>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP. Discover Virtual Experience Brought to you by HP >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover Virtual experience. This is the Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here in the Palo Alto studio with remote interviews. We have a great innovation story here with Disney and HBO. ET Al is tailor vice president of content innovation with studio lab Disney. And so men do suck. Sarkar, distinguished technologist, director of AI at HP. Thanks for coming on, Alice. Someone do. Thank you for taking the time. >>It's great to be here. Hi, >>I love this story. I think it's the innovation story, and I think it's going to be one that will experience in our life going forward. That is media, video and experiences and this innovation in AI. It's a lot to do with the collaboration between Disney Studio Labs Alice that you're running and it's super super important and fun as well. Very relevant. Cool. So first, before we get started, Alice, >>take a minute >>to explain a little about yourself and how Studio Lab came about. Yeah, >>McGuinness Studio lab is just over in its second year of operation. It was an idea that was had by our CTO. I'm going to say, three years ago and at the time, just previously before that I had a start up company that came through the Disney accelerators. So I was already inside the building and, um, the team there said Felicity on the said, You know, we need to start up an innovation lab that will investigate storytelling through emerging technology, and that's basically being the majority of my background. So I said Yes on then. Since then, we'll be going a team. We opened the lab in May of 2018 and here we are in the middle of Pandemic. But it has grown like crazy. Its just a wonderful place to be and to operate. And we've been doing some amazing projects with some amazing partners, >>and it's not unusual that an entrepreneur has this kind of role to think outside the box. We'll get some of that talk about your experiences, and I wonder how you got into this position because you came in as an entrepreneur. You're doing some creative things. Tell us that story real quick. >>Yeah, Okay, well, so as you could sell on British. My actual background started. My whole career started in technology in the mid nineties. A Xai started as a training video editor but then switched very quickly and 95 building websites. And from there on, it was Internet all the way. But I've always focused on storytelling. And, you know, much of my background is working for broadcasters and media and content creators. So those five years of the BBC in there already department and, um actually out here is VP of digital media for them and then Channel four as well. And throughout the whole process, I was always interested in how to tell stories with new technology and the new mediums as they emerged. So yep, flights side story and doing a startup which was actually in toys and video games, but again, big digital storytelling environments for Children. And then I came round. Robin, if you like into Disney and here we are still looking at how to you make films and episodic content. Even Mawr. You name it faster, better, more exciting. Using the best and greatest in emerging tech as we find it, >>and the lab that you're doing is it's an accelerant, almost four new technologies. Your job is to what? Look out over the horizon next 10 years or so to figure out what's next. It's >>not a structure. I think you have >>some rain to be creative and experiment >>Well, yeah, I mean, in fact. So it's a studio live at the studios. We'll Disney has eight studios at the moment, and what we do is we look at actually the whole breath of storytelling. So right from the moment when a creative has an idea through to how our guests and fans might be receiving the end product out in the world and we segregate those that that whole breadth from into three categories i d. Eight. When you know the process of generating the idea and building it, make how we make it where we make it, what we make it with on that experience, how we experience it out in the world. So we have a whole SNU of projects. The studio level so works with some of the best technology companies in the world, and we call those are innovation partners on. We sign these partnerships really to bring what we like to call superpowers to the system we like to think. But the combination of those companies and what comes out of these projects is going to give our filmmakers superpowers, but also that combinatorial effect of Disney. You know, in this case, for instance, working with HP like produces something that Disney couldn't necessarily do on its own or the HP. He couldn't necessarily do it on his own, either. So, yeah, it's a huge remit, and we tend to look, we don't look quite so far out. Generally speaking as 10 years, it's more like three to now. We don't do day to day operational work, but we try to pick something up a couple of years before it's going to be operationally ready and really investigated then and get a bit of a head start. >>Well, it's great. Have HBs partner and And having that bench of technology software people is just a nice power source for you as well. Someone to talk about the relation HP relationship with Disney because, um, you got a lot of deep technical from the lab standpoint to resilient technology. How are you involved? What's your role? You guys sitting around you riff and put a white board together and say, Hey, we're gonna solve these big problems. Here is the future of consumption. That is the future of video. What goes on? Tell us your the relationship between you guys. >>Yeah, it's a good question at HP. We don't really make the service, but what we also do is we work quite a lot on optimizing some of the artificial intelligence solutions and algorithms on the DP use and scale it across servers. So So you don't have this opportunity came up from Disney, where this thing came up with a very innovative solution where they were solving the video quality problem. As as, you know, there are a lot of blemishes and in the video that can come up and didn't want to fix all of them. And they have great algorithm. But what happens is, but with better guards comes a huge amount of computational complexity, which needs a little bit of heterogeneous compute input in parallel processing and in sequential processing. So we thought that it's a perfect on, and it's a combination off the skill sets to make this video quality software execute at speed switch needed for production. Disney. >>So it's good to have a data center whenever you need it to. You guys have a great technology. We hear a lot more from the execs at HB on our reporting else. Want to get your thoughts? We're covering some of this new edge technologies. We're talking about new experiences. I gave a talk at Sundance a few years ago, called The New Creative Class, and it's really about this next wave of art and filmmakers who are using the tools of the trade, which is a cell phone and and really set of Asti studios and use the technology. Can you give us some examples of how Studio Lab collaborates with filmmakers and execs to push the push, the art and technology of storytelling to be fresh? Because the sign of the times, our instagram, tic tac, this is just very elementary. The quality and the storytelling is pretty basic dopamine in, but you can almost imagine the range of quality that's going to come so access to more people, certainly more equipment, cameras, etcetera. What's next? How do you guys see? What's some examples can you share? >>It's an amazing question. I mean, we're working on films and episodic. It's rather than very short form content, obviously, but you're absolutely right. There's a lot of consumer grade technology that is entering the production pipeline in many ways and in many areas, whether it's phones or iPads first using certain bits of software. One of the things that we're building at the moment is the ability Teoh generate vertical metric models, capturing with consumer drones or even iPhones, and then use it getting that data into a three D model as soon as possible. There's a really big theme. What we want to do is like make the process more efficient so that our creatives and the folks working on productions aren't having to slog through something that's slow and tedious. They want to get to the story, telling the art in the act of storytelling as much as possible. And so waiting for a model to render or waiting for their QC process toe finished is what we want to kind of get rid of so they can really get to the meat of the problem much, much faster and just going back to what Mandy was saying about the AI project here I mean, it was about finding the dead pixels on screen when we do our finished prints, which would you believe we do with humans? Humans at their best historically have been the best of finding dead pixels. But what a job I have to do at the end of the process to go through quality control and then have to go and manually find the little dead pixels in each frame of our print. Right? Nobody actually wants to be doing that job. So the algorithm goes and looks follows automatically. And then HP came in and spread that whole process up by nine X. So now it actually runs fast enough to be used on our final prince. >>You know, it's interesting in the tech trend for the past 10 15 years that I've been covering cloud technology. Even in the early days, it was kind of on the fringe them because mainstream. But all the trends were more agility, faster taking with ah, heavy lifting so that the focus on the job at hand when it's creative writing software. This is kind of a success formula, and you're kind of applying it to film and creation, which is still like software is kind of same thing, almost so you know, when you see these new technologies that love to get both your reactions of this. One of the big misses that people kind of miss is the best stuff is often misunderstood until it's understood. And we're kind of seeing that now. A covert our ones. From a way, I could have seen this. No, no one predicted. So what's >>an >>example of something that people might be misunderstanding that super relevant, that that might become super important very quickly? Any thoughts? >>That's great. Well, I can give an example of something that has come and gone and then coming, potentially gone. Except it hasn't it's VR. So it came, you know, whenever it was 20 years ago, and then 10 years ago, and everybody was saying VR is going to change the world And then it reappeared again six years ago again, everybody said it's going to change the world, and in terms of film production, it really has. But that's slightly gone unnoticed, I think, because out in the market everyone is expecting VR to have being a huge consumer success, and I suspect it still will be one day a huge consumer success. But meanwhile, in the background, we're using VR on a daily basis in film production. Virtual production is one of the biggest, um, emerging processes that is happening If you've seen anything to do with, um Jungle Book Line King Man DeLorean. Anything the industrial like magic work on. You're really looking at a lot of virtual production techniques that have ended up on screen, and it is now a technology that we can't do without. I'm gonna have to think two seconds for something that's emerging. Ai and Ml is a huge area, obviously were scratching it. I don't think anyone is going to say that it's going to come and go in this one. This is huge, but we're only just beginning to see where and how we can apply Ai and Ml and you did you wanna jump in on that one? So >>let me take it from the technology standpoint, I think it was also very cool trends. Now what happens is that your ML spaces people have come up with creative ideas. But one of the biggest challenge is how do you take those ideas for commercial, use it on and make and make it work at the speed, as Alice was mentioning, It makes it feasible in production. So accelerating your ML on making it in a form which is visible is super important. And the other aspect of it is just the first video quality that it was mentioning. That picture is one types, and I know the business is working on certain other video qualities to fix the blemishes. But there's a whole variety of these vanishes on with human operators. It's kind of impossible to scale up the production on to find all these different artifacts like, you know, especially now. As you can see, the video is disseminated in your forms in your ipads from like, you know, in that streaming. So this is a problem of scale on do stuff. This is also like, you know, a lot of compute on a very like I said, a lot of collaboration with complimentary skill sets that make it real. >>I was talking with a friend who was an early Apple employees, now retired good friend, and we're talking about all the Dev ops agile go fast scale up, and he made a comment I want to get your reaction to, he said. You know what we're missing is craft and software. You speak crafts game. So when you have speed, you lose craft, and we see that certainly with cloud and agility and then iterating. Then you get to a good product over time. But I think one of the things that's interesting and you guys are kind of teasing out is you can kind of get craft with the help from some of these technologies where you can kind of build crafting into it. Alice, what's your reaction to that? >>One of our favorite anecdotes from The Lion King is so Jon Favreau, the director, built out the virtual production system himself, Teoh with his team to make the film, and it allowed for a smaller production team acting on a smaller footprint. What they didn't do was shortened the time to make the film. What the whole system enabled was more content created within that same amount of time, so effectively John had more takes and more material to make his final film with, and that that's what we want people to have. We want them to have to know ever to have to say I missed my perfect shot because of I don't know what you know. We run out of time so we couldn't get the perfect shot. That's it. That's a terrible thing. We never want that to happen. So where technology can help gather as much material is possible in the most efficient way. Basically, at the end of the day, for our for our creatives, that means more ability to tell a story. >>So someone do. This is an example of the pixel innovation. The Video QC. It's really a burden if you have to go get it and chase it. You can automate that respect from the tech trends. Will automation action in there? >>Yeah, absolutely. And as Chris was mentioning, If you can bridge the gap between imagination and realization, then you have solved the problem that the people who are creative can think on implement something in a very short time, gone back for like, you know, some of these I'm just coming. >>Well, it's a very impressed that I'm looking forward to coming down and visiting studio labs when the world gets back to work. You guys are in the heart of Burbank and all the action and the Euro little incubates really kind of R and D meets commercial commercially. Really cool. But I have to ask you, with covert 19 going on, how are you guys handling? The situation certainly impacted people coming to work. How is your team? Have been impacted. And how are you guys continuing the mission? >>Well, yeah, The lab itself is obviously a physical place on the lot. It's in the old animation building, but it's also this program of innovation that we have with our partners. To be honest, we didn't slow down at all. The team carried on the next day from home, and in fact, we have expanded even because new projects came rolling in as folks who were stuck at home suddenly had needs. So we had editors needing to work work remotely. You know, you name it folks with that home connections, wondering if we had some five G phones hanging around that kind of thing. And so everything really expanded a bit. We are hoping to get back into physical co location as soon as possible, not least to be able to shoot movies again. But I think that there will be an element of this remote working that's baked in forever from here on in not least, cause it was just around. This kind of what this has done has accelerated things like the beginning of cloud adoption properly in the beginning of remote teller work and remote telepresence and then also ideas coming out of that. So ah, you know, again, the other day I heard holograms coming up. Like, Can we have holograms yet? So we don't do it That's going to cover out again. Yeah, but you know what? The team have all been amazing, would. But we'll miss each other. You know, there's something about real life that can't be replaced by technology >>has been a great leader in in accumulating. All HP employees work from removed and in the process. But we're also discovered is we have also, you know, maybe so. We discovered innovative ways where we can still work together. Like so we increase the volume of our virtual collaborations on. I worked with Erica from Disney is a tremendous facilitator and the technologists of mining one. You have this close collaboration going. Andi almost missed nothing, but yes, if you would like to, you know, on the field each other on to be in close proximity. Look at each app in each other's eyes are probably that's only missing thing, but rest off it, You know, we created an environment perfect, clever and work pretty well. And actually, at this point in the process, we also discovered a lot of things which can be done in remote, considering the community of Silicon Valley. >>You know, the final question I want to get your thoughts on is your favorite technology that you're excited about. But someone doing you know, we're talking amongst us nerds and geeks here in Silicon Valley around you know what virtualization server virtualization has done? An HP knows a lot about server virtualization. You're in the server business that created cloud because with virtualization, you could create one server and great many servers. But I think this covert 19 and future beyond it virtualization of life, Immersion of digital is going to bring and change a lot of things. You guys highlight a few of them. Um, this virtualization of life society experiences playing work. It's not just work. It's experiences so Internet of things devices how I'm consuming how I'm producing. It's really going to have an impact. I'd love to get your both of your thoughts on this kind of virtualization of life because certainly impact studio lab, because you think about these things. Alice and HP has to invent that the tech to get scaling up. So final question. What do think about virtualization of life and what technologies do you see that you're excited about to help make our lives better? >>Well, goodness, may, I think we're only beginning to understand the impact that things like video conferencing has on folks. You know, I don't know whether you've seen all of the articles flying around about how it's a lot more work to do video conferencing that you don't have the same subtle cues as you have in real life. And again, you know, virtual technologies like we are on day similar and not going to solve that immediately. So what we'll have to happen is that humans themselves will adapt to the systems. I think, though fundamentally we're about to enter a radical period. We basically have already a radical period of innovation because as folks understand what's at their fingertips. And then what's missing? We're going to see all sorts of startups and new ideas come rushing out as people understand this new paradigm and what they could do to solve for the new pains that come out of it. I mean, just from my perspective, I have back to back nine hours of BTC a day. And by the end of the day, I could barely walk Way gonna do about that. I think we're gonna see holograms like that. We're gonna see home exercise equipment combined. You know, really good ones. Like you've seen politicians shares going crazy. There's tons of that. So I'm just really excited at the kind of three years or so. I think that we're going to see of radical innovation, the likes of which we have always usually being held back by, um other reasons, maybe not enough money or not enough permission. Whereas now people are like we have to fix this problem. >>Well, you've got a great job. I want to come to quit. My job income joined studio left. Sounds like it's a playground of fun. There great stuff. Someone do close us out here. What? Are you excited about as we virtualized you're in the in the labs, creating new technology. You're distinct, technologist and director of AI. When you're on the cutting edge, you're riding the wave two. What's your take on this? >>Virtually? Yeah, you know the experience. What it has done is it has pushed the age to the home. So now if you really see home is one of the principal connectivity to the outside world restaurants. Professional goes on and on with that, What I also offers is like a better experience. Right now. We're all gather about Zoom being able to do a video conferencing. But as this was pointing out there is that here in that we are now consider combining the augmented reality and and the way that we do your conference and all the other innovations that we could begin in the East so that the interactions becomes much more really. And that is like, you know, I'd say that the world is moving to >>l Cool. Thank you very much for that comment and insight really enjoyed. Congratulations on studio lab. You've got a great mission and very cool and very relevant. And someone do. Thank you very much for sharing the insights on HP's role in that. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay, this is the Cube. Virtual covering HP Discover virtual experience. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. Stay tuned for more coverage from HP Discover experience after this break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering HPE's Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome back to the CUBE's coverage of HPE discover Virtual Experience. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, we're here in the Palo Alto Studio for the remote interviews. We have a great innovation story here with Disney and HPE, Alice Taylor, Vice President of Content Innovation with studioLAB at Disney. And Soumyendu Sarkar, distinguished technologist director of AI at HPE. Thanks for coming on Alice. Samandiyu thank you for taking the time. >> No worries. Great to be here. Hi. >> Hi >> I love this story. I think it's an innovation story and I think it's going to be one that we'll experience in our life going forward, and that is media, video, and its experiences and these innovation about AI, It's a lot to do with the collaboration between Disney studioLAB, Alice, that you're running, and it's super, super important and fun as well and very relevant and Cool. So first before we get started, Alice, take a minute to explain a little about yourself and how StudioLAB came about. >> Oh my goodness. StudioLAB is just in its second year of operation. It was an idea that was had by our CTO. I'm going to say three years ago, And at the time, just previously before that, I had a startup company that came through the Disney accelerator. So I was already inside the building and the team there said well, the CTO there, and the boss said, you know, we need to start up an innovation lab that will investigate storytelling through emerging technology. And that's basically being the majority of my background. So I said, yes. And then since then we've been growing a team. We opened the lab in may of 2018 and here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, but it has grown like crazy. It's just a wonderful place to be and to operate. And we've been doing some amazing projects with some amazing partners, >> And it's not unusual that an entrepreneur has this kind of role to think outside the box. We'll get at some of that. Talk about your experience as an entrepreneur, how you got into this position, because you came in as an entrepreneur, you're doing some creative things. Tell us that story real quick. >> Yeah. Okay. Well, so as you can tell, I'm British. My actual background started, my whole career started in technology in the mid 90s. As I started as a trainee video editor, but then switched very quickly in 95 to building websites and from there on, and it was internet all the way. But I've always focused on storytelling and I, you know, much of my background is working for broadcasters and media and content creators. So I was five years at the BBC in their R and D department. And I'm actually out here as VP of digital media for them, and then Channel 4 as well. And throughout the whole process, I was always interested in how to tell stories with new technology and the new mediums as they emerged. So yeah, slight side story and doing a startup, which was actually in toys and video games, but again, big digital storytelling environments for children. And then I came round Robin, if you like into Disney and here we are still looking at how to make films and episodic content, even more, you name it faster, better, more exciting, using the best and greatest in emerging tech as we find it. >> The lab that you're doing, it's an accelerant almost for new technologies. Your job is to what? look out over the horizon next 10 years or so to figure out? >> Yeah >> what's next. It's not a structured thing. You have some reign to be creative and experiment? >> Well, yeah, I mean, the studioLAB, at the studios, well, Disney has eight studios at the moment, And what we do is we look at actually the whole breadth of storytelling. So right from the moment when a creative has an idea through to how our guests and fans might be receiving the end product out in the world, and we segregate that whole breadth into three categories; Ideate, when, you know, the process of generating the idea and building it, Make, how we make it, where we make it, what we make it with and then Experience. How we experience it out in the world. So we have a whole slew of projects, the studio level works with some of the best technology companies in the world. And we call those our innovation partners and we sign these partnerships really to bring what we like to call Superpowers to the system. We like to think that the combination of those companies and what comes out of these projects is going to give our filmmakers superpowers, but also that combinatorial effect of Disney, you know, in this case, for instance, working with HPE, like producing something that Disney couldn't necessarily do on its own or the HBE couldn't necessarily do on his own either. So yeah, it's a huge remit and we don't look quite so far out, generally speaking as 10 years, it's more like three to now. We don't do day to day operational work, but we try to pick something up a couple of years before it's going to be operationally ready and really investigate it then and get a bit of a headstart. >> Well, it's great to have HPE as partner and having that bench of technology, software, and people, and it's just a nice power source for you as well. >> Exactly So Soumyendu talk about HPE relationship with Disney, because you got a lot of deep technical from the lab standpoint to resilient technology. How are you involved? What's your role, you guys sitting around you riffing and put a whiteboard together and say, Hey, we're going to solve these big problems? ... Here's the future of consumption, here's the future of video... What goes on? Tell us the relationship between you guys. >> Yeah, it's a good question. At HPE We can not only make the servers, but what we also do is we work quite a lot on optimizing some of the Artificial Intelligence solutions and algorithms on the GPUs and scale it across Servers. So this opportunity came up from Disney where Disney came up with a very innovative solution where they were solving the video quality problem. As you know, there are a lot of blemishes in the Video that can come up and Disney wanted to fix all of them. And they came up with great algorithm, but what happens is, like with great algorithm comes a huge amount of computational complexity which needs quite a bit of heterogeneous input in both in Parallel Processing and in Sequential Processing. So we thought that it's a perfect, I'd say combination of two skillsets to make this video quality software execute at speeds which are needed for production in Disney. >> So it's good to have a data center whenever you need it to, you guys have some great technology. We'll hear a lot more from the Execs at HPE. On our reporting Alice, we want to to get your thoughts. We're covering some of those new edge technologies, we're talking about new experiences. I gave a talk at Sundance a few years ago called the new creative class, and it's really about this next wave of art and filmmakers who are using the tools of the trade, which is a cellphone, you know, really easy to set up a studios and use the technology. Can you give us some examples of how the studioLAB collaborates with filmmakers and the Execs to push the art and technology of storytelling to be fresh, Because the sign of the times, are Instagram and Tik Tok, this is just very elementary, the quality and the storytelling is pretty basic dopamine driven, but you can almost imagine that the range of quality that's going to come, so access to more people, certainly more equipment and cameras, et cetera. What's next? How do you guys see And what some examples can you share? >> Oh, that's an amazing question. I mean, where working on Films and Episodics rather than very short form content , Obviously. But you're absolutely right. There's a lot of consumer grade technology that is entering the production pipeline in many ways and in many areas, whether it's phones or iPads, using certain bits of software. One of the things that we're building at the moment is the ability to generate photometrical models, capturing with consumer drones or even iPhones, and then getting that data into a 3-D model as soon as possible. There's a really big theme of what we want to do. It's like make the process more efficient so that our creatives and the folks working on productions, aren't having to slog through something that's and tedious. They want to get to the storytelling and the art and the act of storytelling as much as possible. And so waiting for a model to render or waiting for the QC process to finish is what we want to kind of get rid of. So they can really get to the meat of the problem much, much faster. And just going back to what Soumyendu was saying about the AI project here, I mean, it was about finding the dead pixels on the screen when we do all finished prints, which would you believe we do with humans? Humans are the best, or historically have been the best at finding dead pixels, but what a job to have to do at the end of the process. To go through quality control and then have to go and manually find the little dead pixels in each frame of our print, right? Nobody actually wants to be doing that job. So the algorithm goes and looks for those automatically. And then HPE came in and sped that whole process up by 9X. So now it actually runs fast enough to be used on our final prints. >> You know, it's interesting in the tech trend for the past 10, 15 years that I've been covering cloud technology even in the early days, it was kind of on the fringe and then become mainstream. But all the trends were more agility, faster, take away that heavy lifting so that the focus on the job at hand, whether its creative or writing software. This is kind of a a success formula, and you're kind of applying it to film and creation, which is still, like software, it's kind of the same thing almost. >> Yeah >> So you know, when you see these new technologies, I'd love to get both of your reactions to this. One of the big misses, that people kind of miss is the best stuff is often misunderstood until it's understood. >> Yes >> And we're kind of seeing that now with Covid and everyone's like no way I could've seen this. No, no one predicted it. So what's an example of something that people might be misunderstanding. That's super relevant, that might become super important very quickly. Any thoughts? >> Gosh, that's a great one. Well, I can give an example of something that has come and gone and then come and potentially gone, except it hasn't. You'll see. It's VR. So it came whenever it was, 20 years ago and then 10 years ago, and everybody was saying VR is going to change the world. And then it reappeared again, six years ago. And again, everybody said it was going to change the world. And in terms of film production, it really has. But that's slightly gone unnoticed. I think, because out in the market, everyone is expecting VR to have been a huge consumer success. And I suspect it still will be one day a huge consumer success. But meanwhile, in the background, We are using VR on a daily basis in film production, Virtual production is one of the biggest emerging processes that is happening. If you've seen anything to do with Jungle Book, Lion King , the Mandalorian, anything that industrial light and magic work on, you're really looking at a lot of virtual production techniques that have ended up on the screen. And it is now a technology that we can't do without. I'm going to have to think two seconds for something that's emerging. AI and ML is a huge area. Obviously, we're scratching it. I don't think anyone is going to to say that it's going to come and go this one. This is huge, but we're already just beginning to see where and how we can apply AI and ML. >> Yeah. >> So Soumyendu, did you want to jump in on that one? >> Yeah, Let me take it from the technology standpoint. I think Alice sort of puts out some very cool trends. Now what happens in tHE AI and ML spaces, people can come up with creative ideas, but one of the biggest challenges is how do you take those ideas for commercial usage and make it work at a speed, as Alice was mentioning, makes it feasible in production. So accelerating AI/ML and making it in a form, which is usable is super important. And the other aspect of it is, just see, for instance, video quality, that Alice was mentioning. Dead pixel is one type, And I know that Disney is working on certain other video qualities to fix the blemishes, but there is a whole variety of these blemishes and with human operators, Its kind of impossible to scale up the production and to find all these different artifacts, and especially now, as you can see, the video is disseminated in your phones, in your iPads. Like, you know, in just streaming. So this is a problem of scale and to solve this is also like, you know, a lot of computers, and I'd say a lot of collaboration with complementary skillsets that make AI real. >> I was talking with a friend who was an early Apple employee. He's now retired, good friend. And we were talking about, you know, all the dev apps, agile, go fast, scale up. And he made a comment. I want to get your reaction to it. He said, "you know, what we're missing is craft." And software used to be a craft game. So when you have speed, you lose craft. And we see that certainly with cloud and agility and then iterate, and then you get to a good product over time. But I think one of the things that's interesting and you guys are kind of teasing out is you can kind of get craft with the help from some of these technologies, where, you can kind of build crafting into it. >> Yap Alice, what's your reaction to that? >> One of our favorite anecdotes from the lion King is, so Jon Favreau the director, built out the virtual production system with his team to make the film. And it allowed for a smaller production team acting on a smaller footprint. What they didn't do was shorten the time to make the film, what the whole system enabled was more content created within that same amount of time. So effectively Jon had more tapes and more material to make his final film with. And that's what we want people to have. We want them to not ever to have to say, Oh, I missed my perfect shot because of, I don't know what, you know, we ran out of time, so we couldn't get the perfect shot. That's it, that's a terrible thing. We never want that to happen. So where technology can help gather as much material as possible in the most efficient way, basically at the end of the day for our our creatives, that means more ability to tell a story. >> So Soumyendu, this is an example of the pixel innovation, the video QC, it's really a burden if you have to go get it and chase it, you can automate that. That's back to some of the tech trends. A lot of automation action in there. >> Yeah, absolutely. And as Alice was mentioning, if you can bridge the gap between imagination and realization then you have solved the problem. That way, the people who are creative can think and implement something in a very short time. And that's fair, like, you know, some of these scientists come in >> Well, I also very impressed and I'm looking forward to coming down and visiting studio labs when the world gets back to work, >> Alright. >> You guys are in the part of Burbank and all the action. I know you're a little sort of incubate. It's really kind of R and D meet commercially. Commercial is really cool. But I have to ask you what the COVID-19 going on, how are you guys handling the situation? Certainly impacted people coming to work. >> Yeah >> How has your team in been impacted and how are you guys continuing the mission? >> Well, the lab itself is obviously a physical place on the lot. It's in the old animation building. But there's also this program of innovation that we have with our partners. To be honest, we didn't slow down at all the team carried on the next day from home. And in fact, we have expanded even, because new projects came rolling in as folks who were stuck at home suddenly had needs. So we had editors needing to work remotely, you name it, folks with bad home connections, wondering if we had some 5G phones hanging around, that kind of thing. And so everything really expanded a bit. We are hoping to get back into physical co-location as soon as possible, not least to be able to shoot movies again. But I think that there will be an element of this remote working that's baked in forever from here on then. Not least, coz it was just a round, this kind of, what this has done is accelerated things like the beginning of cloud adoption properly, in the beginning of remote teleworking and remote telepresence, and then also ideas coming out of that. So you know, again, the other day I heard Holograms coming up, like, can we have holograms yet? >> Yeah, we can do that, we've done that, Lets do it. Bring that back. >> And so it's that kind of thing. Exactly, that's going to come around again. Yeah. But you know what? The team have all been amazing. But we'll miss each other, you know, there's something about real life that can't be replaced by technology. >> Well, You know, we were talking earlier on theCUBE last week about, the future got pulled to the present, not the present accelerated the future. Which exposes some of these things that are really important and you mentioned it. So I have to ask you Alice, as you guys got more work, obviously it makes sense. What have you learnt as adapting and leading your team through this change? Any learnings you can share with folks? >> Well, yes, that's a good one. But mainly resilience. It's been a nonstop and quite relentless and the news out there is extraordinary. So we're also trying to balance a very full pipeline of work with understanding that people are struggling to balance their lives as well at home, You know, kids, pets, BLM, like you name it, everything is affecting everybody. So resilience and empathy is really top of my mind at the moment as we try to continue to succeed, but making sure that everybody stays healthy and sane. >> Yeah. And in great news, you got a partner here with HPE, the innovation doesn't stop there. You still have to partner. How do you keep up with these technologies and the importance of partners, comments, and Soumyendu your comment as well. >> Yeah. So HPE has been a great leader in accommodating all HPE employees to work from remote and in the process, what we also discovered is, we humans are innovative. So we discover the innovative ways where we can still work together. So we increased the volume of our virtual collaborations, and I have worked with Erica from Disney, who is a tremendous facilitator and a technologist of mine, to have this close collaboration going, and we almost missed nothing. But yes, we would like to, you know the feel each other to be in close proximity, look at each other's eyes. Probably that's the only missing thing, a crest of it, You know, we created an environment where we can collaborate and work pretty well. And to Alice's point in the process, we also discovered a lot of things which can be done in remote considering the community of Silicon Valley. >> You know, I'd love. The final question I want to get your thoughts on is your favorite technologies that you're excited about. But some Soumyendu, you know, we were talking amongst us nerds and geeks here in Silicon Valley around, you know, what Virtualization... Server Virtualization has done. And HPE knows a lot about server virtualization. You're in the server business, that created cloud, because with virtualization, you could create one server and great many servers, but I think this COVID-19 and the future beyond it, virtualization of life, an immersion of digital is going to bring and change a lot of things. You guys highlighted a few of them. This virtualization of life, society, experiences, play, work. It's not just work it's experiences. So Internet of Things, devices, how I'm consuming, how I'm producing, it's really going to have an impact. I'd love to get your, both of your thoughts on this kind of "virtualization of life" because it certainly impacts studioLAB, because you think about these things, Alice, and HP has to invent the tech to get scaling up. So final question. What do you think about virtualization of life and what technologies do you see that you're excited about to help make our lives better? >> Wow. Goodness, me. I think we're only beginning to understand the impact that things like video conferencing has on folks. You know, I don't know whether you've seen all of the articles flying around about how it's a lot more work to do, video conferencing, that you don't have the same subtle cue as you have in real life. And again, you know, virtual technologies like VR and similar, are not going to solve that immediately. So what will have to happen is that humans themselves will adapt to the systems. I think though, fundamentally we're about to enter a radical period. We basically have already a radical period of innovation because as folks understand what's at their fingertips and then what's missing, we're going to see all sorts of startups and new ideas come rushing out. As people understand this new paradigm and what they can do to solve, for the new pains that come out of it. I mean, just from my perspective, I have back-to-back nine hours of etc a day. And by the end of the day, I can barely walk. What are we going to do about that? I think we're going to see, >> Holograms, I like that Idea. >> right, we're going to see home exercise equipment combined with like, you know, really good ones. Like you've seen pellets on the shares going crazy. There's going to be tons of that. So I'm just really excited at the kind of three years or so. I think that we're going to see of radical innovation, the likes of which we have always usually been held back by other reasons, maybe not enough money or not enough permission. Whereas now people are like, we have to fix this problem. >> Well, you got a great job. I want to come, just quit my job and come join studio lab, sounds like that's a playground of fun. They have great stuff. >> Ton of fun. >> Soumyendu, close this out here. What are you excited about as we virtualize. You're in the labs, creating new technology, you're a distinguished technologist and director of AI. I Wean, you're on the cutting edge. You're riding the wave too. What's your take on this virtual center? >> I think, you know the COVID experience, what it has done is it has pushed the edge to the home. So now, if you really see a home is one of the principle connectivity to the outside world, as far as professionalism goes. And with that, what AI also offers is like a better experience. Right now we are all Gaga about zoom being able to do a video conferencing, but as Alice was pointing out, there is that ER, and the VR. Now consider combining the augmented reality. And the way that we do review a conference and all the other AI innovations that we can bring in so that the interactions becomes much more real. And that is like, you know, I'd say, where the world is moving. >> I can't let this go. I have to go one more step in because you guys brought that up. Alice, you mentioned the fatigue and all these things. And if you think about just the younger generations, we have to invest in our communities and our young people. I mean, think about all the kids who have to go back to school in September, in the fall, what their world's like. And you talk about, you know, we can handle video, but learners? So the transformation that's going to come down the path really fast is how do you create an experience for education and for learning and connecting. This is huge. Thoughts and reactions to that. So it's something that I've been thinking a lot about, but I'm sure a lot of other parents have as well. >> My take on that, kids, I've worked a lot with kids and kids media. And over the years, you often find that when a new media does come in, there's a lot of fear around it, but kids are plastic and incredibly good at adapting to new media and new technology and new ways of working. The other thing is, I think this generation of kids have really had to live through something, you know, and it's going to have, with luck, taught them some resilience. I think, if there's one thing that teachers can be focusing on, it is things like resilience and how to cope under very unusual and very unpredictable circumstances, which is never good for things like anxiety. But it's also the reality of the world, you know, be adaptive and learn, keep learning. These are great messages to give to kids. I think if anything, they are the ones who'll figure out how to socialize online successfully and healthily. So we're going to have to learn from them. >> Yeah. They're going to want to make it to be fun too. I mean, you have to make it entertaining. I mean, I find my personal experience, if it's boring, it ain't going to work. Thank you so much, Alice. Well, thank you very much for that comment and insight really enjoy. Congratulations on studioLAB, you got a great mission and very cool and very relevant. Soumyendu thank you very much for sharing the insights on HPE's role in that. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. >> Thanks. It's nice. >> Okay. >> Thanks John. >> This is theCUBE virtual covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Stay tuned for more coverage from HPE Discover Virtual Experience after this break.

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host to minimun. We are doing joined by Donna Sarkar. She is the advocate lead Microsoft power platform at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you very much for having me. Tai cube land. So tell us a little bit about power platform. It's something we're hearing some buzz about, but we still need the overview. What is it all about? All right, so for years, decades we in the tech industry, you have been on this mission where we say everyone in the world can benefit from learning to code, right? Uh, whether you're a farmer and accountant, a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, some sort of code will help you do your job better and you'll be able to automate away boring tasks and make apps and websites to solve your business problems. >>Right? We've been saying this forever and soon we started to realize like, why are we asking everyone to learn to code when the end goal is to solve those business problems, right? So instead of learning to code, why not create a suite of low code or no code tools? So all of these people who we call citizen developers who may not be professional developers as in they didn't go to computer science school, they didn't do a coding boot camp. They don't live in visual studio all day. How can they use these low code tools to solve their specific business problems? So that's like the vision of power platform and they're, I would say six independent pillars of it. Um, the first one, the one that most people know is power BI, which is a dashboard to visualize data and you know, um, traction in your business and all of that. >>So that's the one that most of the fortune 500 are like quite familiar with. The second one that I think a lot of people have used, used to be called Microsoft flow. So this is a automation tool where you'd say, if I get an email, send me a text, you know, a kind of a, if this happens, then that happens. It's just a logical tool that connects lots and lots of services in our life together that has been renamed to power automate to focus more on the automation that many businesses have that we actually have not thought about for decades. How do we automate some of these processes that people have to do all the time? Third thing if I could. So of course one of the new announcements this week, power automate is the RPA piece. Yes. Come out there. So I guess it's a suite and this is a new offering as RPA. >>The robotic process automation is how we can, um, do UI automation, which is a huge pain in the neck. Like it's terrible because you say, Oh click box, wait three seconds, wait for this thing to happen. Sleep 10 sec. It is terrible. I've done UI automation, I hate it. UI automation. So much. So RPA, what it does for you is you perform the act actions and the code is generated and it replays. So that is this powerful tool for anyone who has to do any sort of repetitive scan form, scan, form, scan form, you know, sort of thing. So power automate. The third pillar is PowerApps, which I think everyone hears a lot about today, which is um, apps that are generated from whatever data source that you've got. Say you've got an Excel spreadsheet having, and I saw all of your guests are it all tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, right? >>Donna's coming now, Christina is coming next and there's Christina now and imagine you can see them in an app instead. And all of you have this app on your phone, you can say, Oh, what's on the docket for today, right? Donna's showing up at 11 Christina's at 1130 what are the questions we want to ask Donna? Click on the Donna tab, you get all the questions you want to talk to her about, et cetera. So PowerApps is a way to quickly generate an app from a data source without code. We have a whole bunch of templates depending on what you're trying to do. So maybe you're trying to make a gallery of photos or you're trying to make like an expense tool or like a gas mileage tool or whatever you're trying to do that every single business in the world has the same tools, slightly different. >>So the fourth thing is, um, a new announcement called power virtual assist, which is, um, think about it as simplified chatbots, right? Chatbots are everywhere. Uh, the way people think about making them is, Oh, I have to go get Azure cognitive services and learn it deeply and become a AI expert and learn to like speak natural language processing stuff. But in fact, you can build a chat bot in five minutes using power virtual assist, which was fantastic and really cool. And running through all of this is my favorite that I learned a lot about this week, which is called the AI builder. And AI builder is a tool really that brings intelligence to all of these things and makes you feel it kind of a badass. I'm like, Oh, I trained an AI model and deployed it and tested it on stage. That's crazy and cool. And I learned to do that in five minutes and believe you me, I'm not a data scientist. >>So it was a really, really cool set of tools that I personally, even as a pro developer, I'm very excited about. Well, I want to dig into the tools more than what they can do. But I first want to ask you a personal question because you're new to the role. You've been there two weeks. What made you, what was exciting to you about working with power platforms? So I've been at Microsoft for 14 years and I've always been in the windows division and I've always worked in a software engineering function. So always dealing with like C plus plus code comm code, how do we, what product code do we changes, do we make to windows the. And recently I've been realizing that my personal mission that anyone in the world should have my opportunities. It's, that's really important to me. Right? I grew up underserved society in Detroit, Michigan, right? >>I don't, I often feel like I don't deserve this life that I have and I fell into it because of luck and circumstance and I want other people to have these opportunities and not feel that same kind of impostor thing. So I always believe that tech is this, you know, this sword, this weapon that you can wield and it will as you make your way through the world and it creates so many opportunities, right? It, the opera and anyone in the world wants to hire a software engineer. Every company, right? Every company wants to hire devs. It doesn't matter if you're like government or like oil rigs, you want software developers. And I thought, what an amazing economic power and I want lots of people to have that. And lo and behold, I was offered the opportunity to head up a brand new advocacy team for the power platform, um, as part of the Azure advocates organization. >>And I said, Oh, that's amazing to be able to line up my personal passion with a mission in the company that doesn't come along very often. So I love my job. So it's interesting thought. I would love your viewpoint as someone that's been with Microsoft for 14 years, cause I know a lot of the advocacy people and many of them are ones that if you ask them if they would have joined Microsoft five years ago, I'm not sure. Sure. So you know, moving from windows to there. Tell us a little bit about culturally what's different about Microsoft today and you know, much more obviously than just windows. Yeah. Um, I would say that there's three things that are dramatically different. There's a lot of like things that people notice, but three things I think that are just, you can't even argue about it. One, we are definitely a learn it all mindset rather than a nodal where it's actually much better now to say, I do not know. >>Let's go find out, let's go do an experiment and then we'll have an answer. And that's much better than with great confidence saying something wrong. Right. Oh I know this will work for sure. I guarantee you. And then it not working because you're being a know it all rather than the learn it all. So that tolerance is off the charts. It's, it's expected. If you come in with a strong opinion with no sort of experimental data to back it up, that's no longer a good thing right now. People almost are suspicious. Like, really? Why do you, why do you think that? Have you checked it? Have you done the experiment? The second thing is, um, this co-creating with customers before, like you're asking about windows. I've worked on windows five versions and it always went a little like this, right? We as the developers would go and hide in Redmond, Washington for three and a half years and one day we would show up and say, here is your operating system. >>We'll see you in three years, have fun using it by, and then we go off and make another operating system. Right? We didn't stick around to figure out, is this operating system working for you? Are you being successful? What's you're trying to do? Are your customer successful? We just went ahead and made what we thought was next, right? Because we were convinced we knew better. But with windows 10 and every other product at Microsoft, now we actually cocreate with our customers, right? That feedback loop is part of the product cycle where we don't ship a product without having a feedback loop. So we shipped something. How are we getting feedback? What is the time baked in to actually take that feedback and make changes? So that's one thing. It's dramatically different. Um, it used to all be timed to code, product, time to fix bugs. >>That's it. Now it's code product, listen to customer feedback, fixed bugs from customers. That's it. So it dramatically shorten the amount of time it took to build an operating system because we don't need to make a three year long product. Instead we make like a six month long product. And when I ran the windows insider program, we were testing windows every week, right? Twice a week we're rolling out versions of windows to millions of people and getting their feedback in real time. And the third thing I'd say that's been a dramatic transformation is this inclusivity of not just different kinds of, you know, race in the city, but work styles, the kinds of businesses we do work with. Like we're a, we do Linux now, right? We do eggs. Um, our platform itself pulls from all sorts of data sources. We don't just say we only pull from Microsoft tech. >>Like if you have Excel, if you have access, if you have Azure, if you've sequel, we support you and everyone else go the heck away. No, we're, we're saying whatever data source you've got, we don't care. We'll build you a power app based on your data source. Bring your whole self to work, right? It's that bring your whole self to a work mindset that I think has permeated just across the company and a chosen our products. So you were talking about this feedback loop and I'm interested because these, these, the power platform was rolled out into 2018 we haven't seen any major revenue yet, but Microsoft sees a ton of promise here. So what was the customer feedback you were given in terms of these updates that you've just announced here at ignite and what were customers demanding, wanting, needing from these platforms, these, these, these tools? >>Well, there's been a few things. One, um, the uptake in power platform, especially power apps is the fastest growth of any business app in Microsoft history. Um, in the last like just two years we've reached 84% of the fortune 500 are running power. Now. That's kind of wild, right? When you think these are normally traditional companies who can be quite conservative, but they've got people, whether it's an it, it's a citizen dove or a PRODA, they're actually building power apps to supplement their business needs, right? So it's been just astronomical growth, which is fantastic. Um, and the feedback from this group is actually what dictates all of the changes we've been making. So one of the key things a lot of people said was we just adopted teams like last year, right? Our company adopted teams, we're all in on teams. All of our communication like realtime has done on teams, but power platform is not with teams. >>What's, what's the deal with that? Right? So the par platform dev team engineering team actually went and figured out how can you have a teams channel, how can you build a power plant, a power app, and then share that power app within your teams specifically. So say the three of us are working on a teams channel and I make a Oh, track your attendees app, the one we're talking about, I can share it within the teams itself and we can just see it from within the team's window. So it'll run within the teams window. Um, we can just deploy it to our phones as well. And with the same team's credentials as we're working, that applies to the app as well. So that's something that just rolled out this week as direct feedback from people who say we're, we want an on the latest and greatest. And that means teams. That's one means SharePoint online. That means our platform. That means all the things now. >>Yeah. So Donna, one of the things I love that you talked about is it doesn't take months to get started on this. So many announcements that you talked through all the six pillars and everything. For those people out there seeing what's new, give them some final tips as to how they should get started with, with the power platform family. >>I would say that um, one of the best things you can do is just get your hands on it, right? Stop reading about it. Stop looking at the announcements. Just get your hands on it. Because I was at first reading all these blog posts trying to understand CDs, power platform, AI builder, all this stuff. Stop. Just don't do it. The best thing to do is to go get on Microsoft learn. There's a start, a starter tutorial called canvas apps for power platform. Um, and go do the tutorial. All it does is it deploys an Excel spreadsheet to your personal machine or your personal one drive, whatever it is and using that, it's just carpet, right? It's like black carpet, white carpet and shows pictures of carpet and then you generate a power app. And it shows it in a gallery view on an app that you just see on your computer and then you deploy it to your phone. >>All it does is show you the power of an Excel spreadsheet converted into an app. So I've created a short URL for it just to make life easier for everyone. So it's AKA dot. Ms power up, super straight forward, super simple. And I talk about this tutorial all the time, not because I think it's the best tutorial that's ever existed, but for someone who has absolutely no idea and they're feeling intimidated to start, this is exactly the right thing to do because this tutorial, I am not kidding you both of you can do it in five minutes. Like on the next break. Once you're finished with me and Christina, I challenge you to do the tutorial. All right? Okay. Challenge accepted. One, one final thing. So you are known for this Ted talk that you gave Unimpossible syndrome earlier in this, in our conversation you said you fell into this like, Oh absolutely, you've gotten lucky, but yet you're a smart woman. >>Talk about imposter syndrome. And then and then give your best advice for the young people out there and an old people to frankly who are suffering. Imposter syndrome is a killer because it is a disease that is a global epidemic. It's not. Some people think it's a woman's problem, it's a people of color problem. No, it's not. It's an everyone problem. Every time I give this talk, the Ted audience was thousands of people. I would say about 70% men and when I asked how many of you feel these symptoms? Hands are up. 70% of people, and this was men too, who feel like I got here. You know the thoughts are usually I got here by accident. It was dumb luck. There's a mistake in the process. I slipped in under the radar any minute. Now someone's going to show up here and say, you don't belong here. >>Get out or someone's going to check my credentials or ask me like, how do you think you're as good as the people around you? Or why are you qualified to speak on this topic? Right? People are convinced this is going to happen. Like, almost everyone is convinced and it's wild. And I've realized the reason that happens is because we are not used to doing that thing yet. That's it. We don't imposter about the things we do every day. You don't imposter about being in camera on front of the camera in front of everyone because you do it all the time and you've gotten good reviews and obviously people come to talk to you. But if tomorrow I was to be like you and I are going to write office abs, you may say, ah, I don't think I'm qualified to do that. I don't know if you are or not. >>I'm just making stuff up at this point. Um, and you may say, I am not qualified to do that. And the reason you say that is because you've never done it before. Why would you be qualified to do that? It's like me trying to be qualified to ride a unicycle, right? Which I can't. So my advice to people who feels this, well I don't feel like I belong here, is break it down right into steps, debug this process and say, all right, there are parts of this process that I feel qualified to do and there's parts I do not feel qualified to do. What are they? So from my own example, I absolutely do not feel qualified to lead an advocacy team for power platform. Right. I said, I joined this team two weeks ago. I just learned about this product last year. How am I qualified to lead advocacy for this? >>So I had to break it down and I said, what? What am I feeling and posturing about? Is it leading advocacy? No, I did it for windows. I did it for hollow lens. I do know how to do that. Is it speaking in front of lots of people? Not really. I do that all the time. Is it writing content so others can learn? Not really. I do that all the time. Is it the product? Yes, it's the product. It's the, I don't feel like I know the ins and outs of the product that well. So if you were to ask me where exactly is the connector for, you know, Azure sequeled or PowerApps, I would just freeze. Like I do not know. I think it's in the Azure portal somewhere, somewhere. So I would feel that sense of imposter and like, Oh, I don't know. >>So I don't belong here. It's no, I just don't know the product that well. That's okay. I know advocacy well, so what I need to do now is identify things. I'm good at advocacy things. I'm not good at product, learn the product. That's it. It just becomes a really easy to do list or to learn list. Right. Learn it all mindset, not know it all. Mindset. I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you is a really terrific conversation. Wonderful. Thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite.

(rhythmic techno music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at Oracle Park on the shores of McCovey Cove. We're excited to be here, it's a pretty interesting event. Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. It's kind of like an accelerator but not really, it's kind of like Y Combinator but not really, it's a little bit different. But it's a community of tech start-ups focusing on sports with a real angle on getting beyond sports. We're excited to have our next guest, who's an investor and also a mentor, really part of the program to learn more about it and she is Gayatri Sarkar, the managing partner from Hype Capital. Welcome. >> Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here. >> Pretty nice, huh? (laughs) >> Oh, I just love the view. >> So you said before we turned on the cameras, well first off Hype Capital, what do you guys invest in? What's kind of your focus? >> So Hype Capital is part of one of the biggest ecosystems in sports which is Hype Sports Innovation. We have 13 accelerators all around the world. We are just launching the world's first E-sports accelerator with Epsilon and SK Gaming, one of the biggest gaming company. So we are part of the ecosystem for a pretty long time. And now, we have Hype Capital, VC Fund investing in Europe, Israel, and now in U.S. >> So you mentioned that being a mentor is part of this organization. It's something special. I think you're the first person we've had on who's been a mentor. What does that mean, what does that mean for you? But also what does it mean for all the portfolio companies? >> Sure, I'm a mentor at multiple accelerators. But being a part of Sports Tech Tokyo I saw the very inclusive community that is created by them and the opportunity to look at various portfolio companies and also including our portfolio companies as part of it. One of our portfolio company where we had the lead investors, 'Fun with Balls' they're part of this. >> What's it called, Fun with Balls? >> Fun with Balls, very interesting name. >> Good name. (laughs) >> Yeah, they're from Germany and they came all the way from Germany to here. So, yeah, I'm very excited, because as I said it's an inclusive community, and sports is big. So we are looking at opportunities where deep-techs, where it can be translated into various other verticals, but sports can also be one of the use cases, and that's our focus as investors. >> Right, you said your focus was really on AI, machine learning, you have a big data background a tech background. So when you look at the application of AI in sports what are some of the things that you get excited about. >> Yeah, so for me when I'm looking at investments definitely the diversification of sports portfolio. How can I build my portfolio from esports, gaming, behavioral science in sports to AI, ML, AR, opportunities in material science and various other cases. Coming back to your question it's like how can I look into the market and see the opportunities that, okay can I invest in this sector? Like what's the next big trend? And that's where I want to invest. Obviously, product/market fit, promise/market fit because there's a fan engagement experience that you get in sports, not in any other market the network effect is huge, and I think that's what VVC's are very excited in sports and I think this is right now the best time to invest in sports. >> So promise/market fit, I've never heard that before what does that mean when you say promise/market fit? >> Interesting question so promise/market fit was coined by Union Square Venture VC fund. And they think that where there's the network effect or your engagement with your consumers, with your clients, and with your partners can create a very loyal fan base and I think that is very important. You may see that in other technology sector but, not, it is completely unparalelled when it comes to sports. So, I request all the technologies that are actually trying to build they are use cases, they should focus on sports because the fan engagement, the loyal experience the opportunities, you will not get anywhere else. >> Right >> And I think this is the market that I, and other investors are looking for that, if deep-tech investors and deep-tech technologies are coming into this market we see the sports ecosystem not to be a trillion dollar but a multi-trillion dollar market. >> Right, but it's such a unique experience though, right? I mean some people will joke that fans don't necessarily root for the team, they root for the jersey, right? The players come and go, we're here at Oracle Park which was AT&T park, which was SBC Park, which was I can't even remember, Pac bell I think as well. So you know, is it reasonable for a regular company that doesn't have this innate connection to a fanbase that a lot of sports organizations do that's historical, and family-based, and has such deep roots that can survive maybe down years, can survive a crappy product, can survive kind of the dark days and generally they'll be there when things turn back around. Is that reasonable for a regular company to get that relationship with the customer? >> So, you asked me one of the most important questions in the investors relationship, or investors life which is the cyclicality of the industry and I feel like sports is one industry that has survived the cyclicality of that industry. Because, as you say, a crappy product will not survive you have to focus on customer service so you have to focus, that, okay even if you have the best product in the world how can I make my product sticky? These are the qualities that we are looking into when we are investing in entrepreneurs. But the idea is that if we are targeting startups and opportunities, our focus is that okay, you may have the worlds best product but the founder's should have the ability to understand the market. Okay, there are opportunities, if you look at Facebook if you look at various other companies they started with a product that was maybe like okay, friend site, dating site and they pivoted, so you need to understand the economy you need to understand the market and I think that's what we are looking into the entrepreneurs. And, to answer your question, the family offices they are actually part of this whole startup ecosystem they are saying if there is an opportunity because they are big, they are giant and they are working with legacy techs like Microsoft, Amazon. It's very difficult for the legacy techs to be agile and move fast, so it's very important for them if they can place themselves at a 45 degree angle with the startup ecosystem, and they can move faster. So that's the opportunity for them in the sport's startup ecosystem. >> All right, well Gayatri thanks for taking a few minutes and hopefully you can find some new investments here. >> No, thank you so much thank you so much for your time. >> Absolutely, she's Gayatri, I'm Jeff you're watching The Cube, we are at Oracle Park On the shores of historic McCovey Cove I got to get together with Big John and practice this line thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. (rhythmic techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Oracle Park on the shores of McCovey Cove. We're excited to be here. It's a pretty interesting event. Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. It's kind of like an accelerator, but not really. It's kind of like YCombinator, but not really. It's a little bit different, but it's a community of tech start-ups focusing on sports with a real angle on getting beyond sports. We're excited to have our next guest who's an investor and also a mentor, really part of the program to learn more about it, and she is Gayatri Sarkar, the managing partner from HYPE Capital. Welcome. >> Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here. >> Pretty nice, huh? >> Oh, I just love the view. >> So you said before we turned on the cameras... Well, first off, HYPE Capital, what do you guys invest in? What's kind of your focus? >> So HYPE Capital is one of the biggest ecosystem in sports, which is HYPE Sports Innovation. We have 13 accelerators all around the world. We are just launching the world's first Esports accelerator with FC Koeln and SK gaming, one of the biggest gaming company. So we are part of the ecosystem for a pretty long time. And now we have HYPE Capital or VC Fund investing in Europe, Israel, and now in US. >> So you mentioned that being a mentor, as part of this organization, as something special. Think you're the first person we've had on who's been a mentor. What does that mean? What does it mean for you, but also what does it mean for all the portfolio companies? >> Sure. I'm a mentor at multiple accelerators, but being a part of Sports Tech Tokyo, I saw the very inclusive community that is created by them. And the opportunity to look at various portfolio companies and also including our portfolio companies as part of it. One of our portfolio company where we are the lead investors, Fund with Balls, they are part of this. So-- >> What's it called? Fun with Balls? >> Fun with Balls, very interesting name. >> Good name. >> Yeah. (laughing) They're from Germany and they came all the way from Germany to here. So, yeah, I'm very excited because as I said, it's an inclusive community and sports is big. So we are looking at opportunities where deep techs, where it can be translated into various other verticals, but sports can also be one of the use cases. And that's our focus as investors. >> Right. You said your focus is really on AI, machine learning. You have a big data background, a tech background. So when you look at the application of AI in sports, what are some of the things that you get excited about? >> Yeah, so for me, when I'm looking at investments, definitely the diversification of sports portfolio, how can I build my portfolio from Esports gaming, behavioral science in sports to AI, ML, AR opportunities in material science, and various other cases? Coming back to your question, it's like how can I look into the market and see the opportunities that, okay, can I invest in this sector? As I said, what's the next big trend? And that's where I want to invest. Obviously, founder market fit, product market fit, promise market fit because there's the fan engagement experience that you get in sports, not in any other market. The network effect is huge and I think that's what we VCs are very excited in sports. And I think this is, right now, the best time to invest in sports. >> So promise market fit, I've never heard that before. What does that mean when you say promise market fit? >> Interesting question. So promise market fit was coined by Union Square Venture VC Fund. And they think that where there's the network effect, or your engagement with your consumers, with your clients, with your partners, can create a very loyal fan base and I think that's very important. You may see that in other technology sector, but it is completely unparallel when it comes to sports. So I request all the technologies that are actually trying to build their use cases. They should focus on sports because the fan engagement, the loyal experience, they opportunities, you'll not get anywhere else. >> And I think this is the market that I and other investors are looking forward. If deep tech investors and deep tech technologies are coming into this market, we see the sports ecosystem, not to be a trillion-dollar, but a multi-trillion dollar market. >> Right. But it's such a unique experience, though, right? I mean, some people will joke their fans don't necessarily root for the team, they root for the jersey, right? The players come and go. We're here at Oracle Park, which was AT&T Park, which was SBC Park, which was I can't even remember. Pac Bell, I think, as well. So is it reasonable for a regular company that doesn't have this innate, kind of, a connection to a fan base that a lot of sports organizations do that's historical and family-based, and has such deep roots that can survive, maybe, down years, can survive a crappy product, can survive, kind of, the dark days and generally they'll be there when things turn back around. Is that reasonable for a regular company to try to get that relationship with a customer? >> So you asked me one of the most important question in the investor's relationship or investor's life, which is the cyclicality of the industry. And I feel like sports is one industry that has survived the cyclicality of that industry. Because, as you said, a crappy product will not survive. You have to focus on customer service. You have to focus that, okay, even if you have the best product in the world. How can I make my product sticky? I think these are the qualities that we're looking into when we are investing in entrepreneurs. But the idea is that if we are targeting start-ups and opportunities, our focus is that, okay, you may have the world's best product, but the founders should have the ability to understand the market. Okay, there are opportunities. If you look at Facebook, if you look at various other companies, they started with a product, which maybe, okay, friends saw a dating site and they pivoted. So you need to understand the economy. You need to understand the market. And I think that's what we are looking into the entrepreneurs. And as to answering your question, the family offices, they're actually part of this world start-up ecosystems. They're seeing if there's an opportunity, because they're big, they're giant, and they're working with legacy techs like Microsoft, Amazon. It's very difficult for the legacy techs to be agile and move fast. So it's very important for them if they can place themselves at a 45 degree angle with the start-up ecosystem and they can move faster. So that's the opportunity for them in the sports start-up ecosystem. >> All right. Well, Gayatri, thanks for taking a few minutes and hopefully you can find some new investments here-- >> No, thank you so much. >> over the course of the day. >> Thank you so much for your time. >> Absolutely, she's Gayatri, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We are at Oracle Park on the shores of historic McCovey Cove. I got to get together with big John and practice this line. (laughing) Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music) >> Camera Crew: Clear. >> Jeff: John Miller. >> Gayatri: Oh, yeah.