an ODBC driver within the context of a vertica query, all kinds of parsers and string processors and things like that. We also have more exciting and interesting things where you might not really think of vertica being able to do that, like a heat map generator, which takes some XY coordinates and renders it on top of an image to show you the hotspots in it. So the image on the right was actually generated from one of our intern gaming sessions a few years back. So all these things are great examples that show you not just how you can solve problems, but also how you can use this SDK to solve neat things that maybe no one else has to solve, or maybe that are unique to your business and your needs. Another exciting benefit is with testing. So the test automation strategy that we have in vertica-python these clients, really generalizes well beyond the needs of a database client. Anyone that's ever built a vertica integration or an application, probably has a need to write some integration tests. And that could be hard to do with all the moving parts, in the big data solution. But with our code being open source, you can see in vertica-python, in particular, how we've structured our tests to facilitate smooth testing that's fast, deterministic and easy to use. So we've automated the download process, the installation deployment process, of a Vertica Community Edition. And with a single click, you can run through the tests locally and part of the PR workflow via Travis CI. We also do this for multiple different python environments. So for all python versions from 2.7 up to 3.8 for different Python interpreters, and for different Linux distros, we're running through all of them very quickly with ease, thanks to all this automation. So today, you can see how we do it in vertica-python, in the future, we might want to spin that out into its own stand-alone testbed starter projects so that if you're starting any new vertica integration, this might be a good starting point for you to get going quickly. So that brings us to some of the future work we want to do here in the open source space . Well, there's a lot of it. So in terms of the the client stuff, for Python, we are marching towards our 1.0 release, which is when we aim to be protocol complete to support all of vertica's unique protocols, including COPY LOCAL and some new protocols invented to support complex types, which is our new feature in vertica 10. We have some cursor enhancements to do things like better streaming and improved performance. Beyond that we want to take it where you want to bring it. So send us your requests in the Go client fronts, just about a year behind Python in terms of its protocol implementation, but the basic operations are there. But we still have more work to do to implement things like load balancing, some of the advanced auths and other things. But they're two, we want to work with you and we want to focus on what's important to you so that we can continue to grow and be more useful and more powerful over time. Finally, this question of, "Well, what about beyond database clients? "What else might we want to do with open source?" If you're building a very deep or a robust vertica integration, you probably need to do a lot more exciting things than just run SQL queries and process the answers. Especially if you're an OEM or you're a vendor that resells vertica packaged as a black box piece of a larger solution, you might to have managed the whole operational lifecycle of vertica. There's even fewer standards for doing all these different things compared to the SQL clients. So we started with the SQL clients 'cause that's a well established pattern, there's lots of downstream work that that can enable. But there's also clearly a need for lots of other open source protocols, architectures and examples to show you how to do these things and do have real standards. So we talked a little bit about how you could do UDXs or testing or Machine Learning, but there's all sorts of other use cases too. That's why we're excited to announce here our awesome vertica, which is a new collection of open source resources available on our GitHub page. So if you haven't heard of this awesome manifesto before, I highly recommend you check out this GitHub page on the right. We're not unique here but there's lots of awesome projects for all kinds of different tools and systems out there. And it's a great way to establish a community and share different resources, whether they're open source projects, blogs, examples, references, community resources, and all that. And this tool is an open source project. So it's an open source wiki. And you can contribute to it by submitting yourself to PR. So we've seeded it with some of our favorite tools and projects out there but there's plenty more out there and we hope to see more grow over time. So definitely check this out and help us make it better. So with that, I'm going to wrap up. I wanted to thank you all. Special thanks to Siting Ren and Roger Huebner, who are the project leads for the Python and Go clients respectively. And also, thanks to all the customers out there who've already been contributing stuff. This has already been going on for a long time and we hope to keep it going and keep it growing with your help. So if you want to talk to us, you can find us at this email address here. But of course, you can also find us on the Vertica forums, or you could talk to us on GitHub too. And there you can find links to all the different projects I talked about today. And so with that, I think we're going to wrap up and now we're going to hand it off for some Q&A.

(funky music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering CISCO Live Europe. Brought to you by CISCO and it's ecosystem partners. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019, I'm John Furrier, and my co-host, Stu Miniman. Our next guest Sachin Gupta, senior vice-president of product management in Cisco's enterprise networking business, it's the crown jewels of Cisco, Sachin got the keys to the kingdom. Runs project management, so we get all the info from you, thanks for joining us. Good to see you again, good to see you again, king alumni. >> Yes, thanks. >> Thanks for coming on, I know you've got a keynote at 12 coming up shortly, thanks for spending the time, I'll get right to it. Networking is being reinvented, David Geckler said that onstage yesterday in the keynote. It's not changing, it's just shaping differently for customer needs intent-based networking, we talked briefly last year at Cisco Live in North America moving up the stack, it's here. Intent-based networking, cloud connections, IOT, all kinds of edge con activity, everything's connected, now on to the network. This is real. >> This is real, and John, look, it's been really exciting, right? We've gone through an 18 month journey here, when we first introduced in tent-based networking we talked about moving away from CLI box by box to really solving the problem at an abstracted, intent layer. Specify what user groups and what segments you want, what experience you want to deliver for those applications, and then the network feeding the data back up so you can learn from it, you can manage it, you can troubleshoot it in a much, much simpler way. We're now into this, as I said, 18 months. We have thousands of customers already using intent based networking we talked about software defining access for automated segmentation in the campus, talked about insurance, and then we've been adding capability along the way. And in just this week, David Geckler had people on stage, talked about more innovations with intent-based networking in the data center with ACI anywhere, with innovations on hyper flex. Liz came on and talked about IOT, and how that fits into the framework. And then Gordon talked about what we're doing with SD Ren, really, really exciting stuff going on there. >> Well, why don't you take a minute and quickly explain for the folks watching want to get us on the record so we can get definition. What is intent-based networking? What does it mean, what's the impact for the customers, what is it? >> Intent-based networking means that you can now express your business intent. Here's the outcome I'm looking for from the infrastructure. The system and the architecture will convert that automatically, provision, all the underlying components get the data and the context back out and prove to you that the intent you wanted was delivered. >> And what is changing now, more than ever, because applications are coming on. We see DevNet, we're in the DevNet zone. Seeing a lot of activity, developers. >> Yeah, so now you've got networks that are preventable instead of individual devices that you have to learn from the ground up, all their bells and whistles, you can now live at that intent layer, add an API layer on top of the controllers and move much more quickly. You can now start thinking about multiple domains, and how you cross those domains. >> What is the big product change, if any, especially software, is key to all of this? We've got plenty of hardware. You mentioned Liz in IOT, still runs router, she takes that software, she packages them. We interviewed her yesterday, she was talking about the synergies between code bases in which she customizes for the IOT market, then you've got the intent-based networking. What's the product look like, what's the products as they get more horizontal? >> Yes, so make no mistake, the hardware is still very important. Silicon ASIC's very important, but the magic now is in the software layer. So it starts with the operating system, and Liz talked about how we now have the Cisco IOS EXE operating system, which is modular hot patchable API driven programmable, and now runs across the entire portfolio. It runs on her ruggedized IOT infrastructure, runs on our switches, run on the wireless controller, runs on the routers and the SDWAN nodes, virtual and physical, same operating system. And then the SD controller layer on top of that. So for the campus, you've got DNA centers. So let's code DNA center, and then for the WAN you've got Cisco, the TeleV manage solution that provides a controller layer for automation, for analytics on top of the infrastructure. >> I wonder if we can unpack that SDWAN piece a bit, because WAN's been around a long time. I think back to the 90s, WAN was something that helped us get the internet. In the 2000s there was WAN optimization, I worked on a lot of replication solutions. I'm not sure that people understand the connection between SDWAN and really enabling the multi-cloud world that we need today, and the portfolio that Cisco has to attract that. >> You mentioned the 90s, I joined Cisco in 97, and I actually worked in WAN technical support. (laughing) So I've been with WAN for a very long time. And the customers aren't waking up and saying hey, I need a new WAN. That's not how the conversation starts. What's happening is it's a business transformation question. The companies, the customers are using infrastructure as a service, AWS services. They're using ACER, they're using Google Cloud platform. They're using all the SaaS products. Webex from Cisco, right, they're using Office 365. They're using all of these new applications and their data is not sitting in the data center. I mean, as we've noticed this week, the data center moves to where your data is. Well now, if your data isn't in it's data center that's conveniently connected through a WAN connection and it's all over the place. It's in the cloud, in many clouds. You have to think about, how do you get traffic in and out, how do you deliver security, and in this world where you may be using internet connections and all kinds of connections, how do you deliver the right application experience, and then oh, by the way, how do you manage all of this? That's what SDWAN is about, I need to transfer my business as I move applications or consume cloud services, I need to re-architect my WAN, and SDWAN helps me go do that. >> A big piece of that is what a network person needs to manage today, a lot of what they need to manage, they don't own. They don't control it, and some of that means I can't necessarily put a box that I can dial into and do this, so I need a software piece that I can put there as part of my overall configuration. >> Yes, you need a software piece, and you need something that scales to something that is cloud delivered. You can't be going to hundreds or thousands of sites and manually provisioning these for these services. You need to be able to have virtual services. If you're consuming a cloud service, you need your router or your service presence, your SDWAN presence in the cloud, right? So virtual network functions, virtual services become really critical in this world. >> Just on scale, you know, I've worked with Cisco on a lot of branch solutions over my career, there's lots of different components of scale that these type of solutions play into. >> Okay, people say if everything is in the cloud, does the scale requirement go down? All you think about is do I have 100 sites and I had one or two data centers. Alright, well now I have the same hundred sites, and I have hundreds of services. SaaS applications I'm consuming, and as I said, infrastructure as a service. And I still have some data centers for my legacy applications as well. So the complexity has actually increased, the scale requirement has increased. I need a much better software method, a software define method, to manage all of this. >> This is a key point, a lot of inflection points in the industry always have an abstraction layer to abstract away complexities. So you got two things going on here that are pretty clear, there's more complexity and more scale. So software's the perfect solution to manage that, is that what you're saying? >> Software's the perfect solution to manage this, and that's sort of one more level to that complexity. Because your traffic isn't neatly going from your branch through sort of a lease line or MPLS circuit that you can VPN into a data center, it's a more complicated traffic flow. I might be connecting directly to the internet securely is a huge concern. >> This is a great point, I was going to ask you the flow question, you know the old expression "follow the money and you'll find your answers." In networking, in this business, follow the traffic. Remember, north, south, east, west. That became a paradigm that helped shape a lot of network architecture. Now you have new traffic patterns. Can you give some color around the new traffic patterns and with cloud, comes with Edge, it's not just north, south, east, west, it's everywhere, so give- >> So a new traffic pattern now can be, instead of from the branch through your headquarters to your data center, now the traffic pattern is direct internet access to the SaaS application. Or go to a regional hub that I have in a co-location facility. Well, in the old world you had a security stack in your DMC. So it had your best firewall, your best IPS solution, all layered in there. Now in this new world with your traffic hitting directly, those applications and data in the cloud, you have to rethink security. So what we did in our SDWAN solution, we embed the best Cisco security technology application firewall, URL filtering, IPS solutions natively in our SDWAN software stack. And so you can deploy this across hundreds of branches now, and so you have assurance that the same level of security that you had in your data center can be delivered in a distributed way, in an easy way. And what happens is, customers also want to consume cloud security. You know, maybe I don't want to run in my branch, I actually have a SaaS application, I want to use the Cisco Umbrella service. Alright, so this is a secure internet gateway that processes this traffic, makes sure things are clean, makes sure we are safe, the customers are safe, and we can now integrate with cloud services in our SDWAN solution with just one click. >> How important is this security paradigm you just mentioned? Because there probably will be consequences. We've seen IOT become a talking point around oh, surface area, more surface area for the security breaches. This security paradigm's different. Why is it important and what are the consequences if not followed? >> If you don't follow this paradigm, I think the risk you run into that first of all, you will make a compromise on application experience because you're so worried about security. Let me give you an example, customers may choose, hey, you know what, I'll continue hair pinning all my traffic through my headquarters because I have a rich security stack there, and suffer an application experience because I'm going this way to get to the cloud asset rather than going directly, and so by enabling that rich security stack to be virtually enabled anywhere you want it, anywhere you need it, we can ensure that you can have the maximum level security that you need in your architectural design, and still get the application experience by selecting the best path for your application. >> And it's good business to be in enabling technology. We've seen that, you guys have lived that at Cisco. What is the most important story coming out of Cisco, out of this show, as you guys move forward that customers and the industry should pay attention to in your opinion? What's the most important story? >> I think the most important part of the story is, intent-based networking and the architectural shift, the reinvention that it's created isn't about any single domain, right? This is happening in the WAN to solve application experience problems, SaaS application experience problems, security problems, automations, scale. It's happening in the campus for segmentation, prevent lateral movement of threats. It's happening in the data center with ACI, and the customers want simple outcomes. What they're looking for is users, devices, things connecting to applications and data, doesn't matter where they sit, and ensuring that from a policy based model, they can automate end to end, and they can get the visibility, the telemetry end to end to solve problems and to learn and to improve the network. >> So cross domain traffic, application probability of the network, and the role of data that plays in that seems to be a common thread. >> Beautifully summarized, John, that's exactly right. >> Well, what's coming up in the keynote? What are you going to talk about at noon here in Barcelona? >> Yeah so in the keynote, I'm going to recap why have we done this, why does it matter, and why isn't CLI still going to work for you, and why did we need to reinvent networking? And then talk about the journey so far, all the new things we've announced, and then what I'm really excited about is I have a partner coming on stage with me talking about how we're delivering SDWAN solutions for our customers, how does that conversation work, and what should you really worry about as you select the service, design the architecture you're going to go with. >> Sachin, I want to go back in time, jog your memory, I remember back in the 90s, multi vendor was a big word, multi vendor improbability. Multi vendor meant working with multiple industry standard stuff. I hear multi cloud, I get a similar vibe. This seems to be the trend that people want to pay attention to just as much as hybrid cloud or maybe more on the multi cloud side, some are even saying, multi cloud is hotter than hybrid cloud. Do you agree with that, and how does multi vendor, multi cloud jive to Cisco? You guys thrived in a multi vendor world. What's your thoughts on this multi cloud? >> I think in both of those situations, customers are looking for freedom. It needs to be open, API driven. I should be able to move my traffic from one place to the other, my applications from one place to the other and not feel locked in. And so it's critical to support open protocols, open APIs and to provide customers that freedom. An SDWAN actually helps provide that. We're using open protocols open APIs, but at the same time, if I need to move my service from here to there, and I still need to deliver security, application experience, scale, automation, you can do that. So we provide that freedom to run that application in the multi cloud environment. >> One of the things that comes up all the time when we have conversations with the geeks out there at the conferences, it's microservices in containers on one side, and then on the networking side it's still latency and cost, you've still got latency issues and cost to move traffic around. Still a dynamic, how are you guys still looking there? 'Cause latency is certainly super important, and networking will be moving packets around, moving traffic around, and cost, there's still cost. Is this the concept of data center moving to the applications? How do you guys look at that cost equation and the latency equation, that's still important, can't change the laws of physics. >> The cost of latency equation is still really important, but the problem has changed, now. As your applications now, your data center is sort of moving with the cloud. Think about Office 365, we still need to help you get the best experience for Office 365 as if you were running an on-prem solution. For that we need to do things very different, we need to manage latency, to manage jitter, to manage cost overall. So what we've done is we use an API integration with Office 365 to give you 40% better performance for that fast application, and we're doing this for many applications. So I think you're right, you're solving for similar things, but now everything's changed on here. The applications are in a different place. So you just have to solve them in a fundamentally new way. >> And that's the traffic patterns, really comes down to it, and that's a tell sign of user expectation, user behavior, application behavior, this is the new normal. >> This is the new normal. >> What are you excited for looking forward as you look at your business, you look at Cisco, positioning style, I like the new position, very tight, very good, I like A Bridge to Tomorrow, A Bridge to the Future, kind of makes sense. Bridge, I like the double entendre there. But as you look at the portfolio coming together with multi cloud, what are you excited about? >> Look, and I've heard this from many customers and partners this week as well at Cisco live, we've been on this journey for many years. Building out intent-based networking for each of these domains, and now we've got thousands of customers already using it. But the conversations are going from hey, why did we need to do this? To, hey, help me perfect my design, and I now need to connect two or three domains together, how do we go do that? So we're now having richer, more mature next phase conversations. So it's working with our customers to realize that value across all of the domains from anywhere where there are users and things start anywhere with data and application sessions. >> And the network is foundational with the security architecture, you can build on that, that's where the magic will happen from your perspective, you see that. >> That's where the magic will happen, and you know what, only Cisco can pull this off. Because we have leadership in every one of those domains, and we're following the same architectural principles across all of them. >> So if someone said Sachin, this is not your grandfather's SDWAN, what do you respond to that? How do you update that narrative? What is the SDWAN new message, what's the new picture for SDWAN, what does that mean? >> The new SDWAN is about connecting to your applications and data in any cloud in a multi cloud environment, SaaS, IOS applications, it doesn't matter. Any private data center, still delivering the best security, best application experience in an automated way at the skill that you need. >> Okay, at the center of the value properties, have been saying on theCUBE for nine years, finally it's happening, a lot of stuff coming together meeting the road, congratulations on your success, and thanks for spending the time to come in. Great to see you, good luck on your keynote. This is theCUBE coverage live in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from Cisco Live after this short break, stay with us. (funky music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's the Cube. Covering Polycon '18. Brought to you by Polymath. >> Welcome back, everyone. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage. We're live in the Bahamas, here for day two of our wall to wall coverage of Polycon '18. It's a security token conference, securitizing, you know, token economics, cryptography, cryptocurrency. All this is in play. Token economics powering the world. New investors are here. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Nithin Eapen Who's the Chief Investment Officer for Arcadia Crypto Ventures. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much gentlemen. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for coming out. >> Excited to have you on for a couple reasons. One, we've been talking since day one, lot of hallway conversations. Small, intimate conference, so we've had a chance to talk. Folks haven't heard that yet, so let's kind of get some of the key things we discussed. You are very bullish and long on cryptocurrency and Blockchain. You guys are doing a variety of deals. You're also advising companies and you guys are rolling your sleeves up. So kind of interesting dynamics. So take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, your model. >> Okay. >> And we're going to try to get some of your partners on later. You have a great team. >> Yep. >> Experienced pros in investing. And you got wales, you got pros. So you got a nice balance. >> Yes we do. >> So take a minute to explain Arcadia, your approach and philosophy. >> Okay. Okay. So Arcadia Crypto Ventures primarily we are a private fund. We invest other money. We believe in the whole crypto space. We believe this market is expanding and it is growing and it's going to be the biggest thing that ever happened. It's going to be this fusion of internet and PC and mobile. And everything is going to go batshit, okay. We believe in the whole tokenization world. Everything is going to be tokenized. So as a whole, we believe this space is going to go very big. Okay, so that's one piece and because of that, we invest in the space, the whole space. Not one bitcoin or Ethereum, but everything in the space that makes sense. People who have a use case. Now the second piece of it is we advised great founders. We want to get founders to come out and build these new things because this is the new internet of the new era and people have to come out and build these things. And so many of them are traditional businesses and we have to explain to them why this matters, why you should come to this space and be decentralized and reach the whole world. Because initially, the internet came. The idea of the internet was everybody gets information. Now information did get everywhere. You don't have to worry that the mailman is there to deliver your email anymore. Even if it's a Sunday, your mail will get delivered. So that part was good. But now you have these few companies that's holding all your data. It's okay for most people, but they do censor a lot of people. So that is one point. That censorship. We want a censorship-resistant world where everybody's ideas get out. So that way, we believe that's how this whole internet space itself is going to change because of that. See this is if I explained in one word, this is the greatest sociopolitical economic experimental revolution ever that has happened in humankind. >> In the history of the world. I mean this is important. I'd said that on my opening today. >> Uh-huh. >> Dave and I were riffing and Dave and I have always been studying. We've been entre-- We are entrepreneurs. We live in Silken Valleys in Boston and so you seeing structural change going on. So it's not just make money. >> Nope. >> There's mission-based, younger demographics. So you starting to see really great stuff. So I want to ask you specifically, 'cause you guys are unique in the sense that you're investing in a lot of things. But startups, pure-playing startups? >> Which had only one path before, or two paths. >> Right, yeah. >> Cashflow financing and venture capital. >> Okay. >> So that's a startup model. The growing companies that are transform their growth business with token economics, those would have long odds. Those are the best deals. >> Okay. Then there's like the third deal. Well we're out of business, throw the Hail Mary, repivot. (laughs) Right, so categorically, you're starting to see the shape of the kinds of swim lanes of deals. >> Okay. >> Okay, pivoting, that Hail Mary. Okay, you can evaluate that pretty much straight up on that. Startups need nurturing, right? >> Yeah. >> So the VC1 al-oc-chew works really well for startups because of the product market fits going to be developed. You got cloud computing so you can go faster. So you guys are nurturing startups. At the same time, you're also doing growth deals. >> We do. >> Explain the dynamic between those kinds of deals, how you guys approach them. What's the dynamic? What are the key things that you're bringing? Is it just packaging? Is it tech? So on, so forth. >> So with a lot of people, when they are on the advisory side. Primarily we look at the founder and the tech. What are they trying to solve? That is key. If it's a turd, you can't package it. No matter how you package it, that's not going to work. >> You can't package dog you-know-what. >> Yeah, exactly, okay. >> So that's one thing that we look at. The founders and their idea. Now their idea, can it be decentralized? Some models are meant to be centralized maybe so it doesn't work, okay. Like, see it all boils down to-- Let me break it down. We look at it. Okay, do you have an asset? Behind the scenes, is there an asset? Is that asset being transferred among parties? If you have an asset and it's being transferred, is there some central mechanism in between? Because if there is a central mechanism in between, that means you're going to be paying rent to that. Okay, all right. You have these things. Okay, great. Now you have your asset. Do you have that in between party? But in some of them, let's say you have money in your pocket. You walk, it falls down. Somebody else pick ups the money. It's his. It's a bearer asset, okay? So that's where bitcoin solved a very big problem. It was bearer asset. >> Unless they hack your wallet, then they take your money. >> Right. That happens in real life too, right? Somebody can take money from your wallet. So it can happen in bitcoin. They can hack your wallet. All right. So bitcoin was solving that problem. Now the second piece is a registered asset. And I mean by registered asset is take your car. You buy your car, you go to the DMV, stand in line, register. There's a record of data at the DMV in their central database. If somebody steals your car, the car is still not his. It's only if they can change the record over there in DMV. Then it becomes his. Now there maybe you do want the DMV to be there. Or maybe we can-- But the DMV being there, now you have a problem. They're going to charge you rent and they can decide, oh you know what? John, I'm not going to give him a license or a car in the state of California. They can decide, right? So that is where now you decide do you want to go the centralized route or the decentralized route? So we break it down to the asset. >> So there could be a fit for decentralized. I get that. >> Yeah. >> Let me ask you a tactical question, because I know a lot of entrepreneurs out there. They're watching and they'll hear this. A big strategic decision up front is, obviously, token selection. >> So it's pretty clear that security token works really well for funding and whatnot. Then there's a role for security tokens. I mean utility tokens. >> Yes. >> So do people, should they start from a risk management standpoint, a new company. So let's just say we had an existing business. Entrepreneur says, "Hey, you know what? We're doing well. We're doing 10 million dollars in revenue and I want to do tokenize 'cause we're a decentralized business. That's a perfect fit." Do they start a new company or do they just use the security token with their existing stable company? >> I would suggest, usually at that time, that's more of a legal question at that time. I don't know if I'm a lawyer to answer that. I tell them, you have a business. The business model is going well. If you're happy with it, let that be there. Make a new company. If your business model was not doing good, you might as well start from there because you figure out it's not working. But again, at that time, we tried to come up with this question. Are you trying to put the old wine in a new bottle kind of thing? If the wine is old, it ain't going to work. You have to get to that realization. So, here. >> People are being sued. So mainly the legal question is do I want to risk being. >> All right, let me hop in here. I wanted to ask, go back to something you said about censorship. I had this conversation with my kid the other day. I was explaining Google essentially censors your search results based on what they think you're going to click on. >> They do that. >> He's like no and then he thought about it and he's like okay, yeah they kind of do that. Okay, so that's an underpinning of we're going to take back the internet, right? >> Yeah. >> Okay, I just wanted to sort of clarify that. From an investment philosophy standpoint, you're technical, yet you don't exclusively vet or invest in infrastructure protocols and dig deep into what-- You read the white papers, but there are some folks out there hedge funds, et cetera. All they do is just invest in utility tokens. They're trying to invest in stuff that's going to be infrastructure for the next internet. Your philosophy is different. You're saying, we talked about this, we don't really know what's going to win, but we make prudent investments in areas that we think will win. We like to spread it around a little bit. Why that philosophy? May reduce your return, but it also reduces your risk. Maybe you could describe that a little bit. >> Sure. See, in general, picking winners in the long run has been-- It's a proved fact that nobody could pick winners. Like if you take active hedge fund managers. Active hedge fund managers, in the long run, if you take 10 to 20 years, they lag the S and P. So if you had money, if you give it to an active hedge fund manager, and so that you just had to buy the S and P, you will have beaten 93%. >> That's Buffet's advice. Buy an S and P 500. >> Buffet made a bet for a billion dollars or something where, you know. So take Warren Buffet for that matter, his fund is lagging too. In reality, all his stock investments are down. He put it in IBM at $200 after eight years, it's at the 143 or something, right? So realistically,-- There's a lot of luck element, okay. You can do all of the analysis and you could still end up buying Enron, Lehman, and Bear Stearns, right? >> Right, yeah. >> And at that time, see they were using some models that they knew 'til then. Most people, investment comes from, you have this background that you know, okay this is what I look at. Cash flow, discounted cash flow. Great. If that is there, price to earnings, I'm going to buy. But then an Amazon came, most of the traditional investors never invested in Amazon. They were like, it's a loss- making company. They never going to survive. But they forgot the fact that companies like that there's this network effect and once the people are there, at any point, Jeff Bezos can just turn off the switch and take off the discount. You're not going to change your shopping from Amazon at that point because this month I lost my 15%. We're so used to it so people missed that. Nowadays they see that, but when it came to Blockchain they're like, oh, no, no, this is a fad. That's what most people said. >> So we talked about discounted cashflow as a classic valuation method. I see guys trying to do DCF on these investments. I mean, we were joking about that. (laughs) How do you-- What's your reaction to that? >> If anybody's saying that if they come to me and I'm like you-- I don't know what Kool-Aid do you drink at that point because what cashflow are they discounting? There's no cashflow. It's not like you're going to get dividends from these tokens. There's no dividends. It's like can you find out how many people are going to use it. What is the network effect? And again, for that, a lot of people are coming with a lot of these matrices or matrix right now. But I think even that, they're trying to retrofit into it. They're like, oh I can use this matrix. But, really we don't know. >> So people tend to want metrics. Dave and I talk about this all the time. When people part with their money, they need to know what they're betting on. So the question is when you look at investments, when you spend cash, when you write checks, what is your valuation technique? Do you look for the l-- How do you play that long game? What's the criteria? Besides like the normal stuff like founders, disruptive, like you got to write the check, let's say. Okay, buying a token. It's got to be worth something in the future, obviously. >> So we look at that space, where invariably they are trying to disrupt. Is there a big market? And even if it's a niche market, okay? So we're doing an error chain token. It's a very niche market. It's just the pilot, the maintenance folks, and the charter people, or the plain charter guys. It's a very small market, but that's good enough. It's very niche. They can have an ecosystem between themselves rather than being incentivized to long game miles and stuff like that, right? It doesn't have to be a very big market. We just look at it, okay. Founder is good, he has an idea, it is a space that can be decentralized and people can come in and they feel that they're part of the ecosystem. See the whole thing with the token economy and a traditional economy like let's say I'm spending money to buy a stock. So I buy stock. As an investor, what do I want? I want maximum returns. The employee, he wants to get maximum pay. And the consumer who's buying the product, he wants to get it at the cheapest price. So there's a-- It start aligned, okay? The moment you give 'em the cheapest price, my profits go down. If I increase the employees' salary, my profits go down. So we are all three of us are totally misaligned. >> If I for an important point, do you favor certain asset classes, you know, token, security tokens, or utility tokens, or you looking for equity? I mean, maybe just ... >> Right now, we've moved away from the whole equity bonds, or any of those things. We are totally concentrated on the utility or security tokens. We don't mind if it's a security token or utility token. >> And if it's a security token, are you looking for dividends, are you looking for >> At that point it's some kind of dividend. >> So you're not expecting equity as part of that security token? >> No, I like to expect equity, but if they are saying okay my token, if people buy and if they pay me $10, and out of that you're going to get $1 back, okay that's fine. We don't mind that as long as it's legal and all those things we're fine because it just makes the process easier. Earlier you invest and you didn't know when you could get out of your investment. At this point, it's become so liquid, at any point of time within two or three months, the token is less to people are either buying and selling. We know, otherwise, earlier when we used to do Ren Chain investments, we would get into our product, have it it's time seven to 10 years to get out. And in the meanwhile, they say great stories. Oh we're doing great. Who do I check with that we are doing great? I'm not getting any dividends. Nobody's buying this from me. How do I know? Where am I? I really don't know. I can make these values up and on my Excel sheet and say okay we valuing this company at a billion. >> So your technique is to say okay look at the equity plays the long game. You need an exit on liquidity, either M and A or IPO. >> Yes. >> Now you have a new liquidity market, so you play the game differently. I won't say spray and pray, but you have multiple bets going on so you can monitor liquidity opportunity. So that's a new calculation. >> And it's a great calculation, also. Because see we're in the market and now we know at any point of time, we don't have things on our books that are like we don't know what the value is. We know what that price is because the market is there, the exchange is there. What other people are willing to pay for us doesn't surprise. It's like saying my house is worth a million dollars. Actually it might be worth to me. It depends on what people are willing to pay me. >> Right exactly. >> If I have to synthesize this, you're taking high frequency trading techniques with classic venture investing, handling token from those two perspectives. >> Yes. >> High frequency trading meaning I'm looking at volatility and then option to abandon and get rid of whatever or whatever. >> The only thing is, we're not exiting our positions. We are in the long game. We believe the score market is supposed to at least reach eight trillion. When we started this whole investing, at that time, the whole market was at six billion and we said okay this market, based on our thesis, is supposed to reach eight trillion. Until then, we keep buying, okay? >> But to your HFT, you're not really arbitraging. >> No, no, we're not doing any of those. Because see >> They're applying real time techniques to token evaluations so they're game is try to get into a winner. >> Yes. >> With some tokens. >> A lot of the funds, they're doing this arbitrage more. They're trying to do arbitrage. But the problem is they're missing the big picture that way. So, arbitrage works in a very tight market. So S and P, let's say, somebody's doing 5% return on S and P. The guy with a arbitrage is coming and saying I made five point three, 5.5% or 6%. That's great in the equity world. Now, I want returns last year are 10 x or 30 x or 50 x. And somebody comes and tells me I made an extra 0.2%, doesn't really matter to me. I'm like instead of wasting that time doing arbitrage and paying taxes, I might just hold it. >> You believe in the fundamentals. >> You guys are in New York. Obviously, Arcadia Crypto Ventures, that's how they get ahold of you guys. Final question for you to end the segment. As new real pros come in, and let's take New York as a since you're in New York. The New York crowd comes in or the Silken Valley comes crowd existing market players other markets come in here. How important is optics packaging and compatibility with the sector, meaning I just can't throw my weight around on the hedge fund scene. We do it this way, I got money. Because people here have money. So what's the dynamic of pros coming in, we're seeing institutional folks come in, we're seeing real pros come in. They've never been to Burning Man. So, you know, they get that Burning Man culture exists, but this is not a Burning Man industry. >> Right, right. >> Business doesn't run like Burning Man. Maybe it should, that's a debate we'll have. Your take. >> So the new funds that are coming in, so they have a fear that they have missed out. They are missing the picture that this is just the beginning. So they've seen that this industry has gone from six billion to 500 billion in a year or year and a half. They're like, oh my god, I missed it. >> It's got to be over. >> So I have to write these big checks to get this. We don't write big checks. We write much smaller checks because we believe that if a founder is raising money, he has to raise it through small checks from everybody. That means all those people are really interested in this. And they're all of them really want the token to go up. Whether it's the investor, the user, and the employee who is working there because all of them they're interests are aligned. The moment you give a big check, so let's say you could raise 10 million from 10,000 people or you could raise it from one person. So when the big check is there, let's say I go to raise my money. There's this fund who's missed it and he says here's 10 million dollars. Okay, now I've got me and the fund and my tokens. Nobody else knows about my tokens. My tokens are as good as valueless. Now the funders looking okay, I need to exit. Nobody knows about my tokens. The fund is the only guy who has my tokens, he's trying to exit. Obviously the market is going to crash. There's no market. And he's like why did I get into this. So he missed that point that you need people around you. It's not just you alone. See, earlier days when ... >> This is your point about understanding how token economics works. >> Yes. >> So having more people in actually creates a game mechanic for trading. >> Because then you know that you're not the only guy interested in this. And earlier venture capital space there were these bunch of few venture capitals who wanted to capture that whole thing and tried to sell it to the next guy. Here, I'm what I'm saying is, we all have to come in together. We all can be together at the same price, which is good because the small person has, the common man has a chance to be a VC right now. Earlier you could never be a VC. I could only see Google, after IPO. I could never get it at what KPCB or Sequoia got it at. I had to wait 'til they got through CDA, CDB, which they bought at five cents. I would get at about $40 maybe. In this case, the big fund has a lot more money than me, but I can have my small 5,000 or 10,000. I can invest in the ICO. >> If you picked the right spot and you were there at the right place, the right time. 'Cause you are seeing guys come in and try to buy up all the tokens early on. >> They're trying to do that. They don't get it, but they will understand. So it is a learning (mumbles). Even they will evolve. They're like okay this is not how it works. And you have to make mistakes. >> Sorry, got to ask you one final, final since you brought it up. More people the better. So we're hearing rumors inside the hallways here that big wales are buying full allocations and then sharing them with all their friends. >> Possible, it is possible. >> We see some of that behavior. Dave calls it steel on steel, you know. Groups, you know. I'm going to take this whole deal down. We see that in venture capital. Used to be syndicates. Now you seeing Andreessen Horowitz doing the whole deals. That kind of creates some alienation, my opinion, but what's your take on that? I'm a big wale. I'm taking down the whole allocation. >> It's okay. Some of those things are going to happen, okay. It is fine. The only problem is usually when that happens the big wale who takes it he will realize very quickly. >> He's got to get more people. >> He needs more people otherwise he might be able to exit to his five buddies who were always taking it from him. Now those guys, they also have to exit at some point. Nobody knows about the product. Might as well just take a small piece, even the founders in this case typically in a token model. Founders who've taken 20% or 10% have done better than founders who took 60% of the whole tokens. >> Right. Nithin, great to have you on. Love your business model. Arcadia Crypto Ventures. They got real pros, they got a wale, they got people who know what they're doing, and they're active. They understand the ethos. I think you guys are well-aligned and you're not trying to come in and saying this is how we did it in New York before. You get the culture. You're aligned and you're making investments. Great perspective. Thanks for sharing. >> Thank you so much. >> This is the Cube, bringing the investor perspective live here in the Bahamas. More exclusive Cube coverage. Token economics, huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors to create value and capture it. That's Blockchain, that's crypto, that's token economics. I'm John with Dave Vallante. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (futuristic digital music)

>> [Announcer] Live, from Silicon Valley, it's The Cube Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> [John] Welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Palo Alto, California for a special two days of Mobile World Congress. We're on day two of wall to wall coverage from eight a.m. to six p.m. Really breaking down what's happening in studio and going to our reporters and analysts in the field. We'll have Pete Injerich coming up next and we're going to get on the ground analysis from the current analysis, now with global data. But next we have a segment where, I had a chance this morning early in the morning my time top of the morning Tuesday in Barcelona which was hours ago, I had a chance to speak with Caroline Chan and Dan Rodriguez. I wanted to get their opinion on what's happening and I asked Caroline Chan, "What's the biggest story coming out of Mobile World Congress?" This is what she had to say: >> [Caroline Chan] So last year this time, the people coming in asked a lot of questions about 5G technology. Is it real? Can we really pull it off? You know, 3G, 4G, it's a little bit ho-hum. But this year, I would say when I look around, not just in Apple, everybody else is good. I'm also hoping to, people talk about it as a faithful, I went to a panel last night with Orange, and AT&T, and Telefonica. I think the conversation switched from will there be a 5G to solutions. So, I look around in our booth and next door in Verizon there's a lot of cars, autonomous driving. We had network 5G enable smart city, it's in our homes, It becomes from technology to solution, and then in the last discussion about this iteration of 5G, there was an announcement about the 5G in our loan, Whole bunch of talk about acceleration. It's really becoming how can we quickly get out there. And then the other thing I've read is about AI. How does AI now because 5G becomes an enigma. AI and the cloud, there's all these analytics, so 5G can actually now be able to bring that into the cloud. So AI becomes a buzzword. I just read the SAT CTO Was all NWC live TV at the venue, I talked about AI and 5G transforming the mobile industry, so it really becomes much more of a solution oriented. >> [Dan] No, I can't agree with Caroline more there. Tremendous amount of excitement around 5G as well as network transformation in the show and the two things are really becoming linked. So Caroline mentioned a few of the use cases out there on 5G, so again, lots of autonomous driving, lots of smart home, lots of smart city. I personally had a great time hanging out in our smart home demonstration earlier, but I think the key linkage of all those use cases is that the network needs to become more intelligent, more flexible, and definitely more agile to be able to support this wide variety of use cases. And we're seeing it being really echoed back by not only operators, but a lot of the OES and telecommunication equipment factors, really rallying behind NSE and truly the path to 5G. >> [John] Take a minute, guys, to explain the 5G revolution and why it's not just an evolution from 4G. What's the difference? What is the key enabler of 5G and what is Intel have that's different now than it was before. >> [Caroline] So you imagined 3G is all about getting better voice and also a little bit of SMS, and 4G is a literal 3G on steroids. Now 4G has all these, you can go on the internet and download all kind of things. 5G takes that to the next level. So 2G, 3G, and 4G is about network building for the masses If you think about it it's like a general network. So when you build it and somebody vertical says I want to make this my private network for my enterprise it's a best effort basis, so either too hot or too cold. So what that means is it operates under a wirenut either giving you way too much, unable to recuperate your investments or if it gives you not enough, you wind up with a bad user experience. 5G fundamentally changes this. Why does it change in the standard itself that's undergoing in the 3G PP. As you have a different type of schedule with them, you must predict the different use cases. For example, if you're doing a mission cryptic IOG versus a massive connector IOG, you get a different protocol. You strip out some of the heavy amount of signaling that is typically needed for mission critical for something that's just there like smart city, like traffic light changes, that kind of information you don't need that to generate a whole bunch of bandwidth. So you see something with a different, natively different in the protocol itself so that's a fundamental shift from the mindset that we always had. So that is technology enabled. And the second thing is that the network today, thanks to all the network transformation journey that everybody is on, it's much softer and flexible, it moves away from a single part purse, a belt, power to something that is much more flexible, such that you can enable something like the network driving So a prize for enhanced mobile program for ARPR would be different from something for autonomous driving. So it makes the network fundamentally different, the interface itself is much more flexible for different types of applications, and then not to mention that we have different types of spectrums on the traditional 3 GHz to 6 And now two millimeter waves we open up a whole swathe of the spectrum to allow for a much, much bigger bandwidth and things like camera applications. It really changed the game. >> [Dan] Thanks, Caroline. So I think at a high level, what Caroline was pointing out is that the wide variety of use cases with 5G will stretch and pull the network in all sorts of directions. Essentially, there will be different use cases that require blatant fact network speed, but maximum amounts of bandwidth, but some use cases also require very low latency. So when you think about all the variety of use cases, the best way to truly insure you're meeting the user experience and also delivering the right economic value for the industry is to move to more intelligent and a flexible network. And as Caroline mentioned, it is going to be software-defined. And when you think about some of the products that we're investing in, and the status in our group for networking of course you think about our Intel Xeon processors. These processors can be found in a number of servers around the globe, and customers are using these for a variety of virtual network functions, really everything ranging from the core network to the access network to newer use cases such as virtual TV. In this bit, we did announce some additional products that will be made available later in the year. This is the Atom C3000 series as well as the Xeon D1500 network series. Both of these are SoC, and when you think about 5G, you do think about the mix of centralized and distributed to plan it, and you think about that network edge becoming smarter, so these types of SoCs are very critical because they provide excellent performance density at the right power level so you can have a very intelligent edge of your network. >> [John] Great point. Just to follow up on that, it's interesting, we had a conversation yesterday in The Cube around millimeter waves, CBMA, all the different types of wireless, and I think what's interesting is you have some use cases where you have a lot of density and some cases where you need low latency, but you also have an internet of things. A car, for example, you could say, we were discussing a car is essentially going to become a data center on wheels, where mobility is going to be very important and might not need precise bandwidth per se, but in more mobility in some cases you'll need more bandwidth. And also as an internet of things comes on, whether they're industrial devices that the notion of a phone being provisioned once and then being used is not the same use case as, say, IOT, which you could have anything connected to a network, these devices are going to come on and offline all the time, so there's a real need for dynamic networks. What is Intel's approach here, because this seems to be the conversation that most people are talking about that's happening under the hood, that's the true enabler around bringing out the real mobile edge. >> [Caroline] The couple things that we're doing, number one we use a concept called flex term, flex core which is a server-based platform that works on a variety of technologies applied to it lots of these real time visualizations, dynamic resource sharing and reconfigurations, we're able to support what you just described and provide a flex support team for different types of scenarios. And then the other thing that builds into the 5G support network Splicing allows you to splice up to the pairs of light resources for a variety of cases, Including the coarse part of it, so for example, HP here in this room is demonstrating what looks a server, walks like a server and is a server and it has the RAM, virtual PC, it has orchestration, it has mobile edge computing, it's really become a network in a box. So the fact is the ultimate freedom to support the service providers and enterprises and to apply all the 5G to different scenarios. >> [John] The final question, guys, is market readiness through partners and collaboration. Intel obviously is the leader, Intel Inside who was the main story we've been hearing at Mobile World Congresses end to end, fortunately a great piece with Intel CEO talking about the end to end value in the underlying architecture, it all runs on Intel, it works better, it brings up the notion of market readiness in the ecosystem. What are you guys doing to make the ecosystem robust and vibrant, because Intel can't do it alone, you're going to need partners. Thoughts on how you guys are accelerating it, and really the market readiness for 5G and just timing in your mind when all the fruit comes off the 5G tree, if you will. >> [Caroline] We started with the trials this year, so 2017 we're going to be able, we're working closely with partners, like Ericsson, Nokia, and Cisco and we should be seeing early performance coming up and I really think the wide spread of commercial publicly is more like 2019, 2020 timeframe because of some of the standardization, would you say? >> [Dan] Yeah, so that's a great summary, Caroline. I think the key thing that we're really seeing at Mobile Congress and things that we're investing in, diverse as you mentioned. It definitely takes a village to pull off this network transformation and the movement to 5G, and I think the great thing is about the network size is the network is becoming much more pliable, more software to find, more resilient, more agile, and it's out there to find. You can really invest in many of these innovations we've been discussing today now. So we're seeing a lot of folks start investing in Flex-Core, Network in a Box, mobilized computing, et cetera, so you transform your network now, utilizing network function virtualization, and then you have a sturdy foundation when all the 5G use cases come online in the next years. >> [John] Guys, final question. What power demos are you showing? You guys usually have great demos on the floor, Mobile World Congress, lot of glam, lot of flair at the show. >> [Dan] Great question. We have a number of super demos here, we have a smart and connected home, which showcases all sorts of intel, wireless technology out of the gateway as well as other devices we're showing a smart city, as you know, with 5G, and its lightening fast speeds to pass the lower latencies. It's truly going to change the urban landscape. And we're also showing augmented virtual reality in a few different demonstrations and one definitely caught my eye and I was pretty excited about it. In our Flex Ren demo, we were showcasing augmented virtual reality, actually viewing a skier going downhill and it was pretty exciting. I had a great time, I can't wait to when, in a few years when 5G is out there and I can use augmented virtual reality to watch a number of sporting events ranging from college football to my favorite sport, which is surfing. >> [John] What's next for 5G? How are you guys going to roll this out, what's the big plans post Mobile World Congress? >> [Caroline] Like I mentioned, we have trial plans with our partners through 2017, and then we're also participating in the Winter Olympics showcase, again through our customers. There's activities happening in China now, so I think we can be in a lot of places. You can see us in 5G. >> [John] Winter Olympics, expect to get the downloads and all the video in real time on 4K screens, thank you very much. (laughs) We expect to see some good bandwidth on the Olympics, I'm sure. >> [Dan] Hey thanks, John, this was great. >> [Caroline] Thanks, bye! >> [John] Thank you. Caroline Chan and Dan Rodriguez, from Barcelona, calling in with all the details, I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more live coverage from the Mobile World Congress after this short break.