(upbeat sparkling music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent. We are live from the show floor here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, here with my cohost John Furrier on theCUBE. John, end of day three. You're smiling. >> Yeah. >> You're still radiating energy. Is it, is it the community that's keeping your, your level up? >> It's just all the action. We've got a great special guest joining us for the first time on theCUBE. It's going to be great and Serverless wave is hitting. More and more Serverless embedded into the like, things like analytics, are going to make things tightly integrated. You can see a lot more kind of tightly coupled but yet still cohesive elements together being kind of end-to-end, and again, the, the zero-ELT vision is soon to be here. That and security, major news here at Amazon. Of course, this next segment is going to be awesome, about the modernization journey. We're going to hear a lot about that. >> Yeah, we are, and our next guest is also an extraordinarily adventurous one. Please welcome Joe from Arc XP. Thank you so much for being here. >> Thanks for having me. >> Savannah: How this show going for you? >> It's been great and you know, it's the end of the day but there's so much great energy at the show this year. >> Savannah: There really is. >> It's great walking the halls, seeing the great engineers, the thought leaders, including this session. So, it's been really a stimulating time. >> What do you do at Arc, what do you, what's your role? >> So, I'm Vice President of Technology and Product Development. I recently joined Arc to lead all the product development teams. We're an experience platform, so, in that platform we have content tools, we have delivery tools, we have subscription tools. It's a really exciting time in all those spaces. >> John: And your customer base is? >> Our customers today started with publishers. So, Arc XP was built for the Washington Post's internal needs many years ago and word got out about how great it was, built on top of the AWS tech stack and other publishers came and started licensing the software. We've moved from there to B2C commerce as well as enterprise scenarios. >> I think that's really interesting and I want to touch on your background a little bit here. You just mentioned the Washington Post. You have a background in broadcast. What was it, since you, since you are fresh, what was it that attracted you to Arc? What made you say yes? >> Yeah, so I spent a little under 10 years building the Associated Press Broadcast Newsroom Tools, some of them that you have used for many years, and you know, one of the things that was really exciting about joining ARC, was they were cloud native and they were cloud native from the start and so that really gave them a leg up with how quickly they could innovate, and now we see developers here at re:Invent be able to do custom Lambdas and new extensibility points in a way that, really, no one else can do in the CMS space >> Which, which is very exciting. Let's talk a little bit about your team and the development cycle. We've touched a lot on the economic uncertainty right now. How are things internally? What's the culture pulse? >> Yeah, so the return to work has been a thing for us, just like- >> Savannah: Are you back in office? >> All of them. We actually have a globally distributed team, and so, if you happen to be lucky enough to be in Washington, DC or Chicago or some of our other centers, there's an opportunity to be in the office, but most of our engineers work remotely. One of the exciting things we did earlier this year was ARC week. We brought everyone to DC to see each other face-to-face, and that same energy you see at re:Invent, was there in person with our engineers. >> I believe that. So, I'm a marketer by trade. I love that you're all about the digital experience. Are you creating digital- I mean everyone needs some sort of digital experience. >> Joe: Yes. >> Every company is a technology company now. Do you work across verticals? You see more niche or industry specific? >> Yeah, so we began with a very large vertical of media and broadcast. >> Savannah: There's a couple companies in that category. >> There's a couple big ones out there. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And actually their challenges are really high volume production of great digital storytelling, and so, solving their problems has enabled us to have a platform that works for anyone that needs to tell a story digitally, whether it's a commerce site, corporate HR department. >> Savannah: Which is everyone, right? >> Virtually everyone needs to get their story out today. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And so we have gone to a bunch of other verticals and we've seen the benefits of having that strong, cloud-based platform offer the scale that all storytellers need. >> What are some of the challenges today that aren't, that weren't there a decade ago or even five years ago? We see a lot of media companies looking at the business model innovations, changing landscapes omnichannel distribution, different formats. What's some of the challenges that's going on in content? >> So, you know, content challenges include both production of content and delivery of that content through a great experience. So different parts of ARC focus on those problems and you got to monetize it as well, but what I'd say is unique to Arc and the challenge we talk to our customers about a lot is multi-format production. So, it's not just about one channel. >> Savannah: Right. It's about telling a story and having it go across multi-channels, multi-sites, and having the infrastructure both technically and in the workflow tools, is super critical for our customers and it is a challenge that we receive well. >> A lot of AI is coming into the conversation here. Data, AI, publishing, video, user generated content. It's all data. >> Absolutely, yep. >> It's all data. >> Joe: It's an immense amount of data. >> How do you look at the data plane or the data layer, the data aspect of the platform and what are some of the customers leaning into or are kicking the tires around? What are some of the trends, and what are some of the core issues you see? >> Yeah, so I've spent a lot of time in data ML and analytics looking at giant data sets, and you know, when you look at CMS systems and experience platforms, the first class that it's in, is really the, the documents themselves. What is the story you're saying? But where the rich data is that we can analyze is user behaviors, global distribution of content, how we optimize our CDN and really give a personal experience to the reader, but beyond that, we see a lot of advantages in our digital asset management platform, which is for video, audio, photos, all kinds of media formats, and applying AIML to do detection, suggest photos that might be appropriate based on what a journalist or a marketer is writing in their story. So, there's a lot of opportunities around that sort of data. >> What are some of the business model changes that you're seeing? 'Cause remember we're in digital, Page view advertising has gone down, subscription firewalls on blogs. You got things like Substack emerging. Journalists are kind of like changing. I've seen companies go out of business, some of the media companies or change, some of the small ones go out of business, the bigger ones are evolving. What are some of the business model enablements that you guys see coming, that a platform could deliver, so that a company can value their content, and their talent? >> For sure. I mean this is a perennial question in the media space, right? It's been going on for two decades. >> I was going to say we're- >> Right. >> So it's like- >> Joe: Right, and so we've seen that play out- >> John: Little softball for you. >> Really for almost every format. It's a softball, but- >> It's day three. >> How are we addressing that? You know what, first and foremost, you got to do great storytelling, so, we have tools for that, but then presenting that story, and a great experience no matter what device you're on, that's going to be critical no matter how you're monetizing it, and so, you know, we have customers that go very ad heavy. We also have a subscription platform that can do that built into our infrastructure. >> 50 million plus registered users, correct? >> Yeah, it's unbelievable to scale. Really, Arc is a growth story, and so we went from serving the Washington Post needs, to over 2000 sites today, across 25 countries. >> Very- >> How do we get to that? How do we get that audience if we want to? Can we join that network? Is it a network of people? >> I love that question. >> Of people that are using Arc XP? >> Yeah. >> Actually, we recently launched a new effort around our community, so I think they actually had a meeting yesterday, and so that's one way to get involved, but as you said, everyone needs to have a site and tell great stories. >> Yeah. >> So, we see a wide appeal for our platform, and what's unique about ARC, is it's truly a SaaS model. This is delivered via SaaS, where we take care of all of the services, over a hundred Amazon services, behind the scenes- >> Wow. >> Built into Arc. We manage all of that for our customers, including the CDN. So, it's not as though as our customers have to be making sure the site is up, we've got teams to take care of that 24/7 >> Great value proposition and a lot of need for this, people doing their own media systems themselves. What's the secret sauce to your success? If you had to kind of look at the technology? I see serverless is a big part of it on the EDB stack. What's the, what's the secret sauce? >> I think the secret sauce comes from the roots that Arc has in the Washington Post >> You understand it. >> And some of the most challenging content production workflows anywhere in the world, and I've spent a lot of time, in many newsrooms. So, I think that knowledge, the urgency of what it takes to get a story out, the zero tolerance for the site going down. That DNA really enables our engineers to do great solutions. >> Talk about understanding your user. I mean that that's, and drinking the Kool-Aid, but in a totally amazing way. One of the other things that stuck out to me in doing my research is not only are you a service used, now, by 50 million subscribers, but beyond that, you pride yourself on being a turnkey solution. Folks can get Arc up and running quite quickly. Correct? >> For sure. So, one of the things we built into Arc XP is something called Themes, which has a bunch of pre-built blocks, that our customers don't have to end up with a custom codebase when they've developed a new experience platform. That's not a good solution, of every site be a custom codebase. We're a product with extensibility hooks. >> Savannah: Right. >> That really enables someone to get started very quickly, and that also includes bringing in content from other platforms into Arc, itself. So that journey of migrating a site is really smooth with our toolset. >> What's the history of the company? Is it, did it come from the Washington Post or was that it's original customer? What's the DNA of the firm? >> Yeah, so it was originally built by the Washington Post for the Washington Post. So, designed by digital storytellers, for storytelling. >> Savannah: And one of the largest media outlets out there. >> So, that's that "DNA", the "special sauce". >> Yeah, yeah. >> So that's where that connection is. >> That really is where it comes through. >> John: Awesome. Congratulations on- >> Now today, you know, those roots are still apparent, but we've been very responsive to other needs in the markets around commerce. There's a whole other set of DNA we've brought in, experts in understanding different systems for inventory management, so we can do a great experience on top of some of those legacy platforms. >> My final question, before we go to the challenge- >> Savannah: To the challenge. >> Is, what's next? What's on the roadmap as you look at the technology and the teams that you're managing? What's some of the next milestone or priorities for your business? >> So, it is really about growth and that's the story of Arc XP, which has driven our technology decisions. So, our choice to go serverless was driven by growth and need to make sure we had exceptional experience but most importantly that our engineers could be focused on product development and responding to what the market needed. So, that's why I'd say next year is about, it's enabling our engineers to keep up with the scaling business but still provide great value on the roadmap. >> And it's not like there's ever going to be a shortage of content or stories that need to be told. So I suspect there's a lot of resilience in what you're doing. >> And we hope to be inspired with new ways of telling stories. >> Yeah. >> So if you're in the Washington Post or other media outlets. >> John: Or theCUBE. >> Joe: Or theCUBE. >> Savannah: I know, I was just- >> There's just great formats out there. >> Best dev meeting, let's chat after, for sure. >> Exactly, that's what I've been thinking the whole time. I'm sure the wheels are turning over on this side- >> So great to have you on. >> In a lot of different ways. So, we have a new tradition here at re:Invent, where we are providing you with an opportunity for quite a sizzle reel, Instagram video, 30 second, thought leadership soundbite. What is your hot take, key theme or most important thing that you are thinking about since we're here at this year's show? >> I would say it's the energy that's building in the industry, getting back together, the collaboration, and how that's resulting in us using new technologies. You know, the conversation's no longer about shifting to the cloud. We all have huge infrastructure, the conversation's about observability, how do we know what's going in? How do we make sure we're getting the most value for our customers with those, that technology set. So, I think the energy around that is super exciting. I've always loved building products. So, next year think it's going to be a great year with that, putting together these new technologies. >> I think you nailed it. The energy really is the story and the collaboration. Joe, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story. Arc is lucky to have you and we'll close with one personal anecdote. Favorite place to sail? >> Favorite place to sail. So, I lived in the Caribbean for many years, as we were talking about earlier >> None of us are jealous up here at all. >> And so my favorite place to sail would be in the British Virgin Islands, which was closed during Covid but is now back open, so, if any you've had a chance to go to the BVI, make some time, hop on Catamaran, there's some great spots. >> Well, I think you just gave us a catalyst for our next vacation, maybe a team off-site. >> Bucket list item, of course. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, Let's bring everyone together. >> Here we go. I love it. Well Joe, thanks so much again for being on the show. We hope to have you back on theCUBE again sometime soon, and thank all of you for tuning in to this scintillating coverage that we have here, live from the AWS re:Invent show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier. I'm Savannah Peterson. This is theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> As you know by now, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is stepping aside from his CEO role and AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, is being promoted to head all of Amazon. Bezos, of course, is going to remain executive chairman. Now, 15 years ago, next month, Amazon launched it's simple storage service, which was the first modern cloud offering. And the man who wrote the business plan for AWS, was Andy Jassy, and he's navigated the meteoric rise and disruption that has seen AWS grow into a $45 billion company that draws off the vast majority of Amazon's operating profits. No one in the media has covered Jassy more intimately and closely than John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And John joins us today to help us understand on theCUBE this move and what we can expect from Jassy in his new role, and importantly what it means for AWS. John, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. >> Hey, great day. Great to see you as always, we've done a lot of interviews together over the years and we're on our 11th year with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. But I got to be excited too, that we're simulcasters on Clubhouse, which is kind of cool. Love Clubhouse but not since the, in December. It's awesome. It's like Cube radio. It's like, so this is a Cube talk. So we opened up a Clubhouse room while we're filming this. We'll do more live hits in studio and syndicate the Clubhouse and then take questions after. This is a huge digital transformation moment. I'm part of the digital transformation club on Clubhouse which has almost 5,000 followers at the moment and also has like 500 members. So if you're not on Clubhouse, yet, if you have an iPhone go check it out and join the digital transformation club. Android users you'll have to wait until that app is done but it's really a great club. And Jeremiah Owyang is also doing a lot of stuff on digital transformation. >> Or you can just buy an iPhone and get in. >> Yeah, that's what people are doing. I can see all the influences are on there but to me, the digital transformation, it's always been kind of a cliche, the consumerization of IT, information technology. This has been the boring world of the enterprise over the past, 20 years ago. Enterprise right now is super hot because there's no distinction between enterprise and society. And that's clearly the, because of the rise of cloud computing and the rise of Amazon Web Services which was a side project at AWS, at Amazon that Andy Jassy did. And it wasn't really pleasant at the beginning. It was failed. It failed a lot and it wasn't as successful as people thought in the early days. And I have a lot of stories with Andy that he told me a lot of the inside baseball and we'll share that here today. But we started covering Amazon since the beginning. I was as an entrepreneur. I used it when it came out and a huge fan of them as a company because they just got a superior product and they have always had been but it was very misunderstood from the beginning. And now everyone's calling it the most important thing. And Andy now is becoming Andy Jassy, the most important executive in the world. >> So let's get it to the, I mean, look at, you said to me over holidays, you thought this might have something like this could happen. And you said, Jassy is probably in line to get this. So, tell us, what can you tell us about Jassy? Why is he qualified for this job? What do you think he brings to the table? >> Well, the thing that I know about Amazon everyone's been following the Amazon news is, Jeff Bezos has a lot of personal turmoil. They had his marriage fail. They had some issues with the smear campaigns and all this stuff going on, the run-ins with Donald Trump, he bought the Washington post. He's got a lot of other endeavors outside of Amazon cause he's the second richest man in the world competing with Elon Musk at Space X versus Blue Origin. So the guy's a billionaire. So Amazon is his baby and he's been running it as best he could. He's got an executive team committee they called the S team. He's been grooming people in the company and that's just been his mode. And the rise of AWS and the business performance that we've been documenting on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, it's just been absolutely changing the game on Amazon as a company. So clearly Amazon Web Services become a driving force of the new Amazon that's emerging. And obviously they've got all their retail business and they got the gaming challenges and they got the studios and the other diversified stuff. So Jassy is just, he's just one of those guys. He's just been an Amazonian from day one. He came out of Harvard business school, drove across the country, very similar story to Jeff Bezos. He did that in 1997 and him and Jeff had been collaborating and Jeff tapped him to be his shadow, they call it, which is basically technical assistance and an heir apparent and groomed him. And then that's how it is. Jassy is not a climber as they call it in corporate America. He's not a person who is looking for a political gain. He's not a territory taker, but he's a micromanager. He loves details and he likes to create customer value. And that's his focus. So he's not a grandstander. In fact, he's been very low profile. Early days when we started meeting with him, he wouldn't meet with press regularly because they weren't writing the right stories. And everyone is, he didn't know he was misunderstood. So that's classic Amazon. >> So, he gave us the time, I think it was 2014 or 15 and he told us a story back then, John, you might want to share it as to how AWS got started. Why, what was the main spring Amazon's tech wasn't working that great? And Bezos said to Jassy, going to go figure out why and maybe explain how AWS was born. >> Yeah, we had, in fact, we were the first ones to get access to do his first public profile. If you go to the Google and search Andy Jassy, the trillion dollar baby, we had a post, we put out the story of AWS, Andy Jassy's trillion dollar baby. This was in early, this was January 2015, six years ago. And, we back then, we posited that this would be a trillion dollar total addressable market. Okay, people thought we were crazy but we wrote a story and he gave us a very intimate access. We did a full drill down on him and the person, the story of Amazon and that laid out essentially the beginning of the rise of AWS and Andy Jassy. So that's a good story to check out but really the key here is, is that he's always been relentless and competitive on creating value in what they call raising the bar outside Amazon. That's a term that they use. They also have another leadership principle called working backwards, which is like, go to the customer and work backwards from the customer in a very Steve Job's kind of way. And that's been kind of Jobs mentality as well at Apple that made them successful work backwards from the customer and make things easier. And that was Apple. Amazon, their philosophy was work backwards from the customer and Jassy specifically would say it many times and eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That was a key principle of what they were doing. So that was a key thesis of their entire business model. And that's the Amazonian way. Faster, cheaper, ship it faster, make it less expensive and higher value. While when you apply the Amazon shipping concept to cloud computing, it was completely disrupted. They were shipping code and services faster and that became their innovation strategy. More announcements every year, they out announced their competition by huge margin. They introduced new services faster and they're less expensive some say, but in the aggregate, they make more money but that's kind of a key thing. >> Well, when you, I was been listening to the TV today and there was a debate on whether or not, this support tends that they'll actually split the company into two. To me, I think it's just the opposite. I think it's less likely. I mean, if you think about Amazon getting into grocery or healthcare, eventually financial services or other industries and the IOT opportunity to me, what they do, John, is they bring in together the cloud, data and AI and they go attack these new industries. I would think Jassy of all people would want to keep this thing together now whether or not the government allows them to do that. But what are your thoughts? I mean, you've asked Andy this before in your personal interviews about splitting the company. What are your thoughts? >> Well, Jon Fortt at CNBC always asked the same question every year. It's almost like the standard question. I kind of laugh and I ask it now too because I liked Jon Fortt. I think he's an awesome dude. And I'll, it's just a tongue in cheek, Jassy. He won't answer the question. Amazon, Bezos and Jassy have one thing in common. They're really good at not answering questions. So if you ask the same question. They'll just say, nothing's ever, never say never, that's his classic answer to everything. Never say never. And he's always said that to you. (chuckles) Some say, he's, flip-flopped on things but he's really customer driven. For example, he said at one point, no one should ever build a data center. Okay, that was a principle. And then they come out and they have now a hybrid strategy. And I called them out on that and said, hey, what, are you flip-flopping? You said at some point, no one should have a data center. He's like, well, we looked at it differently and what we meant was is that, it should all be cloud native. Okay. So that's kind of revision, but he's cool with that. He says, hey, we'll revise based on what customers are doing. VMware working with Amazon that no one ever thought that would happen. Okay. So, VMware has some techies, Raghu, for instance, over there, super top notch. He worked with Jassy, directly in his team Sanjay Poonen when they went to business school together, they cut a deal. And now Amazon essentially saved VMware, in my opinion. And Pat Gelsinger drove that deal. Now, Pat Gelsinger, CEO, Intel, and Pat told me that directly in candid conversation off theCUBE, he said, hey, we have to make a decision either we're going to be in cloud or we're not going to be in cloud, we will partner. And I'll see, he was Intel. He understood the Intel inside mentality. So that's good for VMware. So Jassy does these kinds of deals. He's not afraid he's got a good stomach for business and a relentless competitor. >> So, how do you think as you mentioned Jassy is a micromanager. He gets deep into the technology. Anybody who's seen his two hour, three hour keynotes. No, he has a really fine grasp of the technology across the entire stack. How do you think John, he will approach things like antitrust, the big tech lash of the unionization of the workforce at Amazon? How do you think Jassy will approach that? >> Well, I think one of the things that emerges Jassy, first of all, he's a huge sports fan. And many people don't know that but he's also progressive person. He's very progressive politically. He's been on the record and off the record saying things like, obviously, literacy has been big on, he's been on basically unrepresented minorities, pushing for that, and certainly cloud computing in tech, women in tech, he's been a big proponent. He's been a big supporter of Teresa Carlson. Who's been rising star at Amazon. People don't know who Teresa Carlson is and they should check out her. She's become one of the biggest leaders inside Amazon she's turned around public sector from the beginning. She ran that business, she's a global star. He's been a great leader and he's been getting, forget he's a micromanager, he's on top of the details. I mean, the word is, and nothing gets approved without Andy, Andy seeing it. But he's been progressive. He's been an Amazon original as they call it internally. He's progressive, he's got the business acumen but he's perfect for this pragmatic conversation that needs to happen. And again, because he's so technically strong having a CEO that's that proficient is going to give Amazon an advantage when they have to go in and change how DC works, for instance, or how the government geopolitical landscape works, because Amazon is now a global company with regions all over the place. So, I think he's pragmatic, he's open to listening and changing. I think that's a huge quality >> Well, when you think of this, just to set the context here for those who may not know, I mean, Amazon started as I said back in 2006 in March with simple storage service that later that year they announced EC2 which is their compute platform. And that was the majority of their business, is still a very large portion of their business but Amazon, our estimates are that in 2020, Amazon did 45 billion, 45.4 billion in revenue. That's actually an Amazon reported number. And just to give you a context, Azure about 26 billion GCP, Google about 6 billion. So you're talking about an industry that Amazon created. That's now $78 billion and Amazon at 45 billion. John they're growing at 30% annually. So it's just a massive growth engine. And then another story Jassy told us, is they, he and Jeff and the team talked early on about whether or not they should just sort of do an experiment, do a little POC, dip their toe in and they decided to go for it. Let's go big or go home as Michael Dell has said to us many times, I mean, pretty astounding. >> Yeah. One of the things about Jassy that people should know about, I think there's some compelling relative to the newest ascension to the CEO of Amazon, is that he's not afraid to do new things. For instance, I'll give you an example. The Amazon Web Services re-invent their annual conference grew to being thousands and thousands of people. And they would have a traditional after party. They called a replay, they'd have a band like every tech conference and their conference became so big that essentially, it was like setting up a live concert. So they were spending millions of dollars to set up basically a one night concert and they'd bring in great, great artists. So he said, hey, what's been all this cash? Why don't we just have a festival? So they did a thing called Intersect. They got LA involved from creatives and they basically built a weekend festival in the back end of re-invent. This was when real life was, before COVID and they turned into an opportunity because that's the way they think. They like to look at the resources, hey, we're already all in on this, why don't we just keep it for the weekend and charge some tickets and have a good time. He's not afraid to take chances on the product side. He'll go in and take a chance on a new market. That comes from directly from Bezos. They try stuff. They don't mind failing but they put a tight leash on measurement. They work backwards from the customer and they are not afraid to take chances. So, that's going to board well for him as he tries to figure out how Amazon navigates the contention on the political side when they get challenged for their dominance. And I think he's going to have to apply that pragmatic experimentation to new business models. >> So John I want you to take on AWS. I mean, despite the large numbers, I talked about 30% growth, Azure is growing at over 50% a year, GCP at 83%. So despite the large numbers and big growth the growth rates are slowing. Everybody knows that, we've reported it extensively. So the incoming CEO of Amazon Web Services has a TAM expansion challenge. And at some point they've got to decide, okay, how do we keep this growth engine? So, do you have any thoughts as to who might be the next CEO and what are some of their challenges as you see it? >> Well, Amazon is a real product centric company. So it's going to be very interesting to see who they go with here. Obviously they've been grooming a lot of people. There's been some turnover. You had some really strong executives recently leave, Jeff Wilkes, who was the CEO of the retail business. He retired a couple of months ago, formerly announced I think recently, he was probably in line. You had Mike Clayville, is now the chief revenue officer of Stripe. He ran all commercial business, Teresa Carlson stepped up to his role as well as running public sector. Again, she got more power. You have Matt Garman who ran the EC2 business, Stanford grad, great guy, super strong on the product side. He's now running all commercial sales and marketing. And he's also on the, was on Bezos' S team, that's the executive kind of team. Peter DeSantis is also on that S team. He runs all infrastructure. He took over for James Hamilton, who was the genius behind all the data center work that they've done and all the chip design stuff that they've innovated on. So there's so much technical innovation going on. I think you still going to see a leadership probably come from, I would say Matt Garman, in my opinion is the lead dog at this point, he's the lead horse. You could have an outside person come in depending upon how, who might be available. And that would probably come from an Andy Jassy network because he's a real fierce competitor but he's also a loyalist and he likes trust. So if someone comes in from the outside, it's going to be someone maybe he trusts. And then the other wildcards are like Teresa Carlson. Like I said, she is a great woman in tech who's done amazing work. I've profiled her many times. We've interviewed her many times. She took that public sector business with Amazon and changed the game completely. Outside the Jedi contract, she was in competitive for, had the big Trump showdown with the Jedi, with the department of defense. Had the CIA cloud. Amazon set the standard on public sector and that's directly the result of Teresa Carlson. But she's in the field, she's not a product person, she's kind of running that group. So Amazon has that product field kind of structure. So we'll see how they handle that. But those are the top three I think are going to be in line. >> So the obvious question that people always ask and it is a big change like this is, okay, in this case, what is Jassy going to bring in? And what's going to change? Maybe the flip side question is somewhat more interesting. What's not going to change in your view? Jassy has been there since nearly the beginning. What are some of the fundamental tenets that he's, that are fossilized, that won't change, do you think? >> I think he's, I think what's not going to change is Amazon, is going to continue to grow and develop their platform business and enable more SaaS players. That's a little bit different than what Microsoft's doing. They're more SaaS oriented, Office 365 is becoming their biggest application in terms of revenue on Microsoft side. So Amazon is going to still have to compete and enable more ecosystem partners. I think what's not going to change is that Bezos is still going to be in charge because executive chairman is just a code word for "not an active CEO." So in the corporate governance world when you have an executive chairman, that's essentially the person still in charge. And so he'll be in charge, will still be the boss of Andy Jassy and Jassy will be running all of Amazon. So I think that's going to be a little bit the same, but Jassy is going to be more in charge. I think you'll see a team change over, whether you're going to see some new management come in, Andy's management team will expand, I think Amazon will stay the same, Amazon Web Services. >> So John, last night, I was just making some notes about notable transitions in the history of the tech business, Gerstner to Palmisano, Gates to Ballmer, and then Ballmer to Nadella. One that you were close to, David Packard to John Young and then John Young to Lew Platt at the old company. Ellison to Safra and Mark, Jobs to Cook. We talked about Larry Page to Sundar Pichai. So how do you see this? And you've talked to, I remember when you interviewed John Chambers, he said, there is no rite of passage, East coast mini-computer companies, Edson de Castro, Ken Olsen, An Wang. These were executives who wouldn't let go. So it's of interesting to juxtapose that with the modern day executive. How do you see this fitting in to some of those epic transitions that I just mentioned? >> I think a lot of people are surprised at Jeff Bezos', even stepping down. I think he's just been such the face of Amazon. I think some of the poll numbers that people are doing on Twitter, people don't think it's going to make a big difference because he's kind of been that, leader hand on the wheel, but it's been its own ship now, kind of. And so depending on who's at the helm, it will be different. I think the Amazon choice of Andy wasn't obvious. And I think a lot of people were asking the question who was Andy Jassy and that's why we're doing this. And we're going to be doing more features on the Andy Jassy. We got a tons, tons of content that we've we've had shipped, original content with them. We'll share more of those key soundbites and who he is. I think a lot of people scratching their head like, why Andy Jassy? It's not obvious to the outsiders who don't know cloud computing. If you're in the competing business, in the digital transformation side, everyone knows about Amazon Web Services. Has been the most successful company, in my opinion, since I could remember at many levels just the way they've completely dominated the business and how they change others to be dominant. So, I mean, they've made Microsoft change, it made Google change and even then he's a leader that accepts conversations. Other companies, their CEOs hide behind their PR wall and they don't talk to people. They won't come on Clubhouse. They won't talk to the press. They hide behind their PR and they feed them, the media. Jassy is not afraid to talk to reporters. He's not afraid to talk to people, but he doesn't like people who don't know what they're talking about. So he doesn't suffer fools. So, you got to have your shit together to talk to Jassy. That's really the way it is. And that's, and he'll give you mind share, like he'll answer any question except for the ones that are too tough for him to answer. Like, are you, is facial recognition bad or good? Are you going to spin out AWS? I mean these are the hard questions and he's got a great team. He's got Jay Carney, former Obama press secretary working for him. He's been a great leader. So I'm really bullish on, is a good choice. >> We're going to jump into the Clubhouse here and open it up shortly. John, the last question for you is competition. Amazon as a company and even Jassy specifically I always talk about how they don't really focus on the competition, they focus on the customer but we know that just observing these folks Bezos is very competitive individual. Jassy, I mean, you know him better than I, very competitive individual. So, and he's, Jassy has been known to call out Oracle. Of course it was in response to Larry Ellison's jabs at Amazon regarding database. But, but how do you see that? Do you see that changing at all? I mean, will Amazon get more publicly competitive or they stick to their knitting, you think? >> You know this is going to sound kind of a weird analogy. And I know there's a lot of hero worshiping on Elon Musk but Elon Musk and Andy Jassy have a lot of similarities in the sense of their brilliance. They got both a brilliant people, different kinds of backgrounds. Obviously, they're running different things. They both are builders, right? If you were listening to Elon Musk on Clubhouse the other night, what was really striking was not only the magic of how it was all orchestrated and what he did and how he interviewed Robin Hood. He basically is about building stuff. And he was asked questions like, what advice do you give startups? He's like, if you need advice you shouldn't be doing startups. That's the kind of mentality that Jassy has, which is, it's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart, but Elon Musk is a builder. Jassy builds, he likes to build stuff, right? And so you look at all the things that he's done with AWS, it's been about enabling people to be successful with the tools that they need, adding more services, creating things that are lower price point. If you're an entrepreneur and you're over the age of 30, you know about AWS because you know what, it's cheaper to start a business on Amazon Web Services than buying servers and everyone knows that. If you're under the age of 25, you might not know 50 grand to a hundred thousand just to start something. Today you get your credit card down, you're up and running and you can get Clubhouses up and running all day long. So the next Clubhouse will be on Amazon or a cloud technology. And that's because of Andy Jassy right? So this is a significant executive and he continue, will bring that mindset of building. So, I think the digital transformation, we're in the digital engine club, we're going to see a complete revolution of a new generation. And I think having a new leader like Andy Jassy will enable in my opinion next generation talent, whether that's media and technology convergence, media technology and art convergence and the fact that he digs music, he digs sports, he digs tech, he digs media, it's going to be very interesting to see, I think he's well-poised to be, and he's soft-spoken, he doesn't want the glamorous press. He doesn't want the puff pieces. He just wants to do what he does and he puts his game do the talking. >> Talking about advice at startups. Just a quick aside. I remember, John, you and I when we were interviewing Scott McNealy former CEO of Sun Microsystems. And you asked him advice for startups. He said, move out of California. It's kind of tongue in cheek. I heard this morning that there's a proposal to tax the multi-billionaires of 1% annually not just the one-time tax. And so Jeff Bezos of course, has a ranch in Texas, no tax there, but places all over. >> You see I don't know. >> But I don't see Amazon leaving Seattle anytime soon, nor Jassy. >> Jeremiah Owyang did a Clubhouse on California. And the basic sentiment is that, it's California is not going away. I mean, come on. People got to just get real. I think it's a fad. Yeah. This has benefits with remote working, no doubt, but people will stay here in California, the network affects beautiful. I think Silicon Valley is going to continue to be relevant. It's just going to syndicate differently. And I think other hubs like Seattle and around the world will be integrated through remote work and I think it's going to be much more of a democratizing effect, not a win lose. So that to me is a huge shift. And look at Amazon, look at Amazon and Microsoft. It's the cloud cities, so people call Seattle. You've got Google down here and they're making waves but still, all good stuff. >> Well John, thanks so much. Let's let's wrap and let's jump into the Clubhouse and hear from others. Thanks so much for coming on, back on theCUBE. And many times we, you and I've done this really. It was a pleasure having you. Thanks for your perspectives. And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft ambient music)

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of women transforming technology brought to you by VM Ware. >>Hi, Lisa Martin covering the fifth annual Women Transforming Technology event the first time it has been running in. So we're not coming to you from Palo Alto today coming to you from San Jose that I'm really excited to be talking with one of the event speakers, the founder of Happier Inc. Natalie Kogan. Natalie, Welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for having me great to join you, even virtually. Exactly. And we're so fortunate that this I guess, if you can, if you can put a positive spin on it that this event happened when we have technology to still be able to enable as much interaction into a conversations or multiple way conversations as possible. And I know that you just did a session and a couple of days ago at the Digital Women transforming Allergy then But before we get into that, I saw your Ted talk was awesome and it's it's such a and the timeliness happier as a subject, couldn't be more, um, really pivotal. Tell me a little bit about what happier is what the inspiration Waas for your company? >>Definitely. So as many entrepreneurs. The inspiration was my personal journey. So I grew up in the former study on when I was 13 years old, my parents and I left everything and everyone behind and on a journey deep fried becomes refugees did the United States, and we had, as you can imagine, this is a really difficult experience with several months and refugee settlements in Europe before getting permission to come to the U. S. As refugees. And we started our journey and the projects that have destroyed, you know, on welfare and food stamps, very grateful to have an opportunity, but really, really tough. And I was really overwhelmed. That was a teenager. I spoke almost no English, and it was all overwhelming for me. And I kind of decided for myself that if I could just work really hard, achieve a lot of things become successful, then I would feel happy. And then I would just feel like honor this American dream. And for the next 20 years, I did work very, very hard. I did become very successful. I reached the price of four for success. I worked at Mackenzie, you know, the very well known consulting firm. By the age of 25 I was a managing director. We're a venture capital firm in New York. There's fewer than 6% women in venture capital. I started for different companies. I was part of Microsoft in the tech companies, and on the outside I was a feeding incredible stuff. And while I still am still proud of every single thing I achieved, whenever I would've David, I feel happy. And then it was just like the bubble just off, and I didn't feel happy anymore. And so I pushed myself harder and harder because I equated happiness for the achievement. Until, after two decades of doing this, I just couldn't do it anymore. I completely burnt out. Um, it was a really, really dark time in my life, and I knew I had to find a different way to live so that I could do work that's meaningful to me, but that I could also honor myself as a human and find joy in the present. And that led me to doing a lot of research in psychiatry and psychology and neuroscience and learning all of these incredible skills and practices that changed my life, starting with gratitude, which is how you cultivate join the present moment and really inspired me to leave. My career is a technology exact behind you found happier. We have the same mission since we've been founded and that is to help millions of people. Dr. In working in life by practicing science, back skills to cultivate there will be what are >>some of the scientific skills behind it and anything that that, you see that is even more pivotal in week eight of this work from home shelter in place? >>Yes. You know it It sounds really weird to say, but I feel like I've been preparing my full life. Do you help people right now? Because the skills that I have learned and I share are so essential. And >>the two that I >>would mention that I've been you know, we've been doing all these virtual sessions for teams and companies, and this is the ones I talk about. The first is the skill of gratitude. You know, gratitude is just very simply zooming in on something in your life that is good. That is positive. That is meaningful. and honoring it with your full appreciation. And you know, we're all right now going for so many challenges and we all have with all the negativity bias. And that means we're much more sensitive humans, anything that's negative and anything that positive and when we're going through a challenge, that negativity biases even more sensitive. So I know many folks right now are feeling really overwhelmed with their own feelings, but their own sense of loss and fear and with all the negative news and so practicing gratitude is essential because when you pause and you focus on the things >>in your life as it is, >>um, it's the challenge that you do appreciate. You remind your brain that the the challenge is not everything, that there is more to your life than what is going wrong. And that actually helps you to feel a little bit less stressed and anxious. And the other piece of science that I love to share is another skill that I talked about, which does Ah, and acceptance. Really. It simply means that we learn, look at how things are and how we feel with clarity instead of judgment, right and shorthand for judgment is should shouldn't feel like this. It shouldn't be this way, and that's having clarity. Allowing yourself to actually feel the difficult feelings helps us to move through them with a little bit more easy. I think it's one of the most, um, powerful mindset. A mindset shift that I learned on my journey is that happiness does not mean that you feel positive all the time. Happiness and emotional being means that we embrace all of our different feelings, including the difficult one, and we learned how to move through them with compassion. What are >>some of the things that when you're talking to the C suite executives that certain companies, whether it's bm ware or others, how our executive teams managers, where does the emotional health come in to the play? Knowing that these folks are managing teams, there are, we're seeing, as you point out, you know, the negativity vice. We're seeing the numbers of unemployment go up and up and up. Where is emotional health in terms of priority at the executive level? So this is >>one of the it, so it sounds really weird to say, but all of a sudden its like in this huge wave it already started, right? Some companies and we work with many of them already understood. The executives already understood that employee well, being an emotional health, it's not an extra. It is not optional. It is non negotiable. If you want your people to be at their best, there are literally mountains of research that show that when you cultivate, employees will be people are more productive, more resilient. More so, Cecil, they still better problems. But happened in this crisis is that the companies that were in a place where oh, this isn't really important or this is nice to have They are now recognizing that this is actually the most important thing that they could invest in for the success and longevity and survival of their businesses. And so I'm actually incredibly grateful for that. I don't like that off that we have to pay for it. But I am incredibly grateful that in this challenging time, more and more leaders there understanding that their own well being and the emotional health of their employees is non negotiable, not just for survival of their businesses, but if they want to be at their best and actually figure out how to thrive in whatever the future holds. >>And I'm glad to hear that, because the massive amount of uncertainty that we're all facing is unprecedented. You know, you can't pick up the phone and call your Brian mother and say, What did you guys do back in the day? And honestly, even if there had been something similar, 1918 hasn't been that long ago. People have nowadays are used to getting everything that you want on demand and also being able to get connected. Um, have good WiFi and be able to deliver what your clients what your what your bosses expect. The uncertainty factor that really weighs heavily on emotion is a huge inhibitor to productivity negotiation. Being worry >>if I can jump in uncertainty is the hardest thing for a brain to deal with. Our brains would rather know that something very bad will definitely happen. Then the B and uncertainty and I've actually been talking so much the companies and leaders about this, that this is literally the most stressed that we can experience because our brains number one job and I'm the founder of a company called Happier. But I always say that your brain number one job is not to keep you happy. It >>is to help you surmise. And so >>you're bring this constantly Evaluating your environment is the state of fruit or is a dangerous right fighter. But we know that was fun. What's happening right now is that the brain and I've come up with an answer. It doesn't know. Is it safe? Is it not safe? And I don't just mean in a macro way, um, macroeconomic way with the virus. I mean day to day. Things change day to day. We're juggling kids and family, and our businesses are changing so the brain doesn't give up. It's still tries really hard to figure out how to keep your state and that hard that working overtime the way it does that is by releasing stress hormones. So on top of just the very real challenges that so many folks have with worrying about loved ones juggling, working from home and family, there's also this chronic level of stress the world feeling because of uncertainty. >>Tell me a little bit about the interactive session that you held at WT through the other day. What were some of the common concerns or questions that you heard from the >>audience. Yeah, it's really interesting. It was such a great session, and we we had a lot of questions. We could not answer all the questions. Um, and I think that it means a lot to make it really thought about what they wanted to ask. There's a couple of things that emerged as common thread. The first was, How do I help someone in my life a colleague that I manage a loved one? How do I help them during this time if they're really overwhelmed or stressed? They're feeling sad, and we talked about the seal of acceptance, and we talked about how it might be our instincts to immediately cheer up the first thing. But actually, the bigger gift we can give them is to let them know that it's okay to not be okay and to honor their feelings with our effectiveness, and that actually helped them get through. So that was one of the themes that came up a lot. Another one was, with all of this uncertainty and the stress, like people would ask, I have trouble getting motivated like I love my job I love what I do, but I have so much trouble getting motivated, and that is very real. And the first thing that if anyone listening, feels this way, um, there's nothing wrong with you. Think about the amount of energy you're brain is using on all the stress. So no wonder you feel more fired and not as motivated. And so we talked about practicing self compassion, Um, in our expectations of ourselves and recognizing that we're undergoing something unprecedented and so difficult and then get motivated connecting the past on your to do list. Do How do they help someone else? Because that is where we connect first since the purpose, right, So that projects you're working on with your team or that presentation that you just can't get motivated to do. Ask yourself who does this help and actually answer the question? And in that moment, you connect yourself the purpose, which helps us be more resilient and more motivated. >>Get a notification or lack thereof is a huge problem, and I you know, you can't think it's not just may, not just you. It's got to be all the way up to the tops of companies that are really struggling because, as you say, the brain is so focused right now and busy and trying to assess things. And there are no concrete answers. But one of the things that you said I read your article in The Washington Post that you just did in the last week or so with your daughter and with my daughter. Yeah, with your daughter Mia. And the validation was Start on. And it it's so simple. But it's one of those things that I think often we think, Well, let me explain something and try to help you in that way without maybe stepping back and going well, actually help me. But what helps you? Are you seeing that that the executive leaders are also kind of stepping back and asking their teams? How are the ways that you want me to communicate with you? Or is that something that's happened? You know, I think that >>we are in an era of, um, human embracing leadership of, and I am so welcoming the era of leaders who are leading with their humanity first and are embracing the humanity of their people first. You know, I have this, um, actually working on my next book right now with this for leaders. And I have this concept, um, because I was a leader for so many years, and I always thought that I keep my emotions hidden, that emotions really didn't have anything to do with work. So I have this part that for leaders, they imagine you're holding a white board, and this is your emotional whiteboard on it are written your feeling. Whether you want to admit them or not, that team feels them, and it's the same for everyone on the team. So when you walk into a meeting, whether the virtual meeting or in person what is written on your emotional whiteboard, what are you feeling? And how are you approaching others? What do you want to be written on your emotional whiteboard, right? I think, as leaders, we would say, Well, I want to stay there, hear about you as my employees, that I want to hear how you're feeling. But think about are the actions you're taking aligning with with on your emotional whiteboard, right? And so listening and hearing, you know, I have this, um, came up with shorthand. Really? For me as a leader during a challenging time, and it's at C D. The first is acknowledge. Acknowledge your own challenges. Acknowledge your teams challenges, right. Validation. This point we're talking about, he is prepare genuinely care, right? So don't just do it as a check mark. But bring your humanity and compassionate actually care about people. There's so much research that when employees know that their leader cares about them, that on its own is hopeful for them. So there will be in their productivity. And he acts. So a c c es teach by example. So do the things that you want, your employees, the follow. And, um, I do see leaders stepping up more and more in their passion and their acceptance. And again, I think this is, ah, difficult but unique moment in time Do elevate our human embracing leadership. >>Do you advise women and men? Teoh. When we talked about gratitude a few minutes ago, right down, maybe. Right. Maybe it helps with your visual learner or someone that learns by storytelling to write things down, Maybe write down each day a few things. Maybe they seem so simple that you're grateful for, Or maybe even I like the idea of the emotional White Board. I can see that as something that would be helpful to write down. Do you recommend that to folks and maybe write down what your actual emotional thing is and what you want it to be? So a couple >>things on that. So the short answer is yes, you know, when it comes to gratitude, Um, it doesn't really matter how you practice like people say to me like I'm not a journalist, that's fine. That as long as you're specific and your gratitude So instead of I'm grateful for my family, how about I'm really grateful that I could give my daughter hug before I started interview? Right? So the more specific, the better. And actually the smaller the better. You talked about small things. Research shows that it's the frequency of small, positive experiences that contribute thoroughly. Satisfaction more than anything, grants so the smaller the better and capturing does health, so you can write in a journal. You can write it on a sticky notes. Maybe it's a text that you send to a friend to encourage them to practice practice as a leader. Maybe it's an email that you send to your teams. The factoring in some way really does help. And when it comes to the emotional white board, the practice that I share with, um, everyone is a check in. Check in with yourself, right? It's so incredible. You know, we have this group for women executives elevating women leaders. Is that all Vertical group, the year long program. It was worked well before this. So we have a group that goes with us every year, and one of the practice that we do is in the morning and in the afternoon, you check in with yourself on just day all my feeling, and you would not believe the impact that that has on their ability to solve problems on their ability to show up as their best just by pausing and checking in, like, How am I feeling what is in my emotional whiteboard? Acknowledging that without Dutchman being compassionate towards yourself and then saying, What is one thing I can shift if I would like you feel differently? >>The acknowledgement piece is critical, I think because it's it's the vulnerability to step up and go. I don't feel great about this and let me let me say that out loud. Maybe it helps me become accountable to that or expect it to a boss or a colleague that put it out there. That's a hard thing for people to do. Especially I think there is this dichotomy of people being concerned about John Safety when we're seeing what's going on in the news. Did any of that have come up during your WT two session about? I'm afraid to admit that I'm not motivated because our company's experiencing layoff. >>Yeah, it's definitely come up in the session and other sessions of kind of finding that balance. And look, you have to be realistic because we all have different filters in our teams. You have to be realistic about your leadership. But what I find over and over is that authenticity wins today, right? So, um, you have to you have to make all right how much you share. But even if it's just a little bit of Acknowledgments, it is helpful because it helps you not resist it so much and more likely than not. There's somebody on your team who feel similarly so that, by the way, there's comfort in knowing we're not alone. there's actually neurological comfort in knowing we're not alone like we need that sense of safety, but also you made them be able to move through that and brainstorm together and help each other get motivated. So you know, you have to judge by the culture of your team. But authenticity and you acknowledging your humanity to whatever degree you feel comfortable is usually an incredibly hopeful practice to help you be at your best, whatever that means. That >>day, I couldn't agree with you more. I always The authenticity is contagious. Natalie. It's been so great having you on the program. I wish we could keep chatting, but it is time to go. Thank you so much so folks can go toe happier, dot com or help your fellow happier and more. How about your home? Lots >>of lots of tons of free block posts and videos on all of the different practices I shared more about anything we do. So yes, come visit us that happier dot com and thank you so much for such thoughtful questions. I'm always incredibly grateful for thoughtful questions at interviews, but I really appreciate that. Well, >>good. Now it's been a pleasure having you. And I want to thank you for watching on behalf of Natalee code. And I'm Lisa Martin covering women transforming technology. The virtual version 2025. For now. >>Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

>> Announcer: From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. (bright electronic music) >> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're here at Sand Hill Road at Mayfield Fund. This is theCUBE, co-creation of the People First Network content series. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Our next guest, Yuvi Kochar, who's the Data-centric Digital Transformation Strategist at GameStop. Variety of stints in the industry, going in cutting-edge problems around data, Washington Post, comScore, among others. You've got your own practice. From Washington, DC, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for hosting me. >> This is a awesome conversation. We were just talking before we came on camera about data and the roles you've had over your career have been very interesting, and this seems to be the theme for some of the innovators that I've been interviewing and were on the People First is they see an advantage with technology, and they help companies, they grow companies, and they assist. You did a lot of different things, most notably that I recognized was the Washington Post, which is on the mainstream conversations now as a rebooted media company with a storied, historic experience from the Graham family. Jeff Bezos purchased them for a song, with my opinion, and now growing still, with the monetization, with subscriber base growing. I think they're number one in subscribers, I don't believe, I believe so. Interesting time for media and data. You've been there for what, how many years were you at the Washington Post? >> I spent about 13 years in the corporate office. So the Washington Post company was a conglomerate. They'd owned a lot of businesses. Not very well known to have owned Kaplan, education company. We owned Slate, we owned Newsweek, we owned TV stations and now they're into buying all kinds of stuff. So I was involved with a lot of varied businesses, but obviously, we were in the same building with the Washington Post, and I had front row seat to see the digital transformation of the media industry. >> John: Yeah, we-- >> And how we responded. >> Yeah, I want to dig into that because I think that illustrates kind of a lot what's happening now, we're seeing with cloud computing. Obviously, Cloud 1.0 and the rise of Amazon public cloud. Clearly, check, done that, a lot of companies, startups go there. Why would you provision a data center? You're a startup, you're crazy, but at some point, you can have a data center. Now, hybrid cloud's important. Devops, the application development market, building your own stack, is shifting now. It seems like the old days, but upside down. It's flipped around, where applications are in charge, data's critical for the application, infrastructure's now elastic. Unlike the old days of here's your infrastructure. You're limited to what you can run on it based on the infrastructure. >> Right. >> What's your thoughts on that? >> My thoughts are that, I'm a very, as my title suggests, data-centric person. So I think about everything data first. We were in a time when cloud-first is becoming old, and we are now moving into data-first because what's happening in the marketplace is the ability, the capability, of data analytics has reached a point where prediction, in any aspect of a business, has become really inexpensive. So empowering employees with prediction machines, whether you call them bots, or you call them analytics, or you call them machine learning, or AI, has become really inexpensive, and so I'm thinking more of applications, which are built data-out instead of data-in, which is you build process and you capture data, and then you decide, oh, maybe I should build some reporting. That's what we used to do. Now, you need to start with what's the data I have got? What's the data I need? What's the data I can get? We were just talking about, everybody needs a data monetization strategy. People don't realize how much asset is sitting in their data and where to monetize it and how to use it. >> It's interesting. I mean, I got my computer science degree in the 80s and one of the tracks I got a degree in was database, and let's just say that my main one was operating system. Database was kind of the throwaway at that time. It wasn't considered a big field. Database wasn't sexy at all. It was like, database, like. Now, if you're a database, you're a data guru, you're a rock star. The world has changed, but also databases are changing. It used to be one centralized database rules the world. Oracle made a lot of money with that, bought all their competitors. Now you have open source came into the realm, so the world of data is also limited by where the data's stored, how the data is retrieved, how the data moves around the network. This is a new dynamic. How do you look at that because, again, lagging in business has a lot to do with the data, whether it's in an application, that's one thing, but also having data available, not necessarily in real time, but if I'm going to work on something, I want the data set handy, which means I can download it or maybe get real-time. What's your thoughts on data as an element in all that moving around? >> So I think what you're talking about is still data analytics. How do I get insights about my business? How do I make decisions using data in a better way? What flexibility do I need? So you talk about open source, you think about MongoDB and those kind of databases. They give you a lot of flexibility. You can develop interesting insights very quickly, but I think that is still very much thinking about data in an old-school kind of way. I think what's happening now is we're teaching algorithms with data. So data is actually the software, right? So you get an open source algorithm. I mean Google and everybody else is happy to open source their algorithms. They're all available for free. But what, the asset is now the data, which means how you train your algorithm with your data, and then now, moving towards deploying it on the edge, which is you take an algorithm, you train it, then you deploy it on the edge in an IoT kind of environment, and now you're doing decision-making, whether it's self-driving cars, I mean those are great examples, but I think it's going down into very interesting spaces in enterprise, which is, so we have to all think about software differently because, actually, data is a software. >> That's an interesting take on it, and I love that. I mean I wrote a blog post in 2007 when we first started playing with the, in looking at the network effects on social media and those platforms was, I wrote a post, it was called Data is the New Development Kit. Development kit was what people did back then. They had a development kit and they would download stuff and then code, but the idea was is that data has to be part of the runtime and the compilation of, as software acts, data needs to be resident, not just here's a database, access it, pull it out, use it, present it, where data is much more of a key ingredient into the development. Is that kind of what you're getting at? >> Yes. >> Notion of-- >> And I think we're moving from the age of arithmetic-based machines, which is we put arithmetic onto chips, and we then made general-purpose chips, which were used to solve a huge amount of problems in the world. We're talking about, now, prediction machines on a chip, so you think about algorithms that are trained using data, which are going to be available on chips. And now you can do very interesting algorithmic work right on the edge devices, and so I think a lot of businesses, and I've seen that recently at GameStop, I think business leaders have a hard time understanding the change because we have moved from process-centric, process automation, how can I do it better? How can I be more productive? How can I make better decisions? We have trained our business partners on that kind of thinking, and now we are starting to say, no, no, no, we've got something that's going to help you make those decisions. >> It's interesting, you mentioned GameStop. Obviously, well-known, my sons are all gamers. I used to be a gamer back before I had kids, but then, can't keep up anymore. Got to be on that for so long, but GameStop was a retail giant in gaming. Okay, when they had physical displays, but now, with online, they're under pressure, and I had interviewed, again, at an Amazon event, this Best Buy CIO, and he says, "We don't compete with price anymore. "If they want to buy from Amazon, no problem, "but our store traffic is off the charts. "We personalize 50,000 emails a day." So personalization became their strategy, it was a data strategy. This is a user experience, not a purchase decision. Is this how you guys are thinking about it at GameStop? >> I think retail, if you look at the segment per se, personalization, Amazon obviously led the way, but it's obvious that personalization is key to attract the customer. If I don't know what games you play, or if I don't know what video you watched a little while ago, about which game, then I'm not offering you the product that you are most prone or are looking for or what you want to buy, and I think that's why personalization is key. I think that's-- >> John: And data drives that, and data drives that. >> Data drives that, and for personalization, if you look at retail, there's customer information. You need to know the customer. You need to know, understand the customer preferences, but then there's the product, and you need to marry the two. And that's where personalization comes into play. >> So I'll get your thoughts. You have, obviously, a great perspective on how tech has been built and now working on some real cutting-edge, clear view on what the future looks like. Totally agree with you, by the way, on the data. There's kind of an old guard/new guard, kind of two sides of the street, the winners and the losers, but hey, look, I think the old guard, if they don't innovate and become fresh and new and adopt the modern things that need to attract the new expectations and new experiences from their customers, are going to die. That being said, what is the success formula, because some people might say, hey, I'm data-driven. I'm doing it, look at me, I'm data. Well, not really. Well, how do you tell if someone's really data-driven or data-centric? What's the difference? Is there a tell sign? >> I think when you say the old guard, you're talking about companies that have large assets, that have been very successful in a business model that maybe they even innovated, like GameStop came up with pre-owned games, and for the longest of times, we've made huge amount of revenue and profit from that segment of our business. So yes, that's becoming old now, but I think the most important thing for large enterprises at least, to battle the incumbent, the new upstarts, is to develop strategies which are leveraging the new technologies, but are building on their existing capability, and that's what I drive at GameStop. >> And also the startups too, that they were here in a venture capital firm, we're at Mayfield Fund, doing this program, startups want to come and take a big market down, or come in on a narrow entry and get a position and then eat away at an incumbent. They could do it fast if they're data-centric. >> And I think it's speed is what you're talking about. I think the biggest challenge large companies have is an ability to to play the field at the speed of the new upstarts and the firms that Mayfield and others are investing in. That's the big challenge because you see this, you see an opportunity, but you're, and I saw that at the Washington Post. Everybody went to meetings and said, yes, we need to be digital, but they went-- >> They were talking. >> They went back to their desk and they had to print a paper, and so yes, so we'll be digital tomorrow, and that's very hard because, finally, the paper had to come out. >> Let's take us through the journey. You were the CTO, VP of Technology, Graham Holdings, Washington Post, they sold it to Jeff Bezos, well-documented, historic moment, but what a storied company, Washington Post, local paper, was the movie about it, all the historic things they've done from a reporting and journalism standpoint. We admire that. Then they hit, the media business starts changing, gets bloated, not making any money, online classifieds are dying, search engine marketing is growing, they have to adjust. You were there. What was the big, take us through that journey. >> I think the transformation was occurring really fast. The new opportunities were coming up fast. We were one of the first companies to set up a website, but we were not allowed to use the brand on the website because there was a lot of concern in the newsroom that we are going to use or put the brand on this misunderstood, nearly misunderstood opportunity. So I think it started there, and then-- >> John: This is classic old guard mentality. >> Yes, and it continued down because people had seen downturns. It's not like media companies hadn't been through downturns. They had, because the market crashes and we have a recession and there's a downturn, but it always came back because-- >> But this was a wave. I mean the thing is, downturns are economic and there's business that happens there, advertisers, consumption changes. This was a shift in their user base based upon a technology wave, and they didn't see it coming. >> And they hadn't ever experienced it. So they were experiencing it as it was happening, and I think it's very hard to respond to a transformation of that kind in a very old-- >> As a leader, how did you handle that? Give us an example of what you did, how you make your mark, how do you get them to move? What were some of the things that were notable moments? >> I think the main thing that happened there was that we spun out washingtonpost.com. So it became an independent business. It was actually running across the river. It moved out of the corporate offices. It went to a separate place. >> The renegades. >> And they were given-- >> John: Like Steve Jobs and the Macintosh team, they go into separate building. >> And we were given, I was the CTO of the dotcom for some time while we were turning over our CTO there, and we were given a lot of flexibility. We were not held accountable to the same level. We used the, obviously, we used-- >> John: You were running fast and loose. >> And we were, yes, we had a lot of flexibility and we were doing things differently. We were giving away the content in some way. On the online side, there was no pay wall. We started with a pay wall, but advertising kind of was so much more lucrative in the beginning, that the pay wall was shut down, and so I think we experimented a lot, and I think where we missed, and a lot of large companies miss, is that you need to leave your existing business behind and scale your new business, and I think that's very hard to do, which is, okay, we're going to, it's happening at GameStop. We're no longer completely have a control of the market where we are the primary source of where, you talk about your kids, where they go to get their games. They can get the games online and I think-- >> It's interesting, people are afraid to let go because they're so used to operating their business, and now it has to pivot to a new operating model and grow. Two different dynamics, growth, operation, operating and growing. Not all managers have that growth mindset. >> And I think there's also an experience thing. So most people who are in these businesses, who've been running these businesses very successfully, have not been watching what's happening in technology. And so the technology team comes out and says, look, let me show you what we can do. I think there has to be this open and very, very candid discussion around how we are going to transform-- >> How would you talk about your peer, developed peers out there, your peers and other CIOs, and even CISOs on the security side, have been dealing with the same suppliers over, and in fact, on the security side, the supplier base is getting larger. There's more tools coming out. I mean who wants another tool? So platform, tool, these are big decisions being made around companies, that if you want to be data-centric, you want to be a data-centric model, you got to understand platforms, not just buying tools. If you buy a hammer, they will look like a nail, and you have so many hammers, what version, so platform discussions come in. What's your thoughts on this? Because this is a cutting-edge topic we've been talking about with a lot of senior engineering leaders around Platform 2.0 coming, not like a classic platform to... >> Right, I think that each organization has to leverage or build their, our stack on top of commodity platforms. You talked about AWS or Azure or whatever cloud you use, and you take all their platform capability and services that they offer, but then on top of that, you structure your own platform with your vertical capabilities, which become your differentiators, which is what you take to market. You enable those for all your product lines, so that now you are building capability, which is a layer on top of, and the commodity platforms will continue to bite into your platform because they will start offering capabilities that earlier, I remember, I started at this company called BrassRing, recruitment automation. One of the first software-as-a-service companies, and I, we bought a little company, and the CTO there had built a web server. It was called, it was his name, it was called Barrett's Engine. (chuckles) And so-- >> Probably Apache with something built around it. >> So, in those days, we used to build our own web servers. But now today, you can't even find an engineer who will build a web server. >> I mean the web stack and these notions of just simple Web 1.0 building blocks of change. We've been calling it Cloud 2.0, and I want to get your thoughts on this because one of the things I've been riffing on lately is this, I remember Marc Andreessen wrote the famous article in Wall Street Journal, Software is Eating the World, which I agree with in general, no debate there, but also the 10x Engineer, you go into any forum online, talking about 10x Engineers, you get five different opinions, meaning, a 10x Engineer's an engineer who can do 10 times more work than an old school, old classical engineer. I bring this up because the notion of full stack developer used to be a real premium, but what you're talking about here with cloud is a horizontally scalable commodity layer with differentiation at the application level. That's not full stack, that's half stack. So you think the world's kind of changing. If you're going to be data-centric, the control plane is data. The software that's domain-specific is on top. That's what you're essentially letting out. >> That's what I'm talking about, but I think that also, what I'm beginning to find, and we've been working on a couple of projects, is you put the data scientists in the same room with engineers who write code, write software, and it's fascinating to see them communicate and collaborate. They do not talk the same language at all. >> John: What's it like? Give us a mental picture. >> So a data scientist-- >> Are they throwing rocks at each other? >> Well, nearly, because the data scientists come from the math side of the house. They're very math-oriented, they're very algorithm-oriented. Mathematical algorithms, whereas software engineers are much more logic-oriented, and they're thinking about scalability and a whole lot of other things, and if you think about, a data scientist develops an algorithm, it rarely scales. You have to actually then hand it to an engineer to rewrite it in a scalable form. >> I want to ask you a question on that. This is why I got you and you're an awesome guest. Thanks for your insights here, and we'll take a detour into machine learning. Machine learning really is what AI is about. AI is really nothing more than just, I love AI, it gets people excited about computer science, which is great. I mean my kids talk about AI, they don't talk about IoT, which is good that AI does that, but it's really machine learning. So there's two schools of thought on machine. I call it the Berkeley school on one end, not Berkeley per se but Berkeley talks about math, machine learning, math, math, math, and then you have other schools of thought that are on cognition, that machine learning should be more cognitive, less math-driven, spectrum of full math, full cognition, and everything in between. What's your thoughts on the relationship between math and cognition? >> Yeah, so it's interesting. You get gray hair and you kind of move up the stack, and I'm much more business-focused. These are tools. You can get passionate about either school of thought, but I think that what that does is you lose sight of what the business needs, and I think it's most important to start with what are we here trying to do, and what is the best tool? What is the approach that we should utilize to meet that need? Like the other day, we were looking at product data from GameStop, and we know that the quality of data should be better, but we found a simple algorithm that we could utilize to create product affinity. Now whether it's cognition or math, it doesn't matter. >> John: The outcome's the outcome. >> The outcome is the outcome, and so-- >> They're not mutually exclusive, and that's a good conversation debate but it really gets to your point of does it really matter as long as it's accurate and the data drives that, and this is where I think data is interesting. If you look at folks who are thinking about data, back to the cloud as an example, it's only good as what you can get access to, and cybersecurity, the transparency issue around sharing data becomes a big thing. Having access to the data's super important. How do you view that for, as CIOs, and start to think about they're re-architecting their organizations for these digital transformations. Is there a school of thought there? >> Yes, so I think data is now getting consolidated. For the longest time, we were building data warehouses, departmental data warehouses. You can go do your own analytics and just take your data and add whatever else you want to do, and so the part of data that's interesting to you becomes much more clean, much more reliable, but the rest, you don't care much about. I think given the new technologies that are available and the opportunity of the data, data is coming back together, and it's being put into a single place. >> (mumbles) Well, that's certainly a honeypot for a hacker, but we'll get that in a second. If you and I were doing a startup, we say, hey, let's, we've got a great idea, we're going to build something. How would we want to think about the data in terms of having data be a competitive advantage, being native into the architecture of the system. I'll say we use cloud unless we need some scale on premise for privacy reasons or whatever, but we would, how would we go to market, and we have an app, as apps defined, great use case, but I want to have extensibility around the data, I don't want to foreclose any future options, How should I think about my, how should we think about our data strategy? >> Yes, so there was a very interesting conversation I had just a month ago with a friend of mine who's working at a startup in New York, and they're going to build a solution, take it to market, and he said, "I want to try it only in a small market "and learn from it," and he's going very old school, focus groups, analytics, analysis, and I sat down, we sat at Grand Central Station, and we talked about how, today, he should be thinking about capturing the data and letting the data tell him what's working and what's not working, instead of trying to find focus groups and find very small data points to make big decisions. He should actually utilize the target, the POC market, to capture data and get ready for scale because if you want to go national after having run a test in... >> Des Moines, Iowa. >> Part of New York or wherever, then you need to already have built the data capability to scale that business in today's-- >> John: Is it a SaaS business? >> No, it's a service and-- >> So he can instrument it, just watch the data. >> And yes, but he's not thinking like that because most business people are still thinking the old way, and if you look at Uber and others, they have gone global at such a rapid pace because they're very data-centric, and they scale with data, and they don't scale with just let's go to that market and then let's try-- >> Yeah, ship often, get the data, then think of it as part of the life cycle of development. Don't think it as the old school, craft, launch it, and then see how it goes and watch it fail or succeed, and know six months later what happened, know immediately. >> And if you go data-centric, then you can turn the R&D crank really fast. Learn, test and learn, test and learn, test and learn at a very rapid pace. That changes the game, and I think people are beginning to realize that data needs to be thought about as the application and the service is being developed, because the data will help scale the service really fast. >> Data comes into applications. I love your line of data is the new software. That's better than the new oil, which has been said before, but data comes into the app. You also mentioned that app throws off data. >> Yuvi: Yes. >> We know that humans have personal, data exhaust all the time. Facebook made billions of dollars on our exhaust and our data. The role of data in and out of the application, the I/O of the application, is a new concept, you brought that up. I like that and I see that happening. How should we capture that data? This used to be log files. Now you got observability, all kinds of new words kind of coming into this cloud equation. How should people think about this? >> I think that has to be part of the design of your applications, because data is application, and you need to design the application with data in mind, and that needs to be thought of upfront, and not later. >> Yuvi, what's next for you? We're here in Sand Hill Road, VC firm, they're doing a lot of investments, you've got a great project with GameStop, you're advising startups, what's going on in your world? >> Yes, so I'm totally focused, as you probably are beginning to sense, on the opportunity that data is enabling, especially in the enterprise. I'm very interested in helping business understand how to leverage data, because this is another major shift that's occurring in the marketplace. Opportunities have opened up, prediction is becoming cheap and at scale, and I think any business runs on their capability to predict, what is the shirt I should buy? How many I should buy? What color should I buy? I think data is going to drive that prediction at scale. >> This is a legit way that everyone should pay attention to. All businesses, not just one-- >> All businesses, everything, because prediction is becoming cheap and automated and granular. That means you need to be able to not just, you need to empower your people with low-level prediction that comes out of the machines. >> Data is the new software. Yuvi, thanks so much for great insight. This is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here at Sand Hill Road at the Mayfield Fund, for the People First Network series. Thanks for watching. >> Yuvi: Thank you. 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>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's three Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back. We're here to wrap up the M I T. Chief data officer officer, information quality. It's hashtag m i t CDO conference. You're watching the Cube. I'm David Dante, and Paul Gill is my co host. This is two days of coverage. We're wrapping up eyes. Our analysis of what's going on here, Paul, Let me let me kick it off. When we first started here, we talked about that are open. It was way saw the chief data officer role emerged from the back office, the information quality role. When in 2013 the CEO's that we talked to when we asked them what was their scope. We heard things like, Oh, it's very wide. Involves analytics, data science. Some CEOs even said Oh, yes, security is actually part of our purview because all the cyber data so very, very wide scope. Even in some cases, some of the digital initiatives were sort of being claimed. The studios were staking their claim. The reality was the CDO also emerged out of highly regulated industries financialservices healthcare government. And it really was this kind of wonky back office role. And so that's what my compliance, that's what it's become again. We're seeing that CEOs largely you're not involved in a lot of the emerging. Aye, aye initiatives. That's what we heard, sort of anecdotally talking to various folks At the same time. I feel as though the CDO role has been more fossilized than it was before. We used to ask, Is this role going to be around anymore? We had C I. Ose tell us that the CEO Rose was going to disappear, so you had both ends of the spectrum. But I feel as though that whatever it's called CDO Data's our chief analytics off officer, head of data, you know, analytics and governance. That role is here to stay, at least for for a fair amount of time and increasingly, issues of privacy and governance. And at least the periphery of security are gonna be supported by that CD a role. So that's kind of takeaway Number one. Let me get your thoughts. >> I think there's a maturity process going on here. What we saw really in 2016 through 2018 was, ah, sort of a celebration of the arrival of the CDO. And we're here, you know, we've got we've got power now we've got an agenda. And that was I mean, that was a natural outcome of all this growth and 90% of organizations putting sea Dios in place. I think what you're seeing now is a realization that Oh, my God, this is a mess. You know what I heard? This year was a lot less of this sort of crowing about the ascendance of sea Dios and Maura about We've got a big integration problem of big data cleansing problem, and we've got to get our hands down to the nitty gritty. And when you talk about, as you said, we had in here so much this year about strategic initiatives, about about artificial intelligence, about getting involved in digital business or customer experience transformation. What we heard this year was about cleaning up data, finding the data that you've got organizing it, applying meditator, too. It is getting in shape to do something with it. There's nothing wrong with that. I just think it's part of the natural maturation process. Organizations now have to go through Tiu to the dirty process of cleaning up this data before they can get to the next stage, which was a couple of three years out for most of >> the second. Big theme, of course. We heard this from the former head of analytics. That G s K on the opening keynote is the traditional methods have failed the the Enterprise Data Warehouse, and we've actually studied this a lot. You know, my analogy is often you snake swallowing a basketball, having to build cubes. E D W practitioners would always used to call it chasing the chips until we come up with a new chip. Oh, we need that because we gotta run faster because it's taking us hours and hours, weeks days to run these analytics. So that really was not an agile. It was a rear view mirror looking thing. And Sarbanes Oxley saved the E. D. W. Business because reporting became part of compliance thing perspective. The master data management piece we've heard. Do you consistently? We heard Mike Stone Breaker, who's obviously a technology visionary, was right on. It doesn't scale through this notion of duping. Everything just doesn't work and manually creating rules. It's just it's just not the right approach. This we also heard the top down data data enterprise data model doesn't works too complicated, can operationalize it. So what they do, they kick the can to governance. The Duke was kind of a sidecar, their big data that failed to live up to its promises. And so it's It's a big question as to whether or not a I will bring that level of automation we heard from KPMG. Certainly, Mike Stone breaker again said way heard this, uh, a cz well, from Andy Palmer. They're using technology toe automate and scale that big number one data science problem, which is? They spend all their time wrangling data. We'll see if that if that actually lives up >> to his probable is something we did here today from several of our guests. Was about the promise of machine learning to automate this day to clean up process and as ah Mark Ramsay kick off the conference saying that all of these efforts to standardize data have failed in the past. This does look, He then showed how how G s K had used some of the tools that were represented here using machine learning to actually clean up the data at G S. K. So there is. And I heard today a lot of optimism from the people we talked to about the capability of Chris, for example, talking about the capability of machine learning to bring some order to solve this scale scale problem Because really organizing data creating enterprise data models is a scale problem, and the only way you can solve that it's with with automation, Mike Stone breaker is right on top of that. So there was optimism at this event. There was kind of an ooh, kind of, ah, a dismay at seeing all the data problems they have to clean up, but also promised that tools are on the way that could do that. >> Yeah, The reason I'm an optimist about this role is because data such a hard problem. And while there is a feeling of wow, this is really a challenge. There's a lot of smart people here who are up for the challenge and have the d n a for it. So the role, that whole 360 thing. We talked about the traditional methods, you know, kind of failing, and in the third piece that touched on, which is really bringing machine intelligence to the table. We haven't heard that as much at this event. It's now front and center. It's just another example of a I injecting itself into virtually every aspect every corner of the industry. And again, I often jokes. Same wine, new bottle. Our industry has a habit of doing that, but it's cyclical, but it is. But we seem to be making consistent progress. >> And the machine learning, I thought was interesting. Several very guest spoke to machine learning being applied to the plumbing projects right now to cleaning up data. Those are really self contained projects. You can manage those you can. You can determine out test outcomes. You can vet the quality of the of the algorithms. It's not like you're putting machine learning out there in front of the customer where it could potentially do some real damage. There. They're vetting their burning in machine, learning in a environment that they control. >> Right, So So, Amy, Two solid days here. I think that this this conference has really grown when we first started here is about 130 people, I think. And now it was 500 registrants. This'd year. I think 600 is the sort of the goal for next year. Moving venues. The Cube has been covering this all but one year since 2013. Hope to continue to do that. Paul was great working with you. Um, always great work. I hope we can, uh we could do more together. We heard the verdict is bringing back its conference. You put that together. So we had column. Mahoney, um, had the vertical rock stars on which was fun. Com Mahoney, Mike Stone breaker uh, Andy Palmer and Chris Lynch all kind of weighed in, which was great to get their perspectives kind of the days of MPP and how that's evolved improving on traditional relational database. And and now you're Stone breaker. Applying all these m i. Same thing with that scale with Chris Lynch. So it's fun to tow. Watch those guys all Boston based East Coast folks some news. We just saw the news hit President Trump holding up jet icon contractors is we've talked about. We've been following that story very closely and I've got some concerns over that. It's I think it's largely because he doesn't like Bezos in The Washington Post Post. Exactly. You know, here's this you know, America first. The Pentagon says they need this to be competitive with China >> and a I. >> There's maybe some you know, where there's smoke. There's fire there, so >> it's more important to stick in >> the eye. That's what it seems like. So we're watching that story very closely. I think it's I think it's a bad move for the executive branch to be involved in those type of decisions. But you know what I know? Well, anyway, Paul awesome working with you guys. Thanks. And to appreciate you flying out, Sal. Good job, Alex Mike. Great. Already wrapping up. So thank you for watching. Go to silicon angle dot com for all the news. Youtube dot com slash silicon angles where we house our playlist. But the cube dot net is the main site where we have all the events. It will show you what's coming up next. We've got a bunch of stuff going on straight through the summer. And then, of course, VM World is the big kickoff for the fall season. Goto wicked bond dot com for all the research. We're out. Thanks for watching Dave. A lot day for Paul Gillon will see you next time.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (funky electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante! >> Welcome, everybody, to this Cube conversation here in our Marlborough offices. I am very excited today, I spent a number of years at IDC, which, of course, is owned by IDG. And there's a new book out, relatively new, called Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire. And it's a great book, lotta stories that I didn't know, many that I did know, and the author of that book, Glenn Rifkin, is here to talk about not only Pat McGovern but also some of the lessons that he put forth to help us as entrepreneurs and leaders apply to create better businesses and change the world. Glenn, thanks so much for comin' on theCube. >> Thank you, Dave, great to see ya. >> So let me start with, why did you write this book? >> Well, a couple reasons. The main reason was Patrick McGovern III, Pat's son, came to me at the end of 2016 and said, "My father had died in 2014 and I feel like his legacy deserves a book, and many people told me you were the guy to do it." So the background on that I, myself, worked at IDG back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, got to know Pat during that time, did some work for him after I left Computerworld, on a one-on-one basis. Then I would see him over the years, interview him for the New York Times or other magazines, and every time I'd see Pat, I'd end our conversation by saying, "Pat, when are we gonna do your book?" And he would laugh, and he would say, "I'm not ready to do that yet, there's just still too much to do." And so it became sort of an inside joke for us, but I always really did wanna write this book about him because I felt he deserved a book. He was just one of these game-changing pioneers in the tech industry. >> He really was, of course, the book was even more meaningful for me, we, you and I started right in the same time, 1983-- >> Yeah. >> And by that time, IDG was almost 20 years old and it was quite a powerhouse then, but boy, we saw, really the ascendancy of IDG as a brand and, you know, the book reviews on, you know, the back covers are tech elite: Benioff wrote the forward, Mark Benioff, you had Bill Gates in there, Walter Isaacson was in there, Guy Kawasaki, Bob Metcalfe, George Colony-- >> Right. >> Who actually worked for a little stint at IDC for a while. John Markoff of The New York Times, so, you know, the elite of tech really sort of blessed this book and it was really a lot to do with Pat McGovern, right? >> Oh, absolutely, I think that the people on the inside understood how important he was to the history of the tech industry. He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, you didn't think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and then Pat McGovern, however, those who are in the know realize that he was as important in his own way as they were. Because somebody had to chronicle this story, somebody had to share the story of the evolution of this amazing information technology and how it changed the world. And Pat was never a front-of-the-TV-camera guy-- >> Right. >> He was a guy who put his people forward, he put his products forward, for sure, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, most people don't know what that means, but people did know Macworld, people did know PCWorld, they knew IDC, they knew Computerworld for sure. So that was Pat's view of the world, he didn't care whether he had the spotlight on him or not. >> When you listen to leaders like Reed Hoffman or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, great companies and how to build great companies, they always come back to culture. >> Yup. >> The book opens with a scene of, and we all, that I usually remember this, well, we're just hangin' around, waitin' for Pat to come in and hand out what was then called the Christmas bonus-- >> Right. >> Back when that wasn't politically incorrect to say. Now, of course, it's the holiday bonus. But it was, it was the Christmas bonus time and Pat was coming around and he was gonna personally hand a bonus, which was a substantial bonus, to every single employee at the company. I mean, and he did that, really, literally, forever. >> Forever, yeah. >> Throughout his career. >> Yeah, it was unheard of, CEOs just didn't do that and still don't do that, you were lucky, you got a message on the, you know, in the lunchroom from the CEO, "Good work, troops! Keep up the good work!" Pat just had a really different view of the culture of this company, as you know from having been there, and I know. It was very familial, there was a sense that we were all in this together, and it really was important for him to let every employee know that. The idea that he went to every desk in every office for IDG around the United States, when we were there in the '80s there were probably 5,000 employees in the US, he had to devote substantial amount-- >> Weeks and weeks! >> Weeks at a time to come to every building and do this, but year after year he insisted on doing it, his assistant at the time, Mary Dolaher told me she wanted to sign the cards, the Christmas cards, and he insisted that he ensign every one of them personally. This was the kind of view he had of how you keep employees happy, if your employees are happy, the customers are gonna be happy, and you're gonna make a lot of money. And that's what he did. >> And it wasn't just that. He had this awesome holiday party that you described, which was epic, and during the party, they would actually take pictures of every single person at the party and then they would load the carousel, you remember the 35-mm. carousel, and then, you know, toward the end of the evening, they would play that and everybody was transfixed 'cause they wanted to see their, the picture of themselves! >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> I mean, it was ge-- and to actually pull that off in the 1980s was not trivial! Today, it would be a piece of cake. And then there was the IDG update, you know, the Good News memos, there was the 10-year lunch, the 20-year trips around the world, there were a lot of really rich benefits that, you know, in and of themselves maybe not a huge deal, but that was the culture that he set. >> Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to anybody who worked in this company over, say, the last 50 years, you were gonna get the same kind of stories. I've been kind of amazed, I'm going around, you know, marketing the book, talking about the book at various events, and the deep affection for this guy that still holds five years after he died, it's just remarkable. You don't really see that with the CEO class, there's a couple, you know, Steve Jobs left a great legacy of creativity, he was not a wonderful guy to his employees, but Pat McGovern, people loved this guy, and they st-- I would be signing books and somebody'd say, "Oh, I've been at IDG for 27 years and I remember all of this," and "I've been there 33 years," and there's a real longevity to this impact that he had on people. >> Now, the book was just, it was not just sort of a biography on McGovern, it was really about lessons from a leader and an entrepreneur and a media mogul who grew this great company in this culture that we can apply, you know, as business people and business leaders. Just to give you a sense of what Pat McGovern did, he really didn't take any outside capital, he did a little bit of, you know, public offering with IDG Books, but, really, you know, no outside capital, it was completely self-funded. He built a $3.8 billion empire, 300 publications, 280 million readers, and I think it was almost 100 or maybe even more, 100 countries. And so, that's an-- like you were, used the word remarkable, that is a remarkable achievement for a self-funded company. >> Yeah, Pat had a very clear vision of how, first of all, Pat had a photographic memory and if you were a manager in the company, you got a chance to sit in meetings with Pat and if you didn't know the numbers better than he did, which was a tough challenge, you were in trouble! 'Cause he knew everything, and so, he was really a numbers-focused guy and he understood that, you know, his best way to make profit was to not be looking for outside funding, not to have to share the wealth with investors, that you could do this yourself if you ran it tightly, you know, I called it in the book a 'loose-tight organization,' loose meaning he was a deep believer in decentralization, that every market needed its own leadership because they knew the market, you know, in Austria or in Russia or wherever, better than you would know it from a headquarters in Boston, but you also needed that tightness, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know what was going on with each of the budgets or you were gonna end up in big trouble, which a lot of companies find themselves in. >> Well, and, you know, having worked there, I mean, essentially, if you made your numbers and did so ethically, and if you just kind of followed some of the corporate rules, which we'll talk about, he kind of left you alone. You know, you could, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, you could stay in any hotel, you really couldn't fly first class, and we'll maybe talk about that-- >> Right. >> But he was a complex man, I mean, he was obviously wealthy, he was a billionaire, he was very generous, but at the same time he was frugal, you know, he drove, you know, a little, a car that was, you know, unremarkable, and we had buy him a car. He flew coach, and I remember one time, I was at a United flight, and I was, I had upgraded, you know, using my miles, and I sat down and right there was Lore McGovern, and we both looked at each other and said right at the same time, "I upgraded!" (laughs) Because Pat never flew up front, but he would always fly with a stack of newspapers in the seat next to him. >> Yeah, well, woe to, you were lucky he wasn't on the plane and spotted you as he was walking past you into coach, because he was not real forgiving when he saw people, people would hide and, you know, try to avoid him at all cost. And, I mean, he was a big man, Pat was 6'3", you know, 250 lbs. at least, built like a linebacker, so he didn't fit into coach that well, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, he was flyin' to Beijing, he was flyin' to Moscow, he was going all over the world, squeezing himself into these seats. Now, you know, full disclosure, as he got older and had, like, probably 10 million air miles at his disposal, he would upgrade too, occasionally, for those long-haul flights, just 'cause he wanted to be fresh when he would get off the plane. But, yeah, these are legends about Pat that his frugality was just pure legend in the company, he owned this, you know, several versions of that dark blue suit, and that's what you would see him in. He would never deviate from that. And, but, he had his patterns, but he understood the impact those patterns had on his employees and on his customers. >> I wanna get into some of the lessons, because, really, this is what the book is all about, the heart of it. And you mentioned, you know, one, and we're gonna tell from others, but you really gotta stay close to the customer, that was one of the 10 corporate values, and you remember, he used to go to the meetings and he'd sometimes randomly ask people to recite, "What's number eight?" (laughs) And you'd be like, oh, you'd have your cheat sheet there. And so, so, just to give you a sense, this man was an entrepreneur, he started the company in 1964 with a database that he kind of pre-sold, he was kind of the sell, design, build type of mentality, he would pre-sold this thing, and then he started Computerworld in 1967, so it was really only a few years after he launched the company that he started the Computerworld, and other than Data Nation, there was nothing there, huge pent-up demand for that type of publication, and he caught lightning in a bottle, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. >> Yeah, oh, no question. Computerworld became, you know, the bible of the industry, it became a cash cow for IDG, you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look in hindsight and say, oh, well, obviously. But when Pat was doing this, one little-known fact is he was an editor at a publication called Computers and Automation that was based in Newton, Massachusetts and he kept that job even after he started IDC, which was the original company in 1964. It was gonna be a research company, and it was doing great, he was seeing the build-up, but it wasn't 'til '67 when he started Computerworld, that he said, "Okay, now this is gonna be a full-time gig for me," and he left the other publication for good. But, you know, he was sorta hedging his bets there for a little while. >> And that's where he really gained respect for what we'll call the 'Chinese Wallet,' the, you know, editorial versus advertising. We're gonna talk about that some more. So I mentioned, 1967, Computerworld. So he launched in 1964, by 1971, he was goin' to Japan, we're gonna talk about the China Stories as well, so, he named the company International Data Corp, where he was at a little spot in Newton, Mass.-- >> Right, right. >> So, he had a vision. You said in your book, you mention, how did this gentleman get it so right for so long? And that really leads to some of the leadership lessons, and one of them in the book was, sort of, have a mission, have a vision, and really, Pat was always talking about information, about information technology, in fact, when Wine for Dummies came out, it kind of created a little friction, that was really off the center. >> Or Wine for Dummies, or Sex for Dummies! >> Yeah, Sex for Dummies, boy, yeah! >> With, that's right, Ruth Westheimer-- >> Dr. Ruth Westheimer. >> But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, he really didn't deviate from that vision. >> Yeah, no, it was very crucial to the development of the company that he got people to, you know, buy into that mission, because the mission was everything. And he understood, you know, he had the numbers, but he also saw what was happening out there, from the 1960s, when IBM mainframes filled a room, and, you know, only the high priests of data centers could touch them. He had a vision for, you know, what was coming next and he started to understand that there would be many facets to this information about information technology, it wasn't gonna be boring, if anything, it was gonna be the story of our age and he was gonna stick to it and sell it. >> And, you know, timing is everything, but so is, you know, Pat was a workaholic and had an amazing mind, but one of the things I learned from the book, and you said this, Pat Kenealy mentioned it, all American industrial and social revolutions have had a media company linked to them, Crane and automobiles, Penton and energy, McGraw-Hill and aerospace, Annenberg, of course, and TV, and in technology, it was IDG. >> Yeah, he, like I said earlier, he really was a key figure in the development of this industry and it was, you know, one of the key things about that, a lot publications that came and went made the mistake of being platform or, you know, vertical market specific. And if that market changed, and it was inevitably gonna change in high tech, you were done. He never, you know, he never married himself to some specific technology cycle. His idea was the audience was not gonna change, the audience was gonna have to roll with this, so, the company, IDG, would produce publications that got that, you know, Computerworld was actually a little bit late to the PC game, but eventually got into it and we tracked the different cycles, you know, things in tech move in sine waves, they come and go. And Pat never was, you know, flustered by that, he could handle any kind of changes from the mainframes down to the smartphone when it came. And so, that kind of flexibility, and ability to adjust to markets, really was unprecedented in that particular part of the market. >> One of the other lessons in the book, I call it 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, look, that you shared, actually, with your readers, if you wanna do it right, you've gotta be on the ground, you've gotta be there. And the China story is one that I didn't know about how Pat kind of talked his way into China, tell us, give us a little summary of that story. >> Sure, I love that story because it's so Pat. It was 1978, Pat was in Tokyo on a business trip, one of his many business trips, and he was gonna be flying to Moscow for a trade show. And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover in Beijing, which in those days was called Peking, and was not open to Americans. There were no US and China diplomatic relations then. But Pat had it in mind that he was going to get off that plane in Beijing and see what he could see. So that meant that he had to leave the flight when it landed in Beijing and talk his way through the customs as they were in China at the time with folks in the, wherever, the Quonset hut that served for the airport, speaking no English, and him speaking no Chinese, he somehow convinced these folks to give him a day pass, 'cause he kept saying to them, "I'm only in transit, it's okay!" (laughs) Like, he wasn't coming, you know, to spy on them on them or anything. So here's this massive American businessman in his dark suit, and he somehow gets into downtown Beijing, which at the time was mostly bicycles, very few cars, there were camels walking down the street, they'd come with traders from Mongolia. The people were still wearing the drab outfits from the Mao era, and Pat just spent the whole day wandering around the city, just soaking it in. He was that kind of a world traveler. He loved different cultures, mostly eastern cultures, and he would pop his head into bookstores. And what he saw were people just clamoring to get their hands on anything, a newspaper, a magazine, and it just, it didn't take long for the light bulb to go on and said, this is a market we need to play in. >> He was fascinated with China, I, you know, as an employee and a business P&L manager, I never understood it, I said, you know, the per capita spending on IT in China was like a dollar, you know? >> Right. >> And I remember my lunch with him, my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, there's gonna be a huge opportunity there, and yeah, I don't know how we're gonna get the money out, maybe we'll buy a bunch of tea and ship it over, but I'm not worried about that." And, of course, he meets Hugo Shong, which is a huge player in the book, and the home run out of China was, of course, the venture capital, which he started before there was even a stock market, really, to exit in China. >> Right, yeah. No, he was really a visionary, I mean, that word gets tossed around maybe more than it should, but Pat was a bonafide visionary and he saw things in China that were developing that others didn't see, including, for example, his own board, who told him he was crazy because in 1980, he went back to China without telling them and within days he had a meeting with the ministry of technology and set up a joint venture, cost IDG $250,000, and six months later, the first issue of China Computerworld was being published and within a couple of years it was the biggest publication in China. He said, told me at some point that $250,0000 investment turned into $85 million and when he got home, that first trip, the board was furious, they said, "How can you do business with the commies? You're gonna ruin our brand!" And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me on this one, you're gonna see." And the venture capital story was just an offshoot, he saw the opportunity in the early '90s, that venture in China could in fact be a huge market, why not help build it? And that's what he did. >> What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, Chinese investors. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of bittersweet, but in the same time, it's symbolic given Pat's love for China and the Chinese people. There's been a little bit of criticism about that, I know that the US government required IDC to spin out its supercomputer division because of concerns there. I'm always teasing Michael Dow that at the next IDG board meeting, those Lenovo numbers, they're gonna look kinda law. (laughs) But what are your, what's your, what are your thoughts on that, in terms of, you know, people criticize China in terms of IP protections, etc. What would Pat have said to that, do you think? >> You know, Pat made 130 trips to China in his life, that's, we calculated at some point that just the air time in planes would have been something like three and a half to four years of his life on planes going to China and back. I think Pat would, today, acknowledge, as he did then, that China has issues, there's not, you can't be that naive. He got that. But he also understood that these were people, at the end of the day, who were thirsty and hungry for information and that they were gonna be a player in the world economy at some point, and that it was crucial for IDG to be at the forefront of that, not just play later, but let's get in early, let's lead the parade. And I think that, you know, some part of him would have been okay with the sale of the company to this conglomerate there, called China Oceanwide. Clearly controversial, I mean, but once Pat died, everyone knew that the company was never gonna be the same with the leader who had been at the helm for 50 years, it was gonna be a tough transition for whoever took over. And I think, you know, it's hard to say, certainly there's criticism of things going on with China. China's gonna be the hot topic page one of the New York Times almost every single day for a long time to come. I think Pat would have said, this was appropriate given my love of China, the kind of return on investment he got from China, I think he would have been okay with it. >> Yeah, and to invoke the Ben Franklin maxim, "Trading partners seldom wage war," and so, you know, I think Pat would have probably looked at it that way, but, huge home run, I mean, I think he was early on into Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and amazing story. I wanna talk about decentralization because that was always something that was just on our minds as employees of IDG, it was keep the corporate staff lean, have a flat organization, if you had eight, 10, 12 direct reports, that was okay, Pat really meant it when he said, "You're the CEO of your own business!" Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, or a manager at IDC, where you might have, you know, done tens of millions of dollars, but you felt like a CEO, you were encouraged to try new things, you were encouraged to fail, and fail fast. Their arch nemesis of IDG was Ziff Davis, they were a command and control, sort of Bill Ziff, CMP to a certain extent was kind of the same way out of Manhasset, totally different philosophies and I think Pat never, ever even came close to wavering from that decentralization philosophy, did he? >> No, no, I mean, I think that the story that he told me that I found fascinating was, he didn't have an epiphany that decentralization would be the mechanism for success, it was more that he had started traveling, and when he'd come back to his office, the memos and requests and papers to sign were stacked up two feet high. And he realized that he was holding up the company because he wasn't there to do this and that at some point, he couldn't do it all, it was gonna be too big for that, and that's when the light came on and said this decentralization concept really makes sense for us, if we're gonna be an international company, which clearly was his mission from the beginning, we have to say the people on the ground in those markets are the people who are gonna make the decisions because we can't make 'em from Boston. And I talked to many people who, were, you know, did a trip to Europe, met the folks in London, met the folks in Munich, and they said to a person, you know, it was so ahead of its time, today it just seems obvious, but in the 1960s, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, a regular leadership tenet in most companies. The command and control that you talked about was the way that you did business. >> And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, from a cultural standpoint, clearly IDG and IDC have had staying power, and he had the three-quarter rule, you talked about it in your book, if you missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you were in trouble. >> Right. >> You know, one quarter, hey, let's talk, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, three quarters, you're gone. >> Right. >> And so, as I said, if you were makin' your numbers, you had wide latitude. One of the things you didn't have latitude on was I'll call it 'pay to play,' you know, crossing that line between editorial and advertising. And Pat would, I remember I was at a meeting one time, I'm sorry to tell these stories, but-- >> That's okay. (laughs) >> But we were at an offsite meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a exercise, go off and tell us what the customer wants. Bill Laberis, who's the editor-in-chief at Computerworld at the time, said, "Who's the customer?" And Pat said, "That's a great question! To the publisher, it's the advertiser. To you, Bill, and the editorial staff, it's the reader. And both are equally important." And Pat would never allow the editorial to be compromised by the advertiser. >> Yeah, no, he, there was a clear barrier between church and state in that company and he, you know, consistently backed editorial on that issue because, you know, keep in mind when we started then, and I was, you know, a journalist hoping to, you know, change the world, the trade press then was considered, like, a little below the mainstream business press. The trade press had a reputation for being a little too cozy with the advertisers, so, and Pat said early on, "We can't do that, because everything we have, our product is built, the brand is built on integrity. And if the reader doesn't believe that what we're reporting is actually true and factual and unbiased, we're gonna lose to the advertisers in the long run anyway." So he was clear that that had to be the case and time and again, there would be conflict that would come up, it was just, as you just described it, the publishers, the sales guys, they wanted to bring in money, and if it, you know, occasionally, hey, we could nudge the editor of this particular publication, "Take it a little bit easier on this vendor because they're gonna advertise big with us," Pat just would always back the editor and say, "That's not gonna happen." And it caused, you know, friction for sure, but he was unwavering in his support. >> Well, it's interesting because, you know, Macworld, I think, is an interesting case study because there were sort of some backroom dealings and Pat maneuvered to be able to get the Macworld, you know, brand, the license for that. >> Right. >> But it caused friction between Steve Jobs and the writers of Macworld, they would write something that Steve Jobs, who was a control freak, couldn't control! >> Yeah. (laughs) >> And he regretted giving IDG the license. >> Yeah, yeah, he once said that was the worst decision he ever made was to give the license to Pat to, you know, Macworlld was published on the day that Mac was introduced in 1984, that was the deal that they had and it was, what Jobs forgot was how important it was to the development of that product to have a whole magazine devoted to it on day one, and a really good magazine that, you know, a lot of people still lament the glory days of Macworld. But yeah, he was, he and Steve Jobs did not get along, and I think that almost says a lot more about Jobs because Pat pretty much got along with everybody. >> That church and state dynamic seems to be changing, across the industry, I mean, in tech journalism, there aren't any more tech journalists in the United States, I mean, I'm overstating that, but there are far fewer than there were when we were at IDG. You're seeing all kinds of publications and media companies struggling, you know, Kara Swisher, who's the greatest journalist, and Walt Mossberg, in the tech industry, try to make it, you know, on their own, and they couldn't. So, those lines are somewhat blurring, not that Kara Swisher is blurring those lines, she's, you know, I think, very, very solid in that regard, but it seems like the business model is changing. As an observer of the markets, what do you think's happening in the publishing world? >> Well, I, you know, as a journalist, I'm sort of aghast at what's goin' on these days, a lot of my, I've been around a long time, and seeing former colleagues who are no longer in journalism because the jobs just started drying up is, it's a scary prospect, you know, unlike being the enemy of the people, the first amendment is pretty important to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, cutbacks and newspapers going out of business is difficult. At the same time, the internet was inevitable and it was going to change that dynamic dramatically, so how does that play out? Well, the problem is, anybody can post anything they want on social media and call it news, and the challenge is to maintain some level of integrity in the kind of reporting that you do, and it's more important now than ever, so I think that, you know, somebody like Pat would be an important figure if he was still around, in trying to keep that going. >> Well, Facebook and Google have cut the heart out of, you know, a lot of the business models of many media companies, and you're seeing sort of a pendulum swing back to nonprofits, which, I understand, speaking of folks back in the mid to early 1900s, nonprofits were the way in which, you know, journalism got funded, you know, maybe it's billionaires buying things like the Washington Post that help fund it, but clearly the model's shifting and it's somewhat unclear, you know, what's happening there. I wanted to talk about another lesson, which, Pat was the head cheerleader. So, I remember, it was kind of just after we started, the Computerworld's 20th anniversary, and they hired the marching band and they walked Pat and Mary Dolaher walked from 5 Speen Street, you know, IDG headquarters, they walked to Computerworld, which was up Old, I guess Old Connecticut Path, or maybe it was-- >> It was actually on Route 30-- >> Route 30 at the time, yeah. And Pat was dressed up as the drum major and Mary as well, (laughs) and he would do crazy things like that, he'd jump out of a plane with IDG is number one again, he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, IDG is number one again! It was just a, it was an amazing dynamic that he had, always cheering people on. >> Yeah, he was, he was, when he called himself the CEO, the Chief Encouragement Officer, you mentioned earlier the Good News notes. Everyone who worked there, at some point received this 8x10" piece of paper with a rainbow logo on it and it said, "Good News!" And there was a personal note from Pat McGovern, out of the blue, totally unexpected, to thank you and congratulate you on some bit of work, whatever it was, if you were a reporter, some article you wrote, if you were a sales guy, a sale that you made, and people all over the world would get these from him and put them up in their cubicles because it was like a badge of honor to have them, and people, I still have 'em, (laughs) you know, in a folder somewhere. And he was just unrelenting in supporting the people who worked there, and it was, the impact of that is something you can't put a price tag on, it's just, it stays with people for all their lives, people who have left there and gone on to four or five different jobs always think fondly back to the days at IDG and having, knowing that the CEO had your back in that manner. >> The legend of, and the legacy of Patrick J. McGovern is not just in IDG and IDC, which you were interested in in your book, I mean, you weren't at IDC, I was, and I was started when I saw the sort of downturn and then now it's very, very successful company, you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off a lot of profits, just to decide, I worked for every single CEO at IDC with the exception of Pat McGovern, and now, Kirk Campbell, the current CEO, is moving on Crawford del Prete's moving into the role of president, it's just a matter of time before he gets CEO, so I will, and I hired Crawford-- >> Oh, you did? (laughs) >> So, I've worked for and/or hired every CEO of IDC except for Pat McGovern, so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. The McGovern Brain Institute, 350 million, is that right? >> That's right. >> He dedicated to studying, you know, the human brain, he and Lore, very much involved. >> Yup. >> Typical of Pat, he wasn't just, "Hey, here's the check," and disappear. He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- >> Oh yeah. >> Talk about that a little. >> Yeah, well, this was a guy who spent his whole life fascinated by the human brain and the impact technology would have on the human brain, so when he had enough money, he and Lore, in 2000, gave a $350 million gift to MIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. At the time, the largest academic gift ever given to any university. And, as you said, Pat wasn't a guy who was gonna write a check and leave and wave goodbye. Pat was involved from day one. He and Lore would come and sit in day-long seminars listening to researchers talk about about the most esoteric research going on, and he would take notes, and he wasn't a brain scientist, but he wanted to know more, and he would talk to researchers, he would send Good News notes to them, just like he did with IDG, and it had same impact. People said, "This guy is a serious supporter here, he's not just showin' up with a checkbook." Bob Desimone, who's the director of the Brain Institute, just marveled at this guy's energy level, that he would come in and for days, just sit there and listen and take it all in. And it just, it was an indicator of what kind of person he was, this insatiable curiosity to learn more and more about the world. And he wanted his legacy to be this intersection of technology and brain research, he felt that this institute could cure all sorts of brain-related diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. And it would then just make a better future for mankind, and as corny as that might sound, that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. >> Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, 'cause a lot of people saw Pat as somewhat corny, but, as you got to know him, you're like, wow, he really means this, he loves his company, the company was his extended family. When Pat met his untimely demise, we held a crowd chat, crowdchat.net/thankspat, and there's a voting mechanism in there, and the number one vote was from Paul Gillen, who posted, "Leo Durocher said that nice guys finish last, Pat McGovern proved that wrong." >> Yeah. >> And I think that's very true and, again, awesome legacy. What number book is this for you? You've written a lot of books. >> This is number 13. >> 13, well, congratulations, lucky 13. >> Thank you. >> The book is Fast Forward-- >> Future Forward. >> I'm sorry, Future Forward! (laughs) Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin. Check out, there's a link in the YouTube down below, check that out and there's some additional information there. Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, and thanks so much for-- >> Thank you for having me, this is great, really enjoyed it. It's always good to chat with another former IDGer who gets it. (laughs) >> Brought back a lot of memories, so, again, thanks for writing the book. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. You're watchin' theCube. (electronic music)

>> Oh, from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. Palo ALTO, California.  This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hello Everyone. Welcome to this special cube conversation. I'm Childfree, host of The Cube, cofounder of Silicon Angle Media Inc and the Cube. We're here with Andy Cunningham, who is the president and founder of Cunning in collective and also the author of the book. Get to ah ha! Bestseller on line four categories on Amazon E book. Great book. I recommend all Andy. Welcome to the Cube. Great to see you. >> Hey, it's great to be here. Good to see you. You're a thought >> leader. Just what you've been. You've seen many ways of innovation. You've done so much in your career. >> Big, minimal experience. And >> we were all old here. We've no ageism issues here. It's silken angle, but But you've done so much on DH communications and PR. PR is part of communications. You've you've seen it all. You've done it all. And now you're helping cos I've got a great book out, which I recommend everyone should get getting toe really kind of breaks down thirty five years of experience into one book. That you had a talk about the book on your firm for stuff about Connie and collected quick pleasure. >> So Cunningham  >> Collective is a small marketing consultancy that focuses on positioning, which in my opinion, is the epicenter of marketing. If you dont position yourself well for success, you're never going to achieve success. So the >> book is >> about a framework for figuring out how to position yourself. And it's a framework I developed probably around seventeen years ago. But I've been using it over the last seventy years with clients, and I find that it's super successful, especially with technology companies, and because it's an actual step by step sort of framework. So the book tells you how to do it. And then there were six case studies at the back of the book that >> show >> Positioning in action. >> I want to get a book at some specific questions on the positioning, but I want to get your take on because you've seen many waves around PR public relations, which is corporate communications and communications in general. Over the years, where are we now? Because you're seeing you know, the media business change face. What's on the front page? Of all the news these days around how they sucked all the data in and fake news. All these things are happening Cos still need to get the word out. You know, New Channel's new realities take us through how you see the evolution of what the old way is in the new way are of communications. >> So PR was >> actually invented by a guy in the nineteen twenties named Eddie Bernays. And Eddie Bernays actually figured out that if you created a stunt like situation, you could get the journalist to cover it. He was very strategic about it. It sounds, sounds kind of, you know, loopy. But he was very strategic about it, and he actually invented the concept that he actually went to the phrase public relations, and he was modeling it after propaganda. That was the that was where he came up with that phrase. So it was like that for quite a long time until we got into an era of what I would call influence her marketing, you know, now we call it influencer marketing. But back in the you know when when there was a lot of investigative journalism going on, it was really just about who's who are the influencers that you need to influence in order to get them to say what you want them to say about your company or your product. So that was what my old boss, Regis McKenna called that, he said. She said, Journalism, if you're going to launch something into the marketplace, you need to get all the he said. And the she says to say what you want them to say before you actually say it yourself, because the journalists are gonna go back to those people and they're going to corroborate your story or not. So the idea was influenced the influencers. And then you can get your story that lasted for about probably thirty years, that era. Now we're in an era, then I call it's the era of content, marketing. And really, what happens today is you almost don't even need the journalists at all, because first of all, there aren't very many of them left. And second of all, there are so many channels available to ourselves as as communicators that if you build a digital footprint that has a great story and it that is compelling and consistent, and you keep saying the same key messages over and over again, you can build yourself a digital footprint that actually becomes starts to take over the word of mouth that we talked about earlier because we're the mouth is really what it's all about. But word of mouth hap and today because from results from a giant digital footprint about your story. >> I remember back in business school back in the day in the nineties when I got my MBA advertising class would break down. You need to copy strategy because, you know, reach media, print ads and radio really was the old school media and frequency was was a certain first radio print. You have time to read it so all the specs get laid out. Reaches reach, Right? So you broadcast cable or TV? The impression >> yeah, kind of digital brings >> everything kind of weaves it all together, but you mentioned frequency. Why is frequencies so important? Because is that because of the targeting, is that because there's not a lot of reaches more specialized? >> Well, it's still it's still the same reason. >> So there's a thing called the marketing rule of seven, and that means that a person needs to hear your message seven times before it. It seeps into their brain, and they actually either decide to do something about it or not do something about it. But that's what creates awareness seven times. So that still is true today as it was before. But now it's so much easier because now you don't have to buy ads to do it. You don't even have to pay a PR person to do it. You just fill your own social channels, your own website, your own blog's your own vlogs, your own video. You just fill up your own personal channels, however many there that you have with your own story. And then once it's out there as a digital footprint, then it's time to start talking to the journalism community, which is smaller than it used to be. But those who are left are pretty good. The Washington Post is pretty good. The New York Times is pretty good. So you call up the guy at The New York Times and you pitched him on your story, and instead of trying to spend a bunch of time pitching him, you just refer him back to someone of your channels. He Googles that he gets online, and he sees, Oh, my God, there's a giant story here because you've built the story. So you have so much more controlled today. We have so much more control over our stories. >> So the way to pitch, then based on what you're saying is to have the raw materials out there so they can make their story >> exactly. Put it together. We put it >> out there, and then the journalists just find it. It's like an Easter egg hunt. Look under that tree >> there. Well, here's a clip >> of an expert that's talking about something you might be interested in. This is the new model. Have the assets. Well, actually, we we love that came in what we do. But I want to get that to the book and the years of experience you have on this. But before we do that, I got to ask you when I was watching the Steve Jobs movie. You know, you're on the stage and you're part of that. >> You must get, well, an actress actress once you get your >> role. You were very instrumental, hectic days, people who know Steve and know the apple days. What >> did you >> learn from that? That's in the book from the Apple days. And how does and what has changed from the apple days. Now is there some things that are similar to the world's changed. But what are some of the key those key Learnings that that those magical moments. >> So my biggest >> key learning was ice. We spent about six months? Was Steve working on the messaging for the launch of the Macintosh, and we got it down to a Siri's of what I would I now call means that were just very, very. The computer for the rest of us was one of them, right? Everybody remembers that one small footprint was another one nobody remembers. Any more easy to use was another one. There was a Siri's of these things to explain the Macintosh. We then went through a process of educating one hundred journalists about about that and pumping them with those key messages at every juncture. Then we go to De Anza College and we did the big launch. We said those messages again and was a bunch of TV people around and everybody you know, everybody reported on it and I'm driving home in the car. After the show was over with, I turn on the radio and there's the messages that I had written, coming back at me over and over and again and change the station. Same thing over and over again. The Macintosh was launched today, and this is what everyone is saying. The same thing is, it was it gave me chills. It was like, Wow, this really works. And that lesson that I learned with Steve is the same lesson Eddie Bernays learned a hundred years ago. Its the same lesson Regis McKenna learned with influencing the influencers. And it's the same lesson people can learn today. You just you just get too. You get, too, ah ha! With a slightly different strategy. And today it's about building a big digital footprint before you ever talk to anybody. >> And I think this is key to the book of one of the things that you mentioned earlier. That's clearly in the book, and this is a lesson for the folks. Watching on and learn from this is that positioning is critical. Before the branding, the knee jerk reaction from most people. A new person Let's re branded system New Low goes out there. You're taking it a contrarian view on >> the sea >> or race on experience and success. Position first brand later or had second thoughts on that Wise wise is so important, specific successes you had. But what other reasons are important? >> Well, I got I learned this because >> the first part of my career I would I would get called in after somebody had already hired a branding firm and they re branded everything, Got a new new logo. New tagline, new color palette, all of this stuff and a few bits of copy that were really sexy and interesting. But they were finding it wasn't sticking. It wasn't making a difference in their in their sales, because, really, at the end of the day, we're all here to sell stuff, right? So I would come in and I would realize, Oh my God, you did all this first you didn't figure out your positioning strategy. Like what? Who are you in the market? And why do you matter? Those two questions are the two most important questions anybody can ask themselves. Is a market or a CEO? Who are you and why do you matter if you can't answer those questions? Doing a branding exercise is a waste of money. >> Talk about >> the conflict involved when you work for the client or when you have to get to this moment. This Ahamo sometimes is not a parent, sometimes is pretty clear. Sometimes you might think you're one, but you're really another. There's always maybe opinions about what, what people are in terms of a company internally amongst executives or the stakeholders. >> Yeah, how do you How do you figure it out? Is heroic >> golden rule or what's your What's your Tell them how to get to that moment of that self reflection >> is sure that sort of that's actually >> the key point of the book. It's it's based positioning. Really good positioning should be based on what your DNA as a company is, and the book tells you how to determine what is your DNA. But the the end of the day. They're three kinds of companies. There are product focus cos I happen to call them mechanics. There are customer focus, cos I call them mothers, and they're our concept, Focus Cos I call them missionaries. And interestingly, each of these types of companies do things entirely differently. They talk about different things and meetings. They hire different kinds of people. They train them differently. They measure success differently. They market themselves differently. There's actually, the DNA is reflected in there actions. So when I'm sitting around a workshop with a client, we have to determine Are they a mother? Are they a missionary or are there mechanic before we can actually figure out how to create marketing around them? So that's the biggest thing is there's some people over here. So we're a product company. These peoples, they know we're trying to change the world. And these people say, No, no, no, we're all about the customer and the discussion that you have around that is actually the where the ah ha moment comes When you decide okay, we really are a customer focus company doesn't mean the other two things go away. They just take a back seat to the marketing. So everybody has to agree that that's what they're going to move forward with. And that's what makes it. It's so much fun. It's like it's like doing and Myers Briggs test for a company. You know, everybody loves that, right? Oh, I'm in I n t j M e. And whatever the >> letters it was, I'm not that I'm really something else, >> but there's always confident. But >> you >> also mentioned the book that people can change, too. So you start out as something. Maybe a missionary evolve based upon the business changed. Talk about that, >> Yeah. So let's talk about Apple >> for a second cause that's the company that definitely was a missionary, and missionaries exist to change behavior on a fundamental level. And that was what Steve Jobs was all about, right? So when >> he was >> running the company even before he was running it, but he was a big influence, or there he basically was a missionary company. He was trying to change behavior, and that's what the Macintosh was all about. But after he passed away, he left the assets of the company in the hands of Tim Cook, who, by the way, is an amazing, amazing caretaker of those assets. I mean, he's grown them. He's turned them into it, turned the company into one of the world's most valuable companies. But unfortunately, he's not a missionary, and what he has done is he has kind of tried to keep the missionary thing going. But he hasn't been successful doing that. So what's happened is the market is turning Apple into a product focus company, and the leadership is not steering the company that direction they are trailing, so it's happening to ample, in other words. So you're going to start to see Apple focus more on Warren product over the years, which they which they have been. But they're starting to have some product issues, and I think that's the result of them, not it's tearing the company directly into this, >> finding that DNA and get filling the young count or hiring people toe >> exactly. Exactly. >> Just on that same point. Amazon is a company that is doing this to the market. So Amazon started as a product company, and now they've steered their steering themselves purposefully into a customer focus company. And if you go online and check out their new mission statement, it's to be Earth's most customer centric company. And this is the reason Jeff Bezos bought Zappos a number of years ago Wasn't because Jeff couldn't figure out how to sell shoes online. Of course he could. It was because he was buying that customer centric culture, So he's purposefully steering the company into the customer direction so >> you can change your DNA, >> but it ain't easy. >> I've any Jesse. Many times become a good friend on the Cube as well. He's the word customer so many times we can see the frequency, but they've been talking customer for a long time. So you say they were product company >> with his Amazon. Amazon lands >> on Web services. The missionary and a product focus because I think product would be. I think it's safe once >> I think early, early, early >> on meaning they started this customer transition probably five, six years ago, so but they were very much early on a product company, I think in bases his head. They were actually a missionary. But he never he never would go out and say that. What did he say about Amazon? Were online bookseller and oh, by the way, books are going so well now we're going to do music, and now we're going to, you know. And then >> it's product. >> It took about its product. It was product product product until he decided that he was going to eat the universe one bite at a time. And so, in order to be successful with that, he has to have a customer he feels he has to have customer relationships that are going to stick with him over the course of a lifetime. >> So you know a little about the Cube. What's the Cube? What are we? >> I think you're a missionary. I mean, you're trying to change >> behavior on a fundamental level, and, you know it's, um it's amazing what you've done. You know, we had this great conversation beforehand, and I learned about all the new things you're working on, and it's groundbreaking, groundbreaking stuff. >> Okay, Final question on the book is the funniest. Our craziest reaction you've had to it, either someone emailing You owe our ceremonial because it's pretty inspiring. You break it down free simply. But it's really a core fundamental practice. And I've read a lot of marketing books in my day. A lot of you know, these office come out. Process improvement. This is cuts to the chase. It's >> really thank you. Thank you. What's the big waves >> you heard or crazy? >> Well, I this is This is the >> most recent thing I can think of. I I ended up becoming number number one on Amazon's e book thing and four categories, just like two weeks ago, and I got Mohr social media coverage on that than >> anything else in my entire life with the most amazing >> thing that I've ever seen in all these. Congratulations. And, you >> know, they're they're categories. >> Not like this. Not like your New York Times best seller. It's like you're the best multi marketing, you know, book here, The best small business marketing book, those kinds of things. And it just was just blew up. It went viral. >> That's how it was all online. What made you write the book was That was the moment. When was the ah ha moment for you saying, You know what? I got to put the book together. Was it something that you had in mind? That you get this data collecting of institutional knowledge of the trade? When was the ah, ha moment for you to write the book? >> Well, I this framework that I developed here has been working for me really successfully for, like, seventeen years. And I just decided that wow, other people should know how to do this. You know, because when we charge when we hired when that when we hire when someone hires us, it's like one hundred fifty thousand dollars worth of worth of work to do what we do, they could do it for twenty two ninety nine or whatever the heck >> this thing costs these days. And you could occasionally you get a book out there to get an audio book as well. So s so I really wanted >> to spread the word about this framework in this methodology, cause I really believe that my, my inside my core of myself, that the epicentre of great marketing is positioning. And if you don't get that right, you will never succeed with any of the rest of it. So do >> the great folks. You have a great track record. I've seen personal your sex success of up close perambulations on that. Let's talk about cos now I want to get backto successful companies. He's a lot of conversation. I'd build a rocket ship. So you we live in Silicon Valley. There are rocket >> ships that there are, >> you know, go big or go home. Blitz Scaling his Reid, Hoffman would say, I endorse that one hundred percent think there's use cases clearly for blitz scaling. Other people have been throwing him under the bus saying that culture is not what we want and build a still stable business. And so the debate aside, there's two types of companies there's the Okay, I'm going to build this company. I might not know when they're when the growth's gonna be there. And then there's the big venture back category changer rocket ships. Can you talk about the success criteria in your mind of both companies around positioning approaches, things that you've seen in the past that work well, >> I think companies that understand who they are and why they matter are the ones that succeed. And it's also important that they have a good leader, a good, strong leader. But if you don't know who you are and why you matter, you can't build a new category. You can't even launch a new product. So I, >> you know, take a look at some of the companies that have done that. Well, Netflix has done that extremely well, right? Airbnb has done that extreme slack has done that really well. Microsoft is doing it really well again, right? They went through a downtime, and now you know their new CEO, Satya Nadella, is doing an unbelievable job with positioning. There's so much a product company, and he's not trying to make them into a customer. Companies trying to double down on the product so and Netflix is a is a missionary company there change behaviour on a fundamental >> of Microsoft's a great example because I think that's something into anything radical. In the product side, they looked at the tailwind of Cloud computing an A I and said, Let's throw the sails up there and let's let's get around behind it >> and grand source. >> And then they branded it. So they positioned themselves as a Claude company, and then they branded it. As as you're so >>On the tail winds concept of trends, Pat Gelsinger said that if you're not out in front of that next wave, you could be driftwood. Riding the waves are certainly a big part of jumping on a successful or tail wind some call it how important that have that positioning time to something that's trendy or something. >> Oh, that's a great question, because it's because the context in which you are actually putting something into the market is critical. So you have to really understand what are the waves that you want to ride and can ride. And don't try to be riding a wave that passed five years ago. Or that hasn't shown up yet. You might think there's a wave coming. That's the biggest danger of a lot of these high tech start ups is that they see a vision of something way down the line, and there's no way for them to ride today. And they launched their technology. But too early >> and to your point. If they don't have the positioning right, they won't be able to ride it. You >> know what they want. They won't be able to ride it. So if they if if they did a proper positioning exercise before that, they would realize that they're context in which they're doing this is not right for what they're saying. So have to pivot a little bit. These is where pivots come from, right? We have to pivot a little bit to make yourself relevant for the market today, and that's an important thing. >> Andy. Final question for the folks watching saying, I love the book. I'm gonna get it might have helped might need help and saying I need to call Andy and the team or figure it out. What are some of the tell signs that they're not getting it right or what? If some things when they need to call for help and howto people moved to the next level, some people might say, Hey, you know, we need help. We can't get concensus. The leader might not be strong enough to be a leadership transition. Could be a new wave that people have identified. Yeah. What? This is a tough challenge of self awareness. What is that? Some of the tell signs And how does >> > somebody actually make the change? It is a tough, and most CEOs are not into it enough of themselves to know to know those things. So what happens is they launch it and then they don't get traction. So the biggest reason why people call me is they're not getting traction. Now, the really the really smart ones do more analysis, like what you're talking about. Oh, there's something has changed in the context. So I better shift this or, you know, a competitors come up with something that sounds awful on awful lot like ours. Maybe we better get ahead of that. But that takes a really strategic CEO. And there are some of those out there, But not everyone is >> okay. So great book here. Getting toe, huh? Everyone great. It's a good thing I read. It. Came out the day. Volante. He's reading it. Thanks for coming out. Spend the time, John communications. Final word on the communications world. What's the message to folks out there? See, M O's out there and head of communications. What's the future look like for them? What should they do? Going forward to be successful? >> Well, the future of marketing is is really figuring out how to make word of mouth, you know, explode word of mouth, because that's why people buy things. You know, you told me I should check out this product or my book. He said, You told your friends I should check out the books, So he does. So it's all about word of mouth and starts with building a big digital footprint yourself and then going to the peak to the press side. >> Andy cutting him here in Palo Alto Studios. I'm John for with Keep conversations. Thanks for watching

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody, to the LiveWorx show, hashtag LiveWorx with an "x" at the end. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live-tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host Stu Miniman. Mario Armstrong is here. He's a two-time Emmy winner, contributor to NBC today. He's the creator of the "Never Settle Show". He's an NPR contributor. >> Yep. >> And the host of LiveWorx. >> Yeah! >> Thanks so much coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's a pleasure to see both of you. Good to see you too, Stu. Thanks for having me on the show. >> So yeah, this morning, a lot of action-- >> Yes. >> First of all, I tweeted out, that was like an Olympic opening, I mean-- >> That open was phenomenal. I mean, an LED-lit troop, full LED uniforms on, being acrobatic, what you can't see behind the scenes, by the way, 'cause you think it's kind of like Cirque du Soleil type of thing, with like, tech, but what you don't see are, like, these three other people that are way in the back behind the scenes, going up, scaling up and down like this truss that's like dropping them or raising them. It's just, the performance was phenomenal. >> Yeah, it was really great. And you kicked it off... 6,000 plus people here. >> Yes. >> You said the largest digital transformation conference on the planet, which of course, we were joking. Everybody says their digital-- >> Yeah. (laughs) >> But this really is digital transformation, isn't it? >> It's a lot that's taking place. I mean when you think about manufacturing, smart manufacturing, when you think about how you're trying to accelerate processes and you start looking at where things were like 20 or 30 years ago and how physical things had to be and how you actually had to, like, maybe even work on a thing then leave it, go to another place, report on it, come back to it, tweak it, and so now when you start seeing the merging of AI, VR, and so you're taking the physical and the human, and you're putting these... and the virtual, and you're putting these things together, you're seeing things like what PTC is showing us today. I mean, some of the demonstrations that I saw were absolutely mind blowing in terms of the acceleration of the process that you can actually get things done with how they're merging the different technologies and integrating them together. >> Yes, Stu and I, we're talking earlier, it's hard to get your head around this whole IOT, industrial IOT, there's just so many segments, it's so fragment that, and it's-- >> Yeah. >> It's enormous, it's almost impossible to size, I mean it's trillion dollars, this whole economy of its own. What are your takeaways on just that whole space? >> You know, a lot of what I focus on, too, when I'm doing everything from NBC or NPR and stuff like that is on the consumer impact. So I'm looking at the consumer side but I'm also an entrepreneur, so I'm thinking about what's happening on the business side. And when I see on both ends, you're absolutely right. The field is enormous when you really think about it. Whether you want to look at how we can replace old school manufacturing and how this is going to transfer... That's a whole sector just in it of itself. We haven't even now talked about, you know, AI for children or for (incoherent) or for the health and wellness sector, whole other sector that's looking at IOT and the power of that. I mean, being able to look at.. I was just in one of the other, in the deluxe lounge and I was checking out one of our fun games. It's called Sphero. It's a consumer game, but its a small ball that you control through VR and AR on your phone, but you can actually use the phone to program things in real time to make it respond in real time. So all of these things together, to me, start to paint this large ecosystem because now you have kids that are growing up using devices and using technologies that we're just starting to get our hands on but this is how they're solving problems and thinking about things already. So when this economy and this ecosystem starts to mature, you're going to have a ready-made audience that's already been exposed to 90% of this. >> Well, and Stu I wonder if you could chime into it, it makes me think that these worlds, even though consumer and industrial are so seemingly different, it seems like parts of them, anyway, adjacencies are coming together. >> Absolutely. And there's always going to be that... There's always going to be... Look, when I talk about innovation and whether you look at Dr. Hill, who's speaking here today, Dr. Linda Hill from Harvard and others, when I look at it, she calls it creative abrasion, like the difference between brainstorming and actually utilizing new ideas to create new concepts. I call it hybrid design. Normally, it's taking something that you know exists and then taking two things that don't seem to go together-- that's normally where you find creation. I don't like to say disruption, I like to say creation. >> Yeah, actually there's a good friend of mine that I work with and I worked at EMC, he called it venn diagram innovation. >> Oh, that's it! That's it! >> I take a few things and I put it together and we were talking about the consumer side-- >> Yeah! >> We've looked so many technologies, you get the scale usually from the consumer. When we look at things like flash in all of our devices-- >> That's right. >> Really enabled the enterprise to do things. The VR and AR is something that we've actually got some folks on the team that are heavy gamers that they're the ones that I go to when I want to learn, "Okay, what's the cutting-edge--" >> 'Cause they've already been in it. That's right. >> They're on their Steam, they're doing everything. >> That's right. >> They sort everything out. You leverage a lot of technology in how you really get your message out there. Talk a little about how you think of media these days. >> Oh, it's completely different. I mean, when we're looking at how media is even utilized in these new technologies, you know, our talk show is a talk show that we shoot in Nasdaq Studios, so it's shot in New York City, it's called the "Never Settle Show", it's a weekly one-hour live stream talk show, so we get and appreciate what you have to go through. These guys are pros by the way. (Dave and Stu laugh) Yeah, they're pros 'cause this is not easy to do. >> It's a minor miracle, right? Every time. >> (laughs) It's not easy to do at all. And so a lot of kudos to you and the team behind the scenes that make that happen. >> Thank you. >> With that being said, it's a great time if you have an expertise or if you have content to share especially in a live scenario because now you can start to really utilize other technologies within that. For example, we kind of claim ourselves to be one of the most interactive talk shows out there. What we do in our show is we're using other technologies, bringing them together to create real time conversations. So how that practically plays out is I'll have a guest on the show, we'll be talking, I'll put up a screen of three options and people can vote right then and there while they're watching in stream and you'll see which of what they want me to do next. I'll say something like, "Which thing is most appealing... Which topic do you want us to talk about next?" And they'll actually vote in real time and then the control room in everyone doesn't know what the answer's going to be, but we're all waiting for the answer and then when the popular vote comes out, few seconds later, we scramble and adjust to that. That's real time television, giving viewers what they really want in real time, using different technologies. So that's this hybrid approach. We can be a standard show and just do... talk and have that format, or we could really be looking at things that we could integrate in other technologies that would enhance the viewing experience and make it much more productive. >> Well you're actually affecting the, you call it "creation" as supposed to "disruption" of this new media industry, I mean, you've seen... I saw a stat the other day that cost the New York Times 200 million dollars to run a news desk. (Mario laughs) You're seeing, you know, billionaires buy up, you know, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post-- >> Yes, that's right. >> The industry is transforming in a huge way. You're seeing, you know, Facebook backlash with fake news. What's your senses as to what's going on in the media business? Obviously you're "creating", "disrupting", whatever you like to call it, sure. What do you see is the future of the media business? >> Well, I mean I think it's going to become something where the end reader, the end viewer has more control. Ultimately, that's... the problem with most systems and most structures is when people want to hold the control and not share because whether that's ego, whether they're worried about intellectual property loss, or whether they really think that the market's going to swallow them up.... Now I'm not saying, obviously you give away all your secret sauce, but what I am saying is when you start thinking from that small limiting position, you've already lost the game. And so what I think is going to happen, yes, you have big people buying a lot of media and there's a lot of discussion in politics about whether or not, you know, billionaires buying media are problems and what that's going to mean in terms of the message that's going to be reported to people, that's going to always be an issue, but I think even with that, that's why it's even more empowering that the individuals are taking more control over their own narrative. And that's why I think you've seen social media, Instagram video, Instagram talking about going to sixty minutes in it's video, not just a minute, for publishers, I think the power's now more in the person's hand to really pick and choose and so they vote with their eyeballs, they vote with their engagement, they vote with their interactivity. And so I think no matter what happens on the big end, people are going to be able to create and get the stories that they want to be able to get. >> Well we're big believers of that, Stu, and we're decentralized media and we really believe that there's got to be an incentive system to put the power back in the hands of the users to control their data. >> This is how it works. >> Right? I mean... >> Yeah. And, Mario, so we've talked about the tech and your show "Never Settle" actually won an Emmy for the interactivity nature of it? >> Yeah. It did. >> But talk to the people and passion, how that fits into "Never Settle". >> Yeah, so it's a blending. So what we try to do on our show is blend how you can leverage technology to move forward on your passion. But you can't use technology to move forward on your passion if you don't know what your passion is. So a lot of our discussions really work more around, "how do we get you to think differently"? How do we, you know... our vision for our company is to motivate people across the globe to never settle. How we do that through our mission is that we inspire the humans spirit, we want to teach lessons that matter and we want to uncover new perspectives. What that means, tangibly, is that when you watch our show, you should be having notes. You should be, like... our show is meant for you to want to take notes so that you actually know the process. What people are missing for the most part today is they see how to maybe start something or they see how someone else did and how they succeeded or how they failed, but they don't get the in between, the recipe. And so the more we can be sharing about the process about someone's success or, even better, someone's failure, 'cause that's where you learn more and you get more uncomfortable, makes you more comfortable, it's a blending of those two things of getting your mental position and getting you stronger mentally and building up your resilience so that you can actually go find your purpose, be happier in your life, but then use technology to accelerate. Like, that's the, as Jim put, like, you know, put gasoline and make it fast or make it go quicker. And so I think the blending of the two, again, a hybrid... Even how we approach our content is that. So we'll have everyone from tech luminaries on the show but also we'll just have everyday folks that have really proven success, like these people deserve attention but they're not maybe, quote on quote, big-names. >> And this idea of combinatorial innovation, you certainly heard Jim Heppelmann talking about that today with machines that are powerful and computers that are fast and can do things repetitively and then humans, which are creative. I like that theme. >> You can't do it any other way, I mean, this is why, you know, it's determination and direction. Your team needs to be determined but also have the direction. You need to have what I call the three P's. You need to have your passion in place. Like, what are you ultimately passionate about as a team? As an organization? What are you driving towards? What's your "why"? And then once you have that, then you can start to really push through on the perseverance. You're going to bump your head. You're going to fail fast. A great tech term, I love flipping that tech term because we learn in programming to fail to quick so that we can find the bugs fast and correct our course really quick. So that persistence happens. And then, the hardest part is you got to have some patience. Because then you have to kind of sit back. Let the market also play. Let the universe come around. Sometimes we're ahead. Sometimes we're behind. But we need to have a little bit of that patience to have some reflection to see where we are, so I think, you know, now is really just a great time for a lot of people that are looking to really figure out where they can make their moves... the opportunities that keep creating themselves in IOT are endless. I don't care if you're talking from someone that's a graphic designer all the way up to an engineer or a coder, to marketing and sales, like there's so many different facets of this ecosystem and opportunity now. >> I love that, Mario. Patient, passion, persistence, patience-- >> Yes. >> The three P's kind of start with why, the old-- >> Yeah. Simon Sinek. That's right. >> People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. >> That's right. >> Break stuff. >> (laughs) Love that. Break stuff. >> And don't give up. Don't give up. (Mario laughs) >> No, it's, you know... it's because what we're trying to do, if you really wanted to have action, you want to take complex things and you want to pull them together in a hybrid scenario and start to bang upon them. As opposed to the other idea of planning, planning, planning, planning, you actually want to practice, practice, practice, practice. That's what's going to get you there fast. So I just think that with a lot of the technologies it can be overwhelming to people 'cause they start to hear so much so that's why I say it comes back to, "What's your purpose?" If you can stay focused on why you're doing what it is you're doing, you'll know which technologies to pay more attention to. You'll know where your curiosity should veer more into. You'll study the things that you need to really study. And then you'll accelerate faster because you've identified your niche. It's like having a, you know, an Italian restaurant. You're not just, you know... somebody's going to come by and present to you... Some sales rep is going to come by and present to you, like, beer that's not a fit for like Italian restaurant, you know, like, I know that's not for me instantly. As opposed to being pulled in so many directions, which is what the danger of all this technology can do, is it can overwhelm us and pull us into so many directions that we want to go and pursue the hottest new trend or the hot thing. If we come back to our "why", we're always going to be secure. >> That's a great point, I mean there are an infinite opportunities of purposes in this world. >> Yes. >> It's sometimes hard to get a grasp on things and really focus. But you're seeing some of this successful projects really do start with a main spring and a focus and a purpose. >> Yeah. >> And a mission. >> It does. I mean, that's where it all becomes. I mean, it has to start there in order to get other people on board with your dream, whether you're the leader of the organization or the leader of a project. And, you know, I just feel that for many people, they are at an age where they have been in this business for quite some time. They've seen a lot of things evolve. Accepting change and, like Jim had said today, preparing to change is one of the best keys of information that you can take away because we all have the skill, the talent, the ability, it's just a matter or not, are we willing to adjust or are we... do we want to do status quo. >> Awesome. Hey, you're a clear thinker, articulate, you look great. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> (laughs) Aw man, Dave and Stu, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on theCUBE. >> Our pleasure. >> This has been awesome. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back from LiveWorx with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering machine learning everywhere. Build your ladder to AI. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM's Machine Learning Everywhere. Build your ladder to AI, along with Dave Vellante, John Walls here, wrapping up here in New York City. Just about done with the programming here in Midtown. Dave, let's just take a step back. We've heard a lot, seen a lot, talked to a lot of folks today. First off, tell me, AI. We've heard some optimistic outlooks, some, I wouldn't say pessimistic, but some folks saying, "Eh, hold off." Not as daunting as some might think. So just your take on the artificial intelligence conversation we've heard so far today. >> I think generally, John, that people don't realize what's coming. I think the industry, in general, our industry, technology industry, the consumers of technology, the businesses that are out there, they're steeped in the past, that's what they know. They know what they've done, they know the history and they're looking at that as past equals prologue. Everybody knows that's not the case, but I think it's hard for people to envision what's coming, and what the potential of AI is. Having said that, Jennifer Shin is a near-term pessimist on the potential for AI, and rightly so. There are a lot of implementation challenges. But as we said at the open, I'm very convinced that we are now entering a new era. The Hadoop big data industry is going to pale in comparison to what we're seeing. And we're already seeing very clear glimpses of it. The obvious things are Airbnb and Uber, and the disruptions that are going on with Netflix and over-the-top programming, and how Google has changed advertising, and how Amazon is changing and has changed retail. But what you can see, and again, the best examples are Apple getting into financial services, moving into healthcare, trying to solve that problem. Amazon buying a grocer. The rumor that I heard about Amazon potentially buying Nordstrom, which my wife said is a horrible idea. (John laughs) But think about the fact that they can do that is a function of, that they are a digital-first company. Are built around data, and they can take those data models and they can apply it to different places. Who would have thought, for example, that Alexa would be so successful? That Siri is not so great? >> Alexa's become our best friend. >> And it came out of the blue. And it seems like Google has a pretty competitive piece there, but I can almost guarantee that doing this with our thumbs is not the way in which we're going to communicate in the future. It's going to be some kind of natural language interface that's going to rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning and the like. And so, I think it's hard for people to envision what's coming, other than fast forward where machines take over the world and Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk say, "Hey, we should be concerned." Maybe they're right, not in the next 10 years. >> You mentioned Jennifer, we were talking about her and the influencer panel, and we've heard from others as well, it's a combination of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. That combination's more powerful than just artificial intelligence, and so, there is a human component to this. So, for those who might be on the edge of their seat a little bit, or looking at this from a slightly more concerning perspective, maybe not the case. Maybe not necessary, is what you're thinking. >> I guess at the end of the day, the question is, "Is the world going to be a better place with all this AI? "Are we going to be more prosperous, more productive, "healthier, safer on the roads?" I am an optimist, I come down on the side of yes. I would not want to go back to the days where I didn't have GPS. That's worth it to me. >> Can you imagine, right? If you did that now, you go back five years, just five years from where we are now, back to where we were. Waze was nowhere, right? >> All the downside of these things, I feel is offset by that. And I do think it's incumbent upon the industry to try to deal with the problem, especially with young people, the blue light problem. >> John: The addictive issue. >> That's right. But I feel like those downsides are manageable, and the upsides are of enough value that society is going to continue to move forward. And I do think that humans and machines are going to continue to coexist, at least in the near- to mid- reasonable long-term. But the question is, "What can machines "do that humans can't do?" And "What can humans do that machines can't do?" And the answer to that changes every year. It's like I said earlier, not too long ago, machines couldn't climb stairs. They can now, robots can climb stairs. Can they negotiate? Can they identify cats? Who would've imagined that all these cats on the Internet would've led to facial recognition technology. It's improving very, very rapidly. So, I guess my point is that that is changing very rapidly, and there's no question it's going to have an impact on society and an impact on jobs, and all those other negative things that people talk about. To me, the key is, how do we embrace that and turn it into an opportunity? And it's about education, it's about creativity, it's about having multi-talented disciplines that you can tap. So we talked about this earlier, not just being an expert in marketing, but being an expert in marketing with digital as an understanding in your toolbox. So it's that two-tool star that I think is going to emerge. And maybe it's more than two tools. So that's how I see it shaping up. And the last thing is disruption, we talked a lot about disruption. I don't think there's any industry that's safe. Colin was saying, "Well, certain industries "that are highly regulated-" In some respects, I can see those taking longer. But I see those as the most ripe for disruption. Financial services, healthcare. Can't we solve the HIPAA challenge? We can't get access to our own healthcare information. Well, things like artificial intelligence and blockchain, we were talking off-camera about blockchain, those things, I think, can help solve the challenge of, maybe I can carry around my health profile, my medical records. I don't have access to them, it's hard to get them. So can things like artificial intelligence improve our lives? I think there's no question about it. >> What about, on the other side of the coin, if you will, the misuse concerns? There are a lot of great applications. There are a lot of great services. As you pointed out, a lot of positive, a lot of upside here. But as opportunities become available and technology develops, that you run the risk of somebody crossing the line for nefarious means. And there's a lot more at stake now because there's a lot more of us out there, if you will. So, how do you balance that? >> There's no question that's going to happen. And it has to be managed. But even if you could stop it, I would say you shouldn't because the benefits are going to outweigh the risks. And again, the question we asked the panelists, "How far can we take machines? "How far can we go?" That's question number one, number two is, "How far should we go?" We're not even close to the "should we go" yet. We're still on the, "How far can we go?" Jennifer was pointing out, I can't get my password reset 'cause I got to call somebody. That problem will be solved. >> So, you're saying it's more of a practical consideration now than an ethical one, right now? >> Right now. Moreso, and there's certainly still ethical considerations, don't get me wrong, but I see light at the end of the privacy tunnel, I see artificial intelligence as, well, analytics is helping us solve credit card fraud and things of that nature. Autonomous vehicles are just fascinating, right? Both culturally, we talked about that, you know, we learned how to drive a stick shift. (both laugh) It's a funny story you told me. >> Not going to worry about that anymore, right? >> But it was an exciting time in our lives, so there's a cultural downside of that. I don't know what the highway death toll number is, but it's enormous. If cell phones caused that many deaths, we wouldn't be using them. So that's a problem that I think things like artificial intelligence and machine intelligence can solve. And then the other big thing that we talked about is, I see a huge gap between traditional companies and these born-in-the-cloud, born-data-oriented companies. We talked about the top five companies by market cap. Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, which is Google, who am I missing? >> John: Apple. >> Apple, right. And those are pretty much very much data companies. Apple's got the data from the phones, Google, we know where they get their data, et cetera, et cetera. Traditional companies, however, their data resides in silos. Jennifer talked about this, Craig, as well as Colin. Data resides in silos, it's hard to get to. It's a very human-driven business and the data is bolted on. With the companies that we just talked about, it's a data-driven business, and the humans have expertise to exploit that data, which is very important. So there's a giant skills gap in existing companies. There's data silos. The other thing we touched on this is, where does innovation come from? Innovation drives value drives disruption. So the innovation comes from data. He or she who has the best data wins. It comes from artificial intelligence, and the ability to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I think something that we take for granted a lot, but it's cloud economics. And it's more than just, and somebody, one of the folks mentioned this on the interview, it's more than just putting stuff in the cloud. It's certainly managed services, that's part of it. But it's also economies of scale. It's marginal economics that are essentially zero. It's speed, it's low latency. It's, and again, global scale. You combine those things, data, artificial intelligence, and cloud economics, that's where the innovation is going to come from. And if you think about what Uber's done, what Airbnb have done, where Waze came from, they were picking and choosing from the best digital services out there, and then developing their own software from this, what I say my colleague Dave Misheloff calls this matrix. And, just to repeat, that matrix is, the vertical matrix is industries. The horizontal matrix are technology platforms, cloud, data, mobile, social, security, et cetera. They're building companies on top of that matrix. So, it's how you leverage the matrix is going to determine your future. Whether or not you get disrupted, whether your the disruptor or the disruptee. It's not just about, we talked about this at the open. Cloud, SaaS, mobile, social, big data. They're kind of yesterday's news. It's now new artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, cognitive. We're still trying to figure out the parlance. You could feel the changes coming. I think this matrix idea is very powerful, and how that gets leveraged in organizations ultimately will determine the levels of disruption. But every single industry is at risk. Because every single industry is going digital, digital allows you to traverse industries. We've said it many times today. Amazon went from bookseller to content producer to grocer- >> John: To grocer now, right? >> To maybe high-end retailer. Content company, Apple with Apple Pay and companies getting into healthcare, trying to solve healthcare problems. The future of warfare, you live in the Beltway. The future of warfare and cybersecurity are just coming together. One of the biggest issues I think we face as a country is we have fake news, we're seeing the weaponization of social media, as James Scott said on theCUBE. So, all these things are coming together that I think are going to make the last 10 years look tame. >> Let's just switch over to the currency of AI, data. And we've talked to, Sam Lightstone today was talking about the database querying that they've developed with the Plex product. Some fascinating capabilities now that make it a lot richer, a lot more meaningful, a lot more relevant. And that seems to be, really, an integral step to making that stuff come alive and really making it applicable to improving your business. Because they've come up with some fantastic new ways to squeeze data that's relevant out, and get it out to the user. >> Well, if you think about what I was saying earlier about data as a foundational core and human expertise around it, versus what most companies are, is human expertise with data bolted on or data in silos. What was interesting about Queryplex, I think they called it, is it essentially virtualizes the data. Well, what does that mean? That means i can have data in place, but I can have access to that data, I can democratize that data, make it accessible to people so that they can become data-driven, data is the core. Now, what I don't know, and I don't know enough, just heard about it today, I missed that announcement, I think they announced it a year ago. He mentioned DB2, he mentioned Netezza. Most of the world is not on DB2 and Netezza even though IBM customers are. I think they can get to Hadoop data stores and other data stores, I just don't know how wide that goes, what the standards look like. He joked about the standards as, the great thing about standards is- >> There are a lot of 'em. (laughs) >> There's always another one you can pick if this one fails. And he's right about that. So, that was very interesting. And so, this is again, the question, can traditional companies close that machine learning, machine intelligence, AI gap? Close being, close the gap that the big five have created. And even the small guys, small guys like Uber and Airbnb, and so forth, but even those guys are getting disrupted. The Airbnbs and the Ubers, right? Again, blockchain comes in and you say, "Why do I need a trusted third party called Uber? "Why can't I do this on the blockchain?" I predict you're going to see even those guys get disrupted. And I'll say something else, it's hard to imagine that a Google or a Facebook can be unseated. But I feel like we may be entering an era where this is their peak. Could be wrong, I'm an Apple customer. I don't know, I'm not as enthralled as I used to be. They got trillions in the bank. But is it possible that opensource and blockchain and the citizen developer, the weekend and nighttime developers, can actually attack that engine of growth for the last 10 years, 20 years, and really break that monopoly? The Internet has basically become an oligopoly where five companies, six companies, whatever, 10 companies kind of control things. Is it possible that opensource software, AI, cryptography, all this activity could challenge the status quo? Being in this business as long as I have, things never stay the same. Leaders come, leaders go. >> I just want to say, never say never. You don't know. >> So, it brings it back to IBM, which is interesting to me. It was funny, I was asking Rob Thomas a question about disruption, and I think he misinterpreted it. I think he was thinking that I was saying, "Hey, you're going to get disrupted by all these little guys." IBM's been getting disrupted for years. They know how to reinvent. A lot of people criticize IBM, how many quarters they haven't had growth, blah, blah, blah, but IBM's made some big, big bets on the future. People criticizing Watson, but it's going to be really interesting to see how all this investment that IBM has made is going to pay off. They were early on. People in the Valley like to say, "Well, the Facebooks, and even Amazon, "Google, they got the best AI. "IBM is not there with them." But think about what IBM is trying to do versus what Google is doing. They're very consumer-oriented, solving consumer problems. Consumers have really led the consumerization of IT, that's true, but none of those guys are trying to solve cancer. So IBM is talking about some big, hairy, audacious goals. And I'm not as pessimistic as some others you've seen in the trade press, it's popular to do. So, bringing it back to IBM, I saw IBM as trying to disrupt itself. The challenge IBM has, is it's got a lot of legacy software products that have purchased over the years. And it's got to figure out how to get through those. So, things like Queryplex allow them to create abstraction layers. Things like Bluemix allow them to bring together their hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of SaaS applications. That takes time, but I do see IBM making some big investments to disrupt themselves. They've got a huge analytics business. We've been covering them for quite some time now. They're a leader, if not the leader, in that business. So, their challenge is, "Okay, how do we now "apply all these technologies to help "our customers create innovation?" What I like about the IBM story is they're not out saying, "We're going to go disrupt industries." Silicon Valley has a bifurcated disruption agenda. On the one hand, they're trying to, cloud, and SaaS, and mobile, and social, very disruptive technologies. On the other hand, is Silicon Valley going to disrupt financial services, healthcare, government, education? I think they have plans to do so. Are they going to be able to execute that dual disruption agenda? Or are the consumers of AI and the doers of AI going to be the ones who actually do the disrupting? We'll see, I mean, Uber's obviously disrupted taxis, Silicon Valley company. Is that too much to ask Silicon Valley to do? That's going to be interesting to see. So, my point is, IBM is not trying to disrupt its customers' businesses, and it can point to Amazon trying to do that. Rather, it's saying, "We're going to enable you." So it could be really interesting to see what happens. You're down in DC, Jeff Bezos spent a lot of time there at the Washington Post. >> We just want the headquarters, that's all we want. We just want the headquarters. >> Well, to the point, if you've got such a growing company monopoly, maybe you should set up an HQ2 in DC. >> Three of the 20, right, for a DC base? >> Yeah, he was saying the other day that, maybe we should think about enhancing, he didn't call it social security, but the government, essentially, helping people plan for retirement and the like. I heard that and said, "Whoa, is he basically "telling us he's going to put us all out of jobs?" (both laugh) So, that, if I'm a customer of Amazon's, I'm kind of scary. So, one of the things they should absolutely do is spin out AWS, I think that helps solve that problem. But, back to IBM, Ginni Rometty was very clear at the World of Watson conference, the inaugural one, that we are not out trying to compete with our customers. I would think that resonates to a lot of people. >> Well, to be continued, right? Next month, back with IBM again? Right, three days? >> Yeah, I think third week in March. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, theCUBE's going to be there. Next week we're in the Bahamas. This week, actually. >> Not as a group taking vacation. Actually a working expedition. >> No, it's that blockchain conference. Actually, it's this week, what am I saying next week? >> Although I'm happy to volunteer to grip on that shoot, by the way. >> Flying out tomorrow, it's happening fast. >> Well, enjoyed this, always good to spend time with you. And good to spend time with you as well. So, you've been watching theCUBE, machine learning everywhere. Build your ladder to AI. Brought to you by IBM. Have a good one. (techno music)

>>we're back. >>This is Dave Volante. I'm with Wiki bond dot Oregon. This is Silicon angle's the cube where we extract the signal from the noise. We go into the events, we're bringing you the best guests that we can find. And we're here at the AWS summit. Amazon is taking the cloud world by storm. He was on, invented the cloud in 2006. They've popularized it very popular of course with developers. Everybody knows that story. Uh, Amazon appealing to the web startups, but what's most impressive is the degree to which Amazon is beginning to enter the enterprise markets. I'm here with my cohost Jeff Frick and Jeff, we heard Andy Jassy this morning just laying out the sort of marketing messaging and progress and strategies of AWS. One of the things that was most impressive was the pace at which they put forth innovations. We talked about that earlier, but also the pace at which they proactively reduce prices. Uh, that's different than what you'd see in the normal sort of enterprise space. Talk about that a little bit. >>Yeah. Again, I think it really speaks to their strategy to lock up the customer. It's really a lifetime value of the customer and making sure that they don't have a really an opportunity or a reason to go anywhere else. So as we discussed a little bit earlier, they leverage, you know, kind of the pure hardware economics of, of decreasing a computing power, decreasing storage, decreasing bandwidth, but then they also get all the benefits of scale. And I think what's in one of the interesting things that Andy talked about and kind of his six key messages was that it's actually cheaper to rent from them because of the scale than it is to buy yourself. And I know that's a pretty common knock between kind of a build or buy, um, kind of process you go through and usually you would think renting at some scale becomes less economical than if you just did it yourself. But because their scale is so massive because of the flexibility that you can bring, uh, computing resources to bear based on what you're trying to accomplish really kind of breaks down the, uh, the old age old thought that, you know, at scale we need to do it ourselves. >>Well, and that's the premise. Um, I think, and, uh, let's Brits break down a little bit about that, that analysis and, and Andy's keynote. So he put forth some data from IDC which showed that, uh, the Amazon cloud is cheaper than the, uh, a, a so-called private cloud or an in house on premise installation. You know, I certainly, there's, it's, it's a, it's an, it's depends, right? It really depends on the workload. That's somewhat of an apples to orange is going on here and the types of workloads that are going down in the AWS cloud, granted he's right and that they're running Oracle, they're running SAP, but the real mission critical workloads, what he calls mission critical aren't the same as what, you know, Citi would call mission critical. Right? So to replicate that level of mission criticality, uh, would probably almost most certainly be more expensive rental versus owning the real Achilles heel of, of, of any cloud, not just Amazon. >>Cloud really is getting data out. Um, moving data, right? Amazon's going to charge you not to get data in. They're gonna charge you to store it there to exercise, you know, compute. Uh, and then, but they're also gonna charge it if you wanted to take it out. That's expensive. The bandwidth costs and the extrication costs are expensive. Uh, the other issue with cloud again is data movement. It takes a long time to move a terabyte, let alone multiple terabytes. So those are sort of the two sort of Achilles heels of, of cloud. But that's not specific to Amazon's cloud. That's any cloud. Yeah. So we've got a great lineup today. Um, let's see. We've got Ariel Kelman coming on, uh, and I believe he's in the house. So we're going to take a quick break. Quick break. Right now we right back with Ariel Kelman, who's the head of marketing at AWS. Keep right there. This is the cube right back. >>we lift out all the programs out there and identified a gap in tech news coverage. Those shows are just the tip of the iceberg and we're here for the deep dive, the market beg for our program to fill that void. We're not just touting off headlines. We also want to analyze the big picture and ask the questions that no one else is asking. We work with analysts who know the industry from the inside out. So what do you think was the source of this missing? So you mentioned briefly there are, that's the case then why does the world need another song? We're creating a fundamental change in news coverage, laying the foundation and setting the standard, and this is just the beginning. We looked on all the programs out there and identified a gap in tech news coverage. There are plenty of tech shows that provide new gadgets and talk about the latest in gaming, but those shows aren't just the tip of the iceberg. And we're here for the deep dive. >>Okay, >>Dave Olanta. I'm with Wiki bond.org and this is Silicon angle's the cube where we extract signal from the noise. We bring you the best guest that we can find. We go into events like ESPN goes into sporting events, we go into tech events, we find the tech athletes and bring to you their knowledge and share with you our community. We're here at Moscone in San Francisco at the AWS summit. We're here with Arielle Kellman who's the head of worldwide marketing for AWS. Arielle, welcome to the cube. Thanks for having me, Dave. Yeah, our pleasure. I really appreciate you guys having us here. Great venue. Uh, let's see. What's the numbers? It looks like you know, many, many thousands, well over 5,000 people here by four or 5,000 people here. We're doing a about a dozen of these around the world, one to 4,000 people to help educate our customers about all the new things we're doing, all the new partners that are available to help them thrive in the AWS cloud. >>It's mind boggling the amount of stuff that you guys are doing. We just heard NG Jesse's keynote, for those of you who saw Andy's keynote at reinvent, a lot of similar themes with some, some new stuff in there, but one of the most impressive, he said, he said, other than security, one of the things that we're most proud of is the pace at which we introduce new services. And he talked about this fly wheel effect. Can you talk about that a little bit? Sure. Well, there's kind of two different things going on. The pace of innovation is we're really trying to be nimble and customer centric and ultimately we're trying to give our customers a complete set of services to run virtually any workload in the cloud. So you see us expanding a broader would additional services. And then as we get feedback we add more and more features. >>Yeah. So we're obviously seeing a big enterprise push. Uh, Andy was, was very, I thought, politically correct. He said, look, there's one model which is to keep charging people as much as you possibly can. And then there's our model, which is we proactively cut prices and we passed that on to customers. Um, and, and he also stressed that that's not something that's not a gimmick. It's not a sort of a onetime thing. Can you talk about that in terms of your philosophy and your DNA? It's just our philosophy. It's actually a lot less dramatic than is often portrayed in the press. Just the way we look at things as we're constantly trying to drive efficiencies out of our operations. And as we lower our cost structure, we have a choice. We can either pocket those savings as extra margin or we can pass those savings along to our customers in the form of lower prices. >>And we feel that the ladder is the approach that customers like and we want to make our customers happy. So this event, uh, we were talking off camera, you said you've been doing these now for about two years. You do re-invent once a year. That's your big conference out in Vegas and it's a very, very large event, very well attended. And you do these regionally and in and around the world, right. Talk about that a little bit. We do about a dozen of these a year. Um, we did, uh, New York a couple of weeks ago, London, Australia and Sydney. I'm going to go to India and Tokyo, really about a dozen cities in the world and it's a little tactic. I'm not going to beat all of them, but you know, the focus is to really, uh, deliver educational content. Uh, we'll do about maybe 12 to 16 technical breakout sessions all for free, uh, for, for customers and people who want to learn about AWS for the first time. >>And the, and the audience here is largely practitioners and partners, right? Can it talk about the makeup a little bit? Sure. It's a pretty diverse set of people. Um, we have a technical executives like CEOs and architects and we have lots of developers and then lots of people from our, our partner ecosystem of integrators wanting to, um, you know, brush up on the latest technologies and skills and a lot of people who just want to learn about the cloud and learn about AWS. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about AWS and I'd like to just tackle some of those with you if I may. So let me just sort of, let's list them off and you can respond. Yeah, we'll let our audience to sort of decide. So the first is that AWS has only tested dev workloads. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Sure. Um, well test and dev local workloads are very popular. We saw, we covered that in the keynote. Um, and it's often a place where it organizations will start out with AWS, but it is by no means the most popular or most dominant workload. We have a lot of people migrating, uh, enterprise apps to the cloud. Um, if you look at, uh, in New York, uh, in our summit we talked about Bristol Myers Squibb, uh, running all of their, um, clinical trial simulations and reducing the amount of time it takes to run a simulation by 98%. Uh, if people are running Oracle, SharePoint, SAP, pretty much any workload in the cloud. And then another popular use is building brand new applications, uh, for the cloud. You can miss, some people call them cloud native applications. A good example is the Washington post who built an app called the social reader that delivers their content to Facebook and now as more people viewing their content, their than with their print magazines and they just couldn't have done that, uh, on premises. >>So, uh, the other one I want to talk about, we're going to do some serious double clicking on security so we don't have to go crazy on it, but, but there's a sort of common perception that the cloud is not secure. What do you guys say about that? Yeah, so, um, really our number one priority is security. You're looking at a security, operational performance, uh, and then our pace of innovation. But with security, um, what we want to do is to give enterprises everything they need to understand how our security works and to evaluate it and how it meets with their requirements for their projects. So it really all starts with our, our physical security, um, our network security, the access of our people. They're all the similar types of technologies that our customers are familiar with. And then they also tend to look at all the certifications and accreditations, SAS 70 type two SOC one SIS trust. >>I ATAR for our government customers. And then I think it was something a lot of people don't understand is how much work we've put into the security features. It's not just is the cloud secure, but can I interact and integrate, uh, your security functionality with all of my existing systems so we can integrate with people's identity and access systems. You could have a private dedicated connection from your enterprise to AWS with direct connect to, I really encourage anyone who has interest in digging into our security features to go to the security center and our website. It's got tons of information. So I'm putting on the spot. Um, what percent of data centers in the world have security that are, that is as good or better than AWS. It'd be an interesting thing for us to do a survey on. But if you think about security at the infrastructure layer down is what we take care of. >>Now when you build your application, you can build a secure app or non-secure app. So the customer has some responsibility there. But in terms of that cloud infrastructure, um, for a vast majority of our customers, they're getting a pretty substantial upgrade in their security. And here's something to think about is that, um, we run a multitenant service, so we have lots and lots of customers sharing that infrastructure and we get feedback from some of the most security conscious companies in the world and government agencies. So when our customers are giving us a enhancement request, and let's say it is, uh, an oil company like shell or financial services company like NASDAQ, and we implement that improvement because there's always new requirements. We implement that all of our hundreds of thousands of customers get those improvements. So it's very hard for a lot of companies to match that internally, to stay up to speed with all the latest, um, requirements that people need. >>Yeah. Okay. So, uh, and you touched on this as well as the compliance piece of it, but when you think of things like, like HIPAA compliance for example, I think a lot of people don't realize that you guys are a lead in that regard. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Yeah. So, uh, we have a lot of customers running HIPAA compliant, uh, workloads. Um, there's, there's one company or the, the Schumacher group, which does emergency room staffing out of Lafayette, Louisiana. And we, companies like that are going through the process. They have to follow their internal compliance guidelines for implementing a HIPAA compliant plan app. It's actually, it's more about how you implement and manage the application than the infrastructure, which is part of it. But we, we satisfy that for our customers. Let's talk a little bit about SLA. That didn't come up at least today in Andy's keynote, but it didn't reinvent and he made a statement at reinvent. >>He said, we've never lost a piece of business because of SLS. And that caught my attention and I said, okay, interesting. Um, talk about, uh, the criticisms of the SLA. So a lot of people say, wow, SLA, not just of Amazon's cloud, but any public cloud. I mean, SLA is a really a, in essence, a, an indication of the risk that you're able to take and willing to take. What are your customers tell you about SLS? The first thing is we don't hear a lot of questions about SLS from our customers. Some customers, it's very important that we have SLA is for most of our services, but what they're usually judging us on is the operational track record that we provide and doing testing and seeing how we operate and how we perform. Uh, and, uh, we had an analyst from IDC recently do a survey of a bunch of our customers and they found that on average the average app that runs on AWS had 80% less downtime than similar apps that are running on premises. >>So we have a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that our customers are seeing a reliability improvement by migrating their apps to AWS. You're saying don't judge us on the paper, judge us on our actual activities in production and in the field. Typically what most of our customers are asking for is they want to dig into the actual operational features and, and a track record. Now the other thing I want to address is the so called, you know, uh, uh, exit tax, right? It's no charge to get my data in there. I keep my data in there. You, you, you charged me for storing it for exercise and compute activity, but it's expensive to get it out. Um, how do you address that criticism? Well, our pricing is different for every service and we really model it around our customers to both really to really satisfy a broad set of use cases. >>So one example I think you may be talking about is I would Amazon glacier archive service, which is one penny per gigabyte per month. And for an archive service, we figured that most people want to keep their data in there for a long period of time so that we want to make it as cheap as possible for people to put it in. And if you actually needed to pull it out, the reason is because you may have had some disaster or you accidentally deleted something and that you are going to be, uh, you're going to be retrieving data on a far less frequent basis. So on an overall basis for most customers it makes sense that we could have done is made the retrieval costs lower and then made the storage costs higher. But the feedback we got from customers is, you know, archiving a majority of customers may never even retrieve that data at all. >>So it ended up being cheaper for a vast majority of our customers. I mean that's the point of glacier. If you put it there, you kind of hope you never have to go back and get it. Um, the other thing I wanted to ask you about is some of the innovations that we've seen lately in the industry, like a red shift, right? The data warehouse, you mentioned glacier. It was interesting. Andy said that glacier is the fastest growing service in terms of customers. Red shift was the fastest growing service, I guess overall at NAWS. So Redshift is an interesting move for you guys. Uh, that whole big data and analytics space. What if you could talk about that a little bit? If you talk to it, executives in the enterprise and even startups now, they have to analyze lots of data. Building a big data warehouse is, is one of the best examples of how much the pain of hardware and software infrastructure gets in the way of people. >>And there's also a gatekeeping aspect to it. If you're working in a big company and you want to run, you have a question and a hypothesis, you want to run queries against terabytes and petabytes of data, you pretty often have to go and ask for permission. Can I borrow some time from the data warehouse? No, no, no, no. You're not as important. Well, what are customers going to go, Hey, I'm going to go load the data, load a petabyte of data, run a bunch of analysis, and shut it down and only pay for a few hours. So it's not just about making a cheaper, it's about making use of technology possible where it was just not possible in feasible and cost prohibited before. Yeah, so that's an important point. I mean, it's not, it's not just about sort of moving workloads to the cloud, you know, the old saying a my mess for less. >>It's about enabling new business processes and new procedures and deeper business integration. Um, can you talk about that a little bit more? Add a little color to that notion of adding value beyond just moving workloads out of, you know, on premise into the cloud to cut costs, cut op ex, but enabling new business capabilities. When you remove the infrastructure burden between your ideas and what you want to do, you enable new things to be possible. I think innovation is a big aspect of this where if you think about if you reduce the cost of failure for technology projects so much that approaches zero, you change the whole risk taking culture in a company and more people can try out new ideas and companies can Greenlight more ideas because if they fail it doesn't cost you that much. You haven't built up all this infrastructure. So if you have more ideas that are, that are cultivated, you end up with more innovation. >>Whereas before people are too afraid to try new things. So I'm a reader of of Jeffrey's a annual letters. I mean I think they're great. They're Warren buffet like in that regard. One of the exact emphasizes, you know this year was the customer focus. You guys are a customer focused organization, not a competitive focused organization. And again, you got to recognize that both models can work, right? Can you talk about that a little bit? Just the church of the culture. Yeah, I mean when, you know, starts out with how we build our products. Anyone who has a new idea for a product, first thing they got to do is write the press release. So what our customers are going to see is it valuable to them. And then we get come get products out quickly and then we iterate with customers. We don't spend five years building the first version of something. >>We get it out quickly. Uh, sort of the, the, the lean startup, if you heard of the minimum viable product approach, get it out there and get feedback from customers. Uh, and iterate. We don't spend a lot of time looking at what our competitors are doing cause they're not the ones that pay our bill. They're not the ones that can hire and fire us. It's the customers. So I'm you've seen this thing come, you know, quite a ways. I mean, you were at Salesforce, right? Um, which I guess started at all in 99. You could sell that, look at that as the modern cloud sort of movement was, wasn't called cloud. And then you guys in 2006 actually announced what we now know is, you know, the cloud, where are we in terms of, you know, the cloud, you know, what ending is it? To use the sports analogy, I don't know what ending is it, but you know, it's an amazing time where there's such a massive amount of momentum of adoption of the cloud from every type of company, every type of government agency. >>But yet still, when you look at the percentage of it spend or you go talk to a large company and you say, even with all these projects, what percentage of your total projects, there's still tremendous growth ahead of us. Yeah. So, um, there's always that conversation about the pie charts. 70% of our, our effort is spent on keeping the lights on. 30% is spent on, on innovation. And I don't know where that number came from but, but I think generally anecdotally it feels about right. Um, talk about that shift. Yeah. Well I mean your customer base, you talk to any CIO, they don't like the idea of having 80% of their staff and budget being focused on keeping the lights on and the infrastructure would they like to do is to really shift the mix of what people are working on within their organization. It's not about getting rid of it, it's about giving it tools so that every ounce of effort they're doing is geared towards delivering things to the business. >>And that, that, that's what gets CIO is excited about the cloud is really shifting that and having a majority of their people building and iterating with their end users and with their customers. So we talked about the competition a little bit. I want to ask you a question in general, general terms, you guys have laid out sort of the playbook and there's a lot more coming. We know that, uh, but you know this industry quite well. You know, it's very competitive. People S people see what leaders are doing and they all sort of go after it. Why do you feel confident that AWS will be able to maintain its lead and Kennedy even extend its lead in why? Well, there's a couple things that we sort of suggest for customers to look at. I think first of all is the track record and experience of when you're looking at a cloud provider, have they been in this business for a long time? >>Do they have a services mentality where they've had customers trust them for their, for applications that really they trust their business on? Um, and then I think secondly, is there a commitment to innovation? Is there a pace of new features and new technologies as requirements change? And I think the other, the other piece that our customers really give us a lot of feedback on is that they can count on us Lauren prices, they can count on a real partnership as we get better at this and we're always learning as we get better and we reduce our cost structure, they're going to get to benefit and lower their costs as well. So I think those are kind of big things. The other thing is, is the customer ecosystem I think is a big part of it where, um, you know, this is technology. Uh, people need advice, they need, uh, best practices. >>They often need help. And I'm in a kind of analogy I make is if I have a problem with my phone, with my iPhone, I can probably close my eyes and throw it, I'm going to hit someone who also has an iPhone. I can ask them for help. Well, if you're a startup in San Francisco or London or if you're an enterprise in New York or Sydney, odds are that your colleagues, if they're doing cloud, they're doing it with AWS and you have a lot of people to help you out. A lot of people to share best practices with. And that's a subtle but important point is as, as industry participants begin to aggregate within your cloud, there's a data angle there, right? Because there's data that potentially those organizations could share if they so choose to a, that is a, that is a value. And as you say, the best practice sharing as well. >>I have two last questions for you. Sure. First is, is what gets you excited in this whole field? I think it's like seeing what customers are doing. I mean, that's the cool thing about, uh, offering cloud infrastructure is that anything is possible. Like we met Ryan, uh, who spoke from atomic fiction. These guys are the world's first digital effects agency that's 100% in the cloud. And to see that they made a movie and all the effects like the Robertson mech, his flight film without owning a single server, um, it's just, it's amazing. And to see what these guys can do, how happy they are to have a group of 30, 40 artists that, um, can say yes when the director says I want it to do differently. I want to add, go from 150 to 300 shots and to see how happy and excited they are. >>I mean that, that's what motivates me. Yeah. Okay. And then my last question, Ariel, is, um, you know, what keeps you up at night? What worries you? Well, I think, you know, the most important thing that we can't forget is to really keep our fingers on the pulse of the customers and what they want, and also helping them to figure out what they want next. Because if we don't keep moving, then we're not going to keep pace with what the customers want to use the cloud for. All right, Ariel Kelman thanks very much. Congratulations on the Mason's progress and we'll be watching and, and really appreciate, again, you having us here. Appreciate your time coming on. Good luck with the rest of the tour. I hope you don't have to do every city. It sounds like you don't, but, uh, but if it sounds like you've enjoyed them, so, uh, congratulations again. Great. All right. This is Dave Milan to keep it right there. This is the cube. We'll be back with our next guest right after this word.