>>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco, where all the developers are the bay air at Silicon valley. And of course, eights summit in New York city is coming up in this summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us, of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics AI thing, all coming together. Lots of coverage. Stay with us. Say we've got a great guest from Deibel VC. John Skoda, founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, Matt. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over a decade. Um, >>It's been at least 10 years, at >>Least 10 years more, and we don't wanna actually go back as freeze back the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in >>It's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >>It's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in Cuban. You're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software, take old something old and make it better new, faster. So tell us about decibel. What's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you're doing. I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, sort of my was company when I was 24, if you remember before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called IM logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of software companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful 12 years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software C is, and I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start an enterprise software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or builder. Uh, they are building products that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchase software that is traditionally bought and sold tops down. But you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community. So source or open source companies where you have a large technical cook community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of motions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great grow, super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech and VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. Well, >>And, and I think all of us here that are, uh, may maybe students of history and have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three. >>The hype is definitely one, three. You >>Yeah, but, >>But you know, for >>Sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and caught infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, 500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, >>Well, let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get at it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher, a direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SaaS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data. And you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the Tech's better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big, giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution, right? It's the rise of the user. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one and the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. >>You just pull the >>Product through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see and it, and it does extend into things like crypto or currencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement maybe started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. These end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in this. >>I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it, it it's just like the, the, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign. >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion yeah. Around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either, it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try. I you, and sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? Yeah. It's some, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily caring >>About I data, data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the person. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't think, oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. And I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and does it, is it gonna, it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands out to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy that we live in really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product stand out for on the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their products exactly >>The volume back to the user led >>Growth. Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of Joe security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's, if the, you know, it's gotta speak >>To the, to the user. But let me ask you a question for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre entrepreneurs, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer? Just say, here's where I'm at. Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make bad vision of reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and want to invest in you wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta show the path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle. The journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much. If you share the long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the, the latest trends. Cause it's over before you even get >>There. Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Desel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There, there's three big trends that we invest in. And they're the, they're the only things we do day in, day out. One is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen on AMWA timeline >>Happening forever. >>But, uh, it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more, more. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we >>Run and security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cybersecurity as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relat to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion and it still is a fraction of what >>We're, what we're national security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital that's >>Right. You mean arguably, right. Arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta outta say, I gotta love your firm. Love what you're doing. We're big supporters of your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking we'll maybe see a Coon. Uh, absolutely certainly EU maybe even north Americans in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the >>Show. Guess a bell V see Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After this short break, stay with us.

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose it's theCUBE. Presenting Big Data Silicon Valley. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to San Jose everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and you're watching BigData SV, my name is Dave Vellante. In the early days of Hadoop everything was batch oriented. About four or five years ago the market really started to focus on real time and streaming analytics to try to really help companies affect outcomes while things were still in motion. Steve Wilks is here, he's the co-founder and CTO of a company called Stream, a firm that's been in this business for around six years. Steve welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave it's a pleasure to be here. >> So tell us more about that, you started about six years ago, a little bit before the market really started talking about real time and streaming. So what led you to that conclusion that you should co-found Steam way ahead of its time? >> It's partly our heritage. So the four of us that founded Stream, we were executives at GoldenGate Software. In fact our CEO Ali Kutay was the CEO of GoldenGate Software. So when we were acquired by Oracle in 2009, after having to work for Oracle for a couple years, we were trying to work out what to do next. And GoldenGate was replication software right? So it's moving data from one place to another. But customers would ask us in customer advisory boards, that data seems valuable, it's moving. Can you look at it while it's moving and analyze it while it's moving, get value out of that moving data? And so that was kind of set in our heads. And then we were thinking about what to do next, that was kind of the genesis of the idea. So the concept around Stream when we first started the company was we can't just give people streaming data, we need to give them the ability to process that data, analyze it, visualize it, play with it and really truly understand the data. As well as being able to collect it and move it somewhere else. And so the goal from day one was always to build a full end-to-end platform that did everything customers needed to do for streaming integration analytics out of the box. And that's what we've done after six years. >> I got to ask a really basic question, so you're talking about your experience at GoldenGate moving data from point a to point b and somebody said well why don't we put that to work. But is there change data or was it static data? Why couldn't I just analyze it in place? >> GoldenGate works on change data. >> Okay so that's why, there was changes going through. Why wait until it hits its target, let's do some work in real time and learn from that, get greater productivity. And now you guys have taken that to a new level. That new level being what? Modern tools, modern technologies? >> A platform built from the ground up to be inherently distributed, scalable, reliable with exactly one's processing guarantees. And to be a complete end-to-end platform. There's a recognition that the first part of being able to do streaming data integration or analytics is that you need to be able to collect the data right? And while change data captured from databases is the way to get data out of databases in a streaming fashion, you also have to deal with files and devices and message queues and anywhere else the data can reside. So you need a large number of different data collectors that all turn the enterprise data sources into streaming data. And similarly if you want to store data somewhere you need a large collection of target adapters that deliver to things. Not just on premise but also in the cloud. So things like Amazon S3 or the cloud databases like Redshift and Google BigQuery. So the idea was really that we wanted to give customers everything they need and that everything they need isn't trivial. It's not just, well we take Apache Kafka and then we stuff things into it and then we take things out. Pretty often, for example, you need to be able to enrich data and that means you need to be able to join streaming data with additional context information, reference data. And that reference data may come form a database or from files or somewhere else. So you can't call out to the database and maintain the speeds of streaming data. We have customers that are doing hundreds of thousands of events per second. So you can't call out to a database for every event and ask for records to enrich it with. And you can't even do that with an external cache because it's just not fast enough. So we built in an in-memory data grid as part of our platform. So you can join streaming data with the context information in real time without slowing anything down. So when you're thinking about doing streaming integration, it's more than just moving data around. It's ability to process it and get it in the right form, to be able to analyze it, to be able to do things like complex event processing on that data. And also to be able to visualize it and play with it is an essential part of the whole platform. >> So I wanted to ask you about end-to-end. I've seen a lot of products from larger, maybe legacy companies that will say it's end-to-end but what it really is, is a cobbled together pieces that they bought in and then, this is our end-to-end platform, but it's not unified. Or I've seen others "Well we've got an end-to-end platform" oh really, can I see the visualization? "Well we don't have visualization "we use this third party for visualization". So convince me that you're end-to-end. >> So our platform when you start with it you go into a UI, you can start building data flows. Those data flows start from connectors, we have all the connectors that you need to get your enterprise data. We have wizards to help you build those. And so now you have a data stream. Now you want to start processing that, we have SQL-based processing so you can do everything from filtering, transformation, aggregation, enrichment of data. If you want to load reference data into memory you use a cache component to drag that in, configure that. You now have data in-memory you can join with your streams. If you want to now take the results of all that processing and write it somewhere, use one of our target connectors, drag that in so you've got a data flow that's getting bigger and bigger, doing more and more processing. So now you're writing some of that data out to Kafka, oh I'm going to also add in another target adaptor write some of it into Azure Blob Storage and some of it's going to Amazon Redshift. So now you have a much bigger data flow. But now you say okay well I also want to do some analytics on that. So you take the data stream, you build another data flow that is doing some aggregation of a Windows, maybe some complex event processing, and then you use that dashboard builder to build a dashboard to visualize all of that. And that's all in one product. So it literally is everything you need to get value immediately. And you're right, the big vendors they have multiple different products and they're very happy to sell you consulting to put them all together. Even if you're trying to build this from open source and you know, organizations try and do that, you need five or six major pieces of open source, a lot of support in libraries, and a huge team of developers to just build a platform that you can start to build applications on. And most organizations aren't software platform companies, they're finance companies, oil and gas companies, healthcare companies. And they really want to focus on solving business problems and not on reinventing the wheel by building a software platform. So we can just go in there and say look; value immediately. And that really, really helps. >> So what are some of your favorite use cases, examples, maybe customer examples that you can share with me? >> So one of the great examples, one of my customers they have a lot of data in our HP non-stop system. And they needed to be able to get visibility into that immediately. And this was like order processing, supply chain, ERP data. And it would've taken a very large amount of time to do analytics directly on the HP nonstop. And finding resources to do that is hard as well. So they needed to get the data out and they need to get it into the appropriate place. And they recognize that use the right technology to ask the right question. So they wanted some of it in Hadoop so they could do some machine learning on that. They wanted some of it to go into Kafka so they could get real time analytics. And they wanted some of it to go into HBase so they could query it immediately and use that for reference purposes. So they utilized us to do change data capture against the HP nonstop, deliver that datastream out immediately into Kafka and also push some of it into HEFS and some of it into HBase. So they immediately got value out of that, because then they could also build some real-time analytics on it. It would sent out alerts if things were taking too long in their order processing system. And allowed them to get visibility directly into their process that they couldn't get before with much fewer resources and more modern technologies than they could have used before. So that's one example. >> Can I ask you a question about that? So you talked about Kafka, HBase, you talk about a lot of different open source projects. You've integrated those or you've got entries and exits into those? >> So we ship with Kafka as part of our product. It's an optional messaging bus. So, our platform has two different ways of moving data around. We have a high-speed, in-memory only message bus and that works almost network speed and it's great for a lot of different use cases. And that is what backs our data streams. So when you build a data flow, you have streams in between each step, that is backed by an in-memory bus. Pretty often though, in use cases, you need to be able to potentially rewind data for recovery purposes or have different applications running at different speeds and that's where a persistent message bus like Kafka comes in but you don't want to use a persistent message bus for everything because it's doing IO and it's slowing things down. So you typically use that at the beginning, at the sources, especially things like IOT where you can't rewind into them. Things like databases and files, you can rewind into them and replay and recover but IOT sources, you can't do that. So you would push that into a Kafka backed stream and then subsequent processing is in-memory. So we have that as part of our product. We also have Elastic as part of our product for results storage. You can switch to other results storage but that's our default. And we have a few other key components that are part of our product but then on the periphery, we have adapters integrate with a lot of the other things that you mentioned. So we have adapters to read and write HDFS, Hive, HBase, Across, Cloudera, Autumn Works, even MapR. So we have the MapR versions of the file system and MapR streams and MapR DB and then there's lots of other more proprietary connectors like CVC from Oracle, and SQL server, and MySQL and MariaDB. And then database connectors for delivery to virtually any JDBC compliant database. >> I took you down a tangent before you had a chance. You were going to give us another example. We're pretty much out of time but if you can briefly share either that or the last word, I'll give it to you. >> I think the last word would be that that is one example. We have lots and lots of other types of use cases that we do including things like: migrating data from on-premise to the cloud, being able to distribute log data, and being able to analyze that log data being able to do in-memory analytics and get real-time insights immediately and send alerts. It's a very comprehensive platform but each one of those use cases are very easy to develop on their own and you can do them very quickly. And of course as the use case expands within a customer, they build more and more and so they end up using the same platform for lots of different use cases within the same account. >> And how large is the company? How many people? >> We are around 70 people right now. >> 70 People and you're looking for funding? What rounds are you in? Where are you at with funding and revenue and all that stuff? >> Well I'd have to defer to my CEO for those questions. >> All right, so you've been around for what, six years you said? >> Yeah, we have a number of rounds of funding. We had initial seed funding then we had the investment by Summit Partners that carried us through for a while. Then subsequent investment from Intel Capital, Dell EMC, Atlantic Bridge. And that's where we are right now. >> Good, excellent. Steve, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate your time. >> Great, it's awesome. Thank you Dave. >> Great to meet you. All right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from BigData SV in San Jose. We'll be right back. (techno music)