(upbeat music) >> Hello, friends. Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022. We're in Vegas. Lovely Las Vegas. Beautiful outside, although I have only seen outside today once, but very excited to be at re:Invent. We're hearing between 50,000 and 70,000 attendees and it's insane, but people are ready to be back. This morning's keynote by CEO Adam Selipsky was full of great messages, big focus on data, customers, partners, the ecosystem. So excited. And I'm very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, David Shacochis, VP Enterprise Portfolio Strategy Product Management at Lumen. David, welcome back. >> Lisa, good to be here. The Five Timers Club. >> You are in the Five Timers Club. This is David's fifth appearance on the show. And we were talking before we went live- >> Do we do the jacket now and do we do the jacket later? >> Yeah, the jacket will come later. >> Okay. >> The Five Timers Club, like on SNL. We're going to have that for The Cube. We'll get you measured up and get that all fitted for you. >> That'd be better. >> So talk a little bit about Lumen. 'Cause last time you hear it wasn't Lumen. >> We weren't Lumen last time. So this is the first time... last time we were here on The Cube at re:Invent. This was probably 2019 or so. We were a different company. The company was called CenturyLink back then. We rebranded in 2020 to really represent our identity as a delivery of...as a solutions provider over our fiber network. So Lumen is the corporate brand, the company name. It represents basically a lot of the fiber that's been laid throughout the world and in North America and in enterprise metropolitan areas over the past 10 to 15 years. You know, companies like CenturyLink and Quest and Level 3, all those companies have really rolled up into building that core asset of the network. So Lumen is really the brand for the 21st century for the company, really focused on delivering services for the enterprise and then delivering a lot of value added services around that core network asset. >> So rebranding during the pandemic, what's been the customer feedback and sentiment? >> Yeah, I think customers have really actually appreciated it as certainly a more technology oriented brand, right? Sort of shifting away a little bit from some of the communications and telecom background of the company and the heritage. And while those assets that were built up during that period of time have been substantial, and we still build off of those assets going forward, really what a lot of the customer feedback has been is that it puts us in a posture to be a little bit more of a business solutions provider for customers, right? So there's a lot of things that we can do with that core network asset, the fiber networking a lot of the services that we launch on that in terms of public IP, you know, public internet capacity, private networking, private VPNs, VoIP and voice services. These are services that you'd expect from a company like that. But there's a lot of services inside the Lumen brand that you might surprise you, right? There's an edge computing capability that can deliver five milliseconds of latency within 95% of North American enterprise. >> Wow. >> There's a threat detection lab that goes and takes all of the traffic flowing over the public side of our network and analyzes it in a data lake and turns it into threat intelligence that we then offer off to our customers on a subscription basis. There's a production house that goes and, you know, does production networking for major sports arenas and sports events. There's a wide range of services inside of Lumen that really what the Lumen brand allows us to do is start talking about what those services can do and what networking can do for our customers in the enterprise in a more comprehensive way. >> So good changes, big brand changes for Lumen in the last couple of years. Also, I mean, during a time of such turmoil in the world, we've seen work change dramatically. You know, everybody...companies had to pivot massively quickly a couple years ago. >> Yep. >> Almost approaching three years ago, which is crazy amazing to be digital because they had to be able to survive. >> They did >> Now they're looking at being able to thrive, but now we're also in this hybrid work environment. The future of work has changed. >> Totally. >> Almost permanently. >> Yep. >> How is Lumen positioned to address some of the permanent changes to the work environments? Like the last time we were at re:Invented- >> Yeah. >> In person. This didn't exist. >> That's right. So really, it's one of the things we talk to our customers almost the most about is this idea of the future of work. And, you know, we really think about the future of work as about, you know, workers and workloads and the networks that connect them. You think about how much all of those demands are shifting and changing, right? What we were talking about, and it's very easy for all of us to conceptualize what the changing face of the worker looks like, whether those are knowledge workers or frontline workers the venues in which people are working the environments and that connectivity, predictability of those work desk environments changes so significantly. But workloads are changing and, you know we're sitting here at a trade show that does nothing but celebrate the transformation of workloads. Workloads running in ways in business logic and capturing of data and analysis of data. The changing methodologies and the changing formats of workloads, and then the changing venues for workloads. So workloads are running in places that never used to be data centers before. Workloads are running in interesting places and in different and challenging locations for what didn't used to be the data center. And so, you know, the workloads and the workloads are in a very dynamic situation. And the networks that connect them have to be dynamic, and they have to be flexible. And that's really why a lot of what Lumen invests in is working on the networks that connect workers and workloads both from a visibility and a managed services perspective to make sure that we're removing blind spots and then removing potential choke points and capacity issues, but then also being adaptable and dynamic enough to be able to go and reconfigure that network to reach all of the different places that, you know, workers and workloads are going to evolve into. What you'll find in a lot of cases, you know, the workers...a common scenario in the enterprise. A 500 person company with, you know, five offices and maybe one major facility. You know, that's now a 505 office company. >> Right. >> Right? The challenge of the network and the challenge of connecting workers and workloads is really one of the main conversations we have with our customers heading into this 21st century. >> What are some of the things that they're looking forward to in terms of embracing the future of work knowing this is probably how it's going to remain? >> Yeah, I think companies are really starting to experiment carefully and start to think about what they can do and certainly think about what they can do in the cloud with things like what the AWS platform allows them to do with some of the AWS abstractions and the AWS services allow them to start writing software for, and they're starting to really carefully, but very creatively and reach out into their you know, their base of enterprise data, their base of enterprise value to start running some experiments. We actually had a really interesting example of that in a session that Lumen shared here at re:Invent yesterday. You know, for the few hundred people that were there. You know, I think we got a lot of great feedback. It was really interesting session about the...really gets at this issue of the future of work and the changing ways that people are working. It actually was a really cool use case we worked on with Major League Baseball, Fox Sports, and AWS with the... using the Lumen network to essentially virtualize the production truck. Right? So you've all heard that, you know, the sports metaphor of, you know, the folks in the booth were sitting there started looking down and they're saying, oh great job by the guys or the gals in the truck. >> Yep. >> Right? That are, you know, that bring in that replay or great camera angle. They're always talking about the team and their production truck. Well, that production truck is literally a truck sitting outside the stadium. >> Yep. >> Full of electronics and software and gear. We were able to go and for a Major League Baseball game in...back in August, we were able to go and work with AWS, using the Lumen network, working with our partners and our customers at Fox Sports and virtualize all of that gear inside the truck. >> Wow. That's outstanding. >> Yep. So it was a live game. You know, they simulcast it, right? So, you know, we did our part of the broadcast and many hundreds of people, you know, saw that live broadcast was the first time they tried doing it. But, you know, to your point, what are enterprises doing? They're really starting to experiment, sort to push the envelope, right? They're kind of running things in new ways, you know, obviously hedging their bets, right? And sort of moving their way and sort of blue-green testing their way into the future by trying things out. But, you know, this is a massive revenue opportunity for a Major League Baseball game. You know, a premier, you know, Sunday night baseball contest between the Yankees and the Cardinals. We were able to go and take the entire truck, virtualize it down to a small rack of connectivity gear. Basically have that production network run over redundant fiber paths on the Lumen network up into AWS. And AWS is where all that software worked. The technical director of the show sitting in his office in North Carolina. >> Wow. >> The sound engineer is sitting in, you know, on his porch in Connecticut. Right? They were able to go and do the work of production anywhere while connected to AWS and then using the Lumen network, right? You know, the high powered capabilities of Lumens network underlay to be able to, you know, go and design a network topology and a worked topology that really wasn't possible before. >> Right. It's nice to hear, to your point, that customers are really embracing experimentation. >> Right. >> That's challenging to, obviously there was a big massive forcing function a couple of years ago where they didn't have a choice if they wanted to survive and eventually succeed and grow. >> Yeah. >> But the mindset of experimentation requires cultural change and that's a hard thing to do especially for I would think legacy organizations like Major League Baseball, but it sounds like they have the appetite. >> Yeah. They have the interest. >> They've been a fairly innovative organization for some time. But, you know, you're right. That idea of experimenting and that idea of trying out new things. Many people have observed, right? It's that forcing function of the pandemic that really drove a lot of organizations to go and make a lot of moves really quickly. And then they realized, oh, wait a minute. You know... I guess there's some sort of storytelling metaphor in there at some point of people realizing, oh wait, I can swim in these waters, right? I can do this. And so now they're starting to experiment and push the envelope even more using platforms like AWS, but then using a lot of the folks in the AWS partner network like Lumen, who are designing and sort of similarly inspired to deliver, you know, on demand and virtualized and dynamic capabilities within the core of our network and then within the services that our network can and the ways that our network connects to AWS. All of that experimentation now is possible because a lot of the things you need to do to try out the experiment are things you can get on demand and you can kind of pat, you can move back, you can learn. You can try new things and you can evolve. >> Right. >> Yep. >> Right. Absolutely. What are some of the things that you're excited about as, you know, here was this forcing function a couple years ago, we're coming out of that now, but the world has changed. The future of work as you are so brilliantly articulated has changed permanently. What are you excited about in terms of Lumen and AWS going forward? As we saw a lot of announcements this morning, big focus on data, vision of AWS is really that flywheel with Adams Selipsky is really, really going. What are you excited about going forward into 2023? >> Yeah, I mean we've been working with AWS for so long and have been critical partners for so long that, you know, I think a lot of it is continuation of a lot of the great work we've been doing. We've been investing in our own capabilities around the AWS partner network. You know, we're actually in a fairly unique position, you know, and we like to think that we're that unique position around the future of work where between workers, workloads and the networks that connect them. Our fingers are on a lot of those pulse points, right? Our fingers are on at really at the nexus of a lot of those dynamics. And our investment with AWS even puts us even more so in a position to go where a lot of the workloads are being transformed, right? So that's why, you know, we've invested in being one of the few network operators that is in the AWS partner network at the advanced tier that have the managed services competency, that have the migration competency and the network competency. You can count on one hand the number of network operators that have actually invested at that level with AWS. And there's an even smaller number that is, you know, based here in the United States. So, you know, I think that investment with AWS, investment in their partner programs and then investment co-innovation with AWS on things like that MLB use case really puts us in a position to keep on doing these kinds of things within the AWS partner network. And that's one of the biggest things we could possibly be excited about. >> So what does the go to market look like? Is it Lumen goes in, brings in AWS, vice versa? Both? >> Yeah, so a lot of being a member of the AWS partner network you have a lot of flexibility. You know, we have a lot of customers that are, you know, directly working with AWS. We have a lot of customers that would basically look to us to deliver the solution and, you know, and buy it all as a complete turnkey capability. So we have customers that do both. We have customers that, you know, just look to Lumen for the Lumen adjacent services and then pay, you know, pay a separate bill with AWS. So there's a lot of flexibility in the partner network in terms of what Lumen can deliver as a service, Lumen can deliver as a complete solution and then what parts of its with AWS and their platform factors into on an on-demand usage basis. >> And that would all be determined I imagine by what the customer really needs in their environment? >> Yeah, and sort of their own cloud strategy. There's a lot of customers who are all in on AWS and are really trying to driving and innovating and using some of the higher level services inside the AWS platform. And then there are customers who kind of looked at AWS as one of a few cloud platforms that they want to work with. The Lumen network is compatible and connected to all of them and our services teams are, you know, have the ability to go and let customers sort of take on whatever cloud posture they need. But if they are all in on AWS, there's, you know. Not many networks better to be on than Lumen in order to enable that. >> With that said, last question for you is if you had a bumper sticker or a billboard. Lumen's rebranded since we last saw you. What would that tagline or that phrase of impact be on that bumper sticker? >> Yeah, I'd get in a lot of trouble with our marketing team if I didn't give the actual bumper sticker for the company. But we really think of ourselves as the platform for amazing things. The fourth industrial revolution, everything going on in terms of the future of work, in terms of the future of industrial innovation, in terms of all the data that's being gathered. You know, Adam in the keynote this morning really went into a lot of detail on, you know, the depth of data and the mystery of data and how to harness it all and wrangle it all. It requires a lot of networking and a lot of connectivity. You know, for us to acquire, analyze and act on all that data and Lumen's platform for amazing things really helps forge that path forward to that fourth industrial revolution along with great partners like AWS. >> Outstanding. David, it's been such a pleasure having you back on The Cube. We'll get you fitted for that five timers club jacket. >> It sounds good. (Lisa laughs) >> I'll be back. >> Thanks so much for your insights and your time and well done with what you guys are doing at Lumen and AWS. >> Thanks Lisa. >> For David Shacochis, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube hopefully all day. This is our first full day of coverage at AWS re:Invent '22. Stick around. We'll be back tomorrow, and we know we're going to see you then. Have a great night. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Good morning fellow cloud community nerds and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of AWS re:Invent, we're here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. You can tell by my sequence. My name's Savannah Peterson and I'm delighted to be here with theCUBE. Joining me this morning is a packed house. We have three fabulous guests from AWS's global startup program. Immediately to my right is Eric. Eric, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> We've also got Jimmy and Jeff. Before we get into the questions, how does it feel? This is kind of a show off moment for you all. Is it exciting to be back on the show floor? >> Always, I mean, you live for this event, right? I mean, we've got 50,000. >> You live for this? >> Yeah, I mean, 50,000 customers. Like we really appreciate the fact that time, money and resources they spend to be here. So, yeah, I love it. >> Savanna: Yeah, fantastic. >> Yeah, everyone in the same place at the same time, energy is just pretty special, so, it's fun. >> It is special. And Jimmy, I know you joined the program during the pandemic. This is probably the largest scale event you've been at with AWS. >> First time at re:Invent. >> Welcome >> (mumbles) Customers, massive. And I love seeing some of the startups that I partner with directly behind me here from theCUBE set as well. >> Yeah, it's fantastic. First time on theCUBE, welcome. >> Jimmy: Thank you. >> We hope to have you back. >> Jimmy: Proud to be here. >> Jimmy, I'm going to keep it on you to get us started. So, just in case someone hasn't heard of the global startup program with AWS. Give us the lay of the land. >> Sure, so flagship program at AWS. We partner with venture backed, product market fit B2B startups that are building on AWS. So, we have three core pillars. We help them co-built, co-market, and co-sell. Really trying to help them accelerate their cloud journey and get new customers build with best practices while helping them grow. >> Savanna: Yeah, Jeff, anything to add there? >> Yeah, I would say we try our best to find the best technology out there that our customers are demanding today. And basically, give them a fast track to the top resources we have to offer to help them grow their business. >> Yeah, and not a casual offering there at AWS. I just want to call out some stats so everyone knows just how many amazing startups and businesses that you touch. We've talked a lot about unicorns here on the show, and one of Adam's quotes from the keynote was, "Of the 1200 global unicorns, 83% run on AWS." So, at what stage are most companies trying to come and partner with you? And Eric we'll go to you for that. >> Yeah, so I run the North American startup team and our mission is to get and support startups as early as inception as possible, right? And so we've got kind of three, think about three legs of stool. We've got our business development team who works really closely with everything from seed, angel investors, incubators, accelerators, top tier VCs. And then we've got a sales team, we've got a BD team. And so really, like we're even looking before customers start even building or billing, we want to find those stealth startups, help them understand kind of product, where they fit within AWS, help them understand kind of how we can support them. And then as they start to build, then we've got a commercial team of solution architects and sales professionals that work with them. So, we actually match that life cycle all the way through. >> That's awesome. So, you are looking at seed, stealth. So, if I'm a founder listening right now, it doesn't matter what stage I'm at. >> No, I mean, really we want to get, and so we have credit programs, we have enablement programs, focus everything from very beginning to hyper scale. And that's kind of how we think about it. >> That's pretty awesome. So Jeff, what are the keys to success for a startup in working with you all? >> Yeah, good question. Highly differentiated technology is absolutely critical, right? There's a lot of startups out there but finding those that have differentiated technology that meets the demands of AWS customers, by far the biggest piece right there. And then it's all about figuring out how to lean into the partnership and really embrace what Jimmy said. How do you do the co build, the co-marketing, co-sell to put the full package together to make sure that your software's going to have the greatest visibility with our customers out there. >> Yeah, I love that. Jimmy, how do you charm them? What do the startups see in working with AWS? (indistinct) >> But that aside, Jeff just alluded to it. It's that better together story and it takes a lot of buy-in from the partner to get started. It is what we say, a partner driven flywheel. And the successful partners that I work with understand that and they're committing the resources to the relationship because we manage thousands and thousands of startups and there's thousands listed on Marketplace. And then within our co-sell ISV Accelerate program, there's hundreds of startups. So startups have to, one, differentiate themselves with their technology, but then two, be able to lean in to do the tactical engagement that myself and my PDM peers help them manage. >> Awesome, yeah. So Eric. >> Yes. >> Let's say I talk to a lot of founders because I do, and how would I pitch an AWS partnership through the global startup program to them? >> Yeah, well, so this... >> Give me my sound back. >> Yeah, yeah, look for us, like it's all about scaling your business, right? And so my team, and we have a partnership. I run the North American startup team, they run the global startup program, okay? So what my job is initially is to help them build up their services and their programs and products. And then as they get to product market fit, and we see synergy with selling with Amazon, the whole idea is to lead them into the go-to market programs, right? And so really for us, that pitch is this, simply put, we're going to help you extend your reach, right? We're going to take what you know about your service and having product market fit understanding your sales cycle, understanding your customer and your value, and then we're going to amplify that voice. >> Sounds good to me, I'm sold. I like that, I mean, I doubt there's too many companies with as much reach as you have. Let's dig in there a little bit. So, how much is the concentration of the portfolio in North America versus globally? I know you've got your fingers all over the place. >> Jimmy: Yeah. >> Go for it, Jeff. >> Jimmy: Well, yeah, you start and I'll... >> On the partnership side, it's pretty balanced between North America and AMEA and APJ, et cetera, but the type of partners is very different, right? So North America, we have a high focus on infrastructure led partners, right? Where that might be a little different in other regions internationally. >> Yeah, so I have North America, I have a peer that has AMEA, a peer that has Latin America and a peer that has APJ. And so, we have the startup team which is global, and we break it up regionally, and then the global startup program, which is partnership around APN, Amazon Partner Network, is also global. So like, we work in concert, they have folks married up to our team in each region. >> Savannah, what I'm hearing is you want do a global startup showcase? >> Yeah. (indistinct) >> We're happy to sponsor. >> Are you reading my mind? We are very aligned, Jimmy. >> I love it, awesome. >> I'm going to ask you a question, since you obviously are in sync with me all ready. You guys see what you mentioned, 50,000 startups in the program? 100, 000, how many? >> Well you're talking about for the global startup program, the ISV side? >> Sure, yeah, let's do both the stats actually. >> So, the global startup program's a lot smaller than that, right? So globally, there might be around 1,000 startups that are in the program. >> Savanna: Very elite little spot. >> Now, a lot bigger world on Eric's side. >> Eric: Yeah, globally over 200,000. >> Savanna: Whoa. >> Yeah, I mean, you think about, so just think about the... >> To keep track, those all in your head? >> Yeah, I can't keep track. North America's quite large. Yeah, no, because look, startups are getting created every day, right? And then there's positive exits and negative exits, right? And so, yeah, I mean, it's impressive. And particularly over the last two years, over the last two years are a little bit crazy, bonkers with the money coming. (mumbles) And yet the creation that's going to happen right now in the market disruption is going to mirror what happened in 2008, 2009. And so, the creation is not going to slow down. >> Savanna: No, hopefully not. >> No. >> No, and our momentum, I mean everyone's doing things faster, more data, it's all that we're talking about, do more and make it easier for everybody in the same central location. Jimmy, of those thousand global startups that you're working with, can you tell us some of the trends? >> Yeah, so I think one of the big things, especially, I cover data analytics startups specifically. So, one moving from batch to real time analytics. So, whether that's IOT, gaming, leader boards, querying data where it sits in an AWS data, like companies need to make operational decisions now and not based off of historic data from a week ago or last night or a month ago. So, that's one. And then I'm going to steal one of John's lines, is data is code. That is becoming that base layer that a lot of startups are building off of and operationalizing. So, I think those are the two big things I'm seeing, but would love... >> Curious to both, Jeff, let's go to you next, I'm curious, yeah. >> Yeah, totally. I think from a broader perspective, the days of completely free money and infinite resources are coming to a close, if not already closed. >> We all work with startups, we can go ahead and just talk about all the well is just a little (indistinct)... >> So, I think it's closed, and so because of that, it's how do you deal with a lot? How do you produce the results on the go to market side with fewer resources, right? And so it's incumbent on our team to figure out how to make it an easier, simpler process to partner with AWS, knowing those constraints are very real now. >> Savanna: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and to build on that. I think mid stage, it's all about cash preservation, right? And it's in that runway... >> Especially right now. >> Yeah, and so part of that is getting into the right infrastructure, when you had a lot of people, suddenly you don't have as many people moving into managed services, making sure that you can scale at a cost efficient way versus at any cost. That's kind of the latter stage. Now what's really been fascinating more at the at the early stages, I call it the rise of the AIML native. And so, where you say three years ago, you saw customers bolting on AI, now they're building AI from the start, right? And that's pervasive across every industry, whether it's in FinTech, life sciences, healthcare, climate tech, you're starting to see it all the way across the board. And then of course the other thing is, yeah, the other one is just the rise of just large language models, right? And just, I think there's the hype and there's the promise, but you know, over time, like the amount of customers big and small, whom are used in large language models is pretty fascinating. >> Yeah, you must have fascinating jobs. I mean, genuinely, it's so cool to get to not only see and have your finger on the pulse of what's coming next, essentially that's what startups are, but also be able to support them and to collaborate with them. And it's clear, the commitment to community and to the customers that you're serving. Last question for each of you, and then we're talking about your DJing. >> Oh yeah, I definitely, I want to see that. >> No, we're going to close with that as a little pitch for everyone watching this show. So, we make sure the crowd's just packed for that. This is your show, as you said, you live for this show, love that. >> Yeah. >> Give us your 30 second hot take, most important soundbites, think of this as your thought leadership shining moment. What's the biggest takeaway from the show? Biggest trend, thing that has you most excited? >> Oh, that's a difficult one. There's a lot going on. >> There is a lot going on. I mean, you can say a couple things. I'll allow you more than 30 seconds if you want. >> No, I mean, look, I just think the, well, what's fascinating to me in having this is my third or fourth re:Invent is just the volume of new announcements that come out. It's impressive, right? I mean it's impressive in terms of number of services, but then the depth of those services and the building on, I think it's just really amazing. I think that the trend you're going to continue to see and there's going to be more keynotes tomorrow, so, I can't let anything out. But just the AI, ML, real excited about that, analytic space, serverless, just continue to see the maturation of that space, particularly for startups. I think that to me is what's really exciting. And just seeing folks come together, start exchanging ideas, and I think the last piece I'll do is a pitch for my own team, like we have like 18 different sessions from the North American startup team. And so, I mean, shout out to our solution architects putting those sessions together, geared towards startups for startups, and so, that's probably what I'm most excited about. >> Casual, that was good, and you pitched it in time. I think that was great. >> There you go. >> All right, Jeff, you just had a little practice time while he was going. Let's (indistinct). >> No, so it's just exciting to see all the partners that we support here, so many of them have booths here and are showcasing their technology. And being able to connect them with customers to show how advanced their capabilities are that they're bringing to the table to supplement and compliment all the new capabilities that AWS is launching. So, to be able to see all of that in the same place at the same time and really hear what they need from a partnership perspective, that's what's special for us. >> Savanna: This is special. All right, Jimmy. >> My thoughts on re:Invent or? >> Not DJ yet. >> Not DJ. Not DJ, but I mean, your first re:Invent. Probably your first time getting to interact with a lot of the people that you chat with face to face. How does it feel? What's your hot take? Your look through the crystal ball, if you want to take it farther out in front. >> I think it's finally getting FaceTime with some of the relationships that I've built purely over Chime and virtual calls over the past two years has been incredible. And then secondly, to the technical enablement piece, I can announce this 'cause it was already announced earlier, is AWS Security Lake, one of my partners, Cribl, was actually a launch partner for that service. So, a little too to the Horn for Global Startup program, one of the coolest things at the tactical level as a PDM is working with them throughout the year and my partner solution architect finding these unique alignment opportunities with native AWS services and then seeing it build all the way through fruition at the finish line, announced at re:Invent, their logo up on screen, like that's, I can sleep well tonight. >> Job well done. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> That's pretty cool. >> That is cool. >> So, I've already told you before you even got here that you're a DJ and you happen to be DJing at re:Invent. Where can we all go dance and see you? >> So, shout out to Mission Cloud, who has sponsored Tao, Day Beach Club on Wednesday evening. So yes, I do DJ, I appreciate AWS's flexibility work life balance. So, I'll give that plug right here as well. But no, it's something I picked up during COVID, it's a creative outlet for me. And then again, to be able to do it here is just an incredible opportunity. So, Wednesday night I hope to see all theCUBE and everyone that... >> We will definitely be there, be careful what you wish for. >> What's your stage name? >> Oh, stage name, DJ Hot Hands, so, find me on SoundCloud. >> DJ Hot Hands. >> All right, so check out DJ Hot Hands on SoundCloud. And if folks want to learn more about the Global Startup program, where do they go? >> AWS Global Startup Program. We have a website you can easily connect with. All our startups are listed on AWS Marketplace. >> Most of them are Marketplace, you can go to our website, (mumbles) global startup program and yeah, find us there. >> Fantastic. Well, Jeff, Jimmy, Eric, it was an absolute pleasure starting the day. We got startups for breakfast. I love that. And I can't wait to go dance to you tomorrow night or tonight actually. I'm here for the fist bumps. This is awesome. And you all are great. Hope to have you back on theCUBE again very soon and we'll have to coordinate on that global Startup Showcase. >> Jimmy: All right. >> I think it's happening, 2023, get ready folks. >> Jimmy: Here we go. >> Get ready. All right, well, this was our first session here at AWS re:Invent. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, we're theCUBE, the leader in high tech reporting. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat jingle) >> The history of Exadata in the platform is really unique. And from my vantage point, it started earlier this century as a skunkworks inside of Oracle called Project Sage back when grid computing was the next big thing. Oracle saw that betting on standard hardware would put it on an industry curve that would rapidly evolve. Last April, for example, Oracle announced the availability of Exadata X9M in OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. One thing that hasn't been as well publicized is that Exadata on OCI is using AMD's EPYC processors in the database service. EPYC is not Eastern Pacific Yacht Club for all you sailing buffs, rather it stands for Extreme Performance Yield Computing, the enterprise grade version of AMD's Zen architecture which has been a linchpin of AMD's success in terms of penetrating enterprise markets. And to focus on the innovations that AMD and Oracle are bringing to market, we have with us today, Juan Loaiza, who's executive vice president of mission critical technologies at Oracle, and Mark Papermaster, who's the CTO and EVP of technology and engineering at AMD. Juan, welcome back to the show. Mark, great to have you on The Cube in your first appearance, thanks for coming on. Juan, let's start with you. You've been on The Cube a number of times, as I said, and you've talked about how Exadata is a top platform for Oracle database. We've covered that extensively. What's different and unique from your point of view about Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M on OCI? >> So as you know, Exadata, it's designed top down to be the best possible platform for database. It has a lot of unique capabilities, like we make extensive use of RDMA, smart storage. We take advantage of everything we can in the leading hardware platforms. X9M is our next generation platform and it does exactly that. We're always wanting to be, to get all the best that we can from the available hardware that our partners like AMD produce. And so that's what X9M in it is, it's faster, more capacity, lower latency, more iOS, pushing the limits of the hardware technology. So we don't want to be the limit, the software database software should not be the limit, it should be the actual physical limits of the hardware. That that's what X9M's all about. >> Why, Juan, AMD chips in X9M? >> We're introducing AMD chips. We think they provide outstanding performance, both for OTP and for analytic workloads. And it's really that simple, we just think the performance is outstanding in the product. >> Mark, your career is quite amazing. I could riff on history for hours but let's focus on the Oracle relationship. Mark, what are the relevant capabilities and key specs of the AMD chips that are used in Exadata X9M on Oracle's cloud? >> Well, thanks. It's really the basis of the great partnership that we have with Oracle on Exadata X9M and that is that the AMD technology uses our third generation of Zen processors. Zen was architected to really bring high performance back to X86, a very strong roadmap that we've executed on schedule to our commitments. And this third generation does all of that, it uses a seven nanometer CPU that is a core that was designed to really bring throughput, bring really high efficiency to computing and just deliver raw capabilities. And so for Exadata X9M, it's really leveraging all of that. It's really a balanced processor and it's implemented in a way to really optimize high performance. That is our whole focus of AMD. It's where we've reset the company focus on years ago. And again, great to see the super smart database team at Oracle really partner with us, understand those capabilities and it's been just great to partner with them to enable Oracle to really leverage the capabilities of the Zen processor. >> Yeah. It's been a pretty amazing 10 or 11 years for both companies. But Mark, how specifically are you working with Oracle at the engineering and product level and what does that mean for your joint customers in terms of what they can expect from the collaboration? >> Well, here's where the collaboration really comes to play. You think about a processor and I'll say, when Juan's team first looked at it, there's general benchmarks and the benchmarks are impressive but they're general benchmarks. And they showed the base processing capability but the partnership comes to bear when it means optimizing for the workloads that Exadata X9M is really delivering to the end customers. And that's where we dive down and as we learn from the Oracle team, we learn to understand where bottlenecks could be, where is there tuning that we could in fact really boost the performance above that baseline that you get in the generic benchmarks. And that's what the teams have done, so for instance, you look at optimizing latency to our DMA, you look at optimizing throughput on oil TP and database processing. When you go through the workloads and you take the traces and you break it down and you find the areas that are bottlenecking and then you can adjust, we have thousands of parameters that can be adjusted for a given workload. And that's the beauty of the partnership. So we have the expertise on the CPU engineering, Oracle Exadata team knows innately what the customers need to get the most out of their platform. And when the teams came together, we actually achieved anywhere from 20% to 50% gains on specific workloads, it is really exciting to see. >> Mark, last question for you is how do you see this relationship evolving in the future? Can you share a little roadmap for the audience? >> You bet. First off, given the deep partnership that we've had on Exadata X9M, it's really allowed us to inform our future design. So in our current third generation, EPYC is that is really what we call our epic server offerings. And it's a 7,003 third gen and Exadara X9M. So what about fourth gen? Well, fourth gen is well underway, ready for the future, but it incorporates learning that we've done in partnership with Oracle. It's going to have even more through capabilities, it's going to have expanded memory capabilities because there's a CXL connect express link that'll expand even more memory opportunities. And I could go on. So that's the beauty of a deep partnership as it enables us to really take that learning going forward. It pays forward and we're very excited to fold all of that into our future generations and provide even a better capabilities to Juan and his team moving forward. >> Yeah, you guys have been obviously very forthcoming. You have to be with Zen and EPYC. Juan, anything you'd like to add as closing comments? >> Yeah. I would say that in the processor market there's been a real acceleration in innovation in the last few years, there was a big move 10, 15 years ago when multicore processors came out. And then we were on that for a while and then things started stagnating, but in the last two or three years, AMD has been leading this, there's been a dramatic acceleration in innovation so it's very exciting to be part of this and customers are getting a big benefit from this. >> All right. Hey, thanks for coming back on The Cube today. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. Glad to be here. >> All right and thank you for watching this exclusive Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante from The Cube and we'll see you next time. (upbeat jingle)

[Music] the history of exadata in the platform is really unique and from my vantage point it started earlier this century as a skunk works inside of oracle called project sage back when grid computing was the next big thing oracle saw that betting on standard hardware would put it on an industry curve that would rapidly evolve and i remember the oracle hp database machine which was announced at oracle open world almost 15 years ago and then exadata kept evolving after the sun acquisition it became a platform that had tightly integrated hardware and software and today exadata it keeps evolving almost like a chameleon to address more workloads and reach new performance levels last april for example oracle announced the availability of exadata x9m in oci oracle cloud infrastructure and introduced the ability to run the autonomous database service or the exa data database service you know oracle often talks about they call it stock exchange performance level kind of no description needed and sort of related capabilities the company as we know is fond of putting out benchmarks and comparisons with previous generations of product and sometimes competitive products that underscore the progress that's being made with exadata such as 87 percent more iops with metrics for latency measured in microseconds mics instead of milliseconds and many other numbers that are industry-leading and compelling especially for mission-critical workloads one thing that hasn't been as well publicized is that exadata on oci is using amd's epyc processors in the database service epyc is not eastern pacific yacht club for all your sailing buffs rather it stands for extreme performance yield computing the enterprise grade version of amd's zen architecture which has been a linchpin of amd's success in terms of penetrating enterprise markets and to focus on the innovations that amd and oracle are bringing to market we have with us today juan loyza who's executive vice president of mission critical technologies at oracle and mark papermaster who's the cto and evp of technology and engineering at amd juan welcome back to the show mark great to have you on thecube and your first appearance thanks for coming on yep happy to be here thank you all right juan let's start with you you've been on thecube a number of times as i said and you've talked about how exadata is a top platform for oracle database we've covered that extensively what's different and unique from your point of view about exadata cloud infrastructure x9m on oci yeah so as you know exadata it's designed top down to be the best possible platform for database uh it has a lot of unique capabilities like we make extensive use of rdma smart storage we take advantage of you know everything we can in the leading uh hardware platforms and x9m is our next generation platform and it does exactly that we're always wanting to be to get all the best that we can from the available hardware that our partners like amd produce and so that's what x9 in it is it's faster more capacity lower latency more ios pushing the limits of the hardware technology so we don't want to be the limit the software the database software should not be the limit it should be uh the actual physical limits of the hardware and that that's what x9m is all about why won amd chips in x9m uh yeah so we're we're uh introducing uh amd chips we think they provide outstanding performance uh both for oltp and for analytic workloads and it's really that simple we just think that performance is outstanding in the product yeah mark your career is quite amazing i've been around long enough to remember the transition to cmos from emitter coupled logic in the mainframe era back when you were at ibm that was an epic technology call at the time i was of course steeped as an analyst at idc in the pc era and like like many witnessed the tectonic shift that apple's ipod and iphone caused and the timing of you joining amd is quite important in my view because it coincided with the year that pc volumes peaked and marked the beginning of what i call a stagflation period for x86 i could riff on history for hours but let's focus on the oracle relationship mark what are the relevant capabilities and key specs of the amd chips that are used in exadata x9m on oracle's cloud well thanks and and uh it's really uh the basis of i think the great partnership that we have with oracle on exadata x9m and that is that the amd technology uses our third generation of zen processors zen was you know architected to really bring high performance you know back to x86 a very very strong road map that we've executed you know on schedule to our commitments and this third generation does all of that it uses a seven nanometer cpu that is a you know core that was designed to really bring uh throughput uh bring you know really high uh efficiency uh to computing uh and just deliver raw capabilities and so uh for uh exadata x9m uh it's really leveraging all of that it's it's a uh implemented in up to 64 cores per socket it's got uh you know really anywhere from 128 to 168 pcie gen 4 io connectivity so you can you can really attach uh you know all of the uh the necessary uh infrastructure and and uh storage uh that's needed uh for exadata performance and also memory you have to feed the beast for those analytics and for the oltp that juan was talking about and so it does have eight lanes of memory for high performance ddr4 so it's really as a balanced processor and it's implemented in a way to really optimize uh high performance that that is our whole focus of uh amd it's where we've you know reset the company focus on years ago and uh again uh you know great to see uh you know the the super smart uh you know database team at oracle really a partner with us understand those capabilities and it's been just great to partner with them to uh you know to you know enable oracle to really leverage the capabilities of the zen processor yeah it's been a pretty amazing 10 or 11 years for both companies but mark how specifically are you working with oracle at the engineering and product level you know and what does that mean for your joint customers in terms of what they can expect from the collaboration well here's where the collaboration really comes to play you think about a processor and you know i'll say you know when one's team first looked at it there's general benchmarks and the benchmarks are impressive but they're general benchmarks and you know and they showed you know the i'll say the you know the base processing capability but the partnership comes to bear uh when it when it means optimizing for the workloads that exadata x9m is really delivering to the end customers and that's where we dive down and and as we uh learn from the oracle team we learned to understand where bottlenecks could be uh where is there tuning that we could in fact in fact really boost the performance above i'll say that baseline that you get in the generic benchmarks and that's what the teams have done so for instance you look at you know optimizing latency to rdma you look at just throughput optimizing throughput on otp and database processing when you go through the workloads and you take the traces and you break it down and you find the areas that are bottlenecking and then you can adjust we have you know thousands of parameters that can be adjusted for a given workload and that's again that's the beauty of the partnership so we have the expertise on the cpu engineering uh you know oracle exudated team knows innately what the customers need to get the most out of their platform and when the teams came together we actually achieved anywhere from 20 percent to 50 gains on specific workloads it's really exciting to see so okay so so i want to follow up on that is that different from the competition how are you driving customer value you mentioned some you know some some percentage improvements are you measuring primarily with with latency how do you look at that well uh you know we are differentiated with the uh in the number of factors we bring a higher core density we bring the highest core density certainly in x86 and and moreover what we've led the industry is how to scale those cores we have a very high performance fabric that connects those together so as as a customer needs more cores again we scale anywhere from 8 to 64 cores but what the trick is uh that is you add more cores you want the scale the scale to be as close to linear as possible and so that's a differentiation we have and we enable that again with that balanced computer of cpu io and memory that we design but the key is you know we pride ourselves at amd of being able to partner in a very deep fashion with our customers we listen very well i think that's uh what we've had the opportunity uh to do with uh juan and his team we appreciate that and and that is how we got the kind of performance benefits that i described earlier it's working together almost like one team and in bringing that best possible capability to the end customers great thank you for that one i want to come back to you can both the exadata database service and the autonomous database service can they take advantage of exadata cloud x9m capabilities that are in that platform yeah absolutely um you know autonomous is basically our self-driving version of the oracle database but fundamentally it is the same uh database course so both of them will take advantage of the tremendous performance that we're getting now you know when when mark takes about 64 cores that's for chip we have two chips you know it's a two socket server so it's 128 128-way processor and then from our point of view there's two threads so from the database point there's 200 it's a 256-way processor and so there's a lot of raw performance there and we've done a lot of work with the amd team to make sure that we deliver that to our customers for all the different kinds of workload including otp analytics but also including for our autonomous database so yes absolutely allah takes advantage of it now juan you know i can't let you go without asking about the competition i've written extensively about the big four hyperscale clouds specifically aws azure google and alibaba and i know that don't hate me sometimes it angers some of my friends at oracle ibm too that i don't include you in that list but but i see oracle specifically is different and really the cloud for the most demanding applications and and top performance databases and not the commodity cloud which of course that angers all my friends at those four companies so i'm ticking everybody off so how does exadata cloud infrastructure x9m compare to the likes of aws azure google and other database cloud services in terms of oltp and analytics value performance cost however you want to frame it yeah so our architecture is fundamentally different uh we've architected our database for the scale out environment so for example we've moved intelligence in the storage uh we've put uh remote direct memory access we put persistent memory into our product so we've done a lot of architectural changes that they haven't and you're starting to see a little bit of that like if you look at some of the things that amazon and google are doing they're starting to realize that hey if you're gonna achieve good results you really need to push some database uh processing into the storage so so they're taking baby steps toward that you know you know roughly 15 years after we we've had a product and again at some point they're gonna realize you really need rdma you really need you know more uh direct access to those capabilities so so they're slowly getting there but you know we're well ahead and what you know the way this is delivered is you know better availability better performance lower latency higher iops so and this is why our customers love our product and you know if you if you look at the global fortune 100 over 90 percent of them are running exit data today and even in the in our cloud uh you know over 60 of the global 100 are running exadata in the oracle cloud because of all the differentiated uh benefits that they get uh from the product uh so yeah we're we're well ahead in the in the database space mark last question for you is how do you see this relationship evolving in the future can you share a little road map for the audience you bet well first off you know given the deep partnership that we've had on exudate x9m uh it it's really allowed us to inform our future design so uh in our current uh third generation epic epyc is uh that is really uh what we call our epic server offerings and it's a 7003 third gen in and exudate x9m so what about fourth gen well fourth gen is well underway uh you know it and uh and uh you know ready to you know for the for the future but it incorporates learning uh that we've done in partnership with with oracle uh it's gonna have even more through capabilities it's gonna have expanded memory capabilities because there's a cxl connect express link that'll expand even more memory opportunities and i could go on so you know that's the beauty of a deep partnership as it enables us to really take that learning going forward it pays forward and we're very excited to to fold all of that into our future generations and provide even a better capabilities to one and his team moving forward yeah you guys have been obviously very forthcoming you have to be with with with zen and epic juan anything you'd like to add as closing comments yeah i would say that in the processor market there's been a real acceleration in innovation in the last few years um there was you know a big move 10 15 years ago when multi-core processors came out and then you know we were on that for a while and then things started staggering but in the last two or three years and amd has been leading this um there's been a dramatic uh acceleration in innovation in this space so it's very exciting to be part of this and and customers are getting a big benefit from this all right chance hey thanks for coming back in the cube today really appreciate your time thanks glad to be here all right thank you for watching this exclusive cube conversation this is dave vellante from thecube and we'll see you next time [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's extended coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in Monaco at the Yacht Club, part of the VIP Gala with Prince Albert, DigitalBits, theCUBE. theCUBE and Prince Albert celebrating Monaco leaning into crypto. I'm here with Natasha Mahfar, who's our guest. She just came on theCUBE. Great story. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Tell the folks what you do real quick. >> Sure. So I actually started my career in Silicon Valley, like you have. And I had the idea of creating a startup in mental health that was voice based only. So it was peer to peer support groups via voice. So I created this startup, pretended to be a student at Stanford and built out a whole team, and unfortunately, at that time, no one was in the space of mental health and voice. Now, as you know, it's a $30 billion industry that's one of the biggest in Silicon Valley. So my career really started from there. And due to that startup, I got involved in the World XR Forum. Now, the World XR Forum is kind of like a mini Davos, but a little bit more exclusive, where we host entrepreneurs, people in blockchain, crypto, and we have a five day event covering all sorts of topics. So- >> When you host them, you mean like host them and they hang out and sleep over? It's a hotel? Is it an event? A workshop? >> There's workshops. We arrange hotels. We pretty much arrange everything that there is. >> It's a group get together. >> It's a group get together. Pretty much like Davos. >> And so Natasha, I wanted to talk to you about what we're passionate about which is theCUBE is bringing people up to have a voice and give them a voice. Give people a platform. You don't have to be famous. If you have something to say and share, we found that right now in this environment with media, we go out to an event, we stream as many stories, but we also have the virtual version of our studio. And I could tell you, I've found that internationally now as we bring people together, there are so many great stories. >> Absolutely. >> Out there that need to be told. And the bottleneck isn't the media, it's the fact that it's open now. >> Yes. >> So why aren't the stories coming out? So our mission is to get the stories. >> Wow. >> Scale stories. The more stories that are scaled, the more people can feel it. More people are impacted by it, and it changes the world. It gets people serendipity with data 'cause we're, you know, you shared some data about what you're working on. >> Yeah, of course. It's all about data these days. And the fact that you're doing it so openly is great because there is a need for that today, so. >> What do you see right now in the market for media? I mean, we got emerging markets, a lot of misinformation. Trust is a big problem. >> Right. >> Bullying, harassing. Smear campaigns. What's news, what's not news. I mean, how do you get your news? I mean, how do people figure out what's going on? >> No, absolutely. And this is such a pure format and a way of doing it. How did you come up with the idea, and how did you start? >> Well, I started... I realized after the Web 2.0, when social media started taking over and ruining the democratization . Blogging, podcasting, which I started in 2004, one of the first podcasts in Silicon Valley. >> Wow. >> I saw the network of that. I saw the value that people had when normal people, they call it user generated content, shared information. And I discovered something amazing that a nobody like me can have a really top podcast. >> Well, you're definitely not a nobody, but... >> Well, I was back then. And nobody knew me back then. But what it is is that even... If you put your voice out there, people will connect to it. And if you have the ability to bring other people in, you start to see a social dynamic. And what social media ruined, Facebook, Twitter, not so much Twitter 'cause Twitter's more smeary, but it's still got to open the API, LinkedIn, they're all terrible. They're all gardens. They don't really bring people together, so I think that stalled for about almost eight years or nine years. Now, with crypto and decentralization, you start to see the same thing come back. Democratization, level the playing field, remove the middle man and person, intermediate the middle bottlenecks. So with media, we found that live streaming and going to events was what the community wants. And then interviewing people, and getting their ideas out there. Not promotional, not getting paid to say stuff. Yeah, they get the plug in for the company that they're working on, that's good for everybody. But more share something that you're passionate about, data. And it works. And people like it. And we've been doing it for 12 years, and it creates a great brand of openness, community, and network effect. So we scaled up the brand to be- >> And it seems like you're international now. I mean, we're sitting in Monte Carlo, so I don't think it gets better than that. >> Well, in 2016, we started going international. 2017, we started doing stuff in Europe. 2018, we did the crypto, Middle East. And we also did London, a lot of different events. We had B2B Enterprise and Crypto Blooming. 2019, we were like, "Let's go global with staff and whatnot." >> Wow. >> And the pandemic hits. >> I know. >> And that really kind of allowed us to pivot and turn us into a virtual hybrid. And that's why we're into the metaverse, as we see the value of a physical face to face event where intimacy's there, but why aren't my friends connected first party? >> Right. How much would you say the company has grown from the time that you kind of pivoted? >> Well, we've grown in a different direction with new capabilities because the old way is over. >> Right. >> Every event right now, this event here, is in person. People are talking. They get connections. But every person that's connecting has a social graph behind them that's online too, and immediately available. And with Instagram, direct messaging, Telegram, Signal, all there. >> It's brilliant. Honestly, it was brilliant idea and a brilliant pivot. >> Thank you for interviewing me. >> Yeah, of course. (Natasha and John laugh) >> Any other questions? >> That should do it. >> Okay. Are you going to have fun tonight? >> Absolutely. >> What is your take of the Monaco scene here? What's it like? >> You know, I think it's a really interesting scene. I think there's a lot of potential because this is such an international place so it draws a very eclectic crowd, and I think there's a lot that could be done here. And you have a lot of people from Europe that are starting to get into this whole crypto, leaving kind of the traditional banks and finance behind. So I think the potential is very strong. >> Very progressive. Well, Natasha, thank you for sharing. >> Thank you so much. >> Here on theCUBE. We're the extended edition CUBE here in Monaco with Prince Albert, theCUBE, and Prince Albert, DigitalBits Al Burgio, a great market here for them. And just an amazing time. And thanks for watching. Natasha, thanks for coming on. Thanks for watching theCUBE. We'll be back with more after this break. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) (background party chatter) >> All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Cube. Coming up, Bryan Talebi will be here with Ahura A.I? >> Ahura A.I. >> Ahura A.I. Bryan Talebi here with Ahura A.I. We are at The Cube post party networking event, special on the ground, extended coverage. Bryan, we were at The Futurist, not The Futurist Conference, The Future of Blockchain which was the Monaco Crypto Summit over at the Grimaldi Center. Now we're at the VIP gala, the prince is here, a lot of action's happening. You had a chance to look all the presentations we have all the heavy hitters here, kind of a movement going on, right? >> Absolutely. Well, first of all, I think it's absolutely amazing that Prince Albert II put this all together. He obviously understands the future and understands technology. It's absolutely brilliance. And Julio as well, I mean is incredible. So I take off my hat to all the people that put this event together and the speakers were brilliant. I mean, did you see all the speakers the technologies that they've built have the potential to radically transform billions of people's lives. >> It's interesting, you know, I've been covering crypto for a very long time and watched it emerge and then start exploding. And there's always been, and I saw this with the web too early on, legit versus not legit. And all early markets have the hype cycles go down and up, and you always kind of have that but now you're starting to see legitimate tie-in between physical digital assets where, and the confluence of the business value, societal value, government value, all across the spectrum. Every vertical, every use case is got a decentralized vibe going on right now because it's a forcing function. And, and here in Monaco, the price and the king they're leaning into it cause I think they see the future because they could answer their legacy. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And look, you're absolutely right about this because this downturn that we're facing, especially this new crypto winter, I think is the best thing that could possibly have happened to the crypto space because what it's doing is pushing out the let's call them the less than honest brokers within the crypto community, the people that were just in it for a buck, the pump and dumpers and so forth it's really pushing those folks out. And the companies that remain are the true technologists that aren't looking at crypto as just a speculative asset, but rather an underlying technology that can transform the way that we engage with the world in a decentralized way. >> Bryan, you know, we didn't mention in the intro but you also do investment. >> I do. >> You also have a lot of things going on. You got a great history, great pedigree of seeing the waves of innovation the best. That's something, an investment question, like are you in it for the money or are you in it for the make it happen mission? That becomes kind of like the probing question. Someone comes to the table, "Hey, I need some cash. We do funding." What's your exit strategy? "I want to make an exit in two years." Okay. You're out. (Bryan laughs) (John) But it's almost that easy now, right? >> Sure. >> (John) To figure out who's in it for the money. >> Sure. >> (John) Who's in it for the mission. Yeah, the mission's successful. You make a lot of money. >> That's exactly right. Look, one of my mentors once taught me is, money like power is only amassed in great amount if indirectly sought because money by itself is not intrinsically a motivator. And so, what we do at our AB+ Ventures, my venture capital fund, is we only invest, not only in companies that are impact driven and have the capacity to impact a billion people, but we invest in founders that are climbing their third or fourth mountain. So these are people who've already made their money. They either had a couple big exits at over a hundred million dollars or they became rock stars or they became astronauts. They did things where they achieved the highest levels of achievement. And now are building technologies because they believe that they're going to impact the world in a meaningful way. >> They kind of know it's important, right? They made some money, they've been successful. They have scar tissue and experience to apply almost I want to say for the legacy of it, but more for value. >> Yeah. >> For everybody. >> Absolutely. >> All right. So I got to ask about what your current venture, I know you got some good action going on. It's growing pretty good. As they say in golf, it's middle of the fairway. It's growing, got momentum. It's a turbine market. You probably has some offers on the table. I mean, I could imagine all the AI you got going on. Blockchain, very attracted. It's a hard problem, but it's the first inning. Not even. >> Yeah. >> What going on with the company? >> We're very early. Look, we've been building our technologies, the deep tech platform we've been building for four and a half years. There's a whole bunch of offers on the table to buy us. But look, the reality is right now is a fantastic hiring opportunity. There's a lot of amazing talent out there that now wants to come to us, which is great. Number one, number two, if you look back to the 2000 Dot-com bubble, what you saw is all of the companies that didn't really solve real problems went away and it left a more oxygen in the room for the companies that were really solving problems that needed to be solved. And those are now all trillion dollar companies. So, >> Well, Brian, you and I both got a little gray hair. So let's talk about the Dot-com bubble. The other thing, I'll add to that, by the way great commentary, is that everything that was like bullshit actually happened. People bought pet food online, >> Right. >> Groceries delivered to their house. So to your point, the things actually happen. See the visions and the aspirations were correct, timing and capital markets spree. >> Sure. >> Is there similarities going on in crypto? Is it the crypto winter, weeding out those pretenders? Is that what you're saying? >> Well, there's definitely a lot of similarities there but if you look at the example that you use, right, pets.com versus Amazon, people are still buying pet food online. I buy all my pet supplies for my two puppies online. However, if you look at the reason that Amazon works is because of their supply chain and the innovations that they created on being able to deliver anything to you within a day or two days in an extremely cost effective manner. It wasn't just because they had a website and they did some hand wavy stuff to say isn't this a good idea. You actually have to have the underlying operational capability and innovation from a technology standpoint to make it happen. And so, when we talk about crypto over the past number of years, and I've been in the crypto space for a long time, as you have there's been a lot of hand wavy stuff. There's been a lot of people like, "wouldn't this be a good idea?" but then you have the true operators that are able to find the underlying competitive advantages that actually make it work. And that's what I'm interested in. >> I'd love to get your thoughts on that. First of all, great point if you look at like, I was just commentating earlier I was asked the question what I think, and I said, well, I do a lot of lot of reporting and analysis on cloud computing. I watch what Amazon Web Service has done from many, many years ago. And all the followers now. Scale data, higher level services, they're all happening and it's creating a lot of value. Okay? That's going to come to crypto. And so, okay, the dots aren't connected there yet, but you've got this, but one of the things that has proven to be a success criteria, ecosystems. When you have enabling technology like DigitalBits, for instance, is kind the main powering of this ecosystem here, the value that's being created on top of it has to be a step function or multiple of the cost or operational cost to deploy the platform. Okay, so that's kind of in concert with everyone else. You product decentralized, what's your thoughts on that? Because now you have a lot of potential ecosystems that could connect together cause there's no one centralized ecosystem. >> (Bryan) Absolutely. >> But what is, what, how do you get that? How do you square that circle? So to speak. What's your take on that? How does ecosystems play into defi, decentralization, de-apps blockchain? >> So what you really talking about is interoperable, right? So again, if we use an analogy, if we look back to the late nineties, when Web 1.0 was really flourishing and then in the 2000s where everybody created their own websites, people went to the world wide web, but every company had their own website. They had their own social media platform. They had their entire Salesforce platform or what have you. So everyone had their entire separate organization. And so, I suspect that the future of crypto is going to be very similar, where there's going to be a bunch of different metaverses, a bunch of different ecosystems, but someone's going to come along, and I think there's a number of people on the back end that are actually working on this, Some of them are really brilliant, that are going to create an interoperable mechanism for people that jump from metaverse to metaverse from chain to chain in a completely easy experience from a user experience standpoint where you don't have to have a PhD in crypto, so to speak, that doesn't exist, but you don't have to have that level. >> Well, if you're working on crypto for the past five years you've got a PhD. >> Basically. >> The thesis is, you're still alive producing. (Brian laughs) Well, that's a good point. So I'm looking for like, this defacto enabler, right? Because TCP/IP was an example in the old days, you know, the levels of the stack that never, TCP/IP is part of the OSI model. It's just interconnect. That layer, nothing got above it, was open. It was just hard and top that TCP/IP the rest was all standard. Ethernet, token ring add that data layer and then cards. That worked, the industry could galvanize around that. I'm waiting for the crypto moment now, where, what is going to be that cloud (indistinct), Kubernetes and service matches and whatnot. What, is there anything on the horizon that you see that has that kind of coalescent ecosystem, let's get, if we all get behind this, we all win. Rather than chasing crumbs. >> Sure. >> You know, the bigger pie, rising tide, all that stuff. >> Well, so I think there's a really interesting analogy from a couple of hundred years ago on this. So most people don't realize that when the United States first had their railroad system which was the innovative infrastructure play at the time each state or each region had their own systems they had different size railroad. So what would happen if you were trying to ship a bunch of grain from one part of the country to the other you would take it by a train. You get to a train station, you'd have to take everything off, put it on a different train, on a different set of train tracks. You would go a couple states over. You'd have to do that again, go a couple states over. You have to do that again. Eventually what happened is the federal government came in and said, hey, we need to create a system of policies around one set of rules for all trains and all logistics across the country. And so, I do think there's a role for governments to come together, along with the operators and the companies to work collaboratively together to say, hey, what are the regulations? What are the rules of the road? How do we make sure we get all the scam artists out of the system? How do we create a system that actually works for everybody? Now, there's always dangers there, right? You have regulatory capture. Sometimes the government, oftentimes they're slow, they don't understand the technology. So they come down with a heavy hand. And so if it's done properly, and it's not just the United States alone, by the way, it's all the countries in the world. Now at this point, it's a global effort. >> There's money involved, too. >> Exactly. But if we are able to bring together people that are much smarter than me from the public and private sectors as well as the nonprofit sectors, together to come up with one set of rules I think that will enable crypto to massively expand across the entire globe. >> What are you passionate about right now? I know you got the investment fund for, you know, helping society and the planet, you get your project with your startup company, AI is in a hot area. What's going on? What's your top goals for the year? >> So there's two things. Number one, my company, Ahura A.I. is my baby. It's where I spend 70, 80 hours a week. We invent a technology that enables people to learn three to five times faster than traditional education. >> (John) Is that so? >> Because I believe that education is the first step. It's the first variable, that impacts all of the sustainable development goals, impacts the world in a very real way. >> And you're not wearing your UA pin. >> I'm not wearing my pin, I always point to it. >> I wanted to grab it, I saw it earlier. >> But then the second thing I'm super focused on is existential risk. Look, so I throw a lot of events where I bring together four categories of people, CEOs of impact driven companies, investors, whether they're VCs or billionaires or family offices, global experts, and celebrities that want to use their influence for good in the world. And one of the speakers that I had at one of my events is a guy at Stanford who runs their lab on existential risk and what he told the group, and what he told me, is according to Stanford and all the researchers, there's a one in six chance that we're all going to go extinct by 2050. One in six, that's a dice roll. And so to me, the most important thing I can do is bring people together that have capacity, have resources, have capabilities, to address these drivers of existential risk because selfishly, I don't want to live in a dystopian Hellscape. >> Exactly, yeah. Bryan, thanks for coming on. We're going to get back into dinner. Great to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> The Cube after dark, extended hours. Look at us, we're going the whole day. VIP gala, Prince Albert, the team, DigitalBits, The Cube, all here at the Yacht Club in Monaco. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's extended coverage here at the yacht club here in Monaco with prince Albert and the cube, great coverage, big gala event around blockchain and, and crypto we're here at tally Friedman creative director at NFT basil. Great to see you again. Great >>To see you again. Thank you so much for having >>So what's going on? What are you doing here? What's up. >>So I am here helping put together this incredible event, helping to raise awareness, spread education about all the amazing innovation that's happening in the tech in the NFT space, hoping to encourage mass adoption and bring more passionate and talented minds to the space. And that is my main goal of everything that I do. Well, >>You can appreciate the, the agenda here, all the influencers, top dogs and, and, and finances are here, entrepreneurs, but big metaverse vibe, obviously NFTs kind of bundled in cause NFTs are becoming quite part of everything. Absolutely. And as a creative director, you gotta love the creativity coming out of the, the meta metaverse right >>Now. You know what? It kind of feels like anything is possible. And as someone who has that ability to contribute to a space and directly see the impact that the work you have, you know, has as an outcome on, on not just the industry, but the, the rest of the world, and to have the ability to start creating a legacy that other people will soon follow suit on is, has been pretty incredible to experience. I must say, >>You know, tally's been a cultural movement as well. A lot of the younger generation, a lot of gen Z wants this. I mean, I, I could see the in alignment, but certainly true. I mean, you can see nobody wants the old way, inadequate, antiquated ways of email and web surfing webpages. Well, the social media, >>The funny thing about the metaverse is, is that it's actually existed for quite some time. I'd say the term has almost resurfaced in popularity, in association with the blockchain. So now when we think of the metaverse, it's obviously associated with web three cryptocurrency NFTs, but the original term was actually coined in a 1980s novel about it was a science fiction novel. And it, it's funny to see how that term just really encompasses everything that we've predicted. And I have this thing with science fiction where I think humanity almost reflects our fears, but our hope simultaneously, when we talk about dystopia, it's what we're seeing unravel before our eyes. And what we predict and almost know will be the ultimate outcome, but because there's so much uncertainty, what's that gonna look like? How's that gonna affect our day to day lives? And I think we're witnessing right now, the, you know, all the incredible directions, >>Tally, have you dabbled in some of these metae Metasphere environments because this bar, if people are playing music, people are getting together and there's quite the self-expression. >>Absolutely. So I plan a lot of events in the metaverse I'm a metaverse event planner. I helps build our NFT gallery for NFT basil in the metaverse. I think it's really interesting to bridge the gap between fi physical and digital worlds. And when we host a physical exhibition simultaneously host that metaverse exhibition for people who aren't able to attend in real life, >>How do they do that? Is it software? >>So for the most part, what event, I mean, yeah, for an event I work with decentral end a lot. I find it has the best user interface for people who aren't so familiar with, you know, setting up a wallet, getting onboarding onto web three, using cryptocurrency newbies. Exactly. >>So I can't fly the event, but I want to experience the event. >>You type the web address into your browser, NFT, basil.xyz. You can walk around and explore, create your own avatar, have fun. It's gamified life. >>What's the feedback been from some of the attendees, what do they end up doing? What's the pattern they end up, they end up like chatting or mingling, or is it, does it match like life or they just kind of high-fiving each other. Is there a lot of shitter chatter smack being toed around? >>So I think the thing with the metaverse is that a lot of people who are critical of the metaverse are, are saying, why would I replace a real life experience with a digital one when I can talk face to face like we're doing right now. But I think the purpose isn't to replace physical experiences, because there's nothing quite like, you know, having an in-person interaction, but it's about enhancing the digital experience. >>Well, but here, here we're face to face. Okay. We're having a first time experience together. And it's lovely. I have friends, you have friends, we have social grant, people who are instantly online, why can't there be a first class citizen, me connection between our meta version and maybe a friend pops as a hologram right here and chance to chime into the conversation. And you know, that's not far away, >>It's it's happening right now. And the, the beauty of metaverse events and hosting metaverse conferences is an event such as the one today requires so much coordination. People flying in from all over the world, booking hotels, changing time schedules, jet lag. There's so much that goes into it. When you can connect people and have such a similar level of immersiveness. And if not more immersiveness than you would in real life, you have audience members who are able to actively engage with what you're doing. Ask questions live without having to raise your hand and come up on stage and without the technical barriers of, >>And being part of a group. >>I mean, community's >>Organism is everything. It's everything. It's an organism. It's connective tissue. It's not a software mechanism. Absolutely. It's a group thing. Absolutely. All right. So I gotta ask you, what's the coolest thing you're working on right now that you can share with folks. >>I am so passionate about what we're building out at NFT basil. I, I could talk about it for hours, but we really specialize in transforming luxury. One of one physical assets into digital NFTs. And I think it's a different approach than most people take to web three in the NFT space. Because when you think of NFTs, you think of, you know, generative drops, PFP projects, but we're taking real world tangible value and enhancing it through technology. >>Awesome. Tally, thank you for coming on. Dinner's being served with the prince. Thank you for coming on the Q. I really appreciate. Thank you so >>Much. It it's >>Been a pleasure. Thank you. Okay. We're here. The extended edition of cube coverage late night. Now the dinner with the gala event, the cube and prince Albert here in Monaco for an exciting evening. I'm John furrier with the cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you.

[Music] hello everyone welcome back to the live coverage here in monaco for the monaco crypto summit i'm john furrier host of thecube uh we have a great great guest lineup here already in nine interviews small gathering of the influencers and the people making it happen powered by digital bits sponsored by digital bits presented by digital bits of course a lot happening around decentralization web 3 the metaverse we've got a a powerhouse influencer on the qb ryan gills the founder of openmeta been in the issue for a while ryan great to see you thanks for coming on great to be here thank you you know one of the things that we were observing earlier conversations is you have young and old coming together the best and brightest right now in the front line it's been there for a couple years you know get some hype cycles going on but that's normal in these early growth markets but still true north star is in play that is democratize remove the intermediaries create immutable power to the people the same kind of theme has been drum beating on now come the metaverse wave which is the nfts now the meta verses you know at the beginning of this next wave yeah this is where we're at right now what are you working on tell us what's what's open meta working on yeah i mean so there is a reason for all of this right i think we go through all these different cycles and there's an economic incentive engine and it's designed in because people really like making money but there's a deeper reason for it all and the words the buzzwords the terms they change based off of different cycles this one is a metaverse i just saw it a little early you know so i recognized the importance of an open metaverse probably in 2017 and really decided to dedicate 10 years to that um so we're very early into that decade and we're starting to see more of a movement building and uh you know i've catalyzed a lot of that from from the beginning and making sure that while everything moves to a closed corporate side of things there's also an equal bottom-up approach which i think is just more important and more interesting well first of all i want to give you a lot of props for seeing it early and recognizing the impact and potential collateral damage of not not having open and i was joking earlier about the facebook little snafu with the the exercise app and ftc getting involved and you know i kind of common new york times guy comment online like hey i remember aol wanted to monopolize dial up internet and look the open web obviously changed all that they went to sign an extinction not the same comparable here but you know everyone wants to have their own little walled guard and they feel comfortable first-party data the data business so balancing the benefit of data and all the ip that could come into whether it's a visualization or platform it has to be open without open then you're going to have fragmentation you're going to have all kinds of perverse incentives how does the metaverse continue with such big players like meta themselves x that new name for facebook you know big bully tons of cash you know looking to you know get their sins forgiven um so to speak i mean you got google probably will come in apple's right around the corner amazon you get the whales out there how do is it proprietary is walled garden the new proprietary how do you view all that because it's it's still early and so there's a lot of change can happen well it's an interesting story that's really playing out in three acts right we had the first act which was really truly open right there was this idea that the internet is for the end user this is all just networking and then web 2 came and we got a lot of really great business models from it and it got closed up you know and now as we enter this sort of third act we have the opportunity to learn from both of those right and so i think web 3 needs to go back to the values of web one with the lessons in hindsight of web 2. and all of the winners from web 2 are clearly going to want to keep winning in web 3. so you can probably guess every single company and corporation on earth will move into this i think most governments will move into it as well and um but they're not the ones that are leading it the ones that are leading it are are just it's a culture of people it's a movement that's building and accumulating over time you know it's weird it's uh the whole web 2 thing is the history is interesting because you know when i started my podcasting company in 2004 there's only like three of us you know the dave weiner me evan williams and jack dorsey and we thought and the blogging just was getting going and the dream was democratization at the time mainstream media was the enemy and then now blogs are media so and then all sudden it like maybe it was the 2008 area with the that recession it stopped and then like facebook came in obviously twitter was formed from the death of odio podcasting company so the moment in time in history was a glimmic glimmer of hope well we went under my company went under we all went under but then that ended and then you had the era of twitter facebook linkedin reddit was still around so it kind of stopped where did it where did it pick up was it the ethereum bitcoin and ethereum brought that back where'd the open come back well it's a generational thing if you if you go back to like you know apple as a startup they were trying to take down ibm right it was always there's always the bigger thing that was that we we're trying to sort of unbundle or unpackage because they have too much power they have too much influence and now you know facebook and apple and these big tech companies they are that on on the planet and they're doing it bigger than it's ever been done but when they were startups they existed to try to take that from a bigger company so i think you know it's not an it's not a fact that like facebook or zuckerberg is is the villain here it's just the fact that we're reaching peak centralization anything past this point it becomes more and more unhealthy right and an open metaverse is just a way to build a solution instead of more of a problem and i think if we do just allow corporations to build and own them on the metaverse these problems will get bigger and larger more significant they will touch more people on earth and we know what that looks like so why not try something different so what's the playbook what's the current architecture of the open meta verse that you see and how do people get involved is there protocols to be developed is there new things that are needed how does the architecture layout take us through that your mindset vision on that and then how can people get involved yeah so the the entity structure of what i do is a company called crucible out of the uk um but i i found out very quickly that just a purely for-profit closed company a commercial company won't achieve this objective there's limitations to that so i run a dao as well out of switzerland it's called open meta we actually we named it this six months before facebook changed their name and so this is just the track we're on right and what we develop is a protocol uh we believe that the internet built by game developers is how you define the metaverse and that protocol is in the dao it is in the dow it's that's crucial crucible protocol open meta okay you can think of crucible as labs okay no we're building we're building everything so incubator kind of r d kind of thing exactly yeah and i'm making the choice to develop things and open them up create public goods out of them harness things that are more of a bottom-up approach you know and what we're developing is the emergence protocol which is basically defining the interface between the wallets and the game engines right so you have unity and unreal which all the game developers are sort of building with and we have built software that drops into those game engines to map ownership between the wallet and the experience in the game so integration layer basically between the wallet kind of how stripe is viewed from a software developer's campaign exactly but done on open rails and being done for a skill set of world building that is coming and game developers are the best suited for this world building and i like to own what i built yeah i don't like other people to own what i build and i think there's an entire generation that's that's really how do you feel about the owning and sharing component is that where you see the scale coming into play here i can own it and scale it through the relationship of the open rails yeah i mean i think the truth is that the open metaverse will be a smaller network than even one corporate virtual world for a while because these companies have billions of people right yeah every room you've ever been in on earth people are using two or three of facebook's products right they just have that adoption but they don't have trust they don't have passion they don't have the movement that you see in web3 they don't have the talent the level of creative talent those people care about owning what they create on the on what can someone get involved with question is that developer is that a sponsor what do people do to get involved with do you and your team and to make it bigger i mean it shouldn't be too small so if this tracks you can assume it gets bigger if you care about an open metaverse you have a seat at the table if you become a member of the dao you have a voice at the table you can make decisions with us we are building developing technology that can be used openly so if you're a game developer and you use unity or unreal we will open the beta this month later and then we move directly into what's called a game jam so a global hackathon for game developers where we just go through a giant exploration of what is possible i mean you think about gaming i always said the early adopters of all technology and the old web one was porn and that was because they were they were agnostic of vendor pitches or whatever is it made money they've worked we don't tell them we've always been first we don't tolerate vaporware gaming is now the new area where it is so the audience doesn't want vapor they want it to work they want technology to be solid they want community so it's now the new arbiter so gaming is the pretext to metaverse clearly gaming is swallowing all of media and probably most of the world and this game mechanics under the hood and all kinds of underlying stuff now how does that shape the developer community so like take the classic software developer may not be a game developer how do they translate over you seeing crossover from the software developers that are out there to be game developers what's your take on that it's an interesting question because i come to a lot of these events and the entire web 3 movement is web developers it's in the name yeah right and we have a whole wave of exploration and nfts being sold of people who really love games they're they're players they're gamers and they're fans of games but they are not in the skill set of game development this is a whole discipline yeah it's a whole expertise right you have to understand ik retargeting rigging bone meshes and mapping of all of that stuff and environment building and rendering and all these things it's it's a stacked skill set and we haven't gone through any exploration yet with them that is the next cycle that we're going to and that's what i've spent the last three or four years preparing for yeah and getting the low code is going to be good i was saying earlier to the young gun we had on his name was um oscar belly he's argo versus he's 25 years old he's like he made a quote i'm too old to get into esports like 22 old 25 come on i'd love to be in esports i was commenting that there could be someone sitting next to us in the metaverse here on tv on our digital tv program in the future that's going to be possible the first party citizenship between physical experience absolutely and meta versus these cameras all are a layer in which you can blend the two yeah so that that's that's going to be coming sooner and it's really more of the innovation around these engines to make it look real and have someone actually moving their body not like a stick figure yes or a lego block this is where most people have overlooked because what you have is you have two worlds you have web 3 web developers who see this opportunity and are really going for it and then you have game developers who are resistant to it for the most part they have not acclimated to this but the game developers are more of the keys to it because they understand how to build worlds yeah they do they understand how to build they know what success looks like they know what success looks like if you if you talk about the metaverse with anyone the most you'll hear is ready player one yeah maybe snow crash but those things feel like games yeah right so the metaverse and gaming are so why are game developers um like holding back is because they're like ah it's too not ready yet i'm two more elite or is it more this is you know this is an episode on its own yeah um i'm actually a part of a documentary if you go to youtube and you say why gamers hate nfts there's a two-part documentary about an hour long that robin schmidt from the defiant did and it's really a very good deep dive into this but i think we're just in a moment in time right now if you remember henry ford when he he produced the car everybody wanted faster horses yeah they didn't understand the cultural shift that was happening they just wanted an incremental improvement right and you can't say that right now because it sounds arrogant but i do believe that this is a moment in time and i think once we get through this cultural shift it will be much more clear why it's important it's not pure speculation yeah it's not clout it's not purely money there's something happening that's important for humanity yeah and if we don't do it openly it will be more of a problem yeah i totally agree with you on that silent impact is number one and people some people just don't see it because it's around the corner visionaries do like yourselves we do my objective over the next say three to six months is to identify which game developers see the value in web 3 and are leaning into it because we've built technology that solves interoperability between engines mapping ownership from wallets all the sort of blueprints that are needed in order for a game developer to build this way we've developed that we just need to identify where are they right because the loudest voices are the ones that are pushing back against this yeah and if you're not on twitter you don't see how many people really see this opportunity and i talked to epic and unity and nvidia and they all agree that this is where the future is going but the one question mark is who wants it where are they you know it's interesting i talked to lauren besel earlier she's from the music background we were talking about open source and how music i found that is not open it's proprietary i was talking about when i was in college i used to deal software you'd be like what do you mean deal well at t source code was proprietary and that started the linux movement in the 80s that became a systems revolution and then open source then just started to accelerate now people like it's free software is like not a big deal everyone knows it's what it was never proprietary but we were fighting the big proprietary code bases you mentioned that earlier is there a proprietary thing for music well not really because it's licensed rights right so in the metaverse who's the proprietary is it the walled garden is the is it is it the gamers so is it the consoles is it the investment that these gaming companies have in the software itself so i find that that open source vibe is very much circulating around your world actually open maps in the word open but open source software has a trajectory you know foundations contributors community building same kind of mindset music not so much because no one's it's not direct comparable but i think here it's interesting the gaming culture could be that that proprietary ibm the the state the playstation the xbox you know if you dive into the modding community right the modding community has sort of been this like gray area of of gaming and they will modify games that already exist but they do it with the values of open source they do it with composability and there's been a few breakthroughs counter-strike is a mod right some of the largest games of all time came from mods of other games look at quake had a comeback i played first multiplayer doom when it came out in the 90s and that was all mod based exactly yeah quake and quake was better but you know i remember the first time on a 1.5 cable mode and playing with my friends remember vividly now the graphics weren't that good but that was mod it's mod so then you go i mean and then you go into these other subcultures like dungeons and dragons which was considered to be such a nerdy thing but it's just a deeply human thing it's a narrative building collective experience like these are all the bottom-up type approaches modding uh world building so you're going to connect so i'm just kind of thinking out loud here you're going to connect the open concept of source with open meta bring game developers and software drills together create a fabric of a baseline somewhat somewhat collected platform tooling and components and let it just sell form see what happens better self form that's your imposing composability is much faster yeah than a closed system and you got what are your current building blocks you have now you have the wallet and you have so we built an sdk on both unity and unreal okay as a part of a system that is a protocol that plugs into those two engines and we have an inventory service we have an avatar system we basically kind of leaned into this idea of a persona being the next step after a pfp so so folks that are out there girls and boys who are sitting there playing games they could build their own game on this thing absolutely this is the opportunity for them entrepreneurs to circumvent the system and go directly with open meta and build their own open environment like i said before i i like to own the things i built i've had that entrepreneurial lesson but i don't think in the future you should be so okay with other companies or other intermediaries owning you and what you build i think i mean opportunity to build value yeah and i think i think your point the mod culture is not so much going to be the answer it's what that was like the the the the dynamic of modding yes is developing yes and then therefore you get the benefit of sovereign identity yeah you get the benefit of unbanking that's not the way we market this but those are benefits that come along with it and it allows you to live a different life and may the better product win yeah i mean that's what you're enabling yeah ryan thanks so much for coming on real final question what's going on here why are we here in monaco what's going on this is the inaugural event presented by digital bits why are we here monaco crypto summit i'm here uh some friends of mine brittany kaiser and and lauren bissell invited me here yeah i've known al for for a number of years and i'm just here to support awesome congratulations and uh we'll keep in touch we'll follow up on the open meta great story we love it thanks for coming on okay cube coverage continues here live in monaco i'm john furrier and all the action here on the monaco crypto summit love the dame come back next year it'll be great back with more coverage to wrap up here on the ground then the yacht club event we're going to go right there as well that's in a few hours so we're going to be right back [Music] you

okay welcome back everyone we're here live in monaco for siliconangle thecube's coverage of the monaco crypto summit i'm john furrier your host we're here with al berger the founder of the digital bits blockchain digital bits is presented it's an open ecosystem they're the main presenters bringing everybody together al burgia is the man of the hour al great to see you cube alumni great to see you again john thanks thanks for having me back on the show it's been this is an inaugural event yeah you you and your team put together the digital bits foundation um the digits blockchains enabling technology the proof is in the pudding as i always say now you're seeing companies building on top of the ecosystem why monaco this is inaugural event what's going on here what's the motivation what does all this mean all this stuff coming together share uh why monaco i mean there's uh it's part of this next chapter for us things are happening in monaco and and um um we've yet to unveil that and we thought you know what better place to unveil what we're doing in monaco other than to do it in monaco so that was really the genesis of what gave birth this idea to have the monaco crypto summit um but that evolved beyond just sharing the nexus of it all there are organizations that here that have come from all over the world and will be sharing for the first time how they're also utilizing the digital bits watching not bad to come to monaco in the summer though it's pretty pretty nice area beautiful views yeah summer time in monaco is always great but this inaugural event first of all i love the name so congratulations on the name i think it's got a lot of legs to it i think this will be something that's going to be around for a long long time so it's a good good call there there's a lot of other dynamics going on prince albert's got some involvement he's interested in crypto we're going to hear more about that in the yacht club presentation later tonight you got startups companies building on top of the capabilities of digital bits you know you and i have talked in the past on the cube about the technology um your technologists uh followed a lot of your adventures to success and exits multiple exits in tech silicon valley knows you everyone knows you know around the world it's kind of like a cloud game but it's decentralized you've got infrastructure platform applications um there's super applications and decentralized device to all kinds of new stuff going on so you have a stack kind of going on here in a decentralized way and been validated by all the big names jumping in and changing their business models and horowitz you name it now a global financial markets converging on this huge opportunity around crypto and d-apps everything's happening so what's your reaction to someone who's been through many cycles built companies and sold them and been successful what's your analysis i mean this journey is then different and you has a unique some similarities but definitely some unique characteristics in prior journeys uh in in you know venturing off to found a company and so forth and for me it's been obviously the traditional way um you know prior to this obviously it was in the valley and and had uh uh quite the journey um what i would say this time is um with all that's happening in blockchain and cryptocurrency it's the amount of say capital formation the amount of people involvement in into an early technology into an evolving technology and there's various subcategories now across nfts metabours and um and all things fungible um there's a global stage immediately and um and it sort of creates these sort of mini vortexes of getting more people involved um it's it's kind of some semblances of like the dot-com bubble in a sense but with a much bigger ecosystem um in comparison to what we saw in the 90s um the thing about blockchain is that it it needs to the more successful blockchains out there need to evolve into becoming as decentralized as possible and so as to use your analogy of stack i mean it is incredibly important to have contributors at all layers protocol layer application d app layer in many corners of the world but it all starts with an idea so it's really hard to go from point a to point b um like any other new opportunity and so for us it's been a journey we're evolving in this next chapter um and a lot of that will be evident today throughout the course of the summit we'll start to see and start to feel even more so how uh the digitalbits ecosystem is is becoming more and more decentral we're going to see a bunch of folks coming on us off stage are going to come here sit down on thecube and chat with me about their opportunities how would you describe for the folks watching now what's going on on stage here all day and then obviously there's a vip gala tonight at the yacht club with prince albert in attendance and his team and a bunch of big power players what's happening here what's the what's the vibe what's the purpose what's being presented can you just quickly share uh take a minute to explain what's going on so relative to to the summit um it's you know organizations uh platforms um there's there's uh a few metaverse uh platforms here that will be um i mean they've been in in existence but they'll be unveiling um their connection and how they're leveraging the digital business watching for the very first time and so um but also other categories as well even um soon here massive multi-billion dollar real estate development all coming to um the digital blockchain so this is the physical world massive uh resort um real estate development completely being tokenized you just had some success in digital assets obviously the roma team i saw the announcement on on youtube was pretty big um you get digital bits on the jersey a new player so caught my attention you got sports teams you got here you got applications people building on top of digital bits why for us it yeah vision is needs to be supported by a strategy um from inception it was finding ways to take an enterprise go to market strategy and and uh some of it may be a bit of trial and error in the early you know onset from 2017-18 when it when the journey kind of began for the digital biz blockchain but um also part of it is timing and one of the things that we saw more recently again kind of like the journey and the stack you're referring to before nobody foresaw the pandemic nobody foresaw that the whole world would be at home staring at a screen um and figuring out what to do with their time and many of the world for the first time began to learn about blockchain and cryptocurrency for the first time in the onset of this pandemic and so that became a huge accelerant for the space and so um another quote you know i've i'll take away from you that i you know recall you saying many years ago um you need to have a horse on the track to be in the race yeah we're very fortunate to have a horse in the track by having already a number of years of development um awareness so that when there's kind of like these market shifts that can become an accelerant we're in a position to to move with the industry um and so it's been an incredible couple of years i mean it was great for you guys yeah and so there you know there's different contributors in the ecosystem some some that i'm affiliated with that have done things in the sports space um and other things that i'm not affiliated with there's a lot of things that again are emerging today that are happening in different categories or themes of metaverse for example um and i'm humbled by it just simply by the virtue of the fact that they're utilizing the digital that's watching but i had no um stake in building what they've built in terms of this is enabling technology so just to kind of pivot off you said yeah the pandemic was a tailwind now for um this movement for many reasons one people sitting at home boy hey this is technically vegas work on the blockchain two the future of work or the future of how things are organized is was remote work remote work is like next door neighbor to decentralization like i mean come on you're talking about people going this is not the future is not where it used to be that kind of galvanized a lot of people and also the business models have shifted so now post pandemic everything's hybrid which is virtual physical so that's the perfect storm so total acceleration agree um and we're seeing the traction now what's interesting about what you guys are doing is you're enabling people to build apps on it that's the platform and and that's that's again what i want to ask you is i had people always ask me what's digital bits so i'm going to ask you what is digital bits well digital bits is both the name of a blockchain it's also the name of a cryptocurrency the native cryptocurrency of the digital bits blockchain and so um it began 2017 as a fork of stellar in terms of the original repository um and you know there's a question i was asked earlier today in a press conference of like oh there's all these blockchains well we're still in this like early stage uh this early part of this uh evolution and so i i don't necessarily see a lot of what's happening out there as competitive but rather complementary because in unison you know there's different use cases different categories uh where kind of a blockchain can find its array of adoption in in this sort of phase of it all um for us um we've been referred to as a few different things one of which is you know the aspiration become this blockchain for brands i think today we'll learn that it's become much bigger than that in terms of its capability it's not necessarily that um it's as a result of new technology it's the tech a lot of this technology has been there it's just how it's being exploited and used um we're unveiling today for example and part of now this chapter for me is working with um community um developers hold on before you get there so okay i see digital bits i love the name by the way so thanks for that you kind of get to the news now you have a press conference take me through the press conference what's the news what are you guys announcing here today so the press conference we we did share not everything uh there's more um uh likely in store by the end of today that's not on the agenda uh and and maybe i'll be back on the show later today um we will have you back we'll find out come on but in terms of in terms of what we shared so far at the press conference um uh it was centered around two key themes i wanted to um obviously talked about the array of things to come today but focus on some of the things i'm directly involved in one of which was nico swap and the other are the number of things involved here within monaco so in terms of nico swap um by way of nane nico and in the spirit of decentralization nico in ancient greek means victory for the people so we thought that was a fitting name for the platform it's a decentralized exchange platform on uh the digital bits blockchain um filled with liquidity pool technology automated market making technology it's it's but by way of comparison digital bits is version of let's say a uniswap but lower cost faster and so forth and there's a number of organizations here today that will uh are announcing that they're deploying on nicos bringing their token to the digital bits blockchain and and launching um on on nicoswap so we're i'm super excited about that this is you know part of evolution and part of fostering decentralization um and so what that enables is by virtue of uh being able to again help helping other organizations getting their horse on the track the common denominator for us is digital bits it's um you know the fact that every application every utility token every nft you know does require digital bits including the digital bits currency to provide that security to to be used for gas fees and and and so on and so forth so um the blockchain itself the cryptocurrency it's kind of a common denominator beneficiary uh the one way you can kind of think of it um but yeah we shared a lot around an ecoswap um uh what it looks like and um its key functionality and and who are some of the organizations that are uh on on board day one the other part of the press conference today we shared um was more monaco centric digital bits in monaco and this journey is just beginning uh it's super humbling it's super exciting for me to be a part of it um there is again no real particular order there's a an ecampus that's focused around cyber security and blockchain education for both private sector and public sector so um academia so skills government issues solve some skill gap correct right it's an organization a financial institution a whole department needs to know more about blockchain how they can leverage it um digitalbits um is the blockchain um that is forming the first part of the curriculum for this ecampus that's launching here in monaco with uh uh an organization called amvini the other thing uh that we shared and announced uh today is that um the first sov first and only sovereign cloud in europe is the monaco cloud as recently launched what makes it soft and in essence is a few aspects of its characteristics but digital bits blockchain nodes are being deployed in the monaco cloud um and so beyond the nodes that already exist it's um the network is further being let's say hardest to bring your scale in resiliency you know the whole thing around censorship resistance right the more nodes there's a huge strategic aspect to obviously deploying nodes in in sovereign clouds um and so in europe the first for that is the monaco cloud so we're really honored to be working with the team there and mvne and so forth for that and then um and then as well um a number of months ago we began a journey with the prince albert of monaco foundation um the the chair president is uh prince albert and um the uh vice president ceo is olivia windham who was in attendance at the uh at the press conference as well and um and we unveiled um the foundations uh platform entirely built on the digital bits blockchain uh utilizing the digital bits cryptocurrency um as well as uh nft ticketing and so forth uh so we unveiled that we showcased that for uh for members of the press um how it will be used and and so forth some of the questions you got um i mean it went everywhere from um there was a regulatory regulation question related to europe um to questions around decentralization what are what are we doing how do we compare to uh proof of work you know why why digital bits a big part of that is i think we have a lot of common values with um the foundation of prince albert foundation uh around the environment being eco-friendly and so on and so forth and so um um questions of that sort you know how what do you know what's the next chapter look like and and how how um is more and more decentralization in my view going to be fueled and you said you got some announcements you can't talk about um coming okay so is that what's that going to be related to you get a little bit of teaser on that is it going to be something how big we be massive is it the grand finale or is it it's not a finale the unveiling it's an op unboxing of a new deal what's what's what is it a deal is it technology um it is uh um it's it's um large uh organization um that um is is leveraging uh both um the digital bits watching and digital body swerve that one okay good well al thanks for coming on and congratulations we will catch up with you either at the end of the day here on the live program or we will be at the yacht club in monaco yacht club tonight for the big event we hope to be live there but if not we will report on that yeah thanks for having me john all right congratulations digital [ __ ] really rocking the world here in monaco love the name digital bits makes tons tons of sense platform to enable applications this is the future you're going to start to see this decentralized model that kind of looks like cloud computing but not it's a technology enabling the creative and the and and the application transformations to decentralization it's coming almost every single category will be centralized we'll be covering a blanket on the cube i'm john furrier thecube thanks for watching [Music] you

hello welcome everyone to thecube's coverage here in monaco i'm john furrier host of thecube the monaco crypto summit is happening we're here for the full day and tonight at the yacht club for special presentations crypto team is here digital bits and the industry's gathering and we get some great guests lined up throughout the day our first guest is michael gord co-founder and ceo of gda capital michael welcome to thecube cube great lunch on so we're kicking off the day here we got a lot of a lot of commentary around crypto and also we're in monaco so kind of a special inaugural event why this event why are people gathering here in monaco monaco has traditionally been a top financial jurisdiction but and there has been crypto events here before but never with participation from from prince albert so this being the first event first blockchain focus event in monaco that has participation from prince albert has brought a has brought a global audience and the fact that digital bets is intending to there's a a lot of excitement and and what uh what digital bits is going to be coming to market with yeah and i think i talked to alberto the founder and ceo of digitalbits um i've known him for many years he's a tech guy by heart but he's been in the trenches doing a lot of work over the years in crypto and one of the things i think digital bits has nailed this first the name's amazing but they got real deals i saw our announcement a couple days ago less than 48 hours roma soccer team has a new player they brought the big roll out digitalbits is on the uniform on the front of it huge crowd great visibility so this is a real trend where the the assets of physical and digital coming together there's certainly a lot of hype and a lot of kind of like cleaning up right now in the market but this train is definition is happening training has left the station there's been a lot of over the past decade a lot of startups building in the on blockchains and some of those startups have become big companies but big traditional enterprises have been slow to adopt digital assets and uh digitalbits is really well positioned to bring a lot of those and bring a lot of enterprise participation to the blockchain yeah i mean we met a couple days ago and we were talking in um at the hotel um you're you've been at this for a while you got some great successes talk about your firm what are you guys doing gda what are some of the things you're working on uh you're doing some investment what are some of the angles you're taking bets you've made things you're looking at yeah so i'm a serial entrepreneur and investor i've been focused on the mainstream adoption digital assets for the last decade went about that in in various different ways as i have as i've matured but the way our business looks now is uh is focused on bridging the gap between institutional capital markets and the blockchain and helping institutional capital participate in the market um so we help digital assets with their with their public offering we've gotten into traditional public markets through uh the blockchain moon acquisition corp spac that one of my co-founders is director of we have a brokerage business that does a few hundred million dollars about the transaction volume collateralized lending business we just started some some funds principal investments and then we incubate our own companies internally in category new categories like the metaverse nfts and um other things like that so pretty diversified across the boxing cabinet market at this point and in general looking to create solutions to um help the traditional capital market and the boxing cabinet market get get deeper exposure here you know it's interesting i hear you're speaking about the um how you guys are handling your your view of the landscape multiple moving parts on the investment thesis a lot of integration of instruments and vehicles it's a new creative structural change i mean if you look at just the money how crypto and the future of money this this cultural shift it's also some structural change on how to invest how to manage the investments how to bring on like incubation into most capital public private at the same time on the other side of the coin you have the entrepreneurial energy of um a lot of entrepreneurial ideas you see a lot of creative artists the creator culture has emerged in the past year and a half as a massive wave but to me that's just an application on top of the new infrastructure if you look at all the big investment houses that are pouring billions of whether it's industrial horowitz or other big vcs moving and shifting it's all the same game it's the infrastructure platform applications and it's but it's different it's not what we used to see because it decentralized how do you react to that what's your view on that concept you see it the same way yeah i think that there's everything with blockchains is novel but almost all of it we've seen before so um we've had games before now with the blockchain we have the ability to earn income by playing games we've had exchanges before but they've always been a centralized organization that everything that is now built on blockchains exists in the traditional internet or capital market or game industry or or whatever uh that you know there has been art for generations there's been uh now the ability to have art on the blockchain with provable nft like every everything is innovative because of the decentralization aspect but it's not it's not the first thing the first time that we've seen any of this stuff it's almost interesting you're seeing it recycling all the same concepts on the old web kind of come in the new web and there's also a gen z angle especially the metaverse metaverse the constant theme i'm seeing is hey you want to watch sports you can watch in the metaverse and do it differently and not have to attend so you know the whole pandemic has shown us that hybrid virtual and hybrid is coming together and so i see a huge tsunami of innovation coming from just the tailwind post pandemic i think still massive value in a real event like this us being able to sit in front of each other as real people is uh not replicatable in the metaverse but to be in monaco is not possible for everyone because uh visa reasons because they have something you know it's just you have to be here today is not possible for a hundred percent of the world or for a sports game or for a concert or for a music premiere movie premiere really anything that's happening in the real world is not the metaverse is not gonna replace the real world but it is gonna create a massive additional audience to anything that's happening in the real world that anyone around the world can participate and how amazing would it be for uh for someone from zimbabwe someone from sydney and someone from brazil to all be interested in what digital bits is doing in monaco and what prince albert is you know how how how how the monarchical crypto summit is looking to position monaco in the future of cryptocurrency the kind of theme of this event and they have the amazing fortune to meet in the metaverse it doesn't replace well i mean i think i mean i think this is a great point this to me is going to be the holy grail in my opinion i agree if you look at the notion of presence we're face to face we're here there's people here so we peace we see each other in the lobby maybe he's out sightseeing at dinners so when you have that face to face that's the scarce resource right that's going to be the intimacy sometimes it's not even just to learn about what the pro what's going on but if we're present here how do we create that same experience when you have presence not just some icon chatting but like just movement knowing that you're there connected to people first party is going to be no one's really done it well i think the metaverse is to me is showing the path to being a first-class citizen digitally with a real-time event it's new so it is possible to communicate in the metaverse through through a microphone so if if you're beside someone then similar to the real world you can say you know hey how's it going what do you think about the presentation or or whatever you want and if you're speaking in a conversational way then the person beside you will hear what the person down the hall might might not um it's also that i've i've seen new features in certain like experiences that are coming to market that kind of take the google hangout or skype yeah like video infrastructure and put that in so we could choose to have our cameras on which is it's getting better but it of course doesn't replace real presence there's no doubt in my mind that in near future soon sooner or later there's gonna be a guest sitting right next to you that's not here okay there will be a hologram model where people will be interviewed will have capability to visualize that person they'll be in a metaverse they'll be queuing up for interviews this is a game this is a mind-blowing thing i mean if you just think about that concept that we could have participation in real time here with expressions with their with their digital expression their icon whatever whatever their nfts are so i think this is going to be the blending of how communities gather and i think ultimately how truth and and journalism and news is going to change so to me yeah we're super excited we're here obviously because we want to get the stories and you know we love what digital bits is doing prince albert certainly a relevant figure on the global stage um i think this is a signal for a lot of things to come indeed indeed all right so final question before we move on what's your hottest thing you got going on what are you looking at what are you most excited about um well just just this conference um we've got quite a lot of of companies we have exposure in that are that are presenting and a lot of them are coining new new new niches of the market so um we have uh um we've spoken about a lot about the metaverse we have you know i'm and i think the metaverse is probably the the thing that i'm overall most excited about i think it's the next multi-trillion dollar market that feels like bitcoins in but in addition to that we have the first regenerative finance platform that is that is presenting here that's using decentralized finance and and blockchain technology to create a model that people can earn income while mining carbon credits essentially with an objective of having first boxing all blocking protocols but eventually creating a leader board of carbon positive businesses where businesses will challenge their competitors to be more carbon positive in a way that actually earns them earn some income outside of the potential value what's the name of that company that's kyoto protocol uh we have the first entertained to earn a company that is is presenting here it's playgood um the first uh e-commerce metaverse platform so integrated directly into e-commerce without needing to i think the future of the metaverse is is social links you have you know finest in the metaverse and you have all of the all the logos of metaverses that you have experiences in which is cool yeah that that's uh but then you're you're going out of the native website instead of having a um instead of you know native to the to the website having a metabolism experience so they're doing that um yeah really cool awesome final question one more final question i got for you because you made me think of it so metaverse obviously hot is there going to be an open metaverse you start to see walled gardens and you got facebook they got slam dunk by the u.s uh in terms of monopolistic move for buying a exercise act which you know i can i i don't think that was a good move by the u.s i think i let him do that but but there they're they're kind of the wall garden model the old facebook i mean decentralized about open yeah historically if we go back in time there's always open and closed infrastructure in the internet um there was there is companies building open infrastructure companies building closed infrastructure and we could have been talking in 1992 about whether the private intranet will create mass adoption or the open internet will create mass adoption and not that the the intranet is probably is even today still a multi-billion dollar per year business but it's not a multi-trillion dollar per year per year you know infrastructure like the public internet same with the blockchain in 2012 2013 um private blockchains were all the rage by banking raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build up private boxing infrastructure and private blockchains are generating probably today still multi-billion dollars of revenue annually but they haven't accrued multi-trillion dollars like the public watching has i think the same thing will be in the metaverse there will be open and closed infrastructure um but event and there already is close you know fortnight and and games are are essentially closed metaverses just without ownable land um i always look at the i'm old school i look at aol they had they monopolized dial up internet like where the hell did that go you know history so again yeah we don't know it's going to be maybe a connection a connection point between these open metaverses we'll see maybe i'm investment update michael thanks for coming on thecube appreciate you kicking off the event here monaco crypto summit powered by digital bits presented by digital bits uh the company really and behind all the innovation here and the companies i'm john furrier with more coverage after this short break thanks john [Music] you

>>Everyone welcome back from the cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for Aus re Mars. It's one of the re shows, as we know, reinvent is the big show. Now they have focus, shows reinforces coming up that security Remar is here. Machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John for your host, Michael Mike Miller here, director of machine learning thought leadership with AWS. Great to see you again. Yeah. Give alumni welcome back here. Back every time we got deep racer, always to talk >>About, Hey John, thanks for having me once again. It's great to be here. I appreciate it. >>So I want to get into the deep racer in context here, but first re Mars is a show. That's getting a lot of buzz, a lot of press. Um, not a lot of news, cuz it's not a newsy show. It's more of a builder kind of a convergence show, but a lot is happening here. It's almost a, a moment in time that I think's gonna be one of those timeless moments where we're gonna look back and saying that year at re Mars was an inflection point. It just seems like everything's pumping machine learning, scaling robotics is hot. It's now transforming fast. Just like the back office data center did years ago. Yeah. And so like a surge is coming. >>Yeah. >>What, what's your take of this show? >>Yeah. And all of these three or four components are all coming together. Right. And they're intersecting rather than just being in silos. Right. So we're seeing machine learning, enabled perception sort of on robots, um, applied to space and sort of these, uh, extra sort of application initiatives. Um, and that's, what's really exciting about this show is seeing all these things come together and all the industry-wide examples, um, of amazing perception and robotics kind of landing together. So, >>So the people out there that aren't yet inside the ropes of the show, what does it mean to them? This show? What, what, what they're gonna be what's in it for me, what's all this show. What does it mean? >>Yeah. It's just a glimpse into where things are headed. Right. And it's sort of the tip of the iceberg. It's sort of the beginning of the wave of, um, you know, these sort of advanced capabilities that we're gonna see imbued in applications, um, across all different industries. >>Awesome. Well, great to have you in the cube. Every time we have an event we wanna bring you on because deep racers become a, the hottest, I won't say cult following because it's no longer cult following. It's become massive following. Um, and which started out as an IOT, I think raspberry pie first time was like a, like >>A, we did a little camera initially camera >>And it was just a kind of a fun, little clever, I won't say hack, but just having a project that just took on a life OFS own, where are we? What's the update with racer you're here with the track. Yeah, >>Possibly >>You got the track and competing with the big dogs, literally dog, you got spot over there. Boston dynamics. >>Well we'll, we'll invite them over to the track later. Yeah. So deep razor, you know, is the fastest way to get hands on with machine learning. You know, we designed it as, uh, a way for developers to have fun while learning about this particular machine learning technique called reinforcement learning, which is all about using, uh, a simulation, uh, to teach the robot how to learn via trial and error. So deep racer includes a 3d racing simulator where you can train your model via trial and error. It includes the physical car. So you can take, uh, the model that you trained in the cloud, download it to this one 18th scale, um, kind of RC car. That's been imbued with an extra sensor. So we have a camera on the front. We've got an extra, uh, Intel, X, 86 processor inside here. Um, and this thing will drive itself, autonomously around the track. And of course what's a track and uh, some cars driving around it without a little competition. So we've got the deep racer league that sort of sits on top of this and adds a little spice to the whole thing. It's >>It's, it's like formula one for nerds. It really is. It's so good because a lot of people will have to readjust their models cuz they go off the track and I see people and it's oh my, then they gotta reset. This has turned into quite the phenomenon and it's fun to watch and every year it gets more competitive. I know you guys have a cut list that reinvent, it's almost like a, a super score gets you up. Yeah. Take, take us through the reinvents coming up. Sure. What's going on with the track there and then we'll get into some of the new adoption in terms of the people. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, you know, we have monthly online races where we have a new track every month that challenges our, our developers to retrain their model or sort of tweak the existing model that they've trained to adapt for those new courses. Then at physical events like here at re Mars and at our AWS summits around the world, we have physical, uh, races. Um, and we crown a champion at each one of those races. You may have heard some cheering a minute ago. Yeah. That was our finals over there. We've got some really fast cars, fast models racing today. Um, so we take the winners from each of those two circuits, the virtual and the physical and they, the top ones of them come together at reinvent every year in November, December. Um, and we have a set of knockout rounds, championship rounds where these guys get the field gets narrowed to 10 racers and then those 10 racers, uh, race to hold up the championship cup and, um, earn, earn, uh, you know, a whole set of prizes, either cash or, or, you know, scholarships or, you know, tuition funds, whatever the, uh, the developer is most interested >>In. You know, I ask you this question every time you come on the cube because I I'm smiling. That's, it's so much fun. I mean, if I had not been with the cube anyway, I'd love to do this. Um, would you ever imagine when you first started this, that it would be such so popular and at the rise of eSports? So, you know, discord is booming. Yeah. The QB has a discord channel now. Sure, sure. Not that good on it yet, but we'll get there, but just the gaming culture, the nerd culture, the robotics clubs, the young people, just nerds who wanna compete. You never thought that would be this big. We, >>We were so surprised by a couple key things after we launched deep racer, you know, we envisioned this as a way for, you know, developers who had already graduated from school. They were in a company they wanted to grow their machine learning skills. Individuals could adopt this. What we saw was individuals were taking these devices and these concepts back to their companies. And they're saying, this is really fun. Like we should do something around this. And we saw companies like JPMC and Accenture and Morningstar into it and national Australia bank all adopting deep racer as a way to engage, excite their employees, but then also create some fun collaboration opportunities. Um, the second thing that was surprising was the interest from students. And it was actually really difficult for students to use deep racer because you needed an AWS account. You had to have a credit card. You might, you might get billed. There was a free tier involved. Um, so what we did this past year was we launched the deep racer student league, um, which caters to students 16 or over in high school or in college, uh, deep Razer student includes 10 hours a month of free training, um, so that they can train their models in the cloud. And of course the same series of virtual monthly events for them to race against each other and win, win prizes. >>So they don't have to go onto the dark web hack someone's credit card, get a proton email account just to get a deep Razer that's right. They can now come in on their own. >>That's right. That's right. They can log into that virtual the virtual environment, um, and get access. And, and one of the other things that we realized, um, and, and that's a common kind of, uh, realization across the industry is both the need for the democratization of machine learning. But also how can we address the skills gap for future ML learners? Um, and this applies to the, the, the world of students kind of engaging. And we said, Hey, you know, um, the world's gonna see the most successful and innovative ideas come from the widest possible range of participants. And so we knew that there were some issues with, um, you know, underserved and underrepresented minorities accessing this technology and getting the ML education to be successful. So we partnered with Intel and Udacity and launched the AI and ML scholarship program this past year. And it's also built on top of deep Bracer student. So now students, um, can register and opt into the scholarship program and we're gonna give out, uh, Udacity scholarships to 2000 students, um, at the end of this year who compete in AWS deep racer student racers, and also go through all of the learning modules online. >>Okay. Hold on, lets back up. Cuz it sounds, this sounds pretty cool. All right. So we kind went fast on that a little bit slow today at the end of the day. So if they sign up for the student account, which is lowered the batteries for, and they Intel and a desk, this is a courseware for the machine learning that's right. So in order to participate, you gotta take some courseware, check the boxes and, and, and Intel is paying for this or you get rewarded with the scholarship after the fact. >>So Intel's a partner of ours in, in putting this on. So it's both, um, helping kind of fund the scholarships for students, but also participating. So for the students who, um, get qualified for the scholarship and, and win one of those 2000 Udacity Nanodegree scholarships, uh, they also will get mentoring opportunities. So AWS and Intel, um, professionals will help mentor these students, uh, give them career advice, give them technical advice. C >>They'll they're getting smarter. Absolutely. So I'm just gonna get to data here. So is it money or credits for the, for the training? >>That's the scholarship or both? Yes. So, so the, the student training is free for students. Yep. They get 10 hours a month, no credits they need to redeem or anything. It's just, you log in and you get your account. Um, then the 2000, uh, Udacity scholarships, those are just scholarships that are awarded to, to the winners of the student, um, scholarship program. It's a four month long, uh, class on Python programming for >>AI so's real education. Yeah. It's like real, real, so ones here's 10 hours. Here's check the box. Here's here's the manual. Yep. >>Everybody gets access to that. That's >>Free. >>Yep. >>To the student over 16. Yes. Free. So that probably gonna increase the numbers. What kind of numbers are you looking at now? Yeah. In terms of scope to scale here for me. Yeah. Scope it >>Out. What's the numbers we've, we've been, uh, pleasantly surprised. We've got over 55,000 students from over 180 countries around the world that have signed up for the deep racer student program and of those over 30,000 have opted into that scholarship program. So we're seeing huge interest, um, from across the globe in, in this virtual students, um, opportunity, you know, and students are taking advantage of those 20 hours of learning. They're taking advantage of the fun, deep racer kind of hands on racing. Um, and obviously a large number of them are also interested in this scholarship opportunity >>Or how many people are in the AWS deep racer, um, group. Now, because now someone's gotta work on this stuff. It's went from a side hustle to like a full initiative. Well, >>You know, we're pretty efficient with what we, you know, we're pretty efficient. You've probably read about the two pizza teams at Amazon. So we keep ourselves pretty streamlined, but we're really proud of, um, what we've been able to bring to the table. And, you know, over those pandemic years, we really focused on that virtual experience in viewing it with those gaming kind of gamification sort of elements. You know, one of the things we did for the students is just like you guys, we have a discord channel, so not only can the students get hands on, but they also have this built in community of other students now to help support them bounce ideas off of and, you know, improve their learning. >>Awesome. So what's next, take us through after this event and what's going on for you more competitions. >>Yeah. So we're gonna be at the remainder of the AWS summits around the world. So places like Mexico city, you know, uh, this week we were in Milan, um, you know, we've got some AWS public sector, um, activities that are happening. Some of those are focused on students. So we've had student events in, um, Ottawa in Canada. We've had a student event in Japan. We've had a student event in, um, Australia, New Zealand. And so we've got events, both for students as well as for the professionals who wanna compete in the league happening around the world. And again, culminating at reinvent. So we'll be back here in Vegas, um, at the beginning of December where our champions will, uh, compete to ho to come. >>So you guys are going to all the summits, absolutely. Most of the summits or >>All of them, anytime there's a physical summit, we'll be there with a track and cars and give developers the opportunity to >>The track is always open. >>Absolutely. All >>Right. Well, thanks for coming on the cube with the update. Appreciate it, >>Mike. Thanks, John. It was great to be >>Here. Pleasure to know you appreciate it. Love that program. All right. Cube coverage here. Deep race are always the hit. It's a fixture at all the events, more exciting than the cube. Some say, but uh, almost great to have you on Mike. Uh, great success. Check it out free to students. The barrier's been lower to get in every robotics club. Every math club, every science club should be signing up for this. Uh, it's a lot of fun and it's cool. And of course you learn machine learning. I mean, come on. There's one to learn that. All right. Cube coverage. Coming back after this short break.

>>mhm. >>Good morning. Live from Las Vegas. That snowflake Summit 22. Lisa Martin With Day Volonte David's Great. We have three wall to wall days of coverage at Snowflake Summit 22 this year. >>Yeah, it's all about data and bringing data to applications. And we've got some big announcements coming this week. Super exciting >>collaboration around data. We are excited to welcome our first two guests before the keynote. We have seen Nielsen in S V. P of data and Analytics Service offering head at emphasis. And Chris Dignan alumni is back with us to chief revenue officer at stuff like guys. Great to have you on the programme. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. So he'll tell us what's going on with emphasis and snowflake and the partnership. Give us all that good stuff. >>Yeah, No, I think with the convergence of, uh, data digital and computing economy, um, you know that convergence is creating so much possibilities for for customers, uh, snowflake and emphases working together to help our customers realise the vision and these possibilities that are getting driven. We share a very strategic partnership where we are thinking ahead for our customers in terms of what, uh, we can do together in order to build solutions in order to bring out the expertise that is needed for such transformations and also influencing the thinking, Um, and the and the point of view in the market together so that, you know there is there is cohesive approach to doing this transformation and getting to those business outcomes. So it's a It's a partnership that's very successful and its strategic for for our customers, and we continue to invest for the market. >>Got some great customer. Some of my favourite CVS, Nike, William Sanoma. Gotta love that one. Chris talked to us about the snowflake data cloud. What makes it so unique and compelling in the market? >>Well, I think our customers, really they are going through digital transformation today, and they're moving from on premise to the cloud and historically speaking, there just hasn't been the right tool set to help them do that. I think snowflake brings to the table an opportunity for them to take all of their data and take it and and allow it to go from one cloud to the other so they can sit on a W s it can sit on Azure can sit on G, C, P and I can move around from cloud to cloud, and they can do analytics on top of that. >>So data has been traditionally really hard. And we saw that in the big data movement. But we learned a lot. Uh, and AI has been, you know, challenging. So what are you seeing with with customers? What are they struggling with? And how are you guys helping them? >>Yeah. So if you look at the customer journey, they have invested in a number of technologies in the past and are now at a juncture where they need to transform that landscape. They have the challenges of legacy debt that they need to, you know, get rid of or transform. They have the challenges of really bringing, you know, a cohesive understanding within the enterprise as to what these possibilities are for their business. Given the strategy that they are pursuing, um, business and I t cycles are not necessarily aligned. Um, you have the challenge of very fragmented data landscape that they have created over a period of time. How do you, you know, put all these together and work with a specific outcome in mind so that you're not doing transformation for the purpose of transformation. But to be able to actually drive new business models, new data driven products and services ability for you to collaborate with your partners and create unique competitive advantage in the market. And how do you bring those purposes together with the transformation that that's really happening? And and that's where you know our our customers, um, you know, grapple with the challenges of bringing it together. So, >>Chris, how do you see? Because it was talking about, uh, legacy that I think technical debt. Um, you kind of started out making the data warehouse easier. Then this data cloud thing comes out. You're like, Oh, that's an interesting vision and all of a sudden it's way more than vision. You get this huge ecosystem you're extending, we're gonna hear the announcements this morning. We won't. We won't spill the beans, but but really expanding the data cloud. So it's hard to keep up with with where you're at. So I think modernisation, right? So how do you think about modernisation? How are your customers thinking about it? And what's the scope of Snowflake. >>Well, you know, I think historically, you asked about AI and Ml and, you know, in the A I world historically, they've lacked data, and I think because we're the data cloud, we're bringing data, you know, and making it available and democratising it for everybody. And then, you know, partners like emphasis are actually helping us bring, you know, applications and new business models to to the table to our customers and their innovating on top of the data that we already have in the Snowflake Data Club. >>Chris, can you talk about some of the verticals where you guys are successful with emphasis that the three that I mentioned are retailers, But I know that finance, healthcare and life sciences are are huge for smooth, like talk to me, give us a perspective of the verticals that are coming to you. Guys saying help us out with transport. >>You know, I'll give you just an example. So So in the in the retail space, for example, Kraft Heinz is a is a joint customer of ours. And, you know, they've been all in on on snowflakes, Data Cloud and one of our big customers as well it is is Albertsons, and Albertans realises, Oh my gosh, I have all this information around the consumer in in the grocery stores and Kraft Heinz. They want access to that, and they actually can make supply chain decisions a lot faster if they have access to it. So with snowflakes data sharing, we can actually allow them to share data. Albertans share data directly with Kraft, Heinz and Kraft. Heinz can actually make supply chain decisions in real time so that these are some of the stuff that emphasis and stuff like help our customers self. >>So traditionally, the data pipeline goes through some very highly specialised individuals, whether the data engineer, the data scientists and data analyst. So that example that you just gave our organisation you mentioned before democratisation. So democratisation needs to be as a businessperson, I actually can get access to the data. So in that example that you gave between Kraft, Heinz and and and Albertson, is it the the highly hyper specialised teams sharing that data? Or is it actually extending into the line of business focus? >>That's so that's the interesting part for us is I think, snowflake, we just recently reorganise my sales team this year into verticals, and the reason we did that is customers no longer want to talk to us about speeds and feeds of how fast my database goes. They want to actually talk about business outcomes. How do I solve for demand forecasting? How do I supply fix my supply chain issues? Those are things. Those are the. That's how we're aligning with emphasis. So well is they've been doing this for a long time, Can only we haven't. And so we need their help on getting us to the next level of of the sales motion and talking to our customers on solving these business challenges in >>terms of that next level. So no question for you. Where are the customer conversations happening? At what level? I mean, we've seen such dramatic changes in the market in the last couple of years. Now we're dealing with inflation rising interest rates. Ukraine. Are you seeing the conversations in terms of building data platforms rising up the C suite? As every company recognises, we're going to be a data company. We're not gonna be a business. >>Absolutely. And I think all the macroeconomic forces that you talked about that's working on the enterprises globally is actually leading them to think about how to future proof their business models. Right? And there are tonnes of learning that they've hired in the last two or three years and digitising in embracing more digital models. The conversation with the customers have really pivoted towards business outcome. It is a C suite conversation. It is no longer just an incremental change for the for the companies they recognise. That data has been touted as a strategic asset for a long time, but I think it's taking a purpose and a meaning as to what it does for for the customers, the conversations are around industry verticals. You know, what are the specific challenges and opportunities that the the enterprises have, uh, and how you realise those and these cuts across multiple different layers. You know, we're talking about how your democratised data, which in our point of view, is absolute, must in terms of putting a foundation that doesn't take super specialised people to be able to run every operation and every bit of data that you process we have invested in building autonomous data and a state that can process data as it comes in without any manual intervention and take it all the way to consumption but also investing in those industry solutions. Along with snowflake, we launched the healthcare and life Sciences solution. We launched the only channel for retail and CPG. And these are great examples of how Snowflake Foundation enables democratisation on one side but also help solve business problems. In fact, with Snowflake, we have a very, uh, special partnership because our point of view on data economy is about how you connect with the network partners externally, and snowflake brings native capabilities. On this, we leverage that to Dr Exchanges for our customers and one of the services company in the recycling business. Uh, we're actually building and in exchange, which will allow the data points from multiple different sources and partners to come together. So they have a better understanding of their customers, their operations, the field operations and things >>like building a data ecosystem. Yes. Alright, They they Is it a two sided market place where you guys are observers and providing the the technology and the process, you know, guidance. What's your role in that? >>Yeah. So, um, we were seeing their revolution coming? Uh, two stages. Maybe even more. Um, customers are comfortable building an ecosystem. That's kind of private for them. Which means that they know who they are sharing data with. They know what the data is getting used for. And how do you really put governance on this? So that on one side you can trust it on the other side. There is a good use of that data, Uh, and not, uh, you know, compromise on their quality or privacy and some of the other regulations. But we do see this opening up to the two sided market places as well. Uh, some of the industry's lend themselves extremely well for that kind of play. We have seen that happening in trading area. We've seen that happen. And, uh, you know, the credit checks and things like that which are usually open for, you know, those kind of ecosystem. But the conversations and the and the programmes are really leading towards towards that in the market. >>You know, Lisa, one of things I wrote about this weekend is I was decided to come to stuff like summit and and see one of the, you know, thesis I have is that we're going to move not just beyond analytics, including analytics, but also building data products that can be monetised and and I'm hoping we're going to see some of that here. Are you seeing that Christian in the customer? It's It's >>a great question, David. So So we have You know, I just thought of it as as he was talking about. We have a customer who's a very large customer of ours who's in the financial services space, and they handle roughly 40% of the credit card transactions that happen in the US and they're coming to us and saying they want to go from zero in data business today to a $2 billion business over the next five years, and they're leaning on us to help them do that. And one of the things that's exciting for me is they're coming to us not saying Hey, how do you do it? You know, they're saying, Hey, we want to build a consumption model on top of snowflake and we want to use you as the delivery mechanism and the billing mechanism to help us actually monetise that data. So yes, the answer is. You know, I I used to sell to, you know, chief Data Officers and and see IOS. Now I'm talking to VPs of sales and I'm talking to chief operating officers and I'm talking to CEOs about how do we actually create a new revenue stream? And that's just I mean, it's exhilarating to have those conversations. That's >>data products. They don't have to worry about the infrastructure that comes from the cloud. They don't have to worry about the governance, as Senior was saying, Just put >>it in stuff like Just >>put stuff like that. So I call it The super cloud is kind of a, you know, a funny little tongue in cheek. But it's happening. It's this layer. It's not just multiple clouds. You see a lot of your critical competitors adjacent competitors saying, Hey, we're now running in in Google or we're running in Azure. We've been running on AWS. This is different. This is different, isn't it? It's a cloud that floats above the The infrastructure of the hyper scale is, and that's that's a new era. I think >>it's a new error. I think they're you know, I think the hyper scholars want to, you know, keep us as a as a data warehouse and and we're not. The customers are not letting them so So I think that's you know where emphasis kind of saw the light early on. And they were our innovation partner of the year, uh, this past year and they're helping us in our customers innovate, >>but you're uniquely qualified to do that where? I don't think it's the hyper scholars agenda. At least I never say never with the hyper scale is, but yeah, they have focused on providing infrastructure. And, yeah, they have databases and other tools. But that that cross cloud that continuum to your point, talking to VPs of sales and how do you generate revenue? That maybe, is a conversation that they have, but not explicitly as to how to actually do it in a data >>cloud. That's right. I mean, those and those are the Those are the fun conversations because you're you're saying, Hey, we can actually create a new revenue stream. And how can we actually help you solve our joint customers problems? So, yes, it is. Well, >>that's competitive differentiation for businesses. I mean, this is, as I mentioned Every company has to be a data company. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer. They've got to be able to to leverage a data platform like snowflake, to find insights, be able to act on them and create value new services, new products to stay competitive, to stay ahead of the competition. That's no longer nice to have >>100%. I mean, I think they're they're all scared. I mean, you know, like if you look in the financial services space, they look at some of the fintech, as you know, the giant £800 gorillas look at the small fintech has huge threats to the business, and they're coming to us and say, How can we innovate our business now? And they're looking at us as the the innovator, and they're looking at emphasis to help them do that. So I think these are These are incredible times. >>So the narrative on Wall Street, of course, this past earnings season was consumption and who has best visibility and and they they were able to snowflake had a couple of large customers dial down consumption, some consumer facing. Here's the thing. If you're selling a data product for more than it costs you to make. If you dial down consumption in the future, you're gonna dial down revenue. So that's it's going to become less and less discretionary over time. And that, to me, is the next error. That's really exciting. >>The key, The key there is understanding the unit of measure. I think that's the number. One question that we get from customers is what is the unit of measure that we care about, that we want to monetise because to your point, it costs you more to make the product. You're not going to sell it right? And so I think that those are the things that the energy that we're spending with customers today is advising them, jointly advising them on how to actually monetise the specific, you know, unit of measure that they care >>about because when they get the Amazon bill or the snowflake bill, the CFO starts knocking the door. The answer has to be well, look at all the revenue that we generated and all the operating profit and the free cash flow that we drove, and then it's like, Oh, I get it. Keep doing it well, if I'm >>if I'm going on sales calls with the VP of sales and his their sales team, fantastic, right generated helping them generate revenue, right? That's a great conversation >>dynamic. And I think the adoption is really driven through the value, uh, that they can drive in their ecosystem. Their products are similar to products and services that these companies sell. And if you're embedding data inside Syria into your products services, that makes you that much more competitive in the market and drive value for your stakeholders. And that's essentially the future business model that we're talking about. On one side, the other one is the agility. Things aren't remaining constant, they are constantly changing, and we talked about some of those forces earlier. All of this is changing. The landscape is changing the the needs in the economy and things like that, and how you adapt to those kind of models in the future and pivoted on data capabilities that lets you identify new opportunities and and create new value. >>Speaking of creating new value last question guys, before we wrap, what's the go to market approach here between the two companies working customers go to get engaged. I imagine both sides. >>Yeah. I mean, the way that partnership looks good to me is is sell with co selling. So So I think, you know, we look at developing joint solutions with emphasis. They've done a wonderful job of leading into our partnership. So, you know, Sue Neill and I have a regular cadence where we talked every quarter, and our sales teams and our partner teams are are all leaning in and co selling. I don't know if you >>have Absolutely, um, you know, we we proactively identify, you know, the opportunities for our customers. And we work together at all levels within, you know, between the two companies to be able to bring a cohesive solution and a proposition for the customers. Really help them understand how to, you know, what is it that they can, um, get to and how you get that journey actually executed. And it's a partnership that works very seamlessly through that entire process, not just upstream when we're selling, but also downstream and we're executing. And we've had tremendous success together and look forward to more. >>Congratulations on that success, guys. Thank you so much for coming on talking about new possibilities with data and AI and sharing some of the impact that the technologies are making. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. Thank you So much >>for our guests and a Volonte. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live in Las Vegas from Snowflake Summit 22 back after the keynote with more breaking news. Mhm, mhm.

>> From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from "theCUBE" and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> There are very few political issues that get bipartisan support these days, nevermind consensus spanning geopolitical boundaries. But whether we're talking across the aisle or over the pond, there seems to be common agreement that the power of big tech firms should be regulated. But the government's track record when it comes to antitrust aimed at big tech is actually really mixed, mixed at best. History has shown that market forces rather than public policy have been much more effective at curbing monopoly power in the technology industry. Hello, and welcome to this week's "Wikibon CUBE" insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in frequent "CUBE" contributor Dave Moschella, author and senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Dave, welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks Dave, good to be here. >> So you just recently published an article, we're going to bring it up here and I'll read the title, "Theory Aside, Antitrust Advocates Should Keep Their "Big Tech" Ambitions Narrow". And in this post you argue that big sweeping changes like breaking apart companies to moderate monopoly power in the tech industry have been ineffective compared to market forces, but you're not saying government shouldn't be involved rather you're suggesting that more targeted measures combined with market forces are the right answer. Can you maybe explain a little bit more the premise behind your research and some of your conclusions? >> Sure, and first let's go back to that title, when I said, theory aside, that is referring to a huge debate that's going on in global antitrust circles these days about whether antitrust should follow the traditional path of being invoked when there's real harm, demonstrable harm to consumers or a new theory that says that any sort of vast monopoly power inevitably will be bad for competition and consumers at some point, so your best to intervene now to avoid harms later. And that school, which was a very minor part of the antitrust world for many, many years is now quite ascendant and the debate goes on doesn't matter which side of that you're on the questions sort of there well, all right, well, if you're going to do something to take on big tech and clearly many politicians, regulators are sort of issuing to do something, what would you actually do? And what are the odds that that'll do more good than harm? And that was really the origins of the piece and trying to take a historical view of that. >> Yeah, I learned a new word, thank you. Neo-brandzian had to look it up, but basically you're saying that traditionally it was proving consumer harm versus being proactive about the possibility or likelihood of consumer harm. >> Correct, and that's a really big shift that a lot of traditional antitrust people strongly object to, but is now sort of the trendy and more send and view. >> Got it, okay, let's look a little deeper into the history of tech monopolies and government action and see what we can learn from that. We put together this slide that we can reference. It shows the three historical targets in the tech business and now the new ones. In 1969, the DOJ went after IBM, Big Blue and it's 13 years later, dropped its suit. And then in 1984 the government broke Ma Bell apart and in the late 1990s, went after Microsoft, I think it was 1998 in the Wintel monopoly. And recently in an interview with tech journalist, Kara Swisher, the FTC chair Lena Khan claimed that the government played a major role in moderating the power of tech giants historically. And I think she even specifically referenced Microsoft or maybe Kara did and basically said the industry and consumers from the dominance of companies like Microsoft. So Dave, let's briefly talk about and Kara by the way, didn't really challenge that, she kind of let it slide. But let's talk about each of these and test this concept a bit. Were the government actions in these instances necessary? What were the outcomes and the consequences? Maybe you could start with IBM and AT&T. >> Yeah, it's a big topic and there's a lot there and a lot of history, but I might just sort of introduce by saying for whatever reasons antitrust has been part of the entire information technology industry history from mainframe to the current period and that slide sort of gives you that. And the reasons for that are I think once that we sort of know the economies of scale, network effects, lock in safe choices, lot of things that explain it, but the good bit about that is we actually have so much history of this and we can at least see what's happened in the past and when you look at IBM and AT&T they both were massive antitrust cases. The one against IBM was dropped and it was dropped in as you say, in 1980. Well, what was going on in at that time, IBM was sort of considered invincible and unbeatable, but it was 1981 that the personal computer came around and within just a couple of years the world could see that the computing paradigm had change from main frames and minis to PCs lines client server and what have you. So IBM in just a couple of years went from being unbeatable, you can't compete with them, we have to break up with them to being incredibly vulnerable and in trouble and never fully recovered and is sort of a shell of what it once was. And so the market took care of that and no action was really necessary just by everybody thinking there was. The case of AT&T, they did act and they broke up the company and I would say, first question is, was that necessary? Well, lots of countries didn't do that and the reality is 1980 breaking it up into long distance and regional may have made some sense, but by the 1990 it was pretty clear that the telecom world was going to change dramatically from long distance and fixed wires services to internet services, data services, wireless services and all of these things that we're going to restructure the industry anyways. But AT& T one to me is very interesting because of the unintended consequences. And I would say that the main unintended consequence of that was America's competitiveness in telecommunications took a huge hit. And today, to this day telecommunications is dominated by European, Chinese and other firms. And the big American sort of players of the time AT&T which Western Electric became Lucent, Lucent is now owned by Nokia and is really out of it completely and most notably and compellingly Bell Labs, the Bell Labs once the world's most prominent research institution now also a shell of itself and as it was part of Lucent is also now owned by the Finnish company Nokia. So that restructuring greatly damaged America's core strength in telecommunications hardware and research and one can argue we've never recovered right through this 5IG today. So it's a very good example of the market taking care of, the big problem, but meddling leading to some unintended consequences that have hurt the American competitiveness and as we'll talk about, probably later, you can see some of that going on again today and in the past with Microsoft and Intel. >> Right, yeah, Bell Labs was an American gem, kind of like Xerox PARC and basically gone now. You mentioned Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft and Intel. As many people know, some young people don't, IBM unwillingly handed its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft by outsourcing the micro processor and operating system, respectively. Those two companies ended up with IBM ironically, agreeing to take OS2 which was its proprietary operating system and giving Intel, Microsoft Windows not realizing that its ability to dominate a new disruptive market like PCs and operating systems had been vaporized to your earlier point by the new Wintel ecosystem. Now Dave, the government wanted to break Microsoft apart and split its OS business from its application software, in the case of Intel, Intel only had one business. You pointed out microprocessors so it couldn't bust it up, but take us through the history here and the consequences of each. >> Well, the Microsoft one is sort of a classic because the antitrust case which was raging in the sort of mid nineties and 1998 when it finally ended, those were the very, once again, everybody said, Bill Gates was unstoppable, no one could compete with Microsoft they'd buy them, destroy them, predatory pricing, whatever they were accusing of the attacks on Netscape all these sort of things. But those the very years where it was becoming clear first that Microsoft basically missed the early big years of the internet and then again, later missed all the early years of the mobile phone business going back to BlackBerrys and pilots and all those sorts of things. So here we are the government making the case that this company is unstoppable and you can't compete with them the very moment they're entirely on the defensive. And therefore wasn't surprising that that suit eventually was dropped with some minor concessions about Microsoft making it a little bit easier for third parties to work with them and treating people a little bit more, even handling perfectly good things that they did. But again, the more market took care of the problem far more than the antitrust activities did. The Intel one is also interesting cause it's sort of like the AT& T one. On the one hand antitrust actions made Intel much more likely and in fact, required to work with AMD enough to keep that company in business and having AMD lowered prices for consumers certainly probably sped up innovation in the personal computer business and appeared to have a lot of benefits for those early years. But when you look at it from a longer point of view and particularly when look at it again from a global point of view you see that, wow, they not so clear because that very presence of AMD meant that there's a lot more pressure on Intel in terms of its pricing, its profitability, its flexibility and its volumes. All the things that have made it harder for them to A, compete with chips made in Taiwan, let alone build them in the United States and therefore that long term effect of essentially requiring Intel to allow AMD to exist has undermined Intel's position globally and arguably has undermined America's position in the long run. And certainly Intel today is far more vulnerable to an ARM and Invidia to other specialized chips to China, to Taiwan all of these things are going on out there, they're less capable of resisting that than they would've been otherwise. So, you thought we had some real benefits with AMD and lower prices for consumers, but the long term unintended consequences are arguably pretty bad. >> Yeah, that's why we recently wrote in Intel two "Strategic To Fail", we'll see, Okay. now we come to 2022 and there are five companies with anti-trust targets on their backs. Although Microsoft seems to be the least susceptible to US government ironically intervention at this this point, but maybe not and we show "The Cincos Comas Club" in a homage to Russ Hanneman of the show "Silicon Valley" Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all with trillion dollar plus valuations. But meta briefly crossed that threshold like Mr. Hanneman lost a comma and is now well under that market cap probably around five or 600 million, sorry, billion. But under serious fire nonetheless Dave, people often don't realize the immense monopoly power that IBM had which relatively speaking when measured its percent of industry revenue or profit dwarf that of any company in tech ever, but the industry is much smaller then, no internet, no cloud. Does it call for a different approach this time around? How should we think about these five companies their market power, the implications of government action and maybe what you suggested more narrow action versus broad sweeping changes. >> Yeah, and there's a lot there. I mean, if you go back to the old days IBM had what, 70% of the computer business globally and AT&T had 90% or so of the American telecom market. So market shares that today's players can only dream of. Intel and Microsoft had 90% of the personal computer market. And then you look at today the big five and as wealthy and as incredibly successful as they've been, you sort of have almost the argument that's wrong on the face of it. How can five companies all of which compete with each other to at least some degree, how can they all be monopolies? And the reality is they're not monopolies, they're all oligopolies that are very powerful firms, but none of them have an outright monopoly on anything. There are competitors in all the spaces that they're in and increasing and probably increasingly so. And so, yeah, I think people conflate the extraordinary success of the companies with this belief that therefore they are monopolist and I think they're far less so than those in the past. >> Great, all right, I want to do a quick drill down to cloud computing, it's a key component of digital business infrastructure in his book, "Seeing Digital", Dave Moschella coined a term the matrix or the key which is really referred to the key technology platforms on which people are going to build digital businesses. Dave, we joke you should have called it the metaverse you were way ahead of your time. But I want to look at this ETR chart, we show spending momentum or net score on the vertical access market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. We show this view a lot, we put a dotted line at the 40% mark which indicates highly elevated spending. And you can sort of see Microsoft in the upper right, it's so far up to the right it's hidden behind the January 22 and AWS is right there. Those two dominate the cloud far ahead of the pack including Google Cloud. Microsoft and to a lesser extent AWS they dominate in a lot of other businesses, productivity, collaboration, database, security, video conferencing. MarTech with LinkedIn PC software et cetera, et cetera, Googles or alphabets of business of course is ads and we don't have similar spending data on Apple and Facebook, but we know these companies dominate their respective business. But just to give you a sense of the magnitude of these companies, here's some financial data that's worth looking at briefly. The table ranks companies by market cap in trillions that's the second column and everyone in the club, but meta and each has revenue well over a hundred billion dollars, Amazon approaching half a trillion dollars in revenue. The operating income and cash positions are just mind boggling and the cash equivalents are comparable or well above the revenues of highly successful tech companies like Cisco, Dell, HPE, Oracle, and Salesforce. They're extremely profitable from an operating income standpoint with the clear exception of Amazon and we'll come back to that in a moment and we show the revenue multiples in the last column, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, just insane. Dave, there are other equally important metrics, CapX is one which kind of sets the stage for future scale and there are other measures. >> Yeah, including our research and development where those companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. And I think it's easy to look at those numbers and just say, this doesn't seem right, how can any companies have so much and spend so much? But if you think of what they're actually doing, those companies are building out the digital infrastructure of essentially the entire world. And I remember once meeting some folks at Google, and they said, beyond AI, beyond Search, beyond Android, beyond all the specific things we do, the biggest thing we're actually doing is building a physical infrastructure that can deliver search results on any topic in microseconds and the physical capacity they built costs those sorts of money. And when people start saying, well, we should have lots and lots of smaller companies well, that sounds good, yeah, it's all right, but where are those companies going to get the money to build out what needs to be built out? And every country in the world is trying to build out its digital infrastructure and some are going to do it much better than others. >> I want to just come back to that chart on Amazon for a bit, notice their comparatively tiny operating profit as a percentage of revenue, Amazon is like Bezos giant lifestyle business, it's really never been that profitable like most retail. However, there's one other financial data point around Amazon's business that we want to share and this chart here shows Amazon's operating profit in the blue bars and AWS's in the orange. And the gray line is the percentage of Amazon's overall operating profit that comes from AWS. That's the right most access, so last quarter we were well over a hundred percent underscoring the power of AWS and the horrendous margins in retail. But AWS is essentially funding Amazon's entrance into new markets, whether it's grocery or movies, Bezos moves into space. Dave, a while back you collaborated with us and we asked our audience, what could disrupt Amazon? And we came up with your detailed help, a number of scenarios as shown here. And we asked the audience to rate the likelihood of each scenario in terms of its likelihood of disrupting Amazon with a 10 being highly likely on average the score was six with complacency, arrogance, blindness, you know, self-inflicted wounds really taking the top spot with 6.5. So Dave is breaking up Amazon the right formula in your view, why or why not? >> Yeah, there's a couple of things there. The first is sort of the irony that when people in the sort of regulatory world talk about the power of Amazon, they almost always talk about their power in consumer markets, whether it's books or retail or impact on malls or main street shops or whatever and as you say that they make very little money doing that. The interest people almost never look at the big cloud battle between Amazon, Microsoft and lesser extent Google, Alibaba others, even though that's where they're by far highest market share and pricing power and all those things are. So the regulatory focus is sort of weird, but you know, the consumer stuff obviously gets more appeal to the general public. But that survey you referred to me was interesting because one of the challenges I sort of sent myself I was like okay, well, if I'm going to say that IBM case, AT&T case, Microsoft's case in all those situations the market was the one that actually minimized the power of those firms and therefore the antitrust stuff wasn't really necessary. Well, how true is that going to be again, just cause it's been true in the past doesn't mean it's true now. So what are the possible scenarios over the 2020s that might make it all happen again? And so each of those were sort of questions that we put out to others, but the ones that to me by far are the most likely I mean, they have the traditional one of company cultures sort of getting fat and happy and all, that's always the case, but the more specific ones, first of all by far I think is China. You know, Amazon retail is a low margin business. It would be vulnerable if it didn't have the cloud profits behind it, but imagine a year from now two years from now trade tensions with China get worse and Christmas comes along and China just says, well, you know, American consumers if you want that new exercise bike or that new shoes or clothing, well, anything that we make well, actually that's not available on Amazon right now, but you can get that from Alibaba. And maybe in America that's a little more farfetched, but in many countries all over the world it's not farfetched at all. And so the retail divisions vulnerability to China just seems pretty obvious. Another possible disruption, Amazon has spent billions and billions with their warehouses and their robots and their automated inventory systems and all the efficiencies that they've done there, but you could argue that maybe someday that's not really necessary that you have Search which finds where a good is made and a logistical system that picks that up and delivers it to customers and why do you need all those warehouses anyways? So those are probably the two top one, but there are others. I mean, a lot of retailers as they get stronger online, maybe they start pulling back some of the premium products from Amazon and Amazon takes their cut of whatever 30% or so people might want to keep more of that in house. You see some of that going on today. So the idea that the Amazon is in vulnerable disruption is probably is wrong and as part of the work that I'm doing, as part of stuff that I do with Dave and SiliconANGLE is how's that true for the others too? What are the scenarios for Google or Apple or Microsoft and the scenarios are all there. And so, will these companies be disrupted as they have in the past? Well, you can't say for sure, but the scenarios are certainly plausible and I certainly wouldn't bet against it and that's what history tells us. And it could easily happen once again and therefore, the antitrust should at least be cautionary and humble and realize that maybe they don't need to act as much as they think. >> Yeah, now, one of the things that you mentioned in your piece was felt like narrow remedies, were more logical. So you're not arguing for totally Les Affaire you're pushing for remedies that are more targeted in scope. And while the EU just yesterday announced new rules to limit the power of tech companies and we showed the article, some comments here the regulators they took the social media to announce a victory and they had a press conference. I know you watched that it was sort of a back slapping fest. The comments however, that we've sort of listed here are mixed, some people applauded, but we saw many comments that were, hey, this is a horrible idea, this was rushed together. And these are going to result as you say in unintended consequences, but this is serious stuff they're talking about applying would appear to be to your point or your prescription more narrowly defined restrictions although a lot of them to any company with a market cap of more than 75 billion Euro or turnover of more than 77.5 billion Euro which is a lot of companies and imposing huge penalties for violations up to 20% of annual revenue for repeat offenders, wow. So again, you've taken a brief look at these developments, you watched the press conference, what do you make of this? This is an application of more narrow restrictions, but in your quick assessment did they get it right? >> Yeah, let's break that down a little bit, start a little bit of history again and then get to Europe because although big sweeping breakups of the type that were proposed for IBM, Microsoft and all weren't necessary that doesn't mean that the government didn't do some useful things because they did. In the case of IBM government forces in Europe and America basically required IBM to make it easier for companies to make peripherals type drives, disc drives, printers that worked with IBM mainframes. They made them un-bundle their software pricing that made it easier for database companies and others to sell their of products. With AT&T it was the government that required AT&T to actually allow other phones to connect to the network, something they argued at the time would destroy security or whatever that it was the government that required them to allow MCI the long distance carrier to connect to the AT network for local deliveries. And with that Microsoft and Intel the government required them to at least treat their suppliers more even handly in terms of pricing and policies and support and such things. So the lessons out there is the big stuff wasn't really necessary, but the little stuff actually helped a lot and I think you can see the scenarios and argue in the piece that there's little stuff that can be done today in all the cases for the big five, there are things that you might want to consider the companies aren't saints they take advantage of their power, they use it in ways that sometimes can be reigned in and make for better off overall. And so that's how it brings us to the European piece of it. And to me, the European piece is much more the bad scenario of doing too much than the wiser course of trying to be narrow and specific. What they've basically done is they have a whole long list of narrow things that they're all trying to do at once. So they want Amazon not to be able to share data about its selling partners and they want Apple to open up their app store and they don't want people Google to be able to share data across its different services, Android, Search, Mail or whatever. And they don't want Facebook to be able to, they want to force Facebook to open up to other messaging services. And they want to do all these things for all the big companies all of which are American, and they want to do all that starting next year. And to me that looks like a scenario of a lot of difficult problems done quickly all of which might have some value if done really, really well, but all of which have all kinds of risks for the unintended consequence we've talked before and therefore they seem to me being too much too soon and the sort of problems we've seen in the past and frankly to really say that, I mean, the Europeans would never have done this to the companies if they're European firms, they're doing this because they're all American firms and the sort of frustration of Americans dominance of the European tech industry has always been there going back to IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and all of them. But it's particularly strong now because the tech business is so big. And so I think the politics of this at a time where we're supposedly all this great unity of America and NATO and Europe in regards to Ukraine, having the Europeans essentially go after the most important American industry brings in the geopolitics in I think an unavoidable way. And I would think the story is going to get pretty tense over the next year or so and as you say, the Europeans think that they're taking massive actions, they think they're doing the right thing. They think this is the natural follow on to the GDPR stuff and even a bigger version of that and they think they have more to come and they see themselves as the people taming big tech not just within Europe, but for the world and absent any other rules that they may pull that off. I mean, GDPR has indeed spread despite all of its flaws. So the European thing which it doesn't necessarily get huge attention here in America is certainly getting attention around the world and I would think it would get more, even more going forward. >> And the caution there is US public policy makers, maybe they can provide, they will provide a tailwind maybe it's a blind spot for them and it could be a template like you say, just like GDPR. Okay, Dave, we got to leave it there. Thanks for coming on the program today, always appreciate your insight and your views, thank you. >> Hey, thanks a lot, Dave. >> All right, don't forget these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, "Breaking Analysis Podcast". Check out ETR website, etr.ai. We publish every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @davevellante. Comment on my LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Michelle for "theCUBE Insights" powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (slow tempo music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase for 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm really excited because for the first time in my CUBE career of six years, I have a father daughter duo maybe the first time in CUBE's history. Frank and Emma Arrigo from AWS join me guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Great to be here thank you. >> So, Emma, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about how you got to AWS and a little bit about your background. >> Yes, thanks Lisa. So I've joined AWS as a recent graduate from university. So I did my masters of data science and I was going through the grad, the grad job hunt applying for all these different places. And AWS appeared on my radar for an intern program. And Frank was there at the time and so I was like, "Should I do it?" But I still applied cause it was a great program. And so I went did that internship for three months over the summer of 2019-2020, and then I went back and finished my degree. And another grad role came up for in AWS in Tech U to be an associate solutions architect. And so I was approached to apply for that. And I got through to that program and joined the team almost a year ago in March, 2021 through Tech U and yeah, that's how I ended up at AWS. >> Excellent and so Frank, this is a pretty unique situation, father daughter duo at AWS let alone Amazon, let alone probably a lot of companies. Talk to me about it the parental lens. >> Yeah, look it is unique, there's a few family connections within AWS, but you know, definitely here in Australia, it's really rare, but I think the family connection is, you know Emma and we've got four kids, I've got four kids in total. So Emma has three brothers, you know, I've lived in tech, my entire career and so they've been part of it. You know, we've lived in the States, lived in Seattle for a couple of years. And so they'd come to the office and see what dad did. And so it wasn't a big surprise for them to understand what the role was and what we did, so, you know, they kind of grew up with it. And you know, when the opportunity came up for Emma, did the internship, I was excited for it because it was in a different area. It was working in a startup team doing some interesting work that really lined up with some of the interest Emma had. And so she kind of learned what it was like to be Amazonian through that internship and that was... I call that a long audition for a job. And she was then able to join Tech U program, which is a early career bootcamp, I like to think of it, which is the six month program to help our grads learn some of the fundamental skills because the value of a solutions architect or some of these other tech roles is you need experience. You need to have been in the game a while to be a trusted advisor to a customer. And it's hard to do that when you're a grad. So the bootcamp gives them the practical experience and then they get another six months on the job experience where they develop those skills and hone it and get ready to, you know, be a trusted advisor to the customers. >> Right, and that's such a great... I'm sure that's a tremendous opportunity to learn how to become that trusted advisor, especially from peers, such as yourself and I want to go back to you. Talk to me about your interest in IT, in data science. Was this something that you were always interested in primary school or in high school? Or was this something that kind of came on later on? >> Yeah, so my interest in tech kind of emerged as I went along in my education. So when I was younger, I really wanted to be an orthodontist for some reason. I don't know why. And then you just sort of in year eight and like early school sort of didn't really know what I wanted to do. Just sort of going through just trying to survive as a teenage girl at high school at an all girls school, didn't really have many, didn't really have career aspirations, I guess, and then one year I attended a information day at a university about engineering and that just really sparked my interest, I don't know why, but I was like, I've always been obsessed with like factories and those types of things and how things are made. And so that really just sparked my interest and I never really thought of it before. And so then that put STEM engineering on my radar and then I guess spoke with it about with the parents. And then they mentioned that tech would be a like IT, Information Technology would be really useful. And so then we approached the school to ask if I could do IT in year 11. So that's sort of our second last year of high school. And they said, "No, we couldn't do IT." I couldn't go to the boys' school to do IT. That girls don't do it or that not good at it. And I wasn't allowed, and they wouldn't let me do physics either. So I moved school in for the final two of high school to be able to do IT and physics to help, you know, get to the course I wanted to do. And so that was my journey into STEM. So it wasn't really on my radar, but then events like this and at university isn't it? Organizations sparked my interest. And then still when I entered university, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to major in nor where I wanted to work would never have thought it would be where, with my father, like I was aware of the world of IT and everything, but I wouldn't, if you'd asked me in first year, it wouldn't have been that I would probably, we would've said, I don't know an academic or something. I don't know. And then, but again, as the university went on and you attend networking events or club things, you sort of learn a bit more about the ecosystem. And then that's where yeah. Tech company sort of became where I was looking for jobs and roles for when I finished up. So that was kind of my journey to... >> So what I love though, that you and Frank, this is going to be a question for you, how Emma was told. "No, you can't study IT. No, you can't study physics. You can't go to the boys school and do that either." Talk to me about that, Frank, from your perspective as a parent of a daughter, and you said, I think she's got three brothers lucky, Emma, but talk to me about that from your perspective, in terms of going, my daughter has really has an in a strong interest in this and they're telling her no we're going to pivot and actually change schools to be able give her the opportunities that she wants to pursue. >> Yeah. Look, as a parent, we were shocked. You know, it was just an unexpected response, you know, in a lot of ways, the school that she was at was more of a finishing school than anything else, you know, preparing young ladies for marriage and, you know, career as a, I don't know, I will leave it at that. So we were really disappointed. And so very quickly we looked at other alternatives and other options and we pulled Emma out of school and we knew it was like the last two years are critical in Australia. We don't have a middle school and a senior school, it's all one, you know, combined thing. But those last two years are all about getting ready for university. And so we made a really tough call and we picked her up, dropped her into a totally new school. It was co-ed school. And then when we told her previous, her girl's school. I actually spoke to the vice principal and he said, "Oh, I can't believe you're sending her to a co-ed school. She's going to struggle 'cause boys are so much better in tech." And I was totally, I was lost for words, right? Because I felt back in my career and I had some amazing female managers, leaders, role models in my time that I worked for and I followed and they were always struggling because, you know, they were in the minority, but they were incredible, you know, technologists and leaders. And I just couldn't believe it. So as parents we made the tough call. We picked Emma up. We put her into another high school and she flourished, you know, Emma started a club, she got convolved with a whole bunch of other things. When she graduated, the teachers felt that she'd been there six years, right? The whole time of it. So she really made a mark, made an impact at this school and so much so that her younger brother then followed and went to that school and completed his high school there as well. But it, we just can't believe it. And we tell it everyone, this story, you know, we name the school, we won't name. We choose not to name them here, but we name the school because we just think it's really terrible guidance and terrible advice. Like we want people to follow their passion. I tell my kids and I tell the folks when I speak to, you know, early career folks, follow your passion first, guess what the job will appear. Right? You know, there'll be the... The work will come if you do something that you love. And then the second piece that I always say is, "Every future job is going to be a tech job." Technology is embedded in everything that we do. So the fact that you say, "A girl can't do technology," you're limiting yourselves, right? You don't want to think that, you want to think about the possibilities rather than the things you can't do. It's the things you can do. And the things that you haven't even thought about doing. So that's why, you know, it was so exciting to see that experience with Emma, and just seeing her grow through that and she became a bit of a STEM advocate at a high school as well. So, she saw the value of her role model that helped her. And she wants to be a.... Continue being a role model for others as well, which again, I think is admirable, right? It's about- >> Absolutely. >> Shining a light and leading and as a parent, irrespective that we work at the same company as a parent, that's what you want to see. You want to see your kids aim high and inspire others. That's what she does. >> Well, she's already been a role model too, I mean, to your younger brother, but one of the things that we say often, and theCUBE does a lot for women in technology events. And I'm fortunate to get to host a lot of those, we say, "You can't be what you can't see." So needing to have those role models who are visible. Now, it doesn't have to be female necessarily. and Frank you mentioned that you had female mentors and role models and in your illustrious career. But the important point is being able to elevate women into positions where others can see and can identify, "Oh, there's a role model. There's somebody that might be a mentor for me, or a sponsor down the road, it's critically important." And as of course, we look at the numbers in tech, women in technical roles are still quite low, but Emma, tell me a little bit about, you've been through the program. You talked about that. What are some of the things that you feel in like the last six months that you've been able to learn that had you not had this opportunity, maybe you wouldn't have. >> You know, I think that's a great point. So as a solutions architect, I get to be both technical. So hands on building an AWS, helping customers solve their problems, whether it be a data leak or I don't know, an image recognition tool to look for garbage dumped on the street or, and also thinking from the business perspective for the customers, so that's a fun part as the, of the role, but things I get to do. So currently I'm working on a demo for the conference in Sydney. So I'm building a traffic detection model using some computer vision and IOT so I get to bring my data science background to this build and also learn about new areas like IOT, Internet Of Things; Technologies. So that's been a really fun project and yeah, just having the ability to play around on AWS, we have... >> Right. Well, the exposure in the experiences is priceless. You can't put a price on that, but being able to get into the environment, learn it from a technical perspective, learn it from a practical perspective. And then of course get all the great things about getting to interact with customers and learning how different industries work, you mentioned you were in public sector. That just must be a field of dreams, I would imagine. >> I know. >> In some senses for you, right? >> Really have lucked out. I know it's, I'm like, "Wow, this my job is to play around with some new service, just because need to know about that for the customer meeting. Like I'm building a chatbot or helping build a chatbot for a customer, at the university. So yeah, things like that make it very, yeah. It's a pretty amazing role. >> It sounds, it sure sounds like it. And sounds like you're are excelling at it tremendously. Let me ask you Emma. For young girls who might be in a similar situation to where you were not that long ago with the school telling you, "No, you can't do IT." "No, you can't do physics." So you actually switched schools. What would you tell those young girls who might be in that situation about hearing the word, "No." And would you advise them to embrace a career in technology? >> Yeah, I would say that it really..... What makes me so sad is if my family didn't know about tech and had my... Supported me through that like if I would've just gone, "Oh, okay. I won't do it." You know what I mean? Like that just makes me really sad. How many people have missed out on studying what they wanted to study. So by having those types of experiences, so what I would say as advice is, "Back yourself, find supporters, whether it be your family or a teacher that you really sort of connect with, to be able to support you and through these decisions." And yeah, I think having those sponsors in a way, your advocates to help you make those choices and help support you through those choices. >> Yeah. I agree. And I have a feeling you're going to be one of those sponsors and mentors, if you aren't already Emma, I have a feeling that's just around the corner from you. So Frank, last question to you. What's the overall lesson here, if we look at statistics, I mentioned some of the stats about, you know, women in technical roles as usually less than 25% globally. But also we see data that shows that companies are more profitable and more performant when there's at least 30% of the executive suite it's women. So from your parental perspective, and from an Amazonian perspective, Frank, what's the lesson here? >> Well, look from an Amazonian perspective, we need to make sure that we have a team that represents our customers, right? And our customers aren't all boys. You know, they're not all blokes, as we say down here. So you've got to have a team that is made up of what represents your customers. So I think that's the Amazonian view. And so diverse perspectives, diverse experience, diverse backgrounds is what does that. The other from a parent, you know, I said it earlier. I think every future job is a tech job. And I think it's really important that as kids come through, you know, primary school, high school, whatever, they're prepared for that, they're already consumers of technology. You know, they need to be creators or, or participate in that environment. And I can give you an example, a few years ago, I worked for, at a large telco here. And we actually invested in a thing called code club, which was aimed at primary school kids, kids in grade four, five and six. So elementary school for my friends in America, it's kids in grade four, five and six. And they were learning how to use scratch. Scratch is this interactive tool like building lego to write programming and believe it or not, there were more girls interested and were part of code club. It was probably 60-40 was the ratio of young girls doing it compared to boys because it was creative, it was a creative outlet, they were building stuff and assembling and making these things that they loved to make. Right. But then what we saw was there'd be a drop off at high school, whether it's curriculum related or interests or distractions, I don't know what it is, but there things get lost along the way along high school. But I see it at the primary school stage at elementary school that the interest is there. So I think part of it is, there needs to be a bit of a switch up in education or other opportunities outside of school to really foster and nurture and develop this interest because it really does take all kinds to be successful in the role. And Emma talked about a chatbot that she's building and that's a conversational thing. I can't see geek boys having being able to impact and create a interesting conversation, right. Then there's other areas that seems to be skewed and biased based on a predominantly male view of the world. So we need the tech, the industry needs these diverse perspectives and these diverse views, because, you know, to your point, it's going to impact the bottom line. It's going to also deliver a better product and it's going to reflect society. It's going to reflect the customers that are using it because we're made up of every, every race and color, creed, gender. And we need a team that represents that. >> Exactly. I couldn't agree more. Well, it sounds like the Arrigo family are quite the supporters of this, but also we need more of both of you. We need more of the sponsors and the parents who are encouraging the kids and making the right decisions to help them get along that path. And we need more folks like Emma and more women that we can see, "Wow, look what she's doing in such a short time period. We want to be just like that." So you guys are, have both been fantastic. I thank you so much for joining me at the International. Women's Showcase, more power to your family. We need more folks like you guys, so great work. Keep it up. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Lisa. >> For Frank and Emma Arrigo, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Showcase 2022. (soothing music)