(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special CUBEConversation here in the Palo Alto CUBE studio. I'm John Furrier, the co-host, theCUBE co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. In theCUBE we're here with Alan Cohen, CUBE alumni, joining us today for a special segment on the future of technology and the impact to society. Always good to get Alan's commentary, he's the Chief Commercial Officer for Illumio, industry veteran, has been through many waves of innovation and now more than ever, this next wave of technology and the democratization of the global world is upon us. We're seeing signals out there like cryptocurrency and blockchain and bitcoin to the disruption of industries from media and entertainment, biotech among others. Technology is not just a corner industry, it's now pervasive and it's having some significant impacts and you're seeing that in the news whether it's Facebook trying to figure out who they are from a data standpoint to across the board every company. Alan, great to see you. >> Always great to be here, I always feel like, I can't tell whether I'm at the big desk at ESPN or I've got the desk chair at CNBC, but that's what it's like being on theCUBE. >> Great to have you on extracting the signal noises, a ton of noise out there, but one of things of the most important stories that we're tracking is, that's becoming very obvious, and you're seeing it everywhere from Meed to all aspects of technology. Is the impact of technology to people in society, okay you're seeing the election, we all know what that is, that's now a front and center in the big global conversation, the Russian's role of hacking, the weaponizing of data, Facebook's taking huge brand hits on that, to emerging startups, and the startup game that we're used to in Silicon Valley is changing. Just the dynamics, I mean cryptocurrency raises billions of dollars but yet (laughs) something like 10, 20% of it's been hacked and stolen. It's a really wild west kind of environment. >> Well it's a very different environment. John, you and I have been in the technology industry certainly for a whole bunch of lines under our eyes over the years have gone there. My friend Tom Friedman has this phrase that he says, "Everybody's connected and nobody's in control," so the difference is that, as you just said, the tech industry is not a separate industry. The tech industry is in every product and service. Cryptocurrency is like, the concept of that money is just code. You know, our products and services are just code, it raises a couple of really core issues. Like for us on the security point of view, if I don't trust people with the products they're selling me, that I feel like they're going to be hacked, including my personal data, so your product now includes my personal information, that's a real problem because that could actually melt down commerce in a real way. Obviously the election is if I don't trust the social systems around it, so I think we're all at an, and I'd like to say world is still kind of like iRobot moment, and if you remember iRobot, it's like, people build all these robots to serve humankind and then one day the robots wake up and they go, "We have our own point of view on how things are going to work" and they take over, and I think whether it's the debate about AI, whether cryptocurrency's good or bad, or more importantly, the products and services I use, which are now all digitally connected to me, whether I trust them or not is an issue that I think everyone in our industry has to take a step back because without that trust, a lot of these systems are going to stop growing. >> Chaos is an opportunity, I think that's been quoted many times, a variety-- >> You sound like Jeff Goldblum in like Jurassic Park, yeah. (laughing) >> So chaos is upon us, but this is an opportunity. The winds are shifting, and that's an opportunity for entrepreneurs. The technology industry has to start working for us but we've got to be mindful of these blind spots and the blind spots are technology for good not necessarily just for profits, so that also is a big story right now. We see things like AI for good, Intel has been doing a lot of work on that area, and you see stars dedicated to societal impact, then young millennials, you see the demographic shift where they want to work on stuff that empowers people and changes society so a whole kind of new generation revolution and kind of hippie moment, if you look at the 60s, what the 60s were, right? >> Well there's people out in the street protesting, right? There were a couple of million women out in the street this weekend, so we are in that kind of moment again, people are not happy with things. >> And I believe this is a signal of a renaissance, a change, a sea change at enormous levels, so I want to get your thoughts on this. As technology goes out in mainstream, certainly from a security standpoint, your business Illumio is in that now where there's not a lot of control, just like you were mentioning before we came on that all the spends happening but no one has more than 4% market share. These are dynamics and this is not just within one vertical. What's your take on this, how do you view this sea change that's upon us, this tech revolution? >> Well, you know, think about it. You and I grew up in the era where clients server took over from main frame, right? So remember there was this big company called IBM and they owned a lot of the industry, and then it blew up for client server and then there were thousands of companies and it consolidated its way down, but when those thousands of new companies, like you didn't know what was going to be Apollo and what was going to be Oracle right? Like you didn't know how that was going to work out, there was a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty. I think now we're seeing this on a scale like that's 10x of this that there's so much innovation and there's so much connectedness going on very rapidly, but no one is in control. In the security market, you know, what's happening in our world is like, people said, okay I have to reestablish control over my data, I've lost that control, and I've lost it for good reasons, meaning I've evolved to the cloud, I've evolved to the app economy, I've done all of these things, and I've lost it for bad reasons because like am I, like I'm not really running my data center the way I should. We're in the beginning of a move in of people kind of reasserting that control, but it's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle because the world itself is so much more dynamic and more distributed. >> It's interesting, I've been studying communities and online communities for over a decade in terms of dynamics. You know, from the infrastructural level, how packets move to a human interaction. It's interesting, you mentioned that we're all connected and no one's in control, but you now see a ground swell of organic self-forming networks where communities are starting to work together. You kind of think about the analog world when we grew up without computers and networks, you kind of knew everyone, you knew your neighbor, you knew who the town loony was, you kind of knew things and people watch each other's kids and parents sat from the porch, let the kid play, that's the way that I grew up, but it was still chaotic but yet somewhat controlled by the group. So I got to ask you, when you see things like cryptocurrency, things like KYC, know your customer, anti money laundering, which is, you know these are policy based things, but we're in a world now where, you know, people don't know who their neighbors are. You're starting to see a dynamic where people are-- >> Put the phone down. >> Asserting themselves to know their neighbor, to know their customer, to have a connected tissue with context and so your trust and reputation become super important. >> Well I think people are really, so like every time there is a shift in technology, there's scary stuff. There's the fuddy-duddy moment where people are saying, "Oh we can't use that," or "I don't know that," and you know, clearly we're in this kind of new kam-ree and explosion of this cloud mobile blah blah blah type of computing thing and ... Blah blah blah is always a good intersection when you don't have a term. Then things form around it, and just as you said, so if you think about 25 years ago, right, people created The WELL and there was community writing first bulletin boards and like now we have Facebook and you go through a couple of generations and for a while, things feel out of control and then it reforms. I personally am an optimist. Ultimately I believe in the inherent goodness of people, but inherent goodness leaves you open and then, you know, could be manipulated, and people figure these things out. Whether it's cryptocurrency or AI, they are really exciting technologies that don't have any ground rules, right? What's going to happen I believe is that people are going to reestablish ground rules, they're going to figure out some of the core issues, and some of these things may make it, and some of these things may not make it. Like cryptocurrency, like I don't know whether it makes it or not, but certainly the blockchain as a technology we're going to be incorporating in what we do, and maybe the blockchain replaces VPNs and last generation's way of protecting zeros and ones. If AI is figuring out how to read an MRI in five minutes, it's a good thing, and if the AI is teaching you how to exclude old folks for me finding jobs, it's a bad thing. I think as technology forms, there's always Spectre and 007, right? There's always good and bad sides and you know, I think if you believe-- >> I'm with you on that. I think value shifts and I think ultimately it's like however you want to look at it will shift to something, value activity will be somewhere else. Behind me in the bookshelf is a book called The World is Flat and you're quoted in it a lot as a futurist because you have inherently that kind of view, well that's not what you do for a living, but you're kind of in an opt-- >> Alan: Marketing, futurist, kind of same thing. >> Thomas Friedman, the book, that was a great book and at that time, it was game changing. If you take that premise into today where we are living in a flat world and look at cryptocurrency, and then over with the geo political landscape, I mean I just can't see why the Federal Reserve wouldn't reign in this cryptocurrency because if Japan's going to control a bunch of, or China, it's going to be some interesting conversations. I mean I would be like all over that if I was in the Federal Reserve. >> I think people-- Look, cryptocurrency's really interesting and I think people a little over-rotated. If you look at the amount of GDP that's invested in cryptocurrency, it's like, I don't know, there might've been, you know 20 years ago the same amount involved invested in Beanie Babies, right? I mean things show up for a while and the question is is it sustainable over time? Now I'm trained as an economist, you and I have had this conversation, so I don't know how you have a series of monetary without kind of governmental backing, I just don't understand. But I do understand that people find all kinds of interesting ways to trade, and if it's an exchange, like I mean what's the difference between gold and cryptocurrency? Somebody has ascribed a value to something that really has no efficacy outside of its usage. Yeah I mean you can make a filling or bracelets out of gold but it doesn't really mean anything except people agree to a unit of value. If people do that with cryptocurrency, it does have the ability to become a real currency. >> I want to pick your perspective on this being an economist, this is is the hottest area of cryptocurrency, it's also known as token economics, is a concept. >> Alan: Token economics. >> You know that's an area that theCUBE, with CUBE coins, experimenting with tokens. Tokens technically are used for things in mobile and whatnot but having a token as a utility in a network is kind of the whole concept, so the big trend that we're seeing and no one's really talking about this yet is instead of having a CTO, Chief Technology Officer, they're looking for a CEO, a Chief Economist Officer, because what you're seeing with the MVP economy we're living in and this gamification which became growth hack which didn't really help users, the notion of decentralized applications and token economics can open the door for some innovation around value and it's an economic problem, how you have a fiscal policy of your token, there's a monetary policy, what's it tied to? A product and a technology, so you now have a now a new, twisted, intertwined mechanism. >> Well you have it as part of this explosion, right? We're at a period of time, it feels like there's a great amount of uncertainly because everything's, you know, there's a lot of different forces and not everybody's in control of them, and you know, it's interesting. Google has this architecture, they call it BeyondCorp, where the concept is like networks are not trusted so I will just put my trust in this device, Duo Security's a great example of a company that's built a technology, a security technology around it which is completely antithetical to everything we know about networks and security. They're saying everything's the internet, I'll just protect the device that it's on. It's a kind of perfect architecture for a world like where nobody is in charge, so just isolate those, buy this, what is a device? It's a token too, it's a person, your iPhone's your personal token. Then over time, systems will form around it. I think we just have to, we always have to learn how to function in a different type of economy. I mean democracy was a new economy 250 years ago that kind of screwed around with most of the world, and a lot of people didn't think it would make it, in fact we went through two World War wars that it was a little on the edge whether democracy was going to make it and it seems to have done okay, like it was pretty good IPO to buy into. You know, in 1776. But it's always got risks and struggles with it. I think if, ultimately it comes together, it's whether a large group of people can find a way to function socially, economically, and with their personal safety in these systems. >> You bring up a great point, so I want to go to the next level in this conversation which is around-- >> Alan: You've got the wrong guy if you're going to the next level because I just tapped out. >> No, no, no we'll get you there. It's my job to get you there. The question is that everyone always wants to look at, whether it's someone looking at the industry or actors inside the industries across the board, mainly the tech and we'll talk about tech, is the question of are we innovating? You brought up some interesting nuances that we talk about with token economics. I mean Steve Jobs had the classic presentation where he had street signs, technology meets liberal arts. That's a mental image that people who know Steve Jobs, know Apple, was a key positioning point for Apple at that time which was let's make computers and technology connect with society, liberal arts. But we were just talking about is the business impact of technology, the economics, and that's just not like just some hand waving, making technology integrate with business. You're in the security business, There are some gamification technology, gamification that's business built into the products. So the question is, if we have the integration of business, technology, economics, policy, society rolling into the product definitions of innovation, does that change the lens and the aperture of what innovation is? >> I think it does, right? The IT industry's somewhere between three and four trillion dollars depends on how it counts in. It grows pretty slowly, it grows by a low single digit. That tells me as composite, like is that, that slow growth is a structural signal about how consumers of technology think in a macro sense. On a micro sense, things shift very rapidly, right? New platforms show up, new applications show up, all kinds of things show up. What I don't think we have done yet, to your point, is in this new integrated world, the role of technology is not just technology anymore. I don't think, you know you said you need Chief Economical Officer, what about Chief Political Officer? What about a Chief Social Officer? How many heads of HR make decisions about the insertion of systems into their business? And that's what this kind of iRobot concept is in my mind which is that you know, we are exceeding control of things that used to be done by human beings to systems and when you see control, the social mores, the political mores, the cultural mores, and the human emotional mores have to move with it. We don't tend to think about things like that. We're like, "I win and my competitors lose." Like technology used to be much more of a zero sum, my tech's better than yours. But the question is not just is my tech better than yours, is my customer better off in their industry for the consumption of my technology of inserting it into their offering or their service? You know what, that is probably going to be the next area of study. The other thing that's very important in whether, any of you have read Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, the nature of competition technology used to feel like a flat playing field and now the other thing that's rising is do you have super winners? And then what is the power of the super winners? So you mentioned whether it's Facebook or Google or Amazon or you know, or Microsoft, the FANG companies right? Their roles are so much more significant now than the Four Horsemen of the Nasdaq were in 2000 when you had Intel and Cisco and Oracle and Saht-in it's a different game. >> You're seeing that now. That's a good point, so you're reinforcing kind of this notion that the super players if you will are having an impact, you're mentioning the confluence of these new sectors, you know, government, policy, social are new areas. The question is, this sounds like a strategic imperative for the industry, and we're early so it's not like there's a silver bullet or is there, it doesn't sound like there, so to me that's not really in place yet, I mean. >> Oh no. We're not even in alpha. We have demo code for the new economy and we're trying to get the new model funded. >> John: That's the demo version, not the real version. It's the classic joke. >> Yeah this not the alpha or the beta version that like you're going to go launch it. If people think they're launching it, I think it's a little preliminary and you know, it's not just financial investment, it's like do I buy in? I'll tell you something that's really interesting. I've been visiting a bunch of our customers lately and the biggest change I'd say in the last two years is they now have to prove to their customers they're going to be good custodians of their data. Think about that, like you could go to any digital commerce you do, any website you use and you give them basically the ticket to the Furrier family privacy, you do, but you don't spend a lot of time questioning whether they're really going to protect your data. That has changed. And it's really changing in B2B and in government organizations. >> The role of data to us is regulation, GDPR in Europe, but this is a whole new dynamic. >> It's not just my data because I'm worried about my credit card getting hacked, I'm worried about my identity. Like am I going to show up as a meme in some social media feed that's substituted for the news? I don't want to use the FN word, but you know what I mean? It is a really brave new world. It's like a hyper-democracy and a hyper-risky state at the same time. >> We're living in an area of massive pioneering, new grounds, this is new territory so there's a lot of strategic imperatives that are yet not defined. So now let's take it to how people compete. We were talking before we came on camera, you mentioned the word we're in an MVP economy, minimum viable product concept, and you're seeing that being a standard operating procedure for essentially de-risking this challenge. The old way of you know, build it, ship it, will it work? We're seeing the impact from Hollywood to big tech companies to every industry. >> Well you've got a coffee mug for a company that does both. Amazon does MVP in entertainment, like we'll create one pilot and see if it goes as opposed to ordering a season for 17 million dollars to hey, let's try this feature and put it out on AWS. What's interesting is I don't think we've completely tilted but the question is will buyers of technology, of entertainment products, of any product start to say, "I'll try it." You know like, look, I've done four startups and I always know there's somebody I can go to get and try my early product. There are people that just have an appetite, right? The Jeffrey Moores, early adapter, all the way to the left of the-- >> They'll buy anything new. >> They'll try it, they're interested, they have the time and the resources, or they're just intellectually curious. But it was always a very small group of people in the IT industry. What I think that the MVP economy is starting to do is look, I Kickstarted my wallet. I don't know if I'm the only person who bought that skinny little wallet on Kickstarter, it doesn't matter to me, it had appeal. >> What's the impact of the MVP economy? Is it going to change to the competitive landscape like Peter Thiel was suggesting? Does it change the economics? Does it change the makeup of the team? All of the above? What's your thoughts on how this is going to impact? Certainly the encumbrance will seem to be impacted or not. >> I think two things happen. One, it attacks the structural way markets work. If you go back to classical economics, land, labor, and capital, and people who own those assets, now you add information as a fourth. If those guys were around now they would say that would be the fourth core asset, production, I'm sorry, means of production is the term. The people who can dominate that would dominate a market. Now that that's flattened out, you know, I think it pushes against the traditional structures and it allows new giants to kind of show up overnight. I mean the e-commerce market is rife with companies that have, like look at Stich Fix. A company driven by AI, fashions, tries to figure out what you like, sends it to you every month, just had a monster IPO. We invented, by the way the Spiegal Catalog, except like with a personal assistant and you know, it's changed that in just a short number of years. I think two things happen. One is you'll get new potential giants but certainly new players in the market quickly. Two, it'll force a change in the business model of every company. If you're in a cab in any city in the world, I'm not saying whether the app works there or not, Uber and Lyft has forced every cab company to show you here's the app to call the cab. They haven't quite caught up to the rest of the experience. What I think happens is ultimately, the larger players in an industry have to accommodate that model. For people like me, people who build companies or large technology companies, we may have to start thinking about MVPing of features early on, working with a small group, which is a little what the beta process is but now think about it as a commercial process. Nobody does it, but I bet sure a lot of people will be doing it in five years. >> I want to get your take on that approach because you're talking about really disrupting, re-imagining industry, the Spiegal catalog now becomes digital with technology, so the role of technology in business, we kind of talked about the intertwine of that and its nuance, it's going to get better in my opinion. But specifically the IT, the information technology industry is being disrupted. Used to be like a department, and the IT department will give you your phone on your desk, your PC on your desk or whatever, now that's being shattered and everyone that's participating in that IT industry is evolving. What's your take on the IT industry's disruption? >> Well look, it started 20 years ago when Marc Benioff and Salesforce decided to sell the sales forces instead of IT people, right? They went around to the end buyer. I don't think it's a new trend, I think a lot of technology leaders now figure out how to go to the business buyer directly and make their pitch and interestingly enough, the business buyer, if the IT team doesn't get on board, will do that. >> John: Because of cloud computing and ... >> Because of everything. The modern analog I think in our world is that the developers are increasingly in control. Like my friend Martin Casado up in Andreessen talks about this a lot. The traditional model on our industry is you build a product, you launch it, you launch your company, you work with the traditional analyst firms, you try to get a little bit of halo, you get customer references, those are the things you do and there was a very wall structured, for example, enterprise buying cycle. >> And playbook. >> Playbook, and there's the challenger sale and there's Jeffrey Moore and there's like seeing God. You've got your textbooks on how it's been done. As everything turns into code, the people who work with code for a living increasingly become the front end of your cycle and if you can get to them, that changes. Like I mean think about like, you know, Tom wrote about this actually in The World is Flat, like Linux started as a patchy. It didn't start with the IT department, it started with developers and there was the Linux foundation and now Linux is everything. >> There's a big enemy called the big mini computer, and not operating systems and work stations. >> Wiped out whole parts of Boston and other parts of the world, right? >> Exactly, that's why I moved out here. >> You filed client's server out here. >> I filed a smell of innovation. No but this is interesting because this location of industries is happening, so with that, so they also on the analog, so Martin's at Andreessen, so we'll do a little VC poke there at the VCs because we love them of course, they're being dislocated-- >> I don't (mumbles) my investors. >> Well no, their playbook is being challenged. Here's an example, go big or go home investment thesis seems not to be working. Where if you get too much cash on the front end, with the MVP economy we were just riffing on and with the big super powers, the Amazons and the Googles, you can't just go big or go home, you're going to be going home more than going big. >> I think they know that. I mean Dee-nuh Suss-man who's I think Chief Investment Officer at Nasdaq has a very well known talking line that there are half as many public companies as there were 10 years ago, so the exit scenario for our industry is a little bit different. We now have things like acqui-hires, right we have other models for monetization, but I think what the flip side of it is, we're in the-- >> Adapt or die because the value will shift. Liquidity's changing, which acqui-hires-- >> I think the investment community gets it completely and they spend a lot more time with the developer mindset. In fact I think there's been a doubling down focus on technical founders versus business founders for companies for just that reason because as everything turns to code, you got to hang out with the code community. I think there are actually-- >> You think there'll be more doubling down on technical founders? You do, okay. >> Yeah I think because that is ultimately the shift. There are business model shifts, but it's, you know, I mean like Uber was a business model shift, I mean the technology was the iPhone and GPS and they wrote an app for it, but it was a business model shift, so it can be a business model shift. >> And then scale. >> And then scale and then all of those other things. But I think if you don't think about developers when you're in our, and it's like we built Illumio because a developer could take the product and get started. I mean you can, developers actually can write security policy with our product because there's a class of customers, where as not everyone where that matters. There's other people where the security team is in charge or the infrastructure team is in charge but I think everything is based on zeros and ones and everything is based on code and if you're not sensitive to how code gets bought, consumed, I mean there's a GitHub economy which is I don't even have to write the code, I'll go look at your code and maybe use pieces of it, which has always been around. >> Software disruption is clear. Cloud computing is scale. Agile is fast, and with de-risking capabilities, but the craft is coming back and some will argue, we've talked about on theCUBE before is that, you know, the craftsmanship of software is moving to up the stack in every industry, so-- >> I think it's more like a sports league. I love the NBA, right? In the old days, your professional team, you'd scout people in college. Now they used to scout them in high school, now they're scouting kids in middle school. >> (laughs) That's sad. >> Well what it says is that you have to-- >> How can you tell? >> You know but they can, right? I think you know, your point about it craft, you're going to start tracking developers as they go through their career and invest and bet on them. >> Don't reveal our secrets to theCUBE. We have scouts everywhere, be careful out there. (laughs) >> But think about that, imagine it's like there's such a core focus on hiring from college, but we had an intern from high school two years ago. We hire freshman. >> Okay so let's go, I want to do a whole segment on this but I want to just get this point because we're both sports fans and we can riff on sports all day long. >> I'm just not getting the chance >> And the greatness of Tom Brady >> to talk about the Patriots. >> And Tom Brady's gotten his sixth finger attached to his hands for his sixth ring coming up. No but this is interesting. Sports is highly data driven. >> Alan: Yep. >> Okay and so what you're getting at here, with an MVP economy, token economics is more of a signal, not yet mainstream, but you can almost go there and think okay data driven gives you more accuracy so if you can bring data driven to the tech world, that's kind of an interesting point. What's your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I mean look, I think you have to track everything. You have to follow things, and by the way, we have great tools now, you can track people through LinkedIn. There's all kinds of vehicles to tracking individuals, you track products, you track everything, and you know look, we were talking about this before we went on the show right, people make decisions based on analytics increasingly. Now the craft part is what's interesting and I'm not the complete expert, I'm on the business side, I'm not an engineer by training, but look a lot of people understand a great developer is better than five bad developers. >> Well Mark Andris' 10x is a classic example of that. >> There's clearly a star system involved, so if I think in middle school or in high school, you're going to be a good developer, and I'm going to track your career through college and I'm going to try to figure out how to attach. That's why we started hiring freshmen. >> Well my good friend Dave Girouard started a company that does that, will fund the college education for people that they want to bet on. >> Sure, they're just taking an option in them. >> Yeah, option on their earnings. Exactly. >> They are. >> It sounds like token economics to me. (laughs) >> You know you can sell anything. We are in that economy, you can sell those pieces. The good news is I think it can be a great flattener, meaning that it can move things back more to a meritocracy because if I'm tracking people in high school, I'm not worrying whether they're going to go to Stanford or Harvard or Northwestern, right? I'm going to track their abilities in an era and it's interesting, speaking about craft, you know, what are internships? They're apprenticeships. I mean it is a little bit like a craft, right? Because you're basically apprenticing somebody for a future payout for them coming to work for you and being skilled because they don't know anything when they come and work, I shouldn't say that, they actually know a lot of things. >> Alan, great to have you on theCUBE as always, great to come in and get the update. We'll certainly do more but I'd like to do a segment on you on the startup scene and sort of the venture capital dynamics, we were tracking that as well, we've been putting a lot of content out there. We believe Silicon Valley's a great place. This mission's out there, we've been addressing them, but we really want to point the camera this year at some of the great stuff, so we're looking forward to having you come back in. My final question for you is a personal one. I love having these conversations because we can look back and also look forward. You do a lot of mentoring and you're also helping a lot of folks in the industry within just your realm but also startups and peers. What's your advice these days? Because there's a lot of things, we just kind of talked a lot of it. When people come to you for advice and say, "Alan, I got a career change," or "I'm looking at this new opportunity," or "Hey, I want to start a company," or "I started a company," how is your mentoring and your advisory roles going on these days? Can you share things that you're advising? Key points that people should be aware of. >> Well look, ultimately ... I never really thought about it, you just asked the question so, ultimately, I think to me it comes down to own your own fate. What it means is like do something that you're really passionate about, do something that's going to be unique. Don't be the 15th in any category. Jack Welch taught us a long time ago that the number one player in a market gets 70% of the economic value, so you don't want to play for sixth place. It's like Ricky Bobby said, if you're not first, you're last. (John chuckles) I mean you can't always be first, but you should play for that. I think for a lot of companies now, I think they have to make sure that, and people participating, make sure that you're not playing the old playbook, you're not fighting yesterday's battle. Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind said, "There's a lot of money in building up an empire, "and there's even more money in tearing it down." There are people who enter markets to basically punish encumbrance, take share because of innovation, but I think the really inspirational is you know, look forward five years and find a practical but aggressive path to being part of that side of history. >> So are we building up or are we taking down? I mean it seems to me, if I'm not-- >> You're always doing both. The ocean is always fighting the mountains, right? That is the course of, right? And then new mountains come up and the water goes someplace else. We are taking down parts of the client server industry, the stack that you and I built a lot of our personal career of it, but we're building this new cloud and mobile stack at the same time. And you're point is we're building a new currency stack and we're going to have to build a new privacy stack. It's never, the greatest thing about our industry is there's always something to do. >> How has the environment of social media, things out there, we're theCUBE, we do our thing with events, and just in general, change the growth plans for individuals if you were, could speak to your 23 year old self right now, knowing what you know-- >> Oh I have one piece of advice I give everybody. Take as much risk as humanly possible in your career earlier on. There's a lot of people that have worked with me or worked for me over the years, you know people when they get into their 40s and they go, "I'm thinking about doing a startup," I go, "You know when you got two kids in college "and you're trying to fund your 401K, "working for less cash and more equity may not be "the most comfortable conversation in your household." It didn't work well in my household. I mean I'm like Benjamin Button. I started in big companies, I'm going to smaller companies. Some day it's just going to be me and a dog and one other guy. >> You went the wrong way. >> Yeah I went the wrong way and I took all the risk later. Now I was lucky in part that the transition worked. When I see younger folks, it's always like, do the riskiest thing humanly possible because the penalty is really small. You have to find a job in a year, right? But you know, you don't have the mortgage, and you don't have the kids to support. I think people have to build an arc around their careers that's suitable with their risk profile. Like maybe you don't buy into bitcoin at 19,000. Could be wrong, could be 50,000 sometime, but you know it's kind of 11 now and it's like-- >> Yeah don't go all in on 19, maybe take a little bit in. It's the play and run-- >> Dollar cost averaging over the years, that's my best fidelity advice. I think that's what's really important for people. >> What about the 45 year old executive out there, male or female obviously, the challenges of ageism? We're in economy, a gig economy, whatever you want to call, MVP economics, token economics, this is a new thing. Your advice to someone who's 45 who just says "Hey you're too old for our little hot startup." What should they do? >> Well being on the other side of that history I understand it firsthand. I think that you have an incumbent role in your career to constantly re-educate yourself. If you show up, whether you're a 25, 35, 45, 55, or 65, I hope I'm not working when I'm 75, but you never know right? (mumbles) >> You'll never stop working, that's my prediction. >> But you know have you mastered the new skills? Have you reinvented yourself along the way? I feel like I have a responsibility to feed the common household. My favorite part of my LinkedIn profile, it says, "Obedient worker bee at the Cohen household," because when I go home, I'm not in charge. I've always felt that it's up to me to make sure I'm not going to be irrelevant. That to me is, you know, that to me, I don't worry about ageism, I worry about did I-- >> John: Relevance. >> Yeah did I make myself self-obsolescent? I think if you're going to look at your career and you haven't looked at your career in 15 years and you're trying to do something, you may be starting from a deficit. So the question, what can I do? Before I make that jump, can I get involved, can I advise some small companies? Could I work part time and on the weekends and do some things so that when you finally make that transition, you have something to offer and you're relevant in the dialogue. I think that's, you know, nobody trains you, right? We're not good as an industry-- >> Having a good community, self-learning, growth mindset, always be relevant is not a bad strategy. >> Yeah, I mean because I find increasingly, I see people of all ages in companies. There is ageism, there is no doubt. There's financial ageism and then there's kind of psychological bias ageism, but if you keep yourself relevant and you are the up to speed in your thing, people will beat a path to want to work for you because there's still a skill gap in our industry-- >> And that's the key. >> Yeah, make sure that you're on the right side of that skill gap, and you will always have something to offer to people. >> Alan, great to have you come in the studio, great to see you, thanks for the commentary. It's a special CUBEConversation, we're talking about the future of technology impact the society and a range of topics that are emerging, we're on a pioneering, new generational shift and theCUBE is obviously covering the most important stories in Silicon Valley from figuring out what fake news is to impact to the humans around the world and again, we're doing our part to cover it. Alan Cohen, CUBEConversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)