>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. It is a cute conversation. >> Levan, Welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm John for a host of the Cube here in our Cube Studios in Palo Alto, California. Harder Silicon Valley world startups are happening on the venture capitalists air. Here we have with us. O'Neill, Deli Wall, Who is the general partner Amplify Partners and Founder co found with Mike Dauber. You guys have a very successful firm. I've known you since the beginning. When you started this firm. You guys were very successful on your third fund. Congratulations. Thank you. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in. It's always fun >> to be back. Yours? First time we're doing it in person. >> Local as it posted out of the conference. Yeah. Got our studio here. We're kicking off two days a week. Soon to be five days or weeks. Folks watching studio will be open for a lot more. Start up coverage. So great to have you in. And congrats on 10 years for you guys. 10 years of the Cube. 10th year of'em world would do in a big special. So nice we're excited. Well, for another great 10 years have been a lot of fun. A lot of interesting things happen those 10 years and again, you've been on the track to foot during that time. Yeah, on, by the way, Congratulations, fastly when public, thank you very much. And you also investing early investor in Data Dog, which you probably can't comment on, but they look like they're gonna go public. It's a great business >> and it's moving the right direction. And I think they got a lot of happy users. So there's more good stuff in the future for them. >> So you guys came out early, Made big bets. They're paying off two of them. Certainly one. Did another one come around the bikemore. Take it. Give us update on Amplify Partners Current fund. Third Fund gives the numbers. How much? What do you guys investing in with some of the thesis? What's the vision? >> Yeah, the vision is really simple. So amplify has been around from the beginning to work with technical founders. And really, if you wanted to stop there, you could you know, we're the people that engineers, academics, practitioners, operators that they go to get their first capital when they are thinking about starting a company or have a niche that they just feel the need to scratch. We tend to be first call for those folks a lot of times before they even know that they're going to start something. And so we've been doing that. Investing at seeding Siri's A with those people in these really technical enterprise markets now for seven years. Third fund most recent funds a $200,000,000 fund and that has us doing everything from crazy pie in the sky. First check into, ah, somebody with wild vision to now bigger Siri's a lead Rounds, which we're doing a lot more of two. >> So on the business model, just to get a clear personal congratulations Really good venturing by the way. That's what venture capital should be First money in, You know, people not doing the big round. So that's a congratulated, successful thank you now that you have 200,000,000 Plus, are you file doing follow on rounds? Are you getting in on the pro rat eyes? Are you guys following on? Because he's Sonny's big head, sir. Pretty, pretty big. >> Yeah, we've been doing that from the beginning and I think we've always wanted to be people who will start early and go along. We've invested in every round that fastly did we invested in every round that data dog did. So yeah, we're long term supporters and we can go along with the company's. But our differentiation isn't showing up and being the guys who were gonna lead your Siri's g round at a $3,000,000,000 valuation, which might as well be your AIPO were really there to help people figure out how to recruit a Kick ass team and figure out how to find product market fit and get that engine working >> and also help be a friend of the on the same side of the tables and rather than being the potentially out of the side. So the question is, I know you guys do step away and don't go on board. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don't. Was there a formula there? Do you go on the boards as further in the round? You happy the relief? It's a >> mix of, uh, you know, we talked about a couple of these cos fastly. I've been on the board since Day zero and data dog. I was never on the board. And you know what we do tend to be those pretty active. So people come work with us when they go. I've got this vision. I know where I want to go. But when I think about the hard things I've got to do over the 1st 2 to 3 years of a company's life, you know who I want by my side and not the person who wants to be my boss or tell me what to do or tell me why they need to own 1/3 of my company or control four seeds on my board. But who kind of what's it wants to sit shoulder to shoulder with me and probably has a long list of companies that look just like mine. Uh, that tell me that they're going to decent partner. >> We've had a lot of fun together. You and Mike the team and fly. Great party. Great networking. You gotta do that. >> Thank you. Great. Great party. Should hopefully my >> tombstone. Well, you gotta have the networking, and that's always good. Catalyst. That lubricant, if they say, is to get people going. But you guys were hanging out with us and the big data space that had Duke World. We saw Cloudera got to activist board members. That's not looking good there. It's unfortunate big friend of Amer Awadallah, but what ended up happening was cloud Right Cloud kind of changed the game a little bit, didn't change big data as an industry was seeing eye machine learning booming. So, you know, big data had duped change certainly cloud our speculation. But looking back over those 10 years, you saw the rise of the cloud really become Maur of a force than some people thought that most people thought Dev Ops really became the cultural shift. If I had to point to anything over the 10 years, it's Dev Ops, which is implies day to talk about your reaction to that because certainly independent on enabler, but also change the game a bit. >> It has its exploded. There's a couple things in there, so I think there's been a lot of innovation that's coming in the cloud platforms. There's a lot of innovation that cloud platforms have sucked up. We look at that. A lot of guys who back startups, one of things we always say is Hey, is this a primitive? Is this an infrastructure primitive? Because if it is, it's probably gonna be best delivered by a big platform unless you're able to deliver a very compelling and differentiated solution or service around it. And that's different. You know, it's it's different than having a solely a a p I accessible primitive that, you know you would swap out with the next thing if it was, you know, two cents cheaper or 2% faster. So when I think about what's been happening in the cloud, this kind of cloud to, oh, phenomena starts coming up, which is a lot of hell that excited very early on. It was about storage and compute and the real basic building blocks. But now you see people building really compelling experiences for developers, for database engineers for application developed owners all the way up and down this stack that yeah, there cloud companies, but they look a heck of a lot like more like solutions. And, you know, we've mentioned a couple companies in our portfolio that air going great. But there there's a ton of companies that we admire. You know, I look at what the folks that at Hashi Corp have done and what they continue to do. You know what a great business in in security and in giving people automation and configuration that that hasn't been there before. That's a phenomenal I >> mean, monitoring you mentioned is a monitoring to point out going on, he said. Pager duty Got a dining trace. These companies public this year, both public, and you got more coming around the corner, you got analytics is turning. That's calling it mean monitoring has been around for a long time. Observe ability. Now it's observe ability is the monitoring two point. Oh, and that's taking advantage of this Dev Ops Growth. Yeah, this is really the big deal. >> Yeah, well, it's if you're really getting into. And what a lot of this comes down to is velocity, right? A lot of people are trying to deliver software faster, deliver it more reliably, take away the bottlenecks that air between the vision that a product person has the fingers on the keyboard and the delightful experience that a user gets and that has a lot of gates. And I think one of the things that Dev Ops is really enabled is how do you shrink that time? And when you're trying to shrink that time and you're trying to say, Hey, if someone's can code it, we can push it well, that's a great way to do things except if you don't know what you've pushed and things were failing. So as velocity increases, the need to have an understanding of what's going on is going right alongside of it. >> So I want to get your thoughts on enterprise scale because cloud 2.0, it really is about enterprise. You guys have invested in pure cloud native startups. You've invested a networking invested in open sores. You guys house will have, ah, struggle. You are. But I have a strong view on Dev, Ops and Cloud to point out. But the enterprise is now experiencing that, and you guys also done a lot of enterprise deals. What's the intersection of the enterprise as it comes in with cloud two point? Oh, you're seeing Intelligent Edge being discussed Hybrid multi cloud, these air kind of the structural big kind of battle grounds with the changes. How do you guys look at that? How do you invest in that? How do you look for startups in that area? >> Yeah, well, I think we invest in it by starting from the perspective of the customer. What's the problem? And the problem is, a lot of times people know their security. There's compliance. And a lot of cases. There's a legacy infrastructure, right? But the it's not a green field environment is nowhere more applicable than in the enterprise. And so when you think about customers that are gonna need to accommodate the investments the last five and 10 years as well as this beautiful new vision of what the future is, you know you're talking basically talking about every enterprise CEOs problems. So we think a lot about companies that can solve those riel clear enterprise pain points security. One of them, um, we've had a bunch of successful cloud security companies that have been acquired already. We've got great stuff in compliance and data management and awesome company like Integris. That's up in Seattle and in really making sure that projects and software works well with legacy and more traditional enterprise environments, companies like replicated down in L. A. Um, you know, those folks have really figured out what it means to deliver modern on premise software and modern on premise really is, you know, in your V p c in your own environment in your own cloud. But that's on Prem Now that is what on Prem really looks like no one's rack and stack and servers in the closet. It's cloud operations. But if you're going to do that and you're gonna integrate all those legacy investments you've made in an audit, Maxis control et cetera, and you wanna put that together with modern cloud applications, your sass vendors, et cetera. You know you can't really do that in the native cloud unless you can really make it work for the enterprise. >> What is some of the market basket sectors that you see? Where the market second half of our market sectors that have a market basket of companies forming around it? You mentioned drivability. Obviously, that's one we're seeing. Clear map of a landscape developed there. Yeah, okay. Is there other areas just seeing a landscape around this cloud to point out that that are either knew or reconfigurations of other markets? Machine learning What's what. The buckets? What the market's out there that people are clustering around with some of the big >> high level. Well, I think one of things you're gonna see talking about new markets and people people. There's a bunch of It'll tell you what's already happening in history today. But if you want to talk about what's coming, that isn't really on people's radar screen, I think there's a lot that's happening in machine learning and data science infrastructure. And if you're a cloud vendor in the public cloud today, you are really ramping up quickly to understand what the suite of offerings are that you're gonna offer to both ML developers as well as traditional, you know, non machine learning natives to help them incorporate. You know what is really a powerful set of tools into their applications, and that could be model optimization. It could be, um, helping manage cost and scalability. It could be working on explain ability. It could be working on, um, optimizing performance with the introduction of different acceleration techniques. All of that stack is really knew. You know, people gobbled up tensorflow from Google, and that was a great example of what you could do if you turned on ml specific. You know, tooling for for developers. But I think there's a lot more coming there, and we're just starting to see the beginning. >> It's interesting you bring this up because I've been thinking about this and I really haven't been talking about a publicly other than the cloud to point. It was kind of a generic area, but you're kind of pointing out the benefits of what cloud does. I mean, the idea of not having to provision something or invest a lot of cash to just get something up and running fast with this machine learning tooling that's the big problem was stacking everything up and getting it all built >> right goes back. The velocity were talking about earlier, right? >> So velocity is the key to success. Could be any category to be video. It could be, um, you know, some anything. So we're >> also seeing another. The other side of it is, is another form of velocity is we're going to Seymour that's happening and things that look like low code or no code, so lowering the barriers for someone doesn't have to be a true native or an expert in domain, but can get all the benefits of working with, Let's say, ml tooling, right? How do you make this stuff more accessible? So you don't need a phD from Berkeley or Stanford to go figure it out right? That's a huge market. That's just stop happening. We've got a ah phenomenal come way company in New York called Runway ML that has huge adoption. Their platform and their magic is Hey, here's how we're gonna bring ML to the creative class. If you're creative and you want to take advantage of ML techniques and the videos you're working on, the content that you're creating, maybe there's something you can do here at the Cube. You know, these guys were figure out how to do that and saying, Look, we know you're not a machine learning native. Here's some simple, primitive >> Well, this screen, you know, doesn't talk about video, but serious. We have a video cloud of people have seen it out there, demo ing, seeing highlights going around. But you bring up a good point. If we want to incorporate State machine learning into that, I can just connect to a service. I mean slack, I think, is the poster child for how they grew a service that's very traditional a message board put a great you around it. But the A P I integrations were critical for that. They've created a great way to do that. So this is the whole service is game. Yeah, this is the velocity and adding functionality through service is >> Yeah, And this is this this idea that, um the workflow is what matters. I think it has not traditionally been a thing that we talked a lot about an enterprise infrastructure. It was. Here's your tool. It's better than the previous two or three years ago. Throat the new ones by this one. And now people are saying, Well, I don't want to be wed to the tool. What I really want to understand is a process in a workflow. How should I do this? Right? And if I If I do that right, then you're not gonna be opinionated as to whether I'm using Jiro for you know, you're for managing issues or something else or if it's this monitoring the other. >> So I got to get the VC perspective on this because what you just said, she pointed out, is what we've been talking about as the new I p. The workflow is the I P. That translates to an application which then could be codified and scaled up with infrastructure, cloud and other things that becomes the I P. How do you guys identify that? Is that do you first? Do you agree with that? And then, too, how do you invest into that? Because it's not your traditional few of things. If that's the case, do you agree with it? And if you do, how do you invest in? >> I've modified slightly. It's the marriage of understanding that work flow with the ability to actually innovate and do something different. That's the magic. And so I'll give you a popular problem that we see amongst a lot of start ups that come see us. Uh, I am the best, and I'll pick on machine learning for a second. I've you know, I've got the best natural language processing team in this market. We're going to go out and solve the medical coding and transcription and building problem. Hey, sounds awesome. You got some great tech. What do you know about medical transcription and building? Uh, we gotta go hire that person. Do you know how doctors work? Do you know how insurance companies work. That's kind of Byzantine. How? You know, payers and providers, we're gonna work together. We'll get back to you that companies not gonna be that successful in the marriage of that work. >> Full knowledge. Good idea. Yeah, expertise in the work edge of the workflow. >> Well, traditionally, you get excited about the expertise in attack and what you realize in a lot of these areas. If you care about work full, you care about solutions. It's about the marriage of the two. So when you look across our portfolio in applied A I and machine learning, we've actually got shockingly nine companies now that are at the intersection of, um, machine intelligence and health care, both pre clinical and clinical. And people are like, Wow, that's really surprising for, ah, for an infrastructure firm or an enterprise focus firm, like amplifying we're going. No, you know, there's there's groundbreaking ML technology, but we're also finding that people know there's really high value verticals and you put domain experts in there who really understand the solutions, give them powerful tools, and we're seeing customers just adopted >> and that, unlike the whole full stack kind of integration if you're gonna have domain experts in the edge of that work flow, you have the data gathered. It's a data machine learning. I can see the connection. They're very smart, very clever. So I want to get your thoughts on two areas around this cloud to point. I think that come up a lot. Certainly machine learning. You mentioned one of them, but these other ones come up all the time as 2.0, Problems and opportunities. Cloud one. Dato storage, Computing storage. No problem. Easy coat away. Cloud two point. Oh, Networking Insecurity. Yeah, So as the cloud as everyone went to the cloud and cloud one dato there now the clouds coming out of the cloud on premise. So you got edge of the network. So intelligent edge security if you're gonna have low code and no could have better be secure on the cover. So this has become too important. Points your reaction to networking and security as an investor in this cloud. 2.0, vision. >> Yeah, there's different pieces of it. So networking The closer you go to the edge, you say the word ej and edges, you know, a good bit of it is networking, and it's also executing with limited resource is because we could debate what the edge means for probably three hours. >> Writing is very go there, but what it certainly means is you >> don't have a big data center. That's Amazon scale to run your stuff. So you've got to be more efficient and optimized in some dimension. So people that are really at the intersection of figuring out how to move things around efficiently, deliver with speed and reduce late and see giving platforms to developers at the edge, which, you know if you've one of the big reasons for faster going public was to bring their edge. Developments story out to the larger market. Um, absolutely agree with that as it as it relates to broader security. We're seeing security started, stop being a cyclical trend and started becoming a secular one pretty much at the moment the cloud exploded and those things are not, You know, it's not just a coincidence, as people got Maur comfortable with giving up control of the stuff that that had their arms around for years, a perimeter right at the same time that they say we're going through everything online and connect everything up and get over developers whatever they want and bringing all our partners to our. The amount of access to systems grew dramatically right. At the same time, people handed over a lot of these traditional work flows and processes and pieces of infrastructure. So, yeah, I think a lot of people right now are really re platforming to understand what it means to be to build securely, to deploy securely, to run securely. And that's not always a firewall rack and stack boxes and scan packets type of a game. >> Yeah, I'm serious, certainly embedded. And everything's not just part of the applications everywhere. That's native. Yeah, final question for you. What do you guys investing in now? What's the hot areas you mention? Machine learning? Give a quick plug for your key investments. What's the pitch? The entrepreneur? >> Yeah, so again are pitched. The entrepreneur really hasn't changed from Day zero, and I don't see it changing anytime in the future, which is if you're a world beating technologists, you know you want someone who understand what it's like to work with other world beating technologists and take him from start upto I po And that's the thing that we know how to do both in previous career is as well as in the history of Amplified. That's the pitch. The things that we're really excited right now is, um, what does it look like when the best academic experts in the world who understand new areas of machine learning, who are really able to push the forefront of what we're seeing in reinforcement, learning and machine vision and natural language processing are able to think beyond the narrow confines of what the tech can do and really partner of the domain experts? So there is a lot of domain specific applied A i N M l that we're really excited about thes days. We talked about health care, but that is just the tip of the iceberg we're excited about. Financialservices were excited about traditional enterprise work flows. I'd say that that's one big bucket. Um, we're is excited about the developer as we've ever been. >> You know, you and I were talking before he came on camera for the cube conversation. Around our early days in the industry, we were riffing on the O S. I, you know, open systems interconnect, stack if you look at what that did, Certainly it didn't always get standardize. That kind of dinner is up with T C p I p layer, but still, it changed. That changed the game in the computing industry. Now, more than ever, this trend that we're on the next 10 years is really gonna be about stacks involving and just complete horizontal scalability. Elastic resource is new ways to develop Apple case. I mean a completely different ball game. Next 10 years, your your view of the next 10 years as this 1000 flowers start to bloom with stacks changing in new application methods. How do you see it? Yeah, well, >> what Os? I was a great example of this trend that we go through every few months. So many years. You, you, somebody create something new. It's genius. It's maybe a little bit harder than it needs to be in. At some point, you wanted to go mass market and you introduce an abstraction. And the abstractions continue to work as ways to bring more people in and allow them not to be tough to bottom experts. We've done it in the technology industry since the sixties, you know, thank you. Thank you. Semiconductor world All the way on up. But now I think the new abstractions actually look a heck of a lot like the cloud platforms. Right? They're abstractions. People don't. People want toe. Say things like, I am going to deploy using kubernetes. I want a container package. My application. Now let me think from that level. Don't have don't have me think about particular machines don't have to think about a particular servers. That's one great example developments. The same thing. You know, when you talk about low code and no Koda's ideas, it's just getting people away from the complexity of getting down in the weeds. So if you said, What's the next 10 years look like? I think it's going to be this continual pull of making things easier and more accessible for business users abstracting, abstracting, abstracting and then right up into the point where the abstractions get too generalized and then innovation will come in behind it. >> As I always say in the venture business, cool and relevant works and making things simple, easy use and reducing the steps it takes to do something. It's always a winning formula. >> That's pretty good. Don't >> start to fund a consistent Sydney Ellen. Of course not. The cube funds coming in the next 10 years celebrating 10 years. Great to see you. And it's been great to have you on this journey with you guys and amplify. Congratulations. Congrats on all your success is always a pleasure. Appreciate it. Take care. Okay. I'm here with steel. Dolly. Well, inside the key studios. I'm John for your Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Reinvent 2017, presented by AWS, intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas. We're at AWS Reinvent. Day one coverage of three days of theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the host this week. >> We've got two sets, our fifth year covering Reinvent. It's been great to watch. Every year we try to get in the VC panels. We just had Jerry Chen on from Greylock. We've got two more awesome friends of theCUBE in the community here. We've got Sunil Dhaliwal who is the founder of Amplify Ventures and Nick Sturiale with Ignition Partners. Guys, great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> Good to see you, John. >> Boy what a lineup it's been over the past three years, four years with Amazon, just watching them tear. Now it's all steamed ahead. Microsoft is totally gearing up. You can see them playing, what they're doing, they're pedaling as fast as they can. Google Play and the (mumbles) we're gonna compete on TensorFlow and other, little goodness, a lot more to go. You got Alibaba Cloud. Intel behind us is making (mumbles) chips. Good market on paper. >> Yeah. >> But we're seeing startups kind of get bought, not for what they wanted. Didn't go public. Skyhigh from Greylock. You see Barracuda going private. A lot of money to be made. Maybe the investment thesis of 200 million dollar fundings, that's over, is it over? Get a little bit of cash and get the critical mass and... >> Well, here's a question. Do you invest in these companies thinking every one of them is going to go public? Or do you think that a good number of them are gonna get acquired? And I think the investors that have done this for a while, and Nick's done this for what, like 45 years? >> I started when I was two, so. >> I've done this like two years less than you have, so I don't pretend I'm dramatically younger. But the reality is, these companies get acquired. And pretending that you're gonna pile into a company late and expect every single thing to go public I think is kind of crazy. And the people that are getting caught in that trap, I think they're gonna be in for a rude awakening. But look, you've got a billion six outcome for Barracuda, right? >> John: That was pretty damn good. >> And you know Skyhigh number hasn't been printed, but it wasn't a small one. Like, those are good outcomes. Those are good venture returns, if you were smart about where you got in. >> So I have a slightly different perspective, which is the real issue is that so much money moved into the late stage, and these companies thought that growth would always be linear even asymptotic. And so what happens is that their growth rate slows down and the cost of growth goes up, and suddenly the company's not quite as hot as it was a year ago, and so now the options for what they do have shrunk dramatically, and so you get exits like you just mentioned. And so part of the problem is is that entrepreneurs and investors really have to have a sober view of what is a business model that's durable over time and which ones really are gonna start to leak in their later phases. >> Well it's kind of a planted question for you guys, because you're early stage in Amplify. I've been following you guys, do a great job. You guys do a range of early, end growth. >> Mostly early though. >> The days of just laying back and kicking your feet up and throwing cash at stuff is over. You actually gotta do the work. It sounds like old school VCs. Greg Sands and I talk about this all the time. You gotta go in and be venturing. You gotta actually make it work. >> And that sucks, I was just told I put my feet up, I put some money in and then I get a distribution check at the end of it. >> That's what everyone thinks you guys do. What do you guys do every day? Take us through your day. >> It looks a lot like that except... >> It's so easy to be a VC, all you do is okay, yes, no, okay that's good. >> We got a dartboard. >> All you gotta do is bet on the good ones. >> Yeah. >> That's so easy. >> So there are what, 14,000 startups in the bay area, how many of them are worthwhile you think? >> It's a lot of work. Well old school, let's go back to the old school tactics, because you're seeing a couple things going on. You guys essentially pointing it out, you gotta do the work and pick the winners. But now that the business models are changing, right? You're seeing Amazon just ignoring conventional wisdom, and they're winning. The game is changing a bit in the business model side. How are you guys looking at that as you make investments? So you got the classic venture, bet on a good team, do all that stuff. What do you guys look at now in the marketplace for fit, scale, longevity, durability? >> I mean the stuff we care about the most is are you going after a big problem? Because I think a lot of the stuff we see, even with your great teams and great technologies, but you step back and you actually think, you know, that isn't a company, that's a product, or that's not even a product, that's a feature. And I think that's the natural outgrowth of what happens when you got 14,000 startups in the bay area, is there aren't 14,000 products that are companies worth having. What you have is, probably 12,000 features, 1500 products, and then like 500 real companies. And that's probably the biggest filter that you gotta apply on the way in, and it's maybe the hardest one to solve for, which is, roll this out seven years, nine years, because that's really what you're talking about when you're talking about building a public durable company is, what does this market look like way down the road? And is that a thing that can stand alone? And that's really, I think, the difference between the companies and the investors that do really well and the ones that can kind of squeeze by, knocking out a couple interesting outcomes. >> My favorite thing is that when you say we just pick the winners, is that nobody knows who the winner is a priori. If you knew that, that market would be gone already. And most successful companies that you read about, and they talk about the (mumbles) investors that were in it early, that's all BS. It's a million good things happen along the way, serendipity, a ton of hard work on the management team and the employees. So this idea that things are preordained is just silly. And I would tell you that you look at most really successful companies today, their business model is completely different than the one that the venture person backed. >> I mean it's always the classic, because I remember when I first started an entrepreneur in the 90s, the question was what's your exit strategy? It was a legitimate question at that time, and it was kind of a peg mark, okay, when I build a growing company and have an exit. Now the exits are, as you mentioned, buyers. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If Microsoft's in a race to fill in their white spaces, man, I would crop up and get the crops growing, right? So you can say, okay, Microsoft. So you guys gotta kind of do a little bit of homework there, do some relationship work, and you guys are close to Microsoft, so. >> Yes. >> I mean, is that kind of the new playbook? >> Yes. >> How should entrepreneurs posture to this? I mean obviously they're gonna try to build a durable venture, but they don't want to be zig-zagging too much or pivoting. >> No. >> I mean Nick made the point earlier, which I think is absolutely the one to focus on, which is when you raise a ton of capital your options start to shrink. The more money you raise at the higher and higher price, there's somebody you gotta serve who's thinking about the even bigger pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And honestly, when we look at, I'll take one company in our portfolio for example, and I think the Splunk story is right up there with it, If you look at Datadog, Datadog's huge here at this show. There's purple shirts everywhere and a massive booth, and they've been here for five years running or four years running. That business has barely touched the last round of capital they raised, let alone the round of capital before that. The capital efficiency of that business, not only is it gonna make it a great outcome, but it's gonna give them tons of options of things that they can do. And, you know, they'll get to make every single decision they make, whether it's going to new product or whatever, position of strength. And not a lot of companies do that. >> So Splunk started in 2004. Guess how much total the company raised before it went public? >> How much? >> Forty million. Guess how much it spent up to the time it went public? >> John: How much? >> John: Twenty five. >> So it went public... >> So very capital efficient? >> John: Think about that. >> Yes, and it's worth 9 billion now. So you had several hundred millionaires created out of Splunk, and I would submit to you if Splunk was started today, the investor community would have killed it. >> John: Why? >> Because 18 Brinks trucks would have backed up and dumped a billion dollars on top of it, and buried it in too much money without allowing the company to get the time to become a fully viable system. >> Sunil: Yeah. >> So the too much cash can create toxicity for the startup? >> Money rarely makes the company. Money rarely makes the company. >> Lew Cirne was on earlier, founder of New Relic. Another capital efficient company. >> Great company. >> Went public all time high. Love that guy. He's such a strong, he wrote some code last week. He said, if you can help your partners be successful, in referring to Amazon. >> Man: Amazon. >> Then you can be a great ecosystem partner. So the question now is that's not a bad deal for a company to jump into the Cloud game and be a really good partner and build a kick-ass product. >> Yes. >> And look like a feature maybe on paper, and then sequence to an opportunity. Thoughts on that? It's certainly lucrative if you can get the flywheel going. Right? >> So you don't want to build a company whose basic thesis is helping Amazon or Azure or Google. That is a dead company. If, however, you pull revenue for one of those three in a way that's interesting to them, they will support you all day long. We have two companies in particular, Icertis and KenSci that are pulling a lot of revenue for Azure right now. And Microsoft gives them extraordinary support. >> That's the nuance right there. That's the nuance. Pulling revenue, value, creation. >> Yes. >> Well, they've created Amazon and Microsoft and Google, to a degree, as they get going. They've created a really interesting model, which is unlike your traditional ecosystem, hub-and-spoke model, where someone's gonna capture (mumbles) control of the sale, etc., etc. The smart thing that Amazon's done is they say, you use whatever you want, we're gonna bill you for the primitives until the cows come home, and as long as you're not standing in between Amazon and their primitives revenue, you're gonna do great. >> All right, final question for you guys. First of all, great conversation on the capital markets, certainly it's crazy. We always try to cover it, but here's a thought exercise. Last night we were at the analyst summit. We were talking to some analysts, and the question was, the airplane's going down, and you're in a board meeting, I gotta pick a parachute. There are only three parachutes, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which one do you grab? You got 10 seconds. >> To sell to or? >> No, just grab a parachute, and you hope that it opens and you live. Pick a parachute. >> Amazon, >> I'm going with Amazon. This one isn't hard. >> Microsoft and Google. The only person who's gonna grab the Microsoft parachute is the guy who's been with Microsoft for 30 years and knows they're not gonna let him down. If you're a forward-facing company you're going with Amazon, and if you're nuts, you're gonna grab Google right now. No offense to my friends at Google. >> So we're sitting here at Reinvent, so I feel like that's a trick question. (laughing) >> Well, that's good. If you're in the Microsoft ecosystem, they do take care of their own. >> They do. >> Their DNA is tuned to ISVs, they're very good at it. >> and that's their track record. Well, the one guys says, well it depends. By the time you argue with the parachute the planes (mumbles). But it does depend on your business. >> Sunil: Yes. >> Nick: Yes. >> But it is hard not to look at this show and say this is what electricity was in 1920. >> Final question, obviously Amazon is looking at all steam ahead, business models are changing, you're starting to see the top of the stack develop nicely, moving up the stacks seems to be the trend. You got this decentralized market up there. Bitcoin hit 10,000. A lot of smart alpha geeks, including some of the guys here at theCUBE team, is looking at ways to kind of leverage this decentralization trend in a way that's productive. Yet there's a lot of scams out there with these ICOs. Decentralization good or just another infrastructure dynamic? Thoughts on this whole decentralized token economics wave? Also the FCC has regulations now in it. Is it disrupting VC? Your thoughts, Nick. >> Do remember what H.L. Mencken said? "A fool and his money are soon parted." so I think anyone who sits there and says I understand completely what an ICO is and what I'm buying and doesn't view it as something that'll be a tax deduction for next year, I think is gonna be in for a bumpy ride. >> Get out your Gartner Hype Cycle. And if you don't know what it is, go look it up, and there's a spot right now of where we are in the hype cycle, and I think the movement my finger tells you where we are, but this is coming, but this comes afterwards. >> I heard this argument, the web is just for kids. No one will ever use the web. Browsers is a toy. >> A K memory is all you'll ever need. >> Yeah, but guess what, guess what, 2001 happened before we got to 2017, so let's never forget where we are at that kind of hype. >> ICOs are like subprime mortgages, and I speak Spanish and I can't even read the thing. That is what an ICO is. >> So certainly hyped up. Winter's coming, we'll see. All right, we got the VCs here, Nick and Sunil. We got Amplify and Ignition Partners here in theCUBE. More live coverage day one after this short break.

on the ground from galvanized San Francisco its excused covering amplified woman's bitch night here's Jeff hey welcome back here ready Jeff Rick here with a cute we're at galvanized a downtown San Francisco at the girls in tech amplify event which is is women's pitch night so I think they have ten entrepreneurs here pitching their company pitching their ideas somebody's gonna walk away with 10,000 bucks some computers and other fun stuff so we're happy to be here share the stories with you because this is where innovation happens and our next guest is Ellen health can hard do I get that right from Stila welcome thank you first I've had your pitch go pretty good yes okay so your project is called still emotion so what is still emotion still emotion is that pocket-sized secure system it's had a little sample here okay so this is what it looked like so it's a smaller device that you put on anything that you wants to be still like a bag or computer or a stroller or on a window and and if something moves that shouldn't you get an instant notification to your phone or to your SmartWatch okay so it's got accelerometers and those types of things in there that it's really all about motions yeah little app onto your phone or whatever exactly okay so so there's a lot of action right now with tile and those types of things how is it different kind of what's the different value propositions well it's as I said it's kind of the opposite instead of like finding your thinks it's not losing them in the first place so it's it's a preventative device rather than it's proactive instead of reactive okay but it does have similar functionality as well so if you forget your bag at the cafe you will you will get a notification when the distance is Williams contact but yeah if you're sitting here with me and your bag walks away the tiles the trackers won't help versus the Stila would tell you directly someone is touching your your bag right so how did you come up with the idea I was actually learning how to program Arduino boards I I was running an hour working at a hardware accelerator and my background is more sorry ated but I'm I'm a geek at heart so I had like this little Arduino board that I that I learned how to code with so I I just I literally I'm so I'm so geeky I have Arduino boards in my purse but yes I do so this is a little computer kind of so we were sitting in like learning this at the cafe and I dropped it on my bike and when I lifted it up it started blinking and I'll say you know what that would be great if it did something else to plate and that's why I came up with the idea and how long ago is that so give a little just about kind of history the company how many people are you kind of where you on yeah and the development phase still prototype well I also had idea because I've done a hundred startup before but it took like four years and I'm kind of I wasn't willing to give it four years so it's like is it possible to I like the idea but I didn't know if I want to commit so much time and effort and money so I was like can I make it in a hundred days it's it possible to start a Harvard company in a hundred days so I kind of challenged myself to do it did you have a regular job while you're doing this a normal job i I worked this Australia consulting because I had to fund myself so I had no money no money no funding no team no nothing yeah and I was like yeah I'm gonna make this little button so I did this and then I literally make prototypes in clay and paint and like I talk to people I I got a team together and I did patent applications and got apps together and did yeah so I went from this to functioning Harvard product in 100 days and then I was like I actually want to do this so I kind of quit my job and and made sure that I went all in and got a team together and some of the basic investors to help me out and then yeah we got going and it took a hundred days to make the first product and then it had taken almost a year to build the company right right this is just the start like this is the first product and they will have a whole line of things that we're doing so we're you know what are you gonna do with the money kind of is it for scaling is it for more licensing what are you gonna yeah we just closed our campaign okay on Friday last week and we are now in the last batch of prototyping so I'm going down to our hardware engineers in Orange County next week to finalize the production before we kind of go into tooling and then after that we're doing final stages of the app and then we're going to send Jen in China where produce and started tooling and manufacturing process so we're shipping and March next year more chips here awesome so great story and you said you've got team members from all over the world five of seven continents you're leveraging a lot of others technology like accelerometers to pull this thing together in such a short period of time yeah well very exciting well good luck to you and I hope get some of that money tonight thank you all right we'll keep an eye and worship people go to get more information about the company yet my still of calm my still at ICON spelled STI ll a all right my STI ll a with my in the front awesome all right Alan well thank you very much thank you all right I'm Jeff Rick we are at the girls of tech amplify pitch night here at galvanize in San Francisco we'll be right back after this short break

>>Block on the ground from galvanize San Francisco. It's the cue covering amplify women's pitch night. Now here's John furrier. >>Okay. Hello everyone. We are on the ground here in San Francisco at the galvanize incubator. I'm John fur, the founder of Silicon angle media, just the cube on the ground. And we're here. Michelle Lin. Who's the co-founder of CloudFlare and also head of user experience, giving a fireside chat here at the girls in tech amplify event about women in entrepreneurship. Co-founder entrepreneur yourself. Welcome to our on the ground. Thanks for joining me. >>Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here, >>John. So Ashley we've been, we love the women in tech. We just spent an amazing time at Grace Hopper, which 16,000 people. I was one of 1000 men. So I felt I loved it actually. So I love many women in tech, but here more importantly in the bay area. And we're in San Francisco, Silicon valley entrepreneurship is in the blood. >>Yes. Yeah, no, we're so lucky where we, where we live. I feel like, you know, so many people, when you spend time in the valley, you realize, you know, everyone's talking about the next great idea. It's, you know, you go to a party, everyone's talking about what, what they're working on or an idea they have. It's not like that everywhere. And so we're really lucky where we get to live and, and have the resources failed to execute on these different, sometimes crazy ideas. >>So you're giving a fireside chat. You just came off the stage here with all these women entrepreneurs to pitch tonight, tonight. So it's all about getting the pitch out there, talking about your experience. Obviously CloudFlare, your company, you co-founded and head of user experience. You're doing a great job. Great success. You guys, you great customer base, great growth. What, what did you talk about? >>Well, what, well, what did I talk about? So the, you know, we launched at an event like that six years ago. And so, you know, what I talked about with the audience was I was in your seat six years ago, and now six years later, we have a great business. We have real customers that are using CloudFlare. We help make the internet faster, safer, better for more than 4 million internet properties, 15,000 new sites sign up every single day, whether you're small business or large business, a blog, an API, an app, you can use CloudFlare to be fast and safe. And, and what I shared was I was in your seat six years ago, and here are some lessons or ahas I've had along the way that I wish I had known. >>How did you guys get started? Take a minute to explain the story. Were you guys rubbing nickels together? Did you have the master idea? Was it heavily funded on the front end? Take us through the journey, the beginning. >>So we started to work on this idea of if you are a small business or somebody with content online, how can you be as fast, as safe as somebody like google.com? google.com is the fastest and most secure internet property on the internet. How can you make that available to anybody with internet property? And there are over 350 million and we said, feels like there's an opportunity. And that's how we started. And so we started with, could we execute on this? And we started to make progress. We were students when we started. And >>So that helps in the overhead. >>It, it did help us the overhead and whether you're a student or whether you're doing it as part of Y Combinator or, >>Or moonlighting or project >>Lighting, there's lots of different ways that people do. But we were, students's great time to start working on a business idea cuz you're right, your overhead's very low. And when we graduated, we felt so much passion around the idea. We moved out to California to give it a go full time. And when I think back now, I think what was I thinking? I mean, it was, >>Was it blind? Faith just let's go out there. >>It wasn't blind faith. We had, we had, we had done some initial validation, but we didn't have a working product. And so it was early. Yeah. And we came out here to build it, but we, but we believed so strongly in it that we wanted to give it a go. We kind of said, feels like we're onto something. You felt it. I felt like that I'm so I moved, we packed our things in a U-Haul. We were living in Boston. My, my, my co-founder and I, we packed our things in U-Haul him and his mother drove the U-Haul from Boston to San Francisco. >>That's a good mom, >>A very good mom. You, >>The mom award for >>That mom, mom award. And, and we showed up and, and you know, for the next year and a half >>Working good mom become a user. Cause you know, the mom test is always key for right. Yes. Products, validation, especially head of user experience. >>Right, right. Exactly. We, she is not, but we have a lot of small businesses, bloggers, large businesses. Yeah. A lots different types of customers, nonprofits that now use CloudFlare to be fast, safe, and available around the world. But it was really this conviction around. We felt like we could democratize the web. We felt like if you were a business with something to say, we wanted to give you the same resources as Google's technical operations team. >>You know, one of the things I'm observing, I've been out here now, 18 years, I moved from Boston as well in 1999. And when I sold my company out here, it's like, okay, I have to be here. It's so much different, different culture and picked up and, and moved. Right? So what's your advice now? Cuz now the world's different. There's so much more entrepreneurship because the democratization of obviously mobile and cloud have really created a low bar to get into the game. And so you're seeing a lot more diversity, certainly not enough, but a lot more. What's your advice of folks? Even my youngest daughter, who's a sophomore in college. They're oh dad, I got a nap. I'm gonna do this app. I'm like, okay, hold now, settle down. What's your advice. Cause this is now kind of breeding and people are trying to find out when do they know the gut? Is the gut feeling? Do you trust your gut? What is that feeling? It's like falling in love for the first time. You don't, you really know. And so you do it, but you know, I'm saying it's one of those things. >>Well, one thing I've learned is don't give relationship advice. So, you know, I, I, I, you know, the, so I guess the same kind of goes up to the entrepreneurs, but there are a couple things that I've learned, you know, again, we've we started CloudFlare six years ago and things are going very well. We're really proud of I I get up every day and I think, wow, I'm so proud of the work we're doing. And so, you know, I think it's, I love the idea that people are dabbling and, and that it is much easier to pursue these ideas. And I think that's amazing and we should, we should, you know, hold onto that dearly. But doing things as a side project versus full time are two different things. Right? And I, so the questions that entrepreneurs or some founding teams, good questions, limit tests that they can ask themselves are, do I believe so passionately about this idea that I want to commit the next eight to 10 years to it? >>Cause that's how long it is. It's eight to 10 years. This is not, doesn't take a one. It doesn't take two years. It is average time to exit. If you take all the startups is eight to 10 years. And so it's like, do I wanna work on this from the next eight to 10 years? And when we started CloudFlare six years ago, you know, we would go around and say, Hey, we wanna help make their should out a better place. And people would laugh at us. They said, that's an audacious goal. Why you never, but we, I >>Love that many J outta something, the contrarians are the ones who do it. I mean, maybe Nutton DRA. I remember he just went public. He was laughed at light speed, funded him and look at no one got that until four years in like, whoa, he thought differently. So trust your gut and you gotta have a belief. Well, >>It's just this idea of like, do I wanna do this? Like, is there something big here that I wanna work? Is this a, a, like a media enough problem and idea that I wanna work on it for the next eight, 10 years? Yeah. And if the answer is yes, then it's a great, then, then yes, you should keep doing it. And then, and then the second thing is, can I attract all the right people to make it happen? >>Talking about the team dynamic? Cause I know, you know, I've done a bunch of ventures myself and I always, again, I agree with you. I do give relationship advice. I just, but that's me. I always say, be careful on the team. You can't dial a team. You can't like just dial up and say, I need a co-founder or I need this person. It really is a unique selection process. Your thoughts on that, because it also depends in the dynamic funding cycle. If you're self-funding or your bootstrapping to revenue, certainly if you're contrarian, no one's gonna get funding. Maybe some seed will come your way, but that won't last long. Yeah. So the team really is gonna be the, the make or break your thoughts on team selection, team process. >>It, I most important thing I do every day is, is the team we work with. It's can you attract the right people to come work at CloudFlare can make, can you set them up for success so they can do their best work. And I spend 99% of my time thinking about that. And it's never enough, like it's >>In the early days when you guys were moving out here, did you have funding? >>When we moved out here? We didn't. We, we didn't, we, we, so we didn't have funding. When we moved out here, there's three, co-founders working on it, making progress. And then it became, >>Did you make revenue first or get funding? Seat funding? >>We, so we worked on it. We kinda felt like we had a lot of conviction. We there's a small team, the three of us, we ended up raising money and then we hired folks and then we built the product. So we definitely had funding before revenue, but we, the founders worked on it before, before anyone else, because we just couldn't. And >>Who were the investors? >>Vero, peon, NEA, union square ventures outta New York. And then some, >>Several, they had a good sizeable and tier one VC's NEA. Certainly great VC. Yeah, we have great, great history. >>Yes, we have. Excellent. We I'm, I'm very biased, >>But yes, Fred contrarian, which is good. The contrarians usually get the big hits. >>Well, the, the union score ventures outta a New York, they really understand how the internet works. I mean, that's their whole thesis. Yeah. And I mean, they're very technical venture capitalist from, I mean, Fred, Brad, Albert, I mean, Andy, they all really understand how the internet works. And when you're building a company like CloudFlare, where we're helping make the internet a better place, that's very useful that they understand how the internet works. >>So I gotta ask you, we have a minute left. I want to get the women perspective because I was just talking at world of Watson, certainly. And then at Cuban with some of the red hat folks and talking about diversity, and I said, look at 50% of the population is women. Those are the users now. So like, why are male gonna be developing the product? We need to have a perspective. So, you know, cause we're on this whole mansplaining thing. And I'm like, well, mansplaining is also software too. If men are developing the software. So there is an aspect of user user experience that has to take into account the target audience. >>Yes, absolutely. >>The easy answer is get more women to design product, but how do you, how do you, how do you think about that? And what's your thoughts on the current state of the, the, >>So there are more men than women in technology. Yeah, absolutely. But there are a lot of women and it's not like I know every single one of them, there are a lot of us and they're working on so many interesting. There are so many amazing women working on interesting problems in tech. And I think that's great. And so showing more of those stories to inspire the next generation women is awesome. I think that there are a lot of women who are trying to figure out what they wanna do with their career, might making a career switch. If you're at all interest in technology, it's a great industry. You get, you get to work on very hard problems. At scale. People are very smart and talented. It's a growing industry, which means financially there's often like a good outcome. And so I hope that more women will get into the industry. >>You know, surfaces, the surface area of opportunities are expanding too big data as attracted a whole nother realm of visualization. Where are the geeky data geek artists where are not just not just software anymore. It's an increased surface area, >>Health tech. How do you do? I mean, there's so many different. I mean, technology is a touches, so many different facets of our lives. So for folks who are like, well, I don't know anything about it, but I'm kind of interested, encourage, again, women and men to say, this is a great industry that you should really take seriously. And we need more and more smart, passionate people who are really willing to roll their sleeves and work hard to come and execute because there's so much opportunity ahead that there's more opportunity ahead of us than behind us. It's a great industry to pursue >>Michelle final question. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now. >>The coolest thing I'm working on right now? Well, we, I, the favorite part of my job is people. So I get to hire lots of great folks all the time. So that's what I love the most. And so it's hiring recruiting, building out the different function teams, both here in San Francisco as well around the world. We have a London office, the Singapore office. That's what I love the best. So that's the coolest thing. Always people, people, people, the second coolest is we're thinking about our 2017 plan, right? We're at the end of 2016, it's, what's the product roadmap look like for next year? What does that, how does the budget stack up against that? And I think that's pretty opportunity because I think we've done a very good job as a business executing to date. But as you go through that excu exercise of saying, Hey, what does 2017 look like? And having to like write it down. You realize we have so many things left to do ahead of us. And I think that's a good place to be in >>Final, final question. Since I always get these questions after my final question, which is becoming part of the course with great guests like yourself, what is the, the, the, the, your advice for folks out there, whether it's small, medium size business or enterprise to a large scale enterprise customer who says, you know what we are on this digital transformation, we are gonna be cloud native. We're implementing more DevOps, our developers now on the front lines of the business value, how should they be thinking about how to craft their apps, their experiences and their teams. >>So we work with a lot of large organizations who, who are saying, Hey, how do we make sure we have all our security aligned? Or how do we make sure we, we have a global audience? How do we make sure it's faster around the world? And these are hard problems that they have to deal with. And I would say that large organizations respond in two ways. And I think some that are very, very good. This is a lesson that I think other large organizations don't necessarily no one's telling them is we have, the days of sending out RFPs are kind of, don't do that. Don't send on RFP. What, what, what, what is a yeah, >>Agile, right? >>Well, or in RFPs, they serve a purpose. It's fine, but what's better. We have a lot of large organizations that say, here are the problems we need to solve. We think that your team is smart or technical, or we'd like to get to know your team. Could you help us solve these problems and how, and it becomes a much more collaborative process and you basically large organiza, large organizations get the power of our engineering team to help solve their problems, to help educate their engineering team of a ways to approach it. And the really smart large organizations are doing that. And so it's not an RFP, it's saying, Hey, these are the problems. They come to companies like CloudFlare or others saying, Hey, you guys seem like you're gonna be around for a while. How could you help us solve these problems? And the good companies will say, well, we can help you with these. We can't help you with those. Yeah. Go talk to these people for those >>To lock in one year, licenses are like, >>And >>It's not even budgeting differently. >>Right. And it might not even be, you know, necessarily, Hey, it's not a contrary. It's more always have a conversation and you start to develop a relationship. Okay. Now we're ready to buy. And you know, each other, it's, again, it's hardship, it's a partnership and some large organizations approach kind of the digital transformation that way. And I feel like that's a very smart way versus, oh, this is our problem. Here's list of companies. We're gonna ask solutions to and get you to bid on it, which is fine once you know what the problem is. But there's a whole step before during these digital transformations, if you're a large business of, I don't even know how to characterize the exact problems I'm solving and the great organizations are saying, let's go get some of this, this tech talent from these small organizations to help us think through how to solve it >>And work together, hold >>Hands, work >>Together, hold hands across the bridge to the future. >>And so that's something where I think that that can be a great leverage point. >>Michelle Adeline co-founder of CloudFlare. Congratulations on your success. Go get CloudFlare, great product we're gonna do that I've been convinced to do. We should be using it@siliconangle.com and the cube. Thanks so much. Thank you for joining me. I'm John fur here on the ground at Galvan I in San Francisco for the girls in tech startup pitch competition. We right back with more. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to AWS Startup Showcase, I'm John Furrier, your host. This is the Hero panel, the AWS Heroes. These are folks that have a lot of experience in Open Source, having fun building great projects and commercializing the value and best practices of Open Source innovation. We've got some great guests here. Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer, Isovalent. CUBE alumni, great to see you. Brian LeRoux, who is the Co-founder and CTO of begin.com. Erica Windisch who's an Architect for Developer Experience. AWS Hero, also CUBE alumni. Casey Lee, CTO Gaggle. Doing some great stuff in ed tech. Great collection of experts and experienced folks doing some fun stuff, welcome to this conversation this CUBE panel. >> Hi. >> Thanks for having us. >> Hello. >> Let's go down the line. >> I don't normally do this, but since we're remote and we have such great guests, go down the line and talk about why Open Source is important to you guys. What projects are you currently working on? And what's the coolest thing going on there? Liz we'll start with you. >> Okay, so I am very involved in the world of Cloud Native. I'm the chair of the technical oversight committee for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. So that means I get to see a lot of what's going on across a very broad range of Cloud Native projects. More specifically, Isovalent. I focus on Cilium, which is it's based on a technology called EBPF. That is to me, probably the most exciting technology right now. And then finally, I'm also involved in an organization called OpenUK, which is really pushing for more use of open technologies here in the United Kingdom. So spread around lots of different projects. And I'm in a really fortunate position, I think, to see what's happening with lots of projects and also the commercialization of lots of projects. >> Awesome, Brian what project are you working on? >> Working project these days called Architect. It's a Open Source project built on top of AWSM. It adds a lot of sugar and terseness to the SM experience and just makes it a lot easier to work with and get started. AWS can be a little bit intimidating to people at times. And the Open Source community is stepping up to make some of that bond ramp a little bit easier. And I'm also an Apache member. And so I keep a hairy eyeball on what's going on in that reality all the time. And I've been doing this open-source thing for quite a while, and yeah, I love it. It's a great thing. It's real science. We get to verify each other's work and we get to expand and build on human knowledge. So that's a huge honor to just even be able to do that and I feel stoked to be here so thanks for having me. >> Awesome, yeah, and totally great. Erica, what's your current situation going on here? What's happening? >> Sure, so I am currently working on developer experience of a number of Open Source STKS and CLI components from my current employer. And previously, recently I left New Relic where I was working on integrating with OpenTelemetry, as well as a number of other things. Before that I was a maintainer of Docker and of OpenStack. So I've been in this game for a while as well. And I tend to just put my fingers in a lot of little pies anywhere from DVD players 20 years ago to a lot of this open telemetry and monitoring and various STKs and developer tools is where like Docker and OpenStack and the STKs that I work on now, all very much focusing on developer as the user. >> Yeah, you're always on the wave, Erica great stuff. Casey, what's going on? Do you got some great ed techs happening? What's happening with you? >> Yeah, sure. The primary Open Source project that I'm contributing to right now is ACT. This is a tool I created a couple of years back when GitHub Actions first came out, and my motivation there was I'm just impatient. And that whole commit, push, wait time where you're testing out your pipelines is painful. And so I wanted to build a tool that allowed developers to test out their GitHub Actions workflows locally. And so this tool uses Docker containers to emulate, to get up action environment and gives you fast feedback on those workflows that you're building. Lot of innovation happening at GitHub. And so we're just trying to keep up and continue to replicate those new features functionalities in the local runner. And the biggest challenge I've had with this project is just keeping up with the community. We just passed 20,000 stars, and it'd be it's a normal week to get like 10 PRs. So super excited to announce just yesterday, actually I invited four of the most active contributors to help me with maintaining the project. And so this is like a big deal for me, letting the project go and bringing other people in to help lead it. So, yeah, huge shout out to those folks that have been helping with driving that project. So looking forward to what's next for it. >> Great, we'll make sure the SiliconANGLE riders catch that quote there. Great call out. Let's start, Brian, you made me realize when you mentioned Apache and then you've been watching all the stuff going on, it brings up the question of the evolution of Open Source, and the commercialization trends have been very interesting these days. You're seeing CloudScale really impact also with the growth of code. And Liz, if you remember, the Linux Foundation keeps making projections and they keep blowing past them every year on more and more code and more and more entrance coming in, not just individuals, corporations. So you starting to see Netflix donates something, you got Lyft donate some stuff, becomes a project company forms around it. There's a lot of entrepreneurial activity that's creating this new abstraction layers, new platforms, not just tools. So you start to see a new kickup trajectory with Open Source. You guys want to comment on this because this is going to impact how fast the enterprise will see value here. >> I think a really great example of that is a project called Backstage that's just come out of Spotify. And it's going through the incubation process at the CNCF. And that's why it's front of mind for me right now, 'cause I've been working on the due diligence for that. And the reason why I thought it was interesting in relation to your question is it's spun out of Spotify. It's fully Open Source. They have a ton of different enterprises using it as this developer portal, but they're starting to see some startups emerging offering like a hosted managed version of Backstage or offering services around Backstage or offering commercial plugins into Backstage. And I think it's really fascinating to see those ecosystems building up around a project and different ways that people can. I'm a big believer. You cannot sell the Open Source code, but you can sell other things that create value around Open Source projects. So that's really exciting to see. >> Great point. Anyone else want to weigh in and react to that? Because it's the new model. It's not the old way. I mean, I remember when I was in college, we had the Pirate software. Open Source wasn't around. So you had to deal under the table. Now it's free. But I mean the old way was you had to convince the enterprise, like you've got a hard knit, it builds the community and the community manage the quality of the code. And then you had to build the company to make sure they could support it. Now the companies are actually involved in it, right? And then new startups are forming faster. And the proof points are shorter and highly accelerated for that. I mean, it's a whole new- >> It's a Cambrian explosion, and it's great. It's one of those things that it's challenging for the new developers because they come in and they're like, "Whoa, what is all this stuff that I'm supposed to figure out?" And there's no right answer and there's no wrong answer. There's just tons of it. And I think that there's a desire for us to have one sort of well-known trot and happy path, that audience we're a lot better with a more diverse community, with lots of options, with lots of ways to approach these problems. And I think it's just great. A challenge that we have with all these options and all these Cambrian explosion of projects and all these competing ideas, right now, the sustainability, it's a bit of a tricky question to answer. We know that there's a commercialization aspect that helps us fund these projects, but how we compose the open versus the commercial source is still a bit of a tricky question and a tough one for a lot of folks. >> Erica, would you chime in on that for a second. I want to get your angle on that, this experience and all this code, and I'm a new person, I'm an existing person. Do I get like a blue check mark and verify? I mean, these are questions like, well, how do you navigate? >> Yeah, I think this has been something happening for a while. I mean, back in the early OpenStack days, 2010, for instance, Rackspace Open Sourcing, OpenStack and ANSU Labs and so forth, and then trying, having all these companies forming in creating startups around this. I started at a company called Cloudccaling back in late 2010, and we had some competitors such as Piston and so forth where a lot of the ANSUL Labs people went. But then, the real winners, I think from OpenStack ended up being the enterprises that jumped in. We had Red Hat in particular, as well as HP and IBM jumping in and investing in OpenStack, and really proving out a lot of... not that it was the first time, but this is when we started seeing billions of dollars pouring into Open Source projects and Open Source Foundations, such as the OpenStack Foundation, which proceeded a lot of the things that we now see with the Linux Foundation, which was then created a little bit later. And at the same time, I'm also reflecting a little bit what Brian said because there are projects that don't get funded, that don't get the same attention, but they're also getting used quite significantly. Things like Log4j really bringing this to the spotlight in terms of projects that are used everywhere by everything with significant outsized impacts on the industry that are not getting funded, that aren't flashy enough, that aren't exciting enough because it's just logging, but a vulnerability in it brings every everything and everybody down and has possibly billions of dollars of impact to our industry because nobody wanted to fund this project. >> I think that brings up the commercialization point about maybe bringing a venture capital model in saying, "Hey, that boring little logging thing could be a key ingredient for say solving some observability problems so I think let's put some cash." Again then we'd never seen that before. Now you're starting to see that kind of a real smart investment thesis going into Open Source projects. I mean, Promethease, Crafter, these are projects that turned off companies. This is turning up companies. >> A decade ago, there was no money in Dev tools that I think that's been fully debunked now. They used to be a concept that the venture community believed, but there's just too much evidence to the contrary, the companies like Cash Court, Datadog, the list goes on and on. I think the challenge for the Open Source (indistinct) comes back to foundations and working (indistinct) these developers make this code safe and secure. >> Casey, what's your reaction to all of this? You've got, so a project has gained some traction, got some momentum. There's a lot of mission critical. I won't say white spaces, but the opportunities in the big cloud game happening. And there's a lot of, I won't say too many entrepreneurial, but there's a lot of community action happening that's precommercialization that's getting traction. How does this all develop naturally and then vector in quickly when it hits? >> Yeah, I want to go back to the Log4j topic real quick. I think that it's a great example of an area that we need to do better at. And there was a cool article that Rob Pike wrote describing how to quantify the criticality. I think that's sort of quantifying criticality was the article he wrote on how to use metrics, to determine how valuable, how important a piece of Open Source is to the community. And we really need to highlight that more. We need a way to make it more clear how important this software is, how many people depend on it and how many people are contributing to it. And because right now we all do that. Like if I'm going to evaluate an Open Source software, sure, I'll look at how many stars it has and how many contributors it has. But I got to go through and do all that work myself and come up with. It would be really great if we had an agreed upon method for ranking the criticality of software, but then also the risk, hey, that this is used by a ton of people, but nobody's contributing to it anymore. That's a concern. And that would be great to potential users of that to signal whether or not it makes sense. The Open Source Security Foundation, just getting off the ground, they're doing some work in this space, and I'm really excited to see where they go with that looking at ways to stop score critically. >> Well, this brings up a good point while we've got everyone here, let's take a plug and plug a project you think that's not getting the visibility it needs. Let's go through each of you, point out a project that you think people should be looking at and talking about that might get some free visibility here. Anyone want to highlight projects they think should be focused more on, or that needs a little bit of love? >> I think, I mean, particularly if we're talking about these sort of vulnerability issues, there's a ton of work going on, like in the Secure Software Foundation, other foundations, I think there's work going on in Apache somewhere as well around the bill of material, the software bill of materials, the Secure Software supply chain security, even enumerating your dependencies is not trivial today. So I think there's going to be a ton of people doing really good work on that, as well as the criticality aspect. It's all like that. There's a really great xkcd cartoon with your software project and some really big monolithic lumps. And then, this tiny little piece in a very important point that's maintained by somebody in his bedroom in Montana or something and if you called it out. >> Yeah, you just opened where the next lightening and a bottle comes from. And this is I think the beauty of Open Source is that you get a little collaboration, you get three feet in a cloud of dust going and you get some momentum, and if it's relevant, it rises to the top. I think that's the collective intelligence of Open Source. The question I want to ask that the panel here is when you go into an enterprise, and now that the game is changing with a much more collaborative and involved, what's the story if they say, hey, what's in it for me, how do I manage the Open Source? What's the current best practice? Because there's no doubt I can't ignore it. It's in everything we do. How do I organize around it? How do I build around it to be more efficient and more productive and reduce the risk on vulnerabilities to managing staff, making sure the right teams in place, the right agility and all those things? >> You called it, they got to get skin in the game. They need to be active and involved and donating to a sustainable Open Source project is a great way to start. But if you really want to be active, then you should be committing. You should have a goal for your organization to be contributing back to that project. Maybe not committing code, it could be committing resources into the darks or in the tests, or even tweeting about an Open Source project is contributing to it. And I think a lot of these enterprises could benefit a lot from getting more active with the Open Source Foundations that are out there. >> Liz, you've been actively involved. I know we've talked personally when the CNCF started, which had a great commercial uptake from companies. What do you think the current state-of-the-art kind of equation is has it changed a little bit? Or is it the game still the same? >> Yeah, and in the early days of the CNCF, it was very much dominated by vendors behind the project. And now we're seeing more and more membership from end-user companies, the kind of enterprises that are building their businesses on Cloud Native, but their business is not in itself. That's not there. The infrastructure is not their business. And I think seeing those companies, putting money in, putting time in, as Brian says contributing resources quite often, there's enough money, but finding the talent to do the work and finding people who are prepared to actually chop the wood and carry the water, >> Exactly. >> that it's hard. >> And if enterprises can find peoples to spend time on Open Source projects, help with those chores, it's hugely valuable. And it's one of those the rising tide floats all the boats. We can raise security, we can reduce the amount of dependency on maintain projects collectively. >> I think the business models there, I think one of the things I'll react to and then get your guys' comments is remember which CubeCon it was, it was one of the early ones. And I remember seeing Apple having a booth, but nobody was manning. It was just an Apple booth. They weren't doing anything, but they were recruiting. And I think you saw the transition of a business model where the worry about a big vendor taking over a project and having undue influence over it goes away because I think this idea of participation is also talent, but also committing that talent back into the communities as a model, as a business model, like, okay, hire some great people, but listen, don't screw up the Open Source piece of it 'cause that's a critical. >> Also hire a channel, right? They can use those contributions to source that talent and build the reputation in the communities that they depend on. And so there's really a lot of benefit to the larger organizations that can do this. They'll have a huge pipeline of really qualified engineers right out the gate without having to resort to cheesy whiteboard interviews, which is pretty great. >> Yeah, I agree with a lot of this. One of my concerns is that a lot of these corporations tend to focus very narrowly on certain projects, which they feel that they depend greatly, they'll invest in OpenStack, they'll invest in Docker, they'll invest in some of the CNCF projects. And then these other projects get ignored. Something that I've been a proponent of for a little bit for a while is observability of your dependencies. And I don't think there's quite enough projects and solutions to this. And it sounds maybe from lists, there are some projects that I don't know about, but I also know that there's some startups like Snyk and so forth that help with a little bit of this problem, but I think we need more focus on some of these edges. And I think companies need to do better, both in providing, having some sort of solution for observability of the dependencies, as well as understanding those dependencies and managing them. I've seen companies for instance, depending on software that they actively don't want to use based on a certain criteria that they already set projects, like they'll set a requirement that any project that they use has a code of conduct, but they'll then use projects that don't have codes of conduct. And if they don't have a code of conduct, then employees are prohibited from working on those projects. So you've locked yourself into a place where you're depending on software that you have instructed, your employees are not allowed to contribute to, for certain legal and other reasons. So you need to draw a line in the sand and then recognize that those projects are ones that you don't want to consume, and then not use them, and have observability around these things. >> That's a great point. I think we have 10 minutes left. I want to just shift to a topic that I think is relevant. And that is as Open Source software, software, people develop software, you see under the hood kind of software, SREs developing very quickly in the CloudScale, but also you've got your classic software developers who were writing code. So you have supply chain, software supply chain challenges. You mentioned developer experience around how to code. You have now automation in place. So you've got the development of all these things that are happening. Like I just want to write software. Some people want to get and do infrastructure as code so DevSecOps is here. So how does that look like going forward? How has the future of Open Source going to make the developers just want to code quickly? And the folks who want to tweak the infrastructure a bit more efficient, any views on that? >> At Gaggle, we're using AWS' CDK, exclusively for our infrastructure as code. And it's a great transition for developers instead of writing Yammel or Jason, or even HCL for their infrastructure code, now they're writing code in the language that they're used to Python or JavaScript, and what that's providing is an easier transition for developers into that Infrastructure as code at Gaggle here, but it's also providing an opportunity to provide reusable constructs that some Devs can build on. So if we've got a very opinionated way to deploy a serverless app in a database and do auto-scaling behind and all stuff, we can present that to a developer as a library, and they can just consume it as it is. Maybe that's as deep as they want to go and they're happy with that. But then they want to go deeper into it, they can either use some of the lower level constructs or create PRs to the platform team to have those constructs changed to fit their needs. So it provides a nice on-ramp developers to use the tools and languages they're used to, and then also go deeper as they need. >> That's awesome. Does that mean they're not full stack developers anymore that they're half stack developers they're taking care of for them? >> I don't know either. >> We'll in. >> No, only kidding. Anyway, any other reactions to this whole? I just want to code, make it easy for me, and some people want to get down and dirty under the hood. >> So I think that for me, Docker was always a key part of this. I don't know when DevSecOps was coined exactly, but I was talking with people about it back in 2012. And when I joined Docker, it was a part of that vision for me, was that Docker was applying these security principles by default for your application. It wasn't, I mean, yes, everybody adopted because of the portability and the acceleration of development, but it was for me, the fact that it was limiting what you could do from a security angle by default, and then giving you these tuna balls that you can control it further. You asked about a project that may not get enough recognition is something called DockerSlim, which is designed to optimize your containers and will make them smaller, but it also constraints the security footprint, and we'll remove capabilities from the container. It will help you build security profiles for app armor and the Red Hat one. SELinux. >> SELinux. >> Yeah, and this is something that I think a lot of developers, it's kind of outside of the realm of things that they're really thinking about. So the more that we can automate those processes and make it easier out of the box for users or for... when I say users, I mean, developers, so that it's straightforward and automatic and also giving them the capability of refining it and tuning it as needed, or simply choosing platforms like serverless offerings, which have these security constraints built in out of the box and sometimes maybe less tuneable, but very strong by default. And I think that's a good place for us to be is where we just enforced these things and make you do things in a secure way. >> Yeah, I'm a huge fan of Kubernetes, but it's not the right hammer for every nail. And there are absolutely tons of applications that are better served by something like Lambda where a lot more of that security surface is taken care of for the developer. And I think we will see better tooling around security profiling and making it easier to shrink wrap your applications that there are plenty of products out there that can help you with this in a cloud native environment. But I think for the smaller developer let's say, or an earlier stage company, yeah, it needs to be so much more straightforward. Really does. >> Really an interesting time, 10 years ago, when I was working at Adobe, we used to requisition all these analysts to tell us how many developers there were for the market. And we thought there was about 20 million developers. If GitHub's to be believed, we think there is now around 80 million developers. So both these groups are probably wrong in their numbers, but the takeaway here for me is that we've got a lot of new developers and a lot of these new developers are really struck by a paradox of choice. And they're typically starting on the front end. And so there's a lot of movement in the stack moved towards the front end. We saw that at re:Invent when Amazon was really pushing Amplify 'cause they're seeing this too. It's interesting because this is where folks start. And so a lot of the obstructions are moving in that direction, but maybe not always necessarily totally appropriate. And so finding the right balance for folks is still a work in progress. Like Lambda is a great example. It lets me focus totally on just business logic. I don't have to think about infrastructure pretty much at all. And if I'm newer to the industry, that makes a lot of sense to me. As use cases expand, all of a sudden, reality intervenes, and it might not be appropriate for everything. And so figuring out what those edges are, is still the challenge, I think. >> All right, thank you very much for coming on the CUBE here panel. AWS Heroes, thanks everyone for coming. I really appreciate it, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay. >> Thanks for having me. >> Okay, that's a wrap here back to the program and the awesome startups. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for in-person AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE two sets, live wall to wall coverage, all scopes of the hybrid events. Well, great stuff online. That was too much information to consume, but ultimately as usual, great show of new innovation for startups and for large enterprises. We've got a great guest, Paul Duffy head of startups Solutions Architecture for North America for Amazon Web Services. Paul, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Hi John, good to be here. >> So we saw you last night, we were chatting kind of about the show in general, but also about start ups. Everyone knows I'm a big startup fan and big founder myself, and we talk, I'm pro startups, everyone loves startups. Amazon, the first real customers were developers doing startups. And we know the big unicorns out there now all started on AWS. So Amazon was like a dream for the startup because before Amazon, you had to provision the server, you put in the Colo, you need a system administrator, welcome to EC2. Goodness is there, the rest is history. >> Yeah. >> The legacy and the startups is pretty deep. >> Yeah, you made the right point. I've done it myself. I co-founded a startup in about 2007, 2008. And before we even knew whether we had any kind of product market fit, we were racking the servers and doing all that kind of stuff. So yeah, completely changed it. >> And it's hard too with the new technology now finding someone to actually, I remember when we stood with our first Hadoop and we ran a solar search engine. I couldn't even find anyone to manage it. Because if you knew Hadoop back then, you were working at Facebook or Hyperscaler. So you guys have all this technology coming out, so provisioning and doing the heavy lifting for start is a huge win. That's kind of known, everyone knows that. So that's cool. What are you guys doing now because now you've got large enterprises trying to beat like startups. You got startups coming in with huge white spaces out there in the market. Jerry Chen from Greylock, and it was only yesterday we talked extensively about the net new opportunities in the Cloud that are out there. And now you see companies like Goldman Sachs have super cloud. So there's tons of growth. >> Paul: Yeah. >> Take us through the white space. How do you guys see startups taking advantage of AWS to a whole another level. >> And I think it's very interesting when you look at how things have changed in those kind of 15 years. The old world's horrible, you had to do all this provisioning. And then with AWS, Adam Szalecki was talking in his keynote on the first day of the event where people used to think it was just good for startups. Now for startups, it was this kind of obvious thing because they didn't have any legacy, they didn't have any data centers, they didn't have necessarily a large team and be able to do this thing with no commitment. Spin up a server with an API call was really the revolutionary thing. In that time, 15 years later, startups still have the same kind of urgency. They're constrained by time, they're constrained by money, they're constrained by the engineering talent they have. When you hear some of the announcements this week, or you look what is kind of the building blocks available to those startups. That I think is where it's become revolutionary. So you take a startup in 2011, 2012, and they were trying to build something maybe they were trying to do image recognition on forms for example, and they could build that. But they had to build the whole thing in the cloud. We had infrastructure, we had database stuff, but they would have to do all of the kind of the stuff on top of that. Now you look at some of the kind of the AIML services we have things like Textract, and they could just take that service off the shelf. We've got one startup in Canada called Chisel AI. They're trying to disrupt the insurance industry, and they could just use these services like text extracts to just accelerate them getting into that product market fit instead of having to do this undifferentiated (indistinct). >> Paul, we talk about, I remember back in the day when Web Services and service oriented architecture, building blocks, decoupling APIs, all that's now so real and so excellent, but you brought up a great point, Glue layers had to be built. Now you have with the scale of Amazon Web Services, things we're learning from other companies. It reminds me of the open source vibe where you stand on the shoulders of others to get success. And there's a lot of new things coming out that startups don't have to do because startup before then did. This is like a new, cool thing. It's a whole nother level. >> Yeah, and I think it's a real standing on the shoulders of giants kind of thing. And if you just unpick, like in Verna's announcement this morning, his key to this one, he was talking about the Amplify Studio kind of stuff. And if you think about the before and after for that, front-end developers have had to do this stuff for a long period of time. And in the before version, they would have to do all that kind of integration work, which isn't really what they want to spend that time doing. And now they've kind of got that headstart. Andy Jassy famously would say, when he talked about building AWS, that there is no compression algorithm for experience. I like to kind of misuse that phrase for what we try to do for startups is provide these compression algorithms. So instead of having say, hire a larger engineering team to just do this kind of crafty stuff, they can just take the thing and kind of get from naught to 60 (indistinct). >> Gives some examples today of where this is playing out in real time. What kinds of new compression algorithms can startups leverage that they couldn't get before what's new that's available? >> I think you see it across all parts of the stack. I mean, you could just take it out of a database thing, like in the old days, if you wanted to start, and you had the dream that every startup has, of getting to kind of hyper scale where things bursting that seems is the problem. If you wanted to do that in the database layer back in the day, you would probably have to provision most of that database stuff yourself. And then when you get to some kind of limiting factor, you've got to do that work where all you're really wanting to do is try and add more features to your application. Or whether you've got services like Aurora where that will do all of that kind of scaling from a storage point of view. And it gives that startup the way to stand on the shoulders of giants, all the same kind of thing. You want to do some kind of identity, say you're doing a kind of a dog walking marketplace or something like that. So one of the things that you need to do for the kind of the payments thing is some kind of identity verification. In the old days, you would have to have gone pulled all those premises together to do the stuff that would look at people's ID and so on. Now, people can take things like Textracts for example, to look at those forms and do that kind of stuff. And you can kind of pick that story in all of these different stream lines whether it's compute stuff, whether it's database, whether it's high-level AIML stuff, whether it's stuff like amplify, which just massively compresses that timeframe for the startup. >> So, first of all, I'm totally loving this 'cause this is just an example of how evolution works. But if I'm a startup, one of the big things I would think about, and you're a founder, you know this, opportunity recognition is one thing, opportunity capture is another. So moving fast is what nimble startups do. Maybe there's a little bit of technical debt. There maybe a little bit of model debt, but they can get beach head quickly. Startups can move fast, that's the benefit. So where do I learn if I'm a startup founder about where all these pieces are? Is there a place that you guys are providing? Is there use cases where founders can just come in and get the best of the best composable cloud? How do I stand up something quickly to get going that I could regain and refactor later, but not take on too much technical debt or just actually have new building blocks. Where are all these tools? >> I'm really glad you asked that one. So, I mean, first startups is the core of what everyone in my team does. And most of the people we hire, well, they all have a passion for startups. Some have been former founders, some have been former CTOs, some have come to the passion from a different kind of thing. And they understand the needs of startups. And when you started to talk about technical debt, one of the balances that startups have always got to get right, is you're not building for 10 years down the line. You're building to get yourself often to the next milestone to get the next set of customers, for example. And so we're not trying to do the sort of the perfect anonymity of good things. >> I (indistinct) conception of startups. You don't need that, you just got to get the marketplace. >> Yeah, and how we try to do that is we've got a program called Activate and Activate gives startup founders either things like AWS credits up to a hundred thousand dollars in credits. It gives them other technical capabilities as well. So we have a part of the console, the management console called the Activate Console people can go there. And again, if you're trying to build a backend API, there is something that is built on AWS capability to be launched recently that basically says here's some templatized stuff for you to go from kind of naught to 60 and that kind of thing. So you don't have to spend time searching the web. And for us, we're taking that because we've been there before with a bunch of other startups, so we're trying to help. >> Okay, so how do you guys, I mean, a zillion startups, I mean, you and I could be in a coffee shop somewhere, hey, let's do a startup. Do I get access, does everyone gets access to this program that you have? Or is it an elite thing? Is there a criteria? Is it just, you guys are just out there fostering and evangelizing brilliant tools. Is there a program? How do you guys- >> It's a program. >> How do you guys vet startup's, is there? >> It's a program. It has different levels in terms of benefits. So at the core of it it's open to anybody. So if you were a bootstrap startup tomorrow, or today, you can go to the Activate website and you can sign up for that self-starting tier. What we also do is we have an extensive set of connections with the community, so T1 accelerators and incubators, venture capital firms, the kind of places where startups are going to build and via the relationships with those folks. If you're in one, if you've kind of got investment from a top tier VC firm for example, you may be eligible for a hundred thousand dollars of credit. So some of it depends on where the stock is up, but the overall program is open to all. And a chunk of the stuff we talked about like the guidance that's there for everybody. >> It's free, that's free and that's cool. That's good learning, so yeah. And then they get the free training. What's the coolest thing that you're doing right now that startups should know about around obviously the passionate start ups. I know for a fact at 80%, I can say that I've heard Andy and Adam both say that it's not just enterprising, well, they still love the startups. That's their bread and butter too. >> Yeah, well, (indistinct) I think it's amazing that someone, we were talking about the keynote you see some of these large customers in Adam's keynote to people like United Airlines, very, very large successful enterprise. And if you just look around this show, there's a lot of startups just on this expert floor that we are now. And when I look at these announcements, to me, the thing that just gets me excited and keeps me staying doing this job is all of these little capabilities make it in the environment right now with a good funding environment and all of these technical building blocks that instead of having to take a few, your basic compute and storage, once you have all of these higher and higher levels things, you know the serverless stuff that was announced in Adam's keynotes early, which is just making it easy. Because if you're a founder, you have an idea, you know the thing that you want to disrupt. And we're letting people do that in different ways. I'll pick one start up that I find really exciting to talk to. It's called Study. It's run by a guy called Zack Kansa. And he started that start up relatively recently. Now, if you started 15 years ago, you were going to use EC2 instances building on the cloud, but you were still using compute instances. Zack is really opinionated and a kind of a technology visionary in this sense that he takes this serverless approach. And when you talk to him about how he's building, it's almost this attitude of, if I've had to spin up a server, I've kind of failed in some way, or it's not the right kind of thing. Why would we do that? Because we can build with these completely different kinds of architectures. What was revolutionary 15 years ago, and it's like, okay, you can launch it and serve with an API, and you're going to pay by the hour. But now when you look at how Zack's building, you're not even launching a server and you're paying by the millions. >> So this is a huge history lesson slash important point. Back 15 years ago, you had your alternative to Amazon was provisioning, which is expensive, time consuming, lagging, and probably causes people to give up, frankly. Now you get that in the cloud either you're on your own custom domain. I remember EC2 before they had custom domains. It was so early. But now it's about infrastructures code. Okay, so again, evolution, great time to market, buy what you need in the cloud. And Adam talked about that. Now it's true infrastructure is code. So the smart savvy architects are saying, Hey, I'm just going to program. If I'm spinning up servers, that means that's a low level primitive that should be automated. >> Right. >> That's the new mindset. >> Yeah, that's why the fun thing about being in this industry is in just in the time that I've worked at AWS, since about 2011, this stuff has changed so much. And what was state of the art then? And if you take, it's funny, when you look at some of the startups that have grown with AWS, like whether it's Airbnb, Stripe, Slack and so on. If you look at how they built in 2011, because sometimes new startups will say, oh, we want to go and talk to this kind of unicorn and see how they built. And if you actually talked to the unicorn, some of them would say, we wouldn't build it this way anymore. We would do the kind of stuff that Zack and the folks studied are doing right now, because it's totally different (indistinct). >> And the one thing that's consistent from then to now is only one thing, it has nothing to do with the tech, it's speed. Remember rails front end with some backend Mongo, you're up on EC2, you've got an app, in a week, hackathon. Weekend- >> I'm not tying that time thing, that just goes, it gets smaller and smaller. Like the amplify thing that Verna was talking about this morning. You could've gone back 15 years, it's like, okay, this is how much work the developer would have to do. You could go back a couple of years and it's like, they still have this much work to do. And now this morning, it's like, they've just accelerated them to that kind of thing. >> We'll end on giving Jerry Chan a plug in our chat yesterday. We put the playbook out there for startups. You got to raise your focus on the beach head and solve the problem you got in front of you, and then sequence two adjacent positions, refactor in the cloud. Take that approach. You don't have to boil the ocean over right away. You get in the market, get in and get automating kind of the new playbook. It's just, make everything work for you. Not use the modern. >> Yeah, and the thing for me, that one line, I can't remember it was Paul Gray, or somehow that I stole it from, but he's just encouraging these startups to be appropriately lazy. Like let us do the hard work. Let us do the undifferentiated heavy lifting so people can come up with these super cool ideas. >> Yeah, just plugging the talent, plugging the developer. You got a modern application. Paul, thank you for coming on theCUBE, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Head of Startup Solution Architecture North America, Amazon Web Services is going to continue to birth more startups that will be unicorns and decacorns now. Don't forget the decacorns. Okay, we're here at theCUBE bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier, theCUBE. You're watching the Leader in Global Tech Coverage. We'll be right back. (bright upbeat music)

(lively music) >> Narrator: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering GitLab Commit 2020. Brought to you by GitLab. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And this is the theCUBE's exclusive coverage of GitLab Commit 2020, here in San Francisco. You might notice it's a little chilly in San Francisco today. Welcome to the program, first time against Vince Stammegna who is the senior director of engineering at Axway and you can tell by the GitLab Commit jacket that he's a speaker at the show and good thing to wear that one today, yes, Vince? >> Yes, it's very very chilly here. But we're all having a great time. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's the warmth of the community that that's keeping everyone going. First of all, I believe it's first time we have Axway on our program, so people that don't know, tell us a little bit about Axway. >> Sure, Axway is in the business of helping save your company, basically, and help them through the digital transformation. So if you've ever deposited a check electronically on your phone, you've probably, there's a 90% chance you've crossed one of our API gateways or Managed File Transfer systems. So we've helped banks, we've helped hospitals, healthcare, lots of verticals and assisting them through their digital transformation. >> Awesome, so yeah, we love talking about digital transformation. Your presentation here at Commit is actually about journey to cloud. So tell us a little bit about what that means, gets a little bit of you inside what you're going to be sharing with the community here. >> Sure, journey to the cloud is a program that we conceived a couple years ago. And it's all about bringing our company into the cloud native space as well as bringing our existing product line into the cloud, so it can run, it can scale, easy to deploy day to operations. So what we're going to talk about today is basically Axway's journey from, as an ISV going from quarterly and semi-annual deliveries to daily deployments, low change failure rates, fast lead time for changes, so. >> Yeah, it's wonderful things if you hear about DevOps it's all about how we can shorten those release cycles and have those continuous feedback loops. So how long have you been with Axway? >> I've been with Axway for four years now. >> Okay, so yeah, bring us inside a little bit that journey is, what are the ripple effects as you try to tighten things down and not get on the train but just ship and ship and ship. (chuckling) >> Yeah, absolutely. I can say that it's a journey that really requires vigilance. It's constant practice, continuous learning to be lean. So if I were to describe the journey, it's about contributing together, working as one team to build one platform. And that's across DevOps and security. We'll go into a bit about how we really shift, shift in security-left this year by working closely with them. We really took the time to seek to understand their needs as well as the security team understanding our needs in terms of continuous deployment. And we work together on a solution called the Continuous Security Review, allows us to get to the deployment frequency of multiple times per day versus the deployment frequency before that we still followed the traditional initial security review, final security review. We could only release once a sprint, two weeks. >> Yeah, a mantra we've heard at many of the shows we go to is, "security is everyone's responsibility." Was there a lot of training that needed to be done? Did you have to, did the security people kind of lock everybody in the room and make them watch films? Or how did you work through some of these changes? >> That's a great question. So there are a lot of things that our product security group does along with our cloud security team. They do have training globally for Axway not only for the development team, operations team as well. They also, we also have built cross-functional teams within our scrum teams. So our scrum teams contain what's called a SPOC, a security point of contact, DevOps point of contact, the quality point of contact. And those members of the team help that scrum team have full ownership of that service. So when you say security is everybody's job, it's really security, quality, reliability, scalability, and stability is everybody's job. And when you build those cross-functional teams, you're able to provide the team the capability to have the ownership to take those services into the cloud on a daily basis. >> All right, Vince, help us connect the dots. Axway and GitLab, what's the connection there? >> Another great question. So we became a GitLab customer back in 2015. We were on SVN primarily and through lots of acquisitions, either CVS or SVN, and we were looking at the next generation source control management tool. We actually invested and purchased GitLab for Axway in 2015 because it had non-premise offering and we needed to store all of our source code on-premise. We have contracts with the governments around the world and so that's how our journey started. But what we couldn't have imagine was how it was going to evolve. And that's why we're so happy with GitLab. They really take our feedback seriously. A lot of things that we've asked them to go ahead and implement, they've gone and iterated and implemented those things. Allowed us to test features, get faster feedback. One of the things we were looking for was EKS recently as a native way to, basically, plug an EKS as a GitLab runner and run your workloads there. That was implemented, I think, within the last release or two releases ago. So we really appreciate GitLab's responsiveness with their product. >> Okay, yes, you're talking about Amazon's Kubernetes. >> Yes. >> Of course they're so, you talked about on-premises, what is your cloud deployment? Are you multicloud now or, what's and where does Kubernetes fit in that overall discussion? >> Another great question. So our journey to cloud native started with a product called AMPLIFY Central. And what we did was, we start out with docker swarm. We evolved to cops. At the time when we had first gotten our production deployment running on cops, EKS was just in its initial phases of rolling out. We're an Amazon Premier Technology partner. And we actually help them with their evaluation of the initial bit of EKS, give them feed back. A year later, we're looking at it as a way to consolidate platform and allow our teams to focus on building a better product rather than having infrastructure overhead of upgrading infrastructure to, and going through those cycles we can just test the infrastructure before we roll it out. >> All right, so Vince, you're talking a lot about your journey to cloud, what advice do you give to your peers as they're heading down their own journey. >> The advice I give to my peers is to keep calm (chuckles) and we'll go over that in our presentation. But really, it's about behavior change. So it's not just a words that are on some paper that you walk into and you look at. You really have to embody those behaviors and have those feelings about what you're doing. And that's going to change your values and attitudes about how you act and work and help each other out. And that's how you break down silos, and ultimately that's what changes culture. It's your values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that culminate to build a one team, operating as one team to deliver one platform. >> Okay, so you're speaking at the show, obviously you've used GitLab quite a bit. What else, what brings you to this show? What are you hoping to get out of it? >> Just to see what our peers and fellow practitioners are doing in a cloud. See how GitLab's evolving. It was really great keynote this morning from Todd and Sid. So it's great to keep abreast as to what, even some of our customers are here today and to hear their story about how they're moving to the cloud and how might parallel and some things that we can learn from them. That's one of the key behaviors when you move towards cloud native is creating a culture of learning and that's how you grow. >> All right, well, Vince, thanks so much sharing your journey. >> Appreciate it. >> Great to meet you. >> Thanks so much too. >> Best luck with your presentation. And I'm Stu Miniman. This is GitLab Commit 2020. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (lively music)

>> Announcer: Live from New York. It's the Cube. Covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back rush hour's started a little bit early here in New York City with over 10,000 people in attendance for AWS summit in New York City. I'm Stu Miniman, my co host for today is Corey Quinn. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests from our host, Amazon Web Services. To my right here is Deepak Singh, who's the Director of Compute Services. Sitting to his right is Aaron Kao, who's the Senior Manager of Product Marketing. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Alright, so we know that every day we wake up and there's new announcements coming from Amazon and the only way most of us keep up with it is trying to read Corey's newsletter here. But in your group in compute, we know there's a lot going on and quite a few announcements. So Aaron, why don't you kick us off with some of the hard news that went through this morning? >> Yeah, we just launched Amazon EventBridge. It's a serverless event boss that allows you to connect your applications with data from sources like SaaS applications, AWS resources and your own applications. >> All right, so Deepak, I would love to dig into that a little bit. Like you said you that Amazon, you've learned a lot from CloudWatch and building this tool. Everybody looking at kind of, you know, Lambda in the serverless space is like, Okay, how are all these pieces going to come together? Is it all Amazon services all the time? And of course, Amazon has a huge ecosystem, but help us understand or layer down you know how this works? >> Yeah so as you know, AWS services send events to CloudWatch events. They consume events from CloudWatch events. One of the best ways to do it is through Lambda. One of Lambda's biggest strengths is the number of integrations we have with event sources, both taking in events and triggering events. But to your point, there are always events inside database ecosystem. And I think one of the things as a service owner that really excites me about EventBridge is how now customers have access not just to event triggers inside AWS, but also to our partners like Zendesk and the applications you can build will be really exciting. >> Alright, quite a few other announcements, maybe walk us through some of them. >> Yeah, CDK is another announcement where it's an open source software development framework that allows you to model your applications using programming language like TypeScript, Java, Python and .net. You know, the whole thing with building in the cloud, it's slightly different. You used to take your code, put it on a server and run it. Now people are building things a little more distributed, using a lot of different resources for their applications. So it's getting, provisioning your infrastructure is a little bit harder, right? You either have to do a lot of things manually or maybe you're writing a lot of scripts or using a domain specific language. But with CDK, you're now able to use the programming languages that you're programming your applications with, to model and provision your infrastructure. So it's super helpful. Really think it's going to help developers increase their development velocity. They're able to use things like loops, conditions, object oriented programming, they don't have to do context switching and just with a few lines of code, they're able to do a lot more. >> All right. >> I wound up playing with it a little bit when it was in preview and one of the things that I found that it was extremely helpful was, it was a lot easier for me to write something in using CDK, and then see what that rendered down to in terms of cloud formation and then oh, I guess that's how I do it in cloud formation, which was great. The counterpoint though, is it also felt at times like it was super wordy. So if I read that what it generates compared to what I normally write, which is admittedly awful, but I almost start to feel like I'm doing it wrong with that and then with amplify and with Sam and the rest, there's a lot of higher level abstractions that build cloud formation for you. But then it renders down in a few different and key ways. Under the hood, how much are these products that you're coming out with starting to shape the direction of cloud formation itself, or is that mostly baked and done? >> There's a lot of products that we're building that you know, are complementing cloud formation. You know, cloud formation is the templating modeling language to provision AWS resources. But on top of that, we have things like Sam right, that provides a declarative a more high level abstract declarative way to build on top of cloud formation, you know, we have Amplified that also uses cloud formation to help you build mobile applications and front end development. And then finally, you have CDK for just general use. So, these things are all complementing and, you know, things customers are asking for and helping us shape the ecosystem there. >> Yeah, Deepak the container space, of course, has been you know, one of these tidal waves that we've been watching and it's fundamentally changing the way people architect their applications and has huge impact on your product line. Give us the update. If you could just start with some of the high level, I remember first when I talked to you a couple of years ago it was when the whole Kubernetes piece was sorting out. So you know, ECS, EKS, used to have a much longer name that Cory would constantly >> Only for Cory >> Finally you've fixed the compensation problem where someone was getting compensated based upon number of syllables and a service name so good on you on that one. >> Right and you know the acronym A-M-I maybe you can you know settle once and for all you know how how we pronounce that. >> I'm old school it'll always be AMI. (laughs loudly) >> Walk us through kind of, you know your container services. >> I think the great thing about containers is as you said the adoption is everywhere. And what we find is there's a growth of ECS, the growth of EKS whether you're running it on EC2 or Fargate everything is growing like crazy, because people find new interesting ways to run applications based on what they know and what they're comfortable with. We have customers, customers like SNAP that know Kubernetes well and they are building on there're building a big chunk of their new infrastructure on EKS on AWS and it basically helps the developer velocity. On the flip side, you have customers like Turner Broadcasting that run a lot of their web services or the Comedy Central content properties like that on Fargate because they can just stamp them out. They all you know, it's a website, it's a service that they can just keep expanding. So it boils down to what are the key things that you're comfortable with? What are the reasons you've picked something. So if you're running like SNAP across, you know, in many different places, you are likely to choose Kubernetes and standardize on that. So that's the best part for me is, people have choices and then they pick based on what they need at that point in time, which can be two different teams at the same place, picking a different solution. I will add that one of the areas that we are focused on now is observe ability and developer experience. Those are areas that our customers have been asking for. CDK plays into that you saw in the demo this morning and with observe ability with container insights and with the fluid plugins that we announced. I think those are areas that you'll see us do a lot more going forward. >> So right, that was one of news today, CloudWatch container insights just to explain what that one is. >> So historically, when you do CloudWatch look, it's very BM-centric, you're looking at CPU memory, you assuming an application, instances run for a particular period of time. In the container world, you have services where the underlying tasks come and go, all you know, at a very different rate. CloudWatch container insights is meant to be a world that's aware of the fact that your containerized applications are tasks and services and pods, so you're able to get more fine grained metrics on the things that container customers care about and you're not trying to use BM-centric language to look at a containerized infrastructure. So that's the biggest reason for doing that. And then on the Fluent Bit side was, our customers want log routing to whatever they want to do it on. Whether they want it to send to S3 or the Elasticsearch We do that with Kinesis Data Firehose. So we basically wrote a bunch of open source plugins for Fluent Bit that just send your logs where you want them to go. So that's kind of where we are focused. >> Yeah, I view it as more of a log router than I do almost anything else. >> It is that. >> Yeah. A question of: Where does it come from? Where does it go? How do you keep it straight? >> Yeah. >> It's at this point, what does it output to you these days? Are there are various destination options, third party vendors, CloudWatch, history? >> So we wrote two plugins one was for well three, I don't know. One for S3 because so many people don't understand the data to S3. The other one was a Kinesis Data Firehose. So from there, you can send it to Redshift, you can send it to you can send it to Elasticsearch. So based on what you however you want another analyze it, you can send it to a custom resource that's Kinesis. So, you're using some third party provider, you can just send your logs over to those. >> Yeah, Corey, you know, you're dealing with a lot of customers, you know, there's now so many, you know, different instance types and some of the pieces, you know, what's the feedback you're giving to, you know, Amazon these days? >> Entirely depends upon the service teams and it ranges from this is amazing, excellent job to okay, it's a good start. And it's always a question though, it's when you have what 200 service options or darn near it at this point, 170. It's impossible to wind up with something that is evenly consistent and you have services that are sub components of other services and built on top. I mean, I think the, I guess the feedback I've been giving almost universally across the board is, assume that I am about 20% as smart as you right now seem to think I am and then explain it to me and then I'll probably understand it a lot better. It comes down to service to storytelling, more or less of meeting people at various points along their journey and then I was mentioning in our editorial session just before this segment, that that's something that AWS has markedly improved on the last two or three years. Where you have customer stories that are rapidly moving up the stack as far as leverage services. It's not just we took the VMs and now we run them somewhere else. Now it's about building a high, extremely volume intensive applications on top of a whole bunch of managed services and these are serious companies. These are regulators it's not just Twitter for pets anymore. >> Nothing wrong with that. >> No. >> So, you know, we were discussing, like FINRA was a great case study this morning and they talked about in the four years that they've been on, they've re-architected three times. You know, how do you balance all of these new instances coming out with, you know, and how do I make sure that I deploy something today that I've got the flexibility to change, but you know, I want to be able to lock in my pricing and make it easier. >> So actually, we think about that quite a bit. One of the reasons we built app match the way we did, as something that sits outside the container orchestrator, was it doesn't lock you into choosing one or the other or even choosing an architecture. You can start off with a monolith, start putting side cards on it, getting visibility into all your traffic, then portions of your applications you can start breaking out, you can put them on Fargate, you can put them on ECS, you can put them on the EC2. I think that is something we did very consciously because so many of our customers are in that position and I think more and more are going to go higher up the stack using managed databases, using Lambda, but it's not decision they need to make all up front. They can do it piecemeal, and we see our customers find another good example, they've done that. >> One of the philosophies of it, like AWS is giving customers building blocks to build things on. So the whole thing is, here's a new primitive that you can use, then you can take it out, replace something with something else, depending on your needs. So we give customers flexibility and choice. >> And part of the problem is that, that very much becomes a double-edged sword. I mean, most recently, you've had effectively declared war on Alphabet. I don't mean the large cloud provider that turns things off for a living. I'm talking about the English alphabet, where you take a look at all the different EC2 instance types. I think in US East one now there's over what is it 190 different instances you can pick from. It leads to analysis paralysis, which one do I pick? What's the right answer? What am I committing to, what am I not? And you see, that's a microcosm of the larger service problem. I want to build a web app that does a thing, which services do I use, you open up the service listing and you just get this sort of sinking sensation? I get that I can't imagine what someone new to the space is getting to there. >> All right, and this is where things like Amplify, Fargate, AWS Batch where you don't need to select an instance. Where you just tell us what your requirements are and Batch makes that selection for you. The core building blocks are important because you can't really figure out what to do. But then you'll see us do much more about the stack to help people get there. It's an ongoing thing that will keep trying to tackle but you'll see a lot more of that. >> It's controversial. One of my favorite things about Lambda, for example, is there's one knob RAM and as you turn that up, other performance characteristics increase and people complain about it but I love the simplicity, because I don't have to sit and think and make all these different decisions. It's one access. >> Yeah, but if you want more knobs, you can use Fargate. So I think that, that's the beauty of it that you do have that choice. >> Yeah, one of the lines Aaron, I really liked in Werner's keynote is he said, "we've really, you know, my words commoditized IT. "We all have access to all of the tools now." You know, that was, you know what big data originally and cloud also was, you know, you used to have to be a nation state or fortune 100 to be able to do some of these things so, you know, what do you hear from customers? You know, how do they make sure, you know, they're staying competitive and ahead, and therefore, in that relationship between the business and IT, what do you hear from your customers these days? >> In terms of that? Well, I think for, you know, for customers, like I think EventBridge is a, a pretty good example of that, in terms of customers asking us for ability to, you know, integrate their SaaS providers, integrate a lot of different things and not have to, you know, not have to do a lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting and things like that and, you know, customers are increasingly moving towards like event driven architectures and they asked us, hey, we really like CloudWatch events and how you do things with IT automation and then bringing SaaS providers in and, we want to, you know, we don't want to build pulling infrastructure in order to access API's and do all all those heavy liftings. What we did was we built out, we took CloudWatch events and added new features for SaaS applications and built that into a separate service for people to use. So that's like, you know, a lot of the relationships we have with our customers, listening to what they need and giving them what they want. >> And I think that, that's a very valuable thing. You know, we used to say, you know, five years ago, you would talk about, you know, let's get rid of undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yeah. >> Well, now it's like, no, no, let's enable, you know, something that you would have thought was heavy lifting and we're daunted to be able to do it but now hopefully, it's easier, because a lot of this stuff, you know, as Corey said, this is still a little bit daunting and you know, well you've got a lot of ecosystem and service providers and services to help us, you know, take care of, you know, because it's the Paradox of Choice with all the options that you have. >> And I think that's the beauty of what, I mean our customers are smart, they manage to find it interesting ways to keep challenging us and they keep us busy. But I also think that really, really many of them, the ones who have been able to be successful, have figured out what it means to take all the tools we give them, which are the ones where they want to completely hand it over to AWS and give us the responsibility and then which ones do they really feel they care about and the ones who can find their balance are the ones that we see moving the fastest. I think that's what we're trying to do. >> All right, now and one thing that does absolutely permeates virtually every service team I've worked with at AWS, I mean, you I've had this experience with you, where I talked about how my use case isn't a terrific fit for your product and your response is always well, what is your use case? It's not, is starting off from the baseline assumption that my use case is ridiculous, which let's face it, it probably is. But being able to address a customer need and understand that even if it doesn't dictate roadmap, is incredibly valuable and I don't find that there are too many players in any space, let alone this one that are willing to have the patience to listen to, frankly, some loud person wearing a suit. >> We try, I mean, I think you heard Andy say there's so much like a big chunk 85, 90% of our roadmap is customer requests, I would say that even the remaining 10% is maybe not things that they've directly asked for but things that we've observed they've run into or that we've run into working with, you know, the one or two customers who are ahead of the pack. And Okay, they have this problem, how do you generalize that? And we try and understand what it means. One of the reasons we made the container roadmap public, was this space is moving so quickly, it's almost impossible for us to talk to enough customers to figure that out. So like, Okay, this gives us an avenue for them to come to us and just tell us, GitHub issues. >> Yeah, so right. Final question I have for both of you. Directionally looking forward, you know, the roadmap, we love when there is publicly facing material not under the NDAs that we normally have to be able to hear. So what are you hearing from your customers? What direction are they pulling you towards and that we should expect to watch AWS kind of further, as we head towards re:Invent later this year. >> I think customers are asking us for different things for developer experience, especially event driven architectures. I think there's going to be a lot of interesting things happening in the Lambda space and that entire space. >> Yeah and to add to that, I think, to your point earlier, helping them simplify choices is going to be a big part of it. Meeting them where they are, in their IDEs with a tooling is a big part of what you'll see us do. So, you know, I think you saw examples today and we'll keep building on top of those. >> All right, well, send our congratulations to the two pizza teams that worked on all of the projects that were announced today. Look forward to seeing you, you know, down the road. Thanks so much and welcome to being Cube alumni. >> Thank you for have us. >> Thank you for having us on. >> Appreciate it. >> Aaron, Deepak you know, from AWS. He's Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more coverage from AWS summit, here in New York City, thanks for watching the Cube.

(upbeat music) >> From San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here, with The Cube. We're at Downtown San Francisco, Girls in Tech Catalyst. Great event. We've been coming for a couple of years. About 700 professionals, mainly women, a few men, and I think they brought in a busload of kids to get inspired, talking about their stories, and really, it's a series. It's a one-track conference, two days, about 20 minute talks and really good stuff. Really great content. Check it out online if you didn't register this year. Make sure you come next year, and we're excited to have our next guest, Cube alum, really from one of the hottest companies in tech right now, she's Wendy Pfeifer, the CIO of Nutanix. Wendy, great to see you again. >> Hey, nice to see you, Jeff. >> Absolutely, so we see you at Nutanix Next all the time, but we haven't seen you at Girls in Tech. >> Yeah. >> So how long have you been involved in Girls in Tech? >> So, I've been involved since the very first meet up, more than 10 years ago. Girls in Tech was very inspiring to me, and I was here at the Catalyst Conference last year, and I'm a member of the board of Girls in Tech as well, so I'm able to give back and provide some leadership at that level. >> So we just had Adriana on, and she was going through-- >> Yeah. >> Some of the numbers, I mean, the growth of this organization, second to Nutanix, is off the chart. >> Yeah. >> I mean, really amazing. >> It really is amazing, you know. In some ways our time has come. Adriana's had this big vision for a really long time. Really focused on educating women, helping them to understand the potential of careers in tech, and technology knowledge, and that's a global message, and a message that resonates at every age level, and in lots of different sectors of society, so it's juts a privilege to be able to partner with her and others on the board, to enable the vision, and Nutanix as well, you know, is donating, is present here at these conferences, and partnering at Catalyst and Amplify, and other parts of the organization. >> Right, because it's not only the right thing to do, it's also good business, which has been proven time and time again. >> Absolutely, and you know, it's kind of taken on this passion, mission, just excitement thing, but it is practical as well and you know, all the studies, I'm sure so many folks have talked with you about this. There's so many studies, there's so much research that says diversity brings better decision-making, better product development. >> Right. >> And better satisfaction in our work environments as well. >> Right. The other thing that struck me talking to Adriana, and I guess I just didn't know, kind of the breadth of types of activities that Girls in Tech's put on. So we've been to Catalyst before. We've been to-- the Pitch Night, Amplify-- >> Amplify, yeah. >> But I didn't know, she's running, you know, there's all kinds of different-- types of things. >> Absolutely. I think the underlying passion is for education. If you think about, particularly people in underserved communities, there is a real opportunity, you know coding, and learning to code, learning to interact with computers; that's a language that transcends geographic boundaries, ethnic boundaries, age, and religious boundaries, and it's something that, you know ever since my days at Yahoo, I really felt like technology could bring the world together, and today in particular, there is so much disparity between women and men and their access to technology education and technology careers. >> Right. >> That this is, you know, more than just creating a level playing field. I think we're making our own playing field. We're not going to their playing field, anymore. We're creating our own at locations like this. >> Right, and clearly a bunch of founders are here today, who've-- >> Yeah. >> Started their own companies. But the other thing I think is interesting, is culture keeps coming up time and time again in all these conversations, and Adriana's built a culture starting, always from the top down, with the board. It's a phenomenal board of professional women-- >> Yes. >> That she's pulled together of this organization. >> Yeah, there are a couple of males on the board, too. I want to make sure I point out. >> Yep. >> Because we're a diverse board as well, but she has. She has brought together people who are leaders in the technology space, but also folks who are passionate about building a healthy nonprofit organization; one that's global, one that can scale, and so we also look at the fundamentals, and the business fundamentals as well, so we are expanding from 60 to 100 countries, and from 100,000 members to 200,000 members, I mean, who would think, right? >> Right, right, right. >> It's extraordinary. Even then, though, those 200,000 women are a drop in the bucket, compared to the 50% of the global population-- >> Right. >> Who are female. >> Right. And then you work at Nutanix. Super hot-- >> Yeah. >> I don't want to say startup anymore. You guys have IPO'd. >> Right, right. >> But, you know, but you're livin' it in terms of trying to get enough, good, qualified talent-- >> Yes. >> Just to feed the one engine that I Nutanix, so it's a real-- >> Yeah. >> Demand in the market place. >> Definitely, that's the case, you know, we sort of struggle with the thought, you know, are there just not enough women candidates in these fields, but what we learn at conferences like this is, that there are enough women candidates, but we don't necessarily recognize those women, and we don't know where to find them, and they may not find the sort of work that we represent to be attractive. And so we're sort of trying to change how we speak and think. Culture is a good word, but it's a revolution. It's a cultural revolution in terms of identifying talent where it sits. We spoke a lot in the last day and a half around blended careers, the bringing together of art and technology, or communication and technology, and the fact is that technology just underscores everything we do-- >> Right. >> Nowadays. >> Right. >> And so, you know, having people who can blend those things, is a real advantage, and women have this ability to take a multi-faceted approach to the work that we do and the way that we live our lives. We multi-task as a sport. >> Right, right. It's interesting, too, as the machines get better and as A.I. gets better, machine learning, the softer skills applied with the context become so much more important than necessarily just the super hard-core coding skills. >> You know, I have a story around that. So, we've just deployed, my IT department has deployed a machine-learning tool at Nutanix, to replace a lot of the interactions that happen on our help desk, and we found we just couldn't scale as the company was scaling, so we've been training A.I. from a company called Moveworks, and you know, we've been training it uniquely with our voice, and I think a little bit with my voice, and I just had one of our employees write back to me and say, "Not only is this thing", we call it Xbot, "Not only is Xbot solving my problems, but", he said, "she is pretty sassy, too." And I'm like, yay, he knows it's a she! >> Right, right. >> Right, and she's sassy too, so yeah, that unique voice-- >> Right. >> Is infusing even the machine-learning training that we're doing-- >> Right. >> And I think that makes for a more delightful experience-- >> Right. >> For all of us. >> It's funny, the voice thing, 'cause you know, Google had their very famous, the restaurant reservation call-in demo-- >> Yes! >> They got capped on a little bit-- >> Right. >> For, you know, was it real or not, but what made it so, so dramatic was the human-like elements in the conversation of the machine-- with ums, and ahs-- >> Absolutely. >> And uhs, and pauses, which we laugh about, 'cause we can shoot Cube interviews, everybody wants to cut those parts out, and we're like no, that's what makes people, people. >> Right, exactly, I agree with you. And at the same time, you know, there are, you know, things that are uniquely female stereotypes. We're more wordy. We have more things to say. >> Right. >> You know, we're more multi-dimensional. We can hold two thoughts at the same time, and so that's part of the richness of communication and our interaction too, but to the extent to which we can embed that in our technologies and our interactions, those are the extent to which they'll be more delightful-- >> Right. >> It's no coincidence that Siri and Cortana and all of those A.I.s sort of have this female persona, and I don't know if you know this, the, you know, Cortana, who's the Microsoft, you know, A.I., you know, she's voiced by the same character that's Cortana in one of their video games-- >> Oh, really? >> And she's sort of this like, badass fighter gal, too, so check it out. >> Well, we know what happened to Bob, right? >> Right. >> I know, poor Bob. >> Which, ironically, was Melinda Gates's project. Which, I don't know if you knew-- that story. >> I did not know that. >> So yeah, Melinda Gates's introduction to Bill was as product manager for Bob, which, if you don't know that story, check it out. It's old history. >> Oh, that's-- fantastic! >> But it's very good. Alright, before I let you go, one last thing. >> Yes. >> So you spoke, and they've got these great posters all around the room with little highlights from people's-- >> Yes. >> Conversations and yours was, I described it off the wall, "It's okay to be bad." >> Yes. >> I'd love, for the people that missed it, what's the message there? It's an important message. >> Yeah. >> Especially for women. >> Yeah, I think as women, you know, we don't have a lot of role models and when I get up as a role model, I'm one of the few CIO's who's female and Silicon Valley. You know, we give these speeches, and they sort of make us like Mother Teresa, you know. First you hae your mission in mind, and you lean in, and you do all these awesome things. But the fact is, it is actually okay, to be yourself. It's okay to be bitchy. It's okay to be cranky. It's okay for anger to fuel you. It's okay to be aggressive, and even if your male counterparts tell you otherwise, or say, "Wow, that's "unseemly.", I think it's just okay. We don't have to be pure and perfect in order to be successful. I can be those things all at the same time. And I also say, it's also okay to be good, to be merciful, to be soft-spoken, to be wordy, to be studious; that combination of things. We're allowed to be our genuine selves, and we don't have to be perfect to be successful and I feel like I embody that-- in particular. >> Yes, you certainly do. You certainly do! >> What, I'm not perfect? >> Yes, I mean the Nutanix story is a phenomenal story. >> It is. We are fortunate, we've been there since the beginning-- >> Absolutely. >> Watching it grow, and so no-- >> Helping us to frame the story, so thanks to The Cube. I appreciate that. >> Well, and you're super successful, and the company's successful so the fact that are Wendy, you know, you are who you are. You're a big personality, and it comes through, and it's great, and it works, and you're successful, so, if they need someone to look up to, you're certainly a fantastic role model. >> Thank you so much. Well I appreciate that. It's funny, 'cause I have never tried to be a role model, and now, just by accident, I've survived long enough. Here I am. (both laughing) >> Well that's a whole different conversation-- >> Right, right. >> You just look around like, I am the oldest guy in the room. But that's a different thing. >> I know. You're actually the only guy, just sayin'. >> Alright, well Wendy thanks for takin' a few minutes, and I guess we'll see you next at Nutanix next, if not sooner. >> I look forward to it, thanks. >> Alright, thanks. She's Wendy, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from women, or Girls in Tech Catalyst 2018. (upbeat music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, about 700 professionals. It's a really cool conference. It's a single track, two days. All the presentations are about 15, 20 minutes of people telling their stories, vast majority of women, a couple of men. I think they brought in some younger kids to get inspired. So we're excited to be here. Been coming for a couple years. And our next guest, many time CUBE alum, I just know her as Sandy Carter. She does have a title, VP of Enterprise Workloads at AWS, but I dunno, Sandy, how long have you been coming on the CUBE, how many years? >> Oh, wow, I don't know. >> Too many to count, and we don't want to admit to it. >> Yeah, it's true, but thank you guys for supporting events like this, Jeff, because I know that you guys have been supporting Women in Tech, and Girls in Tech for so long, and we really appreciate that very much. Thank you. >> And it's so important, and we love to do it, and we especially love when it's right in our backyard. It makes it really easy just to grab some crew and run up here. >> (laughing) That's right. >> So give us an update. You are chairman of the board now, and I think we've probably talked to probably three or four board members today. It's a really impressive group of people, and Adriana has done amazing things with this organization in the last 11 years. And you're sittin' watching it grow internationally, the number of events, the types of events. Give us your perspective. >> Yeah, so I think Girls in Tech is an amazing organization. That's why I decided to join the board and then to take on the chairman of the board position. And the reason I think it's so powerful is that it's really focused on young women, millennial women who are looking to become business owners, leaders, entrepreneurs and who want to apply technology to make themselves more competitive. You know, I know Adriana came up with this in 2007, but even today, the mission and the values are still really relevant. These are the top things that women need to know about today, and this is really about filling up the pipeline, sharing experiences. The conference today, I don't know if you got to hear any of the sessions, but they're really not about, you know, let me do technical skills. It's really about how do you break through the next level, how do you grow your business, how do you scale. And so it's really those type of topics that we can share experiences as experienced businesswomen with others so that they can learn and grow from that. >> Right, and just really simple stuff, like raise your hand, take the new assignment, take a risk. >> You got it, the crooked path. >> The crooked path, that was the one I was looking for. And do something that you don't necessarily have experience in, whether it's finance or accounting or HR or product management, sales. You know, take a risk, and chances are you're going to get paid off for it, and I think those simple lessons are so, so important. And then, of course, which comes up time and time again is just to have role models, senior role models who've been successful, who have an interesting story, they have a crooked path, it wasn't easy it wasn't even defined, but here they are as successful so that the younger women can look up to them. >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think that it's, you know the big message today, I think, for women was have the confidence. Basically that sums up what you just said, right? Be confident, and even if you don't feel confident, show confidence. >> Right, right. >> Which I think is so important.. >> Fake it 'til you make it, right >> That's right. You got it, you got it. >> 'Cause everybody else is, you just don't know it. >> That's right. >> You think they know what they're doing. They're doing the same thing. >> That's right. Well, it's interesting, one of the stats today said that men will apply for a job if they have 60% of the qualifications. Women will only apply if they have between 90 or 95%. So I think being able to know that you're confident and that you're going to make it, that you're going to do things and going ahead and taking that risk is really important. >> So the other big shift that we've seen in this conference is really the corporate sponsorship. So AWS is here obviously. You're here. You're on the board. But the amount of logos, the size of the companies on the logos has really grown a lot since I think we were first at this one in Phoenix in 2016. >> Phoenix, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> So not only, again, is that the right thing to do, but it's also really good business to get involved, and you great ROI for being involved in these types of organizations. >> That's right. You know, innovation is really about having diversity of thought, and so having women, having different colleges, having different sexual orientation, just diversity really helps you to innovate. >> Right. >> 93% of CEOs said that innovation is their number one competitive advantage. So we're seeing a lot of companies now pick up on that and know that they've got to come and they've got to be attractive, not only as a company that people would want to work at, an employer, but also just as a company that you might want to do business with. So today, I love the story of GoDaddy. She was saying GoDaddy was targeting small businesses. Well, most of those are run by women, but they weren't doing the right targeting. So I think it's a phenomenal change that we're seeing with companies like this doing the support. AWS, Amazon Web Services is proud to be one of the major sponsors. We had Charlie, one of our SVPs on stage today, chatting about lessons he've learned, but we've also don't things like understanding how women are buying, and we're doing focus groups, and we're doing different things like that to really help us gain insight. >> Right, so final question, from the board point of view as you look forward in the expansion opportunities, they seem almost unlimited between the countries, the participants and the variation in types of events that you guys are undertaking. It's really quite a bit to bite off. >> Well, you know, we have kind of a two prong mission. One is for entrepreneurs, and so you're seeing us really emphasize classes and things like our Amplify event where we have women come and pitch ideas that really grow that side of the business. In fact, I was just in Cuba last week, on behalf of Girls in Tech, talking to female entrepreneurs there and how we could help them because they really want us to set up some classes there to teach these entrepreneurs how to grow. And the second prong of our mission is around technology and coding. So we've got classes. We've got things with AWS like We Power Tech, so that women can learn technology and use it for their competitive advantage. So while it seems like we're doing a lot of things, it's really around that two prong mission, entrepreneurship and that coding technology focus. >> Alright, well, Sandy, thanks again for stopping by, and really congratulations to you, not only in what you do at AWS, but really just some very, very important work with Girls in Tech. >> Great, thank you, and thank you for being so supportive. We appreciate it very much. >> Our pleasure. Alright, She's Sandy Carter. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Girls in Tech Catalyst in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watchin'. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, brought to you by Girls in Tech. (upbeat digital music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Fransico at the Girls In Tech Catalyst Conference 2018. About 700 people, mainly women, some men. I think they brought in a school bus load of girls to participate. And really it's a two-day, single track conference. A lot of, just presentations by senior executive women telling their story, how they got to where they were, giving some inspirational advice. And we're psyched to be here. Adriana runs a great, great conference. It's a super organization, and we're excited to have our next guest. She's Wendy Howell, the chief of staff for Cisco Services. Wendy, great to see you. >> Great to see you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so you're here instead of Cisco Live, which I think is great for you. What do think about this event? Why are you involved in Girls in Tech? >> Yeah, so I discovered Girls in Tech probably about three years ago and saw Adriana speak on just some interview. And I went, I don't know who she is, but I love her, and I love her message. So fast forward, attended my first Catalyst about three years ago, found out that we had two VPs that were on the board at Cisco which I didn't know. So, what's going on here? Let's do something with these guys. They were trying to put together a global partnership, and we really, they just couldn't get it over the line. Well, what's the problem? Funding. Okay, well let's fund it and let's just go. So we signed a global partnership two years ago with Girls in Tech. We've done, I think we've sponsored, overall with Cisco, about 15 different events. Catalyst Conference, AMPLIFY Women's Pitch Night. I think we've done eight. Hacking for Humanity events globally. It's just an amazing organization. It's the right organization at the right time. You know Adriana. She is amazing, she's a force of nature. And so I liken myself to be a mini Adriana for Cisco. (laughs) It's the time to get more and more focus on getting women in tech, and especially making sure that we have role models for the young ladies that are coming up in technology. >> Right, right. That's funny, that's how we found Adriana as well. I think she was on at a IBM event many, many moons ago and said you know, we got to get involved. >> It was random. >> The Pitch Night is really fun. You know, that's just a great event. And one of the ones from a couple years ago is really taking off, the little like, tile-like device. >> That's right, that's right. >> Which I can't remember the name, but it's not tile. >> And in fact, I saw one of your interviews, I think it was Sandy Carter. I don't know whether it was >> Yeah. the last year or the year before, I just did volunteer, >> Good, good. and it was great. >> So you know, the sponsorship list has really grow this year, and it's a who's who of corporate logos, >> Absolutely. which is great. We're looking at it over, across the way. And we talked about it a little bit before we turned on the cameras, about how some of the bigger tech companies specifically, 'cause it's kind of a tech focused event, obviously, can be, not only more involved, but a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more organized, a little bit more coordinated in the way that they put resources behind events such as Girls in Tech. So why don't talk to kind of what your experience is there, what are guys doing, how are you trying to add a little bit more purpose and organization behind your efforts? >> Right, and again, originally the partnership, it came together quite fast after we sort of said hey let's just go do this. So then our first year, we really were focused specifically on events, and let's do events together to really get our name associated with the brand of Girls in Tech, which is global, and phenomenoal, and 100,000 plus members, etc. This year, in our second year, I think we're being a little more thoughtful, and we really want to continue to show the ROI for our organization. So we're really focusing more on the recruiting aspect. And there's some new cool things coming out on that front from Girls In Tech. And I really want to just say, hey it's great to have our name associated with Girls In Tech, but what's it doing for us? What are we doing for the women that we're supporting? Let's hire them into Cisco, let's hire them into AWS. So that's a real big key focus area for us this year. Plus the events, 'cause this is, you know, not only is it great for us, but I get to bring my team here and they come away feeling fantastic and amazing, and I get all psyched watching all these young ladies walk around. >> Right. >> Many of them, I'm like, I wasn't even thinking about things like this when I was your age. Back in the day (laughs). >> That's right, dune day, thankfully. >> That's right. >> So that's interesting, in terms of how do you measure your ROI in the investment? Clearly, recruiting has got to big a piece right? You can never get enough >> Yeah. people, and even though machines are going to take everybody's job, Everyone >> That's right one day seems to have a whole lot of open recs, and can't fill the people. So is there anything else that you look at besides just hiring, or is it the number of people that come through the process? How do you measure? 'Cause we know it's not only just good and the right thing to do, but there's real business benefit to participating in diversity programs. >> Absolutely. And I mean, every large organization right now, over the last three years, has come to that realization. This diversity is not just a buzz word, it's a thing. We know that there is greater ideas that come out of it, more diverse ideas, bookings, I mean, there's real, relatable, tangible feedback that you can get from it, right? >> Right, right. So recruiting is a big one for us, but also we look at the impact. You know, every quarter, we sit down with Girls In Tech and we get an impact report of what are you Cisco, what have you done, Cisco, and what has it done for Girls In Tech, and what has it done for us? How many people have we had attend a Hack-A-Thon? How many dollars have we supported with? How many people are going through a boot camp? So that's sort of the way we look at it as well, the impact report, also. >> And do you find it's a higher kind of ROI, in, not so much a smaller organization, but these are relatively small events compared to Cisco Live and a lot of the big events that are in the industry. Is it just a more focused return? Is it a better return? How does it fit in with your whole strategy? Yeah, I would call it more focused. It's more of a niche, but it still provides us, and we're growing, right? So we're only >> Right. the second year in, and I truly believe that if we continue our focus in this area, I can see a strong, high trajectory if you will. >> Right. So just a pitch for companies like Cisco that aren't involved with Girls in Tech, who you may compete with, you may not compete with, you probably partner with out in the ecosystem, what would you tell 'em about this organization and why they should get more involved? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple things. So number one, Adriana herself, and the brand of her, and the brand that is Girls In Tech now. If you think about it, I mean, 10, 11 years now, so going from one chapter to 62 plus, hopefully 75, I think, by 2020 is the goal, and now 100,000 plus members, being associated with this brand is fabulous for your business, but you know, it's also the right thing to do. Because again, I go back to my super passionate about the next generation of female leaders and these role models that the younger folks are seeing. You can't, you can't even put a price on how valuable that is for them. >> It's so funny, talk about the role models, we interviewed Maria Klawe, who runs Harvey Mudd, years ago, at Grace Hopper, and that was such a big part of her theme right? >> Are there people, >> Absolutely. are there women that the younger gals can look up to, and see oh, she looks kind of like me, or I could be like like her one day, and it's such an important thing. And she talked about, you know, Zuckerburg, and Jobs, and kind of the male tech rock stars, if you will, are tech rock stars, but they're not necessarily the ones that some 14 year old [Wendy] 10-25, or 14 13 year old, or 25 is going to look up to and say, that's me >> Exactly. in a few years, if I work, so ... >> Exactly. >> It's such an important piece of the whole component. >> My friend, a buddy of mine, she's the founder of Austin Women magazine. And she has this catch phrase that's fabulous. She goes, the female role models, if you can't see it, you can't be it. So if I'm a 24 year old young lady that's graduating, and I don't see anyone else who looks like me, then what do I do? So that's why I love this event in particular. It's my passion event, yeah. >> Alright, well Wendy, your passion comes through and thanks for taking a few minutes of your time with us. >> Absolutely, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely. Alright, she's Wendy Howell, I'm Jeff Frick. We are at Girls In Tech Catalyst in downtown San Francisco, thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, about 700 professionals. It's a really cool conference. It's a single track, two days. All the presentations are about 15, 20 minutes of people telling their stories, vast majority of women, a couple of men. I think they brought in some younger kids to get inspired. So we're excited to be here. Been coming for a couple years. And our next guest, many time CUBE alum, I just know her as Sandy Carter. She does have a title, VP of Enterprise Workloads at AWS, but I dunno, Sandy, how long have you been coming on the CUBE, how many years? >> Oh, wow, I don't know. >> Too many to count, and we don't want to admit to it. >> Yeah, it's true, but thank you guys for supporting events like this, Jeff, because I know that you guys have been supporting Women in Tech, and Girls in Tech for so long, and we really appreciate that very much. Thank you. >> And it's so important, and we love to do it, and we especially love when it's right in our backyard. It makes it really easy just to grab some crew and run up here. >> (laughing) That's right. >> So give us an update. You are chairman of the board now, and I think we've probably talked to probably three or four board members today. It's a really impressive group of people, and Adriana has done amazing things with this organization in the last 11 years. And you're sittin' watching it grow internationally, the number of events, the types of events. Give us your perspective. >> Yeah, so I think Girls in Tech is an amazing organization. That's why I decided to join the board and then to take on the chairman of the board position. And the reason I think it's so powerful is that it's really focused on young women, millennial women who are looking to become business owners, leaders, entrepreneurs and who want to apply technology to make themselves more competitive. You know, I know Adriana came up with this in 2007, but even today, the mission and the values are still really relevant. These are the top things that women need to know about today, and this is really about filling up the pipeline, sharing experiences. The conference today, I don't know if you got to hear any of the sessions, but they're really not about, you know, let me do technical skills. It's really about how do you break through the next level, how do you grow your business, how do you scale. And so it's really those type of topics that we can share experiences as experienced businesswomen with others so that they can learn and grow from that. >> Right, and just really simple stuff, like raise your hand, take the new assignment, take a risk. >> You got it, the crooked path. >> The crooked path, that was the one I was looking for. And do something that you don't necessarily have experience in, whether it's finance or accounting or HR or product management, sales. You know, take a risk, and chances are you're going to get paid off for it, and I think those simple lessons are so, so important. And then, of course, which comes up time and time again is just to have role models, senior role models who've been successful, who have an interesting story, they have a crooked path, it wasn't easy it wasn't even defined, but here they are as successful so that the younger women can look up to them. >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think that it's, you know the big message today, I think, for women was have the confidence. Basically that sums up what you just said, right? Be confident, and even if you don't feel confident, show confidence. >> Right, right. >> Which I think is so important.. >> Fake it 'til you make it, right >> That's right. You got it, you got it. >> 'Cause everybody else is, you just don't know it. >> That's right. >> You think they know what they're doing. They're doing the same thing. >> That's right. Well, it's interesting, one of the stats today said that men will apply for a job if they have 60% of the qualifications. Women will only apply if they have between 90 or 95%. So I think being able to know that you're confident and that you're going to make it, that you're going to do things and going ahead and taking that risk is really important. >> So the other big shift that we've seen in this conference is really the corporate sponsorship. So AWS is here obviously. You're here. You're on the board. But the amount of logos, the size of the companies on the logos has really grown a lot since I think we were first at this one in Phoenix in 2016. >> Phoenix, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> So not only, again, is that the right thing to do, but it's also really good business to get involved, and you great ROI for being involved in these types of organizations. >> That's right. You know, innovation is really about having diversity of thought, and so having women, having different colleges, having different sexual orientation, just diversity really helps you to innovate. >> Right. >> 93% of CEOs said that innovation is their number one competitive advantage. So we're seeing a lot of companies now pick up on that and know that they've got to come and they've got to be attractive, not only as a company that people would want to work at, an employer, but also just as a company that you might want to do business with. So today, I love the story of GoDaddy. She was saying GoDaddy was targeting small businesses. Well, most of those are run by women, but they weren't doing the right targeting. So I think it's a phenomenal change that we're seeing with companies like this doing the support. AWS, Amazon Web Services is proud to be one of the major sponsors. We had Charlie, one of our SVPs on stage today, chatting about lessons he've learned, but we've also don't things like understanding how women are buying, and we're doing focus groups, and we're doing different things like that to really help us gain insight. >> Right, so final question, from the board point of view as you look forward in the expansion opportunities, they seem almost unlimited between the countries, the participants and the variation in types of events that you guys are undertaking. It's really quite a bit to bite off. >> Well, you know, we have kind of a two prong mission. One is for entrepreneurs, and so you're seeing us really emphasize classes and things like our Amplify event where we have women come and pitch ideas that really grow that side of the business. In fact, I was just in Cuba last week, on behalf of Girls in Tech, talking to female entrepreneurs there and how we could help them because they really want us to set up some classes there to teach these entrepreneurs how to grow. And the second prong of our mission is around technology and coding. So we've got classes. We've got things with AWS like We Power Tech, so that women can learn technology and use it for their competitive advantage. So while it seems like we're doing a lot of things, it's really around that two prong mission, entrepreneurship and that coding technology focus. >> Alright, well, Sandy, thanks again for stopping by, and really congratulations to you, not only in what you do at AWS, but really just some very, very important work with Girls in Tech. >> Great, thank you, and thank you for being so supportive. We appreciate it very much. >> Our pleasure. Alright, She's Sandy Carter. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Girls in Tech Catalyst in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watchin'. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> From San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here, with The Cube. We're at Downtown San Francisco, Girls in Tech Catalyst. Great event. We've been coming for a couple of years. About 700 professionals, mainly women, a few men, and I think they brought in a busload of kids to get inspired, talking about their stories, and really, it's a series. It's a one-track conference, two days, about 20 minute talks and really good stuff. Really great content. Check it out online if you didn't register this year. Make sure you come next year, and we're excited to have our next guest, Cube alum, really from one of the hottest companies in tech right now, she's Wendy Pfeifer, the CIO of Nutanix. Wendy, great to see you again. >> Hey, nice to see you, Jeff. >> Absolutely, so we see you at Nutanix Next all the time, but we haven't seen you at Girls in Tech. >> Yeah. >> So how long have you been involved in Girls in Tech? >> So, I've been involved since the very first meet up, more than 10 years ago. Girls in Tech was very inspiring to me, and I was here at the Catalyst Conference last year, and I'm a member of the board of Girls in Tech as well, so I'm able to give back and provide some leadership at that level. >> So we just had Adriana on, and she was going through-- >> Yeah. >> Some of the numbers, I mean, the growth of this organization, second to Nutanix, is off the chart. >> Yeah. >> I mean, really amazing. >> It really is amazing, you know. In some ways our time has come. Adriana's had this big vision for a really long time. Really focused on educating women, helping them to understand the potential of careers in tech, and technology knowledge, and that's a global message, and a message that resonates at every age level, and in lots of different sectors of society, so it's juts a privilege to be able to partner with her and others on the board, to enable the vision, and Nutanix as well, you know, is donating, is present here at these conferences, and partnering at Catalyst and Amplify, and other parts of the organization. >> Right, because it's not only the right thing to do, it's also good business, which has been proven time and time again. >> Absolutely, and you know, it's kind of taken on this passion, mission, just excitement thing, but it is practical as well and you know, all the studies, I'm sure so many folks have talked with you about this. There's so many studies, there's so much research that says diversity brings better decision-making, better product development. >> Right. >> And better satisfaction in our work environments as well. >> Right. The other thing that struck me talking to Adriana, and I guess I just didn't know, kind of the breadth of types of activities that Girls in Tech's put on. So we've been to Catalyst before. We've been to-- the Pitch Night, Amplify-- >> Amplify, yeah. >> But I didn't know, she's running, you know, there's all kinds of different-- types of things. >> Absolutely. I think the underlying passion is for education. If you think about, particularly people in underserved communities, there is a real opportunity, you know coding, and learning to code, learning to interact with computers; that's a language that transcends geographic boundaries, ethnic boundaries, age, and religious boundaries, and it's something that, you know ever since my days at Yahoo, I really felt like technology could bring the world together, and today in particular, there is so much disparity between women and men and their access to technology education and technology careers. >> Right. >> That this is, you know, more than just creating a level playing field. I think we're making our own playing field. We're not going to their playing field, anymore. We're creating our own at locations like this. >> Right, and clearly a bunch of founders are here today, who've-- >> Yeah. >> Started their own companies. But the other thing I think is interesting, is culture keeps coming up time and time again in all these conversations, and Adriana's built a culture starting, always from the top down, with the board. It's a phenomenal board of professional women-- >> Yes. >> That she's pulled together of this organization. >> Yeah, there are a couple of males on the board, too. I want to make sure I point out. >> Yep. >> Because we're a diverse board as well, but she has. She has brought together people who are leaders in the technology space, but also folks who are passionate about building a healthy nonprofit organization; one that's global, one that can scale, and so we also look at the fundamentals, and the business fundamentals as well, so we are expanding from 60 to 100 countries, and from 100,000 members to 200,000 members, I mean, who would think, right? >> Right, right, right. >> It's extraordinary. Even then, though, those 200,000 women are a drop in the bucket, compared to the 50% of the global population-- >> Right. >> Who are female. >> Right. And then you work at Nutanix. Super hot-- >> Yeah. >> I don't want to say startup anymore. You guys have IPO'd. >> Right, right. >> But, you know, but you're livin' it in terms of trying to get enough, good, qualified talent-- >> Yes. >> Just to feed the one engine that I Nutanix, so it's a real-- >> Yeah. >> Demand in the market place. >> Definitely, that's the case, you know, we sort of struggle with the thought, you know, are there just not enough women candidates in these fields, but what we learn at conferences like this is, that there are enough women candidates, but we don't necessarily recognize those women, and we don't know where to find them, and they may not find the sort of work that we represent to be attractive. And so we're sort of trying to change how we speak and think. Culture is a good word, but it's a revolution. It's a cultural revolution in terms of identifying talent where it sits. We spoke a lot in the last day and a half around blended careers, the bringing together of art and technology, or communication and technology, and the fact is that technology just underscores everything we do-- >> Right. >> Nowadays. >> Right. >> And so, you know, having people who can blend those things, is a real advantage, and women have this ability to take a multi-faceted approach to the work that we do and the way that we live our lives. We multi-task as a sport. >> Right, right. It's interesting, too, as the machines get better and as A.I. gets better, machine learning, the softer skills applied with the context become so much more important than necessarily just the super hard-core coding skills. >> You know, I have a story around that. So, we've just deployed, my IT department has deployed a machine-learning tool at Nutanix, to replace a lot of the interactions that happen on our help desk, and we found we just couldn't scale as the company was scaling, so we've been training A.I. from a company called Moveworks, and you know, we've been training it uniquely with our voice, and I think a little bit with my voice, and I just had one of our employees write back to me and say, "Not only is this thing", we call it Xbot, "Not only is Xbot solving my problems, but", he said, "she is pretty sassy, too." And I'm like, yay, he knows it's a she! >> Right, right. >> Right, and she's sassy too, so yeah, that unique voice-- >> Right. >> Is infusing even the machine-learning training that we're doing-- >> Right. >> And I think that makes for a more delightful experience-- >> Right. >> For all of us. >> It's funny, the voice thing, 'cause you know, Google had their very famous, the restaurant reservation call-in demo-- >> Yes! >> They got capped on a little bit-- >> Right. >> For, you know, was it real or not, but what made it so, so dramatic was the human-like elements in the conversation of the machine-- with ums, and ahs-- >> Absolutely. >> And uhs, and pauses, which we laugh about, 'cause we can shoot Cube interviews, everybody wants to cut those parts out, and we're like no, that's what makes people, people. >> Right, exactly, I agree with you. And at the same time, you know, there are, you know, things that are uniquely female stereotypes. We're more wordy. We have more things to say. >> Right. >> You know, we're more multi-dimensional. We can hold two thoughts at the same time, and so that's part of the richness of communication and our interaction too, but to the extent to which we can embed that in our technologies and our interactions, those are the extent to which they'll be more delightful-- >> Right. >> It's no coincidence that Siri and Cortana and all of those A.I.s sort of have this female persona, and I don't know if you know this, the, you know, Cortana, who's the Microsoft, you know, A.I., you know, she's voiced by the same character that's Cortana in one of their video games-- >> Oh, really? >> And she's sort of this like, badass fighter gal, too, so check it out. >> Well, we know what happened to Bob, right? >> Right. >> I know, poor Bob. >> Which, ironically, was Melinda Gates's project. Which, I don't know if you knew-- that story. >> I did not know that. >> So yeah, Melinda Gates's introduction to Bill was as product manager for Bob, which, if you don't know that story, check it out. It's old history. >> Oh, that's-- fantastic! >> But it's very good. Alright, before I let you go, one last thing. >> Yes. >> So you spoke, and they've got these great posters all around the room with little highlights from people's-- >> Yes. >> Conversations and yours was, I described it off the wall, "It's okay to be bad." >> Yes. >> I'd love, for the people that missed it, what's the message there? It's an important message. >> Yeah. >> Especially for women. >> Yeah, I think as women, you know, we don't have a lot of role models and when I get up as a role model, I'm one of the few CIO's who's female and Silicon Valley. You know, we give these speeches, and they sort of make us like Mother Teresa, you know. First you hae your mission in mind, and you lean in, and you do all these awesome things. But the fact is, it is actually okay, to be yourself. It's okay to be bitchy. It's okay to be cranky. It's okay for anger to fuel you. It's okay to be aggressive, and even if your male counterparts tell you otherwise, or say, "Wow, that's "unseemly.", I think it's just okay. We don't have to be pure and perfect in order to be successful. I can be those things all at the same time. And I also say, it's also okay to be good, to be merciful, to be soft-spoken, to be wordy, to be studious; that combination of things. We're allowed to be our genuine selves, and we don't have to be perfect to be successful and I feel like I embody that-- in particular. >> Yes, you certainly do. You certainly do! >> What, I'm not perfect? >> Yes, I mean the Nutanix story is a phenomenal story. >> It is. We are fortunate, we've been there since the beginning-- >> Absolutely. >> Watching it grow, and so no-- >> Helping us to frame the story, so thanks to The Cube. I appreciate that. >> Well, and you're super successful, and the company's successful so the fact that are Wendy, you know, you are who you are. You're a big personality, and it comes through, and it's great, and it works, and you're successful, so, if they need someone to look up to, you're certainly a fantastic role model. >> Thank you so much. Well I appreciate that. It's funny, 'cause I have never tried to be a role model, and now, just by accident, I've survived long enough. Here I am. (both laughing) >> Well that's a whole different conversation-- >> Right, right. >> You just look around like, I am the oldest guy in the room. But that's a different thing. >> I know. You're actually the only guy, just sayin'. >> Alright, well Wendy thanks for takin' a few minutes, and I guess we'll see you next at Nutanix next, if not sooner. >> I look forward to it, thanks. >> Alright, thanks. She's Wendy, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from women, or Girls in Tech Catalyst 2018. (upbeat music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, brought to you by Girls in Tech. (upbeat digital music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Fransico at the Girls In Tech Catalyst Conference 2018. About 700 people, mainly women, some men. I think they brought in a school bus load of girls to participate. And really it's a two-day, single track conference. A lot of, just presentations by senior executive women telling their story, how they got to where they were, giving some inspirational advice. And we're psyched to be here. Adriana runs a great, great conference. It's a super organization, and we're excited to have our next guest. She's Wendy Howell, the chief of staff for Cisco Services. Wendy, great to see you. >> Great to see you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so you're here instead of Cisco Live, which I think is great for you. What do think about this event? Why are you involved in Girls in Tech? >> Yeah, so I discovered Girls in Tech probably about three years ago and saw Adriana speak on just some interview. And I went, I don't know who she is, but I love her, and I love her message. So fast forward, attended my first Catalyst about three years ago, found out that we had two VPs that were on the board at Cisco which I didn't know. So, what's going on here? Let's do something with these guys. They were trying to put together a global partnership, and we really, they just couldn't get it over the line. Well, what's the problem? Funding. Okay, well let's fund it and let's just go. So we signed a global partnership two years ago with Girls in Tech. We've done, I think we've sponsored, overall with Cisco, about 15 different events. Catalyst Conference, AMPLIFY Women's Pitch Night. I think we've done eight. Hacking for Humanity events globally. It's just an amazing organization. It's the right organization at the right time. You know Adriana. She is amazing, she's a force of nature. And so I liken myself to be a mini Adriana for Cisco. (laughs) It's the time to get more and more focus on getting women in tech, and especially making sure that we have role models for the young ladies that are coming up in technology. >> Right, right. That's funny, that's how we found Adriana as well. I think she was on at a IBM event many, many moons ago and said you know, we got to get involved. >> It was random. >> The Pitch Night is really fun. You know, that's just a great event. And one of the ones from a couple years ago is really taking off, the little like, tile-like device. >> That's right, that's right. >> Which I can't remember the name, but it's not tile. >> And in fact, I saw one of your interviews, I think it was Sandy Carter. I don't know whether it was >> Yeah. the last year or the year before, I just did volunteer, >> Good, good. and it was great. >> So you know, the sponsorship list has really grow this year, and it's a who's who of corporate logos, >> Absolutely. which is great. We're looking at it over, across the way. And we talked about it a little bit before we turned on the cameras, about how some of the bigger tech companies specifically, 'cause it's kind of a tech focused event, obviously, can be, not only more involved, but a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more organized, a little bit more coordinated in the way that they put resources behind events such as Girls in Tech. So why don't talk to kind of what your experience is there, what are guys doing, how are you trying to add a little bit more purpose and organization behind your efforts? >> Right, and again, originally the partnership, it came together quite fast after we sort of said hey let's just go do this. So then our first year, we really were focused specifically on events, and let's do events together to really get our name associated with the brand of Girls in Tech, which is global, and phenomenoal, and 100,000 plus members, etc. This year, in our second year, I think we're being a little more thoughtful, and we really want to continue to show the ROI for our organization. So we're really focusing more on the recruiting aspect. And there's some new cool things coming out on that front from Girls In Tech. And I really want to just say, hey it's great to have our name associated with Girls In Tech, but what's it doing for us? What are we doing for the women that we're supporting? Let's hire them into Cisco, let's hire them into AWS. So that's a real big key focus area for us this year. Plus the events, 'cause this is, you know, not only is it great for us, but I get to bring my team here and they come away feeling fantastic and amazing, and I get all psyched watching all these young ladies walk around. >> Right. >> Many of them, I'm like, I wasn't even thinking about things like this when I was your age. Back in the day (laughs). >> That's right, dune day, thankfully. >> That's right. >> So that's interesting, in terms of how do you measure your ROI in the investment? Clearly, recruiting has got to big a piece right? You can never get enough >> Yeah. people, and even though machines are going to take everybody's job, Everyone >> That's right one day seems to have a whole lot of open recs, and can't fill the people. So is there anything else that you look at besides just hiring, or is it the number of people that come through the process? How do you measure? 'Cause we know it's not only just good and the right thing to do, but there's real business benefit to participating in diversity programs. >> Absolutely. And I mean, every large organization right now, over the last three years, has come to that realization. This diversity is not just a buzz word, it's a thing. We know that there is greater ideas that come out of it, more diverse ideas, bookings, I mean, there's real, relatable, tangible feedback that you can get from it, right? >> Right, right. So recruiting is a big one for us, but also we look at the impact. You know, every quarter, we sit down with Girls In Tech and we get an impact report of what are you Cisco, what have you done, Cisco, and what has it done for Girls In Tech, and what has it done for us? How many people have we had attend a Hack-A-Thon? How many dollars have we supported with? How many people are going through a boot camp? So that's sort of the way we look at it as well, the impact report, also. >> And do you find it's a higher kind of ROI, in, not so much a smaller organization, but these are relatively small events compared to Cisco Live and a lot of the big events that are in the industry. Is it just a more focused return? Is it a better return? How does it fit in with your whole strategy? >> Yeah, I would call it more focused. It's more of a niche, but it still provides us, and we're growing, right? So we're only >> Right. the second year in, and I truly believe that if we continue our focus in this area, I can see a strong, high trajectory if you will. >> Right. So just a pitch for companies like Cisco that aren't involved with Girls in Tech, who you may compete with, you may not compete with, you probably partner with out in the ecosystem, what would you tell 'em about this organization and why they should get more involved? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple things. So number one, Adriana herself, and the brand of her, and the brand that is Girls In Tech now. If you think about it, I mean, 10, 11 years now, so going from one chapter to 62 plus, hopefully 75, I think, by 2020 is the goal, and now 100,000 plus members, being associated with this brand is fabulous for your business, but you know, it's also the right thing to do. Because again, I go back to my super passionate about the next generation of female leaders and these role models that the younger folks are seeing. You can't, you can't even put a price on how valuable that is for them. >> It's so funny, talk about the role models, we interviewed Maria Klawe, who runs Harvey Mudd, years ago, at Grace Hopper, and that was such a big part of her theme right? >> Are there people, >> Absolutely. are there women that the younger gals can look up to, and see oh, she looks kind of like me, or I could be like like her one day, and it's such an important thing. And she talked about, you know, Zuckerburg, and Jobs, and kind of the male tech rock stars, if you will, are tech rock stars, but they're not necessarily the ones that some 14 year old [Wendy] 10-25, or 14 13 year old, or 25 is going to look up to and say, that's me >> Exactly. in a few years, if I work, so ... >> Exactly. >> It's such an important piece of the whole component. >> My friend, a buddy of mine, she's the founder of Austin Women magazine. And she has this catch phrase that's fabulous. She goes, the female role models, if you can't see it, you can't be it. So if I'm a 24 year old young lady that's graduating, and I don't see anyone else who looks like me, then what do I do? So that's why I love this event in particular. It's my passion event, yeah. >> Alright, well Wendy, your passion comes through and thanks for taking a few minutes of your time with us. >> Absolutely, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely. Alright, she's Wendy Howell, I'm Jeff Frick. We are at Girls In Tech Catalyst in downtown San Francisco, thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey, hello everyone. Welcome back to day two of live coverage as theCUBE's exclusive analysis coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-host on set one with Stu Miniman here, analyst at Wikibon. And we got two sets here at Amazon re:Invent The first time we've done two sets, so much content. We have our directors' set with captains' chairs over there getting all the community content. And all the folks doing the innovation here at AWS. Stu, a lot to talk about. We've had companies come through, tell us about their innovation with AWS. But the bottom line is Andy Jassy's keynote just went off. I mean, he's like the energizer bunny. He keeps going and going and going. Announcement after announcement. I broke that Forbes story, laid out what ended up turning out to be the core messaging. Tons of stories on SiliconANGLE.com around Andy Jassy's exclusive interview that we had about a week and a half ago, prior to re:Invent. He's geared up. He's giddy up, as they say, his favorite word. He's taken on the competition. He took Oracle head on and called Oracle a company that abuses their customers. That was hard core, "abuse." He used the word, "abuse." In this culture, he could have just said, "predator." He's that kind of competitive vibe. Microsoft kind of called out Vinder 2 on the chart. Laying out the sets and services. Amazon putting the aggressive we're real stamp out there. What's your thoughts? You got the only analysis. >> So first of all John, this show is always impressive. One of the ones that I look forward to more than almost anything for the entire year. 43,000 people here. I spent the last day and a half in the analyst sessions. There wasn't a single analyst that was like, "Ho-hum." There are so many announcements. You go down the list and the number 73rd announcement on there, you're like, "I'm not sure." "There's this group of customers that's been waiting "for them and is going to transform their business. "It's potentially going to crush certain parts "of the industry." There's so much happening, there's lots of fanboys here. It's tough not to get exuberant about what's going on. Surprised to see Andy punching a little bit of competitors. Sure, he takes jabs at Larry Ellison every year. You know the red stack stuff, you know database. They're making huge piece on the migration. But talking a little bit more about Google and Microsoft, "Well they must be real competitors," a lot of people are saying, "if they're actually putting them up there, "going through the numbers," so many things we want to dig into here, and throughout the next two days. >> Yeah man, and the fact that he talks about the competitors means that it's still on his mind, although they're still full steam ahead. The thing about Jassy though, getting to know him, his style is not just talk, he walks it more than he talks. He'll only talk trash if he's got a solution in his back pocket. And what's different this year is, the bravado has gone up and the rhetoric around Oracle specifically has been really hard core. I mean he called them an abusive partner to their customers. That's a line in the sand. Those are fightin' words but then he goes on stage and essentially rolls out a series of database options. He spent a lot of time talking about databases, Stu, in his keynote. >> John, we got Aurora Serverless totally talking about, "How many companies, how many resources do you have focused "on managing the infrastructure under your database?" So, RDMS, paired with Serverless, absolutely game changer. People are super excited about it. There's so much going on. But I mean, John just take alone, the one thing they put up, it was one of the Gartner slides, and what's Amazon at now, 44% up from 39%? So there's talk about growth rates and everything like that. Amazon chugging along, dominant in their space, and so many pieces. >> That's the one critique I would give Jassy, the one thing I don't like about his keynote, and I don't like in general about Amazon is, they talk new guard, new guard, old guard is bad. They're using Gartner slides, too. I mean, you couldn't old guard then Gartner. Magic Quadrant has nothing to do with the presentation. It was infrastructures of service, didn't include platform as a service, didn't include SAS. I mean, they're using the wrong scoreboard. Now, I think he throws it up there because buyers kinda use Gartner as kind of a bellwether but they're not, they're old guard. He's got to get better stats and I'm pressuring them to get the stats. What is the scoreboard for cloud? >> Well, john, you know one of the things we always look at, there's two days of keynotes. Today is really the enterprise. Enterprise, Andy says, we're in kind of the early part of massive adoption from enterprise. He's talking enterprise-speak and yeah, they go to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, absolutely. John, what's happening in the software world? I mean, that's really where this is is the change of what's happening in the software. Amazon's at the vanguard. There was plenty of things that I'm sure developers will love here, but it wasn't the big focus of today's keynotes. >> To me, the canary in the coalmine is developers. The canary in the coalmine for the big mega trans are also venture capitalists. The canary in the coalmine of the startup entrepreneurs, those alpha entrepreneurs and last night we had a chance. I sat down multiple one on ones with some venture capitalists. We had some here on theCUBE, then we went to the Greylock, Amplify, and then IVP party and haD a chance to talk to some people. The general sentiment is this, we are in a sea change. It's like a tsunami. The whole beach is exposed before the big wave comes in, Stu. The top venture capitalists like Greylock and others, are looking at this going, "the models have changed." The funding model, the dynamics and everyone is going, "holy shit." That's where this renaissance in software development is happening and the top guys on the entrepreneurial side is saying, "the new way to do it is, "take less funding, I need to get in market fast "with a product, I need a partner that's gonna get me." The rest of the market is deer in the headlights, Stu. They're like, "wait a minute, do I compete with Amazon? "Do I partner with Amazon? "Which could do I use?" They get caught rearranging the deck chairs and they're taking their eye off the ball which is software. >> So john, the struggle I've been hearing, you know, you talked to a bunch of Amazon customers already this week. If you're in the enterprise and you're building your strategy, you got to write it on a whiteboard or an etch-a-sketch because things are changing so fast. The thing I was really looking forward to is what were they gonna be in cubernetties and you know, server list, huge promise, what are they delivering? What was the proof point? And I have to say, definitely impressed with what I saw so far. >> What's the top? I mean first of all, you're in the analyst meeting and I heard feedback from the analysts like, "we can't even comprehend all these things." I want you to boil it down for the folks not here and they're gonna be reading some blog posts and still getting a lot of coverage to go through certainly on theCube and SiliconANGLE will keep on. Bottom line, what's the executive summary in your mind, Stu? What should people pay attention to? What's the most important story? >> It is impossible to give one story to everyone but let me start with, Andy lays out, in your interview for Forbes and what he talked about in the keynote, kind of a compute continuum so if you're just using compute instances, there are some new big ones. If you want your AI stuff, your big data, they've got new compute instances. The bare middle offering is basically the fruits of what they have to do to be able to get vmware on AWS to work and they're now making that same instance available for those that want to be able to do other things with it, bring their own hypervisor, things like that. I could tell you, it's a massive... It's like 72 logical cores, huge amounts of memory and it is gonna be wicked expensive because it's not like most of the instances with Amazon, pick between these six versions, it's one. Here's a server and it's a big server, it's gonna be really expensive. We're gonna be digging in with a couple of vmware executives on that piece but the newer stuff, containers. The last year we've been hearing, Amazon's behind on cubernetties, Amazon's behind on cubernetties. They joined the CNCF for a couple months. Now they have EKS so full supporting cubernetties but here's the nuance, I talked to the people that run that group and ECS is not going away. They're there, we've seen all the time is they say, "oh here's the standard and we're gonna fully embrace it, "but our proprietary's version." Cubernetties doesn't scale the way you need, you gotta do our thing. Cubernetties, we can't integrate it with all our services, you know use our services. Andy was like, "hey, we're gonna give you a choice." Underneath that they had farpoint, I'm sorry fargate. Fargate is the underlying level that basically allows me to take rather than, you know, managing at the server level which really I was managing virtualization before. Now I'm managing at the compute level. When containers came out and Docker was buzzing, it was, "this is the new atomic instance "of how we manage things." Fargate really cooled down at that lower level so you have (mumbles) I keep saying fargate at the bottom level, now I've got ECS or cubernetties and I've got things like istio on top of that. You and I are gonna be at the CNCF show next week, CubeCon and everything like that. I'm sure Amazon is gonna suck a lot of the air out of that with what they're doing and gosh, I haven't even talked about serverless yet. >> First of all I mean, it's hard to boil it down like you said. You can't even breathe at this point, it's so exciting but the thing that is a success at Amazon also could be an Achilles heel because it has complexity so I noticed in messaging was everything to everyone or is everything to everything. It's got this vibe going on... >> Stu: Everything is everything. >> Everything is everything. A lot of people have been criticizing the software business on the community side, supplier side of trying to be everything to everyone. But that's what Amazon's doing, right? They're basically saying, "we're gonna give you everything "but it's not mandated that you choose one." So talk about that dynamic because the people critiquing them and saying, "well they're just throwing all this stuff out there, "it's just a feature." Is it viable? >> It's a great point and right, if you look at traditional enterprise vendors, it was, "oh my god look at that catalog "and all these thousands and thousands of skews "that are out there." I believe the number I heard is in the Amazon services, there's like 30,000 services out there and how do you, as a company, manage that? I talked to one global web company and I gave that. How do you keep up with this? How do you know what to do? And he's like, "well, we reach a certain price point. "I've got two TAMs, they help us work through this." There's no way any one person or even any company could be an expert on this. That's where Amazon needs to get consultative. That's where SIs need to come in. I'll tee up, that's where serverless really comes in because there's certain pieces that, as Andy talked about in the keynote, you know lambda is going everywhere. It's getting integrated into the environment. There's certain pieces of the stack that before I needed to choose my compute instance. I needed to figure out how much memory. I have to do all of these kind of things. If I choose a certain layer of integration, Amazon is gonna take care of those things underneath so absolutely they hear loud and clear that they want to simplify things. What was it, last year light sale was one of the big announcements. There's so many things. Spot instances had a huge growth to be able to drive down costs this year. I mean, dozens and dozens of features that Andy talked about this morning. Serverless, John, really massive wave. (mumbles) >> Let's connect the dots. There's a lot to talk about, we've got Werner Vogles keynote tomorrow. That should be really geeky and tech under the hood, but what Jassy is putting out there is a lot of the stuff you're mentioning but also he's got a wireless camera for facial recognition, they've got transcribe recognition, poly, lex, so the sets of services that are new and new guard like and the use cases from this are interesting. A lot of different connective devices so you see a little IOG. They're kind of laying out like this is a landscape. You know, we're gonna do statcast for MLB, NFL. We got edge devices, databases for S3. The programming model, the new assembly model. It's very modular. This is like the building blocks approach. It's not just the lambda and S3. You've got wireless cameras that do facial recognition. >> Right, because John, I talked to a couple customers that are doing serverless and they're working with Amazon and it's like, "oh well, where do you think of serverless functions as a service?" And they're like, "well really I have you know..." One customer was like, "I have a bunch of my own services "and I have APIs I write and now I can just call into "various Amazon services so it makes..." John, the whole API economy that we've been talking about for many years, you know, this is really Amazon having this come to fruition. I should be able to write my own APIs that can program to many of Amazon's APIs. If Dave Vellante was here, I'm sure he'd be talking about API creep because there's so many pieces but you know, Amazon, Andy is saying, "we have everything of the best." I think a lot of he's trying to attack there. Many customers we've talked to, they're going multi-cloud. What does that really mean? It's Amazon the primary. When are they using Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM? There's so many pieces. >> Stu, it's impressive to me. I get called a fanboy all the time, but I just call it as I see it and Amazon is crushing everyone else, in my opinion. There's no doubt about it. When we get more data from Microsoft or Google, then we'll compare, you know, and Oracle. They're not even talking so like they're hiding. They're building again. The tsunami is coming. The war is here. No doubt there's a cloud war and Microsoft is in it to win it. Google's hardcore so this is game on. What Amazon is doing is they're integrating new kinds of interactivity. You start to see Twitch more here. You see the NFL demo on stage that Andy did. The actual data that they're getting from the sensors. They're integrating the application so you know Goldman Sachs never goes on stage and does a testimonial. The guy's basically giving a lovefest for Amazon. That's Goldman Sachs. So you have new software models that are coming. This is something I think nobody's seeing. I think you talk to hardcore dudes. The infrastructures now with serverless is enabling creativity and I think this renaissance is for real. >> John, you nailed something. It's Sandy Carter who you know and have had on theCUBE many times, joined Amazon within the last year, talked about how Amazon, not just AWS but Amazon, is helping customers with buzzword digital transformation but how do you innovate? It's not just Amazon Web Services, there's so many things that the broader Amazon portfolio can tie into, you know. Absolutely, it's impressive. Customers always said it used to be like, "oh how can I have a network that's kinda like Google's?" Now it's "how can I innovate like Amazon?" >> Well Stu, we go to all the shows. We didn't go to Oracle Open World this year. Again, they're kind of silent right now because they don't want to talk to the press because they're gearing up. You've got Oracle, Microsoft, certainly very aggressive, more aggressive than Oracle, but Jassy is laying the line in the sand so we're gonna watch the new guard old guard thing play out. Microsoft is absolutely moving the needle. They are coming up to Amazon. There's no doubt that they're in the sights, in the rearview mirror. I think everyone else is really gearing up. You've got Alibaba cloud in China coming to the US. This is going to be exciting. The cloud game has got so much action in it. It's got the geeky under the hood and the sexiness of the application, Stu. I'm really super excited. >> Yeah, there's just so much information, you know. Choose your category. Choose where you're going. There is just no shortage. Everybody is geeking out. The big complaint is like how there's too many people. If you go standby, you go an hour ahead of time and you're still there and it's spread out, you know. The Aria and the MGM, there's all these things there. We're here at the heart of what used to be the one facility and now it's just spread out so much so you really need to kind of choose your focus, dig on in, and you know, we've got so many interviews. >> Stu, we're gonna want to wrap this up by saying the company that's behind us, you can't see or maybe you're able to see in the shot that's winning that no one's talking about much because they're just winning is Intel. They sell more chips. They sell more compute. The compute game is where it's at. You've just Intel kind of quietly under the surface and this growth is only gonna help Moore's law and everything else. >> John, it's just like the old Intel inside, you know. Amazon does more. They're buying more compute, whether that's standard compute, it's containers, or serverless at the end of the day, there's some Intel chips underneath almost all of it today. >> Intel's not putting their strategy up but it's clear to me through observation and talking to them, is that they're targeting the cloud as that new inside moment. They want to power the top clouds. They already are. They're kinda quietly keeping their nose clean and have their head down and power all those clouds. TheCUBE here powering all the data here at AWS re:Invent. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Day two kickoff, more great coverage. Stay with us, two sets here in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (digital music)