>>Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to Cuan where my cohost John Farer and I are broadcasting live, along with Lisa Martin from Cuan Detroit, Michigan. We are joined this afternoon by two very interesting gentlemen who also happen to be legends on the cube. John, how long have you known the next few? They've, >>They've made their mark on the cube with Jerry Chen from Greylock was one of our most attended cube guests. He's a VC partner at Greylock and an investor and this company that just launched their new cloud observability platform should be a great segment. >>Well, I'm excited. I are. Are you excited? Should I string this out just a little bit longer? No, I won't. I won't do that to you. Please welcome Martin and Jeff from Chronosphere Martin. Jeff, thank you so much for being >>Here. Thank you for having us. Thank you. >>I noticed right away that you have raised a mammoth series C. Yeah. 200 million if I'm not mistaken. >>That is correct. >>Where's the company at? >>Yeah, so we raised that series C a year ago. In fact, we were just talking about it a year ago at Cub Con. Since then, at the time we're about 80 employees or so. Since then, we've tripled the headcount, so we're over 200 people. Casual, triple casual, triple of the headcount. Yeah. Luckily it was the support of business, which is also tripled in the last year. So we're very lucky from that perspective as well. And a couple of other things we're pretty proud of last year. We've had a hundred percent customer retention, which is always a great thing to have as a SaaS platform there. >>Real metric if you've had a hundred percent. I'm >>Kidding. It's a good metric to, to put out there if you had a hundred percent. I would say for sure. It's an A for sure and exactly welcome to meet >>Anyone else who's had a hundred percent >>Customer attention here at coupon this week and 90% of our customers are using more of the service and, and you know, therefore paying more for the service as well. So those are great science for us and I think it shows that we're clearly doing something right on the product side. I would say. And >>Last and last time you're on the cube. We're talking about about the right data. Not so much a lot of data, if I remember correctly. Yeah, a hundred percent. And that was a unique approach. Yeah, it's a data world on relative observability. And you guys just launched a new release of your platform, cloud native platform. What's new in the platform? Can you share an update on what you guys release? >>Yeah, well we did and, and you, you bring up a great point. You know, like it's not just in observably but overall data is exploding. Alright, so three things there. It's like, hey, can your platform even handle the explosion of data? Can it control it over time and make sure that as your business grows, the data doesn't continue explode at the same time. And then for the end users, can they make sense of all this data? Cuz what's the point of having it if the end users can't make sense of it? So actually our product announcement this time is a pretty big refresh of, of a lot of features in our, in our platform. And it actually tackles all three of these particular components. And I'll let Jeff, our head of product, Doug, >>You, you run product, you get the keys to the kingdom, I do product roadmap. People saying, Hey this, take this out. You're under a lot of pressure. What makes the platform platform a great observability product? >>So the keystone of what we do that's different is helping you control the data, right? As we're talking about there's an infinite amount of data. These systems are getting more and more and more complicated. A lot of what we do is help you understand the utility of the telemetry so that you can optimize for keeping and storing and paying for the data that's actually helpful as opposed to the stuff that isn't. >>What's the benefit now with observability, with all the noise out in the marketplace, there's been a shift over the past couple years. Cloud native at scale, you're seeing a lot more automation, almost a set to support the growth for more application development. We had a Docker CEO on earlier today, he said there are more applications being deployed in the past year than in the history of open source. So more and more apps are being deployed, more data's being generated. What's the key to observability right now that's gonna separate the winners from the losers? >>Yeah, I think, you know, not only are there more applications being deployed, but there are smaller and small applications being deployed mostly on containers these days more than if they, hence this conference gets larger and larger every year. Right? So, you know, I think the key is a can your system handle this data explosion is, is the first thing. Not only can it handle the data explosion, but you know, APM solutions have been around for a very long time and those were really introspecting into an application. Whereas these days what's more important is, well how is your application interfacing with every other application in your distributed architecture there, right? So the use case is slightly different there. And then to what Jeff was saying is like once the data is there, not only making use of what is actually useful to you, but then having the end user make sense of it. >>Because we, we, we always think about the technology changes. We forget that the end users are different now we used to have IT operations team operating everything and the developers would write the application, just throw it over the wall. These days the developers have to actually operate this thing in production. So the end users of these systems are very different as well. And you can imagine these are folks, your average developer as maybe not operated things for many years in production before. So they need to, that they need to pick up a new skill set, they need to use new tooling in order to, to do that. So yeah, it's, it's, >>And you got the developer persona, you got a developer that's building products for builders and developers that are building products to be consumed. So they're not, they're not really infrastructure builders, they're just app developers. >>Exactly. Exactly. That's right. And that's what a lot of the new functionality that we're introducing here at the show is all about is helping developers who build software by day and are on call by night, actually get in context. There's so much data chances of when that, when one of those pages goes off and your number comes up, that the problem happens to be in the part of the system that you know a lot about are pretty low, chances are you're gonna get bothered about something else. So we've built a feature, we call it collections that's about putting you in the right context and connecting you into the piece of the system where the problem is to orient you and to get you started. So instead of waiting through, through hundreds of millions of things, you're waiting through the stuff that's in the immediate neighborhood of where the >>Problem is. Yeah. To your point about data, you can't let it go unchecked. That's right. You gotta gotta understand that. And we were talking about containers again with, again with docker, you know, nuance point, but oh, scan your container. But not everyone's scanning the containers security nightmare, right? I mean, >>Well I think one of the things that I, I loved in reading the notes in preparation for you coming up is you've actually created cloud native observability with the goal of eliminating engineering burnout. And what you're talking about there is actually the cognitive burden of when things happen. Yeah, for sure. We we're, you know, we're not just designing for when everything goes right, You need to be prepared for when everything goes wrong and that poor lonely individual in the middle of the night has, it's >>A tough job. >>Has to navigate that >>And, and observability is just one thing you gotta mean like security is another thing. So, so many more things have been piled on top of the developer in addition to actually creating the application. Right? It is. There is a lot. And you know, observably is one of those key things you need to do your job. So as much as, as much as we can make that easier, that's a better bit. Like there are so many things being piled on right now. >>That's the holy grail right there. Because they don't want to be doing exactly >>The work. Exactly. They're not observability experts. >>Exactly. And automating that in. So where do you guys weigh in on the automation wave? Everything's automation. Yeah. Is that kind of a hand waving or what's going on? What's the reality? What's actually happening? >>Yeah, I think automation I think is key. You hear a lot of ai ml ops there. I, I don't know if I really believe in that or having a machine self heal itself or anything like that. But I think automation is key because there are a lot of repeatable tasks in a lot of what you're doing. So once you detect that something goes wrong, generally if you've seen it before, you know what the fix is. So I think automation plays a key on the sense that once it's detected again the second time, the third time, okay, I know what I did the previous time, let, let's make sure we can do that again. So automation I think is key. I think it helps a lot with the burnout. I dunno if I'd go as far as the >>Same burnout's a big deal. >>Well there's an example again in the, in the stuff we're releasing this week, a new feature we call query accelerator. That's a form of automation. Problem is you got all this data, mountain of data, put you in the right context so you're at least in the right neighborhood, but now you need to query it. You gotta get the data to actually inform the specific problem you're trying to solve. And the burden on the developer in that situation is really high. You have to know what you're looking for and you have to know how to efficiently ask for it. So you're not waiting for a long time and >>We >>Built a feature, you tell us what you want, we will figure out how to get it for you efficiently. That's the kind of automation that we're focused on. That's actually a good service. How can we, it >>Sounds >>Blissful. How can we accelerate and optimize what you were gonna do anyway, rather than trying to read your mind or predict the future. >>Yes, >>Savannah, some community forward. Yeah, I, I'm, so I'm curious, you, you clearly lead with a lot of empathy, both of you and, and putting your, well you probably have experience with this as well, but putting your mind or putting yourself in the mind to the developer are, what's that like for you from a product development standpoint? Are you doing a lot of community engagement? Are you talking to developers to try and anticipate what they're gonna be needing next in terms of, of your offering? Or how has that work >>For you? Oh, for sure. So, so I run product, I have a lot of product managers who work for me. Somebody that I used to work with, she was accusing me, but what she called, she called me an anthropologist of a product manager. I >>Get these kind of you, the very good design school vibes from you both of you, which >>Is, and the reason why she said the way you do this, you go and you live with them in order to figure out what a day in their life is really like, what the job is really like, what's easy, what's hard. And that's what we try to aim at and try to optimize for. So that's very much the way that we do all of >>Our work. And that's really also highlights the fact that we're in a market that requires acute realtime data from the customer. Cause it's, and it's all new data. Well >>Yeah, it's all changing. The tools change every day. I mean if we're not watching how, and >>So to your point, you need it in real time as well. The whole point of moving to cloud native is you have a reliable product or service there. And like if you need to wait a few minutes to even know that something's wrong, like you've already lost at that point, you've already lost a ton of customers, potentially. You've already lost a ton of business. You know, to your point about the, the community earlier, one other thing we're trying to do is also give back to the community a little bit. So actually two days ago we just announced the open source of a tool that we've been using in our product for a very long time. But of course our product is, is a paid product, right? But actually open source a part of that tool thus that the broader community can benefit as well. And that tool which, which tool is that? It's, it's called Prom lens. And it's actually the Prometheus project is the open sourced metrics project that everybody uses. So this is a query builder that helps developers understand how to create queries in a much more efficient way. We've had in our product for a long time, but we're like, let's give that back to the community so that the broader community of developers out there can have a much easier time creating these queries as well. What's >>Been the feedback? >>We only now it's two days ago so I'm not, I'm not exactly sure. I imagine >>It's great. They're probably playing with it right now. >>Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. For sure. I imagine. Great. >>Yeah, you guys mentioned burnout before and we heard this a lot now you mentioned in terms of data we've been hearing and reporting about Insta security world, which is also data specific observability ties right into security. Yep. How does a company figure out, first of all, burnout's a big problem. It's more and more data coming. It's like, it's like doesn't stop and the breaches are coming too. How does a company know when they need that their observability strategy is broken? Is there sig signs of you know, burnout? Is there signs of breaches? I mean, what are some of the tell signs that if I'm a CSO I go, you know what, maybe I should check out promisee. When do, when do you guys match in and go we're a perfect fit to solve that problem? >>Yeah, I, I would say, you know, because we're focused on the observability side, less so on the security side, some of those signals are like how many incidents do you have? How many outages do you have? What's the occurrence of these things and how long does it take to recover from from from these particular incidents? How >>Upsetting are we finding customers? >>Upsetting are >>Customer. Exactly. >>And and one trend was seeing >>Not churn happening. Exactly. >>And one trend we're seeing in the industry is that 68% of companies are saying that they're having more incidents over time. Right. And if you have more incidents, you can imagine more engineers are being paid, are being woken up and they're being put under more stress. And one thing you said that very interesting is, you know, I think generally in the observability world, you ideally actually don't want to figure out the problem when it goes wrong. Ideally what you want to do these days is figure out how do I remediate this and get the business back to a running state as quickly as I can. And then when the business isn't burning, let me go and figure out what the underlying root cause is. So the strategy there is changed as well from the APM days where like I don't want to figure out the problem in real time. I wanna make sure my business and my service is running as it should be. And then separately from that, once it is then I wanna go >>Under understand that assume it's gonna happen, be ready to close that isolate >>The >>Fire. Exactly. Exactly. And, and you know, you can imagine, you know the whole movement towards C I C D, like generally when you don't touch a system, nothing goes wrong. You deploy change, first thing you do is not figure out why you change break thing. Get that back like underplay that change roll that change back, get your business back to a estate and then take the time where you're not under pressure, you're not gonna be burnt out to figure out what was it about my change that that broke everything. So, yeah. Got >>It. >>Well it's not surprising that you've added some new exciting customers to the roster. We have. We have. You want to tell the audience who they might >>Be? Yes. It's been a few big names in the last year we're pretty excited about. One is Snapchat, I think everybody knows, knows that application And one is Robin Hood. So you know, you can imagine very large, I'll say tech forward companies that have completed their migrations to, to cloud native or a wallet on their way to Cloudnative and, and we like helping those customers for sure. We also like helping a lot of startups out there cause they start off in the cloud native world. Like if you're gonna build a business today, you're gonna use Kubernetes from day one. Right? But we're actually interestingly seeing more and more of is traditional enterprises who are just early, pretty early on in their cloudnative migration then now starting to adopt cloud native at scale and now they're running to the same problems. As well >>Said, the Gartner data last year was something like 85% of companies had not made that transformation. Right. So, and that, I mean that's looking at larger scale companies, obviously >>A hundred, you're >>Right on the pulse. They >>Have finished it, but a lot of them are starting it now. So we're seeing pilot >>Projects, testing and cadence. And I imagine it's a bit of a different pace when you're working with some of those transforming companies versus those startups that are, are just getting rolling. I >>Love and you know, you have a lot of legacy use case you have to, like, if you're a startup, you can imagine there's no baggage, there's no legacy. You're just starting brand new, right? If you're a large enterprise, you have to really think about, okay, well how do I get my active business moved over? But yeah. >>Yeah. And how do you guys see the whole cloud native scale moving with the hyper scales? Like aws? You've got a lot of multi-cloud conversation. We call it super cloud in our narrative, but there's now this new, we're gonna get some of common services being identified. We're seeing a, we're seeing a lot more people recognize and with Kubernetes that hey, you know what, you could get some common services maybe across clouds with SOS doing storage. We got Min iOS doing some storage. Yeah. Cloud flare, I mean starting to see a lot more non-hyper scale systems. >>Yeah, I mean I, and I think that's the pattern there and I think it, it's, especially for enterprise at the top end, right? You see a, a lot of companies are trying to de-risk by saying, Hey, I, I don't want to bet maybe on one cloud provider, I sort of need to hedge my bets a little bit. And Kubernetes is a great tool to go do that. You can imagine some of these other tools you mentioned is a great way to do that. Observability is another great way to do that. Or the cloud providers have their observability or monitoring tooling, but it's really optimized just for that cloud provider, just for those services there. So if you're really trying to run either your custom applications or a multi-cloud approach, you really can't use one cloud providers solution to go solve that problem. Do you >>Guys see yourselves with that unifying >>Layer? We, we, we are a little bit as that lay because it's agnostic to each of the cloud providers. And the other thing is we actually like to understand where our customers run and then try to run their observability stack on a different cloud provider. Cuz we use the cloud ourselves. We're not running our own data centers of course, but it's an interesting thing where everybody has a common dependency on the cloud provider. So when us e one ofs hate to call them out, but when us E one ofs goes down, imagine half the internet goes down, right? And that's the time that you actually need observability. Right? Seriously. And every other tooling there. So we try to find out where do you run and then we try to actually run you elsewhere. But yeah, >>I like that. And nobody wants to see the ugly bits anyway. Exactly. And we all know who when we're all using someone when everything >>Exactly. Exactly, exactly. >>People off the internet. So it's very, I, I really love that. Martin, Jeff, thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you. What's next? What, how do people find out, how do they get one of the jobs since three Xing your >>Employee growth? We're hiring a lot. I think the best thing is to go check out our website chronosphere.io. You'll find out a lot about our, our, our careers, our job openings, the culture we're trying to build here. Find out a lot about the product as well. If you do have an observability problem, like that's the best place to go to find out about that as well. Right. >>Fantastic. Well if you want to join a quarter billion, a quarter of a billion dollar rocket ship over here and certainly a unicorn, get in touch with Martin and Jeff. John, thank you so much for joining me for this very special edition and thank all of you for tuning in to the Cube live here from Motor City. My name's Savannah Peterson and we'll see you in a little bit. >>Robert Herbeck. People obviously know you from Shark Tanks, but the Herbeck group has been really laser focused on cyber security. So I actually helped to bring my.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The theme, this showcase is MarTech, the emerging cloud scale customer experiences. Season two of episode three, the ongoing series covering the startups, the hot startups, talking about analytics, data, all things MarTech. I'm your host, John Furrier, here joined by Christian Wiklund, founder and CEO of unitQ here, talk about harnessing the power of user feedback to empower marketing. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you so much, John. Happy to be here. >> In these new shifts in the market, when you got cloud scale, open source software is completely changing the software business. We know that. There's no longer a software category. It's cloud, integration, data. That's the new normal. That's the new category, right? So as companies are building their products, and want to do a good job, it used to be, you send out surveys, you try to get the product market fit. And if you were smart, you got it right the third, fourth, 10th time. If you were lucky, like some companies, you get it right the first time. But the holy grail is to get it right the first time. And now, this new data acquisition opportunities that you guys in the middle of that can tap customers or prospects or end users to get data before things are shipped, or built, or to iterate on products. This is the customer feedback loop or data, voice of the customer journey. It's a gold mine. And it's you guys, it's your secret weapon. Take us through what this is about now. I mean, it's not just surveys. What's different? >> So yeah, if we go back to why are we building unitQ? Which is we want to build a quality company. Which is basically, how do we enable other companies to build higher quality experiences by tapping into all of the existing data assets? And the one we are in particularly excited about is user feedback. So me and my co-founder, Nik, and we're doing now the second company together. We spent 14 years. So we're like an old married couple. We accept each other, and we don't fight anymore, which is great. We did a consumer company called Skout, which was sold five years ago. And Skout was kind of early in the whole mobile first. I guess, we were actually mobile first company. And when we launched this one, we immediately had the entire world as our marketplace, right? Like any modern company. We launch a product, we have support for many languages. It's multiple platforms. We have Android, iOS, web, big screens, small screens, and that brings some complexities as it relates to staying on top of the quality of the experience because how do I test everything? >> John: Yeah. >> Pre-production. How do I make sure that our Polish Android users are having a good day? And we found at Skout, personally, like I could discover million dollar bugs by just drinking coffee and reading feedback. And we're like, "Well, there's got to be a better way to actually harness the end user feedback. That they are leaving in so many different places." So, you know what, what unitQ does is that we basically aggregate all different sources of user feedback, which can be app store reviews, Reddit posts, Tweets, comments on your Facebook ads. It can be better Business Bureau Reports. We don't like to get to many of those, of course. But really, anything on the public domain that mentions or refers to your product, we want to ingest that data in this machine, and then all the private sources. So you probably have a support system deployed, a Zendesk, or an Intercom. You might have a chatbot like an Ada, or and so forth. And your end user is going to leave a lot of feedback there as well. So we take all of these channels, plug it into the machine, and then we're able to take this qualitative data. Which and I actually think like, when an end user leaves a piece of feedback, it's an act of love. They took time out of the day, and they're going to tell you, "Hey, this is not working for me," or, "Hey, this is working for me," and they're giving you feedback. But how do we package these very messy, multi-channel, multiple languages, all over the place data? How can we distill it into something that's quantifiable? Because I want to be able to monitor these different signals. So I want to turn user feedback into time series. 'Cause with time series, I can now treat this the same way as Datadog treats machine logs. I want to be able to see anomalies, and I want to know when something breaks. So what we do here is that we break down your data in something called quality monitors, which is basically machine learning models that can aggregate the same type of feedback data in this very fine grained and discrete buckets. And we deploy up to a thousand of these quality monitors per product. And so we can get down to the root cause. Let's say, passive reset link is not working. And it's in that root cause, the granularity that we see that companies take action on the data. And I think historically, there has been like the workflow between marketing and support, and engineering and product has been a bit broken. They've been siloed from a data perspective. They've been siloed from a workflow perspective, where support will get a bunch of tickets around some issue in production. And they're trained to copy and paste some examples, and throw it over the wall, file a Jira ticket, and then they don't know what happens. So what we see with the platform we built is that these teams are able to rally around the single source of troop or like, yes, passive recent link seems to have broken. This is not a user error. It's not a fix later, or I can't reproduce. We're looking at the data, and yes, something broke. We need to fix it. >> I mean, the data silos a huge issue. Different channels, omnichannel. Now, there's more and more channels that people are talking in. So that's huge. I want to get to that. But also, you said that it's a labor of love to leave a comment or a feedback. But also, I remember from my early days, breaking into the business at IBM and Hewlett-Packard, where I worked. People who complain are the most loyal customers, if you service them. So it's complaints. >> Christian: Yeah. >> It's leaving feedback. And then, there's also reading between the lines with app errors or potentially what's going on under the covers that people may not be complaining about, but they're leaving maybe gesture data or some sort of digital trail. >> Yeah. >> So this is the confluence of the multitude of data sources. And then you got the siloed locations. >> Siloed locations. >> It's complicated problem. >> It's very complicated. And when you think about, so I started, I came to Bay Area in 2005. My dream was to be a quant analyst on Wall Street, and I ended up in QA at VMware. So I started at VMware in Palo Alto, and didn't have a driver's license. I had to bike around, which was super exciting. And we were shipping box software, right? This was literally a box with a DVD that's been burned, and if that DVD had bugs in it, guess what it'll be very costly to then have to ship out, and everything. So I love the VMware example because the test cycles were long and brutal. It was like a six month deal to get through all these different cases, and they couldn't be any bugs. But then as the industry moved into the cloud, CI/CD, ship at will. And if you look at the modern company, you'll have at least 20 plus integrations into your product. Analytics, add that's the case, authentication, that's the case, and so forth. And these integrations, they morph, and they break. And you have connectivity issues. Is your product working as well on Caltrain, when you're driving up and down, versus wifi? You have language specific bugs that happen. Android is also quite a fragmented market. The binary may not perform as well on that device, or is that device. So how do we make sure that we test everything before we ship? The answer is, we can't. There's no company today that can test everything before the ship. In particular, in consumer. And the epiphany we had at our last company, Skout, was that, "Hey, wait a minute. The end user, they're testing every configuration." They're sitting on the latest device, the oldest device. They're sitting on Japanese language, on Swedish language. >> John: Yeah. >> They are in different code paths because our product executed differently, depending on if you were a paid user, or a freemium user, or if you were certain demographical data. There's so many ways that you would have to test. And PagerDuty actually had a study they came out with recently, where they said 51% of all end user impacting issues are discovered first by the end user, when they serve with a bunch of customers. And again, like the cool part is, they will tell you what's not working. So now, how do we tap into that? >> Yeah. >> So what I'd like to say is, "Hey, your end user is like your ultimate test group, and unitQ is the layer that converts them into your extended test team." Now, the signals they're producing, it's making it through to the different teams in the organization. >> I think that's the script that you guys are flipping. If I could just interject. Because to me, when I hear you talking, I hear, "Okay, you're letting the customers be an input into the product development process." And there's many different pipelines of that development. And that could be whether you're iterating, or geography, releases, all kinds of different pipelines to get to the market. But in the old days, it was like just customer satisfaction. Complain in a call center. >> Christian: Yeah. >> Or I'm complaining, how do I get support? Nothing made itself into the product improvement, except for slow moving, waterfall-based processes. And then, maybe six months later, a small tweak could be improved. >> Yes. >> Here, you're taking direct input from collective intelligence. Okay. >> Is that have input and on timing is very important here, right? So how do you know if the product is working as it should in all these different flavors and configurations right now? How do you know if it's working well? And how do you know if you're improving or not improving over time? And I think the industry, what can we look at, as far as when it relates to quality? So I can look at star ratings, right? So what's the star rating in the app store? Well, star ratings, that's an average over time. So that's something that you may have a lot of issues in production today, and you're going to get dinged on star ratings over the next few months. And then, it brings down the score. NPS is another one, where we're not going to run NPS surveys every day. We're going to run it once a quarter, maybe once a month, if we're really, really aggressive. That's also a snapshot in time. And we need to have the finger on the pulse of product quality today. I need to know if this release is good or not good. I need to know if anything broke. And I think that real time aspect, what we see as stuff sort of bubbles up the stack, and not into production, we see up to a 50% reduction in time to fix these end user impacting issues. And I think, we also need to appreciate when someone takes time out of the day to write an app review, or email support, or write that Reddit post, it's pretty serious. It's not going to be like, "Oh, I don't like the shade of blue on this button." It's going to be something like, "I got double billed," or "Hey, someone took over my account," or, "I can't reset my password anymore. The CAPTCHA, I'm solving it, but I can't get through to the next phase." And we see a lot of these trajectory impacting bugs and quality issues in these work, these flows in the product that you're not testing every day. So if you work at Snapchat, your employees probably going to use Snapchat every day. Are they going to sign up every day? No. Are they going to do passive reset every day? No. And these things are very hard to instrument, lower in the stack. >> Yeah, I think this is, and again, back to these big problems. It's smoke before fire, and you're essentially seeing it early with your process. Can you give an example of how this new focus or new mindset of user feedback data can help customers increase their experience? Can you give some examples, 'cause folks watching and be like, "Okay, I love this value. Sell me on this idea, I'm sold. Okay, I want to tap into my prospects, and my customers, my end users to help me improve my product." 'Cause again, we can measure everything now with data. >> Yeah. We can measure everything. we can even measure quality these days. So when we started this company, I went out to talk to a bunch of friends, who are entrepreneurs, and VCs, and board members, and I asked them this very simple question. So in your board meetings, or on all hands, how do you talk about quality of the product? Do you have a metric? And everyone said, no. Okay. So are you data driven company? Yes, we're very data driven. >> John: Yeah. Go data driven. >> But you're not really sure if quality, how do you compare against competition? Are you doing as good as them, worse, better? Are you improving over time, and how do you measure it? And they're like, "Well, it's kind of like a blind spot of the company." And then you ask, "Well, do you think quality of experience is important?" And they say, "Yeah." "Well, why?" "Well, top of fund and growth. Higher quality products going to spread faster organically, we're going to make better store ratings. We're going to have the storefronts going to look better." And of course, more importantly, they said the different conversion cycles in the product box itself. That if you have bugs and friction, or an interface that's hard to use, then the inputs, the signups, it's not going to convert as well. So you're going to get dinged on retention, engagement, conversion to paid, and so forth. And that's what we've seen with the companies we work with. It is that poor quality acts as a filter function for the entire business, if you're a product led company. So if you think about product led company, where the product is really the centerpiece. And if it performs really, really well, then it allows you to hire more engineers, you can spend more on marketing. Everything is fed by this product at them in the middle, and then quality can make that thing perform worse or better. And we developed a metric actually called the unitQ Score. So if you go to our website, unitq.com, we have indexed the 5,000 largest apps in the world. And we're able to then, on a daily basis, update the score. Because the score is not something you do once a month or once a quarter. It's something that changes continuously. So now, you can get a score between zero and 100. If you get the score 100, that means that our AI doesn't find any quality issues reported in that data set. And if your score is 90, that means that 10% will be a quality issue. So now you can do a lot of fun stuff. You can start benchmarking against competition. So you can see, "Well, I'm Spotify. How do I rank against Deezer, or SoundCloud, or others in my space?" And what we've seen is that as the score goes up, we see this real big impact on KPI, such as conversion, organic growth, retention, ultimately, revenue, right? And so that was very satisfying for us, when we launched it. quality actually still really, really matters. >> Yeah. >> And I think we all agree at test, but how do we make a science out of it? And that's so what we've done. And when we were very lucky early on to get some incredible brands that we work with. So Pinterest is a big customer of ours. We have Spotify. We just signed new bank, Chime. So like we even signed BetterHelp recently, and the world's largest Bible app. So when you look at the types of businesses that we work with, it's truly a universal, very broad field, where if you have a digital exhaust or feedback, I can guarantee you, there are insights in there that are being neglected. >> John: So Chris, I got to. >> So these manual workflows. Yeah, please go ahead. >> I got to ask you, because this is a really great example of this new shift, right? The new shift of leveraging data, flipping the script. Everything's flipping the script here, right? >> Yeah. >> So you're talking about, what the value proposition is? "Hey, board example's a good one. How do you measure quality? There's no KPI for that." So it's almost category creating in its own way. In that, this net new things, it's okay to be new, it's just new. So the question is, if I'm a customer, I buy it. I can see my product teams engaging with this. I can see how it can changes my marketing, and customer experience teams. How do I operationalize this? Okay. So what do I do? So do I reorganize my marketing team? So take me through the impact to the customer that you're seeing. What are they resonating towards? Obviously, getting that data is key, and that's holy gray, we all know that. But what do I got to do to change my environment? What's my operationalization piece of it? >> Yeah, and that's one of the coolest parts I think, and that is, let's start with your user base. We're not going to ask your users to ask your users to do something differently. They're already producing this data every day. They are tweeting about it. They're putting in app produce. They're emailing support. They're engaging with your support chatbot. They're already doing it. And every day that you're not leveraging that data, the data that was produced today is less valuable tomorrow. And in 30 days, I would argue, it's probably useless. >> John: Unless it's same guy commenting. >> Yeah. (Christian and John laughing) The first, we need to make everyone understand. Well, yeah, the data is there, and we don't need to do anything differently with the end user. And then, what we do is we ask the customer to tell us, "Where should we listen in the public domain? So do you want the Reddit post, the Trustpilot? What channels should we listen to?" And then, our machine basically starts ingesting that data. So we have integration with all these different sites. And then, to get access to private data, it'll be, if you're on Zendesk, you have to issue a Zendesk token, right? So you don't need any engineering hours, except your IT person will have to grant us access to the data source. And then, when we go live. We basically build up this taxonomy with the customers. So we don't we don't want to try and impose our view of the world, of how do you describe the product with these buckets, these quality monitors? So we work with the company to then build out this taxonomy. So it's almost like a bespoke solution that we can bootstrap with previous work we've done, where you don't have these very, very fine buckets of where stuff could go wrong. And then what we do is there are different ways to hook this into the workflow. So one is just to use our products. It's a SaaS product as anything else. So you log in, and you can then get this overview of how is quality trending in different markets, on different platforms, different languages, and what is impacting them? What is driving this unitQ Score that's not good enough? And all of these different signals, we can then hook into Jira for instance. We have a Jira integration. We have a PagerDuty integration. We can wake up engineers if certain things break. We also tag tickets in your support system, which is actually quite cool. Where, let's say, you have 200 people, who wrote into support, saying, "I got double billed on Android." It turns out, there are some bugs that double billed them. Well, now we can tag all of these users in Zendesk, and then the support team can then reach out to that segment of users and say, "Hey, we heard that you had this bug with double billing. We're so sorry. We're working on it." And then when we push fix, we can then email the same group again, and maybe give them a little gift card or something, for the thank you. So you can have, even big companies can have that small company experience. So, so it's groups that use us, like at Pinterest, we have 800 accounts. So it's really through marketing has vested interest because they want to know what is impacting the end user. Because brand and product, the lines are basically gone, right? >> John: Yeah. >> So if the product is not working, then my spend into this machine is going to be less efficient. The reputation of our company is going to be worse. And the challenge for marketers before unitQ was, how do I engage with engineering and product? I'm dealing with anecdotal data, and my own experience of like, "Hey, I've never seen these type of complaints before. I think something is going on." >> John: Yeah. >> And then engineering will be like, "Ah, you know, well, I have 5,000 bugs in Jira. Why does this one matter? When did it start? Is this a growing issue?" >> John: You have to replicate the problem, right? >> Replicate it then. >> And then it goes on and on and on. >> And a lot of times, reproducing bugs, it's really hard because it works on my device. Because you don't sit on that device that it happened on. >> Yup. >> So now, when marketing can come with indisputable data, and say, "Hey, something broke here." And we see the same with support. Product engineering, of course, for them, we talk about, "Hey, listen, you you've invested a lot in observability of your stack, haven't you?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "So you have a Datadog in the bottom?" "Absolutely." "And you have an APP D on the client?" "Absolutely." "Well, what about the last mile? How the product manifests itself? Shouldn't you monitor that as well using machines?" They're like, "Yeah, that'd be really cool." (John laughs) And we see this. There's no way to instrument everything, lowering the stack to capture these bugs that leak out. So it resonates really well there. And even for the engineers who's going to fix it. >> Yeah. >> I call it like empathy data. >> Yup. >> Where I get assigned a bug to fix. Well, now, I can read all the feedback. I can actually see, and I can see the feedback coming in. >> Yeah. >> Oh, there's users out there, suffering from this bug. And then when I fix it and I deploy the fix, and I see the trend go down to zero, and then I can celebrate it. So that whole feedback loop is (indistinct). >> And that's real time. It's usually missed too. This is the power of user feedback. You guys got a great product, unitQ. Great to have you on. Founder and CEO, Christian Wiklund. Thanks for coming on and sharing, and showcase. >> Thank you, John. For the last 30 seconds, the minute we have left, put a plug in for the company. What are you guys looking for? Give a quick pitch for the company, real quick, for the folks out there. Looking for more people, funding status, number of employees. Give a quick plug. >> Yes. So we raised our A Round from Google, and then we raised our B from Excel that we closed late last year. So we're not raising money. We are hiring across go-to-markets, engineering. And we love to work with people, who are passionate about quality and data. We're always, of course, looking for customers, who are interested in upping their game. And hey, listen, competing with features is really hard because you can copy features very quickly. Competing with content. Content is commodity. You're going to get the same movies more or less on all these different providers. And competing on price, we're not willing to do. You're going to pay 10 bucks a month for music. So how do you compete today? And if your competitor has a better fine tuned piano than your competitor will have better efficiencies, and they're going to retain customers and users better. And you don't want to lose on quality because it is actually a deterministic and fixable problem. So yeah, come talk to us if you want to up the game there. >> Great stuff. The iteration lean startup model, some say took craft out of building the product. But this is now bringing the craftsmanship into the product cycle, when you can get that data from customers and users. >> Yeah. >> Who are going to be happy that you fixed it, that you're listening. >> Yeah. >> And that the product got better. So it's a flywheel of loyalty, quality, brand, all off you can figure it out. It's the holy grail. >> I think it is. It's a gold mine. And every day you're not leveraging this assets, your use of feedback that's there, is a missed opportunity. >> Christian, thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations to you and your startup. You guys back together. The band is back together, up into the right, doing well. >> Yeah. We we'll check in with you later. Thanks for coming on this showcase. Appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. Appreciate it very much. >> Okay. AWS Startup Showcase. This is season two, episode three, the ongoing series. This one's about MarTech, cloud experiences are scaling. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS startup showcase. This is season two, episode three of our ongoing series featuring AWS and its big ecosystem of partners. This particular season is focused on MarTech, emerging cloud scale customer experiences. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to be joined by James Fang, the VP of product marketing at mparticle. James, welcome to the program. Great to have you on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Tell us a little bit about mparticle, what is it that you guys do? >> Sure, so we're mparticle, we were founded in 2013, and essentially we are a customer data platform. What we do is we help brands collect and organize their data. And their data could be coming from web apps, mobile apps, existing data sources like data warehouses, data lakes, et cetera. And we help them help them organize it in a way where they're able to activate that data, whether it's to analyze it further, to gather insights or to target them with relevant messaging, relevant offers. >> What were some of the gaps in the market back then as you mentioned 2013, or even now, that mparticle is really resolving so that customers can really maximize the value of their customer's data. >> Yeah. So the idea of data has actually been around for a while, and you may have heard the buzzword 360 degree view of the customer. The problem is no one has really been actually been able to, to achieve it. And it's actually, some of the leading analysts have called it a myth. Like it's a forever ending kind of cycle. But where we've kind of gone is, first of all customer expectations have really just inflated over the years, right? And part of that was accelerated due to COVID, and the transformation we saw in the last two years, right. Everyone used to, you know, have maybe a digital footprint, as complimentary perhaps to their physical footprint. Nowadays brands are thinking digital first, for obvious reasons. And the data landscape has gotten a lot more complex, right? Brands have multiple experiences, on different screens, right? And, but from the consumer perspective, they want a complete end to end experience, no matter how you're engaging with the brand. And in order to, for a brand to deliver that experience they have to know, how the customers interacted before in each of those channels, and be able to respond in as real time as possible, to those experiences. >> So I can start an interaction on my iPad, maybe carry it through or continue it on my laptop, go to my phone. And you're right, as a, as a consumer, I want the experience across all of those different media to be seamless, to be the same, to be relevant. You talk about the customer 360, as a marketer I know that term well. It's something that so many companies use, interesting that you point out that it's really been, largely until companies like mparticle, a myth. It's one of those things though, that everybody wants to achieve. Whether we're talking about healthcare organization, a retailer, to be able to know everything about a customer so that they can deliver what's increasingly demanded that personalized, relevant experience. How does mparticle fill some of the gaps that have been there in customer 360? And do you say, Hey, we actually deliver a customer 360. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, so the reason it's been a myth is for the most part, data has been- exists either in silos, or it's kind of locked behind this black box that the central data engineering team or sometimes traditionally referred to as IT, has control over, right? So brands are collecting all sorts of data. They have really smart people working on and analyzing it. You know, being able to run data science models, predictive models on it, but the, the marketers and the people who want to draw insights on it are asking how do I get it in, in my hands? So I can use that data for relevant targeting messaging. And that's exactly what mparticle does. We democratize access to that data, by making it accessible in the very tools that the actual business users are are working in. And we do that in real time, you don't have to wait for days to get access to data. And the marketers can even self-service, they're able to for example, build audiences or build computed insights, such as, you know, average order value of a customer within the tool themselves. The other main, the other main thing that mparticle does, is we ensure the quality of that data. We know that activation is only as as good, when you can trust that data, right? When there's no mismatching, you know, first name last names, identities that are duplicated. And so we put a lot of effort, not only in the identity resolution component of our product but also being able to ensure that the consistency of that data when it's being collected meets the standard that you need. >> So give us a, a picture, kind of a topology of a, of a customer data platform. And what are some of the key components that it contains, then I kind of want to get into some of the use cases. >> Yeah. So at, at a core, a lot of customer data platforms look similar. They're responsible first of all for the collection of data, right? And again, that could be from web mobile sources, as well as existing data sources, as well as third party apps, right? For example, you may have e-commerce data in a Shopify, right. Or you may have, you know, a computer model from a, from a warehouse. And then the next thing is to kind of organize it somehow, right? And the most common way to do that is to unify it, using identity resolution into this idea of customer profiles, right. So I can look up everything that Lisa or James has done, their whole historical record. And then the third thing is to be able to kind of be able to draw some insights from that, whether to be able to build an audience membership on top of that, build a predictive model, such as the churn risk model or lifetime value of that customer. And finally is being able to activate that data, so you'll be able to push that data again, to those relevant downstream systems where the business users are actually using that data to, to do their targeting, or to do more interesting things with it. >> So for example, if I go to the next Warrior's game, which I predict they're going to win, and I have like a mobile app of the stadium or the team, how, and I and I'm a season ticket holder, how can a customer data platform give me that personalized experience and help to, yeah, I'd love to kind of get it in that perspective. >> Yeah. So first of all, again, in this modern day and age consumers are engaging with brands from multiple devices, and their attention span, frankly, isn't that long. So I may start off my day, you know, downloading the official warriors app, right. And I may be, you know browsing from my mobile phone, but I could get distracted. I've got to go join a meeting at work, drop off my kids or whatever, right? But later in the day I had in my mind, I may be interested in purchasing tickets or buying that warriors Jersey. So I may return to the website, or even the physical store, right. If, if I happen to be in the area and what the customer data platform is doing in the background, is associating and connecting all those online and offline touchpoints, to that user profile. And then now, I have a mar- so let's say I'm a marker for the golden state warriors. And I see that, you know, this particular user has looked at my website even added to their cart, you know, warriors Jersey. I'm now able to say, Hey, here's a $5 promotional coupon. Also, here's a special, limited edition. We just won, you know, the, the Western conference finals. And you can pre-book, you know, the, you know the warriors championships Jersey, cross your fingers, and target that particular user with that promotion. And it's much more likely because we have that contextual data that that user's going to convert, than just blasting them on a Facebook or something like that. >> Right. Which all of us these days are getting less and less patient with, Is those, those broad blasts through social media and things like that. That was, I love that example. That was a great example. You talked about timing. One of the things I think that we've learned that's in very short supply, in the last couple of years is people's patience and tolerance. We now want things in nanoseconds. So, the ability to glean insights from data and act on it in real time is no longer really a nice to have that's really table stakes for any type of organization. Talk to us about how mparticle facilitates that real time data, from an insights perspective and from an activation standpoint. >> Yeah. You bring up a good point. And this is actually one of the core differentiators of mparticle compared to the other CDPs is that, our architecture from the ground up is built for real time. And the way we do that is, we use essentially a real time streaming architecture backend. Essentially all the data points that we collect and send to those downstream destinations, that happens in milliseconds, right? So the moment that that user, again, like clicks a button or adds something to their shopping cart, or even abandons that shopping cart, that downstream tool, whether it's a marketer, whether it's a business analyst looking at that data for intelligence, they get that data within milliseconds. And our audience computations also happens within seconds. So again, if you're, if you have a targeted list for a targeted campaign, those updates happen in real time. >> You gave an- you ran with the Warrior's example that I threw at you, which I love, absolutely. Talk to me. You must have though, a favorite cu- real world customer example of mparticle's that you think really articulates the value to organizations, whether it's to marketers operators and has some nice, tangible business outcomes. Share with me if you will, a favorite customer story. >> Yeah, definitely one of mine and probably one of the- our most well known's is we were actually behind the scenes of the Whopper jr campaign. So a couple of years ago, Burger King ran this really creative ad where the, effectively their goal was to get their mobile app out, as well as to train, you know, all of us back before COVID days, how to order on our mobile devices and to do things like curbside checkout. None of us really knew how to do that, right. And there was a challenge of course that, no one wants to download another app, right? And most apps get downloaded and get deleted right out away. So they ran this really creative promotion where, if you drove towards a McDonald's, they would actually fire off a text message saying, Hey, how about a Whopper for 99 cents instead? And you would, you would, you would receive a text message personalized just for you. And you'd be able to redeem that at any burger king location. So we were kind of the core infrastructure plumbing the geofencing location data, to partner of ours called radar, which handles you geofencing, and then send it back to a marketing orchestration vendor to be able to fire that targeted message. >> Very cool. I, I, now I'm hungry. You, but there's a fine line there between knowing that, okay, Lisa's driving towards McDonald's let's, you know, target her with an ad for a whopper, in privacy. How do you guys help organizations in any industry balance that? Cause we're seeing more and more privacy regulations popping up all over the world, trying to give consumers the ability to protect either the right to forget about me or don't use my data. >> Yeah. Great question. So the first way I want to respond to that is, mparticle's really at the core of helping brands build their own first party data foundation. And what we mean by that is traditionally, the way that brands have approached marketing is reliant very heavily on second and third party data, right? And most that second-third party data is from the large walled gardens, such as like a Facebook or a TikTok or a Snapchat, right? They're they're literally just saying, Hey find someone that is going to, you know fit our target profile. And that data is from people, all their activity on those apps. But with the first party data strategy, because the brand owns that data, we- we can guarantee that or the brands can guarantee to their customers it's ethically sourced, meaning it's from their consent. And we also help brands have governance policies. So for example, if the user has said, Hey you're allowed to collect my data, because obviously you want to run your business better, but I don't want any my information sold, right? That's something that California recently passed, with CPRA. Then brands can use mparticle data privacy controls to say, Hey, you can pass this data on to their warehouses and analytics platforms, but don't pass it to a platform like Facebook, which potentially could resell that data. >> Got it, Okay. So you really help put sort of the, the reigns on and allow those customers to make those decisions, which I know the mass community appreciates. I do want to talk about data quality. You talked about that a little bit, you know, and and data is the lifeblood of an organization, if it can really extract value from it and act on it. But how do you help organizations maintain the quality of data so that what they can do, is actually deliver what the end user customer, whether it's a somebody buying something on a, on a eCommerce site or or, a patient at a hospital, get what they need. >> Yeah. So on the data quality front, first of all I want to highlight kind of our strengths and differentiation in identity resolution. So we, we run a completely deterministic algorithm, but it's actually fully customizable by the customer depending on their needs. So for a lot of other customer data providers, platform providers out there, they do offer identity resolution, but it's almost like a black box. You don't know what happens. And they could be doing a lot of fuzzy matching, right. Which is, you know, probabilistic or predictive. And the problem with that is, let's say, you know, Lisa your email changed over the years and CDP platform may match you with someone that's completely not you. And now all of a sudden you're getting ads that completely don't fit you, or worse yet that brand is violating privacy laws, because your personal data is is being used to target another user, which which obviously should not, should not happen, right? So because we're giving our customers complete control, it's not a black box, it's transparent. And they have the ability to customize it, such as they can specify what identifiers matter more to them, whether they want to match on email address first. They might've drawn on a more high confidence identifier like a, a hash credit card number or even a customer ID. They have that choice. The second part about ensuring data quality is we act actually built in schema management. So as those events are being collected you could say that, for example, when when it's a add to cart event, I require the item color. I require the size. Let's say it's a fashion apparel. I require the size of it and the type of apparel, right? And if, if data comes in with missing fields, or perhaps with fields that don't match the expectation, let's say you're expecting small, medium, large and you get a Q, you know Q is meaningless data, right? We can then enforce that and flag that as a data quality violation and brands can complete correct that mistake to make sure again, all the data that's flowing through is, is of value to them. >> That's the most important part is, is to make sure that the data has value to the organization, and of course value to whoever it is on the other side, the, the end user side. Where should customers start, in terms of working with you guys, do you recommend customers buy an all in one marketing suite? The best, you know, build a tech stack of best of breed? What are some of those things that you recommend for folks who are going, all right, We, maybe we have a CDP it's been under delivering. We can't really deliver that customer 360, mparticle, help us out. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, the best part about mparticle is you can kind of deploy it in phases, right. So if you're coming from a world where you've deployed a, all in one marketing suite, like a sales force in Adobe, but you're looking to maybe modernize pieces of a platform mparticle can absolutely help with that initial step. So let again, let's say all you want to do is modernize your event collection. Well, we can absolutely, as a first step, for example, you can instrument us. You can collect all your data from your web and mobile apps in real time, and we can pipe to your existing, you know Adobe campaign manager, Salesforce, marketing cloud. And later down the line, let's say, you say I want to, you know, modernize my analytics platform. I'm tired of using Adobe analytics. You can swap that out, right again with an mparticle place, a marketer can or essentially any business user can flip the switch. And within the mparticle interface, simply disconnect their existing tool and connect a new tool with a couple of button clicks and bam, the data's now flowing into the new tool. So it mparticle really, because we kind of sit in the middle of all these tools and we have over 300 productized prebuilt integrations allows you to move away from kind of a locked in, you know a strategy where you're committed to a vendor a hundred percent to more of a best of breed, agile strategy. >> And where can customers that are interested, go what's your good and market strategy? How does that involve AWS? Where can folks go and actually get and test out this technology? >> Yeah. So first of all, we are we are AWS, a preferred partner. and we have a couple of productized integrations with AWS. The most obvious one is for example, being able to just export data to AWS, whether it's Redshift or an S3 or a kinesis stream, but we also have productized integrations with AWS, personalized. For example, you can take events, feed em to personalize and personalize will come up with the next best kind of content recommendation or the next best offer available for the customer. And mparticle can ingest that data back and you can use that for personalized targeting. In fact, Amazon personalize is what amazon.com themselves use to populate the recommended for use section on their page. So brands could essentially do the same. They could have a recommended for you carousel using Amazon technology but using mparticle to move the data back and forth to, to populate that. And then on top of that very, very soon we'll be also launching a marketplace kind of entry. So if you are a AWS customer and you have credits left over or you just want to transact through AWS, then you'll have that option available as well. >> Coming soon to the AWS marketplace. James, thank you so much for joining me talking about mparticle, how you guys are really revolutionizing the customer data platform and allowing organizations and many industries to really extract value from customer data and use it wisely. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you very much, Lisa >> For James Fang, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube's coverage of the AWS startup showcase season three, season two episode three, leave it right here for more great coverage on theCube, the leader in live tech coverage.

(upbeat bright music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's main stage coverage of DockerCon 2022. I'm John for your host of theCUBE. We have Knox Anderson, vice president of Product Management, Sysdig. Knox, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. Glad to be back. >> So IAC containers is going crazy madness in terms of adoption, standard, even mainstream enterprise, IT and cloud are all containerized. It's only getting better, and it increases the complications when you start thinking about scale and supportability. This is a huge discussion, and it ranges from how do you support, how do you run operations, how do you secure in the supply chain. All this is happening, and with the growth of cloud and server (indistinct) seeing Kubernetes at the center of everything. So I got to ask you, how has Kubernetes changed how you secure cloud infrastructure? >> Yeah, so Kubernetes is really the modern operating system for the cloud. And with that, you get a lot of facilities. So you get things like Kubernetes' network policies, you can use things like admission controllers. And with that, you're securing multiple layers, whether it's the control plane, individual workloads. And so there's a nice mixture of built-in tools, and part of the Kubernetes platform that then you can leverage to do prevention, auditing, and things like that. But it really requires an entire rethink of your stack and the tools you bring in alongside your people and processes. And so it's an exciting time because it gives you an opportunity to be more secure, but really have to rethink your approach there. >> And I want to get into the whole observability trend here 'cause you start thinking about the mobility, what containers enables. And getting all the data is everything. And then also that feeds into kind of having a good sense of what is going on. And when you hear about shift left and data as code, you know, developers don't want to get stopped coding, right? And then have to come back and go dig into things that they thought they had taken care of. So you kind of got this kind of flywheel going in the wrong direction. So that's causing teams to be disrupted. So how do teams keep up with the changes to the containerized applications or what to prioritize around that? Because if I shift left, am I done or what? And these are the things that come up all the time. >> Yeah. You have to shift left but also watch the right. Like, shifting left is a little bit harder from a people and process perspective. Like you put a tool in place, then it's a gating factor for getting in. And so that runtime context on the right is equally as important. And it's often easier to roll out a runtime tool just because you're not going in and introducing new processes. And that runtime visibility can also make shift left much better. If you're scanning a container image, you might get a thousand different vulnerabilities that you need to address, but only three of those are in packages that are actually executed at runtime. And so we recently released a feature called risk spotlight which does that exact feedback loop. And that's something that's important whether you're addressing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or responding to event. What's on the right, what's on the left, and then tie those together. >> Yeah, it's like left, right, it's like driving training here in the United States. You got a stop sign, you want to be moving, always be moving. I got to ask you what are some of the side effects of infrastructure automation and the result in code artifacts? >> Yeah, it's really, like, Kubernetes is nice because it's a declarative system, but it doesn't always work out that way. Like, someone might have a Helm chart and then someone else changes it in production. So understanding what is drift is really important in these environments. And then it also has enabled real remediation workflows. I think previously, you might patch something, a week later there's a new deploy, that patch gets written over. And so because Kubernetes and the rise of IAC, it's now easier to see a misconfiguration in production, open a poll request, and then fix that at source, which provides that full kind of visibility across those different environments. And it allows you to actually fix issues versus constantly being in that kind of whack-a-mole of patching things and moving on. >> Yeah, I mean this is all about cloud native development, and you look at, you know, some of the things going on, you're starting to see best practices developed. What do you guys see as a best practice for getting started with designing and securing cloud native applications? What are some of the tools that people should look at for beginners and for the entry-level position? And then as they get traction, what does that turn into? >> Yeah, so the pattern we've often seen is like someone gets started on the open source side, whether you're using Open Policy Agent or Falco, which Laurice who've you met with before created. And so really when you're starting, choose kind of the open source option. Learn from that. And then often what we've seen with customers is at scale, there's some companies like if you're in Uber, or Snapchat, and Apple, you can maybe build something around open source, but a lot of other people start to really consolidate platforms that are built on top of those open source technologies, and trying to get that really single view into what's happening in their environment, what are those events. And the thing that I would say, process wise, is most important is build that container center of excellence, that cloud center of excellence, whatever you call it, that brings together people from your ops team, your infrastructure team, your dev team, your security team. Everyone's got to have a seat at the table to have containers be successful. It's a big shift, and if you do it right, it really takes off, but each team really needs to be included there. >> Yeah, there's a lot of operational discussions going on around the devs, and the devs are being pulled to the front lines. We've been saying this for a decade, but now when you got edge computing, you got cloud native operations, on-premises, you start to see that they're getting pulled even further to the frontline. So, you know, what are you guys up to Sysdig? You know, they got a lot of developers here at DockerCon, what's in it for them? Why Sysdig, why should they care? What would you say to the old developers that are watching? What's in it for them? >> Yeah, we really make it easier for you to prioritize what to fix and what to address in your environment. I know I've built something before and like, my test suite or my scanner just lights up like a Christmas tree, and you just want to move to another task because it's just too much to deal with at that time. And so we really help you focus on what matters and get the most bang for your buck. Everyone has way too much time or too many things going on and not enough time. And so being able to understand effective risk, your different vulnerabilities, what to fix, is really key to delivering secure software. >> I mean, it's like a doctor needs to know what to work on with the patient, if you will, when to, and what's important, and then the dependencies, and you got, a system's mindset, you got to know what the consequences. So it sounds easy, just knock down a list of things, but isn't that easy. You got to want to hit things that you know that will be, to have an impact right away. That seems to be the big aha moment here. >> Yeah, definitely. >> So we're going to be at KubeCon in Europe, you guys going to have booth there, what's the quick plug for the company? Give a shout out to what's happening at Sysdig and cloud native world. >> Yeah, really excited to be in Valencia. We have a ton of people at, sorry, at DockerCon with, giving a couple different talks here. So the first is Master Your Container Security Model and then Software Supply Chain Security and Standards. On the supply chain one, we're getting deep into SBOMs. So if that's a topic that's important to you, please join that one. >> Awesome, and then that's a big topic supply chain. We've got a minute and a half left. What's the most important thing people should pay attention to as open source continues to grow in prominence, not just from a code standpoint, but as a social environment, as people's doing ventures and venture capitalists are mining the area, what should they pay attention to as supply chain becomes important, what's the big thing? >> There's a lot of companies I think going around the SBOM space, and kind of trying to certify like where did this come from, and have that providence across the entire supply chain. We, under the hood, use those SBOMs to understand kind of what have you built, what packages are used, and then tie that with that runtime data. So a lot of the things that we talked around before with RiskSpotlight is based on that deep SBOM knowledge. And that's something that, I think the standards are still getting kind of worked out where there's CycloneDX, SBX. And so people really are saying, "Hey, I need to generate SBOMs," and we're regenerating them, but there's going to be more and more applications on "Okay what do you do with that? How does it integrate with other tools?" So it's kind of I think in the little bit of the early data lake phases where it's like, "I've taken all my data, I put it here. Now I need to do more with it." And so that's where I think we'll start to see some pretty exciting things over the next year or two. >> It's super exciting. On one hand you got the attackers, and that's a zero trust environment, and you get the builders, the developers where trust is everything. You got to know what it's in the code. It's really interesting time and super important to scale. So Knox, thanks for for coming on theCUBE and sharing the Sysdig update. Appreciate it, thanks for coming on. Now back to you at the DockerCon main stage, this is theCUBE. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat bright music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome, everyone, to this CUBE Conversation featuring Imply. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Today, we are excited to be joined by FJ Yang, the co-founder and CEO of Imply. FJ, thanks so much for joining us today. >> Lisa, thank you so much for having me. >> Tell me a little bit about yourself and about Imply. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I started Imply a couple years ago and before start the company, I was a technologist. So, I was a software engineer and software developer primarily specializing in distributed systems. And one of the projects I worked on, ultimately became kind of the centerpiece behind Imply. Imply, as a company is a database company. What we do is we provide developers a powerful tool in order to help them build various types of data analytic applications. We're also an open source company, where the company develops a popular open source project called Apache Druid. >> Got it, so database as a service for modern analytics applications. You're also one of the original authors of Apache Druid. Talk to me, gimme a timeline, Druid's 10-year history or so. What's the big picture? What's been the market evolution that you've seen? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I moved out to Silicon Valley basically to try and work at a startup, 'cause I was enamored with startups and I thought they were the coolest thing ever. So, at one point, I basically joined the smallest startup I could find. It was a startup called Metamarkets, which actually doesn't exist anymore, it was ultimately acquired by Snapchat a couple years ago. But, I was one of the first employees there. And what we were trying to do at the time, was we were trying to build an analytics application, a user-facing application where people could slice and dice various types of data. At the time, the data sets we were working with were like online advertising, digital advertising data sets which were very large and complex. And, we really struggled to find a database that could basically power the kind of interactive and user experience that we know we want to provide our end customers. So, what ended up happening was we decided to build our own database and we were a three or five-person shop when we decided to build our own database, and that was Druid. And over time, we saw many other types of companies actually struggle with a similar set of problems, albeit with very different types of use cases and very different types of data sets. And, the Druid community kind of grew and evolved from that. And in my work in engaging with the community, what I saw was a market opportunity and a market gap and that's where Imply formed. >> Let's double click on that. You talked about why you built Druid, the problem you were looking to solve. But, talk to me about the role that Imply has. >> Right. So, Imply is a commercial company. What we do is we build kind of an end-to-end enterprise product around Druid as the core engine. Imply provides deployment, it deploys management, it provides security, and it also provides visualization and monitoring pieces around Druid as a core engine. What we aim to do at Imply is really enable developers to build various types of data applications with only the click of a few buttons and interacting with a simple set of APIs. So, the goal is, if you're a developer, you don't have to think about managing the database yourself, you don't have to think about the operational complexity at the database, but instead, what you do is just work with APIs and build your application. >> So, then what gives Druid its superpower? What makes Druid Druid? >> Yeah, so, Druid, the easiest way to think about it, is it's a really fast calculator and it's a very fast calculator for a whole lot of data. So, when you have a whole lot of data and you want to crunch numbers very, very quickly, Druid is very good at doing that. And, people always ask me this question, which is, what makes Druid special? And I always struggle with it, because it's never just one thing, it's actually layers, upon layers, upon layers of engineering. You start with fundamentals of how you maximally optimize the resources of any hardware. So, how do you maximize storage? How do you maximize compute? And then, there's a lot of optimizations around how do you store the data? How do you access that data in a very fast way once it's stored in order to run computations very quickly? So, unfortunately, there's no silver bullet about Druid, but maybe I can summarize in this way. Druid, it's like a search system, and a data warehouse, and a time series database all mixed together. And, that architecture enables it to be very, very quickly. And unfortunately, if you don't know what some of the components I'm talking about are, it's hard to describe where the secret sauce is (chuckling). >> Sometimes you want to keep that secret sauce secret. Talk to me about the overall data space, as we see these days, every company is a data company or if it's not, it needs to be to be successful. Where does Druid fit in the overall data space? Give us that picture of where it fits. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, it's pretty interesting that you see now in the public markets as well as the private markets, some of the hottest unicorns out there are actually data companies. And, I think what people are are understanding now for the first time, is just how vast and complex the data space is and also how large the market is as well. So for sure, there's many different components and pieces in the data space, and they oftentimes come together to form what's known as a data stack. So, data stack is basically kind of an architecture that has various systems and each of these systems are designed to do a certain set of things very, very well. For example, a company that recently went public is a company called Confluent, which mostly catered towards data transport, so getting data from one place to another. They're built around an open source engine called Apache Kafka. Databricks is another mega unicorn that's going to go public pretty soon. And they're built around an open source project called Spark, which is mainly used for data processing. Where we sit is on the data query side. So, what that means is we're a system in which people can store data and then access that data very, very quickly. And there's other systems that do that, but where our bread and butter is, is we're building some sort of application, where you have end users that are clicking buttons in order to get access to data, we're a platform that enables the best end user experience. We return queries very, very quickly with a consistent SLA, we immediately visualize data as soon as it's made available, and then we can support many, many, many concurrent end users to access the system at the same time. >> So, real time. One of the things I think that we learned during the pandemic, one of the many things is that access to real time data, it's no longer a nice to have, it is table stakes for, as I said, every company, these days is a data company. So with how you describe it, how should people think of Druid versus a data warehouse? >> Yeah. So, that's a great question. And obviously, data warehouses have been around since the 70s. In the B2B space, they're among the largest players that kind of exist in enterprise software. So, it's only natural that when you come up with sort of a new analytics database, that people compare it with what they already know, which is data warehouse. So, a lot of how we think about why we're different than data warehouse goes back to how I answered the previous question, and that we're focused right now, really, on powering different types of data applications. Data applications are UIs in which people are really accessing and getting insights from data by clicking buttons versus writing more complex equal queries. And when you click buttons and you get access to data, what you want in terms of an end user experience, is you want answers to questions to come back almost immediately. So you don't want to click a button and then see a spinning dial that goes on for minute and minutes before an answer comes back. You basically want results to come back immediately. You want that experience no matter what types of queries that you're issuing or how many people are issuing those queries. If you have thousands, if not tens of thousands of people that are trying to access data exact same time, you want to give a consistent user experience like Google, which is one of my favorite products. There're millions of people that use Google, and ask questions and they get their answers back immediately. So we try to provide that same experience, but instead of a generic search engine, what we're doing is we're providing a system that basically answers questions on data and users get a very interactive and fast experience when asking questions. And that's something that I think is very different than what data warehouses are primarily specialized in. Data warehouses are really designed to be systems in which people write very large complex sequel queries that might take minutes or hours sometimes to run. But the experience of using a data warehouse to power and application is not a great one. >> So, I'm just curious, FJ, in the last couple of years, with, as I mentioned before the access to real time data no longer a nice to have, but it's something business critical for so many industries, did you see any industries in particular in the recent years that were really primed candidates for what Druid would can deliver? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you can imagine that the industries that really heavily rely on fast decision making are the ones that are earliest to adopt technologies like this. So, in the security space, and the observability space, as well as working with networking and various forms of backend kind of metrics data, this system has been very popular and it's been popular because people need to triage (indistinct) as they occur, they need to resolve problems, and they also need immediate visibility, as well as very fast queries on data. Another space is online advertising. Online advertising, nowadays is almost entirely programmatic and digital. So, response times are critical in order to make decisions. And that's where Druid was actually born. It was born for advertising before it kind of went everywhere else. We're seeing it more in fraud protection, fraud prevention as well as fraud diagnostics nowadays. We're seeing it in retail as well, which is pretty interesting. And, the goal, of course, is I believe every industry and every vertical needs the capabilities that we provide. So hopefully, we see a whole lot more use cases in the near future. >> Right, it's absolutely horizontal these days. So, 10-year history, you've got a community of thousands, what's the future of Druid? What do you see when you open the crystal ball and look now down the 12 months, 18 months road? >> Yeah. So, I think as a technologist, your goal as the technologist, at least for me, is to try and create technology that has as much applicability as possible and solves problems for as many people as possible. That's always the way I think about it. So, I want to do good engineering and I want to build good systems. And I think what the hallmark of a really good system is you can solve all different types of problems and condense all these different problems, actually into the same set of models and the same set of principles. And, a thing that makes me most excited about Druid is the many, many different industries that it's found value and the many different use cases it's found value. So, if I were to give 30,000 foot roadmap, that's what we're trying to do with the next generation of Druid. We're actually doing a pretty major engine upgrade right now, and pretty major overhaul the entire system. And the goal of that is to take all the learnings that we've had over the last decade and to create something new that can solve an expanded set of problems that we've heard from the community and from other places as well. >> Excellent. FJ, exciting work that you've done the last 10 years. Congratulations on that. Looking forward to the roadmap that you talked about. Thanks for sharing what Druid is, the Imply connection, and all the different use cases where it applies. We appreciate your insights. >> Appreciate you having me on the show. Thank you very much. >> My pleasure. For FJ Yang, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation, the leader in live tech enterprise coverage. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation with Unstoppable Domains. It's a showcase we're featuring all the best content in Web 3 and with unstoppable showcase, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great guest here, Matt Mickiewicz who's the Chief Revenue Officer of Unstoppable Domains. Matt, welcome to the showcase, appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me. >> So the theme of this segment is the potential of the Web 3 marketplace with Unstoppable Domains. You're the Chief Revenue Officer, you guys have a very interesting concept that's going extremely well, congratulations. But you're using NFTs for access and domains, Of course through the metaverse is huge. People want their own domains, but it's not just like real estate in the sense of a website. It's bigger than that it's a lot going on. So take us through what is the value proposition and what is the product? >> Absolutely, so for the past 20 years, most of us have been interacting on the internet using usernames issued to us by big corporations like Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, et cetera. Whenever we get these usernames for free it's because we and our data are the product. As some of the recent leaks in the media have shown incentive individual in companies are not always aligned. And most importantly individuals are not in control of their own digital identity and the data, which means they can economically benefit from the value they create online. Think of Twitter as a two-sided marketplace with 0% revenue share back to its creators. We're now having in the creator economy and we believe that individuals should see the economic rewards of what they do and create online. That's what we are trying to do in** support of domains is provide user own and control identity to four and a half billion internet users. >> It's interesting to see change that's happening with Web3 and just in cultural terms, users are expecting to be part of the creator the personality of the company, there's this almost this intermediation of the middle man whether it's an ad network or a gatekeeper of any kind people going direct, right? So if I'm an artist, I can go direct to my fans. >> Exactly, so Web3 really shifts the power away from a aggregators. Aggregators and marketplaces have been some of the best business models for the last 20 years onto the internet. But Web3 is going to dramatically change all over the next decade. Bring more power back in the hands of consumers. >> What type of companies do you guys work with and partner with that we see out there? Give us some examples of the kinds of companies you're doing business with end partnering with. >> Yeah, so let's talk about use cases first actually. Was the big use case that we identified initially for NFT domain names was around cryptocurrency transfers. Anyone who's ever bought cryptocurrency and tried to transfer it between accounts or wallets is familiar with these awkwardly long hexa decimal strings of random numbers and letters, or even if you make a single type of money is lost forever. That's a pretty scary experience that exists today. That 2 trillion asset dollar as a class with 250 million users. So the first set of partners that we worked on integrating with, we're actually crypto wallets and exchanges. So we will allow users to do is replace all their long hexa decimal wallet addresses with a single human readable name, like John.NFT or MattMickiewicz.crypto to allow for simple crypto transfers. >> And how do the exchange work with you guys on that is it a plugin, is it co-locating code together? What's the relationship between exchanges and Unstoppable Domains? >> Yeah, absolutely great question. So exchanges actually have to do a little bit of engineering list to work with us and they can do that by either using our resolution libraries or using one of our APIs in order to look up an Unstoppable Domain and figure out all the wallet addresses that's associated with that name. So today we work with dozens of the world's top exchanges and wallets ranging from OKX to Coinbase wallet, to Trust wallet, to bread wallet, and many many others. >> I got to ask you on the wallet side, is that a requirement in terms of having specific code and are the wallets that you work well with? Explain the wallet dynamic between Unstoppable Domains and wallets. >> Yeah, so wallets all have this huge usability problem for their users because every single cryptocurrency held by every single one of their users has a different hexadecimal wallet address. And once again every user is subject to the same human fallacies and errors where if they make a single type their money can be lost forever. So what we enable these wallets to do is to make crypto transfer simple and less scary than the current status quo by giving the users an Unstoppable name that they can use to attach to all the wallet addresses on the back end. So companies like Trust Wallet for example, which has 10 million user or Coinbase Wallet. When you go to the crypto transfer fields, there you can just type in an unstoppable name It'll correctly route the currency to the right person, to the right wallet, without any chance for human error. >> When these big waves coming out I got to ask this question, 'cause a lot of people in the mainstream are getting into it now. It reminds me of the web wave that hit the big thing was how many people are coming online, was one of the key metrics and how many web pages are being developed was another metric, which meant that people were building out webpages. And it's hard to look back and think, wow, that was actually a KPI. So internet users and webpages where the two proxies 'cause then search engines came out and everything else happened. So I got to ask you, there are people watching, they're seeing it on commercials on TV, they're seeing it everywhere stadiums are named after crypto companies. So, the bottom line is people want to know how NFT domains take the fear out of working with crypto and sending crypto. >> Yeah, absolutely, so imagine we had to navigate the web using IP addresses rather than typing in Google.com. You'd have to type in a random string of numbers that you'd had to memorize. That would be super painful for users and internet wouldn't have gotten to where it is today with almost 5 billion people online. The history of computer networks we have human readable naming systems built on top in every single instance, it's almost crazy that we got to a $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users worldwide. 13 years after the Satoshi white paper, without a human readable naming system other Unstoppable Domains in a few of our competitors, that's a fundamental problem that we need to solve in order to go from 250 million crypto users in 2022 to 5 billion crypto users a decade from now. >> And just to point out, not to look back and maybe make a correlation but I will, if you look at the naming system of DNS, what it did to IP addresses, that's one major innovation that enabled the web. Then you look at what keyword navigation has done on top of DNS, what that did for the industry, and that basically birthed Google keywords basically ads. So that's trillions and trillions of dollars. Again, now shifting to you guys, is that how you see it? Obviously it's decentralized, so what's different? Okay, I get, so if you compare here Google was successful, keyword advertising industry for the last of 25 years or 20 years. >> What's different now is? >> yeah >> Yeah, what's different now is the technology inflection points. So Blockchains have evolved to a point where they enable high throughput high transaction volume and true decentralized ownership. The NFTs standard, which is only a couple years old, has taken off massively around trading of profile pictures like CryptoPunks and the Bored Apes Yacht Club where the use cases extend much more than just a cool JPEG that goes up in value two or three X year over year. There is a true use case here around ownership of identity ownership over data, a decentralized login authentication and permission data sharing. One of the sad things that happened on the internet the last decade really was, that the platforms built out have now allowed developers to build on top of them in a trustless comissionless way. Developers who built applications on top of them, the early monopolies in the last decade, got the rules changed on them. APIs cut off, new fees instituted. That's not going to happen in Web3 because all permission list. Once an NFT is minted, it's custody in a user's own wallet, we cannot take the way it will continue to exist in eternity, regardless of what happens to Unstoppable Domains, which gives developers a lot more confidence in building new products for the Web3 identity standard that we're building out. >> You know what's amazing is that's a whole another generational shift. I've always been a big fan of abstractions when innovation is needed when there are problems that need to be solved, messes to be cleaned up, a good abstraction layer on top of new architecture is really, really phenomenal. I guess the key question for I have for you is, theCUBE we have all this video where's our NFT how should we implement NFTs? >> There's a couple different ways you could think about it, you could do proof of attendance protocol NFTs, which are really interesting way for users to show that they were at particular event. So just in the same way that people collect T-shirts from conferences, people will be collecting NFTs to show they were attending in person cultural moments or that they were part of an event online or offline. You could do NFTs for our employees to show that they were at your company during certain periods of the company's growth. So think of replacing their resume with a cryptographically secure resume like this on the Blockchain and perpetuity. Now more than half of all resumes contain lies, which is a pretty gnarly problem as a hiring manager that we constantly have to sort through. There's where that this can impact that side of the market as well. >> That's awesome, and I think this is a use case for everything we appreciate that. And of course we can have the most favorite cube moments, it can be a cube host NFT at Board Apes out there. Why not have a board cube host going on and then.. >> We're an auction for charity and OpenSea. >> All right, great stuff, now let's get into some of the cool tech nerd stuff, which is really the login piece which I think is fascinating. The having NFTs be a login mechanism is another great innovation, okay. So this is cool, 'cause it's like think of it as one click NFTs, if you will. What's the response been on this login with Unstoppable for that product? What's some of the use cases, can you get some examples of the momentum intraction? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we launched a product less than 90 days ago and we already have 90 committed or integrated partners live today with a login product. And this replaces login with Google, login with Facebook with a way that it's user owned and user controlled. And over time people will be attaching additional information back to their NFT domain name, such as their reputation, their history, things they've done online and be able to permission to share that with applications that they interact with in order to gain rewards. Once you own all of your data, and you can choose who you shared with . Companies will incentivize you to share data. For example, imagine you just buy a new house and you have 3000 square feet to furnish. If you could tell that fact and prove it, to a company like Wayfair, would they be incentivized to give you discounts? We're spending 10, 20, $30,000 and you'll do all of your purchasing there rather than spread across other e-commerce retailers. For sure they would, but right now when you go to that website, you're just another random email address. They have no idea who you are, what you've done, what your credit score is, whether you're a new house buyer or not. But if you could permission to share that using a log and installable product, I mean the web would just be much much different. >> And I think one of the things too, as these, I call them analog old school companies, old guard companies as referred to in theCUBE talk here. But we always call that old guard as the people who aren't innovating. You could think about companies having more community too, because if you have more sharing and you have this marketplace concept and you have these new dynamics of how people are working together, sharing will provide more or transparency but yet security on identity. Therefore things are going to be happening organically. That's a community dynamic what's your view on that? And what's your reaction. >> Communities are such an important part of Web3 and the cryptos ecosystem in general. People are very tightly knit, they all support each other. There there's a huge amount of collaboration in this space because we're all trying to onboard the next billion users into the ecosystem. And we know we have some fundamental challenges and problems to solve, whether it's complex wallet addresses, whether it's the lack of portable data sharing, whether it's just simple education, right? I'm sure, tens of million of people have gone to crypto for the first time during this year's Super Bowl based on some of those awesome ads they ran. >> Yeah, love the QR code, that's a direct response. I remember when the QR codes been around for a long time. I remember in the late 90's, it was a device at red QR code that did navigation to a webpage. So I mean, QR codes are super cool, great way to get, and we all using it too with the pandemic to ordering food. So I think QR codes are here to stay, in fact, we should have a QR code on all of our images here on the screen too. So we'll work on that, but I got to ask you on the project side, now let's get into the devs and kind of the applications, the users that are adopting unstoppable and this new way of things. Why are they gravitating towards this login concept? Can you give some examples and give some color commentary to why are these D-application, distributed application, dApps guys and gals programming with you guys? >> Yeah, they all believe that the potential for what we're trying to create around user own controlled identity. Where the only company in the market right now with a product that's live and working today. There's been a lot of promises made, and we're the first ones to actually delivered. So companies like Cook Finance for example, are seeing the benefit of being able to have their users, go through a simple process to check in and authenticate into the application using your NFT domain name rather than having to create an email address and password combination as a login, which inevitably leads to problems such as lost passwords, password resets, all those fun things that we used to deal with on a daily basis. >> Okay, so now I got to ask you the kind of partnerships you guys are looking at doing. I can only imagine the old school days you had a registry and you had registrars, you had a sales mechanism. I noticed you guys are selling NFT kind of like domain names on your website. Is that a kind of a current situation, is that going to be ongoing? How do you envision your business model evolving and what kind of partnerships do you see coming along? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we're working with a lot of different companies from browsers to exchanges, to wallets, to individual NFT projects, to more recently even exploring partnership opportunities with fashion brands for example. Monetarily, market is moving so so fast. And what we're trying to essentially do here is create the standard naming system for Web3. So a big part of that for us will be working with partners like blockchain.com and with Circle, who's behind the USDC coin on creating registry such as .blockchain and .coin and making those available to tens of millions and ultimately hundreds of millions and billions of users worldwide. We want an Unstoppable domain name to be the first asset that every user in crypto gets even before they buy their Bitcoin, Ethereum or Dogecoin. >> It makes a lot of sense to abstract the way the long hexa desal stream we all know, that we all write down, put in a safe, hopefully we don't forget about it. I always say, make sure you tell someone where your address is. So in case something happens, you don't lose all that crypto. All good stuff. I got to ask this the question around the ecosystem. Okay, can you share your view and vision of either yourself or the company when you have this kind of new market, you have all kinds of, we meant the web was a good example, right? Web pages, you need to web develop and tools. You had HTML by hand, then you had all these tools. So you had tools and platforms and things kind of came well grew together. How is the Web3 stakeholder ecosystem space evolving? What are some of the white spaces? What are some of the clearly defined areas that are developing? >> Yeah, I mean, we've seen explosion in new smart contract blockchains in the past couple of years, actually going live, which is really interesting because they support a huge number of different use cases, different trade offs on each. We recently partnered and moved over a primary infrastructure to Polygon, which is a leading EVM compatible smart chain, which allows us to provide free gas fees to users for minting and managing their domain name. So we're trying to move all obstacles around user adoption. Here you'll need to have Ethereum in your wallet in order to be an Unstoppable Domains customer or user, you don't have to worry about paying transaction fees every time you want to update the wallet addresses associated with your domain name. We want to make this really big and accessible for everybody. And that means driving down costs as much as possible. >> Yeah, it's a whole nother wave. It's a wave that's built on the shoulders of others. It's a shift in infrastructure, new capabilities, new applications. I think it's a great thing you guys do in the naming system, makes a lot of sense. It abstraction layer creates that ease of use, it simplifies things, makes things easier. I mean was the promise of these abstraction layer. Final question, if I want to get involved, say we want to do a CUBE NFT with Unstoppable, how do we work with you? How do we engage? Can you give a quick plug on what companies can do to engage with you guys on a business level? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we're looking to partner with wallet exchanges, browsers and companies who are in the crypto space already and realize they have a huge problem around usability with crypto transfers and wallet addresses. Additionally, we're looking to partner with decentralized applications as well as Web2 companies who perhaps want to offer logging with Unstoppable domain functionality. In addition to, or in replacement of the login with Google and login with Facebook buttons that we all know and love. And we're looking to work with fashion brands and companies in the sports sector who perhaps want to claim their Unstoppable name, free of charge from us. I might add in order to use that on Twitter or in other marketing materials that they may have out there in the world to signal that they're not only forward looking, but that they're supportive of this huge waves that we're all riding at the moment. >> Matt, great insight, chief revenue officer, Unstoppable Domains. Thanks for coming on the showcase, theCUBE and Unstoppable Domains share in the insights. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this CUBE's coverage here with the Unstoppable Domain showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to this cubes presentation with unstoppable domains. It's a showcase we're featuring all the best content in web three. And with unstabled a showcase I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. We've got a great guest here, Matt Miscavige. Covich who's the chief revenue officer of unstoppable domains. Matt, welcome to the showcase. Appreciate it. >>Thank you for having me. So >>The theme of this segment is the potential of the web three marketplace with unstoppable domains, the chief revenue officer, you guys have a very intriguing, interesting concept. That's going extremely well. Congratulations, but you're using NFTs for access and domains. Of course, the, the metaverse is huge. People want their own domains, but it's not just like real estate in the sense of a website. It's bigger than that. It's a lot going on. So take us through what is the value proposition and what is the product? >>Absolutely. So for the past 20 years, most of us have been interacting on the internet. Using usernames issued to us by big corporations like Facebook, Google, Twitter, tech talks, Snapchat, et cetera. Whenever we get these usernames for free it's because we in our data are the product as some of the recent leaks. And the media has shown incentives. Individuals and companies are not always aligned. And most importantly, individuals are not in control of their own digital identity and the data, which means they can economically benefit from the value they create online. Think of Twitter as a two-sided marketplace with 0% revenue share back to its creators. We're now having in the creator economy and we believe that individuals should see the economic rewards of what they do in create online. That's all we're trying to do here at unstoppable domains is provide user own take control identity to four and a half billion internet users. >>It's interesting to see change that's happening with web three. And just in cultural terms, users are expecting to be part of the creative, the personality of the company. There's this almost this disintermediation of the middleman. You know, whether it's an ad network or a gatekeeper of any kind people going direct, right? So if I'm an artist, I can go direct to my fans. >>Exactly. So web through really shifts the power away from aggregators, aggregators and marketplaces have been some of the best business models. The last 20 years onto the internet, the web three is going to dramatically change that over the next decade, paying more power back in the hands of consumers. >>What type of companies do you guys work with and partner with that we see out there, what's give us some examples of the kinds of companies you're doing business with and partnering with. >>Yeah. So let's talk about use cases. First actually is the big use case that we identified initially for NFT domain names was around cryptocurrency transfers. Anyone who's ever bought cryptocurrency and tried to transfer it between the council while it's is familiar with these awkwardly long hexadecimal strings of random numbers and letters, where if you make a single type of money is lost forever. That's a pretty scary experience that exists today in our $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users. So the first set of partners that we worked on integrating with who actually cook the wilds and exchanges. So we will allow users to do is replace all their long hexadecimal wallet addresses with a single human readable name, like John dot NFT or Maxim needs give each dot crypto to allow for simple crypto transfers. >>And how did the exchange work with you guys on that as it is? Is it a plugin? Is it co-locating code together? What's the, what's the, what's the relationship between exchanges and unstoppable domains? >>Yeah, absolutely. A great question. So exchange has actually have to do a little bit of an engineering lift to work with us, and they can do that by either using our resolution libraries or using one of our API APIs or in order to look up an unstoppable name and figure out all the wallet addresses that's associated with that name. So today we work with dozens of the world's top exchanges and wallets ranging from Oko DX to Coinbase wallet, to trust wallet, to bread wallet, and many, many others. >>I got to ask you on the wallet side, is that a requirement in terms of having specific code and are there wallets that you work well with? Explain the wallet dynamic between unstoppable domains and wallets. >>Yeah. So while it's all have this huge usability problem for their users, because every single cryptocurrency held by every single one of their users has a different hexadecimal wallet address. And once again, every user is subject to the same human fallacies and errors, where they make a single type where their money can be lost forever. So we enable these wallets to do is to make crypto transfer as simple and as less scary than the current status code by giving the users on a sub well name that they can use to attach to all the waltz addresses on the backend. So companies like trust world, for example, which has 10 million users or Coinbase wallet. When you go to the crypto transfer fields, they can just type in an unstoppable name. They'll correctly, route the currency to the right person, to the right world, without any chance for human error. >>You know, when these big waves come, I gotta ask you this question. Cause a lot of people in the mainstream are getting into it. Now reminds me of the web wave that hit the big thing was how many people are coming online. It was one of the key metrics and how many web pages are being developed was another metric, which meant that people were building out web pages. And it's hard to look back and think, wow, that was actually a KPI. So internet users and webpages were the two proxies cause then search and just came out and everything else happened. So I'm going to ask you, there are people watching, they're seeing that on commercials on TV, they're seeing it everywhere stadiums are named after crypto companies. So the bottom line is people want to know how NFT domains take the fear out of working with crypto and sending crypto. >>Yeah, absolutely. So imagine if we had to navigate the web using IP addresses rather than typing in google.com, you'd have to type in a random string of words and numbers that you'd have to memorize. That would be super painful for users. And didn't, it wouldn't have gotten to where it is today with this, you know, almost 5 billion people online, the history of computer networks. We have human readable naming systems built on top. In every single instance. It's almost crazy that we got to a $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users worldwide 13 years after this, the Toshi white paper without a human readable naming system, other than supple domains and a few of our competitors, that's a fundamental problem that we need to solve in order to go from 250 million crypto users in 2022 to 5 billion crypto users, a decade from now. >>And just to point out and not to look back and maybe make a correlation, but I will, if you look at the naming system of DNS, what it did to IP addresses, that's one major innovation that enabled the web. Then you look at what keyword navigation has done on top of DNS, what that did for the industry. And that basically birthed Googled keywords, basically ads. So that's trillions and trillions of dollars again. Now shifting to you guys, is that how you see it? Obviously it's decentralized, so what's different. Okay. I get, so if you compare, Hey, Google was successful, you know, keyword advertising industry for less than 25 years or 20 years. >>Yeah. Yeah. What's different. Now is the technology inflection points. So blockchains have evolved to a point where they enable high throughput, high transaction volume and true decentralized ownership. The NFT standard, which is only a couple of years old know, has taken off massively around trading of profile pictures like crypto punks and the boy apes yacht club where they use cases extended much more than just, you know, a cool JPEG that goes up in value two or three X year over year. There is the true use case here around ownership of identity ownership over a data set, decentralized log-in authentication and permission data sharing. One of the sad things that happened in Jeanette on the internalized decade really was that the platforms built out have now allowed developers to built on top of them and a trustless permissionless way. Developers who build applications on top of some of the early monopolies in the last decade, got the rules changed on them. APIs, cutoff, new fees instituted. That's not going to happen in web three because all permissionless custody in a user's own wallet, we cannot take the way they will continue to exist in eternity, regardless of what happens to unstoppable domains, which gives developers a lot more confidence in building new products for the web three identity standard that we're building out. >>You guys amazing is that's a whole nother generational shift. I'm always been a big fan of abstractions when innovation is needed, when they're problems that need to be solved, messes to be cleaned up. Good abstraction layer on top of new architecture is really, really phenomenal. I guess the key question for I have for you is, you know, the queue, we have all this video where where's our NFT should, how should we implement NFTs? >>There's a couple of different ways you could think about it. You could do proof of attendance, protocol NFTs, which are really interesting way for users to show that they were at particular events. So just in the same way that people collect, t-shirts some conferences, people will be collecting. And if Ts to show, there were in person attending in person cultural moments, whether they were acquired an event online or offline, you could do NFTs for employees to show that they were at your company during certain periods of the company's growth. So think of replacing the resume with a cryptographically secure resume like this on the blockchain and perpetuity. Now more than half of all the resumes contain lies, which is a pretty gnarly problem as a hiring manager, or you constantly have to sort through as ways that this can impact that side of the market as well. >>I saw some, and I think it was a use case for everything. Appreciate that. And of course we can have the most favorite, cute moments. It could be a cube host NFT at 40 apes out there. Why not have a board cube host going on and, and >>Auction for charity on open? >>All right, great stuff. Now let's get into some of the cool tech nerd stuff, which is really the login piece, which I think is fascinating. The having NFTs be a login mechanism is another great innovation. Okay. So this is cool. Cause it's like think of it as one click and FTS, if you will. What's the response been on this? Log-in with unstoppable for that product? What some of the use gates is. Can you give some examples of the momentum and traction? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we launched the product less than 90 days ago. We already have 90 committed or integrated partners live today with a login product. And this replaces login with Google login with Facebook, with a way that's user owned and user controlled. And over time, people will be capturing additional information back to their NFP domain names, such as their reputation, their history, things they've done online and be able to permission to share that with applications that they interact with in order to get any rewards, once you own all your data and you can choose to share it with companies or incentivize you to share data. For example, imagine you just bought a new house and you have 3000 square feet to furnish. You could tell that fact and prove it to a company like Wayfair. Would they be incentivized to give you discounts? We're spending 10, 20, $30,000 and you'll do all of your purchasing there rather than spread across other e-commerce retailers. For sure they would. But right now, when you go to that website, you're just another random email address. They have no idea who you are, what you've done, what your credit score is, whether you house buyer or not. But if you could permission to share that to using a log-in open software product, I mean the web would just be much, much different. >>And I think one of the things too, as these, I call them analog old school companies, old guard companies is referred to in the cube talk here, but we were still always called that old guard is the people who aren't innovating. You could think about companies having more community too, because if you have more sharing and you have this marketplace concept and you have these new dynamics of how people are working together, sharing will provide more transparency, but yet security on identity. Therefore things are going to be happening organically. That's a community dynamic. What's your view on that? And what's your reaction >>Communities are such an important part of web three and the cryptos ecosystem in general, people are very tightly knit and they all support each other. There's a huge amount of collaboration in this space because we're all trying to onboard the next billion users into the ecosystem. And we know we have some fundamental challenges and problems to solve, whether it's complex wallet addresses, whether it's the lack of portable data sharing, whether it's just simple education, right? I'm sure, you know, tens of millions of people got into crypto for the first time during the super bowl face on some of those awesome ads that ran. >>Yeah. Love the QR code. That's a direct response. I remember when the QR code has been around for a long time. I remember in the nineties, late nineties, it was a thing, a device at red QR codes that did navigation to a webpage. So I mean, QR codes are super cool, great way to get, and we all using it to, with the pandemic to ordering food. So I think QR codes are here to stay. In fact, we should have a QR code on all of our images here on the screen too. So we'll work on that, but I gotta ask you on the project side, now let's get into the devs and kind of the applications, the users that are adopting unstoppable and this new way of doing things, why are they gravitating towards this login concepts? Can you give some examples and put, give some color commentary to why are these D application distribute application guys and gals programming and with you guys? >>Yeah. They all believe that the potential for why we're trying to create a round user own the controlled identity. We're the only company in the market right now with a product that's live and working today. There's been a lot of promises made and we're the first ones to actually deliver to companies like cook finance, for example, are seeing the benefit of being able to have their users go through a simple process to check in and authenticate into the application, using your NFT domain name, rather than having to create an email address and password combination as a login, which inevitably leads to problems such as lost passwords, password resets, all those fun things that we used to deal with on a daily basis. >>Okay. So now I got to ask you the kind of partnerships you guys are looking at doing. I can only imagine the old, old school days you had a registry and you had registrars, you had a sales mechanism. I noticed you guys are selling NFT kind of like domain names on your website. Is that a kind of a current situation? Is that going to be ongoing? How do you envision your business model evolving and what kind of partnerships do you see coming along? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we're working with a lot of different companies from browsers that took changes to wallets, to individual NFT projects, to more recently even exploring partnership, partnership opportunities with fashion brands. For example, the Tyree market is moving so so fast. And what we're trying to essentially do here is create the standard naming system for web three. So a big part of that for us, we'll be working with partners like blockchain.com and with circle who's behind the DC coin on creating registries, such as dot blockchain and dot coin and making those available to tens of millions and ultimately hundreds of millions and billions of users worldwide. We want an ensemble domain name to be the first asset that every user in crypto gets, even before they buy their Bitcoin Ethereum or dovish coin. >>It makes a lot of sense obstruct the way the long hexadecimal string. We all know that we all write down putting a safe, hopefully you don't forget about it. You know, I always say, make sure you tell someone where your addresses. So in case something happens, you don't lose all that crypto. All good stuff. I got to ask the question around the ecosystem. Okay, can you share your view and vision of either your purse, yourself or the company when you have this kind of new market, you have all kinds of, and we meant the web was a good example, right? Web pages, you need web development tools. You had HTML by hand. Then you had all these tools. So you had tools and platforms and things kind of came well, grew together. How was the web three stakeholder ecosystem space evolving? What's what are some of the white spaces? What are some of the clearly defined areas that are developing? >>Yeah, I mean, we've seen an explosion in new smart contract blockchains and the past couple of years actually going live, which is really interesting because they support a huge number of different use cases, different trade-offs on each. We recently partnered and moved over a primary infrastructure to polygon, which is a leading EVM compatible smart chain, which allows us to provide free gas fees to users for maintaining and managing their domain name. So we're trying to move all obstacles around user adoption. Here. We all need to have Ethereum in your wallet. You know, it'd be an unstoppable domains customer or user. You don't have to worry about paying transaction fees. Every time you want to update the wallet, addresses associated with your domain name. We want to make this really big and accessible for everybody. And that means driving down costs as much as possible. Yeah, >>It's a whole nother wave. It's a wave that's built on the shoulders of others. It's a shift and infrastructure, new capabilities, new new applications. I think it's a, it's a great thing. You guys doing the naming system makes a lot of sense. This abstraction layer creates that ease of use. It simplifies things makes things easier. I mean, this is, was the promise of, of these abstraction layers. Final question. If I want to get involved, say we want to do a cube NFT with unstoppable. How do we work with you? How do we engage? Can you give a quick plug on what companies can do to engage with you guys on a business level? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we're looking to partner with wallets, exchanges, browsers, and companies who are in the crypto space already and realize they have a huge problem around usability with crypto transfers and wild addresses. Additionally, we're looking to partner with decentralized applications as well as web to companies who perhaps want to offer log-in with unstoppable domain functionality. In addition to, or in replacement of the login with Google and log-in with Facebook buttons that we all know and love. And we're looking to work with fashion brands and companies in the sports sector who perhaps want to claim their unstoppable names, free of charge from us. I might add in order to use that on Twitter or other marketing materials that they may have out there in the world to signal that they're not only forward looking, but that they're supportive of this huge wave that we're all riding at the most. >>May I great insight, chief revenue officer ensemble domains. Thanks for coming on the showcase, the cube and unstoppable domain share in the insights. Thanks for coming on. Okay. This cubes coverage here with the unstoppable domain showcase. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat intro) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE, I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE, we're here with a special power panel on industrial IOT, also known as IIOT, industrial IOT, and cybersecurity, with the theme being apocalypse now or later, when will the rug be pulled out from everyone, when will people have to make a move on making sure that the network and security are all teed up and all locked down, as IOT increases the surface area of networks, industrial IOT, where critical equipment or infrastructure is being run for businesses. Got a great panel here, we got Gabe Lowy who's the founder and CEO of Tectonic Advisors, and author of an upcoming research paper on this particular topic. Bryan Skene, vice president of product development at Tempered Networks, and Greg Ness, the CMO, who happened to be available to join us from Tempered Networks as well. Guys, thanks for spending the time to come on this power panel. >> Great to be here. >> So, convergence is a theme we've heard every wave of innovation, the convergence of this, the convergence of networks and apps. Now more than ever, there's a confluence of multiple waves of convergence happening, you're seeing it right now, infrastructure turned into cloud, big data turned into machine learning and AI, you've got future infrastructure like Blockchain around the corner, but in the middle of all this, the security, data, networking, this is kind of the beginning of a cloud 2.0 dynamic, where pure cloud is great for computing network, you native born in the cloud, you scale it up, it's great. Still got challenges but if you're a large company, and you want to actually operate cloud scale anything, and have instrumentation, internet of things, devices, sensors, in factory's, in plants, in cars, your game is changing, if it's connected to the network, it's got power and connectivity, a terrorist, a hacker, a digital terrorist can come in and do all kinds of damage. This is the topic. So Greg, we talked about this panel, what was the motivation for this, what's your thoughts? >> Well, it occurred to us that you know, as you look at all the connectivity that's you know, underway, billions of devices being connected, the level of scale, complexity, and the porosity of what's being connected, is just really incomprehensible, to the people that developed the internet, and it's raising a lot of issues. All around, basically, the number of devices the inability to protect and secure and update those devices, and the sheer amount of money and effort that would have to be applied to protect them is beyond the scope of current IT security stuff. IT's not ready. >> IT, certainly, you and I talk about this all the time, but you know, I love the hype and you know, digital transformation's going to save the world Gabe, talk about the dynamics because the title of this panel, really the subtitle is apocalypse now or later, and this seems to be the modus operandus is that you know, you know what has to hit the fan before any action is taken, you see Capital One, there isn't a day gone by where there's some major breach, major hack, it's a firewall for Capital One, going to an open S3 bucket from some girl whose bragging about it on Twitter, wasn't really a serious hacker, then you've got adversaries that are organized, whether it's state sponsored and or real money making underbelly activities happening, you know there are digital terrorists out there, there are digital thieves, the surface area with IOT is absolutely opened up, we kind of know that, but industrial IOT, just talking about industrial equipment, industrial activities, whether it's critical infrastructure or planting equipment for a company, this is a huge digital problem. What's your take, what's your thesis? >> Yes it is, and building on what Greg said, there's an interesting gap from both sides. The first is that this industrial equipment or critical infrastructure, some of it goes back 20, 25 years. It was not architected to be connected to the internet, but yet with this digital transformation that you eluded to, companies want to find ways of getting that data, putting it into various analytics engines to improve cost efficiencies or decision outcomes. But how do you do that with a lot of equipment out there that runs on different operating systems and really was not built for internet connections. The other side of the gap is that your traditional IT security technologies, firewalls, intrusion protection, VPN's, they in turn were not built or architected to secure this IIOT infrastructure. And that gap creates the vulnerability that opens the door for cyber criminals to come in, or state sponsored cyber attackers to come in and do some serious damage. >> Bryan, I want you to weight in here. You're a network guy, you've been around the block, you've seen the networks evolve, the primitives were clear, the building blocks internet were, the DNS ran, most of what the internet right now, whether you're talking about from the marketing to routing, it's all DNS based, it's IP addresses as well under that. So you've got the IP address, you've got DNS, what else is there? What can be done? Why aren't these problems being solved by traditional firewalls and traditional players out there, is it just the limitation of the infrastructure? Or is there just more cultural DNA, you've got to evolve, what's your take on this? >> Yeah, um the way I think about this is that the internet that we know and we use was mostly built for human beings, I mean, it's been built for humans to use it, humans have discriminating tastes, they decide what to click on, for the most part they are skeptical, they learn through trial and error what's happened with- when people try to fool other people, a machine or you know, you've got a webpage and it's got something misleading, you learn that, you don't click on that any more. And the infrastructure we have today is built to help people avoid these problems, as well as drop packets when they can detect that something is just absolutely wrong. But machines, they don't know any of that, they're not discriminating, they've been built to, well if it's going to be on a network, to trust everything that's talking to them, and to send data and assume that the other side is also trusting them and just acting on the data. So it's just a fundamentally different problem, you know what traditionally the machine networks have had air gaps, they've been air gapped away from any other kinds of data or potential threat. And those air gaps are gone. >> So air gaps were supposed to save us, weren't they? But they're not are they? >> Well, they kept us going as Gabe alluded, for 20 -25 years, machines have been operating, operating critical infrastructure, but you know, with digitalization, with the opportunity to look at that data in the cloud, and do machine learning, and by the way machine learning's being done in the cloud just for scale, so the problem with getting the data from machines, or other things back into the cloud is a huge issue, and if there's an air gap between say the cloud and the thing, we might be somewhere. >> So a lot of incompatible architectures relative to what everyone's doing with cloud, and say hybrid and multi cloud. Gabe, you know the two worlds of information technology or IT people, and operational technology people, that tend to run the IOT world, you know you do sensors to factory floors to whatever, called OT people, operational technologies. I've always said that's a train wreck between those two cultures, they kind of don't like each other. You got IT guys, they're stacking and racking equipment, OT guys, stay out of my world I run propietary stacks, it's lockdown. Pretty locked down from a security standpoint, IT are pretty promiscuous just in the nature of it. As those two worlds collide, is that the thesis of the catastrophe model, as you see that world coming together, what's your thoughts on this? >> Yes, good question. That world has to come together, and I'll give you an analogy to this. About 10, 12 years ago, a lot of people were doubtful that Devops would ever take off, 'cause development guys really didn't like operations guys, they didn't like dealing with them. Here we are 10 years or so later, and everyone's pretty much adopted it, and they're seeing the benefits of it. This OT IT convergence takes it to a much higher level, because the stakes are so much higher, because a cyber attack can cause catastrophic damage. And as a result, these two teams are not only going to have to work together in harmony, but they're going to have to learn each other's stacks in the case of the OT guys, it's their traditional OSI networking stack for IT networks. And for the IT guys, they're going to have to learn the Purdue model, which was the model that's principally used in architecting these OT systems. And unless these two teams do work together, the vulnerabilities and probabilities for a catastrophic event increases significantly. >> That's a great example, Devops was poo-pooed on earlier on, I mean Greg, we were back in 2008 riffing on this, now it's the mainstream. Agilities come from it, the Lean startup, all kinds of cool things, people are talking about, we love cloud, great. Now we bring the OT world together, and IT world together, Gabe, what is the benefit, what is the key ethos around operating technologies and IT guys coming together? Because you know, dev ops would simply abstract away the complexity so developers don't have to do configuration and management, all that provisioning stuff, and still have the reliability. They called it infrastructure as code, so Devops was infrastructure as code, what's the ethos of the two worlds coming together from IT and OT? >> I think the ethos is at a very high level, it's risk management. Because the stakes are so high that the types of losses that could be incurred, you know you mentioned Capital One at the top of the program, yes those are financial losses, but imagine if the losses resulted in thousands or tens of thousands of people getting infected, or perhaps dying. So the need for these two teams to work together is absolutely critical, and so I'd say the key strategic approach to this, both from the IT and the OT side, is to go into it- into strategy or cyber strategy with the premise that the company has already been compromised. And so that starts to get your thinking away from legacy types of technologies that were not architected to prevent these new threats, or defend against them, and now these teams have to start working together from a totally different standpoint, to try and prevent the risks of those catastrophic losses. >> Greg, I want to get your thoughts, you've been in the IT businesses for a long time, you've been a major player in it, historian as well as us in IT, what do you see as contrast between the two cultures of IT and OT, because you got to lock down these networks, you got to have the teamwork between the two, because the surface area with IOT and industrial IOT is so massive, it's so complicated yet it's an opportunity at the same time it's an exposure, I mean just people working at home in IT, I mean the home is a great place to target people because all you got to do is get that light bulb from nest and you're at a fully threaded processor, you could run malware and get all the passwords from the person working at home. So again, from home to industrial, does IT even have the chops to get there? >> Not the way they're architected today around the TCP- IP stack, and that's the challenge, right? So from the 90's to this era, whether it's the mainframes to the networks to the internet to the enterprise web et cetera, compared to this we've had relatively incremental change, as surprising as that sounds. You know, devices being added and every year, every other year, every three years, people are upgrading those endpoints, they're adding more sophisticated security. But this world that you referred to, the world's in collision. It's not evolving at all in parallel. So, you've got devices with no security in mind they're being connected, and you know, calling it the industrial internet of things almost underwhelms what the risk is, it should be the internet of places or spaces, because what these devices can control, control of a factory, a hospital, et cetera, and you think back you know, yes you've got historical perspective, you don't have to go back very far when the Russians were attacking Ukraine, you know, WannaCry, NotPetya, you know they spread all over the place in a matter of weeks, UK hospitals were running on carbon paper, postponing procedures, Maersk shipping had they're shipping- they lost control of their ships at sea, and now you've got VxWorks coming along, saying you know, you're going to have to update that, because there's some serious vulnerabilities here, VxWorks is deployed to cross billions of devices, so I don't think historically there's really a precedent, I mean, if you want to tap into a common interest with military history, you don't even have the semblance of a Maginot Line, and that was a pretty imperfect protection scheme. >> I mean, the opportunity to infect governments, take 'em down within misinformation to actually harming people say through hospital hacks for instance, you know, people could- lives were in danger. And there's also other threats, I mean, you mentioned, it takes one device to be penetrated, at home or at work, I saw an article, came across my desk I saw IBM did some research, this concept of war shipping, where hackers ship their exploits directly on WiFi devices, so people get these devices, hey, free you know, nest light bulb or whatever's going on, they install in their home, oh it's got, I got a free WiFi router, uh-uh, it's got built in malware. It's just got WiFi connectivity. So again, the exploits are getting more complicated, Bryan, the network has to be smart. At the end of the day, this cloud 2.0 theme is beyond compute and storage, networking and security are two underdeveloped areas that need to evolve very quickly to solve these problems, what's your take on this. >> Well, my take on that is that our approach is that if the network has to be so smart that it can watch everything and understand what's good and bad, then we're doomed, so we're going to need to also combine watching packets, the traditional method, deep packet inspection, with divide and conquer. Frankly, it's-as Tom and I said before, the air gaps are gone for OT. I think we need to figure out a way to divide up the networks of things, and give them clean networks if possible, and try to segment them away from the network that the rest of the things are on. So, you know, we don't have enough compute power, we don't have enough memory and resources, but that's not really the fit. We just don't understand what is good traffic versus bad traffic, and we talk about Day Zero attack, and we talk about, try to chase that down with signatures, and you know the- you can watch transactions, people say AI and machine learning, but machine learning means learning good and bad from people. >> How do companies fix this, what's the answer to all this, or is there one? Or it's just going to take catastrophic loss to wake people up? >> Well we can't react to the problem, that's one thing that we all can probably- we all know that if we wait for the catastrophe, and then we try to react to that and solve it, that it's already gone, it's too late. I mean, this is a geometric expansion in complexity of the problem, I don't think there's a silver bullet, I think that there's going to be several things that need to be done, one is to keep inspecting traffic, but another one is again segmenting things that should be talking to each other, away from things that they should not be talking to. And trying to control the peers in the network of things. And you know, Greg something you said reminded me, fundamentally with networking, the TCP-IP, we are using the IP address, to mean the location say if we're talking about places, we're talking about the location of something and the identity of that thing, and most of our security policies, are spelled out in terms of something, an IP address, that is not under our control, and the network has to be kind of so complex as it is growing, with mass proxies, you know, motion, mobility, things are moving. A lot of this wasn't foreseen. >> So, Gabe and Greg, do we have to build new software, a new naming system? Do we have to kind of level up and put an extraction layer on top of the existing systems? What's the answer? >> The answer is a layered approach. Because to try and do a complete rebuild or a retrofit particularly with different operating systems, different versions, incompatible systems, billions of devices, and various types of security solutions that were not built for this, that's not a practical solution. So you've really got to go with an overlay strategy, people are always going to be the vulnerability, they'll fall for fishing attacks, that's why the strategy is that we're already compromised. So if the attacker is already in our network, how do we contain them from doing serious damage? So one strategy for this is micro-segmentation, which is a much more granular approach, to prevent that lateral movement once the attacker is inside the network. And then when you go from there, you can pair that with host identity protocol which has been around for a while, but that was architected specifically to address the networking and security requirements for IIOT environment, because it addresses that gap that we were talking about between traditional security solutions that lack this functionality, and it only allows white-listed communications between hosts or devices that are already approved and only approved to communicate with one another. So you could effectively do a lockdown even if the attacker is already inside your network. >> I want to get back to some of the criteria on this, and I want to also put the plug in for the TechTonic advisors report that's coming out that you are the author of, called securing critical infrastructure against cyber attacks, I read it, great paper. The line that I read, I want to get your thoughts I'm going to read it out loud, I'd love to get your thoughts on this Gabe or anyone else who wants to chime in, it says industrial IOT cybersecurity is beyond the scope of traditional firewall and VPN solutions would struggle to keep up with the scale and variety of modern attacks. What do you mean by that? Give an example, tell me what you mean by that sentence, and what examples can you give? >> Well, I'd say the most important thing is that firewalls were initially built to protect what we call north-south traffic. In other words, traffic that's coming in from the internet into the organization and back out. But now with network expansion, cloud adoption and more and more devices, industrial devices being connected, these firewalls cannot defend against that. They simply were not architected for it, they cannot scale to those proportions, and even if you're using software only versions, those aren't effective either because they do not protect against east-west or in other words lateral traffic. So if you're an organization moving IIOT data from your OT systems across your network into IP analytics systems or software, that's lateral movement. Your firewall- traditional firewall, just not going to be able to handle that and protect against it, so in simple terms, we need a new overlay not to say that firewalls are going away any time soon, they can still protect north-south traffic, but we need a new type of overlay that can protect this type of traffic, micro-segmentation is the strategy to do that and using host identity protocol or HIP protocol is what fills that gap that your traditional security tools were not designed to protect against. >> Greg, I want you to weigh in on this, because you're in this business now, you know the IT world, the criticality of what you just said is super critical to the nature of business, you know the catastrophic example's there, but IT does not move that fast, you know IT, IT'S like molasses, I mean they're slow. What is going to light a fire under IT to get them to be sensitive, I mean it's pretty obvious, can they get there, do they have to re-structure what has to happen in the IT world, because you know, it is a catastrophic end game here if they don't nail down this traffic protection. >> Well a part of the- you know, part of it is education. Because we've been- we've seen wave and wave of incremental innovation in the network, and when it happened it seemed so big and and it produced huge market cap growth with a lot of companies, you know play this guessing game of who is really connecting to the network. And it's evolved kind of gradually, to this big leap we have ahead of us, and IT is going to have to become aware that IIOT is a fundamentally different problem and challenge to solve, and that's going to require new thinking, new purpose built, like Gabe said, approaches, anything like the traditional firewall segmentation is just not going to address what we talked about, the scale issues, the resilience right? So, some of these devices, you don't want them off for one or two percent of the time. And the implications are that it's much more serious. So I think that, you know, more types of attacks are inevitable, and they're going to be even more catastrophic, and we're all aware that NotPetya and WannaCry raised a lot of eyebrows just for how quick it spread and the damage it caused. And we've just seen VxWorks vulnerabilities being announced. We need to prepare now. >> Malware and worms are still popular, it's a problem. Well guys, thanks so much for spending the time on this panel, I'll give you the final word here, share what you think is going to happen over the next 24 months, 12 months, is it going to take catastrophic failure, what's going to happen in your mind, what's going to end up being the trajectory over the next, you know say year. >> Well, unfortunately, sometimes it might take a catastrophic event to get things moving, hopefully not, but I think there's growing recognition as IIOT is growing, that they need new ways to secure this movement of data between OT and IT, and in order to facilitate that securing of data, you're going to have to have that OT and IT convergence occur, because the risk, as you sort of eluded to earlier John, we hear in the headlines about massive data breaches and all this data that's stolen. But the risk in IIOT is not only the exfiltration of the data, the risk is that the attacker has the capacity to take over the infrastructure. And if that happens in a hospital, if it happens with a water treatment facility or government type of defense installation, the outcomes can be disastrous. So the first thing that has to happen is OT IT convergence. Second, they have to start thinking strategically from a standpoint that they have already been breached, and so that changes their viewpoint about the technologies that they have to deploy, and where they have to move to to efficiently get to what I call the iddies, and that's the- you still need the availability, you've got to have visibility into this traffic, you need reliability of this network, obviously it's got to be at scale, it's got to be manageable, and you need security. >> Well, we'd like to have you on again Gabe, because we've talked about this from a national security perspective, not only the hackers potentially risking the business risk there, there's a national security overlay because you know, if the government's attacking our businesses, that's like showing up on the shores of our country, its the government's job to protect the freedom's and safety of the citizens, that includes companies. So why are companies defending themselves with all this capability, what's the role of government in all of this, that's a very important, I think a longer conversation. So, let's pick that one up, a separate one, my favorite topic these days. Critical infrastructure even if it's just business it's the grid, it's the plants that run our country. >> And John, what I'd like to add to that is, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a CIO down here in California yesterday, and we were talking about the ransomware right, that was taking down all these cities. And you know, he goes well the difference between what you guys are talking about and that, is that you can back up your IT systems, right, into the cloud, and that's a growing business to kind of protect and then replicate game over, and he goes, can you back up a hospital? Can you back up a manufacturing plant? Can you back up a fleet of ships? You know, can you back up a control center? Not really, when you lose physical control, it's game over. And people, I think that really needs to sink in. And that was, I think in Gabe's paper when I first read it, that's what really struck me about it, this is a different ballgame. >> Well, I mean, there's many points, there's the technical point there, and there's also the societal point of- you imagine things being taken over by hackers that physically can harm people, and that's again the societal side, technically the incompatible architecture's coming home to roost now, because there's the problem right there, that's the collision that's happened I think, and a lot of education needs to happen fast, Gabe, thanks for writing that paper critical infrastructure against cyber and securing it, Bryan thanks for coming on appreciate it, you want to say, get the final word Bryan, go ahead. Your thoughts, next 12 months. >> I think that if our future, it depends on OT and IT coming together and a lot of education, a lot of change, I don't think we're going to get there, I think that what's going to happen in the next 24 months is that you know, there are lots of innovative schemes and companies and people, working on this and what we need to do is lay down infrastructure that allows OT and IT to keep operating, and not have to do a forklift upgrade and everything that they do, their processes or teach the things how to protect themselves, and again I'm going to go back to air gaps in network, make a logical air gap, if you imagine driverless cars driving around they're not going to, imagine them sharing the same network that we're using to use Snapchat and look at cities and you know, sitting on the internet and looking at Facebook. We're not going to want that. So we need to try and figure out a way to separate the location of the thing from the identity, create policies in terms of the identity, manage that a new layer, and do it in such a way that doesn't change IT. To me that's the key, 'cause I- we've said it here, IT's doesn't move that fast, they can't. It's not a matter of willpower, it's a matter of momentum and intertia. >> Well, I think the forcing function on this is going to be catastrophic event, the subtitle of this panel, apocalypse now or later. And in my opinion, Greg's been, you know, on this JetEye department of defense story. I believe this is one of the most important stories in the technology industry in a long long time, it really highlights the confluence and convergence of two differently designed infrastructure technologies, that have to in a very short time, be re-platformed at high speed, in a very fast short time frame, because the stakes are so high. So guys, thanks so much for spending the time here on this power panel, IIOT, industrial IOT and cyber security apocalypse now or later, something's going to have to happen, it has to happen fast. Gabe, Bryan, Greg thanks for taking the time. This is a cube conversation here in Palo Alto power panel, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M. I. T. Chief Data officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to M. I. T. In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everybody You're watching The Cube, the Leader and Live Tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante, and it's my pleasure to introduce Matt Kobe, who's the vice president of business strategy Analytics of Chicago Bulls. We love talking sports. We love talking data. Matt. Thanks for coming on. >> No problem getting a date. So talk about >> your role. Is the head of analytics for the Bulls? >> Sure. So I work exclusively on the business side of the operation. So we have a separate team that those the basketball side, which is kind of your players stuff. But on the business side, um, what we're focused on is really two things. One is being essentially internal consultants for the rest of the customer facing functions. So we work a lot with ticketing, allow its sponsorship, um, marketing digital, all of those folks that engage with our customer base and then on the backside back end of it, we're building out the technical infrastructure for the organization right. So everything from data warehouse to C. R M to email marketing All of that sits with my team. And so we were a lot of hats, which is exciting. But at the end of the day, we're trying to use data to enhance the customer and fan experience. Um and that's our aim. And that's what we're driving towards >> success in sports. In a larger respect. It's come down to don't be offended by this. Who's got the best geeks? So now your side of the house is not about like you say, player performance about the business performances. But that's it. That's a big part of getting the best players. I mean, if it's successful and all the nuances of the N B, A salary cap and everything else, but I think there is one, and so that makes it even more important. But you're helping fund. You know that in various ways, but so are the other two teams that completely separate. Is there a Chinese wall between them? Are you part of the sort of same group? >> Um, we're pretty separate. So the basketball folks do their thing. The business folks do their thing from an analytic standpoint. We meet and we collaborate on tools and other methods of actually doing the analysis. But in terms of, um, the analysis itself, there is a little bit of separation there, and mainly that is from priority standpoint. Obviously, the basketball stuff is the most important stuff. And so if we're working on both sides that we'd always be doing the basketball stuff and the business stuff needs to get done, >> drag you into exactly okay. But which came first? The chicken or the egg was It was the sort of post Moneyball activity applied to the N B. A. And I want to ask you a question about that. And then somebody said, Hey, we should do this for the business side. Or was the business side of sort of always there? >> I think I think, the business side and probably the last 5 to 7 years you've really seen it grown. So if you look at the N. B. A. I've been with the Bulls for five years. If you look at the N. B. A. 78 years ago, there was a handful of Business analytics teams and those those teams had one or two people at him. Now every single team in the NBA has some sort of business analytics team, and the average staff is seven. So my staff is six full time folks pushed myself, so we'll write it right at the average. And I think what you've seen is everything has become more complex in sports. Right? If you look at ticketing, you've got all the secondary markets. You have all this data flowing in, and they need someone to make sense of all that data. If you look at sponsorship sponsorship, his transition from selling a sign that sits on the side of the court for these truly integrated partnerships, where our partners are coming to us and saying, What do we get out of? This was our return. And so you're seeing a lot more part lot more collaboration between analytics and sponsorship to go back to those partners and say, Hey, here's what we delivered And so I think you it started on the basketball side, certainly because that's that's where the, you know that is the most important piece. But it quickly followed on the business side because they saw the value that that type of thinking can bring in the business. >> So I know this is not, you know, your swim lane, but But, you know, the lore of Billy Beane and Moneyball and all that, a sort of the starting point for sports analytics. Is that Is that Is that a fair characterization? Yeah. I mean, was that Was that really the main spring? >> I think it It probably started even before that. I think if you have got to see Billy being at the M I t Sports Analytics conference and him thought he always references kind of Bill James is first, and so I think it started. Baseball was I wouldn't say the easiest place to start, But it was. It's a one versus one, right? It's pitcher versus batter. In a lot of cases, basketball is a little bit more fluid. It's a team. Sport is a little harder, but I think as technology has advanced, there's been more and more opportunities to do the analytics on the basketball side and on the business side. I think what you're seeing is this huge. What we've heard the first day and 1/2 here, this huge influx of data, not nearly to the levels of the MasterCard's and others of the world. But as more and more things moved to the mobile phone, I think you're going to see this huge influx of data on the business side, and you're going to need the same systems in the same sort of approach to tackle it. >> S O. Bill James is the ultimate sports geek, and he's responsible for all these stats that, no, none of us understand. He's why we don't pay attention to batting average anymore. Of course, I still do. So let's talk about the business side of things. If you think about the business of baseball, you know it's all about maximizing the gate. Yeah, there's there's some revenue, a lot of revenue course from TV. But it's not like football, which is dominated by the by the TV. Basketball, I think, is probably a mix right. You got 80 whatever 82 game season, so filling up the stadium is important. Obviously, N v A has done a great job of of really getting it right. Free agency is like, fascinating. Now >> it's 12 months a year >> scored way. Talk about the NBA all the time and of course, you know, people like celebrities like LeBron have certainly helped, and now a whole batch of others. But what's the money side of the n ba look like? Where's the money coming from? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you certainly have broadcast right, but in many ways, like national broadcast sort of takes care of it itself. In some ways, from the standpoint of my team, doesn't have a lot of control over national broadcast money. That's a league level thing. And so the things that we have control over the two big buckets are ticketing and sponsorship. Those those are the two big buckets of revenue that my team spends a lot of time on. Ticketing is, is one that is important from the standpoint, as you say, which is like, How do we fill the building right? We've got 41 home game, supposed three preseason games. We got 44 events a year. Our goal is to fill the building for all 44 of those events. We do a pretty good job of doing it, but that has cascading effects into other revenue streams. Right, As you think about concessions and merchandise and sponsorship, it's a lot easier to spell spot cell of sponsorship when you're building is full, then if you're building isn't full. And so our focus is on. How do we? How do we fill the building in the most efficient way possible? And as you have things like the secondary market and people have access to tickets in different ways than they did 10 to 15 years ago, I think that becomes increasingly complex. Um, but that's the fun area that's like, That's where we spend a lot of time. There's the pricing, There's inventory management. It's a lot of, you know, is you look a traditional cpg. There's there's some of those same principles being applied, which is how do you are you looking airline right there? They're selling a plane. It's an asset you have to fill. We have ah, building. That's an asset we have to fill, and how do we fill it in the most optimal way? >> So the idea of surge pricing demand supply, But so several years ago, the Red Sox went to a tiered pricing. You guys do the same If the Sox are playing Kansas City Royals tickets way cheaper than if they're playing the Yankees. You guys do a similar. So >> we do it for single game tickets. So far are season ticket holders. It's the same price for every game, but on the price for primary tickets for single games, right? So if we're playing, you know this year will be the Clippers and the Lakers. That price is going to be much more expensive, so we dynamically price on a game to game basis. But our season ticket holders pay this. >> Why don't you do it for the season ticket holders? Um, just haven't gone there yet. >> Yeah, I mean, there's some teams have, right, so there's a few different approaches you convey. Lovely price. Those tickets, I think, for for us, the there's in years past. In the last few years, in particular, there's been a couple of flagship games, and then every other game feels similar. I think this will be the first year where you have 8 to 10 teams that really have a shot at winning the title, and so I think you'll see a more balanced schedule. Um, and so we've We've talked about it a lot. We just haven't gone to that made that move yet? >> Well, a season ticket holder that shares his tickets with seven other guys with red sauce. You could buy a BMW. You share the tickets, so but But I would love it if they didn't do the tiered. Pricing is a season ticket holder, so hope you hold off a while, but I don't know. It could maximize revenues if the Red Sox that was probably not a stupid thing is they're smart people. What about the sponsorships? Is fascinating about the partners looking for our ally. How are you measuring that? You're building your forging a tighter relationship, obviously, with the sponsors in these partners. Yeah, what's that are? Why look like it's >> measured? A variety of relies, largely based on the assets that they deliver. But I think every single partner we talk to these days, I also leave the sponsorship team. So I oversee. It's It's rare in sports, but I stayed over business strategy and Alex and sponsorship team. Um, it's not my title, but in practice, that's what I do. And I think everyone we talked to wants digital right? They want we've got over 25,000,000 social media followers with the Bulls, right? We've got 19,000,000 on Facebook alone. And so sponsors see those numbers and they know that we can deliver impression. They know we can deliver engagement and they want access to those channels. And so, from a return on, I always call a return on objectives, right? Return on investment is a little bit tricky, but return on objectives is if we're trying to reel brand awareness, we're gonna go back to them and say, Here's how many people came to our arena and saw your logo and saw the feature that you had on the scoreboard. If you're on our social media channels or a website, here's the number of impressions you got. Here is the number of engagements you got. I think where we're at now is Maura's Bad Morris. Still better, right? Everyone wants the big numbers. I think where you're starting to see it move, though, is that more isn't always better. We want the right folks engaging with our brands, and that's really what we're starting to think about is if you get 10,000,000 impressions, but they're 10,000,000 impressions to the wrong group of potential customers, that's not terribly helpful. for a brand. We're trying to work with our brands to reach the right demographics that they want to reach in order to actually build that brand awareness they want to build. >> What, What? Your primary social channels. Twitter, Obviously. >> So every platform has a different purpose way. Have Facebook, Twitter, instagram, Snapchat. We're in a week. We bow in in China and you know, every platform has a different function. Twitter's obviously more real time news. Um, you know the timeline stuff, it falls off really quick. Instagram is really the artistic piece of it on, and then Facebook is a blend of both, and so that's kind of how we deploy our channels. We have a whole social team that generates content and pushes that content out. But those are the channels we use and those air incredibly valuable. Now what you're starting to see is those channels are changing very rapidly, based on their own set of algorithms, of how they deliver content of fans. And so we're having to continue to adapt to those changing environments in those social >> show impressions. In the term, impressions varies by various platforms. So so I know. I know I'm more familiar with Twitter impressions. They have the definition. It's not just somebody who might have seen it. It's somebody that they believe actually spent a few seconds looking at. They have some algorithm to figure that out. Yeah. Is that a metric that you finding your brands are are buying into, for example? >> Yeah. I mean, I think certainly there they view it's kind of the old, you know, when you bought TV ads, it's how many households. So my commercial right, it's It's a similar type of metric of how many eyeballs saw a piece of content that we put out. I think we're the metrics. More people are starting to care about his engagements, which is how many of you actually engaged with that piece of content, whether it's a like a common a share, because then that's actual. Yeah, you might have seen it for three seconds, but we know how things work. You're scrolling pretty fast, But if you actually stopped to engage it with something, that's where I think brands are starting to see value. And as we think about our content, we have ah framework that our digital team uses. But one of the pillars of that is thumb stopping. We want to create content that is some stopping that people actually engage with. And that's been a big focus of ours. Last couple years, >> I presume. Using video, huge >> video We've got a whole graphics team that does custom graphics for whether it's stats or for history, historical anniversaries. We have a hole in house production team that does higher end, and then our digital team does more kind of straight from the phone raw footage. So we're using a variety of different mediums toe reach our fans >> that What's your background? How'd you get into all of this? >> I spent seven years in consulting, so I worked for Deloitte on their strategy group out of Chicago, And I worked for CPG companies like at the intersection of Retailer and CPG. So a lot of in store promotional work helping brands think through just General Revenue management, pricing strategy, promotional strategy and, um stumbled upon greatness with the Bulls job. A friend gave me the heads up that they were looking to fill this type of role and I was able to get my resume in the mix and I was lucky enough to get get the job, and it's been when I started. We're single, single, single, so it's a team of one. Five years later, we're a team of six, and we'll probably keep growing. So it's been an exciting ride and >> your background is >> maths. That's eyes business. Undergrad. And then I got a went Indian undergrad business and then went to Kellogg. Northwestern got an MBA on strategy, so that's my background. But it's, you know, I've dabbled in sports. I worked for the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid back in the day when I was at Deloitte. Um, and so it's been It's always been a dream of mine. I just never knew how I get there like I was wanted to work in sports. They just don't know the path. And I'm lucky enough to find the path a lot earlier than I thought. >> How about this conference? I know you have been the other M I T. Event. How about this one? How we found some of the key takeaways. Think you >> think it's been great because a lot of the conferences we go to our really sports focus? So you've got the M. I T Sports Analytics conference. You have seat. You have n b a type, um, programming that they put on. But it's nice to get out of sports and sort of see how other bigger industries are thinking about some of the problems specifically around data management and the influx of data and how they're thinking about it. It's always nice to kind of elevated. Just have some room to breathe and think and meet people that are not in sports and start to build those, you know, relationships and with thought leaders and things like that. So it's been great. It's my first time here. What are probably back >> good that Well, hopefully get to see a game, even though that stocks are playing that well. Thanks so much for coming in Cuba. No problems here on your own. You have me. It was great to have you. All right. Keep right, everybody. I'll be back with our next guest with Paul Gill on day Volante here in the house. You're watching the cue from M I T CEO. I cube. Right back

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. (upbeat techno music) Brought to you by Actifio. >> Hello everyone and welcome to Boston and theCUBE's special coverage of Actifio Data Driven 19. I'm Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. We've got a special guest, John Furrier is in the house from from Palo Alto. Guys, theCUBE we love to go out on the ground, you know, we go deep. We're here at this data theme, right? We were there in the early days, John, you called me up and say, "Get your butt here, we're going to cover the first of Doop World". And since then things have moved quite fast. Everybody thought, you know, Hadoop Big Data was going to take over the world. Nobody even uses that term anymore, right? It's kind of, now it's AI, and machine intelligence, and block chain, and everything else. So what do you think is happening? Did the early Big Data days fail? You know, Frank Genus this morning called it The experimentation phase. >> I mean, I don't really think Frank has a good handle on what's going on in my opinion, cause I think it's not an experimentation, it's real. That was a wave that was essentially the beginning of, not an experimentation, of realization and reality that data, unstructured data in particular was real and relevant. Hadoop looked good off the tee, mill the fairway as we say, but the thing about the Hadoop ecosystem is that validated big data. Every financial institution jumped on it. Everyone who knew anything about data or had data issues or had a lot of data, knew the value. It's just that the apparatus to build via Hadoop was too expensive. In comes Cloud computing at scale, so, as Cloud was accelerating, you look at the Amazon Web Services Revenue Chart you can almost see the D mark where the inflection point is on the hockey stick of Amazon's revenue numbers. And that is the point in time where Hadoop was on the declining of failure. Hortonworks sold the Cloudera. Cloudera's earnings are at an all-time low. A lot of speculation of their entire strategy, and their venture back company went public, but bet the ranch to be the next data warehouse. That wasn't the business model. The data business was a completely new industry, completely being re-transformed, and, far from experimentation, it is real and definitely growing like a weed, but changing because of the underpinning infrastructure dynamics of Cloud Native, Microservices, and that's only going to get highly accelerated and the people who talk about context of industry like Frank, are going to be off. Their predictions will be off because they don't really see the new picture clear enough, in my opinion, >> So, >> I think he's off. >> So it's not so much of a structural change like it was when we went from, you know, mainframes to PCs, it's more of a sort of flow, evolution into this new area which is being driven, powered by new technologies, we talk about block chain machine intelligence and other things. >> Well, I mean, the make up of companies that were building quote, "Big Data Solutions", were trying to build an apparatus or mechanisms to solve big data problems, but none of them actually had the big data problem. None of them were full of data. None of them had a lot of data. The ones that had problems were the financial institutions, the credit card companies, the people who were doing a lot of large scale, um, with Google, Facebook, and some of the hyperscalers. They were actually dealing with the data tsunami themselves, so the practitioners ended up driving it. You guys at Wikibomb, we pointed this out on theCUBE many times, that the value was going to come from the practitioners not the suppliers of so called technology. So, you know, the Clouderas of the world who thought Hadoop would be relevant and growing as a technology were right on one side, on the other side of the coin was the Cloud decimation of that sector. The Cloud computer just completely blew away that Hadoop market because you didn't have to hire a PhD, you didn't have to hire specialty skills to stand up Hadoop clusters. You could actually throw it in the Cloud and get agile quickly, and get value out of data very very quickly. That has been real, it has not been an experiment. There's been new case studies, new companies born, new brands, so it's not an experiment, it is reality, and it's only going to get more real every day. >> And I add of course now you've got, you mentioned Cloudera and Hortenworks, you also got Matt Bar reeling Stu. Let's talk about Actifio. So they coined the term Copy Data Management, they created the category, of course they do a lot of backup, I mean, everybody in this space does a lot of backup. And then you saw the Silicon Valley companies come in. Particularly Cohesity and Rubric, you know, to a lesser extent he got some other guys like Zerto and Durva, but it was really those two companies, Cohesity and Rubric, they raised more money in their D round than Actifio has since inception. But yet Actifio keeps, you know, plodding along, growing, you know, word is they're profitable, you know, they're not like this really sectioned very East Coast versus kind of West Coast mentality. What's your take on what's going on? >> Yeah, so, Dave right, you look at the early days of Actifio and you say great, Copy Data Management, I have all these copies of data, how do I reduce my cost, get greater utilization than I have and leverage the data? I love the title of the show here, Data Driven. You know, we know at the center of digital transformation if you can't become data driven, like the CMO Brian Regan got up on stage talk about that industrialization of data. How am I going along that journey being this, I collected data versus now, you know, data, you know, is the reason that I make decisions, how I make decisions, I get smarter. The Cloud of course is a huge enabler of this, there's all these services that I can instantly access to be able to get greater insight, and move along with that environment, and if you look underneath all of these backup companies, it's really how I can change that data into business value and drive my business, the metadata underneath and all those pieces, not just the wonky storage and technical solutions that make things better, and I get a faster ROI. It's that data at the core of what we do and how do I get that as a business to accelerate. Because we know IT needs to be able to respond back to the business and data needs to be that rocket fuel. >> Is it the case of data haves and data have-nots? I mean, Amazon has data >> I mean, you're right-- >> and Facebook has data. >> We're talking about Actifio, you brought that up, okay, on this segment, on the inside segment, which is cool, they're here at the event, but they have a good opportunity but they also, they got some challenges. I mean, the thing about Actifio is, to my earlier point, which side of the wave are they on? Are they out too much out front with virtualization and Amazon, the Cloud will take them away, or are they riding the Cloud wave, making that an enabler? And I think what really I like about Actifio is because they have a lot of virtualization capabilities, the question is can they scale that Stu, to containers and microservices, because, the real opportunity in this market, in my opinion, is going to build on the virtualization trend, and make container aware, microservices capabilities because if they don't, then that would be a tell sign. Now either way it's a hot M&A market right now, so I think being in the market, horse on the track as you say. You look at the tableau sales force deal monster numbers we are in clearly a hot IPO market and a major roll up market on the M&A side. I think clearly there's two types of companies, old and new, and that is really what people are looking at, are they part of the old guard, are they the new guard. So, you know, this to me is going to be a tell sign of what they do next, can they make the data driven value proposition, you articulated Stu, actually a reality It's going to come from the technology underneath. >> Well I think it's a really interesting point you're making because, Stu as you probably know, that Amazon announced the Amazon backup service right, and you talked about the backup guys and they're like, "Ah yeah it's backup, but it really doesn't do recovery, it's really not that robust". It's part of me says, "Uh oh"... >> Watch out. >> You better move fast", because Amazon has stated, "Hey if you don't move fast we're going to just keep gobbling", and you've seen Amazon do this. What are your thoughts on that? Can these specialists, can they survive, John's talking about M&A. Can the market support all these guys along with the big, you know, traditional guys like Veritas, and Dell EMC, and IBM and Combol? >> Right, well so Actifio started very much in the data center. They were before this Could wave really took off. It's really only in the last year that they've been sassifying their product. So the question is, does that underlying IP, which wasn't tied to hardware, but, you know, sat at really more of, you know, reminded us of that storage virtualization battles that we talked about for years, Dave, but now they are going in the Cloud. They've got all the partnerships in the Cloud, but they are competing against those new vendors that you talked about like Cohesity and Rubric out there, and there's big money chasing this environment. So, you know, I want to talk to the customers here and find out, you know, where they are using them, and especially some of those first customers using this--. >> Well they clearly need a Cloud play cause that's clearly where the action is. But if you look at what's going on with Amazon, Azure, and Google you see a lot of on premises, Stu, because that's where the customers are. So just because the customers are currently not migrating their existing workloads to the Cloud doesn't mean it's not going to happen. So I think there's an opportunity for any company like Actifio, who may or may not be on the curve on the tech side, one little misfire on a tech bet could cripple the company and also make the company. There's a lot of high risk, reward ratio. How they handle containers. How they build on virtualizations. Virtualization going to to be part of the future with Cloud. These are the kind of the dynamics that are going to be in play, and they got some time on their hands because the on premises growth is because the clients are trying to figure out what to do and they're not going to be migrating, lifting, and shifting workloads all off to the Cloud. New will be Cloud based, but enterprises have proven why we are in multi-Cloud and hybrid-Cloud conversation, that... The enterprise on premises is not going away anytime soon. >> I want to ask you guys, John you specifically, about this sort of new Silicon Valley growth model and how companies are achieving escape velocity. When you and I made our first trip to Barcelona, I was having dinner with David Scott who was the CEO of 3PAR and he said to me, When I came to 3PAR the board said, "Hey we're willing to invest 30 million dollars in this company". And David Scott said to them, "I need way more, I need 80 million dollars". Today 80 million dollars is nothing. You saw, you know, Pure Storage hit escape velocity, was just throwing money, and growing at the problem. You're seeing Cohesity-- >> Well you can debate that. I mean, If you have to build a rocket ship, hit critical mass and you want to fund that, you're going to to need an enterprise. However, there's arguments on the south side that you can actually get fly wheel effect going early with less capital. So again, that's 3PAR-- >> But so that's my point. >> Well so that's 3PAR, that was 2009. >> So, yeah that was early days so that's ancient history. But software is generally supposed to be a capital efficient market, yet these companies are raising many hundreds and hundreds of millions, you know, half a billion dollar raises and they are putting it largely in promotion. Is that the new model, is that sustainable, in your view? >> Well I think you're conflating capital market dynamics with viable companies to invest in. I think there's a robust seed in series A market but the series A market and Silicon Valley is you know, 15 to 25 million, it used to be 3 to 5. So the dynamics are changing on funding. There's just not enough companies, horses on the track, to deploy capital at tranches of 30, 50, 80 million. So the capital markets are clearly going to have the money available so it's a market for the startups and the broke companies. That's separate from actually winning. So you've got slacks going public this weeks, you have other companies who have built business on a sass fly wheel, and then everything else is gravy in terms of the go to market, they got a couple hundred million. I think slack got close to a billion dollars in cash that they've raised. So they're flooded with cash, they'll never spend it all. So there are some companies that can achieve success like that. Others have to buy market share, they got to push and build out a sales force, and it's going to be a function of the role of customer, customization, specialism, and whatnot. But with AI machine leaning there's more efficiencies coming in so I think the modern company can do more with less. >> What do you think of the ride sharing on IPOs, Uber and Lift, do you abol? Do you like 'em or do you think it's just, they're losing too money and can't sustain it? >> I was thinking about that this morning after looking at the article in the Wall Street Journal in our coverage on Silicon angle. You look at Zoom communications, I like models that actually can take a simple concept and an existing mature market and disrupt it by being Cloud efficient and completely sass and data driven. That is an example of success. That to me, Zoom Communications and Zscaler, another company that we talk to, these are companies that were built with a specific value proposition that made the product and they were targeting mature markets with leaders in it. Video conferencing, Webex, Citrix, Zoom came out of nowhere, optimized on simple value proposition, used Cloud scale and data, and crushed it. Uber, Lift, little bit different issue. They're losing money but I would bet on the long term that that is going to be the used case for how people will have transportation. I think that's the long game and I think that without regulatory kind of pressure, without, there's regulatory issues that's really the big risk. But I believe that Uber and Lift absolutely will be long brands and just like Facebook was early on, although they threw off a lot of cash, those guys are building for penetration, and that's where the funding matters. Penetration is critical. Now they're the standard, and people really don't take taxis anymore, but they're really using the ride sharing. And you get the scooters, you get the bikes, they're all sequencing into these adjacent markets which drains more cash but builds the brand, builds the footprint. >> Well that's what I want to ask you. So people compare the early Uber, Lift, Taxi, Ride sharing to Amazon selling books, but there's all these other adjacencies. You have a thought on this? >> Well, just, you know, right, Uber Eats is a huge opportunity for that environment and autonomous vehicles everybody talks about, but it's still quite a ways out. So there are a lot of different- >> Scooters are the same, we're in San Diego, there are 8 gazillion scooters. >> San Diego had fun, you know, going around on their electronic scooters, boy, talk about the gig economy, they pay people at the night, to like go pay by the recharge you do on that, what is the future of work, >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> and how can we have that-- >> Uber going to look a lot like Amazon. You subsidize the front end retail side of the business, but look at the data that they throw up. Uber's data that they're gathering on, not only customer behavior, but just mapping services, 3-D mapping is going to be huge, so you've got these cars that are essentially bots on the road, providing massive mapping and traffic analysis. So you're going to start to see data driven, like Actifio slogan here, be a big part of all design decisions and value proposition from any company out there. And if they're not data driven I think they're going to be toast. >> Probably could because there's that data and that machine learning underneath, that can optimize, you know, where the people are, how I use the system, such a huge wave that we're watching. >> How about one last topic which is heavily data driven, it's Facebook. Facebook is obviously a data driven company, the Facebook crypto play, I love it, I love Facebook. I'm a bull on Facebook, I think it's been beat up. I think, two billion users is hard to replicate, but what's your thoughts on their crypto play? >> Well it's kind of a middle finger to the United States of America but it's a great catalyst for the international market because crypto needed a whale to come in and bring all those users in. Bad timing, in my mind, for Facebook, because given all the anti-trust and regulatory conversations, what better way to show your threat to the world order when you say we're going to run a banking system with a collection of international companies. I think the US is going to look at this and say, "Oh my God! They can't even be trusted to handle personal information and we're going to now let them run a banking system? Run monetary, basically World Bank equivalent infrastructure?" No frickin way! I think this is going to to be a major road to home. I think Facebook has to really make this an ecosystem play if they want to make it work, that's their telegraphic move they're saying, "Hey we want to do for the community but we got our own wallet and we got our own network". But they bring a lot to the table so it's going to be a really interesting dynamic to see the coalescing around Facebook because they could make the market. Look what Instagram did to Snapchat. They literally killed the company, took all their users. That is what's going to happen in the digital money economy when Facebook brings billions of users user experience with money. What happened with Snapchat with Instagram is going to happen to the World Bank if this continues. >> Where do you stand on the government breaking up big tech? >> So Dave, you know, you look in these companies, it's not easy to pull those apart. I don't think our government understands how most of big tech works. You know, take Amazon and AWS, that's one company underneath it. You know, Facebook, Microsoft. You know, Microsoft went through all these issues. Question Dave, we've had lots of debates on Twitter you know, are they breaking the law, are they not doing trust? I have some trust issues with Facebook myself, but most of the big companies up there I don't think the anti-trust kicks in, I don't think it makes sense to pull them apart. >> Stu, the Facebook story and the YouTube story are simply this, they have been hiding under the platform rules, of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and they are an editing platform so you can't sue them. Okay, once they become a publisher they could be sued. Just like CNN, Fox News, and everybody else. And we're publishers. So they've been hiding behind the platform. That gig is up. They're going to have to address are you a platform or are you a publisher? You're making editing decisions around what users can see with software, you are essentially editing the feed, that is a publisher role, with that becomes responsibility, and then obviously regulartory. >> Well Facebook is conflicted right now. They're trying to figure out which side of the fence to go on. >> No no no! They want one side! The platform side! They're make billions of dollars! >> Yeah but so they're making decisions about you know, which content to show and whether they monetize it. And when it's controversial content, they'll turn down the ads a little bit but they won't completely eliminate it sometimes. >> So, Dave, the only thing that the partisans in politics seem to agree on though is that big tech has too much power. You know, What's your take on that? >> Well so I think that if they are breaking the law then they should be moderated. But I don't think the answer is to go hard after Elizabeth Warren. Hard after them and break them up. I think you got to start with okay, because you break these companies up what's going to happen is they're going to be worth more, it's going to be AT&T all over again. >> While you guys were at Sysco Live, we covered this at Amazon Web Service and Public Sector Summit. The real issue in government, Stu, is there's too much tech for bad on the PR side, and there's not enough tech for good. Tech is not bad, tech is good. There's not enough promotion around the apps around there. There's real venture funds being created to promote tech for good. That's going to where the tide will turn. When does the tech industry start doing good stuff, not bad stuff. >> All right we've got to wrap. John, thanks for sitting in. Thank you for watching. Be right back, we're here at Actifio Data Driven 2019. From Boston this is theCUBE, be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network: Insights from Entrepreneurs and Tech Leaders. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here for a special conversations part of Mayfield's 50th anniversary People First Network. This is a series of interviews from fault leaders around entrepreneurship, and insights. Manish Chandra, who's the CEO, Co-Founder and CEO of Poshmark, a very successful company. A serial entrepreneur that I've known for many, many years, going back to his early startups. Great to see you, thanks for spending the time today. >> Thanks for having me, John. And it's great, we were just talking about our early days when you were doing your podcast, and me, I was doing a social shopping company back then, was it, 2006? 2005 timeframe, a long time back. >> Pioneers have arrows on their back, as they always say in entrepreneurship, but if you look at the time when we were doing startups, over 14 years ago, social sharing, democratization; these were the buzzwords. This was the wave that we were all trying to ride. When 2008 hit, it kind of took the water down a little bit. But still the game didn't change, a rise comes Facebook, Twitter, social, multiple channels. The consumer's expectations changed a lot in that timeframe, and I want to get your thoughts because you've had two successful companies, Kaboodle and now PoshMark, with almost 40 million users, billion dollar valuation, hundreds and hundreds of employees, got like a hundred openings in your company. You're ramping up and you're scaling. But the expectations of users has changed. What are some of those dynamics in your business that you're seeing? >> I think the biggest sort of, uh, culmination or ignition point for social platforms came with the advent of mobile. And uh, early days of mobile were crude days, but you know, if you look back at the advent of Poshmark, sort of the idea of Poshmark reignited in my mind in 2010, and iPhone 4 had just come out. It was a couple of months after Instagram had started. And SnapChat had not even started yet. And what, I think, mobile platform did, especially with the high quality platform like iPhone 4 was, it made the process of content creation, consumption, and sharing so fast, and you finally had the device that could produce it, that uh, it just kept accelerating. And now, in the days of, you know, iPhone Excess Max and what have you, it's just so easy. At the same time, the speed expectation, the transparency expectation, and the velocity of expectation has gone up, and so what we've seen in Poshmark is, day one, our users were spending somewhere between 20-25 minutes in the app. And here today, we have billions of users, and they're still doing that same thing, so that level of deep immersion that you see is sort of unique to the mobile paradigm. >> I want to dig into the user expectation and the experiences that you're delivering. But before we start, take a minute to explain Poshmark; what you guys are doing as a core business, how it's evolved. >> So Poshmark, very simply, is a simple way to buy and sell fashion and other sort of style-based paradigm, we call it a social commerce platform because it really brings together users in a unique way. But it really allows anybody to build a business starting with their closet all the way to opening up a full-brand, wholesale engine on the platform. We provide all of the infrastructure, you know, shipping, payments, technology, and you have to bring in your inventory, so we don't touch inventory, but everything else we handle for you. >> So you're really helping people, enabling them to be successful with the ease of use; heavy lifting. >> Heavy lifting. >> It's kind of like Amazon. You don't need to provision anything, just kind of get started. E-Commerce in the era now of Google, Amazon, and Cloud technology, you see the rise of all the scale. How are you riding that trend, because that's a tailwind for you? And what is that doing for the user's expectations, I mean, I have four kids, I see them all online, they never use their laptops, except for homework, but they're on the mobile device, they're doing new things, this is the new expectation; what are some of those expectations? >> In our business, which is the business of fashion and style, what it means for people is, number one is, if they see something. Whether they see something on Instagram, or something on SnapChat, it needs to be instantly shoppable, right? And that obviously benefits a platform like us, which makes easy access to all of the different brands and things that are developing. At the same time, what social media's also doing is making the obsoleting of your products very fast, because once you've used it, you've, you know, posted a picture, you want to be able to not consume it again. >> You've been seen wearing the same outfit, I can't wear it twice! >> Exactly! And so we make that easy as well. And then the third thing is, uh, everyone is a content creator, everyone is a seller, everyone is sort of participating in this economy; people are hosting AirBnB guests in their home, people are selling on Poshmark, and the reason is because phone, and sort of this new mindset of collaboration and social makes it very easy for people to participate, so they want to be able to sell, but they don't want any hassle in that process. And so the new consumer expectation is instantaneous, deeply immersive, and constantly changing, and if you can't satisfy all of those things, then it becomes harder for you to scale. So you have to use technology, the physical world, and sort of the emotion all in the right mixture. >> One of the things I know that you're passionate about, and we've had this conversation, we feel the same way, certainly, at theCUBE is, role of community. And I see a lot of companies these days, whether they're saying we're doing an ICO using tokens to, um, getting a big bag of money from venture capitalists, oh yeah, our key strategy is to build a community. You can't buy a community. You've got to really win the hearts and minds and provide value, and you really can't, and build trust. Talk about the role of community for you guys, especially in the stylist world, where you have all this, where style's involved, a very robust community. How did you do it? How did you foster a community, and how did you nurture it? And how has that played out for you guys? >> So community is a foundation of Poshmark. And community's our value, not just our customer, but also what we are, and uh, community is what I'm more passionate about, even more passionate than fashion; and that was sort of, in my previous company, the thing that was really highlighted for me. And so we did it very slowly, actually. During the first year of our company, we only had a hundred users, but these hundred users were immersed. And then we went from a hundred to a thousand. Then thousand to five thousand. But very deliberately and slowly. So the end of the first 18 months of our company's life, we had maybe ten thousand users, right? And then we went from ten thousand to 300,000 in the next seven months, then we went from 300,000 to 12 million in the next two years. And today we went from 12 million to 40 million in the next few years, because, once you have sort of figured out how the community is created, it can scale very fast, but the early days if you compromise in how the community is being created, it's very powerful. For example, in the first, probably, eight or nine months in the company, I answered every single customer service email. And today, I probably interact with 80-100 customers directly everyday. Really keeping the pulse in sort of servicing. And service and love are sort of two of our core values, and it is very important that's built into the system. The second thing is, the community has to be authentic. You cannot fake a community. Which means, there is conversations that will happen in the community, there is, which may be antithetical to what you think is your brand, but if you don't let that authenticity happen, then what ends up happening is the community sort of withers away, because people are not going to tolerate anything inauthentic. The third thing, as you mentioned, is trust. And so from day one, we created not just trust in the way platform was built, but also in the economics. So day one we said, hey, if you're going to be part of this platform, there's two things that you're going to pay for; one, is, as a buyer, you're going to pay for shipping, and as a seller, you're going to revenue share with us, and we're not going to charge you any other money. Nothing. And so we shared, started from day one, a 20-80 partnership with our sellers, and today, here we are six or seven years later, and we have the exact same partnership. On the buyers, we started by charging them $7 for shipping, today our shipping is $6.49, at that time our shipping was 3 pounds to 5 pounds. Everything was priority, today everything is priority. So in six to seven years, if you think of any other marketplace in the world, not just in the country, how many times have they raised their fees? How many times have they changed their paradigm, changed their shipping paradigm? For us, it was very important. In the early days, it felt, people were saying, why are you charging so heavily? I said, I don't want to charge anything different tomorrow that I'm charging today, and by the way, there's no additional fees we've ever imposed on the platform, so, we don't have any marketing fees, any promotion fees, any credit card fees, and so that trust that's created ultimately leads to a lot of loyalty. And so today, you see our consumers growing, our users growing, and every single cohort we have continues to grow in revenue more like SAAS businesses, as opposed to e-commerce businesses. And that, to me, is the power of community if you do it right. >> And that's an interesting point. There's a lot of things you said in there, I think, that are worth doubling down on. One, I just want to highlight it, if you're creating value, and you're certainly scaling, passing that down in cost savings, and reducing cost and adding value, that's a secret formula. You see, we know one company that does that really well: Amazon! And that's worked. And they recognize the value of keeping people in there engaged, and so I think that's almost a take away for anyone watching is that if you're not adding value and reducing the costs while you're scaling, you're probably doing your math right. >> Absolutely. >> The second thing I want to talk about, and get your reaction to is you know about community and slowing it down at first. That's almost counter-intuitive. The, almost the answer is put the pedal to the metal, let's get some numbers; you took a different approach. You decided to take your time. Was that to get a feeling for the community, build the trust, understand the dynamics? Talk about why you went slow at first. >> The key is that the first two, three years, you're perfecting a lot of things, right? You have to make sure things are getting right. And in the first year, it was all about getting the product right, right? Then we scaled. Then we quickly realized that that scaling was breaking everything, was breaking our shipping system, was breaking our technology's office; I actually, Mayfield, which was an early investor in Poshmark, was on the board, and I went to my board, and I said you know, I'm actually going to slow down growth by 60%. And if you can imagine a venture board hearing that from their CEO, in the early days, it's challenging. >> It's a tough conversation. >> Yes. But I think one of the things that I value about Mayfield and my early investors is their focus on partnership, at a people level, a human level, with me. And uh, trust, and so we actually cut down our marketing budget by 80%, filled out the systems, got the partnership with USPS where we created the country's first fashion shipping label called Poshpost, and built up our technology and infrastructure, built out our payment partnership with BrainTree and Paypal, and by sort of, early-to-mid 2014, we started scaling and have never stopped. And in fact, I had told my investors early on, that first two or three years of building this business will be challenging, so hopefully you are prepared to go on this journey with me; but once we build it, it will accelerate. And what you see with us is, the business continues to accelerate every quarter, and we are seeing hyper growth, six, seven years into the business, which is even faster than the growth we saw in the first few years. And part of it is that, network business, which are built around true sort of networks, continue accelerating and connects later on in the process, but if you haven't created the right foundation in the early days? They fall apart. >> I think that's a lesson that entrepreneurs can learn, because you got to go slow to go fast. In Cloud based businesses where you have network effects, if there's a crack in the foundation, it can come crumbling down. >> It can come completely crumbling down, and it did, I mean, there were times in 2013 when people were literally doing things and just, the data would get lost in other things. We had to fix many of those, the broken pieces. We had USPS come to our offices and say hey, either you pay us a multi-million dollar fine or we have the right to arrest you. We had to renegotiate our contract with them. There's a bunch of things that happen in that scaling, and you hear things like blitz scaling and stuff these days, and their great terms, but at the same time, if you don't fix what's broken, you can't build that super scalable business. >> You got to be ready to blitz scale. As you know, Reid Hoffmann's famous channel, Masters of Scale, points out, which, by the way, is a great program, but, if you're not ready, you can crash and burn big time. That's a good point. You know, I have conversations a lot with a lot of senior people, one of them Theresa Carlson, who runs Amazon Web Services Public Sector Cloud business, she talks about doing the hard work upfront. And, you know, she's using public sector, so you have to get those kind of certifications, it sounds like this is a lot of things that you had to do. How did that test your entrepreneurial spirit? I know you, and you're hard-charging, but you're pragmatic and we can see that. But taking the time to do the work can sometimes test the patience of the team and the entrepreneur themselves. What's your reaction to that? >> Um, I would say that, you know, when we started Poshmark, the mission was that can we serve a hundred million people. In the country, you know, not even around the world. In our way we have 40 million people. From day one what we saw was deep engagement in the platform, because of the level of usage we had, because of the level of, sort of, activation we had, we knew we were on to something. I'll share a small episode with you, which convinced us that we've touched a deep nerve within the community is, in May of 2012, we were barely, you know, six, seven months into our app being launched in the public space, and we had maybe five or ten thousand users. At that time, we were adjusting our shipping for the first time, and uh, literally we announced the, we had launched the product with a small discount on the shipping, we were going to take it back, and we just said, you know, we're going to take it back. We got 200 plus emails which ranged from, you know, you're going to take away my entire set of clothing, and my entire business and we barely thought we were even launched, and so we knew we were servicing something very deep. That commitment to servicing the community where you are, really helping people at a deep level, allowed us to ride through these crazy ups and downs. And there was a point of time we went along the valley, even though we had the initial funding, in the mid stages of it we got over 200 rejections in the paradigm; sometimes multiple by the same investors. And so, it was definitely not a smooth ride in the middle of building this company. But that sort of passion for community and what they were experiencing kept us going. >> Let's talk about People First and venture capital. And one of the things I'm impressed on with this program we're doing with Mayfield is, and theCUBE has newer effect as well in the community, it's a people-centric culture. We lived through the social media early days when social and democratization was happening. More than ever now, you're seeing the role of people, because we're all connected. So there's rapid communications, there's frictionless, for people to yell and/or raise their hand and give accolades as well. So you have now a social dynamic with the fabric around the world. People can transact and communicate, complain, you know, applaud. This is changing everything. How is that change your outlook on life, because you have to recruit people, they want to work for a company that's people-centric, they want to work for a mission-driven company. These are the new dynamics we're starting to see in this generation; how has People First impacted your core mission? >> So for me, life is all about people. This company's all about people. We serve people, people is one of our core values. And my connection with Mayfield, which is through Navid, started back, actually, in my previous company. At the very beginning of that journey, '04/'05, uh, and we tried to partner up but the timing was never right, so when we were starting Poshmark, Navin was the first one with a term sheet, even before he'd sort of seen the business idea. And to me, that was a huge belief in me and the team I could put together. And I have the same sort of feelings about the people we bring on into the company, where uh, many of my team members here, including two of my co-founders, were involved with me in Kaboodle. One of them was a co-founder in Kaboodle. The first 20, 30, 40 people, I think, in the company, are still here seven or eight years later. They were people who are now playing very senior roles in the company, where they've gone through their ups and downs and we are always behind, two or three people left and we recruited them back into the company. So I think at the end, life, anywhere, but particularly in today's world, is so much about people and relationships. And it's the same thing we did to our community. I mean, uh, we just finished our sixth annual user conference, which was six times bigger than our first one. What was amazing was, they were so many people who were there in the first conference who had been coming to all the six conferences, and they are now like mini-celebrities in the community. And so, it's just amazing to see how a focus on people can be both rewarding at a business level, but also very gratifying at a personal level. >> It's nice to see you hit that tipping point. Congratulations on your success, it's great to see. You're a great entrepreneur. I want to ask you the question around funding, because I know, we've both been through venture capital fundings, we've been through this point building this great company you run now, and you've actually hit massive growth to a whole other level, your challenge today and going forward. This is, given it's Mayfield's 50th anniversary, you've seen a lot of changes in venture capital. A rounds used to be A rounds, now there's B and pre-C, there's all kinds of nuance, and now you have alternative funding now and global landscape you're seeing block chain and cryptocurrency, although ICO's have taken a bath because of the regulatory issue. Issues around regulation, some scams out there, actually. But venture capital's been tried and true. What's changed in venture capital the past 25 years in your view? >> I think, two things, which have happened, particularly in the last seven or eight years is there's a lot of it. And secondly, it favors the mighty more than the weak. And so, those are sort of the two big changes that have happened in the venture capital business. I think you were just mentioning is the people I used to work with, a whole range of investors, are now investing in post-growth stage funds. I mean, the same company. So everyone is sort of leveled up and leveled up and then leveled up, you know? You see venture capitalists raising two, three, four billion dollar funds; I mean, that's not venture capital, there's no way you can deploy that at the venture stage. A company is staying private much longer at different scales, which I think is probably more sort of a sign of the times. And finally, I think, it is the metrics and the scale that your business can achieve, that these are obviously very aware of, is an order of magnitude bigger than it has ever been. In fact, sort of, in some ways, unicorn, being the unicorn is uh, as sometimes as people joke, sometimes an insult. You need to be a deca-unicorn these days. So the feeling of not being enough is constant. >> And that's challenging, too, for the venture industry, because, you know, there's still the classic building blocks of entrepreneurship and venture architecture, which is, you start with an idea and you get a prototype, and certainly it's easy to get on the Cloud computing certainly, a great win for the entrepreneur; so I can see maybe some acceleration. But at the end of the day, it's still the classic blocking and tackling with building your company. >> Yes. >> Building a durable company. >> Absolutely. And you and I have both seen the '98, '99, 2000 timeframe, you know, everyone believes nothing repeats, and, you know, we certainly see, maybe not exactly the same thing, maybe it's an order of magnitude less, but there's definitely some level of exuberance we see today. But if you're building a fundamentally good business, that has robust economics, that can scale, and is based on foundational principles, with a large sort of market, I don't think that we are wrong in terms of deploying massive amounts of capital up against it. But at the same time, um, I think it also creates certain socioeconomic, as well as responsibility challenges, that I don't think we are fully facing up to, as an economy, and as a Valley. >> You've raised over a hundred million plus, so you have done some funding. A lot of funding, you have a lot of cash you've raised. When you had to go through those exercises of looking at the fundraising, 'cos, you don't want it to die on the mind, you're building a durable business, you have to go through multiple rounds of fundings. What were the key decision points for you as you started to look at this fundraising process to build your business? >> See, in the early days it was literally just about survival, I mean, there were times where I ran the business on negative balance sheets, right? So it isn't that it's been easy. I was only, I would say, the last funding round was the one that was easy, where we got multiple term sheets proactively, and the first couple of them. In between--. >> When things are scaling things are great, you know? >> In the middle of it, every single round was effectively zero to one term sheets. Every single time. We were lucky to have Mayfield as a partner, and some of our early investors like Inventus and Menlo who sort of supported us through each of these pieces of the journey. Mayfield as an anchor point. But it was really, really hard. And part of it is that, what we were doing was challenging, so many things still are, that even to process our cohort data is hard. Do you think of it as used, do you think of it as buying, do you think of it as selling, what is it? It looks like a bird, but it moves like a plane, you know? What is it? It's Superman or Superwoman, right? So that being a challenge, uh, only in the last round did we have the freedom, we could raise no money, some money, all of the money, and um, most of the focus for us, for that capital, was really to have the deep pockets that would be required for global expansion. We had actually scaled the business, at that point in time, that we didn't need too much money for domestic expansion. And in fact, not only have we not touched any money from that round, we have not touched any money from the previous round, so far; most of the money from the previous round. And so, again, part of it is you need muscle to compete in a bigger world, but at the same time, if you build a fundamentally sound business, then over time you can scale with or without money. >> And you got SAAS, sellers and service, and network effects booming and great community. That's a great tailwind for you guys, for sure. >> It is a phenomenal tailwind, and in fact, um, I was just in my management team meeting this morning, and I said, you know, we are growing, but we can grow even faster at this point, because the level of network effect we are seeing in the community is an extraordinary effect, where there's sort of second order; our community is opening up Instagram accounts to promote Poshmark to sort of go out to YouTube, so there's sort of this wild, organic movement that's happening across the country, which is just bringing out a whole different level of growth that we've ever seen. >> Yeah, there's a whole new dynamic it seems. It's interesting, I'm seeing, and not a lot of people writing stories about it are documenting it, but Masters of Scale has a whole different perspective, but no one's really talking about something that you guys are touching upon, and we're seeing it in our business. Creating an environment that has network effects, and community, and good content in this case, product for your end. Um, creates a flywheel. And what's interesting is, in this new era of people who can create value, with the ability to capture it, is really a unique formula, and I think this is the new kind of management discussion. Certainly lower prices, increased value, that's an Amazon effect. That's a, lacking the words, good example, well-documented, you do that, you're good, you're doing it, but now you have the ability for people to create value. Who can then capture it. This is almost a whole 'nother big wave. Your reaction? >> I think the power of people today is at a very unique level, right? And it can go in the negative direction, but when you harness it from a positive perspective, it's phenomenal. And to me, you know, we've started added a fifth core value recently, is that at the end, the true happiness comes from service of others, right? And if you service everyone, in our job, you're servicing our community, who's then servicing other people, and that creates an amazing sort of paradigm. And if you remove the conversation of money, because it's taken care of, it's built into the platform, then it just keeps sort of circulating. And I think that's something that people underestimate. And one of the things that you, you know, you see is that, for example, open source software, right? You start by focusing on community and then it becomes all about money, and then you forget about the community and you see many of the larger open source companies slow down, because they forget the fact that what brought them there was the community. And to me, I think--. >> If they get greedy, the project's fail. >> Exactly, exactly. And so, the hardest thing at scale to balance is how do you make sure that you're still focused on the community? >> Great stuff! Final question for you. You know, these days, with venture capital, the question always is, where's the value at? Talk about your experiences with Mayfield, and what differentiates a value add versus a value subtract investor? When should an entrepreneur feel it? What's the tell signs of someone's got a value add, and partner is not? >> I think, I think Mayfield is so aligned in so many ways with our core values, which is focus on people and focus on service, that it's just been an amazing partnership with them. You know, even in our lowest moments, I knew that we would get funded; I didn't know how it is, because I knew that Navid and Mayfield would figure out a way, so I never sort of worried about the capital after I brought in Navid and saw him in action for a year and a half. And if you're a venture capitalist, you need to provide capital! And forget about any of the services, many VCs fail that one task, which is to provide capital when you most need it, right? But beyond that, it's been a great resource. I mean, I met my co-founder through Mayfield. Tracy and I were first introduced via Mayfield. Many of our recruiting of the top executives have come from Mayfield, but they're always available as a sounding board across the pieces, so I do think that they take their service paradigm to a whole new level. >> And they support you, too, right? The support's there? >> Support and they have an HR partner who's helped, I think, with some of the recruiting issues, hiring the recruiting partnerships, et cetera. PR, other areas as we needed it. Somebody that you could call on, too, even if it was just talking about searching for a general counsel, and Mayfield has been great, even in that. Help, at this late stage of a company, so it's fantastic. >> It's a great network; people, value, paying it forward. Manish, thanks for coming on, sharing your insights, here as part of theCUBE's 50th People Network with Mayfield. Thanks for sharing your experience. >> Thanks for having me! It's been a pleasure and joy to see you after so many years as well! >> This is theCUBE here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield for their 50th Anniversary as a Venture Capital Firm, sharing insights and ideas from entrepreneurs, and tech executives. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching! (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back, here on theCUBE, along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls and now we're joined by Peter Nichol, who's the CEO of Instaclustr. Peter, good to see you this morning sir. >> Thank you very much John. Nice to meet you. >> and Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub. >> Good to see ya. >> Good morning Todd. >> Good morning. >> First off, let's just talk about what the two of you guys do or specifically what Instaclustr does and PubNub. Peter, if you would. >> Basically at a high level, what Instaclustr does is, we help customers to build applications that have to scale massively in a reliable way. Massive scale means terabytes or petabytes of data or even more. Reliability means the application has got to be up and running all of the time. The way we do that is, we focus on technologies in the data layer and we allow companies to essentially outsource the management of those technologies to us. So they can focus on building their application, which is what they do best, and we focus on taking a lot of the complexity away, which is helping to manage the technologies in the data layer. And the technologies that we focus on are basically in the area of storage, search, messaging, and analytics. Those technologies are Cassandra, for storage, Kafka, for messaging, Spark, for analytics, and Elasticsearch for search. We can manage all of those technologies, in any of the cloud providers, including AWS, and essentially this allows customers to outsource that and focus on their core business. We've got some great customers, PubNub being one of our best customers, a hot startup in Silicon Valley, and we're really proud to have them here with us today. >> So Todd, >> Thanks Peter. >> if you will, give us the PubNub story. >> PubNub is a company that provides a global network, which is infrastructure for real-time applications. What's a real-time application? When we started the company six, seven years ago, we made this realization that, the world was moving from applications that sort of requested data when they needed to, you know, you pull up social information, you wanted to see where something was, you ask a question, to ones where things were constantly moving and changing. So devices were emitting data and consuming data all the time. Uber was launching and everyone wanted to see where their taxi was now. Chat applications were getting big inside, dating apps and B to B apps, and B to C apps, and on top of that IoT was exploding and people needed a way to control devices and turn lights on and off. And all the infrastructure that existed at the time, didn't really address these real-time use cases. So these companies were building that stuff themselves. So PubNub launched this thing we call a Data Stream Network, but it effectively does three things. It allows you to connect to devices and leave an always-on connection over the internet, to deliver data bidirectionally to those devices. Real-time message signaling in under a quarter of a second, and then control that data going back and forth, so being able to provide logic. That core infrastructure, that sort of connect, deliver, control, powers everything from Peloton exercise bikes to Symphony Investor chat applications, athenahealth doctor, patient, nurse, kinds of collaboration and lots of IoT companies, from Logitech Harmony to Samsung smart refrigerators. Across the board, it turns out, our infrastructure has been the key to making these real-time experiences come alive. >> So you had this moment, and startups usually do, they have, you hope you do, they reach a tipping point, right, of success And things work great and you hit a boiling point (laughs) in a way, a few years back, to where things were working almost too well, and that's how you got in to Instaclustr. Tell us, give me that story if you would, or share that with our folks watching. >> Yeah absolutely, you know, it's funny, I was talking to someone recently at Amazon, at AWS, who said we rarely talk to a company your size that actually is doing more traffic than AWS is and we discovered we were doing more than twice as many messages, these control signals we talked about, around our network, more than twice as many as the world's global SMS traffic. We were doing close to 50 billion of these messages per day. So as you can imagine, that's not a simple infrastructure. We store that data, we process it, we route it, we do all these things and in one of our storage layers, built on Cassandra, we were really struggling with the expertise needed to scale this thing at the size that we needed to scale it. And we hit a tipping point about two years ago, when we realized we really needed help and we needed help immediately. We had a lot of outreach to a lot of companies, including the company themselves that had created Cassandra. But once we stumbled on Instaclustr, it was like, you know, the clouds parting, right? All of the sudden we had folks from Instaclustr on with us 24 by 7, helping us migrate, helping us move to a more stable and scaled infrastructure and we've had this ongoing relationship ever since. We now have them managing a lot of different uses of Cassandra within PubNub. >> Yeah, so, infrastructure is, (stammers) sorry, Instaclustr is built on all these open-source technologies you mentioned, like Cassandra and Spark and Kafka, but what made you choose those technologies? What was it that was attractive about them that said, you know what, this is what we want to base our company on? >> Customers are always basically looking for three things, and I think Todd summed it up very well in his business, it's basically all about scalability. If your business is successful, you want to be able to scale massively as you get more and more customers. The second thing is reliability, which means the applications have got to be always on, always up and running. The third thing is performance, which is all about latency and speed and feed and all that type of thing. We chose Cassandra because it is one of the most popular, highly scalable data bases. It's used by Apple and Netflix and big companies that have got millions of customers. We generally pick technologies, based on those three criteria, but we also focus on open-source only, for two reasons. Number one, open-source doesn't involve expensive license fees, so customers don't get locked in with expensive license fees and number two, open-source provides a degree of flexibility, cloud independence, so if you don't want to be locked in to a specific cloud provider, and you want to keep your options in the future, choose open-source. >> Okay, that's a pretty compelling sort of argument there and certainly I think the world has discovered that open-source is totally a thing that we should all be using. I'm old enough to remember when open-source was verboten and you shouldn't be using it and now it just seems to be everywhere. What is it about Instaclustr that makes you special though, because open-source, anyone could use it. I could go and download it >> Yep, yep. >> for free tomorrow, so maybe I could attempt to steal PubNub's customers, steal your customers away. So clearly that's not going to be possible for me to be able to do tomorrow. What is it about Instaclustr that you've invested in this company that makes you so special, that means that PubNub was able to rely on you? >> Right, so I think the main thing is, we have 100% of our focus on operations, not on developing proprietary IP, which we sell, which is the typical software model, we take the open-source software and we actually manage it for our customers. Basically what that means is, if they want to use Cassandra, they go to our website, they go to the customer portal, they choose the cloud provider they want to use, they choose the technology they want to use, what regions do they want to run in, what size is their cluster? They press a button and everything else is done behind the scenes by us. We do the provisioning, we install the software, and from that point on, we're managing it 24 by 7. So instead of, for example, PubNub having to build their own team for each one of these technologies, they can outsource it to us, we can do it much cheaper and we can get them to market much faster, if we're doing our job right. It's all about the operations. We can do it much cheaper and faster and that's our main advantage. The other advantage is we manage all of these different technologies in the data layer, which means that customers have one vendor they can go to, to manage several different technologies. It's all heavily, highly, integrated from one vendor. That's a big, rather than having five different vendors to manage five different technologies, we provide the complete platform. >> So Todd, what does this mean for you, now that you have this partner that you can rely on and that you can trust? What does that change for the business? What has that enabled you to be able to do now that you can look forward to saying, you know what, we can do this to grow our business. >> Well that's a good question. Like Instaclustr, we operate PubNub. Customers pay us, not for our technology, but for our ability to operate our technology at massive scale. And we provide five nines SLA, which is a fancy way for saying, if we have an outage for more than 26 seconds in a month, we provide credits back to our customers. That's a really hard, high bar to fill. And so philosophically, we see ourselves as an operations company ourselves, right? And so we're very careful about who we would bring in to the fold as part of operations, right? And so it has to be an organization that has the same security levels that we do, SOC 2 Type II Compliance, has the same understandings and philosophy around operating things at high availability, and can do it in a way that we feel like, you know, in many ways is a part of our team and not some vendor that we don't know how to get on the phone. Not some vendor that we don't really trust, right? It has to feel like it's part of our company. So really it's only been Instaclustr that we've been able to develop that trust around. And so it is actually in all of us to sort of focus on areas where we can do more innovation while keeping the five nines SLAs at 26 seconds minimum, you know, maximum, of issues any month, but allow us to focus a lot more on innovation and not on the things that, frankly, Instaclustr, as far as we can tell, is best in the world at, which is really operating this infrastructure, the Cassandra piece. >> And what do you want to take on then? You told about innovation. If there's an area of your business, you say alright, this is where 2019, where I want it to take us, what would that be? >> It's a great question. One of the big changes for PubNub, was that we built our initial business on the backs of other startups and it was great. We got to some level of scale by powering a lot of innovative interesting applications that were themselves trying to be the first real-time this and the first real-time that and the first real-time the other thing. And then about two years ago something happened, a year and a half ago, that need for real-time, for having things update in real time, inventory, prices, chat applications, moving things on a map, seeing where your trucks were, that went mainstream, and now even the largest app companies in the world, if they release any kind of application, whether it's a business application or a consumer app, if it doesn't have that same real-time experience like an Uber or like a Snapchat, people kind of look at it and say, well this feels like it was built 20 years ago, right? And so what's happened to our industry, has been the moving of the need for this real-time experience, into the mainstream. Now that's been great for us, but it also means as we are selling to a larger and larger group of, we call mainstream larger enterprise customers, the way we package our product, the way we make it consumable by larger companies, make it easier to deploy our product, make it easier to understand and adding features that round that out, is really the core of our focus right now. Is really being able to appeal to those larger companies. We already have the scale, in fact, we recently participated in an event which was the Guinness Book of World (stammers) Record's largest online event in history. And we powered the source in India for Cricket, we powered the largest social interaction, over 10 million people synchronously going through our network, all in one virtual environment. So we know we can scale this thing beyond any existing human need and now it's really about making sure it's accessible to the world's largest companies. >> So it was cricket in India? >> Yes, yes. >> I would've thought it was the Justin Warren fan club, but I guess not, I (stammers) second online, right? >> Yeah, probably. >> There's a lot of people in India who love cricket, and they all have mobile phones. >> Yes, well gentlemen, thanks for being with us, Peter, Todd, continued success and then thanks for being here on theCUBE. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> Thank you so much, it's been a pleasure, thank you. >> We continue live coverage here from Las Vegas. We're in the Sands. We're here all week at AWS re-Invent. (calm digital music)

>> From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here for a special conversation on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield's 50th anniversary, part of their People First Network. I'm here with Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of Moat, now with Oracle, sold their company in 2017, entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks for having me, John, excited to be here. >> So we're talking before you came on camera. You've been an entrepreneur since you were a small kid doing all kinds of hustles and side things. What's happening with you now? Obviously, you sold your company in 2017, part of Oracle. Oracle not known for the entrepreneurial activity, but you brought that company in, still goin' on. Give us an update. >> So I started Moat back in 2010. Like you said in 2017, Oracle decided to make us an offer, and we decided to sell our company. And it's been frankly exciting for me to be part of a company that has a 40-year history in Oracle. To have a company that has played a pretty pivotal role in Silicon Valley. We're sitting here right in the heart of Silicon Valley, and to be a part of a company that I think is... So important to the future development of software and databases and hardware. I think is interesting and exciting. And certainly not the path that I thought I would be on, but I'm excited to be here today. >> It's always nice to have an entrepreneurial success the level you guys had. Great exit, the numbers that was reported almost close to a billion dollars in value to Oracle, sorry, the company you started. But you got a unique journey. You started with your brother. Was in New York. Take us through that journey. What were some of the things that you did? And how did it get started? What was the main drive? >> Sure, so I got to take us back a little bit. So I've been in business with my brother, Noah, for 20 years. So we started a company in the late 1990's when I was an undergrad at Cornell. And the Internet was going crazy. E-commerce companies were going public. And the first of everything was starting, the first Internet credit card, the first of x, y, and z, fill in the blank. And so we decided, sort of haphazardly at the time, that we would start a business. And we started by helping companies acquire customers using the Internet. And so we really built, I think in sort of looking back on it now, it was somewhat of a marketing agency but at the time we were building-- >> What year was that? >> This is '98, '98, '99. >> So sort right in Internet boom. Things are going crazy. >> Things are going crazy. We're in college. We were building email lists. We were essentially trying to figure out how do you tell stories and advertise online, but we didn't know we were doing that. We were just trying to simply make some money. I was working for $5 an hour at the Computer Center in Ithaca, New York at Cornell, and I didn't own a computer. So I'm sitting there. Part of the reason I worked for the Computer Center was 'cause I got 24-hour access to the Internet and to a computer. And so we started our first business there. And things went really well almost out of the gate. So '98, '99, and then 2000 happened. And 2001 happened, and the world changed. Business certainly changed. The so-called sort of bust of a lot of, I think, the ideas that people had. I think people realized that there was going to have to be real business that were built. And eventually those businesses were built in many cases. But I think it didn't happen the way that people expected. And we were certainly surprised by it. We were 21-year-old, I was 21 at the time. My brother was two years older than me. And so we had this business that was going really well, and then we sort of ran off of a cliff. And so were profitable, growing, on top of the world, and then hit a challenge. And it was one of the first business lessons that I really learned back in 2000, 2001, which is that you have to have something that is sticky. That's going to be able to stick around through the tough times. It can't only work when things are going up. It can't only work when people are spending money. And so we learned a lot of lessons about how do you build a long-term sustainable business. In 2002, someone that we had done business with for a couple years called me. And he said, "I'm going to start a new business. "And I think there's an opportunity to build a business "to trade digital advertising and to do it more effectively "and efficiently than has been done to date." This guy said, "I think there's something to be done. "I think now is the time to do it." My brother and I decided to partner with him. We decided to write a check to become his first client and to help him start a company that he started in 2002 called Right Media. Right Media ended up becoming a big success. It was the first big ad exchange. The first platform to trade digital advertising inventory. Yahoo! ended up acquiring the company in 2007. And so we were sort of on our way as entrepreneurs slash now investors, but enter the world of 2008. Once again, the economy changes. The world changes. And we start to think, "Alright, maybe when the market "goes down, when everything crashes, maybe that's the time "to start thinking about starting a new business. "Maybe when competition dries out a little bit "it's the right time to get back into building companies." And so Noah and I, my brother and I, decided, "Alright, let's go start a new business." And we got started with Moat in 2010. And it's been a pretty fun ride. >> And how long did you work on Moat for? How many years? >> So we started in 2010. We spent a year or two trying to figure out what we would do. Really got started in earnest in 2010. Raised, invested the initial amount of money ourselves through myself, and Noah, and our third partner, Mike Walrath, the guy from Right Media. And in 2011, raised the friends and family round. 2012, we're fortunate to get Mayfield to invest. And at that point was when our business really took off. So we ran the company from 2010 to 2012 with zero dollars in revenue. Mayfield invested in us when we had zero dollars in revenue. And things started to go off from there. So from 2012 to 2017 when we sold the company, we built a pretty sizable SaaS business. >> So interesting experiences as to Mayfield, no revenue, that's the way they like it. Like to build businesses. Take a piece of the action. You also did that early on. But I think what's interesting about your story, and I want to get your thoughts on this is that entrepreneurs sometimes they hit a wall and sometimes they can't get back up. You hit multiple kind of market timings. I'll say the bubble crash, 2001-2002 time frame. You mentioned 2008. Seeing transitions is a big part of having that entrepreneurial antenna, if you will, having a feeling for the market, knowing what the wave is, when to start, when to invest, invest in down markets. As you grew from that first venture and you're on top of the world, college, that first crash, how did you figure out the market transition kind of dynamic? What was, did it jump out at you? Was it just scar tissue? What was some of the feelings there? >> Yeah, I mean my view is that so the market changed, and we had all these expectations about our revenue was going to continue to grow forever, and our profits were going to continue to grow forever. And when the market changed and outside dynamics changed our business. This is Colonize. I'm talking about our first company. All of a sudden we went, "Uh oh, what do you now?" And I think it was more having lived through that experience that we said, "Alright, we need to figure out "when we build businesses, how do we build them "to be sort of fool-proof? "Or as much fool-poof as we can be. "How do we have something that's sticky, sustainable, "that can't simply be turned off with the ebb and flow "of the market?" And I think it, for me, taught me something which was you need to build something that's long-lasting. Something that is not driven by market conditions. If your business is driven by external market conditions, that should be a big signal that there's potentially a problem, 'cause if those conditions change you're going to be in a tough spot. And so we decided then and there, "Alright, we need "to really build businesses that are here for the long run." We sat on the board of Right Media, helped start the company, but we didn't operate it. Mike ran this company, and we watched. We watched very closely and carefully, and he did something else that was interesting. It's that he learned how to story tell. He learned how to think about where we were going as a business in Right Media not where we were. And so I combined, with my brother, these two themes. Sustainable, sticky business with storytelling. Think about where you're going not just where you are. And I think as we created Moat, we thought, "Alright, how do you actually turn that "into a long-term business?" And part of the way you do it is by trying to project forward, trying to think, "Alright, not what are we doing today? "But where are we going into the future?" And that really became a critical part of product development, a part of our vision, of where we wanted to be as a business. And I think it was a critical part of our success. >> What can other entrepreneurs learn from that? Because I think I see a lot of entrepreneurs here in Silicon Valley and around the world, now that entrepreneurship's kind of gone global, is they get stuck in with dogma and like, "We got to make this work." And sometimes they might not be self-aware that they might have to just take their head up and look around and get a feel for what's goin' on around them. What's your advice for those guys? >> I think you have to be honest with yourself. You know, as an entrepreneur, in your heart of hearts is what's happening to you real? You know, you should know I think, whether or not what's happening to you is because of some conditions, because of one customer that's doing something that's good or bad, or because of a broader trend or a broader movement. I try to ask questions about not just what does it look like a year from now or two years from now or three years from now? I think about the world ten years from now. What do I know to be the case ten years from now? I think this is something that Jeff Bezos talks about. Which is what do you for sure know is going to be the case with your business ten years from now? If you can plan towards that, you can build something that's sustainable. And so we knew ten years from now marketers are still going to want to reach people. They're still going to want to story tell. They're still going to want to measure how effective it was to actually reach those people. And so we knew that wouldn't change. What might change are the mechanisms. How they reach people, how they story tell, what platforms they do it on, whether it's Facebook or Snapchat or Pinterest or whatever the next new platform is, that may change. But the fact that marketers will need to reach people won't. And so we felt really confident that ten years from now that's going to still be the case. And I felt if you know that then you can build towards this vision and so-- >> Medium and the channels are all going to change all the time, but the stories need to be told. >> That's right, and interestingly, I think that when you start a business you come up with a theme. You come up with a vision. And so for us it was how do marketers tell their stories increasingly in a world that's digital? That's not something that's going to change overnight. And I felt like over the long haul that's not going to change very quickly. Increasingly we're going to be digital consumers, and marketers are going to have to tell their stories. Now the business that we started at Moat in 2010 ended up changing dramatically. We started a crowd-sourced creative marketplace. We ended as a measurement and analytics company. Pretty different place from creative. The vision was still the same. The vision was still about helping companies, marketers, tell their stories in a world that's increasingly digital. And if you look at successful businesses, they tend to have the same vision from when they started. Now the underlying business may change. Hopefully, the underlying business iterates and finds the right path, but the overall, the high level of where you're going ideally doesn't change. And I think that's part of the key to success. >> That's a great point. I think, I always get in a debate here among entrepreneurs and investors. The word pivot versus adjusting. When you have a North Star or a mission, you just got to kind of tack with the wind and make it a tailwind not a headwind versus a full pivot which might be, "Hey, there's no business here. "We have to do something different." Can you talk about the nuances between what a pivot is? And how you find that tailwind, the wind in the sails if you will, for the entrepreneur to hit that vision? >> Yeah, so first of all, any successful business that I've ever seen never starts off how it ends. In other words, there are always iterations that go through. Pick any company that you can think of right now. They've iterated. They've started off with one theme, and they've gone this slight different path. So I would argue that every good business is going to iterate. Now whether you want to call it a pivot or not, I think is more nomenclature or semantics. My view is you're going to iterate. They key is having that North Star. So in ten years, what do we believe to be the case? Forget about what do we believe, what do we know to be the case? What do we know this is going to be the case ten years from now? And if you're right about that then it can qualify as your North Star. By the way, if you don't know ten years from now this is going to be the case then maybe that shouldn't be your North Star. Maybe that shouldn't be the guiding light for your business. Once you get that part right then it almost frees you to be flexible. It frees you to say, "Okay, so if the world's moving "this way or that way, I'm going to adjust." One of the things that I learned from Moat was actually somebody gave me advice early on. They said, "Go have a thousand meetings. "Go have a thousand meetings in your industry, "in your category. "Go meet with every single person in the business." And I did that. It took me probably 18 months, but I went out and met with everyone who would take my meeting. What I learned from that is that in the B2B world we have an advantage. You can talk to your customers. Your customers will literally tell you, "Here are the issues we're having. "Here are the things we're trying to solve for. "If you can help us solve for this, we will pay you money "to provide a service to us to actually solve this problem." And so I learned, "Wow, that's pretty amazing!" If you actually meet with enough people, you get a sense of the market. You get a sense of what people are buying. You get a sense of the trends. As my oldest brother says, "The world kind of slows down "a little bit." Markets move in slow motion when you really get into it. And so if you go out and have a thousand meetings in your industry, you actually learn what's happening in that business. And you can tweak your business accordingly. I walked away with Moat feeling like if you're not in a meeting talking your story, telling your pitch, telling your vision, and they're not nodding their head going, "Yep, yep, yep, 100% on the same page." Then you're not in the right place. >> I love that comment about slowing the game down. Reminds me of baseball batters up there slowing that game down, watch that ball come in, really slow. And I think that's good advice because you want to slow it down. You want to make sure you're kind of capturing the right things that's happening at the right time, not try to go too fast. >> That's right. Things don't happen overnight. I think oftentimes when you're not in the industry, and you just read the headlines, you think, "Oh my God, that's crazy that this thing happened "and that thing happened!" When it's your space, it doesn't move quite that fast. There's work that has to be done. Contracts that have to be put in place. You see it evolving. And so I always tell people when you want to get to know an industry, read every single piece of content there is about the industry, read every article that comes out about it, and take as many meetings as you can possibly take in the space. And it'll slow down. It'll move at a pace that you can kind of go, "Got it! "It feels like if we do this and this then we can actually "start to build a business here." And again, I think there's a bright line test in B2B if you walk into a meeting and you start telling your story, and you're not getting the nods, and you're not getting the, "Yep, yep, yeah, "that's an issue for us." If that's not happening, then you're not in the right space. Doesn't mean your North Star is wrong, but it means you got to iterate a bit. >> You got to find your groove. I want to change gears a little bit and talk about this People First Network concept that I love because you hear, "Mobile first, cloud first." And the notion of people first, we live in a very social world now, you're seeing a lot of stuff happening where we're connected now almost with digital 100%. Everyone's kind of got mobile even in emerging countries you got connections. Yet there's a lot of new dynamics emerging on the social scene and checking around you're well-known for networking. You're known for connecting with people certainly in your area and beyond. And so there's two things I want to get your thoughts on. One is networks. Who to work with. How do I make decisions on? How do you want to spend your time with other entrepreneurs or other peers? And social entrepreneurship, there's a lot of emphasis around mission-driven things. These are people dynamics where you're starting to see the role of the relationships between people start to take a really important role in entrepreneurship not just, "Let's hire and fire fast." Certainly some basic business knowledge that's common sense. But as you're starting to see this next generation of entrepreneurs emerge, there's an eye on social, mission-driven, but spending time with the right people. What's your thoughts on that? >> So first of all, businesses are about people. In the end of the day, you want to do business with people that you like, with people that you trust, with people that you want to hang out with. That was one of the lessons I learned somewhat early on, and I think it's critical. Businesses are not automated. Businesses are about, "Alright, a group of people "come together with a shared idea of what they can do. "And they can hopefully go support a group of other people "who are trying to get their vision done." And so once you realize that, you realize it's about people. You want to build relationships. You want to build connections. You want to figure out, "Alright, how can I help people? "And hopefully with good karma something will happen "in my favor at some point." And so I always operate under the idea that you just try to do good, you try to help people, and hopefully as a result, good things will happen. In terms of social entrepreneurship what I would tell you is that having a mission that you feel deep down inside of you that is not just, "We're going to make money. "And we're going to deliver on behalf of shareholders." Yes, of course that's important. But when you wake up, and you go to work or you get online, you want to feel something for it. You want to feel like, "Alright, this is something "that I feel good about doing." When you do that, when you know that you've done it right, it doesn't feel like work. It doesn't feel like a job. It feels like you want to wake up, and you can't get enough of it. And I think that's when you know you've done something right. So I think the more that we can lead mission-driven businesses, mission-driven lives, the better that will be. In the end of the day, I think that life and business converge. I think in the end of the day when you do it right, it doesn't feel like work, and it doesn't feel like you're working or not working. It just feels like you're trying to do good, you're trying to help other people, and hopefully good things happen. >> Great stuff. The thing I love about digital is you start to see that blending of analog and digital where lives are now part of each other. If you could go back and be 18 and 20 again with all the tools that we have out there now, open-source at a whole new level, you have everyone's connected, what were some of the things that you would do? If you had to go back and talk to your 18-year-old self going into Cornell with your brother, a lot more on the table to play with. Certainly, it's easier to do ventures, easier to come up with ideas, maybe more lean. What are some of the things that you would do if you were in your 20's? >> Yeah, I guess if I went back I would tell myself to make big bets and make them on where you know the future is going to be ten years from now. I think oftentimes, particularly when I was a young entrepreneur, you were living day to day or week to week where you were going, "Alright, we need to get this thing done by this day "so that we can do this tomorrow." And so we need to fly and stay up all night and end up eating and sort of doing things that are not the best sort of health-wise in order just to try to get things done or what you thought would just get things done. I think I would play a longer game, and I would encourage myself to think about, "Alright, what do I know to be the case "ten years from now and how can I focus on that?" If we go back 20 some years, two or three of the biggest companies in the world were really created in Amazon, in Apple, in Google. And I think the opportunity existed back then. So if I could go back to my-- >> You'd buy some Apple stock for sure. (laughs) >> I don't know if I would bought Apple stock, but certainly I would've made longer term bets. What those companies do that I think is phenomenal is they think about where the world's going not where the world is today. >> I think that's great advice. And it's interesting, too. You go back, and you always, everyone has those experiences in life where they would say, "I could've been there "or there." Looking forward is the key. And I think one of the interesting things about your journey is you had the time in college, make some money, put some dough in your pocket. Then you go out and you have some cash. You make an investment. You ride the wave with Right Media, and then you go the venture-backed startup. Talk about the dynamics. Specifically the venture-backed startup, because now the dynamics are changed. I mean, hell, I might go do an ICL and suddenly get subpoenaed if I did that. But you got all kinds of new opportunities to get funded, either to venture capital, either with Mayfield. Different venture architecture there you mentioned, no revenue, but funding to go build it out. What was different about doing a venture-backed startup versus the other ones? >> Yeah, I guess what I would say is first of all we have to step back and realize that when we're in these industries, we have a hard time understanding what they're doing. What venture capitalists do is just what any money manager does. They're doing allocation of capital so that they can get returns for their investors. And so in the end of the day, they're trying to make bets. Now the bets that a venture capital makes are different from someone who's buying public equities for sure, but the same sort of ideals are there which is they want to make bets on the right companies, on the right people so that they can drive profits and returns and hopefully make a difference. In the case of Moat, we were really impressed by Mayfield. We were impressed by the way that they approached the conversation with us, the way that they leaned forward. I tell entrepreneurs when you have venture capitalist meetings if three out of ten of them go well, you're in the Hall of Fame. It's like baseball. Most of the time you're not going to get that perfect chemistry. You're not going to get that feeling where, "Ah, there's something interesting here." The other thing I tell entrepreneurs is if they're not leaning forward, if they're not going, "You know what we could do? "We could do this, this, and this. "I could connect you with so and so. "We could build a business doing this. "You should think about this." If they're not doing that, they're probably not the right fit. I think about it. I'm happily married for many years with four kids. When you meet your spouse you tend to know that that's the right person. If you have to go home and say, "Alright, why don't you "send me some reasons to try to justify "why you might be the right fit for me," maybe that's not the right spouse. I think it's the same thing with venture capitalism. You ultimately want to have chemistry. Again, it comes back to people. And so Mayfield I think does a really good job of thinking about people and putting people first in that conversation. >> And it's also a team environment almost because you want to have a spouse and a venture partner who's going to be there for the good, bad, and the ugly. >> That's right. >> And be there. And that's, I think a lot of people don't get that. They want the valuation, "Oh, I got a better deal." There's no better deal when you look at the long run impact of potentially making the wrong decision. >> One of the first things that Navin Chaddha from Mayfield said to me when I first met with him is he said, "This is going to take you seven to ten years "to build this business." And I thought, "Wow, that sounds like a long time!" >> I'm going to do it in three. >> Yeah, that seems crazy. (John laughing) But he was right, and one of the things that he said to me after they invested and we had gone through a couple quarters of working. I came in and I actually had pretty high expectations of what we could do as a business. I said, "Well, if we really push the accelerator "I think we could do this number instead of this number." And he said, "Relax. "We have plenty of time. "Don't try to knock it out of the park, "and you'll make mistakes if you do that. "Just try to deliver on the numbers that you think "you can deliver realistically. "And focus on building the business." And he was right. Having that approach is smart. It's not about, "Can I make this work next quarter?" It's about, "Can I make this work over the long run?" And I learned a lot in that process. >> Well, Jonah, I really appreciate the conversation. You're an inspiration to a lot of entrepreneurs out there. And congratulations on all your great success. I guess the question is what's next for you? You got that ten year vision. What's going to happen in the next ten years? Which wave will you be riding? >> Well, I think, increasingly, we're going to live in a connected society where data is information, and data is knowledge. And I think for me I'm excited about a future world where will we use more or less data to make decisions. I think more. Will we make smarter decisions over time? Hopefully smarter decisions over time. Will we be able to catch diseases earlier? I think so. Will we be able to leave longer lives? I think so. And so some of those things end up being themes-- (no audio) >> Great, Jonah Goodhart, at Oracle now, first a founder, entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur, here as part of theCUBE's People First Network series. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(tech music) >> Live, from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our live coverage here in Bahrain for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Summit here in the Middle East in the region. Our first time here, lots of observations, lots of learnings, and also great people we're meeting. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Our next guest is Mohammed Ali Al Qaed, who is the Chief Executive of the Information E-Government Authority, also known as IGA. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, thank you for hosting me. >> Saw you last night at dinner. We were talking about all the opportunities. So the first question I have to ask you is, as you guys are bringing in the digital transformation, which is happening, you now have Amazon here with the region, how is that changing things? >> Of course, always we try to innovate, and the technology, if you don't innovate, if you don't make sure that you are ready for the changes coming, it is very difficult. When we announced our first strategy in 2007, we delivered it in 2010 becoming the leader in the region, delivering 200 services over four channels. But as you mentioned, usually in the technology, the longest cycle is the infrastructure and servers and configurations, buying things and configuring. And with the leadership vision of transforming the country the vision 2030, transformations happening in the judicial system and to the commercial legislations and to the customs and to health and education, the pace of change required and the ambition is very much, much higher. And particularly, when you develop something and you were successful. So our leaders say, we are a bit slow. We need to fast things up. So then we looked into the Amazon and the cloud. How it can help us. And usually, in Bahrain, we don't have the luxury of trial and error. Trying things and if it works, you know, try multiple things. So we have to study it well. This is why we looked into the cloud, what it can bring to the country, the agility, the time to market. And when we put the strategy forward, it was a comprehensive one. The leaders decided to go cloud-first policy. Everybody should move. Because that's the way forward, that's the way that the Kingdom can deliver its vision-- >> And the cloud-first decision, when was that made? >> That was last year. And, when it was made, it's not a piece of strategy. You have to look at it in a comprehensive way. >> Yeah. >> You have to look into your laws, legislations, compliance, >> Yeah. >> audits, architectures, unit policies, skills sets available, the procurement process, the tendering process, and you have to review all of that-- >> Yeah. >> and make sure that there is no show blockers or barriers for the implementation. Otherwise, it will take a long time. >> Yeah. (chuckles) >> This is why, in a year's time, we managed to migrate huge workloads to the cloud. >> We were talking last night about how hard it is just to figure out the future, never mind provisioning all the gear you got to do, and the training, and so this cloud-first is very interesting. But I also want to just tell you that we talked about, also, how hard it is. So when I say, oh, go cloud-first, it's so easy! Right? No, it isn't. There's a lot of work involved. >> Yes. >> Take us through some of the things that you guys have done, your learnings prior to cloud-first. And the key learnings now that cloud-first has been under your belt for over a year. >> Of course, always with the governments, the biggest challenge will happen about the security. How I am going to move losing the control, putting my processing and storage outside the government. How I'm going to protect it, somebody else is there. That's the biggest challenge. That's number one. Number two, people doesn't understand, they think it's processing. So okay, I have my processing power, I will save some money, that's not much. >> Yeah. >> But they don't think about the ultimate goal. About the time to market. >> Yeah. >> When you have a new vision, when you have a new service to be delivered, you cannot wait for 18, 24 months for the infrastructure-- >> Yeah. >> Getting there, idle for a couple of years until you know the full utilization of them. So this is why the ultimate goal is much, much bigger. >> Yeah. >> And the thing about the issue, of somebody else, looking into-- >> So speed is critical. >> Yeah. >> And you guys have speed under your belt. You did a Formula One racetrack in what, 14 months I heard, very fast construction. The Amazon region is going up in record time. Is this a cultural thing? Just go fast? People like speed? The need for speed? >> We like that, you know the Formula One, of course that's just part of our DNA. Our leaders always push the citizens. And that's the Bahraini culture. >> Yeah, the other thing, too, about the application, now to get back to our serious conversation, to have innovation, you need to have software development go on in a way that's not the 24-month, oh we built it, and you don't know if you tested it or not. But you got to built the dev-ops model infrastructure as code. How far along are you on the infrastructure as code? Because the developer side is going to be very great. >> [Mohammed Ali Al Qaed] Yeah. >> Amazon's proven that developers love it, easy to get going, lower cost to test, agility, time to market, time to value. The setup for you guys is a little bit different. You've got infrastructure as code-- >> Yeah. >> You're not a startup. But you want to act like one, but what are you going to do for the infrastructure? >> Of course, the infrastructure in terms of processing, that's easy because it's been migrated, most of it's been migrated, our ports, our channels, our mobile channels. >> The networks, you have 5G, do you have 5G here yet? >> We are already experimenting, ready for it. The frequency's already freed up for the telco's to utilize them. It's already there for the 5G. Of course, fiber is everywhere, all the government entities are connected to the fiber. High speed, we have 100-meg, we have a gig, we have 10 gig, we have all kinds of speed available. >> No problem for bandwidth in the country. >> I don't think so. We don't have an issue about the bandwidth. And the processing power, once moved, then the optimization, which already happened. But as you mentioned, coming to the development, we started already, developing into the serverless, using the lamdas, using born-in-the-cloud concepts, that was not there once we started. But now we are already educating and training our employees. >> What's the reaction to it? >> The reaction is excellent. I give an example today about the fingerprint authentication. That's a basic service, but it requires a huge demand return from all the telco's, all transactions happen in telco's, private hospitals, the banking are coming. >> Yeah. >> Any authentication happens, it has to happen in a second. >> Yeah. >> So that requires a huge, massive infrastructure. Once we built it, at the beginning, for only a few customers-- >> Yeah. >> we invested about 250,000 dinar at that time. Now, I think, it's being moved completely to serverless-- >> Yeah. >> Concept, a new development. >> Yeah. >> So... >> A simple idea, hard to implement in the old way, but the new way, you got to wire API's around, sling API's, and connect devices, telco's, environments quickly. So this brings up the integration, this is the benefit of the cloud. >> [Mohammed Ali Al Qaed] Exactly. >> The glue layer is, what, microservices? Is it API's? How are you making that lambda function...? >> You know, that API's, and, just, you call the service and it gets you online and you go back to the storage. I mean, a basic thing. >> Yeah. >> Initially, you know, you need a testing environment, a development environment, a lot of infrastructure, and then you have to secure all of that, secure your data. >> Yeah. >> Now, it's a fraction of that cost and much faster to go to market. >> I'm a huge believer in the services model, and this is why microservices is a big deal right now in clouds, if you look at all the cloud-native conversations, it's containers, we're using it, no problem, very good to use containers. They're great. Kubernetes, now, orchestration. But deal with state and stateless applications is now the new challenge because there are so many new services that are spinning up. Soon, you're going to be like, ordering McDonald's, you know, I'll have a microservice over here, so this is the world we're moving to. This is the services. >> Exactly. And we would like to build a center of excellence, you know? Because we get into this journey, we looked into all our legislations and the ecosystem, trained our employees, their skillset is very important, with the program, with Tamkeen. We looked into the training strategy, all the portfolio training, making sure that our Bahrainees have the ability to develop, to operate, databases and all aspects, even the planning of it. Then institutes, partners, to be ready to train the private sector and everybody. >> You know, Mohammed, I'm really impressed with the entrepreneurial people that I've met. They've got a good mojo to them, because they're kind of cocky, which I love about them, but they're not arrogant. They're like, they're smart, and I so I got a... I see a good community there. The question for you is, as you move to cloud-native, how is that transition? The young kids get it. I mean, it's no problem. >> Yeah. >> Where's the progress on the skillset gap? I've heard that conversation. I just don't see it being a problem if the young kids are eating up the cloud stuff like it's nobody's business. >> Yeah. >> Then I don't see a problem. What's your take on this skills gap thing? I mean, the guys I met, and the entrepreneurs, they're like, they want more action. >> Exactly. The point is the current employees that we have already. Hundreds of government employees that have been trained in a different environment with different technologies. I get a couple of questions from some of the professionals in the market, private sector and government sector: how we can benefit out of that? How we can help? We are experts in the field, but cloud for us is a new thing. So as you mentioned, for them it might be a bit more difficult. So what we did, and the IGA, we created a taskforce of the most brilliant team, and told them okay, you have to migrate the workloads, train, we'll give you the training, and you have to migrate. >> Go. >> Next, you have now to optimize. Give the task of migration to somebody else, a new team, and the old team, they have to optimize. Third, now you have to work on, bore on the cloud, develop on the cloud, create the environment of the cloud, a new concept. So that's how we take-- >> So you're spreading the work around through hands-on training? >> Of course. You train, and then you get them into the action, hands, on, and so on, one by one. But, eventually, the university's already working on training their students. So we want to make sure that part of the curriculum, the cloud is there for the new generations to take it from day one. >> You know, you guys are a learning culture, my observation, first time here, very impressed. Very friendly, which is always cool. But, it's a multilingual culture. So, if you add source code to the new lingua, coding is going to be critical. Are you guys getting at the younger generation really when they're young? How young are you going in terms of the new language, software... Thoughts on that? Where do you see that going? >> Starting from school-- >> Elementary school? >> From elementary school, trying to get them in to coding. Universities as well. >> So you are teaching kids to code? >> Of course. And you know, any citizen they can get any certifications free of charge, according to the agreement with Tamkeen Labor Fund. They are willing to train any Bahrainian on any certifications, professional certifications, free of charge. >> That's great. >> To be ready for the next, and making Bahrainians-- >> So there's no excuses. >> Of course. >> There it is. >> We want to give Bahrainians a choice for employment. >> Yeah. >> You know? If that's the future, we have to make them ready for the future. >> That's great. And the cloud's going to give you all that energy. Talk about the relationship with Amazon a bit, Amazon Web Services. Obviously, Teresa Carlson, really behind this, the whole team. I talk about the whole company, I see them getting behind this and partnering with you guys. They're not just coming in here and being Amazon. There's a real co-development ethos. Talk about the relationship you have with... >> Amazon is impressive. I mean, the way that we work, in a partnership way, everybody should think about the long-term, not the short-term part of the partnership. That they should help the economy, the Bahrainis for employment, making sure that the economy will benefit out of this move to Bahrain. And as well, we have to help with the registrations, with the regulations, with any infrastructure connectivity to the international links. Whatever they need, we try to help them because we believe that eventually it will create the ecosystem for the market. >> I know they open up a lot of doors for you guys, and then for us as well. They attracted us to come and cover the territory here, so we're super excited. And I'm so glad we came because I learned a lot. >> Thank you. >> It's been fantastic. Okay, your big idea... Final question. What's your big idea that's going to come out of the cloud? It doesn't have to be the complete... Your idea, in your personal opinion, what is going to happen five years down the road? What is it going to look like? What will this new magic look like? What's the outcome? >> I think it will be a major restructure and reform in the government. So most of the people working into the routine work of buying and configuring, buying and configuring, they can be more focused into the real problem about the innovation, trying to bring solutions to the problems and issues in the country. Trying to develop software that will help the economy to foster, and to look at what is required, what is the vision of the leaders, try to implement those. So most of the people think business. Before, it was isolation. The technical people only, they had their territory, their environment looking at the wires and hardware and configurations, and somebody else looking into the development and a third group of people who are looking strategically, analytics, and how to utilize it. So, I think what we'll have, we'll merge those people, thinking only about the solutions, and how to analyze and how to come with new solutions out of those analytics. >> And that model has been consolidated, those silos have been broken down. With the cloud, it brings it all together. Developers are now on the front lines. >> Of course. And those-- >> And they're driving the business. >> They're driving the business. >> Mohammed, great to have you on, great to see you. Thanks for sharing your insight. And congratulations. Looking forward to tracking all the great coverage. Amazing opportunity here for everyone in the country, and also for Amazon and for us. Great to meet new people. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. 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