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

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Euope 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing foundation and eco-system partners. >> Welcome back to the Fira here in Barcelona, Spain. This is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for two days of coverage is Corey Quinn, and we're excited to have on the program a first time guest, but a company that we've known for quite a while, Daniel Lopez Ridruejo, who's the CEO and co-founder of Bitnami. Just announced recently that Bitnami is being acquired by VMware. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us and congratulations to you and the team on the 'exit' as it were. >> Thank you very much, gracias. It's an honor to be here. >> Yeah so we had Erica Brescia who's the co-founder of yours on theCUBE seven years ago. Back then I was trying to figure out exactly what Bitnami was and where it fit in this whole world. Maybe you can just bring us up to speed for those that maybe don't know, and there's all these people in the enterprise space that might not know your community that the dev space knows real well, as to bring us back the who and the why of Bitnami >> Yeah Erica is my co-founder and we have been building this together over the years. It has been quite a fair ride and, we started Bitnami as an offshoot of our previous company called Bedrock in which we made software easy to install. And then we realized that a lot of what people wanted to make easy to install on Linux was Open Source software, so we started working with companies like MySQL and SugarCRM, Splunk really early on when they were only four or five people, and over time we decided to do the same thing as an Open Source project for all those other tools and projects that didn't have a way to make them easy to install. We started as Bitnami.org, we wanted to emphasize that it was an Open Source project, was never going to be a company, and it didn't turn out that way. >> All right so, we got a lot of things to cover, but help us connect the dots as to those early you know, dot org, it wasn't a company, to a company having the dev space to, we're starting down the path towards the enterprise, which seemed to be a natural fit as to what happened today. >> Yeah so going back to your original question of why we wanted to make, was always being driven. There is all this marvelous Open Source software out there that is super difficult to use for a great majority of people, and we just wanted to lower the barrier to make it easy to use, and that's what got it started. We never expected the success. It turns out we went from a hundred, to a thousand, to ten thousand to hundreds of thousands of downloads, and you know, we're super popular with developers. We have literally millions of developers using Bitnami, and as part of that evolution, we started working with the cloud providers. We drive a significant percentage of usage for Amazon, for Google, for Microsoft, that's what makes it valuable to those cloud vendors, and as the next stage of the company, we wanted to go directly to the enterprises in which we already have a lot of developers in those same enterprises, but when you go move to production, you know that it's a lot of red tape, a lot of gates that you have to go about compliance and security, and that's where we're taking the company to. >> Nine, ten years ago I stumbled over you, over your company or I guess project at that time, and it was the second best way I ever found to run WordPress. The first of course is, don't run WordPress. I'm very serious. Don't run WordPress. And I'm curious now, with the acquisition of Bitnami, what is the longer-term vision for how this fits into a more cloud-native landscape. Is it continuing to just be the, well not just but, is it continuing to be the application you get from a catalog and it's up and running, is their a containerized story, is there something else I'm not seeing? >> No, that's the core of Bitnami, and that will continue to do that. What has evolved over time is that initially you could download an installer and run it on your Mac. And then we were one of the first early adapters of AWS, so we created all these AMIs and when, you know, people were thinking that we were crazy, that Amazon was a company that sold books, but you know, what were we doing? We kind of saw where it was going early on. And then as Kubernetes came along, we were really, really early there as well, and we were one of the early partners of these around Helm. We provided a lot of the Helm charts. Right now we may have dabbled a little bit on Serverless, So whatever comes next, we will be there and our goal continues to be the same thing, which is to make awesome software available to everyone. So independently of the underlying platform, that's where we're focusing, so, the core mission is not changing, we're just omitting that, and going after the enterprise, more red hat enterprise Linux, you know, more OpenShift, more multi tier, high availabilty, more production features. >> All right so, you talk about all those pieces, and you talk about linux and everything there. I want you help connect, how does that tie into VMware and what you see them doing today because, sure Linux has been something that could live on a hypervisor for a long time, but in many ways there's been struggles in competition between VMware and them and the Linux community in the past, but, you know, we're starting to see some of that change and maybe this helps accelerate some of that change. >> Yeah I think there is a couple of companies, Microsoft and VMware, that were completely different companies than five years ago and probably the decision would have been different for us like five years ago versus what the company is today and where they're going. For us VMware is, the holy grail of acquisition is 2 plus 2 equals five, and that's hardly the, you know, there's a lot of acquisitions that don't go that way. For us it was a very thought out decision and it was, I think it was clear for us in the sense that we have a very big footprint with developers, they own enterprise IT, we wanted to go enterprise, they wanted to go into developers, they understand Open Source, they understand distributed teams, yeah. >> Maybe, I'd love to hear your insight as to that developer community, because when I walk around the show floor, you know, there was that struggle between the enterprise and the developers, and now, the storage world, we need to get CI/CD and all these things and they're like "uh, we don't know how to get there" . And over the last few years, it seems there's been a blurring of the lines, and more enterprise is embracing it, Open Source is a big piece of that, so is it, as you said, five years ago this wouldn't have happened, but now it feels like we're ready for that next step of the curve. >> Correct. And all of that is because of this standardization, that Kubernetes is allowing, you can standardize business practices, and your seeing a consolidation, the CI/CD wall. And it's like, things that used to be very exotic now is business as usual. And it's a parallel, you know, I started using Linux in '93, when there was not even a concept of a Linux distribution, you have to do all these things just to get a prompt, but over time people have standardized, you know I remember there were like, 50 or 60 Linux distributions; StagWare, SLS. And eventually, everybody converged on Red Hat enterprise Linux. I think something similar is going to happen, we're just midway there, in which you will not have KubeCon because Kubernetes will be something transparent that is boring. So, we're not there yet, but at some point Kubernetes will be boring and there will be layers on top of that where all the action is. Or will be. >> From my perspective, coming from a small startup background, it seemed to me that VMware was always one of those stodgy, boring companies I didn't have much time for and lately there've been a series of high profile acquisitions, Heptio, Wavefront, CloudFront and now Bitnami, and it's really changing, almost without me noticing, my entire perception of their place in the modern evolving cloud ecosystem. >> I think so, and that's one of the things that attracted us and I talked to Victoria about it, get to spend a bit of time with the CEO, with the people at the high level. For us it was very important. But again, one thing we haven't mentioned is that, for the most part we have been bootstrapped. We have been profitable, we only took a little money from Ycombinator when we were already profitable. So we have choices. Sometimes our BC funded peers don't have that choice, so it was a very meditated decision, and for me for these kind of acquisitions, when a much bigger company joins forces with a smaller company, the strategies need to be aligned. And to me, VMware realized that the world, a few years ago, that the world is going to be moved to cloud, the world is going to go towards Kubernetes and containers. And the acquisition of Heptio, the acquisition of CloudHealth, told us that they're serious about that and that we can fit right in and take advantage of that transformation they are going. And so far it's working really, really, really well and that's part of what made us decide to go in this direction. >> Yeah Daniel, what can you tell us about things, once this actually does close, what will that mean for the brand? What about relationships with, you mentioned Heptio? But not only Heptio, Pivotal obvously is a big player in this space. How does all of that line up? >> With Heptio and other units like the marketplace's other groups, we were already working with them before the acquisition, with Heptio, with ksonnet and a bunch of other initiatives. We're just going to double down on that, and they want to keep Bitnami, they want to keep the brand, they want to keep the team. If anything we're going to get more resources, and again, that was the fact that they didn't want to touch something that is working. We have been partners for, I think, seven or eight years. We have gotten to know each other over that time and built that trust that is needed. In a way nothing is going to change. We're going to have the same team doing the same things, we're just going to have more access to their userbase. Which is what we're going to do. We started down this path because we were raising money to build an enterprise sales force, and at some point we decided, okay, this doesn't make sense. We're going to give away all this chunk of the company to get access to the enterprise, or to build a sales force to get access to the enterprise, when we can be part of VMware and get that for free. >> You've mentioned a fair bit about what's going to change as far as you getting exposure to new customers, effectively broadening into additional markets. What does this mean for your existing customers who are, in some cases, whenever you're a customer of a small-ish company, and there's an acquisition, it sometimes is natural to be a little concerned of, do I need to find a new vendor? Do I need to find a new provider? And frankly, there's nothing else like you that I've ever seen on the market. >> No, that's a really good question. For us, what is a little bit unique is we have millions of users, but we only have a handful of customers. So our customers are AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle. So it was very important; VMware is already a vendor to all of these; and so far everybody is going to stay and we're just going to continue and deepen the relationship. And that's one of the things that made this attractive. So for customers, nothing is going to change. And we're just going to continue to deepen those relationships. And again, that was important. Had we gone through some of the other options there would have been a lot of very outward conversations to have and that is not the case. >> Yeah Daniel, how about the developer community itself. It's just had millions of downloads out there. We understand how some of the reaction can be. >> Yeah, everybody is like, is VMware going to be the evil company that's going to touch that? And I think so far the feedback has been extremely positive, including even Hacker News, right, which is shocking. >> And those people don't like anything. >> I've been high Hacker News since the very beginning and it can be harsh. So it was something I was monitoring how people. And so far it has been very positive and that's only not a testimony how much people like Bitnami but also again, VMware acquire Heptio and everything's great. We talk to a lot of the people at Heptio, you know, hey how are things going? How has it been? And everybody loved it there, so for us it was something that gave us a lot of reassurance that all these other companies with a lot of Open Source DNA were being successful there and gave us reassurance. Time will tell. We'll see one year from now where we are, but so far everybody that we have talked to, all the conversations have been great. >> So Daniel you have a very interesting viewpoint on this whole ecosystem, we work with all the cloud providers. Any commentary you'd give of, you talk about that midway point of maturity? Where do you see things today, where do you see them going? What do we need to fix as an industry? >> Well it's very difficult to predict where things are going I just think that at this point it's very safe to say that it's going to be a multi-cloud war. That was not like three, four years ago. It seemed like it could be a repeat of the '90s in which Microsoft own ninety-something percent of the market share. And there was a lot of things that didn't make sense. Right now at least Amazon, plus a bunch of other clouds, are viable, and if anything they are growing. So a lot of companies like HashiCorp, like VMware. Companies that support this multi-cloud environment, not all of them, but all of them are very well positioned to thrive because it's not going to change any time soon. The other thing I think that is safe to assume is, we are going to have more artifacts than ever, so companies like Artifactory, I think they will do well. As any companies have to do to do with security. We're going to have more security issues, not less. But in the long term that's as much as I can predict. >> All right, well, Daniel, thank you so much. Congratulations again, and we look forward to seeing you at VMworld. Where we'll have theCUBE there. It'll actually be our tenth year being at Vmworld. >> Awesome >> So we're excited and always happy to talk to, especially the startups some great news here. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks as always for watching theCUBE.

(intense orchestral music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBEConversation, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. I'm here with Erica Brescia, who's the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at Bitnami, it's the app store for the cloud, they do automated packaging, an application provider. Great to see you, CUBE alumni, great to have you in the studio, thanks for coming in. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So, so much going on, you've been to theCUBE multiple times, we see each other at conferences and, you made some time, thanks for comin' down, appreciate it. >> Yeah. >> So Bitnami's doing some great things, so give us the update, what's goin' on with the company? >> Sure. So we just launched our new offering called Stacksmith, which is our first enterprise offering that basically takes all the tooling that we've built to deliver the application catalog that we have onto all the major cloud vendors, and allows enterprise IT departments to package up their own applications, both for cloud and cloud-native platforms, as well as for whatever they're running in the enterprise today. So, it kind of meets them where they are, helps them automate the application packaging and maintenance in place today, and then sets them up to successfully move to the cloud and Kubernetes and containers over time. >> So it's kind of reverse of this journey to the cloud, you go to where the user, the customers are, help them put it together. >> And make the journey, really. So what we find is a lot of the more traditional orchestration and packaging tools just aren't well suited to cloud and containers in particular. And so enterprises are looking for new tools to help them solve current problems, which is: we need to support all these different platforms, we might have some things running internally in VMware, we're running some things on Amazon, maybe using cloud formation, and now they're trying to get to Kubernetes, and they're trying to figure out how they can do that without having a separate pipeline for everything, and that's the problem that Bitnami solves. >> Yeah, and that's been a bit, we've identified a product at Amazon, then, I want Azure, I want Google Cloud, I got to hire a different development team, different stacks. So there's kind of this problem with multi-cloud. How are you guys talkin' to customers about it? 'Cause this seems to be the hybrid cloud main problem today. It's like, okay I see the cloud, I understand I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff in the cloud, or cloud's going to be on-prem, and it's going to be in the cloud. How do I get ready for the cloud? That seems to be a number one question. >> Yeah, and I think what people are struggling with is, you know, there're a lot of companies out there, particularly in the cloud-native space, that just say: if you just rebuild everything, then your life will be so much better, right? But that's not really realistic for most companies. They need to be able to take what they have, and be able to package it in such a way that they get a lot of the benefits of the cloud and containers without completely re-architecting everything. Because, it might be practical for, say a new start up, or a company like Netflix or Spotify to do that, but lets face it, most companies are not that, most companies have too many demands on their IT and Ops teams already, hiring talent is hard even for the startups working at the forefront of Kubernetes, so, you really need tools that are approachable and solve current problems, but again, I think the key is, set you up for success in the future, and I think we help people kind of bridge the gap between what they're doing today and what they're doing in the future without trying to push them in one direction, which might not make sense for them. >> Yeah, in Netflix, and the Googles of the world, are potential future scenarios of what they might look like, but they got to take care of the current move from IT to cloud, get ready for it. >> Yeah, maybe, and you know, for a lot of these internal applications it doesn't make sense to completely re-architect and rewrite them, like the ROI isn't there, and there are companies out there that have thousands of Java or .NET applications that they just need to be able to move perhaps out of their data center, in many cases it's being shut down, and, onto cloud platforms and so we try to find that nice balance between helping you get the advantage of the automation of cloud without having to invest in re-architecting apps that just aren't worth re-architecting. >> Got to ask you Erica, we've had a couple conversations, I forget what you were founded, at Bitnami, you've had a great journey, a lot of things have changed. When did you guys found 2010, or 2011? >> So we started Bitnami in 2013. The company before Bitnami was Bitrock, and we went through YCombinator in 2013, and that's when we really started growing out the company. First around the app catalog that we deliver both via Bitnami.com as well as all the major cloud platforms, and that's allowed us to bootstrap the business up to this point. And then obviously we took all of the learnings and the technology from delivering 140 applications across 14 different platforms, native and cloud, and productize that in Stacksmith, so our enterprise users, you know, we have over a million deployments a month, but people have only been consuming the things that we build now they can use our tooling, that we've been building out over the years, to automate the packaging of their own applications. >> And it's, just to kind of put some color commentary around that time, it wasn't the most calm waters of the cloud world, massive growth, a lot of things have happened, so containers come to the scene with Docker and that becomes standardized, now you've got Kubernetes, you got service meshes right around the corner, kind of now it sets a perfect opportunity for you guys to bring customers to this app store concept, for you guys. >> Yeah, and we see this great, we call it kind of the great unbundling, right? Where apps used to be distributed with the operating system and they kind of were this one cohesive piece, and now, with Kubernetes and cloud APIs, the applications are very separate, and so there's kind of this new operating system coming together, which is the operating system of containers and Kubernetes and cloud, and it allows you to combine these different pieces in ways that you never could before. Before, you know, you would just go to your OS repo to pull in the app that you wanted. >> And you see the trends, I mean, Google has the SRE concept sight, reliability, engineer, the operators on the VMware side, dealing with VMs kind of all converging together. So I got to ask you, how does that impact your customers with your new Stacksmith offering, what's the impact to the customers? Is it ease of use, is it ease of deployment, what's the main value at? >> So, I think the most important thing is, as you said, there're all these new technologies coming out and there's also cloud formation on AWS, and there's ARM on Azure, and each cloud vendor is coming out with their own tooling and then, like you said, there's operators for Kubernetes. The advantage that you get with Bitnami is you don't have to understand the intricacies of how to package for all of those different platforms because we do that for you. We abstract away having to understand how to build a cloud formation template versus a helm chart helps that Kubernetes, you know, package manager essentially and we've been very involved in helping define and further that project. We're actually the top provider of the official helm charts. So we see a lot of promise there but, what's interesting about Bitnami is at the end of the day we're platform agnostic. And once you start using Bitnami and Stacksmith, you can very easily add support for other platforms. So we have a customer who started out on AWS, for example, they wanted to give a try to running some things on Azure, and they essentially just had to flip a switch, and then they get an ARM template, instead of-- >> What was your alternative to that? If they didn't do that, what would they have to do? >> They would have had to do it either manually, or find system specific tools for each platform, to do it. So, there's no other like singular tool chain that lets you build natively for all the different platforms and that's the key, we don't try to abstract away ARM or any of these other orchestration technologies by giving you some kind of layer on top of them. We just make it really easy to build for those technologies and also, to maintain those applications and templates over time, so this isn't point-in-time thing, we track all of the updates in everything that goes into that image or a set of images, and allow you to automatically rebuild and redeploy across any of those platforms you need to support. >> You guys have been very successful in the cloud, but also have scar tissue like everybody else that's been through the cloud wars. And now, as it starts to hit kind of an inflection point, how has cloud changed now, what are we seeing now in cloud versus, say 2014, 2015 timeframe? >> Oh boy. So, I think the most interesting thing is how quickly Azure in particular has evolved. If I had to pick one thing that has been incredibly impressive and important in the changing cloud landscape, it's, you know, you go back to 2014, it was pretty much all AWS all the time, right? And, Amazon isn't quite the Goliath it used to be anymore, I mean there's-- >> Well it's still pretty damn big. >> They're still huge. Yeah, absolutely, but I'll tell you what, the others are gaining a lot of ground, and they have really interesting and different advantages, right? Google will send all of their amazingly smart engineers in to help you architect applications, or move them over, I've heard a lot of workloads moving off of AWS onto Google because Google is giving them so much love and support and trying to attract those workloads over. But Azure's advantage is their ecosystem, right? They really understand partnering in a way that Amazons retail DNA just, it doesn't lend itself to that, and so, I think Microsoft's approach to building out a really great ecosystem around Azure, coupled with their huge field sales team, which Amazon has just been building, they've never had an enterprise sales team, is making things really interesting and creating, for us, a great dynamic in the market because we like to see a number of cloud vendors flourish. >> You're an arms dealer. >> Yeah exactly! (Erica laughs) >> Whatever you want, any cloud. >> I don't know if our CMO would want me to put it that way, but. (laughing) >> Dave Alante's favorite term, by the way. >> Sure. >> It's good to be an arms dealer, or be Switzerland, as they, to be more politically correct. >> Yeah, we go with Switzerland. >> Azure's interesting, I was just having conversation with Dave about this, because, you know, you've got, consumerization of IT, and digital transformation, have been the biggest buzz words in IT for the past decade. First it was consumerization of IT, now it's digital transformation. If you think about it Amazon and Google are really the consumer companies, Azure is an enterprise company with an ecosystem, so it's going to be very interesting to see if consumerization is the winning formula or is it digital transformation on the enterprise side? So you got to be, watching that pretty closely. Your thoughts? >> So, I would say on the consumerization of IT side, I mean that is absolutely happening, and, there, we could talk for hours probably on why that trend is here and why it's not going away, just, expectations in general have changed with the advent of iPhone and app stores and convenience across every aspect of our lives, so, I think even Microsoft gets that, and I don't think that the consumer DNA of those companies actually gives them a real edge in this case. What is interesting is, every company is starting to really focus on their app stores and their marketplace strategies, and trying to provide a frictionless buying experience. And there're a bunch of announcements coming, both on the AWS side, and the Azure side in particular, around things that they're doing to ease the enterprise buying process. >> Well we identified the three things, SAS business is table stakes, IOT is coming, connected devices, and then you've got the mobile. Those three things are on 20 year runs. Talking about Bitnami's update, you mentioned Stacksmith, you have some new stuff there, you guys are hiring, what's the ramp up, marketing, cash flow, top line revenues? Go ahead, share it. >> I'm not giving you all that. (both laughing) But, yeah it's a really exciting time for us, obviously bringing this enterprise product to market. We're gearing up to scale quite significantly, so, Bitnami's is kind of unusual in the Valley in that we're bootstrapped, and we're very heavily engineering driven. >> So no outside funding? >> A million dollars in total, which pretty much doesn't even count in Silicon Valley, and that was really just they had a number of individual folks involved in the company, when we went through YC. >> So no venturing? >> No, no institutional funding So, we are just getting ready to build out the whole go to market team around the Stacksmith product, which is very new in the market, just launched in the last couple months. >> So is it generally available? >> Oh yes! Generally available, customers, lots of great things to talk about, but, we don't have the full sales team in place. >> And what's the benefits of Stacksmith? What's the bottom line value proposition? >> It's really helping you to automate the packaging and maintenance of your applications, whether internal or external, you know, third-party commercial apps that you're using internally, and deploying them on any of the platforms that you need to support. >> App store for the cloud, I love that. So let's talk about what you're workin' on, one of the things I'm really impressed, first of all I'm really impressed with what you've done with Bitnami, I love it, love the bootstrap stories, we were bootstrapped as well in the run of SiliconANGLE. So it's great, in Silicon Valley, I think that's like the top tier player, if you can bootstrap it to economic visibility around scale, that's a success so congratulations. But you also have something exciting going on with venture investing. X factor, >> X factor, yep. >> This is super impressive. You raised a small little fund, X factor, investing in women entrepreneurs. Take a minute to explain what X factor is, do you have some news coming, another fund coming? >> Sure, yeah it's been very exciting, so, in the free free time that I really don't have, but this is such a good cause it's worth it. We put together a three million dollar fund, to invest a hundred thousand dollars in 30 different companies, with at least one female founder. And this actually was spun out of fly bridge, we have our token guys, we call 'em Chip Hazard, who's a career venture investor, who's doing a lot of interesting things. But, he basically led the charge with a woman named Anna Palmer, to put together a group of female founders, that's what really differentiates us, I think, from the rest of the market, who are operating their own companies, to invest in these very early stage female founded companies And, I think that gives us a really unique advantage in the market of venture, in that first we have an incredible pipeline and deal flow because, you know, we know these folks who are starting the companies. And we also have a unique perspective on the challenges of getting a new venture off the ground, and I think we can really be an ally to the entrepreneurs that we're funding, and helping them get that first bit of funding in the door, we typically help them with their series A rounds and beyond and they really see us as a peer and someone they can relate to and come to for advice, and so, I think it's a pretty unique value prop that we have as a VC fund. >> Operating experience brings a lot to the table, so, you want to get those first three steps goin', get that venture off the ground, trust. >> Yeah, and we have a very diverse range of experiences that we can bring to bare too, I mean some of us have deep infrastructure experience, some folks are on the consumer side, we've got a few East Coast people, a few West Coast people, a few people scattered in other areas. And we all have different areas of expertise, right? I'm pretty strong on the business development side, and I'm business model, SAS, enterprise software. Some of the other women are much more familiar with like distribution deals, or hardware deals, or other consumer businesses as well, so I think we have a really unique range of experiences and expertise that we can bring to bare in supporting our founders. >> And mentoring too, it's being there for, you know, don't give up! >> Yeah! And we've had founders go through things, and they'll call us at, one of our founders I was just on the phone with, and she was looking at changing her role within the company to take on more responsibility, and we had a great conversation around that, and that resulted in her becoming the COO, which was fantastic. Another founder was going through a difficult time where she and her co-founder were splitting up, and I was able to talk her through that. And we have a lot of those stories where, I think, you know, we have really been seen as an ally who can help founders get through those times, because we've been there, and we can empathize. And, it's an interesting dynamic because everybody knows that we're not going to invest in the next round, so there's never any posturing to make sure that they're still selling us on investing in the company. It's all about, once we're in, we're in, and we'll do anything we can do to help you scale successfully over time. >> And the key is get to that next round, or get a clear line of sight on visibility in the union economics or, scale. >> Exactly. >> Alright, so how much is going into the next funding? Can you talk about the amount, or? >> Yeah, so we're not raising yet, we're just about to start raising, we're going to be expanding the number of investment partners on the team, which is fantastic, and I'm really excited to bring some amazing new women on board, so, you know, for the women out there who are maybe interested in starting to learn a little more about venture and have raised funding and build their own companies, please send us an email: hello@xfactorventures the fund should be about 10 million dollars, is the current target. >> How is it structured? Are they structured as limited partners, general partners? How is it, so if someone comes on board, as you expand the partnership what does it look like? >> Sure, so, we all do invest our own money, but the fund has LPs just like any other fund, so there's a number of great folks who have backed up X factor. We do bring in some of our own folks along the way, you know, I had people that I know, who have invested in the fund and I'm sure that will be the case in the next one, but it's not like the fund is only funded by the investment partners, we have LPs like any other fund. >> But you guys are taking profits out of it, through the caring, right? So typical venture capital? >> It's typical venture capital, you know, it's a fairly small fund to start as we work through things, but we expect it to grow quite significantly over time. I'll tell you, without giving away too much, that we have quite grand ambitions for the long term. >> Alright, well let's keep in touch on the deal flow, congratulations on Bitnami, and, we'll see you at the cloud shows, Amazon, Microsoft Ignite, Google Next. >> Everywhere, yep, I'll be there. >> Erica, thanks for coming on and spending some time here on theCUBE. CUBEConversations here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, you're watching CUBEConversations, thanks for watching. (intense orchestral music)