>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Hello, and happy taco Tuesday CUBE viewers! You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft's Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Scott Hanselman, he is the partner program manager at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE! >> Absolutely, my pleasure! >> Rebecca: And happy taco Tuesday to you! Will code for tacos. >> Will code for tacos. >> I'm digging it, I'm digging it >> I'm a very inexpensive coder. >> So you are the partner program manager, but you're really the people's programmer at Microsoft. Satya Nadella up on the main stage yesterday, talking about programming for everyone, empowering ordinary citizen developers, and you yourself were on the main stage this morning, "App Development for All", why is this such a priority for Microsoft at this point in time? >> Well there's the priority for Microsoft, and then I'll also speak selfishly as a priority for me, because when we talk about inclusion, what does that really mean? Well it is the opposite of exclusion. So when we mean inclusion, we need to mean everyone, we need to include everyone. So what can we do to make technology, to make programming possible, to make everyone enabled, whether that be something like drag and drop, and PowerApps, and the Power platform, all the way down to doing things like we did in the keynote this morning with C# on a tiny micro-controller, and the entire spectrum in between, whether it be citizen programmers in Excel using Power BI to go and do machine learning, or the silly things that we did in the keynote with rock, paper scissors that we might be able to talk about. All of that means including everyone and if the site isn't accessible, if Visual Studio as a tool isn't accessible, if you're training your AI in a non-ethical way, you are consciously excluding people. So back to what Satya thinks is why can't everyone do this? SatyaSacha thinks is why can't everyone do this? Why are we as programmers having any gate keeping, or you know, "You can't do that you're not a programmer, "you know, I'm a programmer, you can't have that." >> So what does the future look like, >> Rebecca: So what does the future look like, if everyone knows how to do it? I mean, do some imagining, visioning right now about if everyone does know how to do this, or at least can learn the building blocks for it, what does technology look like? >> Well hopefully it will be ethical, and it'll be democratized so that everyone can do it. I think that the things that are interesting, or innovative today will become commoditized tomorrow, like, something as simple as a webcam detecting your face, and putting a square around it and then you move around, and the square, we were like, "Oh my God, that was amazing!" And now it's just a library that you can download. What is amazing and interesting today, like AR and VR, where it's like, "Oh wow, I've never seen augmented reality work like that!" My eight-year-old will be able to do it in five years, and they'll be older than eight. >> So Scott, one of the big takeaways I had from the app dev keynote that you did this morning was in the past it was trying to get everybody on the same page, let's move them to our stack, let's move them to our cloud, let's move them on this programming language, and you really talked about how the example of Chipotle is different parts of the organization will write in a different language, and there needs to be, it's almost, you know, that service bus that you have between all of these environments, because we've spent, a lot of us, I know in my career I've spent decades trying to help break down those silos, and get everybody to work together, but we're never going to have everybody doing the same jobs, so we need to meet them where they are, they need to allow them to use the tools, the languages, the platforms that they want, but they need to all be able to work together, and this is not the Microsoft that I grew up with that is now an enabler of that environment. The word we keep coming back to is trust at the keynote. I know there's some awesome, cool new stuff about .net which is a piece of it, but it's all of the things together. >> Right, you know I was teaching a class at Mesa Community College down in San Diego a couple of days ago and they were trying, they were all people who wanted jobs, just community college people, I went to community college and it's like, I just want to know how to get a job, what is the thing that I can do? What language should I learn? And that's a tough question. They wonder, do I learn Java, do I learn C#? And someone had a really funny analogy, and I'll share it with you. They said, well you know English is the language, right? Why don't the other languages just give up? They said, you know, Finland, they're not going to win, right? Their language didn't win, so they should just give up, and they should all speak English, and I said, What an awful thing! They like their language! I'm not going to go to people who do Haskell, or Rust, or Scala, or F#, and say, you should give up! You're not going to win because C won, or Java won, or C# won. So instead, why don't we focus on standards where we can inter-operate, where we can accept that the reality is a hybrid cloud things like Azure Arc that allows us to connect multiple clouds, multi-vendor clouds together. That is all encompassing the concept of inclusion, including everyone means including every language, and as many standards as you can. So it might sound a little bit like a Tower of Babel, but we do have standards and the standards are HTTP, REST, JSON, JavaScript. It may not be the web we deserve, but it's the web that we have, so we'll use those building block technologies, and then let people do their own thing. >> So speaking of the keynote this morning, one of the cool things you were doing was talking about the rock, paper, scissors game, and how it's expanding. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the new elements to rock, paper, scissors. >> So folks named Sam Kass, a gentleman named Sam Kass many, many years ago on the internet, when the internet was much simpler web pages, created a game called Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, and a lot of people will know that from a popular TV show on CBS, and they'll give credit to that show, in fact it was Sam Kass and Karen Bryla who created that, and we sent them a note and said, "Hey can I write a game about this?" And we basically built a Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock game in the cloud containerized at scale with multiple languages, and then we also put it on a tiny device, and what's fun about the game from a complexity perspective is that rock, paper, scissors is easy. There's only three rules, right? Paper covers rock, which makes no sense, but when you have five, it's hard! Spock shoots the Rock with his phaser, and then the lizard poisons Spock, and the paper disproves, and it gets really hard and complicated, but it's also super fun and nerdy. So we went and created a containerized app where we had all different bots, we had node, Python, Java, C#, and PHP, and then you can say, I'm going to pick Spock and .net, or node and paper, and have them fight, and then we added in some AI, and some machine learning, and some custom vision such that if you sign in with Twitter in this game, it will learn your patterns, and try to defeat you using your patterns and then, clicking on your choices and fun, snd then, clicking on your choices and fun, because we all want to go, "Rock, Paper, Scissors shoot!" So we made a custom vision model that would go, and detect your hand or whatever that is saying, this is Spock and then it would select it and play the game. So it was just great fun, and it was a lot more fun than a lot of the corporate demos that you see these days. >> All right Scott, you're doing a lot of different things at the show here. We said there's just a barrage of different announcements that were made. Love if you could share some of the things that might have flown under the radar. You know, Arc, everyone's talking about, but some cool things or things that you're geeking out on that you'd want to share with others? >> Two of the things that I'm most excited, one is an announcement that's specific to Ignite, and one's a community thing, the announcement is that .net Core 3.1 is coming. .net Core 3 has been a long time coming as we have began to mature, and create a cross platform open source .net runtime, but .net Core 3.1 LTS Long Term Support means that that's a version of .net core that you can put on a system for three years and be supported. Because a lot of people are saying, "All this open source is moving so fast! "I just upgraded to this, "and I don't want to upgrade to that". LTS releases are going to happen every November in the odd numbered years. So that means 2019, 2021, 2023, there's going to be a version of .net you can count on for three years, and then if you want to follow that train, the safe train, you can do that. In the even numbered years we're going to come out with a version of .net that will push the envelope, maybe introduce a new version of C#, it'll do something interesting and new, then we tighten the screws and then the following year that becomes a long term support version of .net. >> A question for you on that. One of the challenges I hear from customers is, when you talk about hybrid cloud, they're starting to get pulled apart a little bit, because in the public cloud, if I'm running Azure, I'm always on the latest version, but in my data center, often as you said, I want longer term support, I'm not ready to be able to take that CICD push all of the time, so it feels like I live, maybe call it bimodal if you want, but I'm being pulled with the am I always on the latest, getting the latest security, and it's all tested by them? Or am I on my own there? How do you help customers with that, when Microsoft's developing things, how do you live in both of those worlds or pull them together? >> Well, we're really just working on this idea of side-by-side, whether it be different versions of Visual Studio that are side-by-side, the stable one that your company is paying for, and then the preview version that you can go have side-by-side, or whether you could have .net Core 3, 3.1, or the next version, a preview version, and a safe version side-by-side. We want to enable people to experiment without fear of us messing up their machine, which is really, really important. >> One of the other things you were talking about is a cool community announcement. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? >> So this is a really cool product from a very, very small company out of Oregon, from a company called Wilderness Labs, and Wilderness Labs makes a micro-controller, not a micro-processor, not a raspberry pie, it doesn't run Linux, what it runs is .net, so we're actually playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock on this device. We've wired it all up, this is a screen from our friends at Adafruit, and I can write .net, so somehow if someone is working at, I don't know, the IT department at Little Debbie Snack Cakes, and they're making WinForms applications, they're suddenly now an IOT developer, 'cause they can go and write C# code, and control a device like this. And when you have a micro-controller, this will run for weeks on a battery, not hours. You go and 3D print a case, make this really tiny, it could become a sensor, it could become an IOT device, or one of thousands of devices that could check crops, check humidity, moisture wetness, whatever you want, and we're going to enable all kinds of things. This is just a commodity device here, this screen, it's not special. The actual device, this is the development version, size of my finger, it could be even smaller if we wanted to make it that way, and these are our friends at Wilderness Labs. and they had a successful Kickstarter, and I just wanted to give them a shout out, and I just wanted to give them a shoutout, I don't have any relationship with them, I just think they're great. >> Very cool, very cool. So you are a busy guy, and as Stu said, you're in a lot of different things within Microsoft, and yet you still have time to teach at community college. I'm interested in your perspective of why you do that? Why do you think it's so important to democratize learning about how to do this stuff? >> I am very fortunate and I think that we people, who have achieved some amount of success in our space, need to recognize that luck played a factor in that. That privilege played a factor in that. But, why can't we be the luck for somebody else, the luck can be as simple as a warm introduction. I believe very strongly in what I call the transitive value of friendship, so if we're friends, and you're friends, then the hypotenuse can be friends as well. A warm intro, a LinkedIn, a note that like, "Hey, I met this person, you should talk to them!" Non-transactional networking is really important. So I can go to a community college, and talk to a person that maybe wanted to quit, and give a speech and give them, I don't know, a week, three months, six months, more whatever, chutzpah, moxie, something that will keep them to finish their degree and then succeed, then I'm going to put good karma out into the world. >> Paying it forward. >> Exactly. >> So Scott, you mentioned that when people ask for advice, it's not about what language they do, is to, you know, is to,q you know, we talk in general about intellectual curiosity of course is good, being part of a community is a great way to participate, and Microsoft has a phenomenal one, any other tips you'd give for our listeners out there today? >> The fundamentals will never go out of style, and rather than thinking about learning how to code, why not think about learning how to think, and learning about systems thinking. One of my friends, Kishau Rogers, talked about systems thinking, I've hade her on my podcast a number of times, and we were giving a presentation at Black Girls Code, and I was talking to a fifteen-year-old young woman, and we were giving a presentation. It was clear that her mom wanted her to be there, and she's like, "Why are we here?" And I said, "All right, let's talk about programming "everybody, we're talking about programming. "My toaster is broken and the toast is not working. "What do you think is wrong?" Big, long, awkward pause and someone says, "Well is the power on?" I was like, "Well, I plugged a light in, "and nothing came on" and they were like, "Well is the fuse blown?" and then one little girl said "Well did the neighbors have power?", And I said, "You're debugging, we are debugging right?" This is the thing, you're a systems thinker, I don't know what's going on with the computer when my dad calls, I'm just figuring it out like, "Oh, I'm so happy, you work for Microsoft, "you're able to figure it out." >> Rebecca: He has his own IT guy now in you! >> Yeah, I don't know, I unplug the router, right? But that ability to think about things in the context of a larger system. I want toast, power is out in the neighborhood, drawing that line, that makes you a programmer, the language is secondary. >> Finally, the YouTube videos. Tell our viewers a little bit about those. you can go to D-O-T.net, so dot.net, the word dot, you can go to d-o-t.net, so dot.net, the word dot, slash videos and we went, and we made a 100 YouTube videos on everything from C# 101, .net, all the way up to database access, and putting things in the cloud. A very gentle, "Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood" on-ramp. A lot of things, if you've ever seen that cartoon that says, "Want to draw an owl? "Well draw two circles, "and then draw the rest of the fricking owl." A lot of tutorials feel like that, and we don't want to do that, you know. We've got to have an on-ramp before we get on the freeway. So we've made those at dot.net/videos. >> Excellent, well that's a great plug! Thank you so much for coming on the show, Scott. >> Absolutely my pleasure! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman., stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Burlingame, California, it's theCUBE, covering Sumo Logic Illuminate 2019. Brought to you by Sumo Logic. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here, with theCUBE. We're at Sumo Logic Illuminate at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport. About 800 people, 900 people, packed house in the keynote earlier this afternoon, really interesting space. And we're excited to have our next guest, kind of on the cutting edge of the IoT space on the consumer side. And he's Robert Parker, the CTO of Samsung SmartThings. Robert, great to see you. >> Hi, great to be here. >> Absolutely, so, before we get into the depth of the conversation, a little bit of a background on SmartThings. I was doing some research, getting ready for this, and the fact that it started as a Kickstarter a long time ago, not that long ago, and now is part of Samsung, a global electronics giant, what a fun adventure. >> Absolutely, I think it's been one of these things where it's great to be something where it's community-driven to begin with. So, Kickstarter was a big part of our launch, and we were one of the biggest Kickstarter launches at the time, really powered by our community around the website and early users. We got a lot of interest in IoT, and then moved on to the next stage of the vision, which is sort of encompassing all devices. And so, that meant we have more than 2,000 different Samsung devices on the platform now, which really allowed devices to talk to each other in ways that are really exciting, and that breadth has been a really great thing to be part of. >> Right, it's really funny, we went to the Samsung Developer Conference a couple years ago, and it was funny to see the living room guys fighting with the kitchen guys as to, what was the center? Is it the TV, or is it the refrigerator? Or is the the washing machine, for that bit? And Samsung's really got a foot in all those places. >> Absolutely, this is one of the things that the SmartThing platform has really enabled Samsung to transition across, as then it's no longer a conversation with the washing machine person or the dryer. All the devices are part of the SmartThings cloud. The SmartThings cloud is a one way that you can talk to Samsung devices, and it's an open ecosystem. So, it's not just Samsung devices, we're equally comfortable with manufacturers, any manufacturer, bringing those devices because home is a multi-vendor environment. You are not going to have all of your home from any one vendor. >> Right. >> And that's been one of the exciting parts of the vision, is that's been part, the open ecosystem has been something that's been part of the SmartThings story forever. To really immortalize that in a platform for Samsung has been a great transition. >> Right, so we're here at Sumo Logic Illuminate, and in preparing for this, I saw an interview with you, you made a really interesting comment. You said that we are a pervasive user of Sumo Logic, and then you said 90% of the team are using Sumo Logic. It's fascinating to me, because I think a lot of companies are chasing innovation, and I think one of the ways to get innovation is you enable more people to have more access to more data, and the tools to actually operate that data so that they can do their jobs and find cool ways to make improvements that aren't necessarily coming from the top down. It sounds like you guys have addressed that philosophy wholeheartedly. >> So, we absolutely have addressed it wholeheartedly, I think there was a lot of luck involved, and I wanted to sort of describe it, is that one of the things that worked well for us is people were excited to use Sumo more and more. They were more excited to see what they could do with the tool, what insights they could get, and so, you'd see your neighbor looking at it, and they'd look at a dashboard and they'd say, hey, can I do a little bit of that? And so much so, in the last year, we've seen a lot of unplanned value come out. So, a third of the value we got out of the Sumo in the past year was unplanned. It was things people didn't, processes they didn't know they would improve that really just came from this groundswell, from what I would call the community. And I think that's where you get, that unlocks a lot of the potential, because you really can't do things from sort of the planned high level. You really need people actively engaged and doing stuff you wouldn't expect. >> That's great. So, I want to talk a little bit about security. Security's a big topic here, it's a topic everywhere we go. And now, with connected devices, and connected keys, and connected doorbells, it seems like, oh, here we go again, and there's this constant talk that security's got to be baked in throughout the entire process. How are you guys dealing with security? It's obviously got to be right at the top of mind in terms of priorities while you're still connecting the sprinklers-- >> No, absolutely. >> And the thermostat and everything else. >> Security and privacy are both critical. I link in privacy even though you didn't ask about it, because, as you think about devices like cameras and things like this, privacy is top of mind. Also, in terms of regulation like GDPR. And so, because of that, we're really looking at both cases, the challenge for both security and privacy is, it really cuts through your whole organization and every process, and by the way, every process that every partner at the organization has, because we can have something that could be exploited from an attack through a customer service representative, that could be a person in the customer service organization, it could be how someone social engineered that. And so, what we've really needed is this kind of continuous intelligence that can span all of these processes, because in something like security, you're as good as your weakest process. And that doesn't mean that we don't focus on all the things that you talked about. We're industry-leading from a device perspective to have hardware baked-in keys and do things in the manufacturing process that lead to something that could be as secure as anything, but that's really the secret of using a lot of the continuous intelligence tools like Sumo, is that all of these could-bes aren't enough. You have to bring it together by having the intelligence that spans those processes to make sure that all of them are elevated, because at the end of the day, a security attack is going to attack your weakest thing, not your strongest thing. >> Right, so one of the other topics here that's talked about is this exponential growth of data, and you guys are part of the problem, 'cause now we got sensors, and light switches, and all these other things that are kickin' off data that, before, we weren't monitoring. And so, from an execution point of view at the company, when you've got so much data that you need to turn into information, and then actionable insight, you said Sumo's got some unique characteristics that allow you guys to get more leverage out of that platform. I wonder if you could dig into that a little bit more. >> And I'd like to reframe the data discussion a little bit, because a lot of people look at it as a problem, and I want to really talk about the opportunity side. So, part of that goes to our story, where we started off at Kickstarter with a few thousand users. We have over 50 million active users now. >> Jeff: 50 million? >> 50 million, our Android application in the Google Play Store had been been downloaded around 200 million times, so it gives you some idea of that size and scope. So, the data is an opportunity. There's an opportunity to build a customer base, to excite people, and to manage the processes that do that. And what's great now is that the availability of this data means that you can do it in more ways than you ever could before. The problem is, you need a tool that brings this together to be able to do that, and doing that well is difficult. Difficult both on the teams, and difficult because of the size, scope, and complexity of the systems because of the data that you mentioned. But the reason you want to do it is so that you can cross the chasm in terms of this opportunity. And more and more companies have this opportunity out in front of them. One of the things that's been really exciting about the cloud is it sort of democratized the entry point, but that wasn't good enough. Just because you could get in the game with three people, it's like making a, you can make a application in a mobile application store, either on Google's or on Apple's, really easily, that gets you in there. What you really need to do is manage the intelligence that goes from that, and for us, it's been really exciting to be able to take our decisions and make them data-driven. And we can do that by this explosion of data because it is there. >> Right, and the data is good, and I think we see data as an asset, it hasn't really hit balance sheets officially yet, but I think you see it in the valuations of companies like Google, and Facebook, and Amazon, right, who obviously have these crazy, giant multiples of their revenue, one, because they're growing, but two, because they have so much data. So, the market's kind of valuing that data without explicitly calling it out as a line item on the balance sheet. That said, not all data has the same value, not all data needs to be treated the same. And so, it really opens up an opportunity to say how do you tier it? So, you don't want to get, y'know, spend a ton of money on a piece of data and a big, fat stream that somebody leaves open on Amazon accidentally, suddenly have a big bill, and that maybe wasn't the most valuable, so. >> I'd actually double down on what you said, because for a typical company, one of the things that's also been true of the mega-scale companies that you pointed out with, is there's a lot of uniformity in their data. So, a company like Amazon, they have customer orders and they've got orders at this massive scale. A typical company doesn't look like that. Their data spread is more fragmented, smaller scale, and so, because of that, they want to make different decisions. And this is the same thing that has already happened in the storage area. People are really comfortable with storage that they're going to have in either disaster recovery, or long-term storage, and they want a very low-cost footprint around that. They've got their hot data, and they're much more willing to have that data managed differently, and at a higher cost rate, because it's much more valuable. We're looking for tools that span that, not just in storage, but in the ingestion, and the management, and the querying of that data, because, like you said, for most businesses, a lot of data is infrequently looked at, or looked at in response to a situation, so I'll never know which 10% of the data will be looked at. It'll be based on, oh, I got audited, or some other business event that happens. And so, this is one of the keys things that businesses are now struggling with. One of them is that, hey, they want to adopt these practices to become modern, or more modernized, but the second one is, to really be able to tier the data because they couldn't treat all the data as if it's hot data, just like they already figured that out for storage. >> Right, it's pretty interesting, 'cause it's been going on for storage forever, and we really saw it, I think, with the rise of Flash, which was super-high quality but super-expensive in the early days, that's coming down. And then, at the other end, we have the Glacier Storage and the cold storage just put it away. I want to get your last thoughts, last answer, Robert. As you look forward, I can't believe we're already in middle of September of 2019, it's fascinating to me that time flies so fast, but as you look forward, what are some of your priorities over the next year or so? How are you guys moving the ball down the field? >> One of the things that we're looking at was the data problem that you were talking about, if, really looking at our infrequent data, and being able to manage that effectively, both from the types of insights that we can get from that, so a lot of this starts to be better usage of machine learning, pattern recognition, AI, and so that we can, the ideal situation for us in that type of data is it got touched once, it got looked at once, and then we could understand how to action it later, that deferred action. And then, how to trigger that deferred action, as well as the tiering that we sort of talked about, that all data's not-- >> Created equal. >> Created equally, and so both those things are happening. Just to put some numbers on this, as why, is that we have 150 terabytes or so of data that is somewhat interesting to our business generated on a daily basis. >> 150 terabytes a day? >> 150 terabytes a day. >> That's interesting, that's the good stuff. >> And out of that, I'd say 10 terabytes is really actionable. And so, that gives you an idea. The other part is how that's growing, where a year ago, we would've been at maybe 60 terabytes of what I would've called this interesting data, and maybe five terabytes of immediately actionable. And so, this is following that, where that's exponentially growing, and it's a big number, so that's what we really think about. >> So, you scared? Because those curves, those curves get steep. >> It's the same way, we look at it as a huge opportunity, so what will happen is, either people will create value out of that for customers, in which case, actually, the opportunity, because it's at such a scale, it will be great for everyone, or, number two, it just becomes noise. And so, it isn't really something to get scared of, because worst case is, it became noise to you. We really want to be one of those people who are getting value out of it, and see the business growth and the consumer value growth out of that. I'm pretty optimistic that we'll be able to do it, because we really, if I look back three, four, years, we've just been able to figure out a way, and I think it will continue to do that. >> All right, well, Robert, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and sharing the story, it's a great story. >> Thank you, appreciate being here. >> All right, he's Robert, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Sumo Logic Illuminate 2019. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.

>> from Burlingame, California It's the Cube covering Suma logic Illuminate 2019. Brought to you by Sumer Logic >> Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey Here with the Cube Worth Suma >> logic illuminated the higher Regency San Francisco airport. About 800 people, 900 people packed house in the keynote earlier this afternoon. Really interesting space, and we're excited to have our next guest >> kind of on the cutting edge >> of the I o T space on the consumer side. And he's Robert Parker, the CTO of Sand Samsung. Smart things, Robert. Great to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Absolutely so before we get into >> the kind of the depth of the conversation, a little bit of a background on smart things. I was doing some research getting ready for this and the fact that it started as a kickstarter a long time ago, not that long ago, and now is part of Samsung, a global electronics giants. What a fun adventure. >> Absolutely. I think it's been one of these things where it's great to be something where it's community driven to begin with, so kick start. It was a big part of our launch, and we were one of the biggest kicks are launches at the time. Uh, really powered by our community around the website and early users. We got a lot of interest in I O. T. And then moved on to the next stage of the vision, which is sort of encompassing all devices. And so that meant we have more than 2000 different Samsung devices on the platform now, which really allow devices to talk to each other in ways that are really exciting. And that breath has been really great thing to be part of >> right. It's really funny. We went to the Samsung Developer conference a couple of years ago. It was funny to see the the living room guys fighting with the kitchen guys, you know, What was >> the centers that the TV or is it >> the fridge aerator? Or is it the washing machine for that bit? And Samsung's got really got a foot in all those places? >> Absolutely. This is one of the things that the smart thing platform is really enabled Samsung to transition across is then it's no longer a conversation with the washing machine person or the dryer. All the devices are part of the smart things. Cloud. Martin Claude is a one way that you could talk to Samsung Devices, and it's an open ecosystem. So it's not just Samsung. Devices were equally comfortable with manufacturers. Any manufacturer bringing those devices because home is a multi vendor environment you are not. We're gonna have all of your home from anyone, vendor, right? And that's been one of the exciting parts of visions that's been part The open ecosystem is something that's been part of smart things. Story forever to really immortalize that in a platform for Samsung has been great transit, >> right? So we're here. It's Uma Logic, eliminate and preparing for this. I saw an interview with you. You made a really interesting comment. >> You said that we are a pervasive >> user of suma logic, and he said 90% of the team are using similar logic. It's fascinating to me because I think a lot of companies air chasing innovation. I think one of the ways to get innovation is you enable more people to have more access to more data and the tools to actually operate that data so that they can do their jobs and find cool ways to make improvements that aren't necessarily coming from the top down. It sounds like you guys have addressed that philosophy wholeheartedly, >> so we absolutely have addressed it wholeheartedly. I think there's a lot of luck involved, and I want to sort of describe it Is that one of the things that worked well for us is people were excited to use sumo more and more. They're more excited to see what they could do with the tool, what insights they could get. And so you see your neighbor looking at it and they look a dashboard and they say, Can I do a little bit of that? And so much So you know, in the last year we've seen ah lot of unplanned value come out. So 1/3 of the value we gotta assume of, um, um in the past year was unplanned. These things people didn't process, they didn't know they would improve. That really just came from this groundswell from what I would call the community. And I think that's where you get that. That unlocks a lot of the potential because you really can't do things from sort of the planned high level. You really need. People actively engaged right and doing stuff you wouldn't expect. >> That's great. So I >> want to talk about >> a little bit about security. Security is a big topic here. It's topic everywhere we go on and now, with connected devices and connected keys and connect doorbells, it seems like, Oh, here we go again And there's this constant talk that security's got to be baked in throughout the entire process. How are you guys dealing with security? Obviously got to be right at the top of mind in terms of priorities. While you're still connecting the sprinklers in the thermostat and everything else. Security >> and privacy are both critical link in privacy, even though you didn't ask about it. Because as you think about devices like cameras and things like this, privacy is top of mind. Also, in terms of regulation like GDP, are so because of that, we're really looking at both cases that the challenge for both security and privacy is it really cuts through your whole organization and every process, and by the way, every process that every partner, if the organization has because we can have something that could be exploited from sort of a an attack through a customer service representative. That could be a person in the customer service organization. It could be how some of social engineered that. And so what we've really needed is this kind of continuous intelligence that can span all of these processes because in something I security, you're as good as your weakest process. And that doesn't mean that we don't focus on all things that you talked about. Were industry leading from device perspective tohave hardware baked in keys and, you know, do things the manufacturing process that lead to something that could be as secure as anything. But that's really that the secret of using a lot of the continuous intelligence tools like sumo is that all of these could bees aren't enough. You have to bring it together by having the intelligence that spans those processes to make sure that all of them are elevated. Because at the end of the day, a security attack is gonna attack your weakest thing, not your strongest right. >> So one of the other >> topics here that talked about is this exponential growth of data, and you guys were part of the problem because now we got sensors and light switches and all these other things that are kicking off data that before we weren't monitoring. And so from from an execution point of view at the company, when you've got so much data that you need to turn into information and then actionable insight, you said Sumo's got some unique characteristics that allow you guys to get more leverage of that platform. I wonder if you could dig into that little bit more >> and I'd like to reframe the data discussion a little bit. A lot of people look at it. It's a problem. I want to really talk about the opportunity side. So part of that goes to our story where we started off at KICKSTARTER with a few 1000 users, we have over 50 million active users now. >> 50 million >> 50 million. Our Android application, the Google Play store, had been downloaded around 200 million times, so it gives you some idea of that size and scope. So the data is an opportunity. There's an opportunity to build a customer base, too, excite people and to manage the processes that do that. And you know what's great now is that the availability of this data means that you can do it in more ways than you ever could before. The problem is, you need a tool that brings us together. To be able to do that in doing that well is difficult, difficult both on the teams and difficult because the size, scope and complexity of the systems because of the data that you mentioned. But the >> reason you want to >> do it is so that you can cross the chasm in terms of this opportunity, and more and more companies are enough. You have this opportunity on the front of them. One of the things that's been really exciting, but the cloud is a sort of democratized the entry point. But that wasn't good enough just because you could get in the game with three people. It's like making a you can make us application in Mobile Applications store, either on Google's on Apple's really easily that gets you in there. What you really need to do is manage the intelligence that goes from that, and for us, it's been really exciting to be able to take our decisions and make them data driven, and we can do that by this explosion of data because it is their >> right in the date is good. And I think we see, you know, kind of date of it as an asset. It hasn't really hit balance sheets officially yet, but I think you see it in the valuations of of companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon, right, who obviously have these crazy giant multiples of the revenue one because they're growing but too because they have so much data. So the markets kind of valuing that data without explicitly calling it out as a line on the balance sheet. That said, not all data has the same value, not all day. Not all data needs to be treated the same and so really opens up an opportunity. How do you tear it so you don't want to get? You know, it's been a ton of money on a piece of data and a big fat stream that somebody leaves open and accidentally suddenly have a big building that maybe wasn't the most valuable. So >> it actually double down on what you said because for a typical company, one of things has also been true. Of the mega scale companies that you pointed out with is there's a lot of uniformity in their data coming the cost of the Amazon. They have customer orders, and they've got orders at this massive scale. A typical company doesn't look like that. They have their data spread is more fragmented, smaller scale on so >> because they want to make different decisions. And this is the >> same thing that has already happened in the storage area. People are really comfortable with storage that they're gonna have in either just disaster recovery or long term storage. And they want a very low cost footprint around that they've got their hot data and they're much more willing, tohave that data managed differently and at a higher cost rate because it's it's much more valuable. We're looking for tools that span that not just in storage, but in the ingestion in the management in the querying of that data. Because, like you said for most businesses, a lot of data's infrequently looked at or looked at in response to a situation, so I'll never know which 10% of the data will be looked at. It will be based on Oh, I got audited or, you know, some other business event that happened on, so this is one of the key things that business is struggling with. One of them is that they they want to adopt these practices to become modern or boring, modernized. But the 2nd 1 is to really be able to tear the data because they couldn't treat all the data's if it's hot data, just like they already figured that out for storage, >> right? It's pretty interesting. It's been going on for storage forever. We really saw it, I think, with the rise of Flash, which was super high quality but super expensive in the early days that's coming down and then at the other. And we have the end of the glacier storage in the cold, cold, cold store. Just put it away by what your last thought's that last. Answer, Robert. As you look forward, I can't believe you're already in middle of September of 2019. It's fascinating to me that time flies so fast. But as >> you look >> forward, what are some of your priorities over the next year or so? How are you guys kind of moving the ball down the field? >> So we're one of the things that we're looking at? Was the data problem that you were talking about, if really looking at are infrequent data and be able to manage that effectively both from the types of insights that we can get from that. So a lot of this starts to be better usage of machine learning pattern recognition a eye on so that we can, you know, the ideal situation for us and not type of data is it got touched once it got looked at once, and then we could understand how to action it later that deferred action. And then how do you know trigger that deferred action as well as the tearing that we sort of talked about that all day? It is not created, equal, created equally, and so both those things are happening just to put some numbers on this. And why is that? We have 150 terabytes or so of data that is somewhat interesting to our business generated on a daily basis. 150. Terrible, terrible. That's interesting. And then on that's out of that, I'd say 10 terabytes is kind of really actionable. It's that gives you an idea. The other part is how that's growing. Where a year ago, we would have been at maybe 60 terabytes of what I would have called this interesting data and maybe five terabytes of, of of, you know, immediately actionable. And And so that's where you know this is following that where that's exponentially growing and it's a big number. So that's what we really think about. >> So you scared those curves. Curves get state, we look. It >> is a huge opportunity. What will happen is either people will create value out of that for customers, in which case, actually the opportunity, because is that such a scale? It will be great for everyone or number two, you know, it just becomes noise, right? And so it isn't really something that scared of, because worst case is it became noise to you. We really want to be one of those people were getting value out of it and see sort of the business growth and the consumer value growth. Out of that, I I'm pretty optimistic that we'll be able to do it because we really if I look back 34 years, we've just been able to figure out a way, and I think it will continue to do that >> All right. Well, Robert, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and ensuring the story. It's a great story. Thank you. Appreciate being here. All right. >> He's Robert. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Q word. Suma logic illuminate 2019. >> Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

(funky music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California with CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host of this CUBE Conversation with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix. CUBE alumni, very special part of our community. Great to see you again, thanks for coming in. We're previewing your big show coming up, Nutanix NEXT in Europe. Thanks for joining me. >> It's an honor. >> It's always great to get you. I saw your interview on Bloomberg with Emily Chang. Kind of short interview, but still, you're putting the message out there. You've been talking software. We covered your show here in North America. Clearly moving to the subscription model, and I want to get into that conversation. I think there's some notable things to talk about now that we're in this cloud 2.0 era, as we're calling it, kind of a goof on web 2.0. But cloud 2.0 is a whole shift happening, and you've been on it for a while. But you got the event coming up in Europe, Nutanix NEXT. What's the focus? Give a quick plug for that event. Let's talk about that. >> Yeah, in fact, the reiteration of the message is a key part of any of our user conferences. We have 14,000 customers around the world now, across 150 countries. We've done almost more than $5 billion worth of just software business in the last six, seven years of selling. It's a billion six run rate. There's a lot going on in the business, but we need to take a step back and in our user conference talk about the vision. So what's the vision of Nutanix? And the best part is that it hasn't changed. It's basically one of those timeless things that hopefully will withstand the test of time in the future as well. Make computing invisible anywhere. People scratch their heads. What does computing mean? What does invisible mean? What does anywhere mean? And that's where we'll actually go to these user conferences, talk about what is computing for us. Is it just infrastructure? Is it infrastructure and platform? Now that we're getting into desktop delivery, is it also about business users and applications? The same thing about invisible, what's invisible? For us, it's always been a special word. It's a very esoteric word. If you think about the B2B world, it doesn't talk about the word invisible a lot. But for us it's a very profound word. It's about autonomous software. It's about continuous, virtues of continuous delivery, continuous consumption, continuous mobility. That's how you make things invisible. And subscription is a big part of that continuous delivery message and continuous consumption message. >> So the event is October 9th, around the first week of October. You got some time there, but getting geared up for that. I wanted to ask you what you've learned from the North America conference and going into the European conference. It's ultimately the same message, same vision, with a tweak, you got some time under your belt since then. The subscription model business, which you were talking in your Bloomberg interview, is in play. It is not a new thing. It's been in operation for a while. Could you talk about that specifically? Because I think most people would say, hey, hardware to software, hard to do. Software subscription, hard to maintain and grow. Where are you on that transition? Explain and clarify your mix of business, hardware, software. Where are you in the progress of that transformation? >> Well, you know, I have been a big student of history, and I can't think of a company that's gone from hardware to software and software subscription in such a short span. Actually, I don't know of any company. If you know of one, please let me know. But why? The why of subscription is to be frictionless. Hybrid is impossible without having the same kind of consumption model, both on-prem and off-prem. And if we didn't go through that, we would be hypocritical as a company to talk about cloud and hybrid itself. The next 10 years for this company is about hybrid, and doing it as if private and public are one in the same is basically the essence of Nutanix's architecture. >> Well, I can think of some hardware-software dynamics that, again, might not match your criteria, but some might say Apple. Is it a software or hardware company? Hardware drives the ecosystem, they commoditize it. Peloton bicycle is a bike, but it's mainly a software business and in-person business. So there's different models. Oracle has hardware, they have software. It doesn't always relate to the enterprise. What's the argument to say, hey, why don't you just create your own box and kick ass with that box, or is it just different dynamics? What's that? >> Well, there's a tension in the system. People want to buy experiences as opposed to buying things. They don't want to integrate things, like, oh, I need to actually now get a hardware vendor to behave as a software vendor when it comes to support issues and such. And at the same time, you want to be flexible and portable. How do you really work with the customer with their relationships that they have with their hardware vendors? So the word anywhere in our vision is exactly that. It's like, okay, we can work on multiple servers, multiple hypervisors, and multiple clouds. At the end of the day, the customer experience is king. And that's one thing that the last 10 years has taught us, John, if anything, is don't sell things to people. You know, Kubernetes is a thing. Cloud is a thing. Can you really go sell experiences? The biggest lesson in the last year for us has been integrate better. Not just with partners, but also within your own products. And now if you can do that well, customers will buy from you. >> I think you just kind of clarified where I was thinking out loud, because if you think about Apple, the hardware is part of the experience. So they have to have it. >> Mm-hmm. >> You don't have to have the hardware to create those experiences. Is that right? >> Absolutely, which is why it's now 2% of our business, and yet we are saying that we take the burden of responsibility of supporting it, integrating with it. One of the biggest issues with cloud is operations. What is operations? It's day two patching. How do you do day two patching? Intel is coming up with microcode upgrades every quarter now because of security reasons. If we are not doing an awesome job of one-click upgrade of firmware and microcode and BIOS, we don't belong in the hybrid cloud world. I think that's the level of mundaneness that we've gotten to with our software that makes us such a high NPS company with our customers. >> I want to just drill in on the notion of a thing versus experience. You mentioned Kubernetes is a thing. I would say Hadoop was a thing. But Hadoop was a great example. It was hard to do. Kubernetes, jury's still out. People love them. Kubernetes, we'll see how that goes. If it can be abstracted away, it's not a thing anymore. We'll see. But Hadoop was a great example. Unbelievable technology direction, big data, all the goodness of object storage and unstructured data. We knew that. Just hard to work with. Setting up clusters, managing clusters. And it ended up being the death of the sector, in my opinion. What is an experience? Define what does that mean. Is it frictionless only? Is there a trust equation? Just unpack your vision on what that means. A thing, which could be a box with software on it, and experience, which is something different. >> Yeah, I mean, now you start to unpeel the word experience. It's really about being frictionless, trusted, and invisible. If you can really do these things well, around the word, define frictionless. Well, it has to be consumer-grade. It has to be web scalable, 'cause customers are looking for the Amazon architecture inside, and aren't just going and renting it from Amazon, but also saying, can I get the same experience inside? So you've got to make it web scale. You've got to make it consumer-grade. Because our operators and users, talk about Hadoop, I mean, they struggled with the experience of Hadoop itself because it was a thing, it was a technology, as opposed to being something that was consumer-grade itself. And then finally, security. Trust is very important. We must secure always on resilient. The word resilience is very important. In fact, that's one of the things we'll actually talk about at our conference, is resilience. What does it mean, not just for Nutanix stock, to be where it is today from where it was six months ago. And that's what I'm most proud of, is you go through these transitions, you actually talk about resilience of software, resilience of systems, resilience of customer support, and resilience of companies. >> So you mentioned hybrid cloud. We were talking before we came on camera about hybrid cloud. But software's a two-way relationship. Talk about what you mean by that, and then I want to ask you a follow-up question of where hardware may or may be an opportunity or a problem in that construct. >> Yeah, I mean, look, in the world of hybrid, what's really important is delivering an experience that's really without silos. Ideally, on-prem infrastructure is an availability zone. How do you make it look like an availability zone that can stand up shoulder-to-shoulder with a public cloud availability zone? That's where you sell an experience. That's how you talk about a management plane where you can actually have a single pane of glass that really delivers a cloud experience both ways. >> You're kind of a contrarian. I always love interviewing you because you seem to be on the next wave before any realizes it. Right now everyone's trying to go on-premise and you're moving from on-premise to the cloud. Not you guys moving, but your whole vision is. You've been there, done that on premises. Now you've got to be where the customers are, which is where they need to be, which is the cloud. I heard you say that. It's interesting, you're going the other way, right? >> Mm-hmm. But you could look at the infrastructure and say, hey, there's a lot of hardware inside these clouds that have a lot of hardware-specific features like hardware assist that software or network latency might not be able to deliver. Is that a missed opportunity for you guys, or does your software leverage these trends? And even on premises, there's hardware offload-like features coming. How do you reconcile that? Because I would just argue inside of the company, say, hey, Dheeraj, let's not go all in on software. We can maximize this new technology, this thing, for our software. How do you-- >> Look, I think if you look at our features, like security, the way we use TPM, which is a piece of assist that you get from Intel's motherboards for doing key encryption management. What does it mean to really do encryption at scale using Intel's vectored instructions? How do you do RDMA? How do you look at InfiniBand? How do you look at Optane drives? We've been really good at that lowest level, but making sure that it's actually selling a solution that can then go drive SAP HANA and Oracle databases and GPU for graphics and desktops. So as a company, we don't talk about those things because they are the how of the business. You don't talk about the how. You'd rather talk about the why and the what, actually. >> So from a business strategy standpoint, I just want to get this clear because there's downfalls for getting into the hardware business. You know them. Inventory, all these hardware cycles are moving fast. You mentioned Intel shipping microcode for security reasons. So you're basically saying you'd rather optimize for decoupling hardware from the software and ride the innovation of the hardware guys, like Nvidia and Intel and others. >> Absolutely, and do it faster than anybody else, but more integrated than anybody else. You know, all together now is kind of our message for .NEXT. How do you bring it all together? Because the world is struggling with things, and that's the opportunity for Nutanix. >> Well, I would say making compute invisible is a great tagline. I would add storage and networking to that too. >> Yeah, computing, by the way. >> Computing. >> I said computing. >> Okay, computing. >> 'Cause computing is compute storage networking. Computing is infrastructure, platform, and apps. It's a very clever word, and it's a very profound word as well. >> Well, let's just throw Kubernetes in there too and move up the stack, because ultimately, we're writing a lot of stories on covering this editorially, is that the world's flipped upside down. It used to be the infrastructure. We're calling this cloud 2.0, like I said earlier. The world used to be the infrastructure enabled what the apps could do, and they were limited to the resources they had. Now the apps are in charge. They're dictating terms below the software line, if you want to call it the app line. So the apps are in charge now. Whoever can serve up the best infrastructure capability, which changes the entire computing industry because now the suppliers who can deliver that elastic or flexible capacity or resource, wins. >> Absolutely. >> And that's ultimately a complete shift. >> You know, I tell people, John, about the strategy of Nutanix because we have some apps now. Frame is an app for us. Beam is an app. Calm is an app. These are apps, they're drawn on the platform, which is the core platform of Nutanix, the core hyper-convergence innovation that we did. If you go back to the '90s, who was to say that Windows really fueled Office or Office fueled Windows? They had to work in conjunction, because without one, there would be no, the other, actually. So without Office there would be no Windows. Without Windows there would be no Office. How platforms and apps work with each other synergistically is at the core of delivering that experience. >> I want to add just you're a student of history. As an entrepreneur, you've been there through the many waves and you also invest a lot, and I want to ask you this question. It used to be that platforms was the holy grail. You'd go to a VC and say, hey, I'm building a platform. Big time investment. An entrepreneur will come back: I got a tool. You're a feature. You're a feature, not a platform. Platforms was the elite engineering position to come in to look for the big money. How would you define platforms now? Because with cloud, if apps are in charge, and there's potential features that are coming around the corner that no one's yet invented, what is this platform 2.0 world look like if you were coming out of grad school or you were a young engineer or a young entrepreneur? How do you think about that right now? >> Well, the biggest thing is around extensibility and openness. You know, we were talking about openness before, but the idea of APIs, where API is the new graphically why, because the developer is the builder. And how do you really go sell to them and still deliver a great experience? And not just from the point of view of, well, I've given you the best APIs, but the best SDKs. What does it mean to give them a development kit that gets them up and running in no time? And maybe even a graphical Kickstarter. We're working with our partners a lot, where it's not just about delivering APIs or raw APIs because they're not as consumable, but to deliver SDKs and to deliver graphical structural kits to them so that they can be up and running, building applications in two months rather than two years. I think that's at the core of what our platform is. >> And data and having an operating system thinking seems to be another common pattern. Understand the subsystems of data. Running and assembling things together. >> I think what is Nutanix, I mean, if people ask me what is Nutanix, I start with data. Data is the core of the company. We've done data for virtualization. We're now doing data for applications with Nutanix Files. We have object store data. We are doing Era, which is database as a service. Without data, we'd be dead as a company. That's how important it is. Now, how do you meld that with design and delivery is basically where the three Ds come together: data-- >> I wrote a blog post. Dave Vellante always laughs when I bring this up because he always references it too. In 2007 I said, data is the new development kit. 'Cause back then, development kits existed. SDKs, software development kits. MSDN was Microsoft's thing. You remember those glory days, Dheeraj, I know. But the thesis was, if data does actually come in, it's actually an input into the software. This is what I think you guys are doing that is clever that's not well understood, is data is an input, like a software library almost. A module, but it's dynamic and it's always changing. And writing software for that is a nouveau kind of thing. This is new. >> Yeah, I know, and delivered to the developer, because right now data and hardware data is sitting in silos which are mainframe-like systems. How do you deliver it where they can spin it up on their own? Making sure that we democratize data is the biggest challenge in most companies. >> We're in a new era, I think you just pointed that out, and we talk about it at CUBE all the time. We don't really talk about up-front. It used to be UI was the thing, user interface, ease of use. I think now the new table stake feature in all companies is if you can't show value instantly in any solution that has a thing or things in it, then it's pretty much not going to happen. I mean, this is the new expectation that becomes the experience for-- >> Yeah, I mean, millennials are the new developers, and they need to actually see instant gratification, many of these-- >> Well, cost too. I don't want to spend a million dollars to find out it didn't work. I want to maybe spend something variable. >> And look, agility, the cliched word, and I don't want to talk about agility per se, but at the end of the day it's all about, can we provide that experience where you don't have to really learn something over 18 months and provide it in the next three hours. >> Great conversation here with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix, about his vision. I always loved your software vision. You guys have smart engineers there. Let's talk about your company. I think a lot of people at your conference and your community and others want to know, is how you're doing and how the company's doing. Because I think you guys are in the midst of a major transition we talked about earlier, hardware to software, software to subscription, recurring revenue. I mean, it's pretty much a disruptive enabler for you guys at one level as an opportunity. It's changing how you do accounting. It's having product management. Your customers are going to consume it differently. It's been a big challenge. And stock's taken a little bit of a hit, but you're kind of playing the long game. Talk about the growth strategy as you guys go forward. This has been a struggle. There's been some personnel changes in the company. What's going on? Give us the straight scoop. >> Yeah, in fact the biggest thing is about the transformation for this coming decade. And there's fundamental things that need to change for the world of cloud. Otherwise, you're basically just talking the word rather than walking the walk itself. So this last quarter I was very pleased to announce that we finally showed the first strong point of this whole transformation. There's a really good data point coming out that the company is growing back again. We beat street estimates on pretty much every metric. Billings, revenue, gross margin. And we also guided above street estimates for billings, revenue, and gross margin, and I think that's probably one of the biggest things I'm proud of in the last six, nine months of this subscription transition. We're also telling the street about how to look at us from software and support billings point of view as opposed to looking at overall billings and revenue. If you take a step back into the company, I talk about this in our earnings call, 'til three years ago, we were a commercial company, also doing federal and some international. And the last three years we proved to ourselves and to the community that we can do enterprise, you know, high-end customers, upmarket, and also do a very good job of international. Now, the next three years is really about saying, can we do both enterprise and commercial together? All together now, which is also our, coincidentally, our .NEXT message, is the proof that we actually have to go and show that we can do federal, enterprise, and commercial to really build a very large business from it. >> Well, federal's got certification levels. We know that's different depending upon which agency you're talking to. Commercial, a little bit different ball game. SaaS becomes important, cloud becomes important. The big trend is on-premise hardware. Outposts for AWS, Azure Stack for Microsoft. How do you fit into that? Because you, again, you said you're both ways. >> Mm-hmm. >> So are you worried about that? Is that a headwind, tailwind for you? What's the impact for this now fashionable on-premises shift? Which I think is just a temporary thing as cloud continues to grow. But I still argue with Michael Dell about this. I think cloud is going to be a bigger TAM. Even though there's a huge total addressable market on enterprise, that's like saying there's a great TAM for horses and buggies when cars are coming out. It's different world between public cloud and on-premises. How does that impact Nutanix, this on-premise-- >> Well, remember I said about the word anywhere in our vision? Make computing invisible anywhere? With software you can actually reduce the tension between public and private. It's not this or that. It's this and that. Our software running on Outpost is a reality. It's not like we're saying, Outpost is one thing and Nutanix is another. And that's the value of software. It's so fungible, it's so portable, that you don't have to take sides between-- >> Are you guys at ISV inside Amazon Marketplace? >> No, but again, it's still a thing. Marketplace is still not where it should be, and it's hard to search and discover things from there. So we are saying, let's do it right. Remember, we were not the first hyper-convergence company. Right? We were probably the ninth one, like the way Google was as a search engine, actually. But we did it right, because the experience mattered. You know that search box that did everything? That's what Nutanix's overall experience is today. We will do the public cloud right with our software so that we can use the customer's credits with Amazon-- >> But you're still selling direct. And your partners. >> Well, everything is coming through partners, so at the end of the day we have to do an even better job of that, like what we're doing at HPE now. I think being able to go and find that common ground with partners is what commercial is all about. Commercial is a lot about distribution. As a company, we've done a really good job of enterprise and federal. But doing it with partners-- >> What are the biggest impact areas for your business and business model, elements with software transition that you're scaling up on the subscription side? What are the biggest areas? >> Well, one is just communication, 'cause obviously a lot is changing. At a private company, things change, nobody cares. The board just needs to know about it. But at a public company, we have investors in the public market. And many of them are in the nosebleeding section, actually, of this arena. So really, you're sitting in the arena, being the man in the arena, or the woman in the arena. How do you really take this message to the bleachers section is probably the biggest one, actually. >> Well, I think one of the things I've always speculated on, you look at the growth of, just pick some stocks that we all know. VMware, Microsoft. You look at the demarcation point where, right when the stock was low to high was the shift to cloud and software. With VMware, it was they had a failing strategy and they kill it and they do a deal with Amazon. Game has changed, now they're all in the software-defined data center. Microsoft, Satya Nadella comes in, boom, they're in cloud. Real commitment. And with Microsoft specifically, that was a real management commitment. They were committed to software. They were committed to the cloud business model, and took whatever medicine they needed to take. >> That's it. That's it, you take short-term pain for long-term gain, and look, anything that becomes large over time, to me it's all about long-term greed, and I use this word a lot. I want all our employees and our customers and our investors to really think about the word. There's greed, but it's long-term greed, and that's how most companies have become large over time. So I think for us to have done this right, to say, look, we are set for the next 10 years, was very important. >> It's interesting. Everyone wants to be like Jeff Bezos. Everyone wants to be like you guys now, because long-term greed or long-term thinking is the new fashion. It's the new standard and tack. >> Yeah, I mean, look the CEOs, the top 200 CEOs, came out and talked about, are we taking good care of main street, or are we just focused on this hamster wheel of three months reporting to Wall Street alone? And I think consensus is emerging that you got to take care of main street. You and I were talking about, that I look at investors as customers, and I look at customers as investors. Which is really kind of a contrarian way of thinking about it. >> It's interesting. We live in the world, we've seen many waves. I think the wave we're on now from an entrepreneurial and venture creation standpoint, whether you're public or private, is the long game is the new 3D chess. It's where the masters are playing their best game. You look at the results of the best companies. I just bought the book about Uber from Mike Isaac from the New York Times. Short-term thinking, win at all costs, that's not the 3D chess game that's going on with entrepreneurs these days. All the investment thesis is stay long-term. And certainly now, with this perceived bubble popping, or this downturn that may or may not happen, long-term game is more important than ever. Your thoughts on it? >> I think the word authenticity has never been more important, not just in the Valley, but around the world, actually. What you're seeing with all this Me Too movement and a lot of skeletons in the cupboard out there, I think at the end of the day, the word authentic cannot be artificially created. It has to come from within. What you talk about, Satya... I look at Shantanu Narayen, the Adobe CEO, and they're authentic CEOs. I mean, I look at Dara now, at Uber, he's talking about bringing authenticity to Uber. I think there's no shortcuts to success in this world. >> I think Adobe's a great example. What they've done has been amazing. I know you're on the board there, so congratulations. Final word, I'll let you get your plug in for the event and your customer base. Talk to your customers and investors out there that might watch this. From your state of mind, what's the state of the union for Nutanix? Speak directly to your customers and investors right now. >> Well, the tagline for .NEXT Copenhagen is all together now. We're bringing clouds together. We're bringing app infrastructure and data together. I think it's a really large opportunity for us to go sell an experience to our customers, rather than selling things. All these buzzwords that come up in technology, as a company, we've done a really good job of integrating them, and the next decade is about integrating the public cloud and the private cloud. And I look at investors and customers alike. I talk about long-term greed with them. Providing an experience to them is the core of our journey. >> Thanks for your insight, Dheeraj. This was a CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (funky music)

. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeffrey here with the cube. We're in Reno, Nevada at the Interbike show. It's a big industry gathering, talking all about bikes, but today we're at a, a little side event is put on by the Royal Dutch, a gazelle bike company, 125 year old bike company that's all in on eBikes. And when we wanted to come check it out, really learn how the bike phenomenon is impacting smart cities and last bile. And there's so much cool stuff going on with big batteries and small motors, but it's really a lot more than that. And we're excited to be here with someone who's been writing about the industry for over 25 years as Patrick Brady, the publisher of the red kite prayer. Great to see you. Thanks. Nice to be here. Yeah. So you've been doing this for a long time and I just love to get your perspective on this e-bike phenomenon because you know, used to be, it's cheating and you know, these are not real bikes and you know, we're tough and we climbed the mountain and these things, that upset bubble, but they're, they're getting a ton of adoption. We just heard from the, the teammate goes up, they're going to sell a third of the bikes they sell this year or e-bike. >>That's amazing to me. Yay. I'm glad. I mean, this thing where, yeah, it's cheating. It's like, no, a good time is never cheating. Why? This is a problem for people. I don't understand. The thing is the very first time I ever got on an E bike, I grinned so hard. My cheeks hurt. It's a good time. And you know, the thing is, it's so effective for transportation. I'm cyclophilin. Okay. I love rode bikes. I love mountain bikes, but I just like bikes. And so if I can keep my car parked and use a bike to get around, I bought an I-CAR go bike, different company. But I love these. They're stylish, you know, and it's such a great way to get around. It's easy to park, easy to lock. They've got an integrated lock on them. You know, why wouldn't you use that as a way to get around, you know, gas guzzling cars. >>This is not what our future will be. We've got to be intelligent about what the future is. Another problem that we face as cyclists is that we're getting run over. People are on the smart phones and every time somebody gets out of an SUV and starts riding a bike, what happens? It's in the brain. We recognize that which we are. And so a chance to cause someone to recognize us out on the road. Oh look, somebody on a bike like I have. Right, right. Maybe they're not going to run us over. Right. So it's a, it's a way to decrease congestion on our roads. It's a nice way to see the world. I mean I don't care what bike you're on, if you're on a bike, it's a better way to see the world. Right? >>Well, 15 miles an hour. That's going to be a my blogger 14 cause it is. It's nice to be outside. You know, you're, you're in the fresh air. What's amazing to me though is I really came into this with a hypothesis around last mile. This is not last mile at all. These things are just substituting out for people's car. I just heard about a ride that people are doing, the Googlers are doing from San Francisco to mountain view every day. That's not an insignificant ride. Yeah. So it's really a game >>changer. Oh yeah. I take my kids to school on my e-bike pick them up in the afternoon, we'll go to the grocery store, pick up a pizza. No, it's so nice and it's easy to get my boys out the door. Can we take the green bike? You know, they get excited about it. Right. So it's, it's a big difference. Let's talk a little bit about regulations. So it's pretty interesting to see kind of, you know, regulation is usually always behind the technology. You know, how do we treat these things? Are they, are they scooters? Are they like a motor vehicle, but as defined by DMV, are they, are they bikes? And, and, and obviously the danger comes on yet, disparity of speeds. So you know, we're seeing on, I see it a lot of bike paths, no heat, no motor vehicles, which I think they mean scooters and then no eBikes. >>So how do you see kind of the regulation gonna change cause to your bed, to your point, it's always better to have somebody on a bike in a car in general in terms of space and congestion and all the reasons that you went through. So what is it going to take for the legislation and kind of the laws to kinda catch up to what these really represent and transforming really cities well, things have evolved a lot already. There's been a working group within the industry that helped define the three different classifications that are being used. Uh, not being able to use them on a bike path I don't think is a really big deal. You know, as, as the infrastructure improves for cycling, uh, out on roads, you know, bike lanes, that sort of thing. I think that's gonna help. But you know, one of the great things about an e-bike is you roll up to a red light and you pop it and turbo, you know, and the moment the light turns green, you're through the intersection instantly. >>So being out on the road where I live in Santa Rosa, I don't have any problems. And because the bike's big, I've got two other people with bright helmets on, people are cheering me, you know, I get waved at people like, you know, they're not pedaling, cracking jokes. So it's, it's become a very different way to present cycling to people who aren't on bikes and they look at it and they get excited. But you know, back to the legislation, I don't see that we're really having a big problem. There've been issues in some other places where, you know, they're just flat out not legal and it's like, well, you know, they're going to, they're going to see the light on that sooner or later. Right, right. We need to provide other options to get people around and it's just too intelligent and really all it takes for anybody to see. >>The light usually is one ride. Give them a half a mile, they'll get it. Right. It's funny because right at the end of the day we all like to be like that eight year old, they got their first thing Ray and you get out on the road and there's really just nothing like that. But now we're a little older, a little heavier and don't quite have that agility that we had as an eight year old. So you can see it bring it back. Yeah, it's crazy. So I'm just curious to your perspective, even within the bike industry, how it's evolved over the years. You know, there's so much stuff going on with batteries and motors. I think they could sell bikes. Are you using a Bosch system? Obviously Bosch is a huge car components company with giant, giant scale. >>Um, so as you've seen that evolve, you know, kind of what are some of your takes in terms of the longer capacity, the longer batteries, the better. >>Oh, you know, the biggest single thing. Sure. The batteries last longer. The motors provide torque on a more even basis. So they don't just take off or do anything crazy, but the units themselves, the biggest single thing that I see, because a motor is a motor at a certain level, the reliability has gone through the roof. You know, BOSH, yet they understand what reliability is. All the companies doing this now are so much better. I remember being at a magazine in 1998 and a guy just begging me to cover his bike and his Lake. It looked like a piece of junk and I had to communicate to them, but well, our reader is it who you're trying to sell to. Our reader. We actually liked going home. We liked the whole sweaty thing. Uh, and so that was, that was an issue, but I remember what that bike was and yeah, they're just so much more reliable. There's so much easier to use. The batteries lasts so much longer. Everything is, you know, it's ready for you. >>Right, right. It's funny, a lot of, a lot of the conversations earlier today, we're, we're talking about kind of those early days and it's fascinates me, all the Kickstarter projects around all these kinds of alternative vehicles, whether they're scooters or skateboards or one wheels and all these different variations of, of personal mobility. Um, but this is an old company. These guys have been added for awhile and I cannot believe that a third of their sales this year are going to be e-bike. So when a big, the big traditional powerhouses come into the market, that changes everything. >>Yeah. Well, when you look at the population of cyclists in the world, and then you look at the population of the world, who do you want to sell to? If you want to grow your company? I don't, let's sell to all the people who aren't currently riding bikes, you know, and think about what that's gonna do for the world. Fewer emissions, happier people. Holy cow. You know, that's crazy talk. >>Right, right, right. All right, Pat. Well, thanks for, uh, for sharing your perspective. It's, it's a really exciting time. We're happy to be here and, uh, I'm sure it's a whole breath of fresh air in your coverage area to be able to get into this space. Yeah, I really welcome it. I love it. I love it. Oh, I love these, said I'm over the, I'm over the cheating. All right. Well, he's Patrick. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at Interbike and actually a little side event here with Royal Dutch gazelle. Thanks for watching.

. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're in Reno, Nevada. Interbike is happening uh, this week in Reno. It's a big huge bike show. They have stuff up at the mountains. They've got stuff at the convention center. This is a small side of it put on by Royal Dutch gazelle, a bikes, 125 year old bike company that is all in on electric bikes. We came because this e-bikes story and part of the big motors, or excuse me, a little motors, big battery kind of last mile thing has really taken off. So we want to come get a better feel for what's going on and we're excited to have a dealer from Portland, one of the most bike friendly towns in all the U S he's wait, Greg. And he runs e-bike store weight. Great to see you. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. >>So you said you've had your store open for 10 years. 10 years. We were the first all I looked at short store to open in Portland. Actually it was part of an MBA project. I was in China taking a class, saw electric bikes for the first time, gas had just spiked and realize these are the most efficient form of motorized transportation known. Right. And nobody was doing it. And so next class I had wrote a business plan, launched it 10 years ago by putting 25,000 on a credit card and borrowed 10,000 from a friend and 10 years later we're still here. Love it, love the story. It's been, it's been a fun ride. So it's just, you know, you're the second retailer we've had on and they were also exclusive e-bikes in the Bay area. So you know, was the kind of existing bike infrastructure attitude, you know, industry just looking down to these only things where they just too weird to new Y, you know, kind of the early ones are e-bikes only. >>What's interesting, if you come to the market right now, what you see is you see some of the largest companies in the world putting a lot of resources, engineering resources, manufacturing resources, testing resources behind e-bikes. Back in the day, it wasn't such you, these manufacturers make them in the kind of, the customer was a test person. Right. And so it's been a very bumpy road to get to this point. But at this point they're very reliable. And so at first when caught, when shops were brought these things, they said, why would I ever carry that? Who can keep it running? You know? And now it's at the point where they're very easy to keep her on. They have log files, you plug it into the computer if you have a problem with it and it tells you, Oh error code, fix this one thing and off you're going again. >>But it hasn't always been such. And so the Rick older bike shops in particular avoided them because you make your money in a bike shop by having a customer for life and they couldn't keep them running. So they were nervous. They would not be able to keep the customer. Right. And there was a, it was wise, you know, now it's at the point where all the IBDs are coming in in Portland right now we have seven electrical only bike shops. All the big IBDs are carrying it with IBD, independent bike dealers. Okay. And on top of that, half the people that are looking for any bike will not buy from a traditional bike shop. It only come to an e-bike specialist. And so that's kind of our niche is the people and we really focus on that. So we try to have all of our, how we explain things, not to use big bike terms. >>We talk about how it would value the customer and use a whole different lingo than a traditional shop. Right. So it is a lot of different things going on with bikes. So one of them, right, is the speed, um, and then, and how it's classified. So yes, you know, there's the kind of the 20 mile an hour limit and we see that in the scooters and all these electric vehicles that keep it not a motor vehicle. And then they've got one here. I think it was 27 or 28 miles across three class three. So the laws seem to be kind of trying to catch up, like how do we classify these things? Are they bikes? Are they allowed on the bike path? Are they not allowed on the bike? Pass the hop. It's funny you bring that up tonight. Evolve. Well, it's funny you bring that up today because just today by Portland, which is one of the biggest bike blogs in the nation, um, came out with an article saying they were relatively in the fine print of or Portland code, my city's code and found out you can't ride your bike on the city paths and the city parks, and I didn't know this, I've been in business 10 years, but the very fine print and under dissertation you can't do it. >>Um, so it is, it's a gray space. Um, the 20th mile an hour bikes. Well it seems crazy fast when you and I are standing here. When you're on a road and there is a backup of cars behind you, where's the 20 mile an hour speed limit and they're driving 25 right. You know, it feels kind of safer to be able to go 25 with them and not hold them up and be able to get away from the door and, and zone. We're in a car doesn't go over to the store and you by taking the lane it feels much safer. So I actually, you know, I ride a class one most of the time but I, I do like riding class three bikes. Right. Just curious in terms of of the change of experience on an E bike versus a regular bike, some of the customers that you have, how is it fundamentally different? >>Cause I, you know I came to here today thing and this was really a last mile play. It's not a last mile play at all. For us, about 35% of our customers, their e-bike is their main mode of transportation. It is their car. It is how they get around and about 20% historically from our shop having people with physical disabilities or limitations in some way, shape or form 20%, 20%. So it's people who can no longer make it up the Hill to their house. It's people who can't arrive at work sweaty. It's people with ms, people who are missing along, people who have CLPD, um, you name it. These are people who now can ride again and getting them active again. And so it's a whole different mindset. Um, historically the bike industry has really gone after kinda the elite athlete, right? And this is something different. >>It's people who have, may haven't written a bike for oftentimes 20 plus years, right. Are now able to get out and go on a Hill. And the most interesting thing, they did a study in Australia where they put on, they worked with psycho stupid, been injured and they hooked him up to exercise bikes in front of a video screen showing them as they're paddling down the road essentially. And they change the video to climb a Hill, but they didn't change the settings on the exercise bike. They're sitting on the cyclist reported a higher level of pain when the visual show them climbing the Hill. So e-bikes do the exact reverse of that. And you're actually rewiring your brain so that bikes don't add pain and you can get where you need to go easily and efficiently. Right. So it's their primary, their primary methods. So you talked about the connectivity, um, you know, an app, integrated experience with all these devices we see over and over. >>So how has that changed your experience? Are you, is it, is it app for the consumer in terms of they're keeping track of their miles? Is it just for you and the maintenance or how's the integration of an app working through different ways for the app? So there's a mechanics app, we can plug it in and see the error codes. And that's important because being back in the day, someone will come in and say, I wrote this thing at mile 25 it cut out and stopped working. So after work, you know, or we go out and ride 25 miles and try to see if we could recreate the issue. And it was a pain. Now wait, you just told me it wasn't a pain to ride 25 buses. This is back in the day. It was a pain to try falls off. Intermittent issues are the bane of our existence. >>Yes, yes. But the uh, having a log file, we just plug it in and says, Oh, it cut out because of this error code, you know, and boom. Okay. Replaced the speed sensor. Good. You're back up and rolling. Right. Especially with people who commute. They don't want to leave their bike in the shop. They want ready within 24 hours or less. And so it's gotta be turned right. And so it's a whole different form of mechanics and a whole different level of support from the bike dealer. And that's why we choose the bike lines we choose like gazelle. Right. Who support their products very well. So it's pretty interesting that you said, you know, we talked about the scooter space and one wheels and all that fun stuff. So many deals, companies were started with Kickstarter. It's amazing to me how many kind of Kickstarter projects actually turned into real companies. >>Boosted future motion being a couple of my favorites. Future motion. Actually the design behind it was the guy who first invented the cell and unicycle unicycles Daniel Wood, he's actually from clock, I remember from Clackamas right across the river from Portland. And so I tried as original version of the self-balancing unicycle, which they made their first one wheels from and that, you know, it's come a long way and there's the one wheel, but it's been fascinating progression to watch him write and bring that out too. But that's very different than 125 year old Dutch company that's been making Mike making these bikes for a hundred plus years. Really? It's funny, we have, I think there's seven models here that they're showing today. I asked the exact guys how many regular bikes models they have and they're like one. Yeah. So, so they're all in. I mean this is significant. >>You think about some of the biggest companies in the world market cap. Bosch has always worn the top five or 10 market companies in the world. They make the largest set of best selling system in the United States and in Europe. Right? And they're behind it. They have millions of lithium batteries and people's homes already through their power tool division. They're the kind of engineering they're bringing is staggering and it's been really fun to be part of an industry that has been so nascent and yet just boom. Right. You just comes up with fright before you write for your eyes. Okay, so I got to ask you about the, whether you're from Portland, Portland rains a lot in, in, in Holland. How does the rain impact these things? Obviously you just send us their primary vehicle. Is it, is it more dangerous? Is there more spray? >>Is it, is it a factor? Not a factor. This is where the lines you carry make a huge difference. So when you, if you carry it, if you buy one off the internet that hasn't been product tested, you are the product tester. If you buy one like this, they literally have like a saltwater steam bath. They put the bikes in for weeks to stimulate Marine corrosion. They have hydraulic machines that the tar out of them. And so when you get a product, it just works. Um, and so we've had a, we had a Bosch system go completely underwater. Now, I'm not saying this is going to happen for everybody's experience. We had a guy literally put the bike in a river. He went one way. The bike went another, not on purpose, not on purpose. It was underwater for a few minutes. Right? Right. At work and rode home. >>And about a week later it made some noises and we told Bosch what happened, it was not a warranty issue with it was a collision. And Bosch said, you know, we haven't had enough warranty claims. You have some extra motors, we're going to send you a new one. And the guy said, it uses daily commuter. Right? Um, and it works great. Right? So, so w rain does not affect them, but it really depends on the model you have and how much product testing and how much engineering has gone in behind it to make sure you have the experience. Cause lithium and water are not generally friends. No. So, so just, I'll give you the last word. When you talk to people that are new to the space, maybe they just stumbled into the store, they heard about these e-bike things. What's kind of the biggest surprise that you see time and time again when people get one of these things and bring it home. >>Number one is that it rides like a bike. You can just go further. Um, th how well integrated they are. Um, on average the Baker's written 75% more than a traditional bike, 75% more, 75% more. Um, on average you can go about, well, the average speed wise on it. Um, I just study on this today. You know, you can increase your time by an average cycles average 11 miles an hour average e-bike average is about 13 to 1415 around there. And I forget the exact number. So I'm giving a bit of a gray area there. A little bit faster. Yeah. And so it gets you where you're going faster with less sweat. Right. We'll wake. Thanks for, uh, for taking a minute. What a, it's a, it's a cool story. And you know, Portland obviously is leading the charge in this, in this whole transformation. It's been a fun place to be and our customers are just awesome and no two ways about it. Super. Well, thanks again. He's waking. Jeff, you're watching the cube. We're at the Royal Dutch gazelle bike event at Interbike. Thanks for watching. Thank you.

. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff, Rick here with the cube Worthen Nevada museum of art in Reno, Nevada for the Interbike show. Just happening down the street at the convention center. But we're actually at a side of it put on by Royal Dutch, a gazelle bikes, 125 year old, a bike company who is all in on electric bikes. We wanted to come in, see what's going on, really how the e-bike phenomenon is kind of intermingling with all these alternative scooters and, and all these alternative ways of getting around cities especially and, and get a feel for it. So we're excited to have a retailer who's been in the business for a long time. He's Davey oil. He is a founder a and, and cone or of GNO family. Cyclery David. Great. See you. Thanks. It's really happy to be here. Yeah. So first off, uh, just impressions of this event tonight. Um, cause I was rolling eyes. There's six or seven new bikes out here tonight. What do you think? >>It's very exciting because that was an extremely high quality brand of electric bicycle. And like you said, they have a uh, like a very long history in, in bicycle design. Right. And what they're doing now is they're, they're riding this wave of new technology that's coming through e-bikes and it's phenomenal. It's so funny cause >>some of these things I was talking about earlier, you know, so many Kickstarters, right, that have started and actually a lot of the companies have been pretty successful on the Kickstarter basis, but this is an old line company. They'd been making these things, I think I heard earlier, they're still making them at the same factory that they've been making them for 125 years. And surprisingly to me a third of this year's bike sales will be eBikes. So clearly there's something going on here. Yeah, there is that. What do you think in terms of the adoption Seattle, cause what I've heard as well is that the U S is about 10 years behind >>and Kennedy bike adoption. Yeah. I think that's probably the case in Seattle. We're very fortunate that there are a lot of factors at play that are, that are driving your bike adoption a happening a little faster than it is in some other parts of the country. But I think that all around the country and in cities and suburbs and also in rural areas, people are gonna find that adding an electric mobility to your bicycle, it takes away the barriers to cycling that so many people experienced that are totally rational. Like when I arrived at my destination, I don't want to be sweaty or I want to be able to use a bicycle, but I want to be able to carry more things or my children. Right. And when you add the mobility to your bicycle, those kind of barriers are just eliminated. You can see you're still getting exercise, but you can choose to make the bicycle ride more of what you'd expect from other forms of transportation, which is convenient and not sweaty and difficult. >>So how many of your customers aren't really bicyclists that that they're coming at this as a, as kind of a new opportunity? Maybe they just, they cycled before, but they're not kind of hardcore cyclists. You see this as the right foot. What's amazing to me is you have all these form factors, but this is a form factor that people are very familiar with and that's where I think there's a real opportunity bike that's not the same as scooters and some of these other things. Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, what we experience is that probably two thirds of our customers don't previously identified themselves as bicyclists. Um, they're probably somewhat friendly with the idea bicycles so they wouldn't have walked into a bicycle store. But what we see is that that transformation that happens to people when they adopt cycling as a, as a major part of their life and a major part of their transportation that still occurs, but it occurs all at once when they leapfrog over so many of these barriers and just have the opportunity to use a bicycle so much more than they would have otherwise. And the same thing happens to people who are already interested in cycling. People who only ride recreationally often find that with the addition of any bike into their life, they can use a bicycle for many, many, or most of their transportation needs, uh, over the course of their life. And that's profound, right. Transforms people. >>So there's a lot of special kind of characteristics of Seattle. Yeah. Obviously the weather is not great. Of course it's not great in, in Holland either. And they got a lot of bikes. They're got Hills and bridges and some nasty traffic. Not that everybody else does them, Massey traveling, but Seattle's got some crazy traffic. So you guys are seeing not only the adoption of the bikes for commuting and for fun and all those things, but you're selling a lot of cargo bikes for commercial purposes in this tight urban center. So I wonder if you can give us a little bit more color on how you're seeing the penetration in cargo bikes. Sure. >>Well, I think that cargo bikes when used for like freight purposes and delivery purposes and enterprise purposes in general, they benefit from the same things that bicyclists benefit from in urban environments in general, which is just greater mobility, freedom from the restrictions of traffic. I'm not trying to say that bicycles aren't on the road and that they don't sometimes find themselves behind a long line of stopped cars, but we have so much more flexibility in those situations and we can park safely and reasonably on a sidewalk. And so, so many things that happen, uh, that people suffer through due to congestion or alleviated when they're riding a bicycle in general. And business has experienced that when they use them for freight for sure. >>And it's not just a cargo bike, it's any cargo bikes. So now I've got the superhuman skills so I can, I can carry that load. I can replace a truck. I mean we have, we have bicycles in operation in Seattle for some, some of our customers use that. Our daily carrying 400 500 pounds of weight in there and they're traveling, you know, 60 70 miles in a day. Right. So how are you seeing the integration of the eBikes with the regular bikes, the hardcore bikers, the recreational bikers, and then of course you've got the slow move in pedestrians, right? And the, the dangerous stuff occurs when you've got all these disparity in, in, in velocity. And it's going to be interesting to see kind of how the regs kind of catch up and eventually probably, you know, discriminate. So these PO, these paths are for, you know, 20 miles or more of these paths are for, you know, 10 miles an hour or less. So how are you seeing that kind of work itself out in the streets of the city? Cause absolutely get a little rough sometimes out there. I think it has the potential to get a little rough. I think that honestly, um, yeah, >>the situation, the opportunities for conflict between pedestrians and electric bicyclists is not an issue or not any more significant than the opportunities for conflict between pedestrians and conventional bicyclists. I think that while an electric bicycle can travel up to 20 miles an hour or in some cases faster, they don't ordinarily travel that fast. That's a peak speed. Um, and so I don't really think that sidewalks are being menaced by electric bicyclists. I don't think that's really occurring, although I do think that the kind of regulations that you're talking about that classify type II bikes into types so that we can then, um, uh, empower people who have jurisdiction over different pieces of infrastructure to, um, to determine for themselves and for their users what bikes are allowed in which ones are, are, are forbidden, um, or restricted. I think that's really positive. Right? I think it's extremely important that we define what these vehicle types are because of course there are some vehicles which are more appropriate for some environments than others. >>Right. But I think the real thing is that bicyclists and III bicyclists are not the enemy of pedestrians. I think that together we're all making smart choices and we're in the safe spot. And I think that if it feels like there's too many bicycles on the sidewalk in your town, it's probably because you haven't made any room for bicyclists in the streets of your town. Right. And I think we all need to work together to make cycling a safe and viable option across all of our communities that will help congestion when we remove people from cars, we improve traffic for everybody. >>Right, right. And bikes should not be on sidewalks, period. Right. That's not really not the bike, not the bike place unless the, the street is just so, so tragic. >>I think. I think that if you're talking about it in a situational like daily life active, uh, situation, I think, um, there are a lot of conditions where bicycles are going to be on the sidewalk and there are many of them that I think are reasonable. I think it's totally reasonable to decide as a city we don't want bicycles, bicycles to primarily ride on sidewalks or when bicycles are on sidewalks. I don't think there's any city in the country that allows bicycles on sidewalks. It doesn't also stipulate as long as they're traveling safely. So if somebody has a problem with how somebody is behaving, that's still a problem either way. >>Right, right, right. So I'm just curious to get your take as, as you've seen this market evolved. Again, we've got big players involved. Bosch is doing all the, all the electronics on these bikes. Yeah. Capacity's got bigger on the battery speeds have gotten better. Dependability. Yeah. So how are you seeing kind of the evolution of the eBikes impacting the total market for bikes? Again, I can't believe that that gives out. Guys said they're going to sell a third of their bikes. Are e-bikes. Yeah. You see in the same thing in your business. >>Yeah. Well, I mean my business is focused on eBikes. Um, but what I will say is that I think that um, one of the challenges for bicycle advocacy and bicycle marketing and retail has always been a how to appeal to people who are somewhat friendly towards bicycling but aren't doing it that called interested but concerned. And it, I think it turns out that e-bikes are the key here, that we can help transform people from someone who is friendly towards bicycling to somebody who uses a bicycle as a big part of their life simply by making bicycles easier. And as you identified right now, finally, we're at a point in the development of this technology where the bikes really are reliable as a vehicle. And that's significant, right? It's not just a hobbyist activity at this point. These are, these are legitimate, uh, reliable vehicles >>in transportation. I mean, legitimate trans, it's not just your last mile vehicle anyway. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at our shop at least we're talking about people who are, who have given up a car. Um, almost almost every one of our customers who's getting an electric cargo bag is doing this as part of their family transportation budget. And that includes driving less or removing a car from their life, right? And that could only work if the e-bike was at least as reliable as driving lists. And so maybe a flat tire is still a pretty annoying problem, but that should be the worst problem. Right? And I think we're finally there in terms of the quality of technology that's out >>and now it's only upward. We're like at year zero now. Right. Amazing. Even with the weather and the Hills and everything else, it's profound, man. It's really, and then it's a, it's a cultural shift, so it's just, it's just spreads across our community. Right. One person who inspires somebody else and inspires somebody else. Well, David, thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing your story. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. All right. He's Dave young. Jeff. We are at Interbike Reno, but we're actually at the gazelle, uh, event looking at their e-bikes and they're really, really cool. Thanks for watching. Catch you next time.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Reno, Nevada at Interbike 2018. I think it's like 20,000 people. I'm trying to get the official number. I haven't been able to run it down yet. >> It feels big. >> It feels big, a lot of stuff going on here. We came up because really the last mile vehicles, this amazing kind of revolution in small motors and big batteries and reliability and smart cities and it's really going to play an important part in travel going forward. And we're excited to be here on the floor and the first company we came across, I'm obviously a big fan if you follow me on social, is Future Motion, they make the Onewheel. It's a crazy cool device and we have Orion O'Neill, the sales manager from Future Motion. Orion, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so you said it's your first year at the show. We were kind of wondering kind of where, you know, your class of vehicles fits within this whole bicycle world. >> Yeah absolutely, so generally speaking, we generally exhibit in kind of more like outdoor retailer and outdoor apparel shows but really the cool thing about Interbike is, at the end of the day, bikes are like transportation, you know? And really our product, the Onewheel Plus, is really a last mile transportation tool. So we decided to come to Interbike and see what's going on in the industry and see how we can kind of fit into the new last mile transportation. >> Right, and how's it been going? >> It's been awesome, the response has been really cool. Surprisingly, not a lot of people here know about us, so it's always cool to see people who have never seen our product, you know. >> Right, right, but what's interesting in terms of the bikes and the E part of it is, what we're seeing a lot of here is the outdoors so now the e-bike has gone beyond just kind of the road bike or the city bike, the commuter bike, and they're running 'em up and down the mountains out there. >> Yeah absolutely, and you know I talk with a fair amount of people in the bike industry and my understanding is that lots of the growth in mountain biking is coming from the e-bike, you know, and that's because it just lowers the barriers to entry. It's all about getting more people out there and able to enjoy the outdoors. >> Right. >> And we think with our board its kind of similar, you know, it has the utility to do commuting within the city, but the big tire also allows for us to kind of go out and explore trails, you know, beach, grass, gravel, all that stuff. >> Right, so I wonder if you guys are doing any work or you see anything on kind of the regulations? 'Cause, you know, the regs are always kind of behind the technology and it's interesting, you go on a lot of trails, which are perfect for bikes, they're perfect for Onewheels, they're perfect for e-bikes, but you see this sign, right, no motor vehicles, and I think, most of the time, they're thinking motorcycles, they're thinking kind of traditional internal combustion motor vehicles, not necessarily this new class. So I wonder kind of from your point of view, are you guys working on that? What do you kind of see in terms of the acceptance of having these new age vehicles in space? >> Totally. Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, you know, legislation is always very far behind, kind of, you know, where the industry and innovation is going. But we really think that slowly but surely we're seeing more acceptance on, you know, generally what we need to work on is the forest service and BLM. And they're starting to open dialogues with e-bike communities and we were actually talking with a few people in Tahoe and just having a more, you know, tailored legislation towards kind of last mile commutes and electric transportation that's not like a dirt bike or something like that. >> Right, right, because it's really about disparity of speed, that's where dangerous things happen. >> Exactly. >> But, if you're on a mountain trail or, you know, you're running around, it shouldn't be a big issue. And actually, Onewheels are unique because they work very well slow. >> I know. >> Which a lot of vehicles don't. >> And the cool thing about Onewheels on trails, that lots of people don't know is, the big tire actually packs the trails so it actually can like repair some of the ruts that bikes put in. >> Alright, that's a good reach. (Orion laughing) I like that. Thinking ahead, you're giving us a gift for a get, we're helping you do trail maintenance if you ride your Onewheel, I like it. So you guys just released this version a couple years ago, Kickstarter company, just kind of give us a quick overview of what's happening with the company now. I think you said you caught up with your back orders, you're getting into more retail locations. What's up with Future Motion? >> Yeah, so, minute overview, you know, we Kickstarted back in early 2014, first product came to market basically a year after that which was the original Onewheel. Then we had the Onewheel Plus two years ago and we just introduced the Onewheel Plus XR at CES this past January and, yeah, the growth has been pretty amazing. We're now up to basically 400 retailers worldwide. We have Europe, Australia, and North America. And the response to the product has just been amazing. >> Yeah, pretty cool, and the thing a lot of people don't know is you're actually riding on software which is what I think is part of the unique attributes of this vehicle. >> Right, I'm not an engineer, let me preface that, but my understanding is the hardest part in what makes our boards so amazing is the actual programming. The firmware that tells the motor how to respond to those inputs, you know >> Right, right >> That's the bread and butter. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Very cool, well Orion thanks for spending a few minutes and congrats on the success. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me. >> Alright, he's Orion, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Interbike 2018 in Reno, Nevada. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week, now here's John Furrier. (upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage here in New York City in Manhattan at the Hilton Midtown for Consensus 2018 part of Blockchain Week New York. Our next guest here is Greg Landegger who's with Smith Parsons and Whittemore also known for Bit Digest, investor in this space since the beginning, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me John. >> So I've got to ask you, you've been an investor in a lot of coins and equity deals the space is now busting out, I mean first of all are you amazed by the amount of people here? >> I'm more than amazed, it's surreal. >> And you now have an interesting culture of new investors in the space coming in. What's it like for you working with the new investors? >> So we are a single family office that started originally in 2014 and the way I describe it is for the past few years I was the loser at the lunchroom, everyone was making fun of me and then last year all the cool jocks wanted me to sit at their table. (John laughing) A lot of our bankers, all the traditional firms, started calling up saying, "What are you doing? What is this bitcoin thing that you've been spending your time on?" >> So you had a nice little cover story there for a while but can't ignore the returns, at the end of the day. >> That's exactly right, last year was too good a year. >> Alright, so talk about some of the dynamics that you're seeing here at Blockchain Week. What are you seeing? What's the top story, what's the big news that you think is most important? >> I think the news right now is that there's real development going on, I mean we're all waiting, the holy grail to me is coming up with an institutional custodial project. Ledger Wallets announced something today so we're very excited about that and there's more and more effort being done in that area. And that's really what'll bring in more people into the market. >> Big controversy yesterday in the panel about you know Blockchain washing or you know seeing blockchain, pretty heated argument there, your thoughts? I mean obviously, it's early, embryonic, it's growing really fast, I've heard the same arguments when the web came along, too slow, you know it's not fully functional, but it was still early. Same here? What's your take on all this? >> As an investor we'd like it to be must faster, but realistically everything's surpassing any expectations. I mean nobody, if you talked to people early last year we would laugh about people predicting bitcoin at 2,500. >> So with the coins, talk about the investment you're making in coins. >> So we invest it. >> 'Cause that's different than the equity. >> It is, but we had a learning experience where one of our companies ICOed, we chose not to participate in it and it was the wrong decision, it really told us we need to be on the equity side as well the coin side. >> When was that? Early on or? >> Last year. >> Last year. >> The middle of last year. >> Okay, so what kind of coin deals are you doing? What's that profile? >> So we do a little bit of everything, I mean we've come up with a term rebel coins which are the top six coins, it's Ripple, Etherium, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, and Lightcoin, we like those. Then we invest in a total of about 20 coins. >> And the blockchain doesn't bother you in the performance and all that good stuff? >> No because we're making a bet on the future of different things >> Long game. >> It's a long game for us. >> What's your criteria for investment? You obviously get the, you're kind of a rebel in yourself, but your returns are there, I've seen this movie before in the web, but everything happened in the web and the returns were made you know really before the dot com bubble popped around 2001 timeframe. But there's still great returns, but the decisions were interesting then. How do you make your choices? How do you know what a good deal is? >> It's, I'd say 80% the team. Do they have the experience? Do they have an understanding of what they're doing? I mean I have a lot of great ideas on things I know nothing about and know I'll never succeed in 'em. So if we find a team that is experienced in an area, understands it, has a real go to market story, >> Interesting enough. >> that's exciting us. >> Okay so it's the classic criteria with a twist. How about running hard? You say really you got to run hard in this game it's a fast-moving, unlike the dot com bubble, this thing is highly accelerated, you got to, you can't be sittin' on you butt on this one. >> No agreed, you've got to be very aggressive in the area, but I think with the ICOs there's more money up front than people typically had and that's really what's changed the market a lot for us, is it's not a deal where the venture capitalists go out and give a million dollars to five companies, wait to see what happens, now those five companies are able to raise a lot more money, but it doesn't guarantee they'll succeed. >> Greg you've become kind of a great known investor, certainly the Bit Digest is well-known for great following there. I got to ask you the double coin question, pun intended. There's the good and the bad, name something that's really good about this industry right now, that people should know about that might not be familiar. And what are some of the things that you're concerned with? That you want to see kind of stopped, or bad behavior eradicated? Share your perspective on the double coin side of the life if you're in the crypto world. >> So let's, starting with the bad, I think it's education, people don't understand what's going on. We keep on hearing about Mt Gox, Silk Road, that's in the past, bitcoin, and I use bitcoin as a general term at times, but you know it is not a, I mean it's a transparent currency, it's safer than a lot of other things out there, people don't understand that and I blame the media a lot for just repeating the story, maybe it sells papers, but just people aren't explaining what's really going on in the market. >> That's the Ed model for you, if it leads, if it bleeds, it leads, and that's a story. No but I think people see the ICO things too happening right? They go, "Okay, there's been some scams on the ICO-side, so I've heard that story, you know I'm worried about that." >> I mean I've spent some time in the microcap space I dealt with a lot more questionable people in microcaps than I deal in crypto. >> You mean in the traditional market? >> Traditional, pink sheets area. >> So I think what's different now, I'd love to get your perspective on that I see at least, observation wise, is you have an open source ethos kind of community model where there's a lot of self-governing going on. Are you seeing the same thing? Is there people talking, it's a tight knit community, still small, growing, is there like a special self-governance thing going on in the finance world? I mean you know there's been talk on people kind of organizing, syndicating, pooling deals together, which is natural. But how about the self-governing aspect of it? >> You know I think, I mean people, the funds or the actual token offerings themselves, that's still something that needs to be addressed, people haven't done it in the same way a typical equity raise would be done and a lot of the different fund managers, let me back up by saying this is the most open market I've ever seen where everybody is willing to talk to each other to try and share ideas and make this grow and a lot of the fund managers are now looking at it saying, "We need some more governance." There're things going on today, such as in the ICO market, if you invested in equity, you never thought that a ICO offering may occur originally and is it a liquidity event and what happens? So we're trying to come up with some governance that hasn't existed but probably needs to be, but to be fair the companies that we've been lucky enough to invest with are supporting the ideas. >> Yeah so there's liquidity going on. It's a new kind of liquidity. What is that liquidity? Where is the liquidity? It's not just a Kickstarter campaign, there's actually liquidity going on. >> There is liquidity going on and I think we're trying to figure out how to now take equity that is established in the traditional sense, we talked about security tokens, but the companies that are actually have issued ICOs are trying to determine how to give a dividend or some form of liquidity to the shareholders and that's a new market. >> Greg does the domicile matter to you? Where they are located? I mean I've heard things like special purpose vehicles have always been kind of an analogy. >> I mean traditionally I will say no, our attorneys would say yes, but if it's a Cayman, we've invested in some Cayman companies, Europe, Asian companies, so that really doesn't bother us that much, again it's the team >> It's not a deal killer. >> It's definitely not a deal killer. >> But you'd prefer, obviously, security token, in the US. >> Delaware-based would make us the happiest. But if they have a real team behind it, if they have real attorneys, real auditors, we'll look past that. >> And global reach, that's a big factor. >> Absolutely. >> How much is global impacting this world? I mean, we're in the US, we're kind of turning into it. >> It's incredibly, but I think the one area where we need to do a better job is in expanding it, I mean there are a lot of foreigners at this market today, at this event, but it's, we know the US market really well, we don't know what's going on in Asia, we read the trade magazines and that's how we know what's going on there's efforts now, I'm even, Consensus announced today they're having an event next year, or this year, in Singapore. We need to have greater reach to share what's going on around the world versus what a few people are telling us. >> John: You see that as a big issue? >> I do, we don't see what's going on in China today, we don't see what's going on in Singapore, the Philippines, and that's where a lot of the effort is going on. >> Well I think you're right, I think one of the things and that's where fake news on Facebook, you know with the whole election here in the US and now outside influence, whether it's terrorist groups or propaganda-based systems, quality of the data >> That's exactly right. >> is a really important with real time. >> And the data's limited today, I mean it's not. >> I agree, I mean we totally agree with the same thing. Okay final thought, walk away this week from big data, not big data, Blockchain Week NYC, your big walk away here this week. What's your takeaway? What do you take home? >> We went in the right direction, I mean that this is still developing, we're not there yet, there's still a lot of work to be done, but long-term whether you believe in digital currencies or not today, this is something that central governments are looking at in supporting, enterprise is getting into it, and this is the future. So we made the right choice. >> And is it only going to get better you think? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah I think stability-wise, technically, and the business models are starting to shake out. Just quickly before, I know you got to go, thank you for your time, quickly token economics, big part of the business model side of it your thoughts and reaction to how that's going and how people should start thinking about that if they could meet their criteria for some sort of de-centralized business opportunity. >> So I think, it's looking at network usage, I mean that's really the way we look at it today, the fundamental model doesn't work, or we haven't been able to determine how to do that, but adoption, it's growth, and that's how we've focused things and see where it is. >> Well congratulations for all the work and all the work you're doing and that continue to do. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to have a big-time investor on theCUBE here. Big-time investors, we had entrepreneurs, we had folks from Europe, Lithuania, all over the world here on theCUBE, we're out in the open. This is theCUBE covering Blockchain Week New York City Consensus 2018, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. Stay with us for more, after this break. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello and welcome to exclusive CUBE coverage here in New York City for Blockchain Week, NY Blockchain Week New York City. CUBE's coverage continues with cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, the applications of blockchain. Our next guest is Richard Rofe, who's the co-found partner of Arcadia Crypto Ventures. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> So when you're in that neck of the woods, New York City, obviously Wall Street, you know, they traded across the wall in the old days, and then it became now the Wall Street, it's changing. We're seeing crypto and token economics really driving the entrepreneurial energy, both on start-ups, as well as in the capital market. And you guys are on the front end of that, with some awesome investments advisory. And what's the craze all about? I mean, you have more practical view, your firm, conservative and also aggressive. What's your take? >> Well, first off, I'm a little older than most of the guys in the space, so I have a different perspective. I did come from Wall Street prior to this, I ran a hedge fund for 12 years, and before that I was basically an entrepreneur my whole life, software and other things. So, I looked at this a little differently, than probably some of the younger guys do. I've kind of seen this before? I think I saw it with the internet. And I think it's a world-changing shift, and we're an early part of it. We've been in for a while, actually in this space forever. Cause, you know, this space isn't that old. So, six years out of 10, we've been in it from the beginning, basically. >> You know, us old guys look at the waves, these waves of innovation, we're like hanging ten on the old big surfboards, and the young kids are ninjaing up on the small board. What is the younger generation looking at? Cause they're certainly, I wish I was 20-something, this is the best wave I've seen in tech revolution coming, all the ingredients are there, the capital markets are changing radically, the technology product market is changing radically, the global landscape's changing radically, the regulatory landscape, and everything else, is a perfect storm for innovation. >> Rapid change, I got involved early around 2012, just to give you a, you know, since we're at a conference this week, and see how crowded and incredibly busy it is, takes up an entire giant hotel, and bursting into the street, when I, in 2012 when I went to the very first conference, that I attended anyway, you could fill a small room with every single person at the conference. So the growth has been insane. It is driven by younger people, but the beauty of this is it's driven by people all over the world. This is not just an American thing. This is a worldwide thing. This is a shift, a technology shift that I don't think we've seen since basically the advent of the internet itself. >> You know, there's an old expression, both sides of the table, you've been an entrepreneur, you've been an investor. A hedge fund is almost the third side of the table, it's like 3D chess almost, you are now playing in the crypto world. Being an entrepreneur, you've been there, done that, hedge fund you had to run money and make great investments. Now, with this new crypto phase, how are you looking at it? Because you have the experience, you can see the growth in the younger generation, new disruptive people literally just flying blind, just going crazy with some good stuff. How are you managing that? How do you look at the marketplace, how do you make your bets? >> Good question. It's difficult. First of all, the barrier to entry is low. At this time, anyone who understands technology is really getting involved, and for good reason, but therefore you have, hundreds and hundreds of deals that come your way on a weekly basis. So you have to really pick and choose through the ones that are interesting. And you apply the same techniques that you applied as an entrepreneur and an investor prior to that, you look at the underlying business, the area that the blockchain will disrupt, change, shift, how it will do it, how long it will last, and how many people will be interested in it. And if you find the ones that are attractive and interesting, then you find the team that's attractive and interesting. That's the big point, is that you really want to have a very good team, you care so much about their background, their technology background, as well as their business background. If you can put those things together, you have a winning investment, and then you try to do it. >> You and I were talking before you came on camera... crowd sales and Kickstarter, Gofundme, as great ways to get capital. But now there's really no liquidity there. Talk about the dynamics because I think, you know, traditional investors in this market say "hmm", and there's so much more coming that'll create more stability obviously. We see some of that, I'll get to that in a second. But I want to get your take on, from an investor standpoint, the notion of liquidity, and also an entrepenuer's standpoint, access to capital. Talk about the dynamics between access to capital and liquidity for the investors and for the entrepreneurs. >> Also great points. I mean, right now, we have something that is giving both things, right? Access to capital, worldwide access to capital, from the smallest investor to the biggest investor, everybody has an opportunity, where before it was really limited, and then you have liquidity in that if you have a token or a coin, that's tradable, whether it's on an exchange, or private trade, you can actually liquidify your investment. Where if you were in a private company in the past, and I've done many of those, you're locked in. You're kind of at the mercy of the organizers of the company, whoever they are, the people that run the business. And you're kind of stuck there, good or bad. In this case, you have the ability to trade in and out, just as you would with a public stock. >> So you can get some liquidity in the front end, while private still, so it's kind of like a little liquidity market. I want you to address a question that's come up, an observation that we've made on theCUBE. We were at the Bahamas at Polycon 18, Puerto Rico. Not in the US, is New York or New York City the capital, you know, of money, that's where money never sleeps, so to speak, Gordon Gekko would say, in the old Wall Street quote. But this is a global phenomenon. We're outside of the United States, there's a lot of action. Let's talk about the role of global money. >> Well, that's part of the excitement of the whole thing. It's not just the United States. It's all over the world, so it's really democratized investing, it's democratized finance, it's changing the landscape completely. And I think that it's unstoppable. I do think that regulation, and I know we talked about that earlier too, is a good thing. I think that regulation is necessary, because you can't just have a rogue environment completely, but on the other hand too much regulation kills things. So there has to be a happy medium and hopefully they'll find that. >> I love the invisible hand strategy, and certainly let capital take, but you want to have some signaling, SSC's been doing that. I just don't think it's stoppable in my opinion. But I want to go shift to where entrepreneurs are looking at the capital markets. Today the choices are bootstrap, friends and family, small sized business, cash flow business if you will, or go venture capital or private equity, if you have the kind of multiples that would warrant that, assuming the sector is in vogue at the moment. Which, you know, always a coin flip. Here, with token economics, there's a huge access to capital. Bubble we're seeing certainly is reflected in that. What are you looking for, when you see that kind of behavior? How do you manage the risk, how are entrepreneurs navigating that world? >> First of all, managing the risk, it's tough obviously. Especially as I mentioned earlier, there's so many deals coming at you at all times, so you have to choose wisely, that's the first way to manage risk. Always was the way to manage risk. People used to ask me in the hedge fund business, how do you manage your risk? Well, I only try to invest in the things that I think have the best upside, and the smallest downside, it was pretty simple. And it's the same here. It comes down to at the end of the day, what businesses are you choosing? The other thing is that, you know, first of all there's inherent risk. You can never get around that fact. But if you really believe in the long-term future, and you're willing to go through some ups and downs, and there are going to be, and there have been, as we know, over the past 10 years, and there will be more in the future. You have to be willing to ride those waves. And if you can do that, then I think your risk will just mitigate over time, as long as you're a smart, wise investor, and of course spreading it around. You don't want to be in, you know, all your eggs in one basket, then you'll take a giant risk. >> Yeah, it's one of those things where you don't want to zig when you should have zagged, with all this going on. It's certainly a turbulent landscape, I've heard phrases like, it's like wet cement, you don't know when it's going to form, all these kinds of phrases. So the question I want to ask you is, what do you look for? What are you looking at, what signals are you trying to synthesize, what's the tea leaves that you're reading, what're you looking at? What's concerning you, what are some tell signs that are going to help you navigate the investment side and advisory side? >> With regard to the entire space, we're looking very much at regulation, we want to know what the regulators want. I'm not sure they know what they want. We speak to them, we keep them pressed on the situation from our end, and we hear back from them on with their thinking. We'd like to see some regulation over time, but it's complicated because they don't even know what they're looking at yet. That's a big part of it. They're not sure how to regulate something that they don't understand. And there are very few people in this space, and this is one of the biggest risks. There are very few people that even do understand it, and are in this maze. >> I was telling an entrepreneur just here today, and then last week, it's in the Bay Area in California, they're more progressive than their suppliers, their law firm, and some of their accounting help. They're more progressive on the front end, they're actually advising the law firm on deals. >> And that has happened, that's happened with us, in fact we've recently put a structure together, where we taught the law firm how to do it, the law firm was impressed with it. They had to go study it, they spent a few weeks, and they came back and said "Hey, this is a great idea, we're going to do this with everybody else going forward." And that basically came from us backwards. >> Did they bill you for those hours, or did you charge them? >> Great question, I really hope not. I'm going to ask my partner if we got billed for anything. >> Rich, I want to ask about blockchain, we got to see Consensus 2018, it's happening here in New York, big event, part of CoinDesk too, they're doing a great job, content program's been solid. It's been super crowded, they need a bigger venue obviously, the demand was high and sold out. And I know there's a lot of side events going on, a lot of activity. What is your take away, what do you look this as saying? Is it like, wow, what's your take on the impact of the momentum? >> Well, first of all, as I mentioned before, I saw this thing with my own eyes, right, from a little tiny room in Las Vegas, was the entire conference, to what we saw today. With people in the streets who can't even get in, thousands and thousands of people in one hotel, which is probably not even cut out for that many. I think it's incredible, the momentum says a lot, by the way, talking about mitigating risk, there's not just so many people, there's so many smart people, that are figuring this out, one by one, and getting involved early. And that really gives me a lot of confidence, in terms of the long-term strategy. If this thing grew by, you know, two or three times, four or five times what I saw in 2012, I would not be nearly as excited. What I'm seeing here, this mass load of people, who are fighting to get into an event, right, into a venue, and the intelligence, and the kind of people they are, and how educated they are, it really gives me hope. And it reminds me, of early days in the internet, where we saw the super smartest people, kind of broke away from the crowd, did their own thing. We saw guys leaving traditional firms, going and starting companies, the Amazons, the Googles, the Facebooks, and things of that nature, which became the largest companies in the world. >> And there were problems there too. You had back-dating stock options, you had all these deals where revenue is revenue, and then accounting issues, but again all that is just a symptom of a growth market. Final question for you, when you look at what you guys are doing, and how you're investing, how you're getting involved in companies, you're also an advisor to Bloq which is having an event here in New York City. How are you navigating the hiring, the partnership, the community aspect, as in the financial community, like the entrepreneurial community, there's a tight-knit bond. How is it evolving, how are you guys shaping that, what are some of the things you can share around the financial community? >> Well, we do advisory work, so we work with a lot of different clients that want to get into the space. We work with some very traditional clients, that are not really technologists, and those are the most interesting ones. They're difficult, because they don't understand a lot of it, and I don't blame them, I come from that world too. So, we have to really hold their hand, and we deal with a lot of very smart tech people who come from a whole other, but don't know the business side so well, so we kind of work with both. In terms of our own hiring, and who we bring on to our company, we really look for a very unique person, which is, usually in this case a younger, because of the space itself, we look for everybody, but we don't find that many people my age and older, that even want to spend time, let alone understand it. >> Some smart kid "I don't want to work at Goldman Sachs, they're old." >> Listen, and again, we saw this in the internet, you could not get a smart kid out of college to get a regular job back in the Nineties. They were all going to Web startups. Kind of same thing here. So we have a great pool to choose from, we try to pick people that are on the cutting-edge, but that also want to work hard. Because, again, it's a start-up industry, right? So, think about the hours, you know, you're really going to put in a lot more than you would at a nine-to-five job. Your weekend, nights, you know, the phone, you're connected 24/7. But the hiring's been, uh, we have a staff of about six people, and I think they're great, but we do hand-pick them and it takes a while. >> Take a minute to explain what you guys do, how many investments you've made, you've been there early, the year 2012 you mentioned, early on. >> I started in 2012 in terms of in just the space itself, due to my friend Matt Roszac at Bloq, who was really early, a year ahead of me there, and he got me involved, but I didn't really start making serious investments. My first investment was in 2014, we invested in a settlement and clearing house company, that's now one of the fastest growing banks in the country, and then we got into some of the coins, and some of the platforms, that's where we invest the most, and a few deals here and there. And then we started to do advisory work, because let's face it, we knew what we were doing, we were ahead of the curve, we certainly understood it, and so many people want to get into something that they don't know, they're going to need someone to hold their hand all the way through. So, our advisory business is our main stable business, and then we invest into certain deals that we think are interesting, a lot of them are platforms. >> Yeah, and token economics is driving all that. Richard, thanks for coming on, appreciate taking the time to come on CUBE, I'm John Furrier, we're here at New York City for Blockchain Week New York, and this is theCUBE exclusively continuing coverage of the cryptocurrency craze, token economics, obviously blockchains enabling technology underneath it, and the whole new Internet infrastructure is transforming with cloud, everything behind it's really exciting. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C. It's Cube Conversations with John Furrier. (upbeat music) Hi everyone, welcome to special on the ground. This is the Cube in Washington D.C. Chain of all the innovations at Peace Tech labs here in the Peace Tech accelerator here with Tania Pinto. Is SEaB Energy one of the startups here with the United States Institute of Peace? Acceleration displacement, you're one of the startups. (Tania chuckles) >> Yes, exactly. >> What do you guys do? >> Hi John, thanks for interviewing me. I'm from SEaB Energy, and we came up with ways to power in a box. Essentially, appliances that are made to tackle climate change. Extract the water content to value of water out of the waste. I don't remember-- >> And turn it into energy? >> Actually, no. The other thing that I was going to say, exactly, it's down the throat. Providing a source of energy, where the infrastructure can't reach. >> So, the Peace Tech accelerator, you're part of, What's that like here? I mean as a startup, you got to get your idea off the ground, it's a venture for good, and some applications for society with it. >> Yes. >> What's it like at the accelerator? >> Definitely. The accelerator is amazing. Lots of great people with great ideas to help us. Kickoff essentially, we are actually about to launch the kickstarter to get into India, and fund two of our systems going to a smart village there. And I'm pretty sure, all the team that is at the Peace Tech accelerator is going to help us in that direction. >> As a startup here in Venture for Good, with the Peace Tech accelerator. What are some of your challenges that you guys have that you're overcoming with the accelerator and how you guys are going to take your venture to the marketplace? >> Well, we are a U.K. based company and the U.S. market is actually our biggest and most important market, so, it's super relevant in the sense that we're being immersed in the market itself in the U.S. It gives us a different perspective on how we can expand to the U.S. So that's very important. >> Listening to the technology involve, I'll say that's seems like there's a lot of cloud there. What are you guys using for technology and how's that helping you? >> Yeah, so, we did all the research and development. We have our systems fit into shipping containers. And, we can remote monitor them, and we collect all the data. So we can, ultimately-- Actually, we are working with the AWS, to come up with the user-interface that is more attractive, so that customers can actually optimize their energy production by playing around with how their handling their own waste. >> So turning waste into energy is kind of taking something that you can turn into good, but also energy. This sounds like a great idea. Where did it come from? How does this all start? >> It's actually a fun story. The CEO and CTO of the company are a couple. They love horses. And, one day they were going to move a pony called ladybird. And, it was England, it was miserable, rainy, dark, and there was a pile of manure on the ground. And, Sandra, the CEO, told Nick, the CTO and the inventor, "How can-- "You need to come up with a way of taking this manure, "and make a light so that I can see what I'm doing "and I'm not stepping on the manure." (John laughs) And that's how the idea came up, actually. Turning poop to energy. (laughs) >> And this is great skill, became very interesting because now the challenge around a greener planet, becomes interesting if you can focus the energy of the technology. How does the technology apply to this? Can you take us through real quick on how it works? >> Essentially, it's a biological process that it's behind. It's a anaerobic digestion and it's a thing that has millions of years, and it's just giving them the right feed stock and they will make the work for us. >> How about the kickstart you mentioned. What's the plans for funding? You guys house an accelerator. How are you going to go to the market and explain how the kickstart will work? What are some of of your plans? >> Okay, so, there's... an idea that came out of UC Berkeley, that's called, Smart villages in India. And, we are one of the partners. We are doing the kickstarter to fund the first two systems that we would like to deploy there. And after we're in the first two villages, our goal is to find local manufacturing, and actually expand to all of these remote places that have no access to energy, and actually also supply the water, of course. >> So, seed the market with a little kickstart, and get in place, prototype it, get up and running, then find partners to scale it out. >> Exactly. That's exactly it. >> Wow, interesting. >> You explain much better. (laughs) >> Well you're in it. So I got to ask you, What have you learned in the accelerator? Any interesting observations that have come out of the work here? >> Yes. It's very interesting to be continuing, practicing, the way we deliver to the customer. I think our technology is a bit complicated to explain, and we tend to get too technical because it's technology. And, being with a group from all different backgrounds, actually helps us clarify and deliver a better, cleaner message. >> Awesome. Tania, thanks for spending some time with me. >> Tania: Thank you. >> We are here on the ground in Washington D.C. It's the Cube's coverage seeing all the innovation, the sile entrepreneurship action happening in D.C. Like we've never seen before. Normally, it's look and value. You see it here in D.C., non-profits. Ventures for Good that are not only for good, but also for profit economies. We're checking it out here, all powered by the cloud and data, AI, IoT. This is exclusive Cube coverage. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special CUBEConversation here in the Palo Alto CUBE studio. I'm John Furrier, the co-host, theCUBE co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. In theCUBE we're here with Alan Cohen, CUBE alumni, joining us today for a special segment on the future of technology and the impact to society. Always good to get Alan's commentary, he's the Chief Commercial Officer for Illumio, industry veteran, has been through many waves of innovation and now more than ever, this next wave of technology and the democratization of the global world is upon us. We're seeing signals out there like cryptocurrency and blockchain and bitcoin to the disruption of industries from media and entertainment, biotech among others. Technology is not just a corner industry, it's now pervasive and it's having some significant impacts and you're seeing that in the news whether it's Facebook trying to figure out who they are from a data standpoint to across the board every company. Alan, great to see you. >> Always great to be here, I always feel like, I can't tell whether I'm at the big desk at ESPN or I've got the desk chair at CNBC, but that's what it's like being on theCUBE. >> Great to have you on extracting the signal noises, a ton of noise out there, but one of things of the most important stories that we're tracking is, that's becoming very obvious, and you're seeing it everywhere from Meed to all aspects of technology. Is the impact of technology to people in society, okay you're seeing the election, we all know what that is, that's now a front and center in the big global conversation, the Russian's role of hacking, the weaponizing of data, Facebook's taking huge brand hits on that, to emerging startups, and the startup game that we're used to in Silicon Valley is changing. Just the dynamics, I mean cryptocurrency raises billions of dollars but yet (laughs) something like 10, 20% of it's been hacked and stolen. It's a really wild west kind of environment. >> Well it's a very different environment. John, you and I have been in the technology industry certainly for a whole bunch of lines under our eyes over the years have gone there. My friend Tom Friedman has this phrase that he says, "Everybody's connected and nobody's in control," so the difference is that, as you just said, the tech industry is not a separate industry. The tech industry is in every product and service. Cryptocurrency is like, the concept of that money is just code. You know, our products and services are just code, it raises a couple of really core issues. Like for us on the security point of view, if I don't trust people with the products they're selling me, that I feel like they're going to be hacked, including my personal data, so your product now includes my personal information, that's a real problem because that could actually melt down commerce in a real way. Obviously the election is if I don't trust the social systems around it, so I think we're all at an, and I'd like to say world is still kind of like iRobot moment, and if you remember iRobot, it's like, people build all these robots to serve humankind and then one day the robots wake up and they go, "We have our own point of view on how things are going to work" and they take over, and I think whether it's the debate about AI, whether cryptocurrency's good or bad, or more importantly, the products and services I use, which are now all digitally connected to me, whether I trust them or not is an issue that I think everyone in our industry has to take a step back because without that trust, a lot of these systems are going to stop growing. >> Chaos is an opportunity, I think that's been quoted many times, a variety-- >> You sound like Jeff Goldblum in like Jurassic Park, yeah. (laughing) >> So chaos is upon us, but this is an opportunity. The winds are shifting, and that's an opportunity for entrepreneurs. The technology industry has to start working for us but we've got to be mindful of these blind spots and the blind spots are technology for good not necessarily just for profits, so that also is a big story right now. We see things like AI for good, Intel has been doing a lot of work on that area, and you see stars dedicated to societal impact, then young millennials, you see the demographic shift where they want to work on stuff that empowers people and changes society so a whole kind of new generation revolution and kind of hippie moment, if you look at the 60s, what the 60s were, right? >> Well there's people out in the street protesting, right? There were a couple of million women out in the street this weekend, so we are in that kind of moment again, people are not happy with things. >> And I believe this is a signal of a renaissance, a change, a sea change at enormous levels, so I want to get your thoughts on this. As technology goes out in mainstream, certainly from a security standpoint, your business Illumio is in that now where there's not a lot of control, just like you were mentioning before we came on that all the spends happening but no one has more than 4% market share. These are dynamics and this is not just within one vertical. What's your take on this, how do you view this sea change that's upon us, this tech revolution? >> Well, you know, think about it. You and I grew up in the era where clients server took over from main frame, right? So remember there was this big company called IBM and they owned a lot of the industry, and then it blew up for client server and then there were thousands of companies and it consolidated its way down, but when those thousands of new companies, like you didn't know what was going to be Apollo and what was going to be Oracle right? Like you didn't know how that was going to work out, there was a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty. I think now we're seeing this on a scale like that's 10x of this that there's so much innovation and there's so much connectedness going on very rapidly, but no one is in control. In the security market, you know, what's happening in our world is like, people said, okay I have to reestablish control over my data, I've lost that control, and I've lost it for good reasons, meaning I've evolved to the cloud, I've evolved to the app economy, I've done all of these things, and I've lost it for bad reasons because like am I, like I'm not really running my data center the way I should. We're in the beginning of a move in of people kind of reasserting that control, but it's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle because the world itself is so much more dynamic and more distributed. >> It's interesting, I've been studying communities and online communities for over a decade in terms of dynamics. You know, from the infrastructural level, how packets move to a human interaction. It's interesting, you mentioned that we're all connected and no one's in control, but you now see a ground swell of organic self-forming networks where communities are starting to work together. You kind of think about the analog world when we grew up without computers and networks, you kind of knew everyone, you knew your neighbor, you knew who the town loony was, you kind of knew things and people watch each other's kids and parents sat from the porch, let the kid play, that's the way that I grew up, but it was still chaotic but yet somewhat controlled by the group. So I got to ask you, when you see things like cryptocurrency, things like KYC, know your customer, anti money laundering, which is, you know these are policy based things, but we're in a world now where, you know, people don't know who their neighbors are. You're starting to see a dynamic where people are-- >> Put the phone down. >> Asserting themselves to know their neighbor, to know their customer, to have a connected tissue with context and so your trust and reputation become super important. >> Well I think people are really, so like every time there is a shift in technology, there's scary stuff. There's the fuddy-duddy moment where people are saying, "Oh we can't use that," or "I don't know that," and you know, clearly we're in this kind of new kam-ree and explosion of this cloud mobile blah blah blah type of computing thing and ... Blah blah blah is always a good intersection when you don't have a term. Then things form around it, and just as you said, so if you think about 25 years ago, right, people created The WELL and there was community writing first bulletin boards and like now we have Facebook and you go through a couple of generations and for a while, things feel out of control and then it reforms. I personally am an optimist. Ultimately I believe in the inherent goodness of people, but inherent goodness leaves you open and then, you know, could be manipulated, and people figure these things out. Whether it's cryptocurrency or AI, they are really exciting technologies that don't have any ground rules, right? What's going to happen I believe is that people are going to reestablish ground rules, they're going to figure out some of the core issues, and some of these things may make it, and some of these things may not make it. Like cryptocurrency, like I don't know whether it makes it or not, but certainly the blockchain as a technology we're going to be incorporating in what we do, and maybe the blockchain replaces VPNs and last generation's way of protecting zeros and ones. If AI is figuring out how to read an MRI in five minutes, it's a good thing, and if the AI is teaching you how to exclude old folks for me finding jobs, it's a bad thing. I think as technology forms, there's always Spectre and 007, right? There's always good and bad sides and you know, I think if you believe-- >> I'm with you on that. I think value shifts and I think ultimately it's like however you want to look at it will shift to something, value activity will be somewhere else. Behind me in the bookshelf is a book called The World is Flat and you're quoted in it a lot as a futurist because you have inherently that kind of view, well that's not what you do for a living, but you're kind of in an opt-- >> Alan: Marketing, futurist, kind of same thing. >> Thomas Friedman, the book, that was a great book and at that time, it was game changing. If you take that premise into today where we are living in a flat world and look at cryptocurrency, and then over with the geo political landscape, I mean I just can't see why the Federal Reserve wouldn't reign in this cryptocurrency because if Japan's going to control a bunch of, or China, it's going to be some interesting conversations. I mean I would be like all over that if I was in the Federal Reserve. >> I think people-- Look, cryptocurrency's really interesting and I think people a little over-rotated. If you look at the amount of GDP that's invested in cryptocurrency, it's like, I don't know, there might've been, you know 20 years ago the same amount involved invested in Beanie Babies, right? I mean things show up for a while and the question is is it sustainable over time? Now I'm trained as an economist, you and I have had this conversation, so I don't know how you have a series of monetary without kind of governmental backing, I just don't understand. But I do understand that people find all kinds of interesting ways to trade, and if it's an exchange, like I mean what's the difference between gold and cryptocurrency? Somebody has ascribed a value to something that really has no efficacy outside of its usage. Yeah I mean you can make a filling or bracelets out of gold but it doesn't really mean anything except people agree to a unit of value. If people do that with cryptocurrency, it does have the ability to become a real currency. >> I want to pick your perspective on this being an economist, this is is the hottest area of cryptocurrency, it's also known as token economics, is a concept. >> Alan: Token economics. >> You know that's an area that theCUBE, with CUBE coins, experimenting with tokens. Tokens technically are used for things in mobile and whatnot but having a token as a utility in a network is kind of the whole concept, so the big trend that we're seeing and no one's really talking about this yet is instead of having a CTO, Chief Technology Officer, they're looking for a CEO, a Chief Economist Officer, because what you're seeing with the MVP economy we're living in and this gamification which became growth hack which didn't really help users, the notion of decentralized applications and token economics can open the door for some innovation around value and it's an economic problem, how you have a fiscal policy of your token, there's a monetary policy, what's it tied to? A product and a technology, so you now have a now a new, twisted, intertwined mechanism. >> Well you have it as part of this explosion, right? We're at a period of time, it feels like there's a great amount of uncertainly because everything's, you know, there's a lot of different forces and not everybody's in control of them, and you know, it's interesting. Google has this architecture, they call it BeyondCorp, where the concept is like networks are not trusted so I will just put my trust in this device, Duo Security's a great example of a company that's built a technology, a security technology around it which is completely antithetical to everything we know about networks and security. They're saying everything's the internet, I'll just protect the device that it's on. It's a kind of perfect architecture for a world like where nobody is in charge, so just isolate those, buy this, what is a device? It's a token too, it's a person, your iPhone's your personal token. Then over time, systems will form around it. I think we just have to, we always have to learn how to function in a different type of economy. I mean democracy was a new economy 250 years ago that kind of screwed around with most of the world, and a lot of people didn't think it would make it, in fact we went through two World War wars that it was a little on the edge whether democracy was going to make it and it seems to have done okay, like it was pretty good IPO to buy into. You know, in 1776. But it's always got risks and struggles with it. I think if, ultimately it comes together, it's whether a large group of people can find a way to function socially, economically, and with their personal safety in these systems. >> You bring up a great point, so I want to go to the next level in this conversation which is around-- >> Alan: You've got the wrong guy if you're going to the next level because I just tapped out. >> No, no, no we'll get you there. It's my job to get you there. The question is that everyone always wants to look at, whether it's someone looking at the industry or actors inside the industries across the board, mainly the tech and we'll talk about tech, is the question of are we innovating? You brought up some interesting nuances that we talk about with token economics. I mean Steve Jobs had the classic presentation where he had street signs, technology meets liberal arts. That's a mental image that people who know Steve Jobs, know Apple, was a key positioning point for Apple at that time which was let's make computers and technology connect with society, liberal arts. But we were just talking about is the business impact of technology, the economics, and that's just not like just some hand waving, making technology integrate with business. You're in the security business, There are some gamification technology, gamification that's business built into the products. So the question is, if we have the integration of business, technology, economics, policy, society rolling into the product definitions of innovation, does that change the lens and the aperture of what innovation is? >> I think it does, right? The IT industry's somewhere between three and four trillion dollars depends on how it counts in. It grows pretty slowly, it grows by a low single digit. That tells me as composite, like is that, that slow growth is a structural signal about how consumers of technology think in a macro sense. On a micro sense, things shift very rapidly, right? New platforms show up, new applications show up, all kinds of things show up. What I don't think we have done yet, to your point, is in this new integrated world, the role of technology is not just technology anymore. I don't think, you know you said you need Chief Economical Officer, what about Chief Political Officer? What about a Chief Social Officer? How many heads of HR make decisions about the insertion of systems into their business? And that's what this kind of iRobot concept is in my mind which is that you know, we are exceeding control of things that used to be done by human beings to systems and when you see control, the social mores, the political mores, the cultural mores, and the human emotional mores have to move with it. We don't tend to think about things like that. We're like, "I win and my competitors lose." Like technology used to be much more of a zero sum, my tech's better than yours. But the question is not just is my tech better than yours, is my customer better off in their industry for the consumption of my technology of inserting it into their offering or their service? You know what, that is probably going to be the next area of study. The other thing that's very important in whether, any of you have read Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, the nature of competition technology used to feel like a flat playing field and now the other thing that's rising is do you have super winners? And then what is the power of the super winners? So you mentioned whether it's Facebook or Google or Amazon or you know, or Microsoft, the FANG companies right? Their roles are so much more significant now than the Four Horsemen of the Nasdaq were in 2000 when you had Intel and Cisco and Oracle and Saht-in it's a different game. >> You're seeing that now. That's a good point, so you're reinforcing kind of this notion that the super players if you will are having an impact, you're mentioning the confluence of these new sectors, you know, government, policy, social are new areas. The question is, this sounds like a strategic imperative for the industry, and we're early so it's not like there's a silver bullet or is there, it doesn't sound like there, so to me that's not really in place yet, I mean. >> Oh no. We're not even in alpha. We have demo code for the new economy and we're trying to get the new model funded. >> John: That's the demo version, not the real version. It's the classic joke. >> Yeah this not the alpha or the beta version that like you're going to go launch it. If people think they're launching it, I think it's a little preliminary and you know, it's not just financial investment, it's like do I buy in? I'll tell you something that's really interesting. I've been visiting a bunch of our customers lately and the biggest change I'd say in the last two years is they now have to prove to their customers they're going to be good custodians of their data. Think about that, like you could go to any digital commerce you do, any website you use and you give them basically the ticket to the Furrier family privacy, you do, but you don't spend a lot of time questioning whether they're really going to protect your data. That has changed. And it's really changing in B2B and in government organizations. >> The role of data to us is regulation, GDPR in Europe, but this is a whole new dynamic. >> It's not just my data because I'm worried about my credit card getting hacked, I'm worried about my identity. Like am I going to show up as a meme in some social media feed that's substituted for the news? I don't want to use the FN word, but you know what I mean? It is a really brave new world. It's like a hyper-democracy and a hyper-risky state at the same time. >> We're living in an area of massive pioneering, new grounds, this is new territory so there's a lot of strategic imperatives that are yet not defined. So now let's take it to how people compete. We were talking before we came on camera, you mentioned the word we're in an MVP economy, minimum viable product concept, and you're seeing that being a standard operating procedure for essentially de-risking this challenge. The old way of you know, build it, ship it, will it work? We're seeing the impact from Hollywood to big tech companies to every industry. >> Well you've got a coffee mug for a company that does both. Amazon does MVP in entertainment, like we'll create one pilot and see if it goes as opposed to ordering a season for 17 million dollars to hey, let's try this feature and put it out on AWS. What's interesting is I don't think we've completely tilted but the question is will buyers of technology, of entertainment products, of any product start to say, "I'll try it." You know like, look, I've done four startups and I always know there's somebody I can go to get and try my early product. There are people that just have an appetite, right? The Jeffrey Moores, early adapter, all the way to the left of the-- >> They'll buy anything new. >> They'll try it, they're interested, they have the time and the resources, or they're just intellectually curious. But it was always a very small group of people in the IT industry. What I think that the MVP economy is starting to do is look, I Kickstarted my wallet. I don't know if I'm the only person who bought that skinny little wallet on Kickstarter, it doesn't matter to me, it had appeal. >> What's the impact of the MVP economy? Is it going to change to the competitive landscape like Peter Thiel was suggesting? Does it change the economics? Does it change the makeup of the team? All of the above? What's your thoughts on how this is going to impact? Certainly the encumbrance will seem to be impacted or not. >> I think two things happen. One, it attacks the structural way markets work. If you go back to classical economics, land, labor, and capital, and people who own those assets, now you add information as a fourth. If those guys were around now they would say that would be the fourth core asset, production, I'm sorry, means of production is the term. The people who can dominate that would dominate a market. Now that that's flattened out, you know, I think it pushes against the traditional structures and it allows new giants to kind of show up overnight. I mean the e-commerce market is rife with companies that have, like look at Stich Fix. A company driven by AI, fashions, tries to figure out what you like, sends it to you every month, just had a monster IPO. We invented, by the way the Spiegal Catalog, except like with a personal assistant and you know, it's changed that in just a short number of years. I think two things happen. One is you'll get new potential giants but certainly new players in the market quickly. Two, it'll force a change in the business model of every company. If you're in a cab in any city in the world, I'm not saying whether the app works there or not, Uber and Lyft has forced every cab company to show you here's the app to call the cab. They haven't quite caught up to the rest of the experience. What I think happens is ultimately, the larger players in an industry have to accommodate that model. For people like me, people who build companies or large technology companies, we may have to start thinking about MVPing of features early on, working with a small group, which is a little what the beta process is but now think about it as a commercial process. Nobody does it, but I bet sure a lot of people will be doing it in five years. >> I want to get your take on that approach because you're talking about really disrupting, re-imagining industry, the Spiegal catalog now becomes digital with technology, so the role of technology in business, we kind of talked about the intertwine of that and its nuance, it's going to get better in my opinion. But specifically the IT, the information technology industry is being disrupted. Used to be like a department, and the IT department will give you your phone on your desk, your PC on your desk or whatever, now that's being shattered and everyone that's participating in that IT industry is evolving. What's your take on the IT industry's disruption? >> Well look, it started 20 years ago when Marc Benioff and Salesforce decided to sell the sales forces instead of IT people, right? They went around to the end buyer. I don't think it's a new trend, I think a lot of technology leaders now figure out how to go to the business buyer directly and make their pitch and interestingly enough, the business buyer, if the IT team doesn't get on board, will do that. >> John: Because of cloud computing and ... >> Because of everything. The modern analog I think in our world is that the developers are increasingly in control. Like my friend Martin Casado up in Andreessen talks about this a lot. The traditional model on our industry is you build a product, you launch it, you launch your company, you work with the traditional analyst firms, you try to get a little bit of halo, you get customer references, those are the things you do and there was a very wall structured, for example, enterprise buying cycle. >> And playbook. >> Playbook, and there's the challenger sale and there's Jeffrey Moore and there's like seeing God. You've got your textbooks on how it's been done. As everything turns into code, the people who work with code for a living increasingly become the front end of your cycle and if you can get to them, that changes. Like I mean think about like, you know, Tom wrote about this actually in The World is Flat, like Linux started as a patchy. It didn't start with the IT department, it started with developers and there was the Linux foundation and now Linux is everything. >> There's a big enemy called the big mini computer, and not operating systems and work stations. >> Wiped out whole parts of Boston and other parts of the world, right? >> Exactly, that's why I moved out here. >> You filed client's server out here. >> I filed a smell of innovation. No but this is interesting because this location of industries is happening, so with that, so they also on the analog, so Martin's at Andreessen, so we'll do a little VC poke there at the VCs because we love them of course, they're being dislocated-- >> I don't (mumbles) my investors. >> Well no, their playbook is being challenged. Here's an example, go big or go home investment thesis seems not to be working. Where if you get too much cash on the front end, with the MVP economy we were just riffing on and with the big super powers, the Amazons and the Googles, you can't just go big or go home, you're going to be going home more than going big. >> I think they know that. I mean Dee-nuh Suss-man who's I think Chief Investment Officer at Nasdaq has a very well known talking line that there are half as many public companies as there were 10 years ago, so the exit scenario for our industry is a little bit different. We now have things like acqui-hires, right we have other models for monetization, but I think what the flip side of it is, we're in the-- >> Adapt or die because the value will shift. Liquidity's changing, which acqui-hires-- >> I think the investment community gets it completely and they spend a lot more time with the developer mindset. In fact I think there's been a doubling down focus on technical founders versus business founders for companies for just that reason because as everything turns to code, you got to hang out with the code community. I think there are actually-- >> You think there'll be more doubling down on technical founders? You do, okay. >> Yeah I think because that is ultimately the shift. There are business model shifts, but it's, you know, I mean like Uber was a business model shift, I mean the technology was the iPhone and GPS and they wrote an app for it, but it was a business model shift, so it can be a business model shift. >> And then scale. >> And then scale and then all of those other things. But I think if you don't think about developers when you're in our, and it's like we built Illumio because a developer could take the product and get started. I mean you can, developers actually can write security policy with our product because there's a class of customers, where as not everyone where that matters. There's other people where the security team is in charge or the infrastructure team is in charge but I think everything is based on zeros and ones and everything is based on code and if you're not sensitive to how code gets bought, consumed, I mean there's a GitHub economy which is I don't even have to write the code, I'll go look at your code and maybe use pieces of it, which has always been around. >> Software disruption is clear. Cloud computing is scale. Agile is fast, and with de-risking capabilities, but the craft is coming back and some will argue, we've talked about on theCUBE before is that, you know, the craftsmanship of software is moving to up the stack in every industry, so-- >> I think it's more like a sports league. I love the NBA, right? In the old days, your professional team, you'd scout people in college. Now they used to scout them in high school, now they're scouting kids in middle school. >> (laughs) That's sad. >> Well what it says is that you have to-- >> How can you tell? >> You know but they can, right? I think you know, your point about it craft, you're going to start tracking developers as they go through their career and invest and bet on them. >> Don't reveal our secrets to theCUBE. We have scouts everywhere, be careful out there. (laughs) >> But think about that, imagine it's like there's such a core focus on hiring from college, but we had an intern from high school two years ago. We hire freshman. >> Okay so let's go, I want to do a whole segment on this but I want to just get this point because we're both sports fans and we can riff on sports all day long. >> I'm just not getting the chance >> And the greatness of Tom Brady >> to talk about the Patriots. >> And Tom Brady's gotten his sixth finger attached to his hands for his sixth ring coming up. No but this is interesting. Sports is highly data driven. >> Alan: Yep. >> Okay and so what you're getting at here, with an MVP economy, token economics is more of a signal, not yet mainstream, but you can almost go there and think okay data driven gives you more accuracy so if you can bring data driven to the tech world, that's kind of an interesting point. What's your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I mean look, I think you have to track everything. You have to follow things, and by the way, we have great tools now, you can track people through LinkedIn. There's all kinds of vehicles to tracking individuals, you track products, you track everything, and you know look, we were talking about this before we went on the show right, people make decisions based on analytics increasingly. Now the craft part is what's interesting and I'm not the complete expert, I'm on the business side, I'm not an engineer by training, but look a lot of people understand a great developer is better than five bad developers. >> Well Mark Andris' 10x is a classic example of that. >> There's clearly a star system involved, so if I think in middle school or in high school, you're going to be a good developer, and I'm going to track your career through college and I'm going to try to figure out how to attach. That's why we started hiring freshmen. >> Well my good friend Dave Girouard started a company that does that, will fund the college education for people that they want to bet on. >> Sure, they're just taking an option in them. >> Yeah, option on their earnings. Exactly. >> They are. >> It sounds like token economics to me. (laughs) >> You know you can sell anything. We are in that economy, you can sell those pieces. The good news is I think it can be a great flattener, meaning that it can move things back more to a meritocracy because if I'm tracking people in high school, I'm not worrying whether they're going to go to Stanford or Harvard or Northwestern, right? I'm going to track their abilities in an era and it's interesting, speaking about craft, you know, what are internships? They're apprenticeships. I mean it is a little bit like a craft, right? Because you're basically apprenticing somebody for a future payout for them coming to work for you and being skilled because they don't know anything when they come and work, I shouldn't say that, they actually know a lot of things. >> Alan, great to have you on theCUBE as always, great to come in and get the update. We'll certainly do more but I'd like to do a segment on you on the startup scene and sort of the venture capital dynamics, we were tracking that as well, we've been putting a lot of content out there. We believe Silicon Valley's a great place. This mission's out there, we've been addressing them, but we really want to point the camera this year at some of the great stuff, so we're looking forward to having you come back in. My final question for you is a personal one. I love having these conversations because we can look back and also look forward. You do a lot of mentoring and you're also helping a lot of folks in the industry within just your realm but also startups and peers. What's your advice these days? Because there's a lot of things, we just kind of talked a lot of it. When people come to you for advice and say, "Alan, I got a career change," or "I'm looking at this new opportunity," or "Hey, I want to start a company," or "I started a company," how is your mentoring and your advisory roles going on these days? Can you share things that you're advising? Key points that people should be aware of. >> Well look, ultimately ... I never really thought about it, you just asked the question so, ultimately, I think to me it comes down to own your own fate. What it means is like do something that you're really passionate about, do something that's going to be unique. Don't be the 15th in any category. Jack Welch taught us a long time ago that the number one player in a market gets 70% of the economic value, so you don't want to play for sixth place. It's like Ricky Bobby said, if you're not first, you're last. (John chuckles) I mean you can't always be first, but you should play for that. I think for a lot of companies now, I think they have to make sure that, and people participating, make sure that you're not playing the old playbook, you're not fighting yesterday's battle. Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind said, "There's a lot of money in building up an empire, "and there's even more money in tearing it down." There are people who enter markets to basically punish encumbrance, take share because of innovation, but I think the really inspirational is you know, look forward five years and find a practical but aggressive path to being part of that side of history. >> So are we building up or are we taking down? I mean it seems to me, if I'm not-- >> You're always doing both. The ocean is always fighting the mountains, right? That is the course of, right? And then new mountains come up and the water goes someplace else. We are taking down parts of the client server industry, the stack that you and I built a lot of our personal career of it, but we're building this new cloud and mobile stack at the same time. And you're point is we're building a new currency stack and we're going to have to build a new privacy stack. It's never, the greatest thing about our industry is there's always something to do. >> How has the environment of social media, things out there, we're theCUBE, we do our thing with events, and just in general, change the growth plans for individuals if you were, could speak to your 23 year old self right now, knowing what you know-- >> Oh I have one piece of advice I give everybody. Take as much risk as humanly possible in your career earlier on. There's a lot of people that have worked with me or worked for me over the years, you know people when they get into their 40s and they go, "I'm thinking about doing a startup," I go, "You know when you got two kids in college "and you're trying to fund your 401K, "working for less cash and more equity may not be "the most comfortable conversation in your household." It didn't work well in my household. I mean I'm like Benjamin Button. I started in big companies, I'm going to smaller companies. Some day it's just going to be me and a dog and one other guy. >> You went the wrong way. >> Yeah I went the wrong way and I took all the risk later. Now I was lucky in part that the transition worked. When I see younger folks, it's always like, do the riskiest thing humanly possible because the penalty is really small. You have to find a job in a year, right? But you know, you don't have the mortgage, and you don't have the kids to support. I think people have to build an arc around their careers that's suitable with their risk profile. Like maybe you don't buy into bitcoin at 19,000. Could be wrong, could be 50,000 sometime, but you know it's kind of 11 now and it's like-- >> Yeah don't go all in on 19, maybe take a little bit in. It's the play and run-- >> Dollar cost averaging over the years, that's my best fidelity advice. I think that's what's really important for people. >> What about the 45 year old executive out there, male or female obviously, the challenges of ageism? We're in economy, a gig economy, whatever you want to call, MVP economics, token economics, this is a new thing. Your advice to someone who's 45 who just says "Hey you're too old for our little hot startup." What should they do? >> Well being on the other side of that history I understand it firsthand. I think that you have an incumbent role in your career to constantly re-educate yourself. If you show up, whether you're a 25, 35, 45, 55, or 65, I hope I'm not working when I'm 75, but you never know right? (mumbles) >> You'll never stop working, that's my prediction. >> But you know have you mastered the new skills? Have you reinvented yourself along the way? I feel like I have a responsibility to feed the common household. My favorite part of my LinkedIn profile, it says, "Obedient worker bee at the Cohen household," because when I go home, I'm not in charge. I've always felt that it's up to me to make sure I'm not going to be irrelevant. That to me is, you know, that to me, I don't worry about ageism, I worry about did I-- >> John: Relevance. >> Yeah did I make myself self-obsolescent? I think if you're going to look at your career and you haven't looked at your career in 15 years and you're trying to do something, you may be starting from a deficit. So the question, what can I do? Before I make that jump, can I get involved, can I advise some small companies? Could I work part time and on the weekends and do some things so that when you finally make that transition, you have something to offer and you're relevant in the dialogue. I think that's, you know, nobody trains you, right? We're not good as an industry-- >> Having a good community, self-learning, growth mindset, always be relevant is not a bad strategy. >> Yeah, I mean because I find increasingly, I see people of all ages in companies. There is ageism, there is no doubt. There's financial ageism and then there's kind of psychological bias ageism, but if you keep yourself relevant and you are the up to speed in your thing, people will beat a path to want to work for you because there's still a skill gap in our industry-- >> And that's the key. >> Yeah, make sure that you're on the right side of that skill gap, and you will always have something to offer to people. >> Alan, great to have you come in the studio, great to see you, thanks for the commentary. It's a special CUBEConversation, we're talking about the future of technology impact the society and a range of topics that are emerging, we're on a pioneering, new generational shift and theCUBE is obviously covering the most important stories in Silicon Valley from figuring out what fake news is to impact to the humans around the world and again, we're doing our part to cover it. Alan Cohen, CUBEConversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(orchestral music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation here in theCUBE's Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier. Where conversation around venture capital, entrepreneurship, crypto currencies, block chain, and more, Jonathan Ebinger our friend with BRV, formerly Blue Run Ventures, but BRV for short, sounds better, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks John, looking forward to it. >> Great to see you, we've known each other for a long time and you've been a great investor, your firm has done a lot of great stuff, deals are really famous deals, but also you dig into the companies and you really stand by your portfolio companies, but you've also done a lot of work in China. >> Yes. >> So you have a good landscape of what's going on. What's the, what's going on in China? >> Well China is really expanding in ways which we had not foreseen when we first started investing there almost 15 years ago. We were really active for five to 10 years, investing in companies that initially were considered copycat companies, you can't really use that term anymore. In fact what's happening more and more, you're seeing Chinese ideas coming to the United States. Businesses like We Chat are being copied as fast as they can, you're seeing Snapchat, Messenger and so forth, they're quickly trying to amalgamate as many assets as they can within their viewership much like we're seeing in a lot of the other Chinese analogs over there. It's exciting to see, it's very much an arms race. >> It's been interesting to watch. We were at the Ali Baba Cloud Conference last year, at the end of last year, it's interesting the innovation and entrepreneurial thirst has really changed. If you go back just 10 years ago when you guys were first getting in there, I remember the conversations were what's going on in China, it's very developmental but what's going on 10 years ago, they are dominating the mobile space, they're mobile usage is really much different makeup in how they do startups, the apps. How much of that has influenced some of their success just the demand? >> Always on, location always available, it opens up a whole new level of communication services. The idea of the larger screen format, people used to think in the United States, these large devices coming out of Korea first and then China, we thought these would never play in the United States, now Apple 10, larger screen size, it makes sense, it's mobile first right from the get go for a now billion plus users. >> So BRV, how many active portfolio companies do you guys have and what's the profile that you're looking for for entrepreneurs, what are some of the kind of companies? >> We're about 45 active companies right now. We're putting about, we're putting money in about 10 new companies a year at this point. We have a very disciplined approach of investing in Series A style companies, Series A of course means a lot of different things to people, but generally, we like to put $3 to $5 million to work early on and then follow on. >> How much do take for that, just a third? >> Typical in the 20%-25% range. There's a lot of companies out there that still fit that profile. Of course you're seeing some super sized Series A's that happen, we don't play in those but for the traditional software companies, evaluations are really right in our sweet spot. >> How big is the fund now, just what's the number in terms of capital? >> We're in fund six, we're just over $150 million. >> And you got to save some for follow on rounds. >> Exactly. >> Talk about the changes in venture capital because what's interesting, I had a conversation with Greg Sands with Costanoa Ventures, another great investor, formerly I think the first employee of Netscape I think or the business plan. Great guy, he talked about the dynamics of, you don't need that much cash anymore because if you can get unit economic visibility into what the business is working, you can do so much more with that and I'm calling it the hourglass effect, you get through that visibility, you're in control, you own your own destiny, versus the old Silicon Valley model which seems to be fading away, which is hey, what do you need? $40 million, or here's $100 million. That really limits your exit options and sometimes you can drown in your own capital. Talk about that dynamic. >> You're seeing the $40 million rounds with businesses that are much more capital intensive and that's coming back in vogue now but for the most part, I agree with what Greg's saying and this whole advent of seed funds and super seed funds and angel funds and so forth has been really great for the traditional series A investor. A lot of that early fundamental and foundational work is being done and then when the series A comes, it's more about expansion so we're effectively getting what was a Series B type stage company now we're investing in Series A. We're saying hey, this product works, there's product market fit, let's put dollars to work to really grow the market. >> So you're saying Series B was a kind of prove the business model, shifted down to the A because the cost to get there is lower and hence that's opened up a seed round lower in numbers, so it just shifts down a little bit. >> It really has, it really has and that plays into our sweet spot. We really like working on business models, distribution strategies, things like that. >> And what kind of startups do you want to invest in? What are some of the categories? >> Love financial services, we like health tech, we're doing education, we're really pretty omnivorous when it comes to the sector. What we're looking for is really businesses that are using data, real time data to disrupt the numbers. >> So you're not sector driven, you're disruption oriented. >> That's right. >> Okay let's talk about disruption, my favorite trend. Obviously I love the China dynamic because you're not sure what it is, but it's really doing well so you can't ignore it and they're innovative and they're hustling hard and they've got massive numbers. Block chain, we're super excited about, we love crypto, we think it's the biggest wave coming out there, so a lot of my smart, entrepreneurial friends are jumping on their surfboards literally and jumping out into those waves and there's a lot of action there. At the same time, people are saying, stay away from that crypto thing, it's a scam. Kind of a different perspective, what's your thoughts on that? >> If you look at, you separate the cryptocurrencies from block chain, I think it becomes a lot more clear. Block chain is for real. Tracking provenance on transactions, real estate transactions, multinational transactions, makes a lot of sense, dovetails nicely with security, so there's a real business there. You saw the announcement with IBM and Mersk the other day, what they are taking enterprise level block chain into their whole supply chain. I think that's really important. We have a company in the category called pay stand which is doing the same sort of thing with smaller size businesses, just accelerating the whole process on accounts receivable, taking working capital. >> And they're doing block chain for that? >> Yes block chain is an option, we're not forcing people onto block chain, but the idea of hey, let's give people more cost effective ways to transact, get rid of the paper checks, get rid of the invoicing and just join the modern world, much like you use Venmo if you and I are going to exchange money. >> That's pay stand, that's one of your hot companies. >> Yeah it is, absolutely. >> So are they using block chain or not? >> They are, yes. >> Okay, because it's a physical asset, it's kind of a supply chain thing? >> They use it to track the funds themselves, unlike a credit card where you have to pay a big fee or ACH which you can't really get proof of funds, with their block chain technology, you can be sure that you have the funds available and you get it instantly. >> Let's talk about use cases that you think out there, I'd like you to just weigh in on use cases for block chain that a mainstream person that's not in the tech business would understand, because they say, is it real or not? I agree block chain is legit, what are some use cases that would highlight that? >> I think if you've ever been involved in real estate, bought a home, things like that, just tracking title insurance, you're going all the way back if you live in California, you're going all the way back to pre-statehood days, you have to track the provenance of that land all the way through. You're paying title insurance, title insurance is a business you don't really need if you have accurate provenance tracking through block chain. I think that's one most of us can understand. Obviously bills of weighting with things coming over on ships. That's natural and right now things get held up in port because people are trying to find a clipboard before you can sign off on who, is this bill of weighting actually clean, that stuff can be done automatically with 2D barcodes, block chain usage. >> Certainly with perishable goods too, we learned that with IBM's example. >> Sure. >> Okay let's get into the hot companies you got going on. Name some of the hot investments that you've done. >> Sure, well I talked about pay stand a minute ago, really excited about them, another one we really like is a company called aerobotics. I know you're a fan of autonomous flying. If you think about drones and everyone knows DJI and they're a great company, that's one to one, one person flying one drone, that's not scalable obviously, it scales at one to one. With autonomous flying, you can have a whole army of drones out doing your business, whether they're doing site exploration, checking for chemical spills, looking at traffic and so forth. The company is now operating in three continents, it's just, if you think about what a drone is, effectively it's a flying cell phone. It's a cell phone that goes around, takes pictures, transmits data back, we know something about cell phones at BRV, we've been investing in this category for a long time so when we say aerobotics come along, we said this is just a natural extension of real time data, cellular technology, and location based services. >> You guys don't get a lot of credit as much as you should, in my opinion on that, you guys were very early on the mobile, mobile connectivity side and mobile footprint and device and software. That's playing well into the hottest trend that we see, that's not the sexiest trend, that's IOT. >> Absolutely. >> Because drones are certainly, industrial IOT is a big one. Instrumenting physical plants, equipment, and IOT in general the edge of the network. What's your thoughts on IOT and how would you, how do you see that evolving? It's more than just the edge of the network issue, it's bigger. >> It is, well of course the devices and sensors are important. I think a lot of that's been commoditized. The business that we've been seeing develop and there's a lot of folks, they've moved from analytics of the web to analytics of IOT, so there's a lot of interesting companies coming in the analytic space. We're not playing in that as much, we tend to like to invest in companies that are big enough that you need to have analytics for them. We like companies that have proprietary control of analytics versus necessarily running analytics for company X. >> So you're not poopooing IOT per se, just that from an investment thesis standpoint, it's not on your radar yet. >> That's right, they're either too capital intensive for us as a firm or you're basically managing someone else's data. I want to be in companies that we're managing our own data for a proprietary advantage. >> That's really what I was going to get to next, the role of data driven, so we've lived in dupe world, theCUBE started in 2010 in the offices of Cloud Air actually and people don't know the history and it's been interesting, Hadoop was supposed to save the world, the data, but it really started the data trend, the data driven trend, Mike Olsen, Amar Omadala and the team over there really nailed it but it didn't turn into be just Hadoop, it's everything so we're seeing that now become a bumper sticker, data driven marketer, I'm a data driven executive, I'm a data driven interviewer, all that stuff, what does it actually mean? What does data driven mean to you? >> Data is, there's big data and then there's actionable data obviously people talk about exhaust, the data coming off, we really got started with, as you know, we were investors in Waze, awful lot of data coming out of your cell phone, extracting just the important pieces of it are really what's important. We're investors in a company called Cabbage which looks at every transaction a small business makes to determine their credit worthiness. It's really the science. People talk about data scientists, what do they actually do? What they're actually doing is separating out the wheat from the chaff because it's just a crush of data. I saw your interview with Andy Jazzy to other day from AWS, the amount of data that's being stored, it's almost unfathomable but the important people. >> They have a lot of data. You'd like to invest in them now. >> Exactly, but that's really the thing, it's being able to separate the good data from the bad. >> You look at Amazon, I was talking to Jesse and he didn't really go there because he was kind of on message but when I talked with Swami who runs the AI group over there, we were talking about, I said to him straight up, I'm like, you're running a lot of workloads on your cloud, I'm sure you have data on those workloads. Just the impact of what they could do with that data. This is the virtuous cycle that their business model is made up of, but it's changing the game for what they can become. The thing that we're seeing in the data world is, sometimes the outcome might not be what you think because if you can use the data effectively, it's a competitive advantage, not a department. >> Right and you have to really stay true to your commitment to data. What we've seen happen is when companies, if you've been around for 10 years or so, you start to trust your gut, that's important, but it can also not lead you to see obvious conclusions because the world changes. >> And also committing to data also means from a practitioner's standpoint, investing in the tech, investing in things to be data driven, not just to say it. >> Exactly. >> Okay so what's the future for you guys? What are you looking at next year, what are some of the things you'd like to accomplish for investment opportunities, besides getting all the hot deals, you did Waze, that was an amazing deal, one of my favorite products, how did that go down? How many people passed on Waze? >> I don't know how many people passed, but we were lucky, they wanted to bring us in to the initial syndicate, they wanted to have some folks who understood. >> But it wasn't that obvious though at the beginning. What was the original pitch? >> The initial pitch was that they were going to have folks have the dash devices, the product would sit on your dashboard and they were going to be using it to map Eastern Europe because Eastern Europe was just coming into the Western world and they didn't really have good roads and good maps. We thought, that's interesting but they probably also don't have smartphones, so why don't we come across the Atlantic and let's make this thing work in the US and then from there, the rest took off country by country we were the number one navigation app in I think 150 countries at one point. >> What's the biggest thing that you've learned over the past few years in the industry that's different now I mean obviously there's some context that I'll share which is obviously the big cloud players are becoming bigger, scale's a big thing, you got Google, you got Microsoft and Amazon, you've got Facebook's out there as well. Then you get the political climate. You go to Washington D.C. and New York, Silicon Valley is not really talked highly about these days on the hill in Washington, yet GovCloud is completely changing the game of how the government is going to work with massive innovations and efficiencies, literally overnight, it's almost weird. >> It is and it isn't. If you look at it through a longer term horizon, Silicon Valley is again at the forefront, we're really the first ones with more transparency in the industry, all the different movements which are really important and all the conversations that are happening are important and they're happening here first. I think you're starting to see a ripple effect, you're seeing it going through entertainment, you're going to see it in the government, industry after industry I think is going to start to have to be more open as Silicon Valley has led the way on that. >> That's a great point. Take a minute to describe the folks out there watching that aren't from here, what is Silicon Valley about in your opinion? >> Silicon Valley is, of course it's more than a mindset, but folks who are here are here on purpose. They come here intentionally. There are very few people that I know who were born and raised here, so they're coming here because they want to be part of a shared ethos around success, around success, around shared values and competition so it's a very healthy environment, I came, I used to live in Washington D.C. and I couldn't be happier to be 3000 miles away. >> If you're a technology entrepreneur, this is where all the sports and action is, as I always say, we always love sports analogies. Okay, I got to ask you about the VC situation around ICOs, initial coin offerings are being talked about as an alternative to fundraising, there's some security options on token sales as a utility, the SEC has started to put some guidelines down on what that looks like, but the general sentiment is, it's a new way to raise money and some people are doing private rounds with venture capital and doing token sales through ICOs. You see some hybrids, but for the most part, the hard core I don't want to say right or left wing, is there a wing of the political spectrum, but the hard core ICO guys are like, this is all about disrupting the VC community and you're a VC, so you got to take that a little bit personal but the point is, what do you think about that? Is that talked about? >> I think that's good salesmanship. The VC industry such as it is, you can fit every VC into one section of Stanford stadium. There just aren't that many VCs to really go after. We're a small group of folks. I think that going after maybe disrupting the way folks are raising money through Kickstarter and things like that, that's all great. We're not going to stop it, we're going to embrace it. I think that there's plenty of different ways to raise capital, I have no compunction about those things. >> Do you think it's more of a democratization trend or a new asset class, so you don't see it disrupting the VCs per se, but if it's only a handful of VCs that could fit into Stanford Stadium, for instance, then certainly there's more options, it's a dilution. >> I think you look at it as it's just an alternative financing method, do I take debt, do I take equity, do I take venture, do I take friends and family? It's just one more arrow in the quiver of the entrepreneur, I think you have to be smart about it because thinking that you're going to get the same level of attention from an investor in your ICO that you are going to get from a series A investor who owns 20% of your company, those are two very different value propositions. >> So you see a lot of pitches and sometimes, you have to say no a lot and that's the way the game is, but a lot of times, you want the best deals. But the founders' side of the table, they're looking at the VC, I need money. So that's one of the options, what they really want is a value added partner, so what's your current take on what that means these days? Sometimes it means a firm, sometimes it means a partner, sometimes it means the community. How are you guys looking at BRV as value add versus the worst case scenario which is value subtract, you just want to have that be positive. >> I see that written about venture too. >> I know, some people experienced it. >> I think it helps that we've been around now for almost 20 years, we got started in '98 so you have to look at our body of work and the continuum of investments and founders and CEOs and CTOs that we've invested in. There's hundreds and hundreds of people who have taken money from BRV, and so that's one of the real positives about this current state we're in is that there's so much transparency. The fact that we are, I like to think we're good actors and have been for a long time, that comes out, now through our words but through the words of. >> What would they say about you guys? What would your entrepreneurs say about BRV? >> Aside from using buzzwords like value add, they say, they know their industry, they're not afraid to ask for help, they try to call problems when they see it, things like that. >> You stand by your companies. >> Absolutely. >> Awesome, well what's your favorite trend that you're personally interested in? >> I think you have to go after health care right now. It is just such a big market right now. People have been nibbling all different sides of it right now, there's been folks who are trying to expedite processing, there's actual innovations happening on the medical side, I think there is just, technology is just now starting to get into that, technology has gotten into education. >> How about the startup you guys funded that's related to the health care field. >> Yes, we're in a company called Hello Heart which is really at the confluence of a number of trends. It starts off, what Hello Heart is, it's a personal blood pressure cuff for you as an employee of a big company, more and more companies are starting to self insure. If you're a big enough company, 10,000 plus employees or even fewer, you're going to want to self insure to save money but also, your employees get very much more comfortable with you as an employer, you care about my well being, so it's a very virtuous cycle for the employees. >> So companies themselves insuring their own employees. >> Absolutely. >> They have to be super big, this company. >> This is just one component of a self insured business. You also, of course you still have access to doctors and stuff, I'm not making the pitch for being self insured as a company, I'm just saying that. >> But that's a trend. >> It's absolutely a trend and you're seeing a lot of what I would call point solutions stepping in, whether it's psychiatric, whether it's opioid help, whether it's working on heart conditions, these are all different point solutions which are being amalgamated together to help companies which are self insuring. >> So is Hello Heart for consumers or for business? >> It's sold to businesses but individual employees have it so they can keep track of their blood pressure. >> But I can't buy one if I wanted one? >> Not today, but I'll make sure I can get one to you. >> I need one, get all of our employees instrumented. >> Exactly. >> Drug tested all that stuff going on. People worry about the privacy, that's something I would be concerned with, putting. >> That's taken a really fast pendulum swing. A few years ago, Generation X was privacy, there is no privacy, the default was, location is always on, that's just flipped 180 degrees in the last few years. >> Well Jonathan, thanks for coming into this CUBE conversation, I want to ask you one final question, one thing we're passionate about is women in tech and underserved minorities, obviously Silicon Valley has to do a better job, it's out on the table, and it's working but we're still seeing a lot more work to be done, we're seeing titles not being at the right level, but pay's getting there in some places but titles aren't, some paying still below for women, still a lot more to do, what are you guys doing for the women in tech trend, how are you guys looking at that? Certainly it's a sensitive topic these days, but more importantly, it's one that's super important to society. >> It is, I think like a lot of things that have long term value, it's really about your actions versus your words, so our firm has two out of the five investment professionals are female, one of the last three CEO's we've founded is a female CEO, we have technologists, we have marketing people, we have CEO's that are females it's very much of a cross the board, sex, race and so forth. >> You guys are indiscriminate, a good deal's a good deal. >> Exactly right. >> It's about making money, VC's are in the business of making money, a lot of people don't understand, you guys have a job to do but you do a good job. >> We're in the business of making money but our investors for the most part are not for profits. Large universities, our biggest investor is the Red Cross, so when we do well, the Red Cross does well and the country does well. >> You're mission driven at this point. >> Exactly. >> Is that by design or is that just, your selection? >> We're delighted with our LP's, it's important that we have synergies aside from just finances with our investors. >> That's super well, I appreciate you coming on, I think it's super great that you're tying society benefits into money making and entrepreneurship, great stuff Jonathan Ebinger here on theCUBE, BRV check them out, great VC firm here in Silicon Valley. It's a CUBE conversation, we're talking about startups and entrepreneurship I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017 brought to you by Samsung. >> Okay, welcome back and we're live here in San Francisco for the Samsung Developer Conference, SDC2017. I'm John Furrier. This is The Cube's exclusive coverage, and I'm excited to have an amazing guest, Amanda Cooloong who's a chief storyteller, Women in Tech International, Tech TV, TechZula. She's been really a storyteller in digital for a long time. Great to have you on. Been following all your Twittersphere and your content. >> Thank you. >> You did some work with Leo Laporte, Jason Calcanis, both this week in tech's kind of version of the scene. >> Mm hm. >> What are you up to now? >> Well I am working very closely with Women in Technology International, WITI. It is the largest, oldest organization for women in tech. They have a huge summit that they put on in San Jose every year, and I'm sort of the class clown for that and emcee the conference and lead the charge there. >> Well certainly you know what's interesting you have kind of a cool vibe, you're a cool person, you know tech, you know cloud computing. >> Mm hm. >> You've been in inside baseball for the tech scene. >> Mm hm. >> But now the consumer market with digital. >> Yeah. >> Pretty powerful, I mean like finally us geeks now have a national and global stage to flex our geekness, so you see nerds- >> We're suddenly cool? >> Cool to be a geek and now you see well the programmer calls us over thank god. >> (laughs) Well is it? >> Well the bad side of it. The good side of the democratization is happening. >> Right. >> So now you have an augmented reality. So it's just some cool stuff happening. What are you most impressed with? >> What am I most impressed with? Well I love Blockchain. I've been involved with some of that for three or four years now. I actually had a podcast about Blockchain and Bitcoin. And I'm really excited about what that means for investment specifically and ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings. My friend Brock Pierce is a big, big figurehead with all of that, with Blockchain Capital. And I believe that, especially for women that are looking to get into investment and get back in the earlier stage of things, I think ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings, are a huge opportunity for them to really change up the venture world. >> So when you say ICOs, which we know a lot about 'cause we're doing one at SiliconANGLE the next couple quarters. >> Yeah. >> No rush to do it but we're going to use our own cryptocurrency. But those nuances, when you say investment do you mean as an alternative to venture capital investment or actually investing in, say, the currency itself? >> Both. But I think of it as a completely new way to invest in companies. And there are so many barriers especially for women in technology... Again, that's a big platform for me. To getting into that world that ICOs just are completely changing up the entire ecosystem there. >> Well we're seen a ton of stuff. You saw Lisa Fetterman was on earlier. >> Mm hm. >> She had a huge success with her Kickstarter. Now she's got some pretty glamorous products. The cooking thing is pretty sexy, right? >> Mm hm. >> That thing could go- >> Sous vide, even the term sous vide. I mean, it's so fresh (laughs) >> I would put money to that. I mean it's just so... But that's a good example of Kickstarter. When we look at some of the ICOs, a lot of people are raising some serious capital in utility and stock or securities. >> Mm hm. >> Although the regulations are a moving train. But on the utility side it's a no-brainer. There's some significant cash being raised. In some cases, five to 50 million plus in token sales. >> Mm hm. >> That's like Kickstarter on steroids. >> It really is, and some people are afraid of it. You know, some people are saying that's completely absurd. Why would you ever do that? I personally would say don't put all of your eggs in one basket either. We know that. There's volatility anywhere. But, again, I think it's opening a lot of doors and giving certain people opportunities that they didn't have before. >> So how is your Bitcoin position these days? >> I may have been an early investor in some Bitcoin. I may obsessively look at the value every 15 minutes or so. No, I am fortunate. I listened to my mentors, and luckily I love emerging tech, so I'm doing well in that regard. >> I saw a post on Facebook: If you just bought 10 in bitcoin and smoked weed and sat on the beach and clipped coupons all day and did nothing else, you'd be worth 20 million dollars. >> Let's just say I know people that have actually bought castles with it. I'm not joking. >> What I like about the crypto Boxchain side is that there's an early community growing. So what's your analysis, because a lot of people want to know, is it Silk Road guys? Are they bad actors? Bitcoin's the underbelly of the internet. Early adopter. >> Those stories were so funny at the beginning. I mean, I live in LA. Everyone loves the sensationalized story. And of course that existed with Bitcoin too, and yes, there was some truth to it. >> Oh of course there was. >> Yes, absolutely the Silk Road story was real. >> Anonymous and encrypted transactions. >> Oh yes. >> That's going to attract some honey to the bees. >> There's a reason why certain people can't come back into the country. Let's just leave it at that. However, we've also seen major financial institutions get onboard. You know, Fintech has exploded. There's a lot of legitimacy to Blockchain and the distributed ledger technology. >> It's one of the fastest growing products in the Linux Foundation, Hyperledger project- >> Yes. >> Which is just going gangbusters. IBM's behind it. >> Yep. >> So it's got that opensource vibe, I get that. But the community, talk about the community because there are people who are leading the community. You said you know a few of them. >> What's your take on the community? How big is it? It's emerging, obviously, it's growing. What's the protocol for new entrants coming in? What's the behavior norms? >> Sure. It's grown in leaps and bounds, I can say that. I mean, from the time I did my Bitcoin podcast a few years ago to now, back then it was very much the bro culture to a degree, a lot of libertarians (laughs), a lot of folks that couldn't come back in the country, to be quite honest. But there were certain people that came out of that movement though like Brock Pierce that really thought ahead to how do we legitimize this, how do we make sure that this is white knighted, so to speak. >> Yeah, well it's a revolutionary... It's fundamental. I had the founder of Alibaba Cloud on the record. Haven't published a video yet so this is exclusive material. He said, I asked him about Blockchain. He says it's fundamental to the internet. It is the internet. >> It is, mm hm. >> Just like TCP/IP was in the stack. >> Absolutely. >> He was adamant that this is not on top of the internet. It's fundamental to... He's talking about Blockchain. >> Yep. >> Absolutely 'cause it's supply chain, it's currency, it's a zillion things. >> It's not just coins. Everyone focused in on Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin. It's a distributed ledger technology. So it goes hand in hand with the internet of things. So the two have become very much married in that regard. >> You know, all these guys I interview on The Cube over the years, and certainly I lived through it, talk about the waves, the PC wave. >> Mm hm. They talk about the client server wave. Client server essentially, it's not so much about the mini computers 'cause the mini computers were not the client server wave 'cause that was proprietary operating systems and proprietary hardware. >> Mm hm. >> HP. >> Right. >> What made client server was TCP/IP. That created Threecom, Cisco, interoperability. So that really was that second wave. People are comparing Blockchain to TCP/IP. >> I can see that. >> Dr. Wang from Alibaba Cloud. Other people are saying like the dot com bubble, euphoric excitement. >> Yeah. >> So that begs the question. Who can bring functionality... This is my thesis. I want to test it with you. >> Mm hm. >> Who can bring functionality and simplicity? Because all the successes in Web 1.0, was Yahoo a directory of links, simple, easy to use. Cisco Routers, connect your networks, it works. So simplicity and functionality seems to be the norm in the Blockchain world. >> Mm hm. >> What's your thoughts on that? Can you share your reaction to that? >> Simplicity and functionality, I mean, for me it's- >> In terms of the winners versus the losers 'cause that's what people want to know with Blockchain. Where's the scams and where the legit? >> Mm hm, well the scams are the people that came from the gaming side that had no real business expanding out the way that they did and everybody loses their coin. But we won't name names there. I think more- >> It's okay to name names. >> (laughs) But with functionality, I mean again, I keep going back to its marriage with IOT, you know, the ledger based technology and just being able to do anything transactional. That's the simplicity of it for me, the fact that it's opensource, the fact that, yeah, I think that's the core of it. >> So let's talk about Samsung. We're here's at the Samsung event. >> Sure. >> How do you see these guys? We were talking about Blockchain. It's kind of the next big wave coming. Obviously a lot of things underneath that, but above that you've got software machine learning, all the goodness of open source is growing exponentially. That wave is coming to exponential growth in opensource, code shipments, meaning more people using opensource, and things like Blockchain. How does that impact a Samsung, an Apple, an Amazon? >> Well I think opensource is necessary for IOT specifically. Obviously that would be shut down without that. I've been talking with a lot of the developers here, the Samsung-specific people saying what is it that's exciting you about this forward movement, like with the keynote this morning. What do we need? How do we move this entire industry forward with IOT? And they're excited about the platform that Samsung has announced this morning in terms of just the ubiquity of everything working together in comparison to, well, a lot of other... Sorry. >> So the crypto thing is also tying into that too. >> Yes. >> I was tying that with IOT because IOT has some security issues. >> Right. >> So we can argue maybe- >> Some security issues? (laughs) >> Well the surface area. So you know, the theme in the enterprise is, you know, cloud computing. There's no moat anymore, there's no firewall. >> Yeah. >> Perimiterless security. Perimiterless problems. It means the edge is a surface area, and we've seen these attacks coming. >> Right. >> That's a problem. >> Mm hm. >> So there's no silver bullet right now. >> Yeah. >> So Samsung probably is cagey right now on the data. >> Exactly. >> They've got some security products, but smarter things is their kind of pitch. >> And then everybody keeps saying well who owns the security piece, who's responsible for the security piece. I think that's a big question we're going to see popping up a lot because the security piece is going to be a very valuable piece to all of this, especially when you're looking at edge computing too and data being passed back and forth between the edge. I would rather see everything stay with just the edge devices, personally. >> Yeah, well it's easier to manage, why do you want to move data across the network? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Move compute it's more efficient. >> Yeah. >> So final take on augmented reality VR. >> Oh, okay. >> What's imploding? What's imploded? What's growing? What's rising? What's falling? >> Sure. >> We had a comment earlier, said VR 1.0 is over. >> It really is. I personally think AR is where it's at. I've watched a lot of things on the VR front and a lot of it was marketing speak. I think we need a bigger push on the hardware side for VR to work effectively too. We also need to look at the audience there. And a lot of people are complaining, well I don't just want to go disappear into a separate world. A lot of women, actually, are complaining about that side of it. But the AR side I think has way more application. >> Yeah, crawl, walk, run in virtual space, basically. >> Yeah, yeah. VR I think will still be a place, but I think AR is going to be a bigger explosion. >> One of the things we were talking about earlier was as folks have been through many waves you and I've seen, waves of innovation, Web 1.0, the early adopters were the adult industry with banners 'cause they were about making money. We saw this wave. We're seeing the Silk Roads and Blockchain. Arbitrage comes from usually bad actors and not usually desirable actors. >> Right. >> But one big indicator of the current user experience we're seeing is the gaming culture, right. >> Mm hm. >> Gaming right now seems to be the early adopter indicator of the major trend lines 'cause it's gamification, it's a little bit analog, multiplayer. >> Look at Unity. Unity has a huge presence here at SDC and especially on the VR front if you want to look at that. Unity's a huge player there. >> What are some of the things you see coming out of the gaming world? 'Cause we've seen virtual currencies, ICO, lot of storage, lot of dynamic, realtime. >> Yeah. Gaming mechanism too across the board always play into this too, but I think the big one is ICOs for me. That's the one I've been focusing on a lot, yeah. >> I'd like to follow up more with you on the ICO thing. We're doing a whole programming on that on November second, love to have you. >> Mm hm. Look at what Crystal Rose with Sensay's been doing. >> Who? >> Crystal Rose, Sensay, she's launched her own ICO called SENSE. >> SENSE. Great, looking forward to chatting more. >> Mm hm, out of LA. >> Final question for you for the folks not here. What's the vibe here? How would you describe SDC2017? >> I love that there's a great vibe of innovation. Honestly, I've been to some other stodgier conferences lately, and this one definitely has a nice playful, creative vibe. >> B2B is boring to boring. This is not- >> I know, you were talking about E2E, everything to everything. See, I was listening. >> You were. >> Everything to everything. Exciting to exciting. >> Exciting. >> See, I listened to that too. Yeah, I would say there's a lot of creativity here. There's a lot of side conversations happening. That's important. And I see a good balance of men and women, so that makes me happy. >> Well I'm excited from Vanessa for bringing on a great lineup, you included. >> Thank you. >> Great to meet you in person. Had a great conversation here inside The Cube. I'm John Furrier here, exclusive coverage of the SDC2017. We'll be back after this short break.

>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017 brought to you by Samsung. >> Welcome back, we're live here in San Francisco. We're here at the SDC, the Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE and co-host of theCUBE. My next guest, Lisa Fetterman, who is of Nomiku and she's a three-time, triple-star winner, Forbes Under 30- >> Inc 30 Under 30, and Zagat 30 under 30. That's a weird one. >> That's a great one. You're likely to get the Michelin Star soon. Tell us about your company. It's a really super story here. You have this new device you guys started. Tell the story. >> Well, speaking of Michelin Stars, I used to work under the best chefs in the nation. I worked under my Mario Batali, Jean-Georges at the three Michelin Star restaurants and I saw this huge, hulking piece of laboratory equipment. We would cook so many of our components in it and I'd lusted after one for myself, but they were $2000 and up, so that was like you know what, I'm going to save up money and then I went on a date with a plasma physicist and he said, "Hey, you know what, "we could just make it on our own." We run to the hardware store, we make a prototype. We travel all across the United States and teach people how to make their own DIY open-source sous vide kits to the point where we amassed so much attention that Obama invited us to the White House. And then we put it on Kickstarter and it becomes the #1 most-funded project in our category, and we are here today with our connected home sous vide immersion circulator that interacts with Samsung's Smart Fridge. >> That's a fantastic story of all in a very short time. Well done, so let me just back up. You guys have the consumer device that all the top chef's have. >> That's right. >> That's the key thing, right? >> It's consumable, low-priced, what's the price point? >> We do hardware, software, and goods. Right now the price of our machine is $49 on souschef.nomiku.com because it interacts with the food program. So there's food that comes with the machine. You weigh the food in front of the machine. It automatically recognizes the time and temperature. It interacts with different time and temperatures of different bags of food, and you just drop it in. In 30 minutes, you have a gourmet chef-prepared meal just the way that we would do it in Michelin Star restaurants. >> And now you're connecting it to Samsung, so they have this SmartThings Messaging. That's kind of the marketing, SmartCloud, SmartThings. What does that mean, like it's connected to the wifi, does it connect to an app? Take us through how it connects to the home. >> We're connected through Family Hub, which is the system inside of the Samsung Smart Fridge. Every single Samsung Smart Fridge ships with a Nomiku app pre-downloaded inside of it and the fridge and the Nomiku talk to each other so there's inventory management potential. There's learning consumer behaviors to help them. Let's say you cook a piece of chicken at 4:00 AM. You go to a subset of people who also do that, like wow, and then we recognize that those folks do CrossFit. They will eat again at 7:00 AM because they eat more little meals rather than full meals, and then we can recommend things for them as their day goes along, and help manage things for them, like a personal assistant. >> So it's like a supply chain of your personal refrigerator. So can you tell if the chicken's going to go bad so you cook the chicken now, kind of thing? That would be helpful. >> You can actually tell if the chicken's going to go bad. If the chicken, if there's a recall or the chicken's expired and you tap it with the machine, the machine will tell you to throw it out. >> So tell us about some of the travel's you've been under. You said you've traveled the world. You also have done a lot of writing, best-selling author. Tell us about your books and what you're writing about. >> I wrote the book called Sous Vide at Home. It's an international best-seller and it's sous vide recipes. Everybody has been lusting after sous vide since we invented the technology in 2012, so much actually that the market for it grows 2.5x every single year so the adoption rate is insane. The adoption rate for sous vide actually has surpassed that of the internet, the cell phone, and the personal computer. >> Why is the excitement on the Kickstarter, obviously, the record-breaking, and the sales, and the trend, why is it so popular? Is it 'cause it's a convenience? Is it the ease of use, all of the above? What's the main driver? >> All of the above. If you ever cooked in the kitchen and you've lost your confidence, it was mostly because you messed something up in the kitchen. This is foolproof cooking. So at 57 degrees Celsius, that's when the fat and the collagen melt into the muscle of steak, making each bite so juicy, tender, and delicious. We can set it at exactly that magic temperature, drop a steak in, and then put it in the water. When you cook it like that, there's no overcooking the muscle and it becomes effectively marbled by all that juicy, fat deliciousness. >> Aw, I'm kind of hungry already. >> Yeah. >> Lenny wants a steak. I can hear Leonard moaning over there. Okay, let's get down to the science here because a lot of people might not understand what temperatures to cook anything. Do you guys provide some best practices because this is a game-changer for my family of four. >> We want to meal cooked fast, but you want to have meals staged potentially and then recook them. How does someone use it? Is there a playbook? Is there a cookbook? >> Like we say in the industry, there's an app for that. The app is on the Smart Fridge and it's also on your smartphones. Moreover, so the machine acts as a stand-alone sous vide machine for you to cook your own recipes, and it also reads rfid tags from our meals. If you use our meals, then it's a no-brainer. You just tap and then put in the water. There's nothing more. Actually people get flustered that it's so easy. They're like, "That's it? "That was all that was?" But I hate smart devices that actually make people stupider. Being a stand-alone sous vide machine, you can create any of your recipes whether it's from my cookbook, the app, which is community-focused, so we have over 1000 recipes inside there from our community. People make it and they share it with the world. >> So with the Kickstarter, I'm just going to ask that next question. I'll say community layer. >> Sure. Kind of like is it a Reddit page? Do you have your own pages? What's going on with the community? Tell us about the community. >> Oh, the community. Everybody who has an OmniCube downloads our app called Tender and inside you can make your own-- >> Not to be confused with Tinder. >> Correct. >> Tender. >> Although I wouldn't mind if you confused it and instead of going out, I guess you're making dinner. >> Wife left for the steak and right for the chicken. >> (laughing) Exactly, exactly. We love the play on the word. >> That's great. >> When you make your own little profile, it encourages you to share. It's really fun because you can keep your recipes in there so you never have to look it up ever again. You can bing it and it goes directly to your machine. It's great for professional chefs, too 'cause you can share it with your entire team. >> So maybe we should start a Cube food channel. You can get a dedicated recipe channel. Exciting. >> That's great. Will you be my sous chef? >> (laughing) Course, I'm a great guest to have do that. If I can do it, anyone can do it. How do I get one? How do people buy? What's the deal? >> It's namiku.com for just our hardware, and in California, we've launched our food program on souschef.nomiku.com. Right now our machines for the food program are only $49. That is such a great value considering that souv vide machines are usually $200 and up right now. >> Awesome, well thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Lisa Fetterman is CEO, entrepreneur of Namiku, entrepreneur of great stuff here in the Cube. Of course, we're bringing the food, tech, and remember, farming tech is big, too, so as the culture gets connected, the food from the farm to the table is being changed with data and IT. More after this short break. (innovative tones)