>>Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Cube's Live coverage of Cuban here in Motor City, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson and I'm delighted to be joined for this segment by my co-host Lisa Martin. Lisa, how you doing? Good. >>We are, we've had such great energy for three days, especially on a Friday. Yeah, that's challenging to do for a tech conference. Go all week, push through the end of day Friday. But we're here, We're excited. We have a great conversation coming up. Absolutely. A little of our alumni is back with us. Love it. We have a great conversation about learning. >>There's been a lot of learning this week, and I cannot wait to hear what these folks have to say. Please welcome Tom and Victoria from Cast by Beam. You guys are swag up very well. You've got the Fanny pack. You've got the vest. You even were nice enough to give me a Carhartt Beanie. Carhartt being a Michigan company, we've had so much love for Detroit and, and locally sourced swag here. I've never seen that before. How has the week been for you? >>The week has been amazing, as you can say by my voice probably. >>So the mic helps. Don't worry. You're good. >>Yeah, so, So we've been talking to tons and tons of people, obviously some vendors, partners of ours. That was great seeing all those people face to face again, because in the past years we haven't really been able to meet up with those people. But then of course, also a lot of end users and most importantly, we've met a lot of people that wanted to learn Kubernetes, that came here to learn Kubernetes, and we've been able to help them. So feel very satisfied about that. >>When we were at VMware explorer, Tom, you were on the program with us, just, I guess that was a couple of months ago. I'm listening track. So many events are coming up. >>Time is a loop. It's >>Okay. It really is. You, you teased some new things coming from a learning perspective. What is going on there? >>All right. So I'm happy that you link back to VMware explorer there because Yeah, I was so excited to talk about it, but I couldn't, and it was frustrating. I knew it was coming up. That was was gonna be awesome. So just before Cuban, we launched Cube Campus, which is the rebrand of learning dot cast io. And Victoria is the great mind behind all of this, but what the gist of it, and then I'll let Victoria talk a little bit. The gist of Cube Campus is this all started as a small webpage in our own domain to bring some hands on lab online and let people use them. But we saw so many people who were interested in those labs that we thought, okay, we have to make this its own community, and this should not be a branded community or a company branded community. >>This needs to be its own thing because people, they like to be in just a community environment without the brand from the company being there. So we made it completely independent. It's a Cube campus, it's still a hundred percent free and it's still the That's right. Only platform where you actually learn Kubernetes with hands on labs. We have 14 labs today. We've been creating one per month and we have a lot of people on there. The most exciting part this week is that we had our first learning day, but before we go there, I suggest we let Victoria talk a little bit about that user experience of Cube Campus. >>Oh, absolutely. So Cube Campus is, and Tom mentioned it's a one year old platform, and we rebranded it specifically to welcome more and, you know, embrace this Kubernetes space total as one year anniversary. We have over 11,000 students and they've been taking labs Wow. Over 7,000. Yes. Labs taken. And per each user, if you actually count approximation, it's over three labs, three point 29. And I believe we're growing as per user if you look at the numbers. So it's a huge success and it's very easy to use overall. If you look at this, it's a number one free Kubernetes learning platform. So for you user journey for your Kubernetes journey, if you start from scratch, don't be afraid. That's we, we got, we got it all. We got you back. >>It's so important and, and I'm sure most of our audience knows this, but the, the number one challenge according to Gartner, according to everyone with Kubernetes, is the complexity. Especially when you're getting harder. I think it's incredibly awesome that you've decided to do this. 11,000 students. I just wanna settle on that. I mean, in your first year is really impressive. How did this become, and I'm sure this was a conversation you two probably had. How did this become a priority for CAST and by Beam? >>I have to go back for that. To the last virtual only Cuban where we were lucky enough to have set up a campaign. It was actually, we had an artist that was doing caricatures in a Zoom room, and it gave us an opportunity to actually talk to people because the challenge back in the days was that everything virtual, it's very hard to talk to people. Every single conversation we had with people asking them, Why are you at cu com virtual was to learn Kubernetes every single conversation. Yeah. And so that was, that is one data point. The other data point is we had one lab to, to use our software, and that was extremely popular. So as a team, we decided we should make more labs and not just about our product, but also about Kubernetes. So that initial page that I talked about that we built, we had three labs at launch. >>One was to learn install Kubernetes. One was to build a first application on Kubernetes, and then a third one was to learn how to back up and restore your application. So there was still a little bit of promoting our technology in there, but pretty soon we decided, okay, this has to become even more. So we added storage, we added security and, and a lot more labs. So today, 14 labs, and we're still adding one every month. The next step for the labs is going to be to involve other partners and have them bring their technologies in the lab. So that's our user base can actually learn more about Kubernetes related technologies and then hopefully with links to open source tools or free software tools. And it's, it's gonna continue to be a, a learning experience for Kubernetes. I >>Love how this seems to be, have been born out of the pandemic in terms of the inability to, to connect with customers, end users, to really understand what their challenges are, how do we help you best? But you saw the demand organically and built this, and then in, in the first year, not only 11,000 as Victoria mentioned, 11,000 users, but you've almost quadrupled the number of labs that you have on the platform in such a short time period. But you did hands on lab here, which I know was a major success. Talk to us about that and what, what surprised you about Yeah, the appetite to learn that's >>Here. Yeah. So actually I'm glad that you relay this back to the pandemic because yes, it was all online because it was still the, the tail end of the pandemic, but then for this event we're like, okay, it's time to do this in person. This is the next step, right? So we organized our first learning day as a co-located event. We were hoping to get 60 people together in a room. We did two labs, a rookie and a pro. So we said two times 30 people. That's our goal because it's really, it's competitive here with the collocated events. It's difficult >>Bringing people lots going on. >>And why don't I, why don't I let Victoria talk about the success of that learning day, because it was big part also her help for that. >>You know, our main goal is to meet expectations and actually see the challenges of our end user. So we actually, it also goes back to what we started doing research. We saw the pain points and yes, it's absolutely reflecting, reflecting on how we deal with this and what we see. And people very appreciative and they love platform because it's not only prerequisites, but also hands on lab practice. So, and it's free again, it's applied, which is great. Yes. So we thought about the user experience, user flow, also based, you know, the product when it's successful and you see the result. And that's where we, can you say the numbers? So our expectation was 60 >>People. You're kinda, you I feel like a suspense is starting killing. How many people came? >>We had over 350 people in our room. Whoa. >>Wow. Wow. >>And small disclaimer, we had a little bit of a technical issue in the beginning because of the success. There was a wireless problem in the hotel amongst others. Oh geez. So we were getting a little bit nervous because we were delayed 20 minutes. Nobody left that, that's, I was standing at the door while people were solving the issues and I was like, Okay, now people are gonna walk out. Right. Nobody left. Kind >>Of gives me >>Ose bump wearing that. We had a little reception afterwards and I talked to people, sorry about the, the disruption that we had under like, no, we, we are so happy that you're doing this. This was such a great experience. Castin also threw party later this week at the party. We had people come up to us like, I was at your learning day and this was so good. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm gonna take the rest of the classes online now. They love it. Really? >>Yeah. We had our instructors leading the program as well, so if they had any questions, it was also address immediately. So it was a, it was amazing event actually. I'm really grateful for people to come actually unappreciated. >>But now your boss knows how you can blow out metrics though. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gonna >>Raise Victoria. >>Very good point. It's a very >>Good point. I can >>Tell. It's, it's actually, it's very tough to, for me personally, to analyze where the success came from. Because first of all, the team did an amazing job at setting the whole thing up. There was food and drinks for everybody, and it was really a very nice location in a hotel nearby. We made it a colocated event and we saw a lot of people register through the Cuban registration website. But we've done colocated events before and you typically see a very high no-show rate. And this was not the case right now. The a lot of, I mean the, the no-show was actually very low. Obviously we did our own campaign to our own database. Right. But it's hard to say like, we have a lot of people all over the world and how many people are actually gonna be in Detroit. Yeah. One element that also helped, I'm actually very proud of that, One of the people on our team, Thomas Keenan, he reached out to the local universities. Yes. And he invited students to come to learning day as well. I don't think it was very full with students. It was a good chunk of them. So there was a lot of people from here, but it was a good mix. And that way, I mean, we're giving back a little bit to the universities versus students. >>Absolutely. Much. >>I need to, >>There's a lot of love for Detroit this week. I'm all about it. >>It's amazing. But, but from a STEM perspective, that's huge. We're reaching down into that community and really giving them the opportunity to >>Learn. Well, and what a gateway for Castin. I mean, I can easily say, I mean, you are the number, we haven't really talked about casting at all, but before we do, what are those pins in front of you? >>So this is a physical pain. These are physical pins that we gave away for different programs. So people who took labs, for example, rookie level, they would get this p it's a rookie. >>Yes. I'm gonna hold this up just so they can do a little close shot on if you want. Yeah. >>And this is PR for, it's a, it's a next level program. So we have a program actually for IS to beginners inter intermediate and then pro. So three, three different levels. And this one is for Helman. It's actually from previous. >>No, Helmsman is someone who has taken the first three labs, right? >>Yes, it is. But we actually had it already before. So this one is, yeah, this one is, So we built two new labs for this event and it was very, very great, you know, to, to have a ready absolutely new before this event. So we launched the whole website, the whole platform with new labs, additional labs, and >>Before an event, honestly. Yeah. >>Yeah. We also had such >>Your expression just said it all. Exactly. >>You're a vacation and your future. I >>Hope so. >>We've had a couple of rough freaks. Yeah. This is part of it. Yeah. So, but about those labs. So in the classroom we had two, right? We had the, the, the rookie and the pro. And like I said, we wanted an audience for both. Most people stayed for both. And there were people at the venue one hour before we started because they did not want to miss it. Right. And what that chose to me is that even though Cuban has been around for a long time, and people have been coming back to this, there is a huge audience that considers themselves still very early on in their Kubernetes journey and wants to take and, and is not too proud to go to a rookie class for Kubernetes. So for us, that was like, okay, we're doing the right thing because yeah, with the website as well, more rookie users will keep, keep coming. And the big goal for us is just to accelerate their Kubernetes journey. Right. There's a lot of platforms out there. One platform I like as well is called the tech world with nana, she has a lot of instructional for >>You. Oh, she's a wonderful YouTuber. >>She, she's, yeah, her following is amazing. But what we add to this is the hands on part. Right? And, and there's a lot of auto resources as well where you have like papers and books and everything. We try to add those as well, but we feel that you can only learn it by doing it. And that is what we offer. >>Absolutely. Totally. Something like >>Kubernetes, and it sounds like you're demystifying it. You talked about one of the biggest things that everyone talks about with respect to Kubernetes adoption and some of the barriers is the complexity. But it sounds to me like at the, we talked about the demand being there for the hands on labs, the the cube campus.io, but also the fact that people were waiting an hour early, they're recognizing it's okay to raise, go. I don't really understand this. Yeah. In fact, another thing that I heard speaking of, of the rookies is that about 60% of the attendees at this year's cube con are Yeah, we heard that >>Out new. >>Yeah. So maybe that's smell a lot of those rookies showed up saying, >>Well, so even >>These guys are gonna help us really demystify and start learning this at a pace that works for me as an individual. >>There's some crazy macro data to support this. Just to echo this. So 85% of enterprise companies are about to start making this transition in leveraging Kubernetes. That means there's only 15% of a very healthy, substantial market that has adopted the technology at scale. You are teaching that group of people. Let's talk about casting a little bit. Number one, Kubernetes backup, 900% growth recently. How, how are we managing that? What's next for you, you guys? >>Yeah, so growth last year was amazing. Yeah. This year we're seeing very good numbers as well. I think part of the explanation is because people are going into production, you cannot sell back up to a company that is not in production with their right. With their applications. Right? So what we are starting to see is people are finally going into production with their Kubernetes applications and are realizing we have to back this up. The other trend that we're seeing is, I think still in LA last year we were having a lot of stateless first estate full conversations. Remember containers were created for stateless applications. That's no longer the case. Absolutely. But now the acceptance is there. We're not having those. Oh. But we're stateless conversations because everybody runs at least a database with some user data or application data, whatever. So all Kubernetes applications need to be backed up. Absolutely. And we're the number one product for that. >>And you guys just had recently had a new release. Yes. Talk to us a little bit about that before we wrap. It's new in the platform and, and also what gives you, what gives cast. And by being that competitive advantage in this new release, >>The competitive advantage is really simple. Our solution was built for Kubernetes. With Kubernetes. There are other products. >>Talk about dog fooding. Yeah. Yeah. >>That's great. Exactly. Yeah. And you know what, one of our successes at the show is also because we're using Kubernetes to build our application. People love to come to our booth to talk to our engineers, who we always bring to the show because they, they have so much experience to share. That also helps us with ems, by the way, to, to, to build those labs, Right? You need to have the, the experience. So the big competitive advantage is really that we're Kubernetes native. And then to talk about 5.5, I was going like, what was the other part of the question? So yeah, we had 5.5 launched also during the show. So it was really a busy week. The big focus for five five was simplicity. To make it even easier to use our product. We really want people to, to find it easy. We, we were using, we were using new helm charts and, and, and things like that. The second part of the launch was to do even more partner integrations. Because if you look at the space, this cloud native space, it's, you can also attest to that with, with Cube campus, when you build an application, you need so many different tools, right? And we are trying to integrate with all of those tools in the most easy and most efficient way so that it becomes easy for our customers to use our technology in their Kubernetes stack. >>I love it. Tom Victoria, one final question for you before we wrap up. You mentioned that you have a fantastic team. I can tell just from the energy you two have. That's probably the truth. You also mentioned that you bring the party everywhere you go. Where are we all going after this? Where's the party tonight? Yeah. >>Well, let's first go to a ballgame tonight. >>The party's on the court. I love it. Go Pistons. >>And, and then we'll end up somewhere downtown in a, in a good club, I guess. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll see how the show down with the hawks goes. I hope you guys make it to the game. Tom Victoria, thank you so much for being here. We're excited about what you're doing. Lisa, always a joy sharing the stage with you. My love. And to all of you who are watching, thank you so much for tuning into the cube. We are wrapping up here with one segment left in Detroit, Michigan. My name's Savannah Peterson. Thanks for being here.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022. Brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to Licia Spain and cube con cloud native con 2022 Europe. I'm Keith Townsend, along with Paul Gillon senior editor, enterprise architecture for Silicon angle. We're gonna talk to some amazing folks. Day two coverage of Q con cloud native con Paul. We did the wrap up yesterday. Great. A great back and forth about what en Rico about yesterday's, uh, session. What are you looking for to today? >>I'm looking for, uh, to understand better, uh, how Kubernetes is being put into production, the types of applications that are being built on top of it. Yesterday, we talked a lot about infrastructure today. I think we're gonna talk a little bit more about applications, including with our first guest. >>Yeah, I was speaking our first guest. We have ish Degan CPO chief product officer at Hazelcast Hazelcast has been on the program before, but you, this is your first time in the queue, correct? >>It, it is Keith. Yeah. Well, >>Welcome to been Cuban. So we're talking data, which is always a fascinating topic. Containers are, have been known for not being supportive of stateful applications. At least you shouldn't hold the traditional thought. You shouldn't hold stateful data in containers. Tell me about the relationship between Hazel cast and containers we're at Cuan. >>Yeah, so a little bit about, uh, Hazelcast. We are a real time data platform and, uh, we are not a database, but a data platform because we basically allow, uh, data at rest as well as data in motion. So you can imagine that if you're writing an application, you can basically query and join a data coming in events, as well as data, which might have been persisted. So you can do both stream processing as well as, you know, low latency data access. And, and this platform of course, is supported on all the clouds. And we kind of delegate the orchestration of this kind of scale out system to Kubernetes. Um, and you know, that provides a resiliency and many things which go along with that. >>So you say you don't, you're not a database platform. What are you used for to manage the data? >>So we are, uh, we are memory first. So we are, you know, we started with low latency applications, but then we realized that real time has really become a business term. It's it's more of a business SLA mm-hmm, <affirmative>, it's really the, we see the opportunity, the punctuated change, which is happening in the market today is about real time data access to real time. I mean, there are real time applications. Our customers are building around real time offers, um, realtime thread detection. I mean, just imagine, you know, one of our customers like B and P par bars, they have, they basically originate a loan while the customer is banking. So you are in an ATM machine and you swipe your card and you are asking for, you know, taking 50 euros out. And at that point they can actually originate a custom loan offer based on your existing balance you're existing request and your credit score in that moment. So that's a value moment for them and they actually saw 400% loan origination go up because of that, because nobody's gonna be thinking about a credit, uh, line of credit after they're done banking. So it's in that value moment and we allow basically our data platform allows you to have fast access to data and also process incoming streams. So not before they get stored, but as they're coming in. >>So if I'm a developer and cuon is definitely a conference for developer and I, I come to the booth and I hear <inaudible>, that's the end value. I, I hear what I can do with my application. I guess the question is, how do I get there? I mean, uh, if it's not a database, how do I make a call from a container to, from my microservice to Hazel cath? Like, do I think of this as a, uh, a CNI or, or C CSI? How do I access >>PA care? Yeah. So, so we, uh, you know, we are, our server is actually built in Java. So a lot of the application which get written on top of the data platform are basically accessing through Java APIs. Or as you have a.net shop, you can actually use.net API. So we are basically an API first platform and SQL is basically the polyglot way of accessing data, both streaming data, as well as it store data. So most of the application developers, a lot of it is run done in microservices, and they're doing these fast get inputs for data. So they, they have a key, they want to get to a customer, they give a customer ID. And the beauty is that, um, while they're processing the events, they can actually enrich it because you need contextual information as well. So going back to the ATM example, you know, at that event happened, somebody swiped the card and ask for 50 euros, and now you want more information like credit score information, all that needs to be combined in that, in that value moment. >>So we allow you to do those joins and, you know, the contextual information is very important. So you see a lot of streaming platform out there, which just do streaming, but if you're an application developer, like you asked, you have to basically do call out to a streaming platform to get, um, to do streaming analytics and then do another call to get the context of that. You know, what is the credit score for this customer? But whereas in our case, because the data platform supports both streaming as well as data at rest, you can do that in one call and, you know, you don't want to have the operational complexity to stand out. Two different scale out servers is, is, is, is humongous, right? I mean, you want to build your business application. So, >>So you are querying data streaming data and data rest yes. In the same query >>Yes. In the same query. And we are memory first. So what happens is that we store a lot of the hot data in memory. So we have a scale out Ram based server. So that's where you get the low latency from. In fact, last year we did a benchmark. We were able to process a billion events a second, uh, with 99% of the latency under 30 milliseconds. So that kind of processing and that kind of power is, and, and the most important thing is determinism. I mean, you know, there's a lot of, um, if you look at real time, what real time is, is about this predictable latency at scale, because ultimately your, your adhering to a business SLA is not about milliseconds or microsecond. It's what your business needs. If your business needs that you need to deny or, uh, approve a credit credit card transaction in 50 milliseconds, that's your business SLA, and you need that predictability for every transaction. >>So talk to us about how how's this packaged in consumed. Cause I'm hearing a, a bunch of server Ram I'm hearing numbers that we're trying to adapt away from at this conference. We don't wanna see the onlay. We just want to use it. >>Yeah. So, so we kind of take a bit that, that complexity of managing this scale out, um, uh, uh, cluster, which actually utilizes Rams from each server. And then, you know, if you, you can configure it so that the hard set of data is in Ram, but the data, which is, you know, not so hard can actually go into a tiered storage model. So we are memory first. So, but what you are doing is you're doing simple, it's an API. So you do basically a crud, right? You create records, you read them through SQL. So for you, it's, it's, it's kind of like how you access that database. And we also provide you, you know, real time is also a journey. I mean, a lot of customers, you know, you don't want to rip their existing system and deploy another kind of scale out platform. Right? So we, we see a lot of these use cases where they have a database and we can sit in between the database, a system of record and the application. So we are kind of in between there. So that's, that's the journey you can take to real time. >>How does Kubernetes, uh, containers and Kubernetes change the game for real time analytics? >>Yeah. So, uh, Kubernetes does change it because what's hap first of all, we service most of the operational workloads. So it's, it's more on the, a lot of our customers. We have most, most of the big banks credit card companies in financial services and retail. Those are the two big sectors for us. And first of all, you know, a lot of these operational workloads are moving to the cloud and with move to the cloud, they're actually taking their existing applications and, and moving to, you know, one of the providers and to kind of orchestrate this scale out platform, which does auto scaling, that's where the benefit comes from mm-hmm <affirmative>. And it also gives them the freedom of choice. So, you know, the Kubernetes is, you know, a standard which goes across cloud providers. So that gives them the benefit that they can actually take their application. And if they want, they can actually move it to a different, a different cloud provider because we take away the orchestration complexity, you know, in that abstraction layer. >>So what happens when I need to go really fast? I mean, I, I, I need, uh, I'm looking at bare metal and I'm looking at really scaling a, a, a homogeneous application in a single data center set of data centers. Is there a bare metal play here? >>Yes. There, there, there are some very, very, uh, like if you want microsecond latency, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, um, you know, we have customers who actually store two to four terabytes in Ram and, and they can actually stand up. Um, you know, again, it depends on what kind of deployment you want. You can either scale up or scale out, scaling up is expensive, you know, because those boxes are not cheap, but if you have a requirement like that, where there is sub millisecond or microphone latency requirement, you could actually store the entire data set. I mean, a lot of the operational data sets are under four terabytes. So it's not uncommon that you could actually take the entire operational transactional data set, actually move, move that to a pure Ram. But, uh, I think now we, we also see that these operational workloads are also, there's a need for analytics to be done on top as well. >>I mean, we, going back to the example I gave you, so this, this, uh, customer is not only doing stream crossing, they're also influencing a machine learning algorithm in that same, in the same kind of cycle in the life cycle. So they might have trained a machine learning or algorithm on a data lake somewhere, but once they're ready, they're actually influencing the ML algorithm in our kind of life cycle right there. So, you know, that that really brings analytics and transactions kind of together because after all transactions are where the real, you know, insights are. >>Yeah. I'm, I'm struggling a little bit with this, with these two different use cases where I have transactional basically a transactional database or transactional data platform alongside a analytics platform. Those are two, like they're two different things. I have a, you know, I, I have spinning rust for one, and then I have memory and, and MBME for another. Uh, and that requires tuning requires DBAs. It requires a lot of overhead, there seems to be some type of secret sauce going on here. >>Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, we, we basically say that if you are, if you have a business case where you want to make a decision, you know, you, the only chance to succeed is where you are not making a decision tomorrow based on today's data. Right? I mean, the only way to act on that data is today. So the act is a keyword here. We actually let you generate a realtime offer. We, we let you do credit card fraud detection. In that moment, the analytics is about knowing less about acting on it. Right? Most of our applications are machine critical. They're acting on real time. I think when you talk about like the data lakes there, there's actually a real time there as well, but it's about knowing, and we believe that the operational side is where, you know, that value moment is there, you know, what good is, is to know about something tomorrow, you know, if something wrong happened, I mean, it, yeah, so there's a latency squeeze there as well, but we are on, on more on the kind of transaction and operational side. >>I gotcha. Yeah. So help me understand, like integrations. A lot of the, the, when I think of transactions, I'm thinking of SAP, Oracle, where the process is done, or some legacy banking or not legacy or new modern banking app, how does the data get from one platform to a, to Hazel cast so I can make those >>Decisions? Yeah. So we have, uh, this, the streaming engine, we have has a whole bunch of connectors to a lot of data sources. So in fact, most of our use cases already have data sources underneath there, their databases there's KA connectors, you know, joining us because if you look at it, events is, are comprised of transactions. So something, a customer did, uh, a credit card swipe, right. And also events events could be machine or IOT. So it's really unique connectivity and data ingestion before you can process that. So we have, uh, a whole suite of connectors to kind of bring data in, in our platform. >>We've been talking a lot, these last couple of days about, uh, about the edge and about moving processing capability closer to the edge. How do you enable that? >>Yeah. So edge is actually very, very relevant because of what's happening is that, um, you know, if you, if you look at like a edge deployment use case, um, you know, we have a use case where data is being pushed from these different edge devices to cloud data warehouse. Right. But just imagine that you want to be filtering data at the, at, at where it is being originated from, and you wanna push only relevant data to, to maybe a central data lake where you might want to do, you know, train your machine learning models. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so that at the edge, we are actually able to process that data. So Hazel cast will allow you to actually write a data pipeline and do stream processing so that you might want to just push, you know, a part or a subset of data, which applies by the rules. Uh, so there's, there's a big, um, uh, I think edge is, you know, there's a lot of data being generated and you don't want like garbage and garbage out there's there's, there is there's filtration done at the edge. So that only the relevant data lands in a data, data lake or something like that. >>Well, Monash, we really appreciate you stopping by realtime data is an exciting area of coverage for the queue overall from Valencia Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, along with Paul Gillon, and you're watching the queue, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>what? Hello, I'm john free with the cube. I want to welcome Conrad Feldman, the founder and Ceo of Kwan cast here to kick off the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The events called the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. The changing advertising landscape, super relevant conversation just now. More than ever. Conrad welcome to your own program kicking this off. Thanks for holding this event. It's a pleasure. Great to chat with you today. So a big fan been following your company since the founding of it. Been analytics is always the prize of any data driven company. Media. Anything's all data driven now. Um, talk about the open internet because now more than ever it's under siege. As I, as I mentioned in my open, um, we've been seeing the democratization, a new trend of decentralization. We're starting to see um, you know, everyone's present online now, Clay Shirky wrote a book called, here comes everyone in 2005. Well everyone's here. Right? So you know, we're here, it's gonna be more open. But yet people are looking at as close right now. You're seeing the big players, um, or in the data. What's your vision of this open internet? >>Well, an open internet exists for everyone. And if you think about the evolution of the internet, when the internet was created for the first time really in history, anyone that had access to the internet could publish the content, whatever they were interested in and could find an audience. And of course that's grown to where we are today, where five billion people around the world are able to engage in all sorts of content, whether that's entertainment or education, news, movies. What's perhaps not so widely understood is that most of that content is paid for by advertising and there's a lot of systems that support advertising on the open Internet and some of those are under siege today certainly. >>And what's the big pressure point? Is it just more control the data? Is it just that these walled gardens are wanting to, you know, suck the audience in there? Is that monetization driving it? What's where's the friction? >>Well, the challenges is sort of the accumulation of power into a really small number of now giant corporations who have actually reduced a lot of the friction that marketers have in spending their money effectively. And it means that those companies are capturing a disproportionate spend of the ad budgets that fund digital content. So the problem is if more of the money goes to them, less of its going to independent content creators. It's actually getting harder for independent voices to emerge and be heard. And so that's the real challenges. That has more power consolidates into just a limited number of tech giants. The funding path for the open Internet becomes constrained and there'll be less choice for consumers without having to pay for subscriptions. >>Everyone knows the more data you have the better and certainly, but the centralized power when the trend is going the other way, the consensus is everyone wants to be decentralized more truth, more trust all this is being talked about on the heels of the google's news around, you know, getting rid of third party cookies and others have followed suit. Um, what does this mean? I mean, this cookies have been the major vehicle for tracking and getting that kind of data. What is gonna be replaced with what is this all about? And can you share with us what the future will look like? >>Sure, Well, just as advertising funds the open Internet is advertising technology that supports that advertising spend. It supports sort of the business of advertising that funds the open Internet. And within all of that technology is the need for different systems to be able to align around um the identification of for example, a consumer, Have they been to this site before? Have they seen an ad before? So there's all of these different systems that might be used for advertising for measurement, for attribution, for creating personalization. And historically they've relied upon the third party cookie as the mechanism for synchronization. Well, the third party cookie has been in decline for some time. It's already mostly gone from actually apple safari browser, but google's chrome has so much control over how people access the internet. And so it was when Google announced that chrome was going to deprecate the third party cookie, that it really sort of focus the minds of the industry in terms of finding alternative ways to tailor content and ultimately to just simply measure the effectiveness of advertising. And so there's an enormous amount of um innovation taking place right now to find alternative solutions. >>You know, some are saying that the free open internet was pretty much killed when, you know, the big comes like facebook and google started bringing all this data and kind of pulls all sucks all the auction in the room, so to speak. What's this mean with cookies now getting, getting rid of um, by google has an impact publishers because is it helpful? I mean hurtful. I mean, where's the where is that, what the publisher impact? >>Well, I don't think anyone really knows right now. So first of all, cookies weren't necessarily a very good solution to the sort of the challenge of maintaining state and understanding those sorts of the delivery of advertising and so on. It's just the one that's commonly used, I think for different publishers it may mean different things. But many publishers need to be able to demonstrate the value and the effectiveness of the advertising solutions that they deliver. So they'll be innovating in terms of how they use their first party data. They'll be continuing to use contextual solutions that have long been used to create advertising relevant, relevant. I think the big question of course is how we're going to measure it that any of this is effective at all because everyone relies upon measuring advertising effectiveness to justify capturing those budgets in the first place. >>You know, you mentioned contextual come up a lot also in the other interviews we've done with the folks in the around the internet around this topic of machine learning is a big 12 What is the impact of this with the modernization of the solution? You mentioned cookies? Okay cookies, old technology. But the mechanisms in this ecosystem around it or not, it funds the open internet. What is that modern solution that goes that next level? Is it contextual metadata? Is that shared systems? What's the it's the modernization of that. >>It's all of those and and more. There's no there's no single solution to replace the third party cookie. There'll be a combination of solutions. Part of that will be alternative identity mechanisms. So you know, you will start to see more registration wars to access content so that you have what's called a deterministic identify there will be statistical models so called probabilistic models, contextual has always been important. It will become more important and it will be combined with we use contextual combining natural language processing with machine learning models to really understand the detailed context of different pages across the internet. You'll also see the use of first party data and there are discussions about shared data services as well. I think there's gonna be a whole set of different innovations that will need to inter operate and it's going to be an evolutionary process as people get used to using these different systems to satisfy the different stages of the media fulfillment cycle from research and planning to activation to measurement. >>You know, you put up walled gardens. I want to just touch on the on on this kind of concept of walled gardens and and and and compare and contrast that with the demand for community, open internet has always fostered a community vibe. You see network effects mostly in distinct user communities or subnets of sub networks. If you will kind of walled gardens became that kind of group get together but then became more of a media solution to make the user is the product, as they say, facebook's a great example, right? People talk about facebook and from that misinformation abuse walled garden is not the best thing happening right now in the world, but yet is there any other other choice? That's how they're going to make money? But yet everyone wants trust, truth community. Are they usually exclusive? How do you see this evolving, what's your take? >>Well, I think the open internet is a, is a forum where anyone can have their voice, uh, put their voice out there and have it discovered and it's in that regard, it's a it's a force for good look. I think there are there are challenges, obviously in terms of some of the some of the optimization that takes place with inside the walled gardens, which is, is sort of optimized to drive engagement can have some unintended consequences. Um obviously that's something that's, that's broadly being discussed today and the impact on society, but sort of more at a more pointed level, it's just the absorption of advertising dollars. There's a finite amount of money from advertisers. It's estimated to be $400 billion this year in digital advertising. So it's a huge amount of money in terms of funding the open Internet, which sounds great except for its increasingly concentrated in a tiny number of companies. And so, you know, our job at Quan cast as champions of the free and open Internet is to help direct money effectively to publishers across the open internet and give advertisers a reliable, repeatable way of accessing the audiences that they care about in the environment they care about and delivering advertising results. >>It's a publisher, we care a lot about what our audience wants and try to serve them and listen to them. If we could get the data, we want that data and then also broker in the monetization with advertisers, who might want to reach that audience in whatever way. So this brings up the question of, you know, automation and role of data. You know, this is a huge thing to having that data closed loop, if you will for for publishers. But yet most publishers are small, some niche. And even as they can become super large, they don't have all the data and more, the more data, the better the machine learning. So what's the answer to this as it goes forward? How do we get there? What's the dots that that we need to connect to get that future state? >>So I think it takes it takes companies working together effectively. I think a really important part of it is, is a more direct conversation with consumers. We've seen that change beginning to happen over the past few years with the introduction of regulations that require clear communication to consumers about the data that's captured. And y and I think that creates an opportunity to explain to your audience is the way in which content is funded. So I think that consumer that consumer conversation will be part of the collective solution. >>You know, I want to as we wind down this kickoff segment, get your thoughts and vision around um, the evolution of the internet and you guys have done some great work at quan Cast is well documented, but everyone used to talk about traffic by traffic, then it became cost of acquisitions. PPC search. This is either mechanisms that people have been using for a long, long time, then you know, your connections but audience is about traffic, audience traffic. If this if my family is online, doesn't it become about networks and the people. So I want to get your thoughts and your vision because if community is going to be more important than people agree that it is and things are gonna be decentralized, more openness, more voices to be heard. You need to dress ability. The formation of networks and groups become super important. What's your vision on that? >>So my vision is to create relevance and utility for consumers. I think that's one of the things that's often forgotten is that when we make advertising more relevant and useful for consumers, it automatically fulfils the objectives that publishers and marketers have, everyone wins when advertising is more relevant. And our vision is to make advertising relevant across the entire open internet so that that ad supported model can continue to flourish and that five billion and hopefully many more billions in the future, people around the world have access to high quality, diverse content. >>If someone asked you Conrad, what is quant cast doing to make the open internet viable now that cookies are going away? What's the answer? >>So well, the cookie pieces is a central piece of it in terms of finding solutions that will enable sort of planning activation and measurement post cookies and we have a lot of innovation going on. There were also working with a range of industry bodies and our and our partners to build solutions for this. What we're really trying to do is to make buying the open internet as straightforward for marketers as it is today and buying the walled gardens. The reason the walled gardens capture so much money is they made it really easy for marketers to get results, marketers would like to be able to spend their money across all of the diverse publishes the open internet. You know, our job at Comcast is to make it just as easy to effectively spend money in funding the content that they really care about in reaching the audiences that they want. >>Great stuff. Great Mission. Conrad, thanks for coming on. Conrad Feldmann founder and Ceo here at the cookie conundrum recipe for success event, Quant Cast Industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. Thank you. Conrad appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, I'm john ferrier, stay with us for more on the industry event around the middle cookies. Mhm Yeah, yeah, thank you. Mhm. Welcome back to the Qantas industry summit on the demise of third party cookies, the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. I'm john furrier host of the cube, the changing landscape of advertising is here and shit Gupta, founder of you of digital is joining us chief. Thanks for coming on this segment. Really appreciate, I know you're busy, you've got two young kids as well as providing education to the digital industry, you got some kids to take care of and train them to. So welcome to the cube conversation here as part of the program. >>Yeah, thanks for having me excited to be here. >>So the office of the changing landscape of advertising really centers around the open to walled garden mindset of the web and the big power players. We know the big 34 tech players dominate the marketplace so clearly in a major inflection point and we've seen this movie before Web mobile revolution which was basically a reply platform NG of capabilities. But now we're in an error of re factoring the industry, not re platt forming a complete changing over of the value proposition. So a lot at stake here as this open web, open internet, global internet evolves. What are your, what's your take on this, this industry proposals out there that are talking to this specific cookie issue? What does it mean? And what proposals are out there? >>Yeah, so, you know, I I really view the identity proposals and kind of to to kind of groups, two separate groups. So on one side you have what the walled gardens are doing and really that's being led by google. Right, so google um you know, introduce something called the privacy sandbox when they announced that they would be deprecating third party cookies uh as part of the privacy sandbox, they've had a number of proposals unfortunately, or you know, however you want to say they're all bird themed for some reason, I don't know why. Um but the one, the bird theme proposal that they've chosen to move forward with is called flock, which stands for Federated learning of cohorts. And essentially what it all boils down to is google is moving forward with cohort level learning and understanding of users in the future after third party cookies, unlike what we've been accustomed to in this space, which is a user level understanding of people and what they're doing online for targeting tracking purposes. And so that's on one side of the equation, it's what google is doing with flock and privacy sandbox now on the other side is, you know, things like unified I. D. Two point or the work that I. D five is doing around building new identity frameworks for the entire space that actually can still get down to the user level. Right? And so again, unified I. D. Two point oh comes to mind because it's the one that's probably got the most adoption in the space. It's an open source framework. So the idea is that it's free and pretty much publicly available to anybody that wants to use it and unified, I need to point out again is user level. So it's it's basically taking data that's authenticated data from users across various websites you know that are logging in and taking those authenticated users to create some kind of identity map. And so if you think about those two work streams right, you've got the walled gardens and or you know, google with flock on one side and then you've got unified I. D. Two point oh and other I. D. Frameworks for the open internet. On the other side, you've got these two very differing type of approaches to identity in the future. Again on the google side it's cohort level, it's going to be built into chrome. Um The idea is that you can pretty much do a lot of the things that we do with advertising today, but now you're just doing it at a group level so that you're protecting privacy, whereas on the other side of the open internet you're still getting down to the user level. Um And that's pretty powerful. But the the issue there is scale, right? We know that a lot of people are not logged in on lots of websites. I think the stat that I saw is under five of all website traffic is authenticated. So really if you if you simplify things you boil it all down, you have kind of these two very differing approaches. >>I guess the question it really comes down to what alternatives are out there for cookies and which ones do you think will be more successful? Because I think, you know, the consensus is at least from my reporting, in my view, is that the world agrees. Let's make it open, Which one is going to be better. >>Yeah, that's a great question, john So as I mentioned, right, we have we have to kind of work streams here, we've got the walled garden work streams, work stream being led by google and their work around flock, and then we've got the open internet, right? Let's say unified I. D to kind of represents that. I personally don't believe that there is a right answer or an endgame here. I don't think that one of them wins over the other, frankly, I think that, you know, first of all, you have those two frameworks, neither of them are perfect, they're both flawed in their own ways. There are pros and cons to both of them. And so what we're starting to see now is you have other companies kind of coming in and building on top of both of them as kind of a hybrid solution. Right? So they're saying, hey, we use, you know, an open I. D. Framework in this way to get down to the user level and use that authenticated data and that's important. But we don't have all the scale. So now we go to google and we go to flock to kind of fill the scale. Oh and hey, by the way, we have some of our own special sauce, right? We have some of our own data, we have some of our own partnerships, we're gonna bring that in and layer it on top. Right? And so really where I think things are headed is the right answer, frankly, is not one or the other. It's a little mishmash of both. With a little extra something on top. I think that's that's what we're starting to see out of a lot of companies in the space. And I think that's frankly where we're headed. >>What do you think the industry will evolve to, in your opinion? Because I think this is gonna, you can't ignore the big guys on this because these programmatic you mentioned also the data is there. But what do you think the market will evolve to with this, with this conundrum? >>So, so I think john where we're headed? You know, I think we're right now we're having this existential existential crisis, right? About identity in this industry, because our world is being turned upside down, all the mechanisms that we've used for years and years are being thrown out the window and we're being told they were gonna have new mechanisms, Right? So cookies are going away device ids are going away and now we got to come up with new things and so the world is being turned upside down and everything that you read about in the trades and you know, we're here talking about it, right? Like everyone's always talking about identity right now, where do I think this is going if I was to look into my crystal ball, you know, this is how I would kind of play this out. If you think about identity today. Right? Forget about all the changes. Just think about it now and maybe a few years before today, Identity for marketers in my opinion has been a little bit of a checkbox activity. Right? It's been hey, um, okay, uh, you know ad tech company or a media company, do you have an identity solution? Okay. Tell me a little bit more about it. Okay, Sounds good. That sounds good. Now can we move on and talk about my business and how are you going to drive meaningful outcomes or whatever for my business? And I believe the reason that is, is because identity is a little abstract, right? It's not something that you can actually get meaningful validation against. It's just something that, you know. Yes, You have it. Okay, great. Let's move on, type of thing. Right. And so that, that's, that's kind of where we've been now, all of a sudden The cookies are going away, the device ids are going away. And so the world is turning upside down in this crisis of how are we going to keep doing what we were doing for the last 10 years in the future. So everyone's talking about it and we're trying to re engineer right? The mechanisms now if I was to look into the crystal ball right 2 3 years from now where I think we're headed is not much is going to change. And what I mean by that john is um uh I think that marketers will still go to companies and say do you have an ID solution? Okay tell me more about it. Okay uh Let me understand a little bit better. Okay you do it this way. Sounds good. Now the ways in which companies are going to do it will be different right now. It's flock and unified I. D. And this and that right. The ways the mechanisms will be a little bit different but the end state right? Like the actual way in which we operate as an industry and kind of like the view of the landscape in my opinion will be very simple or very similar, right? Because marketers will still view it as a tell me you have an ID solution. Make me feel good about it. Help me check the box and let's move on and talk about my business and how you're going to solve for my needs. So I think that's where we're going. That is not by any means to discount this existential moment that we're in. This is a really important moment where we do have to talk about and figure out what we're going to do in the future. My just my viewpoint is that the future will actually not look all that different than the present. >>And I'll say the user base is the audience. Their their data behind it helps create new experiences, machine learning and Ai are going to create those and we have the data you have the sharing it or using it as we're finding shit Gupta great insight dropping some nice gems here. Founder of you of Digital and also the Adjunct professor of Programmatic advertising at Levi School of Business and santa Clara University professor. Thank you for coming dropping the gems here and insight. Thank you. >>Thanks a lot for having me john really appreciate >>it. Thanks for watching. The cooking 100 is the cube host Jon ferrier me. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Hello welcome back to the cookie conundrum recipe for success and industry conference and summit from Guanacaste on the demise of third party cookies. Got a great industry panel here to break it down chris Gunther Senior Vice president Global Head of programmatic at news corp chris thanks for coming on Zal in Managing Director Solutions at Z axis and Summer Simpson. Vice president Product at quan cast stellar panel. Looking forward to this conversation. Uh thanks for coming on and chatting about the cookie conundrum. Thank you for having us. So chris we'll start with you at news corp obviously a major publisher deprecation of third party cookies affects everyone. You guys have a ton of traffic, ton of audience across multiple formats. Um, tell us about the impact to you guys and the reliance he has had on them. And what are you gonna do to prepare for this next level change? >>Sure. I mean, I think like everyone in this industry there's uh a significant reliance and I think it's something that a lot of talk about audience targeting but obviously that reliance on third party cookies pervasive across the whole at tech ecosystem Martek stack. And so you know, we have to think about how that impact vendor vendors, we work with what it means in terms of use cases across marketing, across advertising, across site experience. So, you know, without a doubt, it it's it's significant, but you know, we look at it as listen, it's disruptive, uh, disruption and change is always a little scary. Um, but overall it's a, it's a long overdue reset. I mean, I think that, you know, our perspective is that the cookies, as we all know was it was a crutch, right sort of a technology being used in way it shouldn't. Um, and so as we look at what's going to happen presumably after Jan 2022 then it's, it's a good way to kind of fix on some bad practices practices that lead to data leakage, um, practice or devalue for our perspective, some of the, you know, we offered as as publishers and I think that this is a key thing is that we're not just looking to as we look at the post gender world, not just kind of recreating the prior world because the prior world was flawed or I guess you could say the current world since it hasn't changed yet. But the current world is flawed. Let's not just not, you know, let's not just replicate that. Let's make sure that, you know, third party cookie goes away. Other work around like fingerprinting and things like that. You know, also go away so philosophically, that's where our heads at. And so as we look at how we are preparing, you know, you look at what are the core building blocks of preparing for this world. Obviously one of the key ones is privacy compliance. Like how do we treat our users with consent? Yeah, obviously. Are we um aligned with the regulatory environments? Yeah. In some ways we're not looking just a Jan 2022, but Jan 23 where there's gonna be the majority of our audiences we covered by regulation. And so I think from regulation up to data gathering to data activation, all built around an internal identifier that we've developed that allows us to have a consistent look at our users whether they're logged in or obviously anonymous. So it's really looking across all those components across all our sites and in all in a privacy compliant way. So a lot of work to be done, a lot of work in progress. But we're >>excited about what's going on. I like how you framed at Old world or next gen kind of the current situation kind of flawed. And as you think about programmatic, the concept is mind blowing and what needs to be done. So we'll come back to that because I think that original content view is certainly relevant, a huge investment and you've got great content and audience consuming it from a major media standpoint. Get your perspective on the impact because you've got clients who want to get their their message out in front of the audience at the right time, at the right place and the right context. Right, So your privacy, you got consent, all these things kind of boiling up. How do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. Everyone, everyone has a megaphone, now, everyone's, everyone's here, everyone's connected. So how are you impacted by this new notion? >>You know, if if the cookie list future was a tic tac, dance will be dancing right now, and at least into the next year, um this has been top of mind for us and our clients for quite some time, but I think as each day passes, the picture becomes clearer and more in focus. Uh the end of the third party cookie does not mean the end of programmatic. Um so clients work with us in transforming their investments into real business outcomes based on our expertise and based on our tech. So we continue to be in a great position to lead to educate, to partner and to grow with them. Um, along this uh cookie list future, the impact will be all encompassing in changing the ways we do things now and also accelerating the things that we've already been building on. So we take it from the top planning will have a huge impact because it's gonna start becoming more strategic around real business outcomes. Uh where Omni channel, So clients want to drive outcomes, drew multiple touch points of a consumer's journey, whether it has programmatic, whether it has uh cookie free environment, like connected tv, digital home audio, gaming and so forth. So we're going to see more of these strategic holistic plans. Creative will have a lot of impact. It will start becoming more important with creative testing. Creative insights. You know, creative in itself is cookie list. So there will be more focused on how to drive uh brand dialogue to connect to consumers with less targeting. With less cookies, with the cohesiveness of holistic planning. Creative can align through multiple channels and lastly, the role of a. I will become increasingly important. You know, we've always looked to build our tech our products to complement new and existing technology as well as the client's own data and text back to deliver these outcomes for them. And ai in its core it's just taking input data uh and having an output of your desired outcome. So input data could be dSP data beyond cookies such as browser such as location, such as contextual or publisher taking clients first party data, first party crm data like store visitation, sales, site activity. Um and using that to optimize in real time regardless of what vendor or what channel we're on. Um So as we're learning more about this cookie list dance, we're helping our clients on the steps of it and also introducing our own moves. >>That's awesome. Data is going to be a key value proposition, connecting in with content real time. Great stuff. Somewhere with your background in journalism and you're the tech VP of product at quan cast. You have the keys to the kingdom over there. It's interesting Journalism is about truth and good content original content. But now you have a data challenge problem opportunity on both sides, brands and publishers coming together. It's a data problem in a way it's a it's a tech stack, not so much just getting the right as to show up at the right place the right time. It's really bigger than that now. What's your take on this? >>Um you know, >>so first >>I think that consumers already sort of like except that there is a reasonable value exchange for their data in order to access free content. Right? And that's that's a critical piece for us to all kind of like understand over the past. Hi guys, probably two years since even even before the G. D. P. R. We've been doing a ton of discovery with customers, both publishers and marketers. Um and so you know, we've kind of known this, this cookie going away thing has been coming. Um And you know, Google's announcement just kind of confirmed it and it's been, it's been really, really interesting since Google's announcement, how the conversations have changed with with our customers and other folks that we talked to. And I've almost gone from being like a product manager to a therapist because there's such an emotional response. Um you know, from the marketing perspective, there's real fear there. There's like, oh my God, how you know, it's not just about, you know, delivering ads, it's about how do I control frequency? How do I, how do I measure, you know, success? Because the technology has has grown so much over the years to really give marketers the ability to deliver personalized advertising, good content, right. The consumers um and be able to monitor it and control it so that it's not too too intrusive on the publisher perspective side, we see slightly different response. It's more of a yes, right. You know, we're taking back control and we're going to stop the data leakage, we're going to get the value back for our inventory. Um and that both things are a good thing, but if it's, if it's not managed, it's going to be like ships passing in the night, right? In terms of um of, you know, they're there, them coming together, right, and that's the critical pieces that they have to come together. They have to get closer, you got to cut out a lot of that loom escape in the middle so that they can talk to each other and understand what's the value exchange happening between marketers and publishers and how do we do that without cookies? >>It's a fascinating, I love love your insight there. I think it's so relevant and it's got broader implications because, you know, if you look at how data's impact, some of these big structural changes and re factoring of industries, look at cyber security, you know, no one wants to share their data, but now if they share they get more insight, more machine learning, benefit more ai benefit. So now we have the sharing notion, but that goes against counter the big guys that want to wall garden, they want to hoard all the data and and control that to provide their own personalization. So you have this confluence of, hey, I want to hoard the data and then now I want to share the data. So so christmas summer you're in the, in the wheelhouse, you got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there the sharing model coming with privacy and these kinds of services? Is the open, come back again? How do you guys see this uh confluence of open versus walled gardens, because you need the data to make machine learning good. >>So I'll start uh start off, I mean, listen, I think you have to give credit to the walled gardens have created, I think as we look as publishers, what are we offering to our clients, what are we offering to the buy side? We need to be compelling. We shouldn't just be uh yeah, actually as journalists, I think that there is a case of the importance of funding journalism. Um but ultimately we need to make sure we're meeting the KPI is and the business needs of the buy side. And I think around that it is the sort of three core pillars that its ease of access, its scope of of activation and targeting and finally measurable results. So as I think is us as an individual publishers, so we have, we have multiple publications. So we do have scale. But then in partnership with other publishers perhaps to organizations like pre bid, you know, I think we can, you know, we're trying to address that and I think we can offer something that's compelling um, and transparent in terms of what these results are. But obviously, you know, I want to make sure it's clear transparent terms of results, but obviously where there's privacy in terms of the data and I think the form, you know, I think we've all heard a lot like data clean rooms, a lot of them out there flogging those wears. I think there's something valuable but you know, I think it's the right who is sort of the right partner or partners um and ultimately who allows us to get as close as possible to the buy side. And so that we can share that data for targeting, share it for perhaps for measurement, but obviously all in a privacy compliant >>way summer, what's your take on this? Because you talk about the future of the open internet democratization, the network effect that we're seeing in Vire al Itty and across multiple on the on the channels. Is that pointed out what's happening? That's the distribution now. So um that's almost an open garden model. So it's like um yeah, >>yeah, it's it's um you know, back in the day, you know, um knight ridder who was who was the first group that I that I worked for, um you know, each of those individual properties, um we're not hugely valuable on their own from a digital perspective, but together as a unit, they became valuable, right, and got scale for advertisers. Now we're in a place where, you know, I kind of think that each of those big networks are going to have to come together and work together to compare in size to the, to the world gardens. Um, and yeah, this is something that we've talked about before and an open garden. Um, I think that's the, that's the definitely the right route to take. And I and I agree with chris it's, it's about publishers getting as close to the market. Is it possible working with the tech companies that enable them to do that and doing so in a very privacy centric >>way. So how do we bring the brands and agencies together to get ready for third party cookies? Because there is a therapist moment here of it's gonna be okay. The parachute will open. The future is not gonna be as as grim. Um, it's a real opportunity. But if managed properly, what's your take on this is just more first party data strategy and what's your assessment of this? >>So we collaborated right now with ball grants on how did this still very complex cookie list future. Um, you know what's going to happen in the future? 2, 6 steps that we can take right now and market should take. Um, The first step is to gather intel on what's working on your current campaign, analyzing the data sets across cookie free environment. So you can translate those tactics eventually when the cookies do go away. So we have to look at things like temperature or time analysis. We could look at log level data. We could look at site analytics data. We can look at brand measurement tools and how creative really impacts the campaign success. The second thing we can look at is geo targeting strategies. The geo target strategy has been uh underrated because the granularity and geo data could go down all the way to the local level, even beyond zip code. So for example the census black data and this is especially important for CPG brands. So we're working closely with the client teams to understand not only the online data but the offline data and how we can utilize that in the future. Uh We want to optimize investments around uh markets that are working so strong markets and then test and underperforming markets. The third thing we can look at is contextual. So contextual by itself is cookie free. Uh We could build on small scale usage to test and learn various keywords and content categories based sets. Working closely with partners to find ways to leverage their data to mimic audiences that you are trying to target right now with cookies. Um the 4th 1 is publisher data or publisher targeting. So working with your publishers that you have strong relationships with who can curate similar audiences using their own first party data and conducting RFs to understand the scale and reach against your audience and their future role maps. So work with your top publishers based on historical data to try to recreate your best strategies. The 15 and I think this is very important is first party data, you know, that's going to matter more than ever. In the calculus future brands will need to think about how to access and developed the first party data starting with the consumers seeing a value in exchange for the information. It's a gold mine and understanding of consumer, their intent, the journey um and you need a really great data science team to extract insights out of that data, which will be crucial. So partner with strategic onboarding vendors and vet their ability to accept first party data into a cleaner environment for targeting for modeling for insight. And lastly, the six thing that we can do is begin to inform prospect prospecting by dedicating test budget to start gaining learnings about cookie list 11 place that we can start and it is under invested right now is Safari and Firefox. They have been calculus for quite some time so you can start here and begin testing here. Uh work with your data scientist team to understand the right mix is to to target and start exploring other channels outside of um just programmatic cookies like CTV digital, out of home radio gaming and so forth. So those are the six steps that we're taking right now with our clients to uh prepare and plan for the cookie list future. >>So chris let's go back to you. What's the solution here? Is there one, is there multiple solutions? What's the future look like for a cookie was future? >>Uh I think the one certain answers, they're definitely not just one solution. Um as we all know right now there there seems to be endless solutions, a lot of ideas out there, proposals with the W three C uh work happening within other industry bodies uh you know private companies solutions being offered and you know, it's a little bit of it's enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it to understand and understand the impact. And as a publisher were obviously a lot of people are knocking on our door. Uh they're saying, hey our solution is one that is going to bring in lots of money, you know, the all the buy side is going to use it. This is the one like I ma call to spend um, and so expect here and so far is that none of these solutions are I think everyone is still testing and learning no one on the buy side from our, from our knowledge is really committed to one or a few. It's all about a testing stage. I think that, you know, putting aside all that noise, I think what matters the most to us as publisher is actually something summer mentioned before. It's about control. You know, if we're going to work with a again, outside of our sort of, you know, internal identifier work that we're doing is we're going to work with an outside party or outside approach doesn't give us control as a publisher to ensure that it is, we control the data from our users. There isn't that data leakage, it's probably compliant. What information gets shared out there. What is it, what's released within within the bid stream? Uh If it is something that's attached to a somewhat declared user registered user that if that then is not somehow amplified or leverage off on another site in a way that is leveraging bit stream data or fingerprinting and going against. I think that the spirit of what we're trying to do in a post third party cookie world so that those controls are critical and I think they have those controls, his publisher, we have collectively be disciplined in what solutions that we we test out and what we eventually adopt. But even when the adoption point arrives, uh definitely it will not be one. There will be multiple because it's just too many use cases to address >>great, great insight there from, from you guys, news corp summer. Let's get back to you. I want to get your thoughts. You've been in many waves of innovation ups and downs were on a new one. Now we talked about the open internet democratization. Journalism is under a lot of pressure now, but there's now a wave of quality people really leaning in towards fighting misinformation, understanding truth and community and date is at the heart of it. What do you see as the new future for journalists, reward journalism is our ways their path forward. >>So there's uh, there's what I hope is going to happen. Um, and then I'm just gonna ignore what could write. Um, you know, there's there's a trend in market right now, a number of fronts, right? So there are marketers who are leaning into wanting to spend their marketing dollars with quality journalists, focusing on bipac owned and operated, really leaning into into supporting those businesses that have been uh, those publishers that have been ignored for years. I really hope that this trend continues. Um We are leaning into into helping um, marketers curate that supply right? And really, uh, you know, speak with their dollars about the things that that they support. Um, and uh, and and value right in market. So I'm hoping that that trend continues and it's not just sort of like a marketing blip. Um, but we will do everything possible to kind of like encourage that behavior and and give people the information they need to find, you know, truly high quality journalism. >>That's awesome chris Summer. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight on this panel on the cookie list future. Before we go, just quick summary each of you. If you don't mind just giving a quick sound bite or bumper sticker of what we can expect. If you had to throw a prediction For what's going to happen in the next 24 months Chris We'll start with you. >>Uh it's gonna be quite a ride. I think that's an understatement. Um I think that there, I wouldn't be surprised if if google delays the change to the chrome by a couple of months and and may give the industry some much needed time, but no one knows. I guess. I guess I'm not except for someone somewhere deep within chrome. So I think we all have to operate in a way that changes to happen, changes to happen quickly and it's gonna cover across all facets of the industry, all facets of from advertising, marketing. So just be >>prepared. >>Yeah, along the same lines, be prepared, nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. Uh You know, while dancing in this together. Uh I think um for us it's um planning and preparing and also building on what we've already been working on. Um So omni channel ai um creative and I think clients will uh lean more into those different channels, >>awesome. So we'll pick us home, last word. >>I think we're in the throwing spaghetti against the wall stage. Right, so this is a time of discovery of leaning in trying everything out, Learning and iterating as fast as we possibly >>can. Awesome. And I love the cat in the background over your shoulder. Can't stop staring at your wonderful cat. Thanks for coming on chris, Thanks for coming on. This awesome panel industry breakdown of the cookie conundrum. The recipe for success data ai open. Uh The future is here, it's coming, it's coming fast. I'm john fryer with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. Welcome back to the Quant Cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. We're here peter day. The cto of quad cast and crew T cop car, head of product marketing quad cast. Thanks for coming on talking about the changing advertising landscape. >>Thanks for having us. Thank you for having >>us. So we've been hearing this story out to the big players. Want to keep the data, make that centralized control, all the leverage and then you've got the other end. You got the open internet that still wants to be free and valuable for everyone. Uh what's what are you guys doing to solve this problem? Because cookies go away? What's going to happen there? How do people track things you guys are in this business first question? What is quan cast strategies to adapt to third party cookies going away? What's gonna be, what's gonna be the answer? >>Yeah. So uh very rightly said, john the mission, the Qantas mission is the champion of free and open internet. Uh And with that in mind, our approach to this world without third party cookies is really grounded in three fundamental things. Uh First as industry standards, we think it's really important to participate and to work with organizations who are defining the standards that will guide the future of advertising. So with that in mind, we've been participating >>with I. A. B. >>Tech lab, we've been part of their project Triarc. Uh same thing with pre bid, who's kind of trying to figure out the pipes of identity. Di di di di di pipes of uh of the future. Um And then also is W three C, which is the World Wide Web Consortium. Um And our engineers and our engineering team are participating in their weekly meetings trying to figure out what's happening with the browsers and keeping up with the progress they're on things such as google's block. Um The second uh sort of thing is interoperability, as you've mentioned, there are lots of different uh I. D. Solutions that are emerging. You have you I. D. Two point oh, you have live RAM, you have google's flock. Uh And there will be more, there are more and they will continue to be more. Uh We really think it is important to build a platform that can ingest all of these signals. And so that's what we've done. Uh The reason really is to meet our customers where they are at today. Our customers use multiple different data management platforms, the mps. Um and that's why we support multiple of those. Um This is not going to be much different than that. We have to meet our customers where we are, where they are at. And then finally, of course, which is at the very heart of who contrast is innovation. Uh As you can imagine being able to take all of these multiple signals in including the I. D. S. And the cohorts, but also others like contextual first party um consent is becoming more and more important. Um And then there are many other signals, like time, language geo location. So all of these signals can help us understand user behavior intent and interests um in absence of 3rd party cookies. However, uh there's there's something to note about this. They're very raw, their complex, they're messy all of these different signals. Um They are changing all the time, they're real time. Um And there's incomplete information isolation. Just one of these signals cannot help you build a true and complete picture. So what you really need is a technology like AI and machine learning to really bring all of these signals together, combine them statistically and get an understanding of user behavior intent and interests and then act on it, be it in terms of providing audience insights um or responding to bid requests and and so on and so forth. So those are sort of the three um fundamentals that our approach is grounded in which is industry standards, interoperability and and innovation. Uh and you know, you have peter here, who is who is the expert So you can dive much deeper into >>it. Is T. T. O. You've got to tell us how is this going to actually work? What are you guys doing from a technology standpoint to help with data driven advertising in a third party cookie list world? >>Well, we've been um This is not a shock, you know, I think anyone who's been close to his space has known that the 3rd Party Cookie has been um uh reducing inequality in terms of its pervasiveness and its longevity for many years now. And the kind of death knell is really google chrome making a, making the changes that they're gonna be making. So we've been investing in the space for many years. Um and we've had to make a number of hugely diverse investment. So one of them is in how as a marketer, how do I tell if my marketing still working in the world without >>computers? The >>majority of marketers completely reliant on third party cookies today to tell them if they're if they're marketing is working or not. And so we've had to invest heavily and statistical techniques which are closer to kind of economic trick models that markets are used to things like out of home advertising, It's going to establishing whether they're advertising is working or not in a digital environment actually, >>just as >>often, you know, as is often the case in these kind of times of massive disruption, there's always opportunity to make things better. And we really think that's true. And you know, digital measurement has often mistaken precision for accuracy. And there's a real opportunity to kind of see the wood for the trees if you like. And start to come with better methods of measuring the affections of advertising without third party cookies. And in fact to make countless other investments in areas like contextual modeling and and targeting that third party cookies and and uh, connecting directly to publishers rather than going through this kind of bloom escape that's gonna tied together third party cookies. So if I was to enumerate all the investments we've made, I think we'll be here till midnight but we have to make a number of vestments over a number of years and that level investments only increasing at the moment. >>Peter on that contextual. Can you just double click on that and tell us more? >>Yeah, I mean contextual is unfortunately these things, this is really poorly defined. It can mean everything from a publisher saying, hey, trust us, this dissipated about CVS to what's possible now and has only really been possible the last couple of years, which is to build >>statistical >>models of the entire internet based on the content that people are actually consumed. And this type of technology requires massive data processing capabilities. It's able to take advantage of the latest innovations in there is like natural language processing and really gives um computers are kind of much deeper and richer understanding of the internet, which ultimately makes it possible to kind of organize, organized the Internet in terms of the types of content of pages. So this type of technology has only been possible the last two years and we've been using contextual signals since our inception, it's always been massively predictive in terms of audience behaviours, in terms of where advertising is likely to work. And so we've been very fortunate to keep the investment going um and take advantage of many of these innovations that have happened in academia and in kind of uh in adjacent areas >>on the ai machine learning aspect, that seems to be a great differentiator in this day and age for getting the most out of the data. How is machine learning and ai factoring into your platform? >>I think it's, it's how we've always operated right from our interception when we started as a measurement company, the way that we were giving our customers at the time, we were just publishers, just the publisher side of our business insights into who their audience was, were, was using machine learning techniques. And that's never really changed. The foundation of our platform has always been, has always been machine learning from from before. It was cool. A lot of our kind of, a lot of our core teams have backgrounds in machine learning phds in statistics and machine learning and and that really drives our our decision making. I mean, data is only useful if you can make sense of it and if you can organize it and if you can take action on it and to do that at this kind of scout scale, it's absolutely necessary to use machine learning technology. >>So you mentioned contextual also, you know, in advertising, everyone knows in that world that you've got the contextual behavioural dynamics, the behavior that's kind of generally everyone's believing is happening. The consensus is undeniable is that people are wanting to expect an environment where there's trust, there's truth, but also they want to be locked in. They don't wanna get walled into a walled garden, nobody wants to be in the world, are they want to be free to pop around and visit sites is more horizontal scalability than ever before. Yet, the bigger players are becoming walled garden, vertical platforms. So with future of ai the experience is going to come from this data. So the behavior is out there. How do you get that contextual relevance and provide the horizontal scale that users expect? >>Yeah, I think it's I think it's a really good point and we're definitely this kind of tipping point. We think, in the broader industry, I think, you know, every published right, we're really blessed to work with the biggest publishers in the world, all the way through to my mom's vlog, right? So we get to hear the perspectives of publishers at every scale. I think they consistently tell us the same thing, which is they want to more directly connected consumers, they don't wanna be tied into these walled gardens, which dictate how they must present their content and in some cases what content they're allowed to >>present. >>Um and so our job as a company is to really provide level >>the playing field a little bit, >>provide them the same capabilities they're only used to in the walled gardens, but let's give them more choice in terms of how they structure their content, how they organize their content, how they organize their audiences, but make sure that they can fund that effectively by making their audiences in their environments discoverable by marketers measurable by marketers and connect them as directly as possible to make that kind of ad funded economic model as effective in the open Internet as it is in social. And so a lot of the investments we've made over recent years have been really to kind of realize that vision, which is, it should be as easy for a marketer to be able to understand people on the open internet as it is in social media. It should be as effective for them to reach people in the environment is really high quality content as it is on facebook. And so we invest a lot of a lot of our R and D dollars in making that true. We're now live with the Comcast platform, which does exactly that. And as third party cookies go away, it only um only kind of exaggerated or kind of further emphasizes the need for direct connections between brands and publishers. And so we just wanna build the technology that helps make that true and gives the kind of technology to these marketers and publishers to connect and to deliver great experiences without relying on these kind of walled >>gardens. Yeah, the Director Director, Consumer Director audience is a new trend. You're seeing it everywhere. How do you guys support this new kind of signaling from for for that's happening in this new world? How do you ingest the content and just this consent uh signaling? >>Uh we were really fortunate to have an amazing, amazing R and D. Team and, you know, we've had to do all sorts to make this, you need to realize our vision. This has meant things like, you know, we have crawlers which scan the entire internet at this point, extract the content of the pages and kind of make sense of it and organize it uh, and organize it for publishers so they can understand how their audiences overlap with potential competitors or collaborators. But more importantly, organize it for marketers. So you can understand what kind of high impact opportunities are there for them there. So, you know, we've had to we've had to build a lot of technology. We've had to build analytics engines, which can get answers back in seconds so that marketers and publishers can kind of interact with their own data and make sense of it and present it in a way that's compelling and help them drive their strategy as well as their execution. We've had to invest in areas like consent management because we believe that a free and open internet is absolutely reliant on trust and therefore we spend a lot of our time thinking about how do we make it easy for end users to understand who has access to their data and easy for end users to be able to opt out. And uh and as a result of that, we've now got the world's most widely adopted adopted consent management platform. So it's hard to tackle one of these problems without tackling all of them. Were fortunate enough to have had a large enough R and D budget over the last four or five years, make a number investments, everything from consent and identity through context, your signals through the measurement technologies, which really bring advertisers >>and Publishers places together great insight. Last word for you is what's the what's the customer view here as you bring these new capabilities of the platform, uh what's what are you guys seeing as the highlight uh from a platform perspective? >>So the initial response that we've seen from our customers has been very encouraging, both on the publisher side as well as the marketer side. Um I think, you know, one of the things we hear quite a lot is uh you guys are at least putting forth a solution, an actual solution for us to test Peter mentioned measurement, that really is where we started because you cannot optimize what you cannot measure. Um so that that is where his team has started and we have some measurement very, very uh initial capabilities still in alpha, but they are available in the platform for marketers to test out today. Um so the initial response has been very encouraging. People want to engage with us um of course our, you know, our fundamental value proposition, which is that the Qantas platform was never built to be reliant on on third party data. These stale segments like we operate, we've always operated on real time live data. Um The second thing is, is our premium publisher relationships. We have had the privilege of working like Peter said with some of the um biggest publishers, but we also have a very wide footprint. We have first party tags across um over 100 million plus web and mobile destinations. Um and you know, as you must have heard like that sort of first party footprint is going to come in really handy in a world without third party cookies, we are encouraging all of our customers, publishers and marketers to grow their first party data. Um and so that that's something that's a strong point that customers love about us and and lean into it quite a bit. Um So yeah, the initial response has been great. Of course it doesn't hurt that we've made all these are in the investments. We can talk about consent. Um, and you know, I often say that consent, it sounds simple, but it isn't, there's a lot of technology involved, but there's lots of uh legal work involved as it as well. We have a very strong legal team who has expertise built in. So yeah, very good response. Initially >>democratization. Everyone's a publisher. Everyone's a media company. They have to think about being a platform. You guys provide that. So I congratulate Peter. Thanks for dropping the gems there. Shruti, thanks for sharing the product highlights. Thanks for, for your time. Thank you. Okay, this is the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. And what's next? The cookie conundrum. The recipe for success with Kwan Cast. I'm john free with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mm

>>Yeah, yeah. >>Welcome back to our final session in cultivating a data fluent culture track earlier today, we heard from experts like Valerie from the Data Lodge who shared best practices that you can apply to build that data flew into culture in your organization and tips on how to become the next analyst of the future from Yasmin at Comcast and Steve at all Terex. Then we heard from a captivating session with Cindy Hausen and Ruhollah Benjamin, professor at Princeton, on how now is our chance to change the patterns of injustice that we see have been woven into the fabric of society. If you do not have a chance to see today's content, I highly recommend that you check it out on demand. There's a lot of great information that you could start applying today. Now I'm excited to introduce our next session, which will take a look at how the democratization of data is powering digital transformation in the insurance industry. We have two prestigious guests joining us today. First Jim Bramblett, managing director of North America insurance practice, lead at its center. Throughout Jim's career, he's been focused on large scale transformation from large to midsize insurance carriers. His direct experience with clients has traditionally been in the intersection of technology, platform transformation and operating remodel redesign. We also have Michael cast Onus, executive VP and chief operating officer at DNA. He's responsible for all information technology, analytics and operating functions across the organization. Michael has led major initiatives to launch digital programs and incorporating modern AP I architectures ER, which was primarily deployed in the cloud. Jim, please take it away. >>Great. Thanks, Paula E thought we'd cover a few things today around around data. This is some of the trends we see in data within the insurance sector. And then I'll hand it over to Michael Teoh, take you through his story. You know, I think at the macro level, as we think about data and we think about data in the context of the insurance sector, it's interesting because the entire history of the insurance sector has been built on data and yet, at the same time, the entire future of it relies on that same data or similar similar themes for data. But but different. Right? So we think about the history, what has existed in an insurance companies. Four walls was often very enough, very enough to compete, right? So if you think about your customer data, claims, data, CRM, data, digital data, all all the data that was yeah, contained within the four walls of your company was enough to compete on. And you're able to do that for hundreds of years. But as we we think about now as we think about the future and the ability to kind of compete on data, this data comes from many more places just than inside your four walls. It comes from every device, every human, every vehicle, every property, every every digital interaction. Um in upon this data is what we believe insurers need to pivot to. To compete right. They need to be able to consume this data at scale. They need to be able to turn through this data to drive analytics, and they serve up insights based on those analytics really at the desktop of insurance professionals. And by the way, that has to be in the natural transition of national transaction. Of that employees work day. So an underwriter at a desktop claim him on the desktop, the sales associate of desktop. Those insights need to be served up at that point in time when most relevant. And you know. So if we think about how insurance companies are leveraging data, we see this really on kind of three horizons and starting from the left hand side of the page here, this is really brilliant basics. So how my leveraging core core data and core applied intelligence to monetize your existing strategy? And I think this brilliant based, brilliant basics concept is where most of most of my clients, at least within insurance are are today. You know, how are we leveraging data in the most effective way and putting it in the hands of business decision makers to make decisions largely through reporting and some applied intelligence? Um, Horizon two. We see, you know, definitely other industries blazing a trail here, and this is really about How do we integrate ecosystems and partners Now? I think within insurance, you know, we've had data providers forever, right? Whether it's NPR data, credit data risk data, you know, data aggregators and data providers have been a critical part of the insurance sector for for decades. I think what's different about this this ecosystem and partnership model is that it's much more Oneto one and it's much more, you know, kind of. How do we integrate more tightly and how do we become more embedded in each other's transactions? I think that we see some emergence of this, um, in insurance with automotive manufacturers with building management systems. But I think in the grand scheme of things, this is really very, very nascent for us as a sector. And I think the third horizon is is, you know, how do we fundamentally think about data differently to drive new business models? And I, you know, I don't know that we haven't ensure here in North America that's really doing this at any sort of scale. We certainly see pilots and proofs of concepts. We see some carriers in Europe farther down this path, but it's really it's really very new for us. A Z Think about these three horizons for insurance. So you know what's what's behind all this and what's behind. You know, the next powering of digital transformation and and we think at the end of the exercise, its data data will be the next engine that powers digital transformation. So in this exhibit, you know we see the three horizons across the top. You know, data is activated and activating digital transformation. And this, you know, this purple 3rd, 3rd road here is we think some of the foundational building blocks required to kind of get this right. But I think what's most important about about this this purple third bar here is the far right box, which is business adoption. Because you can build this infrastructure, you can have. You know, this great scalable cloud capability. Um, you can create a bunch of applications and intelligence, but unless it's adopted by the business, unless it's democratized, unless those insights and decisions air served up in the natural course of business, you're gonna have trouble really driving value. So that way, I think this is a really interesting time for data. We think this is kind of the next horizon to power the next age of digital transformation for insurance companies. With that brief prelude, I am, I'm honored. Thio, turn it over to Michael Stone Is the Cielo at CNN Insurance? >>Thanks, Jim, for that intro and very exciting Thio be here is part of part of beyond when I think a digital transformation within the context of insurance, actually look at it through the lens of competing in an era of near perfect information. So in order to be able to deliver all of the potential value that we talked about with regard to data and changing ecosystem and changing demands, the question becomes, How do you actually harness the information that's available to everybody to fundamentally change the business? So if you'll indulge me a bit here, let me tell you just a little bit more for those that don't know about insurance, what it really is. And I use a very long run on sentence to do that. It's a business model where capital is placed against risk in the form of products and associated services sold the customers through channels two companies to generate a return. Now, this sounds like a lot of other businesses in across multiple industries that were there watching today. But the difference within insurance is that every major word in that long run on sentence is changing sources of capital that we could draw on to be able to underwrite risk of going away. The nature of risk itself is changing from the perspective of policies that live six months to a year, the policies that could last six minutes. The products that we're creating are changing every day for our ability to actually put a satellite up in the air or ensure against the next pandemic. Our customers are not just companies or individuals, but they could be governments completely different entities than we would have been in sharing in the past and channels were changing. We sell direct, we sell through brokers and products are actually being embedded in other products. So you may buy something and not even know that insurance is a part of it. And what's most interesting here is the last word which is around return In the old world. Insurance was a cash flow business in which we could bring the premium in and get a level of interest income and being able to use that money to be able thio buffer the underwriting results that we would have. But those returns or dramatically reduced because of the interest income scenario, So we have to generate a higher rate of return. So what do we need to do? Is an insurance company in through this digital transformation to be able to get there? Well, fundamentally, we need to rethink how we're using information, and this is where thought spot and the cloud coming for us. We have two basic problems that we're looking to solve with information. The first one is information veracity. Do we believe it? When we get it? Can we actually trust it? Do we know what it means when we say that this is a policy in force or this is a new customer where this is the amount of attention or rate that we're going to get? Do we actually believe in that piece of data? The second is information velocity. Can we get it fast enough to be able to capitalize upon it? So in other words, we're We're working in a situation where the feedback loop is closing quickly and it's operating at a speed that we've never worked in before. So if we can't solve veracity and velocity, then we're never going to be able to get to where we need to go. So when we think of something like hot spot, what do we use it for? We use it to be able to put it in the hands of our business years so that they could ask the key questions about how the business is running. How much profit of my generating this month? What brokers do I need to talk? Thio. What is my rate retention? Look like what? The trends that I'm seeing. And we're using that mechanism not just to present nice visualizations, but to enable that really quick, dynamic question and answer and social, socially enabled search, which completely puts us in a different position of being able to respond to the market conditions. In addition, we're using it for pattern recognition. Were using it for artificial intelligence. We're gonna be capitalizing on the social aspect of of search that's that's enabled through thought spot and also connecting it into our advanced machine learning models and other capabilities that we currently have. But without it solving the two fundamental problems of veracity and velocity, we would be handicapped. So let me give you some advice about if I were in your position and you don't need to be in sleepy old industry like insurance to be able to do this, I'll leave you with three things. The first one is picking water holes so What are the things that you really want to be good at? What are the pieces of information that you really need to know more about? I mean, in insurance, its customers, it's businesses, locations, it's behavior. There are only a few water also really understand and pick those water holes that you're going to be really good at. The second is stand on the shoulders of giants. You know, in the world of technology, there's often a philosophy that says, Well, I can build it something better than somebody else create if I have it in house. But I'm happy to stand on the shoulders of giants like Thought Spot and Google and others to be able to create this capability because guess what? They're gonna out innovate any of the internal shops all day and every day. So don't be afraid. Thio. Stand side by side on the shoulders of giants as part of your journey. Unless you've got to build these organizations not just the technology for rapid experimentation and learning, because guess what? The moment you deliver insight, it begs another question, which also could change the business process, which could change the business model and If your organization the broader organization of business technology, analytics, customer service operations, etcetera is not built in a way that could be dynamic and flexible based on where the market is or is going, then you're gonna miss out on the opportunity. So again, I'm proud to be part of the fast black community. Really love the technology. And if if you look too, have the same kind of issues with your given industry about how you can actually speed up decision making, deliver insights and deliver this kind of search and recommended to use it. And with that, let's go to some questions. >>Awesome. Thank you so much, Michael and Jim for that in depth perspective and those tangible takeaways for our audience. We have a few minutes left and would love to ask a few questions. So here's the first one for Michael Michael. What are some of the most important things that you know now that you didn't know before you started this process? I think one of >>the things that's a great question. I think one of the things that really struck me is that, you know, traditional thinking would be very use case centric or pain point centric Show me, uh, this particular model or a particular question you want me to answer that can build your own analytics to do that or show me a deficiency in the system and I can go and develop a quick head that will do well, then you know, wallpaper over that particular issue. But what we've really learned is the foundation matters. So when we think about building things is building the things that are below the waterline, the pipes and plumbing about how you move data around how the engines work and how it all connects together gives you the above the waterline features that you could deliver to. You know, your employees into your customers much faster chasing use cases across the top above the waterline and ignoring what's below the water line to me. Is it really, uh, easy recipe too quick? Get your way to nothing. So again, focus on the foundation bill below the water line and then iterated above the water line that z what the lessons we've learned. It has been very effective for us. >>I think that's a very great advice for all those watching today on. But Here's one for Jim. Jim. What skills would you say are required for teams to truly adopt this digital transformation process? >>Yeah, well, I think that's a really good question, and I think I'd start with it's It's never one. Well, our experience has shown us number a one person show, right? So So we think to kind of drive some of the value that that that Michael spoke about. We really looked across disciplinary teams, which is a an amalgamation of skills and and team members, right? So if you think about the data science skills required, just kinda under under understand how toe toe work with data and drive insights, Sometimes that's high end analytic skills. Um, where you gonna find value? So some value architectural skills Thio really articulate, you know, Is this gonna move the needle for my business? I think there's a couple of critical critical components of this team. One is, you know, the operation. Whatever. That operation maybe has to be embedded, right, because they designed this is gonna look at a piece of data that seems interesting in the business Leader is going to say that that actually means nothing to me in my operation. So and then I think the last the last type of skill would be would be a data translator. Um, sitting between sometimes the technology in the business so that this amalgamation of skills is important. You know, something that Michael talked about briefly that I think is critical is You know, once you deliver insight, it leads to 10 more questions. So just in a intellectual curiosity and an understanding of, you know, if I find something here, here, the implications downstream from my business are really important. So in an environment of experimenting and learning thes thes cross discipline teams, we have found to be most effective. And I think we thought spot, you know, the platform is wired to support that type of analysis and wired to support that type of teaming. >>Definitely. I think that's though there's some really great skills. That's for people to keep in mind while they are going through this process. Okay, Michael, we have another question for you. What are some of the key changes you've had to make in your environment to make this digital transformation happen? >>That's a great question. I think if you look at our environment. We've got a mixture of, you know, space agent Stone age. We've got old legacy systems. We have all sorts of different storage. We have, you know, smatterings of things that were in cloud. The first thing that we needed to do was make a strong commitment to the cloud. So Google is our partner for for the cloud platform on unabashedly. The second thing that we needed to dio was really rethink the interplay between analytics systems in operational systems. So traditionally, you've got a large data warehouses that sit out over here that, you know, we've got some kind of extract and low that occurs, and we've got transactional operational systems that run the business, and we're thinking about them very differently from the perspective of bringing them together. How Doe I actually take advantage of data emotion that's in the cloud. So then I can actually serve up analytics, and I can also change business process as it's happening for the people that are transacting business. And in the meantime, I can also serve the multiple masters of total cost and consumption. So again, I didn't applications are two ships that pass in the night and never be in the world of Sienna. When you look at them is very much interrelated, especially as we want to get our analytics right. We want to get our A i m all right, and we want to get operational systems right By capturing that dated motion force across that architecture er that was an important point. Commit to the cloud, rethink the way we think analytics systems, work and operational systems work and then move them in tandem, as opposed to doing one without the other one in the vacuum. >>That's that's great advice, Michael. I think it's very important those key elements you just hit one question that we have final question we have for Jim. Jim, how do you see your client sustain the benefits that they've gained through this process? >>Yeah, it's a really good question. Um, you know, I think about some of the major themes around around beyond right, data fluency is one of them, right? And as I think about fluency, you only attain fluency through using the language every single day. They were day, week, over week, month over month. So you know, I think that applies to this. This problem too. You know, we see a lot of clients have to change probably two things at the same time. Number one is mindset, and number two is is structure. So if you want to turn these data projects from projects into processes, right, so so move away from spinning up teams, getting getting results and winding down. You wanna move away from that Teoh process, which is this is just the way working for these teams. Um, you have to change the mindset and often times you have to marry that with orb structure change. So So I'm gonna spin up these teams, but this team is going to deliver a set of insights on day. Then we're gonna be continuous improvement teams that that persist over time. So I think this shifting from project teams to persistent teams coupled with mindset coupled with with or structure changed, you know, a lot of times has to be in place for a period of time to get to get the fluency and achieve the fluency that that most organizations need. >>Thanks, Jim, for that well thought out answer. It really goes to show that the transformation process really varies when it comes to organizations, but I think this is a great way to close out today's track. I like to think Jim, Michael, as well as all the experts that you heard earlier today for sharing. There's best practice as to how you all can start transforming your organization's by building a data fluent culture, Um, and really empowering your employees to understand what data means and how to take actions with it. As we wrap up and get ready for the next session, I'd like to leave you all with just a couple of things. Number one if you miss anything or would like to watch any of the other tracks. Don't worry. We have everything available after this event on demand number two. If you want to ask more questions from the experts that you heard earlier today, you have a chance to do so. At the Meet The Experts Roundtable, make sure to attend the one for track four in cultivating a data fluent culture. Now, as we get ready for the product roadmap, go take a sip of water. This is something you do not want to miss. If you love what you heard yesterday, you're gonna like what you hear today. I hear there's some type of Indiana Jones theme to it all, so I won't say anything else, but I'll see you there.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >>Hi everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 virtual. We are the cube virtual I'm John ferry, your host with my coach, Dave Alante for keynote analysis from Swami's machine learning, all things, data huge. Instead of announcements, the first ever machine learning keynote at a re-invent Dave. Great to see you. Thanks Johnny. And from Boston, I'm here in Palo Alto. We're doing the cube remote cube virtual. Great to see you. >>Yeah, good to be here, John, as always. Wall-to-wall love it. So, so, John, um, how about I give you my, my key highlights from the, uh, from the keynote today, I had, I had four kind of curated takeaways. So the first is that AWS is, is really trying to simplify machine learning and use machine intelligence into all applications. And if you think about it, it's good news for organizations because they're not the become machine learning experts have invent machine learning. They can buy it from Amazon. I think the second is they're trying to simplify the data pipeline. The data pipeline today is characterized by a series of hyper specialized individuals. It engineers, data scientists, quality engineers, analysts, developers. These are folks that are largely live in their own swim lane. Uh, and while they collaborate, uh, there's still a fairly linear and complicated data pipeline, uh, that, that a business person or a data product builder has to go through Amazon making some moves to the front of simplify that they're expanding data access to the line of business. I think that's a key point. Is there, there increasingly as people build data products and data services that can monetize, you know, for their business, either cut costs or generate revenue, they can expand that into line of business where there's there's domain context. And I think the last thing is this theme that we talked about the other day, John of extending Amazon, AWS to the edge that we saw that as well in a number of machine learning tools that, uh, Swami talked about. >>Yeah, it was great by the way, we're live here, uh, in Palo Alto in Boston covering the analysis, tons of content on the cube, check out the cube.net and also check out at reinvent. There's a cube section as there's some links to so on demand videos with all the content we've had. Dave, I got to say one of the things that's apparent to me, and this came out of my one-on-one with Andy Jassy and Andy Jassy talked about in his keynote is he kind of teased out this idea of training versus a more value add machine learning. And you saw that today in today's announcement. To me, the big revelation was that the training aspect of machine learning, um, is what can be automated away. And it's under a lot of controversy around it. Recently, a Google paper came out and the person was essentially kind of, kind of let go for this. >>But the idea of doing these training algorithms, some are saying is causes more harm to the environment than it does good because of all the compute power it takes. So you start to see the positioning of training, which can be automated away and served up with, you know, high powered ships and that's, they consider that undifferentiated heavy lifting. In my opinion, they didn't say that, but that's clearly what I see coming out of this announcement. The other thing that I saw Dave that's notable is you saw them clearly taking a three lane approach to this machine, learning the advanced builders, the advanced coders and the developers, and then database and data analysts, three swim lanes of personas of target audience. Clearly that is in line with SageMaker and the embedded stuff. So two big revelations, more horsepower required to process training and modeling. Okay. And to the expansion of the personas that are going to be using machine learning. So clearly this is a, to me, a big trend wave that we're seeing that validates some of the startups and I'll see their SageMaker and some of their products. >>Well, as I was saying at the top, I think Amazon's really trying, working hard on simplifying the whole process. And you mentioned training and, and a lot of times people are starting from scratch when they have to train models and retrain models. And so what they're doing is they're trying to create reusable components, uh, and allow people to, as you pointed out to automate and streamline some of that heavy lifting, uh, and as well, they talked a lot about, uh, doing, doing AI inferencing at the edge. And you're seeing, you know, they, they, uh, Swami talked about several foundational premises and the first being a foundation of frameworks. And you think about that at the, at the lowest level of their S their ML stack. They've got, you know, GPU's different processors, inferential, all these alternative processes, processors, not just the, the Xav six. And so these are very expensive resources and Swami talked a lot about, uh, and his colleagues talked a lot about, well, a lot of times the alternative processor is sitting there, you know, waiting, waiting, waiting. And so they're really trying to drive efficiency and speed. They talked a lot about compressing the time that it takes to, to run these, these models, uh, from, from sometimes weeks down to days, sometimes days down to hours and minutes. >>Yeah. Let's, let's unpack these four areas. Let's stay on the firm foundation because that's their core competency infrastructure as a service. Clearly they're laying that down. You put the processors, but what's interesting is the TensorFlow 92% of tensor flows on Amazon. The other thing is that pie torch surprisingly is back up there, um, with massive adoption and the numbers on pie torch literally is on fire. I was coming in and joke on Twitter. Um, we, a PI torch is telling because that means that TensorFlow is originally part of Google is getting, is getting a little bit diluted with other frameworks, and then you've got MX net, some other things out there. So the fact that you've got PI torch 91% and then TensorFlow 92% on 80 bucks is a huge validation. That means that the majority of most machine learning development and deep learning is happening on AWS. Um, >>Yeah, cloud-based, by the way, just to clarify, that's the 90% of cloud-based cloud, uh, TensorFlow runs on and 91% of cloud-based PI torch runs on ADM is amazingly massive numbers. >>Yeah. And I think that the, the processor has to show that it's not trivial to do the machine learning, but, you know, that's where the infrared internship came in. That's kind of where they want to go lay down that foundation. And they had Tanium, they had trainee, um, they had, um, infrared chow was the chip. And then, you know, just true, you know, distributed training training on SageMaker. So you got the chip and then you've got Sage makers, the middleware games, almost like a machine learning stack. That's what they're putting out there >>And how bad a Gowdy, which was, which is, which is a patrol also for training, which is an Intel based chip. Uh, so that was kind of interesting. So a lot of new chips and, and specialized just, we've been talking about this for awhile, particularly as you get to the edge and do AI inferencing, you need, uh, you know, a different approach than we're used to with the general purpose microbes. >>So what gets your take on tenant? Number two? So tenant number one, clearly infrastructure, a lot of announcements we'll go through those, review them at the end, but tenant number two, that Swami put out there was creating the shortest path to success for builders or machine learning builders. And I think here you lays out the complexity, Dave butts, mostly around methodology, and, you know, the value activities required to execute. And again, this points to the complexity problem that they have. What's your take on this? >>Yeah. Well you think about, again, I'm talking about the pipeline, you collect data, you just data, you prepare that data, you analyze that data. You, you, you make sure that it's it's high quality and then you start the training and then you're iterating. And so they really trying to automate as much as possible and simplify as much as possible. What I really liked about that segment of foundation, number two, if you will, is the example, the customer example of the speaker from the NFL, you know, talked about, uh, you know, the AWS stats that we see in the commercials, uh, next gen stats. Uh, and, and she talked about the ways in which they've, well, we all know they've, they've rearchitected helmets. Uh, they've been, it's really a very much database. It was interesting to see they had the spectrum of the helmets that were, you know, the safest, most safe to the least safe and how they've migrated everybody in the NFL to those that they, she started a 24%. >>It was interesting how she wanted a 24% reduction in reported concussions. You know, you got to give the benefit of the doubt and assume some of that's through, through the data. But you know, some of that could be like, you know, Julian Edelman popping up off the ground. When, you know, we had a concussion, he doesn't want to come out of the game with the new protocol, but no doubt, they're collecting more data on this stuff, and it's not just head injuries. And she talked about ankle injuries, knee injuries. So all this comes from training models and reducing the time it takes to actually go from raw data to insights. >>Yeah. I mean, I think the NFL is a great example. You and I both know how hard it is to get the NFL to come on and do an interview. They're very coy. They don't really put their name on anything much because of the value of the NFL, this a meaningful partnership. You had the, the person onstage virtually really going into some real detail around the depth of the partnership. So to me, it's real, first of all, I love stat cast 11, anything to do with what they do with the stats is phenomenal at this point. So the real world example, Dave, that you starting to see sports as one metaphor, healthcare, and others are going to see those coming in to me, totally a tale sign that Amazon's continued to lead. The thing that got my attention was is that it is an IOT problem, and there's no reason why they shouldn't get to it. I mean, some say that, Oh, concussion, NFL is just covering their butt. They don't have to, this is actually really working. So you got the tech, why not use it? And they are. So that, to me, that's impressive. And I think that's, again, a digital transformation sign that, that, you know, in the NFL is doing it. It's real. Um, because it's just easier. >>I think, look, I think, I think it's easy to criticize the NFL, but the re the reality is, is there anything old days? It was like, Hey, you get your bell rung and get back out there. That's just the way it was a football players, you know, but Ted Johnson was one of the first and, you know, bill Bellacheck was, was, you know, the guy who sent him back out there with a concussion, but, but he was very much outspoken. You've got to give the NFL credit. Uh, it didn't just ignore the problem. Yeah. Maybe it, it took a little while, but you know, these things take some time because, you know, it's generally was generally accepted, you know, back in the day that, okay, Hey, you'd get right back out there, but, but the NFL has made big investments there. And you can say, you got to give him, give him props for that. And especially given that they're collecting all this data. That to me is the most interesting angle here is letting the data inform the actions. >>And next step, after the NFL, they had this data prep data Wrangler news, that they're now integrating snowflakes, Databricks, Mongo DB, into SageMaker, which is a theme there of Redshift S3 and Lake formation into not the other way around. So again, you've been following this pretty closely, uh, specifically the snowflake recent IPO and their success. Um, this is an ecosystem play for Amazon. What does it mean? >>Well, a couple of things, as we, as you well know, John, when you first called me up, I was in Dallas and I flew into New York and an ice storm to get to the one of the early Duke worlds. You know, and back then it was all batch. The big data was this big batch job. And today you want to combine that batch. There's still a lot of need for batch, but when people want real time inferencing and AWS is bringing that together and they're bringing in multiple data sources, you mentioned Databricks and snowflake Mongo. These are three platforms that are doing very well in the market and holding a lot of data in AWS and saying, okay, Hey, we want to be the brain in the middle. You can import data from any of those sources. And I'm sure they're going to add more over time. Uh, and so they talked about 300 pre-configured data transformations, uh, that now come with stage maker of SageMaker studio with essentially, I've talked about this a lot. It's essentially abstracting away the, it complexity, the whole it operations piece. I mean, it's the same old theme that AWS is just pointing. It's its platform and its cloud at non undifferentiated, heavy lifting. And it's moving it up the stack now into the data life cycle and data pipeline, which is one of the biggest blockers to monetizing data. >>Expand on that more. What does that actually mean? I'm an it person translate that into it. Speak. Yeah. >>So today, if you're, if you're a business person and you want, you want the answers, right, and you want say to adjust a new data source, so let's say you want to build a new, new product. Um, let me give an example. Let's say you're like a Spotify, make it up. And, and you do music today, but let's say you want to add, you know, movies, or you want to add podcasts and you want to start monetizing that you want to, you want to identify, who's watching what you want to create new metadata. Well, you need new data sources. So what you do as a business person that wants to create that new data product, let's say for podcasts, you have to knock on the door, get to the front of the data pipeline line and say, okay, Hey, can you please add this data source? >>And then everybody else down the line has to get in line and Hey, this becomes a new data source. And it's this linear process where very specialized individuals have to do their part. And then at the other end, you know, it comes to self-serve capability that somebody can use to either build dashboards or build a data product. In a lot of that middle part is our operational details around deploying infrastructure, deploying, you know, training machine learning models that a lot of Python coding. Yeah. There's SQL queries that have to be done. So a lot of very highly specialized activities, what Amazon is doing, my takeaway is they're really streamlining a lot of those activities, removing what they always call the non undifferentiated, heavy lifting abstracting away that it complexity to me, this is a real positive sign, because it's all about the technology serving the business, as opposed to historically, it's the business begging the technology department to please help me. The technology department obviously evolving from, you know, the, the glass house, if you will, to this new data, data pipeline data, life cycle. >>Yeah. I mean, it's classic agility to take down those. I mean, it's undifferentiated, I guess, but if it actually works, just create a differentiated product. So, but it's just log it's that it's, you can debate that kind of aspect of it, but I hear what you're saying, just get rid of it and make it simpler. Um, the impact of machine learning is Dave is one came out clear on this, uh, SageMaker clarify announcement, which is a bias decision algorithm. They had an expert, uh, nationally CFUs presented essentially how they're dealing with the, the, the bias piece of it. I thought that was very interesting. What'd you think? >>Well, so humans are biased and so humans build models or models are inherently biased. And so I thought it was, you know, this is a huge problem to big problems in artificial intelligence. One is the inherent bias in the models. And the second is the lack of transparency that, you know, they call it the black box problem, like, okay, I know there was an answer there, but how did it get to that answer and how do I trace it back? Uh, and so Amazon is really trying to attack those, uh, with, with, with clarify. I wasn't sure if it was clarity or clarified, I think it's clarity clarify, um, a lot of entirely certain how it works. So we really have to dig more into that, but it's essentially identifying situations where there is bias flagging those, and then, you know, I believe making recommendations as to how it can be stamped. >>Nope. Yeah. And also some other news deep profiling for debugger. So you could make a debugger, which is a deep profile on neural network training, um, which is very cool again on that same theme of profiling. The other thing that I found >>That remind me, John, if I may interrupt there reminded me of like grammar corrections and, you know, when you're typing, it's like, you know, bug code corrections and automated debugging, try this. >>It wasn't like a better debugger come on. We, first of all, it should be bug free code, but, um, you know, there's always biases of the data is critical. Um, the other news I thought was interesting and then Amazon's claiming this is the first SageMaker pipelines for purpose-built CIC D uh, for machine learning, bringing machine learning into a developer construct. And I think this started bringing in this idea of the edge manager where you have, you know, and they call it the about machine, uh, uh, SageMaker store storing your functions of this idea of managing and monitoring machine learning modules effectively is on the edge. And, and through the development process is interesting and really targeting that developer, Dave, >>Yeah, applying CIC D to the machine learning and machine intelligence has always been very challenging because again, there's so many piece parts. And so, you know, I said it the other day, it's like a lot of the innovations that Amazon comes out with are things that have problems that have come up given the pace of innovation that they're putting forth. And, and it's like the customers drinking from a fire hose. We've talked about this at previous reinvents and the, and the customers keep up with the pace of Amazon. So I see this as Amazon trying to reduce friction, you know, across its entire stack. Most, for example, >>Let me lay it out. A slide ahead, build machine learning, gurus developers, and then database and data analysts, clearly database developers and data analysts are on their radar. This is not the first time we've heard that. But we, as the kind of it is the first time we're starting to see products materialized where you have machine learning for databases, data warehouse, and data lakes, and then BI tools. So again, three different segments, the databases, the data warehouse and data lakes, and then the BI tools, three areas of machine learning, innovation, where you're seeing some product news, your, your take on this natural evolution. >>Well, well, it's what I'm saying up front is that the good news for, for, for our customers is you don't have to be a Google or Amazon or Facebook to be a super expert at AI. Uh, companies like Amazon are going to be providing products that you can then apply to your business. And, and it's allowed you to infuse AI across your entire application portfolio. Amazon Redshift ML was another, um, example of them, abstracting complexity. They're taking, they're taking S3 Redshift and SageMaker complexity and abstracting that and presenting it to the data analysts. So that, that, that individual can worry about, you know, again, getting to the insights, it's injecting ML into the database much in the same way, frankly, the big query has done that. And so that's a huge, huge positive. When you talk to customers, they, they love the fact that when, when ML can be embedded into the, into the database and it simplifies, uh, that, that all that, uh, uh, uh, complexity, they absolutely love it because they can focus on more important things. >>Clearly I'm this tenant, and this is part of the keynote. They were laying out all their announcements, quick excitement and ML insights out of the box, quick, quick site cue available in preview all the announcements. And then they moved on to the next, the fourth tenant day solving real problems end to end, kind of reminds me of the theme we heard at Dell technology worlds last year end to end it. So we are starting to see the, the, the land grab my opinion, Amazon really going after, beyond I, as in pass, they talked about contact content, contact centers, Kendra, uh, lookout for metrics, and that'll maintain men. Then Matt would came on, talk about all the massive disruption on the, in the industries. And he said, literally machine learning will disrupt every industry. They spent a lot of time on that and they went into the computer vision at the edge, which I'm a big fan of. I just loved that product. Clearly, every innovation, I mean, every vertical Dave is up for grabs. That's the key. Dr. Matt would message. >>Yeah. I mean, I totally agree. I mean, I see that machine intelligence as a top layer of, you know, the S the stack. And as I said, it's going to be infused into all areas. It's not some kind of separate thing, you know, like, Coobernetti's, we think it's some separate thing. It's not, it's going to be embedded everywhere. And I really like Amazon's edge strategy. It's this, you, you are the first to sort of write about it and your keynote preview, Andy Jassy said, we see, we see, we want to bring AWS to the edge. And we see data center as just another edge node. And so what they're doing is they're bringing SDKs. They've got a package of sensors. They're bringing appliances. I've said many, many times the developers are going to be, you know, the linchpin to the edge. And so Amazon is bringing its entire, you know, data plane is control plane, it's API APIs to the edge and giving builders or slash developers, the ability to innovate. And I really liked the strategy versus, Hey, here's a box it's, it's got an x86 processor inside on a, throw it over the edge, give it a cool name that has edge in it. And here you go, >>That sounds call it hyper edge. You know, I mean, the thing that's true is the data aspect at the edge. I mean, everything's got a database data warehouse and data lakes are involved in everything. And then, and some sort of BI or tools to get the data and work with the data or the data analyst, data feeds, machine learning, critical piece to all this, Dave, I mean, this is like databases used to be boring, like boring field. Like, you know, if you were a database, I have a degree in a database design, one of my degrees who do science degrees back then no one really cared. If you were a database person. Now it's like, man data, everything. This is a whole new field. This is an opportunity. But also, I mean, are there enough people out there to do all this? >>Well, it's a great point. And I think this is why Amazon is trying to extract some of the abstract. Some of the complexity I sat in on a private session around databases today and listened to a number of customers. And I will say this, you know, some of it I think was NDA. So I can't, I can't say too much, but I will say this Amazon's philosophy of the database. And you address this in your conversation with Andy Jassy across its entire portfolio is to have really, really fine grain access to the deep level API APIs across all their services. And he said, he said this to you. We don't necessarily want to be the abstraction layer per se, because when the market changes, that's harder for us to change. We want to have that fine-grained access. And so you're seeing that with database, whether it's, you know, no sequel, sequel, you know, the, the Aurora the different flavors of Aurora dynamo, DV, uh, red shift, uh, you know, already S on and on and on. There's just a number of data stores. And you're seeing, for instance, Oracle take a completely different approach. Yes, they have my SQL cause they know got that with the sun acquisition. But, but this is they're really about put, is putting as much capability into a single database as possible. Oh, you only need one database only different philosophy. >>Yeah. And then obviously a health Lake. And then that was pretty much the end of the, the announcements big impact to health care. Again, the theme of horizontal data, vertical specialization with data science and software playing out in real time. >>Yeah. Well, so I have asked this question many times in the cube, when is it that machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors and you know, that day is coming. If it's not here, uh, you know, I think helped like is really interesting. I've got an interview later on with one of the practitioners in that space. And so, you know, healthcare is something that is an industry that's ripe for disruption. It really hasn't been disruption disrupted. It's a very high, high risk obviously industry. Uh, but look at healthcare as we all know, it's too expensive. It's too slow. It's too cumbersome. It's too long sometimes to get to a diagnosis or be seen, Amazon's trying to attack with its partners, all of those problems. >>Well, Dave, let's, let's summarize our take on Amazon keynote with machine learning, I'll say pretty historic in the sense that there was so much content in first keynote last year with Andy Jassy, he spent like 75 minutes. He told me on machine learning, they had to kind of create their own category Swami, who we interviewed many times on the cube was awesome. But a lot of still a lot more stuff, more, 215 announcements this year, machine learning more capabilities than ever before. Um, moving faster, solving real problems, targeting the builders, um, fraud platform set of things is the Amazon cadence. What's your analysis of the keynote? >>Well, so I think a couple of things, one is, you know, we've said for a while now that the new innovation cocktail is cloud plus data, plus AI, it's really data machine intelligence or AI applied to that data. And the scale at cloud Amazon Naylor obviously has nailed the cloud infrastructure. It's got the data. That's why database is so important and it's gotta be a leader in machine intelligence. And you're seeing this in the, in the spending data, you know, with our partner ETR, you see that, uh, that AI and ML in terms of spending momentum is, is at the highest or, or at the highest, along with automation, uh, and containers. And so in. Why is that? It's because everybody is trying to infuse AI into their application portfolios. They're trying to automate as much as possible. They're trying to get insights that, that the systems can take action on. >>And, and, and actually it's really augmented intelligence in a big way, but, but really driving insights, speeding that time to insight and Amazon, they have to be a leader there that it's Amazon it's, it's, it's Google, it's the Facebook's, it's obviously Microsoft, you know, IBM's Tron trying to get in there. They were kind of first with, with Watson, but with they're far behind, I think, uh, the, the hyper hyper scale guys. Uh, but, but I guess like the key point is you're going to be buying this. Most companies are going to be buying this, not building it. And that's good news for organizations. >>Yeah. I mean, you get 80% there with the product. Why not go that way? The alternative is try to find some machine learning people to build it. They're hard to find. Um, so the seeing the scale of kind of replicating machine learning expertise with SageMaker, then ultimately into databases and tools, and then ultimately built into applications. I think, you know, this is the thing that I think they, my opinion is that Amazon continues to move up the stack, uh, with their capabilities. And I think machine learning is interesting because it's a whole new set of it's kind of its own little monster building block. That's just not one thing it's going to be super important. I think it's going to have an impact on the startup scene and innovation is going, gonna have an impact on incumbent companies that are currently leaders that are under threat from new entrance entering the business. >>So I think it's going to be a very entrepreneurial opportunity. And I think it's going to be interesting to see is how machine learning plays that role. Is it a defining feature that's core to the intellectual property, or is it enabling new intellectual property? So to me, I just don't see how that's going to fall yet. I would bet that today intellectual property will be built on top of Amazon's machine learning, where the new algorithms and the new things will be built separately. If you compete head to head with that scale, you could be on the wrong side of history. Again, this is a bet that the startups and the venture capitals will have to make is who's going to end up being on the right wave here. Because if you make the wrong design choice, you can have a very complex environment with IOT or whatever your app serving. If you can narrow it down and get a wedge in the marketplace, if you're a company, um, I think that's going to be an advantage. This could be great just to see how the impact of the ecosystem this will be. >>Well, I think something you said just now it gives a clue. You talked about, you know, the, the difficulty of finding the skills. And I think that's a big part of what Amazon and others who were innovating in machine learning are trying to do is the gap between those that are qualified to actually do this stuff. The data scientists, the quality engineers, the data engineers, et cetera. And so companies, you know, the last 10 years went out and tried to hire these people. They couldn't find them, they tried to train them. So it's taking too long. And now that I think they're looking toward machine intelligence to really solve that problem, because that scales, as we, as we know, outsourcing to services companies and just, you know, hardcore heavy lifting, does it doesn't scale that well, >>Well, you know what, give me some machine learning, give it to me faster. I want to take the 80% there and allow us to build certainly on the media cloud and the cube virtual that we're doing. Again, every vertical is going to impact a Dave. Great to see you, uh, great stuff. So far week two. So, you know, we're cube live, we're live covering the keynotes tomorrow. We'll be covering the keynotes for the public sector day. That should be chock-full action. That environment is going to impact the most by COVID a lot of innovation, a lot of coverage. I'm John Ferrari. And with Dave Alante, thanks for watching.

>>Fly from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media. >>Hey, welcome back everyone. Cubes coverage here in San Francisco, the Moscone South. We're here at the RSA conference. I'm John, your host and the cube. You know, cybersecurity is now a global phenomenon, but cubbies have to move at the speed of business, which now is at the speed of the potential attacks. This is a new paradigm shift. New generation of problems that have to be solved and companies solving them. We have a hot startup here that's growing. Hazel cast, the CEO, Kelly Kelly Harrell is here. Cube alumni. Good to see you. Good to see you, John. Hey, so we know each other you've been on before. Um, you know, networking, you know, compute, you know the industry. You're now the CEO of Hazel cast. So first of all, what does Hazelcast do? And then we can get into some of the cool things. Hazel cast is an in memory compute platform. >>So we're a kind of a neutral platform. You write your applications to us. We sit in front of things like databases and stream, uh, streaming sources, uh, and we execute applications at microsecond speeds, which is really, really important as we move more and more towards digital and AI. Uh, so basically when, when time matters, when time is money people buy Hazelcast. So I've got to ask you your interest in better, you can do a lot of different things. You can run any companies you want. Why Hazelcast what attracted you to this company? What was unique about it that got your attention and what made you join the firm? Well, when I first started looking at it and realized that a hundred of the world's largest companies are their customers and this company really was kind of kind of a run silent run deep company. A lot of people didn't know about it. >>Um, I could not, I had this dissonance, like how can this possibly be the case? Well, it turns out, uh, if you go into the Java developer world, the name is like Kleenex. Everybody knows Hazelcast because of the open source adoption of it, which has gone viral a long, long time ago. So once I started realizing what they had and why people were buying it, and I looked at that, that problem statement and the problem statement is really increasing with digitalization. So the more things are speeding up, the more applications have to perform at really, really low latency. So there was this big big growth market opportunity and Hazel CAS clearly had the had the drop on the market. So I've got to ask you, so we're at RSA and I mentioned on my intro here the speed of business while he's been down the, it kind of cliche moving at the speed of business, but now business has to move as the speed of how to react to some of the large scale things, whether it's compute power, cloud computing, and obviously cyber is attacks and a response. >>How do you view that and how are you guys attacking that problem? Well, you know, it's funny. I think the first time I truly understood security was the day that I was shopping for a home safe. You know, because I realized that all of these safes, they all were competing on one of the common metric, which is the meantime to break in, right? Is that you had one job and all you can tell me is that it's going to happen eventually, you know? So the kind of the scales got peeled off my eyes and I realized that, that when it comes to security, the only common factor is elapsed time, you know, and uh, so the last time is what matters. And then the second thing is that time is relative. It's relative to the speed of the attack. You know, if I'm just trying to protect my goods in a safe, the last amount of time is how long it can take for the bad guy to break into the safe. >>But now we're working at digital speeds, you know, so, you know, you take a second break that down to a thousand, uh, that's uh, you know, milliseconds. It takes 300 milliseconds. The blink. Yeah. Now we're working at microsecond speeds. Uh, and we're finding that there are just a really rapidly growing number of transactions that have to perform at that scale and that, and that speed. Um, you know, it, it may have escaped people completely, but card processing, credit card, debit card processing, ever Dawn on you that that's an IOT application now. Yeah, because my phone is a terminal. Amazon's a giant terminal number of transactions go up. They have three milliseconds to decide whether or not they're going to approve that. And uh, now with using Hazel Cassady not just handle it within that three milliseconds, but they also are running multiple fraud detection algorithms in that same window. >>Okay. So I get it now. That's why the in-memory becomes critical. You can't gotta be in memory. Okay, so I got to ask the next logical question, which is okay, I get that it makes less sense and I want to dig into that in a second. But let's go to the application developer. Okay, I'm doing dev ops, I'm doing cloud. I'm cool. Right? So now you just wake me up and say, wait a minute, I'm not dealing with nanosecond latency. What do I do? Like what's I mean, who's, how to applications respond to that kind of attack velocity? Well, it's not a not a a an evolution. So the application is written to Hazel cast is very, very simple to do. Um, there are, uh, like 60 million Hazel cast cluster starts every month. So people out in the wild are doing this all day long and we're really big in the Java developer community, but not only Java. >>Um, and so it's very, very straightforward with how to write your application and pointed at Hazelcast instead of pointing at the database behind us. Uh, so that part is actually very, very simple. All right, so take me through, I get the market space you're going after. It makes total sense. You run the, I think the right wave in my opinion. Business model product, how you guys organize, how do people sign up for our development and the development side? Who's your buyer? What's the business look like? Share a Hazel. Cast a one-on-one. Yeah. So we're an open core model, meaning the core engine is open source and fully downloadable and you know, free to use, uh, the additional functionality is the commercial aspect of it, which are tend to be features that are used when you're really going into, into sensitive and large scale deployments. Um, so the developers have access to a, they just come to hazelcast.org and uh, and join the community that way. >>Um, the people that we engage with are everyone from the developer all the way up through the architect and then the a C level member who's charged with standing up whatever this new capability is. So we talk up and down that chain, um, where you're a very, very technical company. Uh, but we've got a very, very powerful RLM. What's the developer makeup look like? Is it a software developer? Is it an engineer? So what's the makeup of the, of the developer? They're core application developers. Um, a lot in Java, increasingly in.net, uh, as a MLM AR coming on, we're getting a lot of Python. Uh, so it's, it's developers with that skillset and they're basically, uh, writing an application that they're, um, uh, basically their division is specified. So we need this new application. It could be a new application for a customer engagement and application for fraud detection and an application for stock trading. >>Anything that's super, super time sensitive and, uh, they, they select us and they build on us. So you get the in-memory solution for developers. Take me through the monetization on the open core. Is it services? Is it, uh, it's a subscription. It's a subscription model. So, okay. Uh, w we are paid on a, on a annual basis, uh, for, for use of the software. And um, you know, however large the installation gets is a function that basically determines, uh, you know, what the price is and then it's just renewed annually. Awesome. We'll do good subscriptions. Good economics. It is. What about the secret sauce? What sun in the cut was on the covers? Can you share what the magic is or is it proprietary? Is that now what's, uh, it's, it's hardcore computer science. It really is what it is. And that is actually what is in the core engine. >>Um, but I mean, we've got PhDs on staff. We're tackling some really, really hard problems. You know, I can, I can build anything in memory. I can make a spreadsheet in memory, I can make a word processor and memory. But you know, the question is how good is it? How fast is it, how scalable, how resilient. So, um, you know, those, you're saying speed, resilience and scale are the foundation and it took the company years and years to be able to master this. That's an asymptotic attempt and you're never at the end of that. But we've got, you know, the most resilience, so something, it doesn't go down. It can't go down because our customers lose millions for every second that it's down. So it can't go down. It's got to scale. And it's gotta be low latency number of customers you guys have right now. Can you tell us about the public references and why they using Hazelcast and what did they say about it? >>Yeah, I mean we've got a hundred of the largest, uh, financial services, about 60% of our revenue. E-commerce is a, another 20% large telcos. Another job. There are a lot of IOPS type companies, right? Yeah. Basically it's, um, so you know, in the financial services, uh, it's all the names that you would know, uh, every logo in your wallet. It's probably one of our customers as an example. Um, massive banks, uh, card processors, uh, we don't get to talk about very many of them, but you know, something like national bank of Australia, uh, capital one, um, you know, you can, you can let your, your mind run there. Um, our largest customer has over a trillion dollar market cap. There's only a few that meet that criteria. So I'll let you on that one. One of the three. Um, all right, so what's next for you guys? >>Give the quick plug in. The company would appreciate the insights. I think he'd memory's hot. What do you guys are going to do? What's your growth strategy? Uh, what's, what do you, what's your priorities? The CEO? Yeah. Well, we just raised a $50 million round, which is a very, very significant round. Um, and we're putting that to work aggressively. We just came off the biggest quarter in the company's history. So we're really on fire right now. Uh, we've established a very strong technology partnership with Intel, uh, including specialty because of their AI initiatives. Because we power a lot of AI, uh, uh, applications. IBM has become a strategic partner. They're now reselling Hazelcast. Uh, so we've got a bunch of, uh, a bunch of wind in our sails right now coming into this year, what we're going to be doing is, uh, really delivering a full blown, uh, in memory compute platform that delivers, that can process stored and streaming data simultaneously. >>Nothing else on the planet can do that. We're finding some really innovative applications and, um, you know, we're just really, really working on market penetration right now. You know, when you see all these supply chain hacks out there, you're going to look at more in memory detection, prevention, counter strike, you know, all this provision things you got to take care of. Mean applications have to now respond. It's almost like a whole new SLA for application requirement. Yeah, it is. I mean, the bad guys are moving to digital speed, you know, if you have important apps that, uh, that are affected by that. Right. You know, you'd better get ahead of that. Well, actually you could be doing that, by the way. You can be doing that on your, on premise or you could be doing in the cloud with the managed service that we've also stood up while still we get the Cuban in, in memory Africa and when we were there, I will be happy. Kelly, congratulations on the funding. Looking forward to tracking you. We'll follow up and check in with you guys. All right. Congratulations. Awesome. Thanks John. I appreciate it. Okay. It's keep coverage here in San Francisco, the Moscone. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching.

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host Stu minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and this is a special cube conversation from our Boston area studio following up from the Cronus global cyber summit it happened recently down in Miami Beach Florida John Fourier was a host there you can always go to the cube net to get all of the content here happy to welcome to the program first I've got Pat Hurley who's the vice president and general manager of Americas for a Cronus and joining him as one of his partners Jason Nolan who's the vice president of business development at S Castle both you locally-based thank you so much for joining us great to be here thanks for having us - all right so Pat why don't we start with you we talked a little bit earlier with William tall about some of the announcements give us some of the things and that specifically might be it'd be important to to the partners like Jason well first of all was a fantastic event was our inaugural cyber summit we had great attendance from our partners and getting a lot of feedback about the content that was there actually Jason was one of our panel speakers we got a lot of very positive feedback there as well fantastic event for us the the food was even great so we enjoyed that it was on Miami Beach fantastic location so from our side we thought was a very successful event now the biggest challenge we will have is making even that much better next year yeah did you get the stone crab while you were down there Jason who is unbelievable huh yeah so you were out the show you got to sit on some panels you know you were feeling the energy it was great to interact for the audience and kind of hear the questions that they had and the excitement and the energy around the messaging was really really powerful all right so bring us a little bit into the solutions how are they benefiting you know all of your partners absolutely so for those of you guys who don't know really who Acronis does a lot of people know us really as a backup company from back in the day maybe consumer backup maybe small medium-sized business on-premise backup solutions we've completely transformed the company over the last few years and how we talk about cyber protection which is the combination of cybersecurity and and and data protection we frame that in some tenants that we call sabes so safety accessibility privacy authenticity and security we take those solutions delivering the partners like as cast so that they can then wrap additional services around their customer base to increase the ARPU that they're getting there increase the margin that they're collecting from their customers and obviously deliver an end-to-end complete cyber protection solution all right so Jason you're here is the voice of the customer so as Castle what are your customers telling you and how does that resonate with them so for our customers data protection has always been important they've had to address the number one rule is never lose the data and with the cyber threats today always changing they're not sure what to do so they turn to us as their service provider to help guide them through you know to make sure that they're not one of the next companies on the news and it's nice as a service provider to be able to combine those those services and products with a vendor like a Cronus so that we can provide more value we can strengthen relationships and not have 300 vendors that we have to work with all right my understanding you spend a lot of time with the financial institutions absolutely they don't want to be the next one you know on the front page of the paper in the news on the radio and the like so anything specifically for them that that's worth calling out so I think with the financial services companies having the ability to protect their data their portfolio that they hold you know so important to their business they don't want anyone to have access to that and if any of their so they have to meet the requirements of the investors they have to meet the requirements of the financial institutions and make sure that they're following all of the different guidelines and depending on which markets are in what countries are in they all have different data sovereignty rules they have to deal with gdpr and so there's a lot of different areas that they need to navigate and so they as castle as a service provider we help them understand you know and kind of build that in as a standard and that's what we've done with the Cronus is we've built in the data protection strategy and now we can look at adding in the cybersecurity components to our portfolio to help give them that comprehensive suite and then I you can imagine how it takes a lot of different solutions to pack those together to provide an end band solution for their customers I think one of the beauties of recurrence is that we allow you to provide multiple services in a single pane of glass so you get a lot of very smart people on your team that have to manage multiple solutions what we try to provide is that single opportunity that single solution they learn one thing where they can be backup disaster recovery secure files things are all in one platform allow them to kind of minimize the number of solutions they need to be experts on to provide their customers the highest level service all right Jason security is a very much a multi-faceted you know ever-growing landscape out there tell us how is castle partners with the Cronus and how it fits into your your overall services so our partnership with the Cronus first started with data protection it was one of the first solutions that we were able to find that was able to fit every use case so as a platform as a service provider we're supporting on-premise legacy equipment our hosted VMware cloud infrastructure multi-tenant and infrastructure as your every flavor of cloud services you could imagine because we want the customer to have the solution that fits their needs the best and what we were looking for and a Cronus was able to provide for us was one platform of data protection that was able to be universal across all the different use cases so that's where it starts as a foundation always protecting the data always having a backup in multiple locations and all of our data centers worldwide and now to be able to layer on top of that some of the cybersecurity components in one single pane of glass is only going to allow us to give a better level of service to our customers and Panna I expect that a lot of stuff that we talked about with the financial services translate to many other industries yeah I mean the of the day data's data right and you could talk about different verticals how they use that data the other day it's all about protecting the data making sure your data is secure making sure you have an authentic copy of your data making sure that everything is secure so for us you know we we are known as a backup company but backup is kind of going away you need a more complete solution so one of the things that all these guide bad bad doers out they're doing is they're really trying to go after your backups and trying to lock them down because they understand that that's a first place you're gonna go to try to recover from a ransomware attack our solutions are based on artificial intelligence allowing the machine learning capabilities within our solutions to detect those from from the beginning from to prevent our customers from a zero-day attack so that you're not relying on that one backup to make sure your infrastructure can get back up and running you know and Jason maybe just frame for us the relationship between you and your customers and security you hear everything from you know certain cloud providers are like you know well you know we're like your landlord you know you made her lock your doors and take care of all that stuff and others are more you know hey we're gonna you know really go belly to belly with you and make sure that we've done everything bulletproof with you but what do you hear these days and what we're hearing from the customers is that they're looking to everyone is looking to migrate either start their cloud strategy if they haven't if they've been you know behind the curve if they've had a cloud strategy they were looking to increase we've actually had some customers want to maybe come out of the hyperscale as already so there's a lot of different use cases a lot of different journeys that the customers run and I think helping them navigate so what we've been able to do is as part of our services is wrap around the different cloud services a layer of security at each component so there's that perimeter network the you know there's all of the firewalls next-gen firewalls are now are a requirement they're no longer optional mobile devices endpoint protection network security fishing spearfishing user education there's so many different things that that their own employees need to be aware of that they never had to worry about before and it's it's almost you know like 20 years ago when disaster recovery emerged on the market cybersecurity now is front and center and if you're not paying attention to it at some point it's gonna come up and bite them so we're working with our customers to make sure they never have to deal with that yeah and I think an important part of that it's no longer just the data center right it's all those edge devices right we live in a very connect world data is transferred across multiple devices every day so there's different points where there's a vulnerability that could be identified and you can't just rely on an end user to make sure that they're protecting me well and especially if I know when I was having the earlier conversation with William we're talking about the smbs you know you know if the enterprise I've got my C so and I've got my team and I'm gonna work on that if I'm the SMB well it might be a generalist that security is under the bucket of all the other things that they need to do and therefore they're going to need to turn to their platforms and their partners to help them with a lot of this I mean to say they go to the IT guy right who say well he resolves everything at the end of the day enterprises have big budgets to spend on the stuff I heard something for the analysts reports that you know they're talking about high-level guy at Bank America so what's your budget for cybersecurity I have a budget that ever needs to be spent we're gonna spend on that to make sure that our customers data is secure what we really try to do is package lot of that stuff together to make it affordable complete secure for any customers no I absolutely think most of your customers don't have the billions of dollars to be able to say that they've at least done what they needed to do to make sure that they've they've done all they can so Jason I'll give you the final word first and Pat for you know things that you took away from the show and bring in to your customers so a in the panel discussion we had at the show we were asked to talk about different experiences as a service provider and one of the things that was really important for us that came from the audience was you know what does it take to switch how do you select your vendors and I think what's often overlooked by service riders is the cost of choosing a vendor and what we mean by that is if we were to choose the wrong vendor there is a huge cost of operations to switch from one vendor to the other where you're taking a very limited resource pool of the people on the operations team that are usually focused on on boarding new customers servicing the existing customer base generating revenue who now have to go to non revenue operations just to make that heavy-lift of a transition so picking the partnership with the Kronus was really important to us we made that change and it's been the best decision we've ever made yeah just to piggyback off of that we're not someone that our partners right so we considered as Castle be very strong channel partner of ours they give us reach into that mm custer community the other day they're really the experts we're providing some technology they can rely upon upon to provide a secure complete solution for their customers but that was really the key takeaway for me as you're able to interact face-to-face with your partners directly you're able to hear some of the pain points that they deal with on a daily basis it's not over email so I don't know phone calling on a zoom or WebEx you know you're talking face-to-face these guys understand those real-time problems and working toward solutions together at one big event so that's been fantastic we hope to double attendance for the next event and bring even more partners into the fold pen Jason thank you so much for sharing your takeaways from the Acronis global cybersecurity summit I'm Stu Mittleman and thanks as always for watching the cute

>> Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering AWS re:Inforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon web services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. It's The Cube's live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts for AWS re:Inforce. This is Amazon web services' inaugural security conference around Cloud security. I'm John Furrier. My host Dave Vellante. We've got special guest, we've got another CSO, Dan Meacham, VP of Security and Operations at Legendary Entertainment. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Oh, thank you. It's a very pleasure to be here. >> We had some fun time watching the Red Socks game the other night. It was the best night to watch baseball. They did win. >> Was it ever. >> Always good to go to Fenway Park, but we were talking when we were socializing, watching the Red Socks game at Fenway Park about your experience. You've seen a lot of waves of technology you've been involved in. >> Yes, yes. >> Gettin' dirty with your hands and gettin' coding and then, but now running VP of Security, you've seen a lot of stuff. >> Oh. >> You've seen the good, bad, and the ugly. (laughing) >> Yeah, fun business. >> It is. >> You guys did Hangover, right? >> Yes. >> Dark Knight. >> Yes. >> Some really cool videos. >> Good stuff there, yeah. And it's just amazing cause, you know, how much technology has changed over the years and starting back out in the mid-eighties and early nineties. Sometimes I'm just like, oh, if I could only go back to the IPXSX days and just get rid of botnets and things like that. (laughing) That'd be so much easier. Right? >> The big conversation we're having here, obviously, is Amazon's Security Conference. What's your take on it? Again, security's not new, but their trying to bring this vibe of shared responsibility. Makes sense because they've got half of the security equation, but you're seeing a lot of people really focusing on security. What's your take of, so far, as an attendee? >> Well, as we look and, cause I like to go to these different things. One, first to thank everybody for coming because it's a huge investment of time and money to be at these different shows, but I go to every single booth to kind of take a look to see where they are cause sometimes when we look at some of the different technology, they may have this idea of what they want the company to be and they're maybe only a couple years old, but we may see it as a totally different application and like to take those ideas and innovate them and steer them in another direction that kind of best suits our needs. But a lot of times you see a lot of replay of the same things over and over again. A lot of folks just kind of miss some of the general ideas. And, um, this particular floor that we have, there's some interesting components that are out there. There's a lot of folks that are all about configuration management and auto correction of misconfigured environments and things like that. Which is good, but I think when we look at the shared responsibility model and so forth, there's some components that a lot of folks don't really understand they really have to embrace in their environment. They think, oh it's just a configuration management, it's just a particular checklist or some other things that may fix something, but we really got to talk about the roots of some of the other things because if it's not in your data center and it's out somewhere else, doesn't mean you transfer the liability. You still have the ownership, there's still some practice you got to focus on. >> Take us through the Cloud journey with Legendary. You put some exchange service out there. Continue. >> Yes, and so as we started bringing these other different SaaS models because we didn't want to have the risk of if something went down we lost everything, but as we did that and started embracing Shadow IT, because if this worked for this particular department, we realized that there wasn't necessarily a applicable way to manage all of those environments simultaneous. What we mean after the standpoint, like we mentioned before, the MFA for each of these different components of the Cloud applications. So that naturally led us into something like single sign-on that we can work with that. But as we started looking at the single sign-on and the device management, it wasn't so much that I can't trust you devices, it's how do I trust your device? And so that's when we created this idea of a user-centric security architecture. So it's not necessarily a zero trust, it's more of a, how can I build a trust around you? So, if your phone trusts you based off of iometrics, let me create a whole world around that, that trust circle and build some pieces there. >> Okay, so, let me just interrupt and make sure we understand this. So, you decided to go Cloud-First. You had some stuff in colo and then said, okay, we need to really rethink how we secure our operations, right? So, you came up with kind of a new approach. >> Correct. >> Cloud approach. >> Absolutely. And it's Cloud and so by doing that then, trying to focus in on how we can build that trust, but also better manage the applications because, say for example, if I have a collaboration tool where all my files are, I may want to have some sort of protection on data loss prevention. Well, that Cloud application may have its own piece that I can orchestrate with, but then so does this one that's over here and this one over here and so now I've got to manage multiple policies in multiple locations, so as we were going down that piece, we had to say, how do we lasso the security around all these applications? And so, in that particular piece, we went ahead and we look forward at where is the technology is, so early on, all we had were very advanced sims where if I get reporting on user activity or anomalies, then I had limited actions and activities, which is fine, but then the CASB world ended up changing. Before, they were talking about Shallow IT, now they actually do policy enforcement, so then that allowed us to then create a lasso around our Cloud applications and say, I want to have a data loss prevention policy that says if you download 5,000 files within one minute, take this action. So, before, in our sim, we would get alert and there were some things we could do and some things we couldn't, but now in the CASB I can now take that as a piece. >> So more refined >> Exactly. >> in policy. Now, did you guys write that code? Did you build it out? Did you use Cloud? >> We work with a partner on help developing all this. >> So, when you think about where the CASBs were five years ago or so, it was all about, can we find Shadow IT? Can we find where social security numbers are? Not necessarily can I manage the environment. So, if you were take a step back to back in the old days when you had disparate in network architecture equipment, right? And you wanted to manage all your switches and firewalls, you had to do console on each and every one. Over time as it progressed, we now had players out there that can give you a single console that can get in and manage the entire network infrastructure, even if it's disparate systems. This is kind of what we're seeing right now within the Cloud, where on the cusp of it, some of then are doing really good and some of them still have a lot of things to catch up to do, but we're totally stoked about how this is working in this particular space. >> So, talk about, like, um, where you are now and the landscape that you see in front of you. Obviously, you have services. I know you. We met through McAfee, you have other, some fenders. You have a lot of people knocking on your doors, telling you stuff. You want to be efficient with your team. >> Yes. >> You want to leverage the Cloud. >> Yes. >> As you look at the landscape and a future scape as well, what're you thinking about? What's on your mind? What's your priorities? How're you going to navigate that? What're some of the things that's driving you? >> (sighing) It's a cornucopia of stuff that's out there. (laughing) Depending on how you want to look at it. And you can specialize in any particular division, but the biggest things that we really want to focus on is we have to protect out data, we have to protect our devices, and we have to protect our users. And so that's kind of that mindset that we're really focused on on how we integrate. The biggest challenges that we have right now is not so much the capability of the technology, because that is continually to evolve and it's going to keep changing. The different challenges that we have when we look in some of these different spaces is the accountability and the incorporation and cooperation because a incident's going to happen. How are you going to engage in that particular incident and how are you going to take action? Just because we put something in the Cloud doesn't mean it was a set and forget kind of thing. Because if it was in my data center, then I know I have to put perimeter around it, I know I got to do back-ups, I know I got to do patch management, but if I put it in the Cloud, I don't have to worry about it. That is not the case. So, what we're finding a lot is, some of these different vendors are trying to couch that as, hey we'll take care of that for you, but in fact, reality is is you got to stay on top of it. >> Yeah. And then you got to make sure all the same security practices are in there. So, the question I have for you is: what's the security view of the Cloud versus on premise (muttering) the data's in the perimeter, okay that's kind of an older concept, but as your thinking about security in Cloud, Cloud security versus on premise, what's the difference? What's the distinction? What's the nuances? >> Well, if we go old-school versus new-school, old-school would say, I can protect every thing that's on prem. That's not necessarily the case that we see today because you have all this smart technology that's actually coming in and is eliminating your perimeter. I mean, back in the day you could say, hey, look, we're not going to allow any connections, inbound or outbound, to only outside the United States cause we're just a U.S.-based company. Well, that's a great focus, but now when you have mobile devices and smart technology, that's not what's happening. So, in my view, there's a lot of different things that you may actually be more secure in the Cloud than you are with things that are on prem based off of the architectural design and the different components that you can put in there. So, if you think about it, if I were to get a CryptoLocker in house, my recovery time objective, recovery point objective is really what was my last back-up. Where if I look at it in the Cloud perspective, it's where was my last snapshot? (stuttering) I may have some compliance competes on there that records the revision of a file up to 40 times or 120 times, so if I hit that CryptoLocker, I have a really high probability of being able to roll back in the Cloud faster than I could if I lost something that was in prem. So, idly, there's a lot more advantages in going with the Cloud than on prem, but again, we are a Cloud-First company. >> Is bad user behavior still your biggest challenge? >> Is it ever! I get just some crazy, stupid things that just happen. >> The Cloud doesn't change that, right? >> No! (laughing) No, you can't change that with technology, but a lot of it has to be with education and awareness. And so we do have a lot of very restrictive policies in our workforce today, but we talk to our users about this, so they understand. And so when we have things that are being blocked for a particular reason, the users know to call us to understand what had happened and in many cases it's, you know, they clicked on a link and it was trying to do a binary that found inside of a picture file of all things on a web browser. Or they decided that they wanted to have the latest Shareware file to move mass files and then only find out that they downloaded it from an inappropriate site that had binaries in it that were bad and you coach them to say, no this is a trusted source, this is the repository where we want you to get these files. But my favorite though is, again, being Cloud-First, there's no reason to VPN into our offices for anything because everything is out there and how we coordinate, right? But we do have VPN set up for when we travel to different countries with regards to, as a media company, you have to stream a lot of different things and, so, if we're trying to pitch different pieces that we may have on another streaming video-on-demand service, some of those services and some of those programmings may not be accessible into other countries or regions of the world. So, doing that allows us to share that. So, then, a lot of times, what we find is we have offices and users that're in different parts of the world that will download a free VPN. (laughing) Because they want to to be able to get to certain types of content. >> Sounds good. >> And then when you're looking at that VPN and that connection, you're realizing that that VPN that they got for free is actually be routed through a country that is not necessarily friendly to the way we do business. They're like, okay, so you're pushing all of our data through that, but we have to work through that, there's still coaching. But fortunately enough, by being Cloud-First, and being how things are architected, we see all that activity, where if was all in prem, we wouldn't necessarily know that that's what they were doing, but because of how the user-centric piece is set-up, we have full visibility and we can do some coaching. >> And that's the biggest issue you've got. Bigtime, yes? Visibility. >> What's a good day for a security practitioner? >> (laughing) A good day for a security practitioner. Well, you know, it's still having people grumpy at you because if they're grumpy at you, then you know you're doing you job, right? Because if everybody loves the security guy, then somebody's slipping something somewhere and it's like, hey, wait a minute, are you really supposed to be doing that? No, not necessarily. A good day is when your users come forward and say, hey, this invoice came in and we know that this isn't out invoice, we want to make sure we have it flagged. And then we can collaborate and work with other studios and say, hey, we're seeing this type of vector of attack. So, a good day is really having our users really be a champion of the security and then sharing that security in a community perspective with the other users inside and also communicating back with IT. So, that's the kind of culture we want to have within out organization. Because we're not necessarily trying to be big brother, we want to make it be able to run fast because if it's not easy to do business with us, then you're not going to do business with us. >> And you guys have a lot of suppliers here at the re:Inforce conference. Obviously, Amazon, Cloud. What other companies you working with? That're here. >> That're here today? Well, CrowdStrike is a excellent partner and a lot of things. We'll have to talk on that a little bit. McAfee, with their MVISION, which was originally sky-high, has just been phenomenal in our security architecture as we've gone through some of the other pieces. We do have Alert Logic and also Splunk. They're here as well, so some great folks. >> McAfee, that was the sky-high acquisition. >> That is correct and now it's MVISION. >> And that's the Cloud group within McAfee. What do they do that you like? >> They brought forth the Cloud access security broker, the CASB product, and one of the things that has just been fascinating and phenomenal in working with them is when we were in evaluation mode a couple of years ago and were using the product, we're like, hey, this is good, but we'd really like to use it in this capacity. Or we want to have these artifacts of this intelligence come out of the analytics and, I kid you not, two weeks later the developers would put it out there in the next update and release. And it was like for a couple of months. And we're like, they're letting us use this product for a set period of time, they're listening to what we're asking for, we haven't even bought it, but they're very forward-thinking, very aggressive and addressing the specific needs from the practitioner's view that they integrated into the product. It was no-brainer to move forward with them. And they continue to still do that with us today. >> So that's a good experience. I always like to ask practitioners, what're some things that vendors are doing that either drive your crazy or they shouldn't be doing? Talk to them and say, hey, don't do this or do this better. >> Well, when you look at your stop-doing and your start doing list and how do you work through that? What really needs to be happening is you need your vendor and your account manager to come out on-site once a quarter to visit with you, right? You're paying for a support on an annual basis, or however it is, but if I have this Cloud application and that application gets breached in some way, how do I escalate that? I know who my account manager is and I know the support line but there needs to be an understanding and an integration into my incidents response plan as when I pick up the phone, what' the number I dial? And then how do we engage quickly? Because now where we are today, if I were to have breach, a compromised system administrator account, even just for 20 minutes, you can lose a lot of data in 20 minutes. And you think about reputation, you think about privacy, you think about databases, credit cards, financials. It can be catastrophic in 20 minutes today with the high-speed rates we can move data. So, my challenge back to the vendors is once a quarter, come out and visit me, make sure that I have that one sheet about what that incident response integration is. Also, take a look at how you've implemented Am I still on track with the artchitecture? Am I using the product I bought from you effectively and efficiently? Or is there something new that I need to be more aware of? Because a lot of times what we see is somebody bought something, but they never leveraged the training, never leveraged the support. And they're only using 10% of the capability of the product and then they just get frustrated and then they spend money and go to the next product down the road, which is good for the honeymoon period, but then you run into the same process again. So, a lot of it really comes back to vendor management more so than it is about the technology and the relationship. >> My final question is: what tech are you excited about these days? Just in general in the industry. Obviously security, you've got the Cloud, you're Cloud-First, so you're on the cutting edge, you've got some good stuff going on. You've got a historical view. What's exciting you these days from a tech perspective? >> Well, over the last couple of years, there's been two different technologies that have really started to explode that I really am excited about. One was leveraging smart cameras and facial recognition and integrating physical stock with cyber security stock. So, if you think about from another perspective, Cameras, surveillance today is, you know, we rewind to see something happen, maybe I can mark something. So, if somebody jumped over a fence, I can see cause it crossed the line. Now the smart cameras over the last three or four or five years have been like, if I lost a child in a museum, I could click on child, it tells me where it is. Great. Take that great in piece and put it in with your cyber, so now if you show up on my set or you're at one of our studios, I want the camera to be able to look at your face, scrub social media and see if we can get a facial recognition to know who you are and then from that particular piece, say okay, has he been talking trash about our movies? Is he stalking one of our talent? From those different perspectives. And then, moreover, looking at the facial expression itself. Are you starstruck? Are you angry? Are you mad? So, then that way, I know instantly in a certain period of time what the risk is and so I can dispatch appropriately to have security there or just know that this person's just been wandering around because they're a fan and they want to know something. So, maybe one of those things where we can bring them a t-shirt and they'll move on onto their way and they're happy. Versus somebody that's going to show up with a weapon and we have some sort of catastrophic event. Now, the second technology that I'm really pretty excited about. Is when we can also talk a little about with the Five G technology. So, when everybody talk about FIJI, you're like, oh, hey, this is great. This is going to be faster, so why are we all stoked about things being super, super fast on cellular? That's the technical part. You got to look at the application or the faculty of things being faster. To put it into perspective, if you think about a few years ago when the first Apple TV came out, everybody was all excited that I could copy my movies on there and then watch it on my TV. Well, when internet and things got faster, that form factor went down to where it was just constantly streaming from iTunes. Same thing with the Google Chrome Cast or the Amazon Fire Stick. There's not a lot of meat to that, but it's a lot of streaming on how it works. And so when you think about the capability from that perspective, you're going to see technology change drastically. So, you're smartphone that holds a lot of data is actually probably going to be a lot smaller because it doesn't have to have all that weight to have all that stuff local because it's going to be real-time connection, but the fascinating thing about that, though, is with all that great opportunity also comes great risk. So, think about it, if we were to have a sphere and if we had a sphere and you had the diameter of that sphere was basically technology capability. As that diameter grows, the volume of the technology that leverages that grows, so all the new things that come in, he's building. But as that sphere continue to grow, what happens is the surface is your threat. Is your threat vector. As it continue to grow, that's going to continue to grow. (stuttering) There's a little but of exponential components, but there's also a lot of mathematical things on how those things relate and so with Five G, as we get these great technologies inside of our sphere, that threat scape on the outside is also going to grow. >> Moore's law in reverse, basically. >> Yeah. >> Surface area is just balloon to be huge. That just kills the perimeter argument right there. >> It does. >> Wow. And then we heard from Steve and Schmidt on the keynote. They said 90% of IOT data, thinking about cameras, is HTTP, plain text. >> Exactly. And it's like, what're you-- >> Oh, more good news! >> Yeah. (laughing) >> At least you'll always have a job. >> Well, you know, someday-- >> It's a good day in security. Encrypt everywhere, we don't have time to get into the encrypt everywhere, but quick comment on this notion of encrypting everything, what's your thoughts? Real quick. (sighing) >> All right, so. >> Good, bad, ugly? Good idea? Hard? >> Well, if we encrypt everything, then what does it really mean? What're we getting out? So, you remember when everybody was having email and you had, back in the day, you had your door mail, netscape navigator and so forth, and thought, oh, we need to have secure email. So then they created all these encryption things in the email, so then what happens? That's built into the applications, so the email's no longer really encrypted. >> Yeah. >> Right? So I think we're going to see some things like that happening as well. Encryption is great, but then it also impedes progress when it comes to forensics, so it's only good until you need it. >> Awesome. >> Dan, thanks so much here on the insights. Great to have you on The Cube, great to get your insights and commentary. >> Well, thank you guys, I really appreciate it. >> You're welcome. >> All right, let's expecting to steal is from noise, talking to practitioner CSOs here at re:Inforce. Great crowd, great attendee list. All investing in the new Cloud security paradigm, Cloud-First security's Cube's coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBEConversation. >> Hi everyone, welcome to the special CUBEConversation. We're in Palo Alto, California, at theCUBE studio. I'm John Furrier, co-host of the CUBE. We're here with Chris Yeh. He's the co-founder and general partner of Blitzscaling Ventures, author of the book Blitzscaling with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and a variety of other ventures, also a partner at Greylock Partners. Chris, great to see you. I've known you for years. Love the book, love Reid. You guys did a great job. So congratulations. But the big news is you're now a TV star as one of the original inaugural contestants on the Mental Samurai, just premiered on Fox, was it >> On Fox. >> On Fox, nine o'clock, on which days? >> So Mental Samurai is on Fox, Tuesdays at 9 p.m. right after Master Chef Junior. >> Alright. So big thing. So successful shows. Take us through the journey. >> Yeah. >> It's a new show, so it's got this kind of like Jeopardy vibe where they got to answer tough questions in what looks like a roller coaster kind of arm that moves you around from station to station, kind of jar you up. But it's a lot of pressure, time clock and hard questions. Tell us about the format. How you got that. Gives all the story. >> So the story behind Mental Samurai is it's from the producers of American Ninja Warrior, if you've ever seen that show. So American Ninja Warrior is a physical obstacle course and these incredible athletes go through and the key is to get through the obstacle course. If you miss any of the obstacles, you're out. So they took that and they translated it to the mental world and they said, okay, we're going to have a mental obstacle course where you going to have different kinds of questions. So they have memory questions, sequence questions, knowledge questions, all these things that are tapping different elements of intelligence. And in order to win at the game, you have to get 12 questions right in five minutes or less. And you can't get a single question wrong. You have to be perfect. >> And they do try to jar you up, to kind of scrabble your brain with those devices, it makes it suspenseful. In watching last night at your watch party in Palo Alto, it's fun to watch because yeah, I'm like, okay, it's going to be cool. I'll support Chris. I'll go there, be great and on TV, and oh my, that's pretty interesting. It was actually riveting. Intense. >> Yeah. You have that element of moving around from station to station and it's dramatic. It's kind of a theater presence. But what's it like in there? Give us some insight. You're coming on in April 30th so you're yet to come on. >> Yes. >> But the early contestants, none of them made it to the 100,000. Only one person passed the first threshold. >> Right >> Take us through the format. How many thresholds are there? What's the format? >> Perfect, so basically when a competitor gets strapped into the chair, they call it Ava, it's like a robot, and basically they got it from some company in Germany and it has the ability to move 360 degrees. It's like an industrial robot or something. It makes you feel like you're an astronaut or in one those centrifugal force things. And the idea is they're adding to the pressure. They're making it more of a challenge. Instead of just Jeopardy where you're sitting there, and answering questions and bantering with Alex Trebek, you're working against the clock and you're being thrown around by this robot. So what happens is first you try to answer 12 questions correctly in less than five minutes. If you do that, then you make it through to the next round, what they call the circle of samurai and you win $10,000. The circle of samurai, what happens is there are four questions and you get 90 seconds plus whatever you have left over from your first run, to answer those four questions. Answer all four questions correctly, you win $100,000 and the official title of Mental Samurai. >> So there's only two levels, circle of samurai but it gets harder. Now also I noticed that it's, their questions have certain puzzles and there's certain kinds of questions. What's the categories, if you will, what's the categories they offer? >> Yes, so the different categories are knowledge, which is just classic trivia, it's a kind of Jeopardy stuff. There's memory, where they have something on screen that you have to memorize, or maybe they play an audio track that you have to remember what happened. And then there's also sequence where you have to put things in order. So all these different things are represented by these different towers which are these gigantic television screens where they present the questions. And the idea is in order to be truly intelligent, you have to be able to handle all of these different things. You can't just have knowledge. You can't just have pop culture. You got to have everything. >> So on the candidates I saw some from Stanford. >> Yeah. >> I saw an athlete. It's a lot of diversity in candidates. How do they pick the candidates? How did you get involved? Did your phone ring up one day? Were you identified, they've read your blog. Obviously they've, you're smart. I've read your stuff on Facebook. How did you get in there? (laughs) >> Excellent question. So the whole process, there's a giant casting department that does all these things. And there's people who just cast people for game shows. And what happened with me is many years ago back in 2014, my sister worked in Hollywood when I was growing up. She worked for ER and Baywatch and other companies and she still keeps track of the entertainment industry. And she sent me an email saying, hey, here's a casting call for a new show for smart people and you should sign up. And so I replied to the email and said hey I'm Chris Yeh. I'm this author. I graduate from Stanford when I was 19, blah blah blah blah. I should be on your show. And they did a bunch of auditions with me over the phone. And they said we love you, the network loves you. We'll get in touch and then I never heard. Turns out that show never got the green light. And they never even shot that show. But that put me on a list with these various casting directors. And for this show it turns out that there was an executive producer of the show, the creator of the show, his niece was the casting director who interviewed me back in 2014. And she told her uncle, hey, there's this guy, Chris Yeh, in Palo Alto. I think would be great for this new show you're doing. Why don't you reach out to him. So they reached out to me. I did a bunch of Skype auditions. And eventually while I was on my book tour for Blitzscaling, I got the email saying, congratulations, you're part of the season one cast. >> And on the Skype interviews, was it they grilling you with questions, or was it doing a mock dry run? What was some of interview vetting questions? >> So they start off by just asking you about yourself and having you talk about who you are because the secret to these shows is none of the competitors are famous in advance, or at least very few of them are. There was a guy who was a major league baseball pitcher, there's a guy who's an astronaut, I mean, those guys are kind of famous already, but the whole point is, they want to build a story around the person like they do with the Olympics so that people care whether they succeed or not. And so they start off with biographical questions and then they proceed to basically use flash cards to simulate the game and see how well you do. >> Got it, so they want to basically get the whole story arc 'cause Chris, obviously Chris is smart, he passed the test. Graduate when he's 19. Okay, you're book smart. Can you handle the pressure? If you do get it, there's your story line. So they kind of look from the classic, kind of marketing segmentation, demographics is your storylines. What are some of the things that they said to you on the feedback? Was there any feedback, like you're perfect, we like this about you. Or is it more just cut and dry. >> Well I think they said, we love your energy. It's coming through very strongly to the screen. That's fantastic. We like your story. Probably the part I struggle the most with, was they said hey, you know, talk to us about adversity. Talk to us about the challenges that you've overcome. And I tell people, listen, I'm a very lucky guy. A lot of great things have happened to me in life. I don't know if there's that much adversity that I can really complain about. Other people who deal with these life threatening illnesses and all this stuff, I don't have that. And so that was probably the part I struggled the most with. >> Well you're certainly impressive. I've known you for years. You're a great investor, a great person. And a great part of Silicon Valley. So congratulations, good luck on the show. So it's Tuesdays. >> 9 p.m. >> 9 p.m. >> On fox. >> On Fox. Mental Samurai. Congratulations, great. Great to be at the launch party last night. The watch party, there'll be another one. Now your episode comes out on April 30th. >> Yes. So on April 30th we will have a big Bay area-wide watch party. I'm assuming that admission will be free, assuming I find the right sponsors. And so I'll come back to you. I'll let you know where it's going to be. Maybe we should even film the party. >> That's, well, I got one more question on the show. >> Yeah. >> You have not been yet on air so but you know the result. What was it like sitting in the chair, I mean, what was it personally like for you? I mean you've taken tests, you've been involved with the situation. You've made some investments. There's probably been some tough term sheets here and there, board meetings. And all that experience in your life, what was it compared to, what was it like? >> Well, it's a really huge adrenaline rush because if you think about there's so many different elements that already make it an adrenaline rush and they all combine together. First of all, you're in this giant studio which looks like something out of a space-age set with this giant robotic arm. There's hundreds of people around cheering. Then you're strapped into a robotic arm which basically makes you feel like an astronaut, like every run starts with you facing straight up, right? Lying back as if you're about to be launched on a rocket. And then you're answering these difficult questions with time pressure and then there's Rob Lowe there as well that you're having a conversation with. So all these things together, and your heart, at least for me, my heart was pounding. I was like trying very hard to stay calm because I knew it was important to stay clam, to be able to get through it. >> Get that recall, alright. Chris, great stuff. Okay, Blitzscaling. Blitzscaling Ventures. Very successful concept. I remember when you guys first started doing this at Stanford, you and Reid, were doing the lectures at Stanford Business School. And I'm like, I love this. It's on YouTube, kind of an open project initially, wasn't really, wasn't really meant to be a book. It was more of gift, paying it forward. Now it's a book. A lot of great praise. Some criticism from some folks but in general it's about scaling ventures, kind of the Silicon Valley way which is the rocket ship I call. The rocket ship ventures. There's still the other venture capitals. But great book. Feedback from the book and the original days at Stanford. Talk about the Blitzscaling journey. >> And one of the things that happened when we did the class at Stanford is we had all these amazing guests come in and speak. So people like Eric Schmidt. People like Diane Greene. People like Brian Chesky, who talked about their experiences. And all of those conversations really formed a key part of the raw material that went into the book. We began to see patterns emerge. Some pretty fascinating patterns. Things like, for example, a lot of companies, the ones that'd done the best job of maintaining their culture, have their founders involved in hiring for the first 500 employees. That was like a magic number that came up over and over again in the interviews. So all this content basically came forward and we said, okay, well how do we now take this and put it into a systematic framework. So the idea of the book was to compress down 40 hours of video content, incredible conversations, and put it in a framework that somebody could read in a couple of hours. >> It is also one of those things where you get lightning in a ball, the classic and so then I'd say go big or go home. But Blitzscaling is all about something new and something different. And I'm reading a book right now called Loonshots, which is a goof on moonshots. It's about the loonies who start the real companies and a lot of companies that are successful like Airbnb was passed over on and they call those loonies. Those aren't moonshots. Moonshots are well known, build-outs. This is where the blitzscaling kind of magic happens. Can you just share your thoughts on that because that's something that's not always talked about in the mainstream press, is that a lot of there blitzscaling companies, are the ones that don't look good on paper initially. >> Yes. >> Or ones that no one's talking about is not in a category or herd mentality of investors. It's really that outlier. >> Yes. >> Talk about that dynamic. >> Yeah, and one of the things that Reid likes to say is that the best possible companies usually sound like they're dumb ideas. And in fact the best investment he's been a part of as a venture capitalist, those are the ones where there's the greatest controversy around the table. It's not the companies that come in and everyone's like this is a no-brainer, let's do it. It's the companies where there's a big fight. Should we do this, should we not? And we think the reason is this. Blitzscaling is all about being able to be the first to scale and the winner take most or the winner take all market. Now if you're in a market where everyone's like, this is a great market, this is a great idea. You're going to have huge competition. You're going to have a lot of people going after it. It's very difficult to be the first to scale. If you are contrarian and right you believe something that other people don't believe, you have the space to build that early lead, that you can then use to leverage yourself into that enduring market leadership. >> And one of the things that I observed from the videos as well is that the other fact that kind of plays into, I want to get your reaction, this is that there has to be a market shift that goes on too because you have to have a tailwind or a wave to ride because if you can be contrarian if there's no wave, >> Right. >> right? so a lot of these companies that you guys highlight, have the wave behind them. It was mobile computing, SaaSification, cloud computing, all kind of coming together. Talk about that dynamic and your reaction 'cause that's something where people can get confused on blitzscaling. They read the book. Oh I'm going to disrupt the dry cleaning business. Well I mean, not really. I mean, unless there's something different >> Exactly. >> in market conditions. Talk about that. >> Yeah, so with blitzscaling you're really talking about a new market or a market that's transforming. So what is it that causes these things to transform? Almost always it's some new form of technological innovation, or perhaps a packaging of different technological innovations. Take mobile computing for example. Many of the components have been around for a while. But it took off when Apple was able to combine together capacitative touchscreens and the form factor and the processor strength being high enough finally. And all these things together created the technological innovation. The technological innovation then enables the business model innovation of building an app store and creating a whole new way of thinking about handheld computing. And then based on that business model innovation, you have the strategy innovation of blitzscaling to allow you to grow rapidly and keep from blowing up when you grow. >> And the spirit of kind of having, kind of a clean entrepreneurial segmentation here. Blitzscaling isn't for everybody. And I want you to talk about that because obviously the book's popular when this controversy, there's some controversy around the fact that you just can't apply blitzscaling to everything. We just talk about some of those factors. There are other entrepreneurialship models that makes sense but that might not be a fit for blitzscaling. Can you just unpack that and just explain, a minute to explain the difference between a company that's good for blitzscaling and one that isn't. >> Well, a key thing that you need for blitzscaling is one of these winner take most or winner take all markets that's just enormous and hugely valuable, alright? The whole thing about blitzscaling is it's very risky. It takes a lot of effort. It's very uncomfortable. So it's only worth doing when you have those market dynamics and when that market is really large. And so in the book we talk about there being many businesses that this doesn't apply to. And we use the example of two companies that were started at the same time. One company is Amazon, which is obviously a blitzscaling company and a dominant player and a great, great company. And the other is the French Laundry. In fact, Jeff Bezos started Amazon the same year that Thomas Keller started the French Laundry. And the French Laundry still serves just 60 people a day. But it's a great business. It's just a very different kind of business. >> It's a lifestyle or cash flow business and people call it a lifestyle business but mainly it's a cash flow or not a huge growing market. >> Yeah. >> Satisfies that need. What's the big learnings that you learned that was something different that you didn't know coming out of blitzscaling experience? Something that surprised you, something that might have shocked you, something that might have moved you. I mean you're well-read. You're smart. What was some learnings that you learned from the journey? >> Well, one of the things that was really interesting to me and I didn't really think about it. Reid and I come from the startup world, not the big company world. One of the things that surprised me is the receptivity of big companies to these ideas. And they explained it to me and they said, listen, you got to understand with a big company, you think it's just a big company growing at 10, 15% a year. But actually there's units that are growing at 100% a year. There's units that are declining at 50% a year. And figuring out how you can actually continue to grow new businesses quicker than your old businesses die is a huge thing for the big, established companies. So that was one of the things that really surprised me but I'm grateful that it appears that it's applicable. >> It's interesting. I had a lot of conversations with Michael Dell before, and before they went private and after they went private. He essentially was blitzscaling. >> Yeah. >> He said, I'm going to winner take most in the mature, somewhat declining massive IT enterprise spend against the HPs of the world, and he's doing it and VMware stock went to an all time high. So big companies can blitz scale. That's the learning. >> Exactly. And the key thing to remember there is one of the reasons why somebody like Michael Dell went private to do this is that blitzscaling is all about prioritizing speed over efficiency. Guess who doesn't like that? Wall street doesn't like because you're taking a hit to earnings as you invest in a new business. GM for example is investing heavily in autonomous vehicles and that investment is not yet delivering cash but it's something that's going to create a huge value for General Motors. And so it's really tough to do blitzscaling as a publicly traded company though there are examples. >> I know your partner in the book, Reid Hoffman as well as in the blitzscaling at Stanford was as visible in both LinkedIn and as the venture capitalist of Greylock. But also he was involved with some failed startups on the front end of LinkedIn. >> Yeah. >> So he had some scar tissue on social networking before it became big, I'll say on the knowledge graph that he's building, he built at LinkedIn. I'm sure he had some blitzscaling lessons. What did he bring to the table? Did he share anything in the classes or privately with you that you can share that might be helpful for people to know? >> Well, there's a huge number of lessons. Obviously we drew heavily on Reid's life for the book. But I think you touched on something that a lot of people don't know, which is that LinkedIn is not the first social network that Reid created. Actually during the dot-com boom Reid created a company called SocialNet that was one of the world's first social networks. And I actually was one of the few people in the world who signed up and was a member of SocialNet. I think I had the handle, net revolutionary on that if you can believe that. And one of the things that Reid learned from his SocialNet experience turned into one of his famous sayings, which is, if you're not embarrassed by your first product launch, you've launched too late. With SocialNet they spent so much time refining the product and trying to get it perfectly right. And then when they launched it, they discovered what everyone always discovers when they launch, which is the market wants something totally different. We had no idea what people really wanted. And they'd wasted all this time trying to perfect something that they've theoretically thought was what the market wanted but wasn't actually what the market wanted. >> This is what I love about Silicon Valley. You have these kind of stories 'cause that's essentially agile before agile came out. They're kind of rearranging the deck chairs trying to get the perfect crafted product in a world that was moving to more agility, less craftsmanship and although now it's coming back. Also I talked to Paul Martino, been on theCUBE before. He's a tribe with Pincus. And it's been those founding fathers around these industries. It's interesting how these waves, they start off, they don't get off the ground, but that doesn't mean the category's dead. It's just a timing issue. That's important in a lot of ventures, the timing piece. Talk about that dynamic. >> Absolutely. When it comes to timing, you think about blitzscaling. If you start blitzscaling, you prioritize speed over efficiency. The main question is, is it the right time. So Webvan could be taken as an example of blitzscaling. They were spending money wildly inefficiently to build up grocery delivery. Guess what? 2000 was not the right time for it. Now we come around, we see Instacart succeeding. We see other delivery services delivering some value. It just turns out that you have to get the timing right. >> And market conditions are critical and that's why blitzscaling can work when the conditions are right. Our days back in the podcast, it was, we were right but timing was off. And this brings up the question of the team. >> Yeah. >> You got to have the right team that can handle the blitzscaling culture. And you need the right investors. You've been on both sides of the table. Talk about that dynamic because I think this is probably one of the most important features because saying you going to do blitzscaling and then getting buy off but not true commitment from the investors because the whole idea is to plow money into the system. You mentioned Amazon, one of Jeff Bezos' tricks was, he always poured money back into his business. So this is a capital strategy, as well financial strategy capital-wise as well as a business trait. Talk about the importance of having that stomach and the culture of blitzscaling. >> Absolutely. And I think you hit on something very important when you sort of talk about the importance of the investors. So Reid likes to refer to investors as financing partners. Or financing co-founders, because really they're coming on with you and committing to the same journey that you're going on. And one of the things I often tell entrepreneurs is you really have to dig deep and make sure you do more due diligence on your investors than you would on your employees. Because if you think about it, if you hire an employee, you can actually fire them. If you take money from an investor, there's no way you can ever get rid of them. So my advice to entrepreneurs is always, well, figure out if they're going to be a good partner for you. And the best way to do that is to go find some of the entrepreneurs they backed who failed and talked to those people. >> 'Cause that's where the truth will come out. >> Well, that's right. >> We stood by them in tough times. >> Exactly. >> I think that's classic, that's perfect but this notion of having the strategies of the elements of the business model in concert, the financial strategy, the capital strategy with the business strategy and the people strategy, all got to be pumping that can't be really any conflict on that. That's the key point. >> That's right, there has to be alignment because again, you're trying to go as quickly as possible and if you're running a race car and you have things that are loose and rattling around, you're not going to make it across the finish line. >> You're pulling for a pit stop and the guys aren't ready to change the tires, (snapping fingers) you know you're out of sync. >> Bingo. >> Chris, great stuff. Blitzscaling is a great book. Check it out. I recommend it, remember blitz scale is not for anyone, it's for the game changers. And again, picking your investors is critical on this. So if you picked the wrong investors, blitzscaling will blow up in a bad way. So don't, don't, pick properly on the visa and pick your team. Chris, so let's talk about you real quick to end the segment and the last talk track. Talk about your background 'cause I think you have a fascinating background. I didn't know that you graduated when you're 19, from Stanford was it? >> Yes. >> Stanford at 19, that's a great accomplishment. You've been an entrepreneur. Take us through your journey. Give us a quick highlight of your career. >> So the quick highlight is I grew up in Southern California and Santa Monica where I graduated from Santa Monica High School along with other luminaries such as Rob Lowe, Robert Downey, Jr., and Sean Penn. I didn't go at the same time that they did. >> They didn't graduate when they were 17. >> They did not, (John laughing) and Charlie Sheen also attended Santa Monica High School but dropped out or was expelled. (laughing) Go figured. >> Okay. >> I came up to Stanford and I actually studied creative writing and product design. So I was really hitting both sides of the brain. You could see that really coming through in the rest of my career. And then at the time I graduated which was the mid-1990s that was when the internet was first opening up. I was convinced the internet was going to be huge and so I just went straight into the internet in 1995. And have been in the startup world ever since. >> Must love that show, Halt and Catch Fire a series which I love reminiscing. >> AMC great show. >> Just watching that my life right before my eyes. Us old folks. Talk about your investment. You are at Wasabi Ventures now. Blitzscaling Ventures. You guys looks like you're going to do a little combination bring capital around blitzscaling, advising. What's Blitzscaling Ventures? Give a quick commercial. >> So the best way to think about it is for the entrepreneurs who are actually are blitzscaling, the question is how are you going to get the help you need to figure out how to steer around the corners to avoid the pitfalls that can occur as you're growing rapidly. And Blitzscaling Ventures is all about that. So obviously I bring a wealth of experience, both my own experience as well as everything I learned from putting this book together. And the whole goal of Blitzscaling Ventures is to find those entrepreneurs who have those blitzscalable opportunities and help them navigate through the process. >> And of course being a Mental Samurai that you are, the clock is really important on blitzscaling. >> There are actually are a lot of similarities between the startup world and Mental Samurai. Being able to perform under pressure, being able to move as quickly as possible yet still be accurate. The one difference of course is in our startup world you often do make mistakes. And you have a chance to recover from them. But in Mental Samurai you have to be perfect. >> Speed, alignment, resource management, capital deployment, management team, investors, all critical factors in blitzscaling. Kind of like entrepreneurial going to next level. A whole nother lesson, whole nother battlefields. Really the capital markets are flush with cash. Post round B so if you can certainly get altitude there's a ton of capital. >> Yeah. And the key is that capital is necessary for blitzscaling but it's not sufficient. You have to take that financial capital and you have to figure out how to combine it with the human capital to actually transform the business in the industry. >> Of course I know you've got to catch a plane. Thanks for coming by in the studio. Congratulations on the Mental Samurai. Great show. I'm looking forward to April 30th. Tuesdays at 9 o'clock, the Mental Samurai. Chris will be an inaugural contestant. We'll see how he does. He's tight-lipped, he's not breaking his disclosure. >> I've got legal requirements. I can't say anything. >> Just say he's sticking to his words. He's a man of his words. Chris, great to see you. Venture capitalist, entrepreneur, kind of venture you want to talk to Chris Yeh, co-founder, general partner of blitzscaling. I'm John Furrier for theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)