>>mhm. Welcome back to Boston. This is the cubes coverage of the Red Hat Summit 2022. The first Red Hat Summit we've done face to face in at least two years. 2019 was our last one. We're kind of rounding the far turn, you know, coming up for the home stretch. My name is Dave Valentin here with Paul Gillon. A J monger is here is a senior director of Iot. The Iot group for developer solutions and engineering at Intel. AJ, thanks for coming on the Cube. Thank you so much. We heard your colleague this morning and the keynote talking about the Dev Cloud. I feel like I need a Dev Cloud. What's it all about? >>So, um, we've been, uh, working with developers and the ecosystem for a long time, trying to build edge solutions. A lot of time people think about it. Solutions as, like, just computer the edge. But what really it is is you've got to have some component of the cloud. There is a network, and there is edge and edge is complicated because of the variety of devices that you need. And when you're building a solution, you got to figure out, like, where am I going to push the computer? How much of the computer I'm going to run in the cloud? How much of the computer? I'm gonna push it at the network and how much I need to run it at the edge. A lot of times what happens for developers is they don't have one environment where all of the three come together. And so what we said is, um, today the way it works is you have all these edge devices that customers by the instal, they set it up and they try to do all of that. And then they have a cloud environment they do to their development. And then they figure out how all of this comes together. And all of these things are only when they are integrating it at the customer at the solution space is when they try to do it. So what we did is we took all of these edge devices, put it in the cloud and gave one environment for cloud to the edge. Very good to your complete solution. >>Essentially simulates. >>No, it's not >>simulating span. So the cloud spans the cloud, the centralised cloud out to the edge. You >>know, what we did is we took all of these edge devices that will theoretically get deployed at the edge like we took all these variety of devices and putting it put it in a cloud environment. So these are non rack mountable devices that you can buy in the market today that you just have, like, we have about 500 devices in the cloud that you have from atom to call allusions to F. P. G s to head studio cards to graphics. All of these devices are available to you. So in one environment you have, like, you can connect to any of the cloud the hyper scholars, you could connect to any of these network devices. You can define your network topology. You could bring in any of your sources that is sitting in the gate repository or docker containers that may be sitting somewhere in a cloud environment, or it could be sitting on a docker hub. You can pull all of these things together, and we give you one place where you can build it where you can test it. You can performance benchmark it so you can know when you're actually going to the field to deploy it. What type of sizing you need. So >>let me show you, understand? If I want to test, uh, an actual edge device using 100 gig Ethernet versus an Mpls versus the five G, you can do all that without virtualizing. >>So all the H devices are there today, and the network part of it, we are building with red hat together where we are putting everything on this environment. So the network part of it is not quite yet solved, but that's what we want to solve. But the goal is here is you can let's say you have five cameras or you have 50 cameras with different type of resolutions. You want to do some ai inference type of workloads at the edge. What type of compute you need, what type of memory you need, How many devices do you need and where do you want to push the data? Because security is very important at the edge. So you gotta really figure out like I've got to secure the data on flight. I want to secure the data at Brest, and how do you do the governance of it. How do you kind of do service governance? So that all the services different containers that are running on the edge device, They're behaving well. You don't have one container hogging up all the memory or hogging up all the compute, or you don't have, like, certain points in the day. You might have priority for certain containers. So all of these mortals, where do you run it? So we have an environment that you could run all of that. >>Okay, so take that example of AI influencing at the edge. So I've got an edge device and I've developed an application, and I'm going to say Okay, I want you to do the AI influencing in real time. You got something? They become some kind of streaming data coming in, and I want you to persist, uh, every hour on the hour. I want to save that time stamp. Or if the if some event, if a deer runs across the headlights, I want you to persist that day to send that back to the cloud and you can develop that tested, benchmark >>it right, and then you can say that. Okay, look in this environment I have, like, five cameras, like at different angles, and you want to kind of try it out. And what we have is a product which is into, um, open vino, which is like an open source product, which does all of the optimizations you need for age in France. So you develop the like to recognise the deer in your example. I developed the training model somewhere in the cloud. Okay, so I have, like, I developed with all of the things have annotated the different video streams. And I know that I'm recognising a deer now. Okay, so now you need to figure out Like when the deer is coming and you want to immediately take an action. You don't want to send all of your video streams to the cloud. It's too expensive. Bandwidth costs a lot. So you want to compute that inference at the edge? Okay. In order to do that inference at the edge, you need some environment. You should be able to do it. And to build that solution What type of age device do you really need? What type of compute you need? How many cameras are you computing it? What different things you're not only recognising a deer, probably recognising some other objects could do all of that. In fact, one of the things happened was I took my nephew to San Diego Zoo and he was very disappointed that he couldn't see the chimpanzees. Uh, that was there, right, the gorillas and other things. So he was very sad. So I said, All right, there should be a better way. I saw, like there was a stream of the camera feed that was there. So what we did is we did an edge in friends and we did some logic to say, At this time of the day, the gorillas get fed, so there's likelihood of you actually seeing the gorilla is very high. So you just go at that point and so that you see >>it, you >>capture, That's what you do, and you want to develop that entire solution. It's based on whether, based on other factors, you need to bring all of these services together and build a solution, and we offer an environment that allows you to do it. Will >>you customise the the edge configuration for the for the developer If if they want 50 cameras. That's not You don't have 50 cameras available, right? >>It's all cameras. What we do is we have a streaming capability that we support so you can upload all your videos. And you can say I want to now simulate 50 streams. Want to simulate 30 streams? Or I want to do this right? Or just like two or three videos that you want to just pull in. And you want to be able to do the infant simultaneously, running different algorithms at the edge. All of that is supported, and the bigger challenge at the edge is developing. Solution is fine. And now when you go to actual deployment and post deployment monitoring, maintenance, make sure that you're like managing it. It's very complicated. What we have seen is over 50% 51% to be precise of developers are developed some kind of a cloud native applications recently, right? So that we believe that if you bring that type of a cloud native development model to the edge, then you're scaling problem. Your maintenance problem, you're like, how do you actually deploy it? All of these challenges can be better managed, Um, and if you run all of that is an orchestration later on kubernetes and we run everything on top of open shift, so you have a deployment ready solution already there it's everything is containerised everything. You have it as health charged Dr Composed. You have all their you have tested and in this environment, and now you go take that to the deployment. And if it is there on any standard kubernetes environment or in an open ship, you can just straight away deploy your application. >>What's that edge architecture looked like? What's Intel's and red hats philosophy around? You know what's programmable and it's different. I know you can run a S, a p a data centre. You guys got that covered? What's the edge look like? What's that architecture of silicon middleware? Describe that for us. >>So at the edge, you think about it, right? It can run traditional, Uh, in an industrial PC. You have a lot of Windows environment. You have a lot of the next. They're now in a in an edge environment. Quite a few of these devices. I'm not talking about Farage where there are tiny micro controllers and these devices I'm talking about those devices that connect to these forage devices. Collect the data. Do some analytics do some compute that type of thing. You have foraged devices. Could be a camera. Could be a temperature sensor. Could be like a weighing scale. Could be anything. It could be that forage and then all of that data instead of pushing all the data to the cloud. In order for you to do the analysis, you're going to have some type of an edge set of devices where it is collecting all this data, doing some decisions that's close to the data. You're making some analysis there, all of that stuff, right? So you need some analysis tools, you need certain other things. And let's say that you want to run like, UH, average costs or rail or any of these operating systems at the edge. Then you have an ability for you to manage all of that. Using a control note, the control node can also sit at the edge. In some cases, like in a smart factory, you have a little data centre in a smart factory or even in a retail >>store >>behind a closet. You have, like a bunch of devices that are sitting there, correct. And those devices all can be managed and clustered in an environment. So now the question is, how do you deploy applications to that edge? How do you collect all the data that is sitting through the camera? Other sensors and you're processing it close to where the data is being generated make immediate decisions. So the architecture would look like you have some club which does some management of this age devices management of this application, some type of control. You have some network because you need to connect to that. Then you have the whole plethora of edge, starting from an hybrid environment where you have an entire, like a mini data centre sitting at the edge. Or it could be one or two of these devices that are just collecting data from these sensors and processing it that is the heart of the other challenge. The architecture varies from different verticals, like from smart cities to retail to healthcare to industrial. They have all these different variations. They need to worry about these, uh, different environments they are going to operate under, uh, they have different regulations that they have to look into different security protocols that they need to follow. So your solution? Maybe it is just recognising people and identifying if they are wearing a helmet or a coal mine, right, whether they are wearing a safety gear equipment or not, that solution versus you are like driving in a traffic in a bike, and you, for safety reasons. We want to identify the person is wearing a helmet or not. Very different use cases, very different environments, different ways in which you are operating. But that is where the developer needs to have. Similar algorithms are used, by the way, but how you deploy it very, quite a bit. >>But the Dev Cloud make sure I understand it. You talked about like a retail store, a great example. But that's a general purpose infrastructure that's now customised through software for that retail environment. Same thing with Telco. Same thing with the smart factory, you said, not the far edge, right, but that's coming in the future. Or is that well, that >>extends far edge, putting everything in one cloud environment. We did it right. In fact, I put some cameras on some like ipads and laptops, and we could stream different videos did all of that in a data centre is a boring environment, right? What are you going to see? A bunch of racks and service, So putting far edge devices there didn't make sense. So what we did is you could just have an easy ability for you to stream or connect or a Plourde This far edge data that gets generated at the far edge. Like, say, time series data like you can take some of the time series data. Some of the sensor data are mostly camera data videos. So you upload those videos and that is as good as your streaming those videos. Right? And that means you are generating that data. And then you're developing your solution with the assumption that the camera is observing whatever is going on. And then you do your age inference and you optimise it. You make sure that you size it, and then you have a complete solution. >>Are you supporting all manner of microprocessors at the edge, including non intel? >>Um, today it is all intel, but the plan, because we are really promoting the whole open ecosystem and things like that in the future. Yes, that is really talking about it, so we want to be able to do that in the future. But today it's been like a lot of the we were trying to address the customers that we are serving today. We needed an environment where they could do all of this, for example, and what circumstances would use I five versus i nine versus putting an algorithm on using a graphics integrated graphics versus running it on a CPU or running it on a neural computer stick. It's hard, right? You need to buy all those devices you need to experiment your solutions on all of that. It's hard. So having everything available in one environment, you could compare and contrast to see what type of a vocal or makes best sense. But it's not >>just x 86 x 86 your portfolio >>portfolio of F. P. G s of graphics of like we have all what intel supports today and in future, we would want to open it up. So how >>do developers get access to this cloud? >>It is all free. You just have to go sign up and register and, uh, you get access to it. It is difficult dot intel dot com You go there, and the container playground is all available for free for developers to get access to it. And you can bring in container workloads there, or even bare metal workloads. Um, and, uh, yes, all of it is available for you >>need to reserve the endpoint devices. >>Comment. That is where it is. An interesting technology. >>Govern this. Correct. >>So what we did was we built a kind of a queuing system. Okay, So, schedule, er so you develop your application in a controlled north, and only you need the edge device when you're scheduling that workload. Okay, so we have this scheduling systems, like we use Kafka and other technologies to do the scheduling in the container workload environment, which are all the optimised operators that are available in an open shift, um, environment. So we regard those operators. Were we installed it. So what happens is you take your work, lord, and you run it. Let's say on an I seven device, when you're running that workload and I summon device, that device is dedicated to you. Okay, So and we've instrumented each of these devices with telemetry so we could see at the point your workload is running on that particular device. What is the memory looking like power looking like How hard is the device running? What is a compute looking like? So we capture all that metrics. Then what you do is you take it and run it on a 99 or run it on a graphic, so can't run it on an F p g a. Then you compare and contrast. And you say Huh? Okay for this particular work, Lord, this device makes best sense. In some cases, I'll tell you. Right, Uh, developers have come back and told me I don't need a bigger process that I need bigger memory. >>Yeah, sure, >>right. And some cases they've said, Look, I have I want to prioritise accuracy over performance because if you're in a healthcare setting, accuracy is more important. In some cases, they have optimised it for the size of the device because it needs to fit in the right environment in the right place. So every use case where you optimise is up to the solution up to the developer, and we give you an ability for you to do that kind >>of folks are you seeing? You got hardware developers, you get software developers are right, people coming in. And >>we have a lot of system integrators. We have enterprises that are coming in. We are seeing a lot of, uh, software solution developers, independent software developers. We also have a lot of students are coming in free environment for them to kind of play with in sort of them having to buy all of these devices. We're seeing those people. Um I mean, we are pulling through a lot of developers in this environment currently, and, uh, we're getting, of course, feedback from the developers. We are just getting started here. We are continuing to improve our capabilities. We are adding, like, virtualisation capabilities. We are working very closely with red hat to kind of showcase all the goodness that's coming out of red hat, open shift and other innovations. Right? We heard, uh, like, you know, in one of the open shift sessions, they're talking about micro shifts. They're talking about hyper shift, the talking about a lot of these innovations, operators, everything that is coming together. But where do developers play with all of this? If you spend half your time trying to configure it, instal it and buy the hardware, Trying to figure it out. You lose patience. What we have time, you lose time. What is time and it's complicated, right? How do you set up? Especially when you involve cloud. It has network. It has got the edge. You need all of that right? Set up. So what we have done is we've set up everything for you. You just come in. And by the way, not only just that what we realised is when you go talk to customers, they don't want to listen to all our optimizations processors and all that. They want to say that I am here to solve my retail problem. I want to count the people coming into my store, right. I want to see that if there is any spills that I recognise and I want to go clean it up before a customer complaints about it or I have a brain tumour segmentation where I want to identify if the tumour is malignant or not, right and I want to telehealth solutions. So they're really talking about these use cases that are talking about all these things. So What we did is we build many of these use cases by talking to customers. We open sourced it and made it available on Death Cloud for developers to use as a starting point so that they have this retail starting point or they have this healthcare starting point. All these use cases so that they have all the court we have showed them how to contain arise it. The biggest problem is developers still don't know at the edge how to bring a legacy application and make it cloud native. So they just wrap it all into one doctor and they say, OK, now I'm containerised got a lot more to do. So we tell them how to do it, right? So we train these developers, we give them an opportunity to experiment with all these use cases so that they get closer and closer to what the customer solutions need to be. >>Yeah, we saw that a lot with the early cloud where they wrapped their legacy apps in a container, shove it into the cloud. Say it's really hosting a legacy. Apps is all it was. It wasn't It didn't take advantage of the cloud. Never Now people come around. It sounds like a great developer. Free resource. Take advantage of that. Where do they go? They go. >>So it's def cloud dot intel dot com >>death cloud dot intel dot com. Check it out. It's a great freebie, AJ. Thanks very much. >>Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. All right, >>keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for Paul Dillon. We're right back. Covering the cube at Red Hat Summit 2022. >>Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mm.

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE, covering Polygon 18, brought to you by Polyman. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live with theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Polycon '18. We're in the Bahamas, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, co-founders and co-hosts of theCUBE. We're here with special guest Halsey Minor, entrepreneur, serious serial entrepreneur here on theCUBE. Halsey, great to have you. You're the founder and CEO of VideoCoin, a successful ICO. You had an event last night, kind of an investor thank you event out in the Bahamas Country Club, there, you're here. Man, you're a pro, you're back in the game with this crypto. This is the wave, I mean, I want to get your perspective 'cause you see waves. You've seen CNET, you started that from scratch before online news was anything, you were the pioneer in that. First investor, first operator in salesforce.com, a variety of other successful entrepreneurial adventures. You've got a nose for the waves. So just put it in perspective, what is this wave? >> Yeah, so I actually have an interesting story because I've actually started around 2012, and I launched my first business in 2013. So, the first problem that I saw was, how do you get your money from your bank account and buy Bitcoin? Still a problem, hasn't been fixed, right? So I tried to fix that. Oh well, I did to a certain extent, I did fix the problem. So what I did was created effectively a coin-based converter, and I started out and was going to make it very easy for you to take your bank account, connect it up, seemed logical, and then buy, you know, the currency. The company was called Bit Reserve at the time. So, no bank would touch anybody named Bit in their name. And it was even worse than that, all of us who put our company name into our bank account, we had our bank accounts basically shut down, right? So, I started getting an idea how difficult this was going to be, you know, Coinbase getting a Silicon Valley bank account early on to become a conduit, was very fortuitous. It ultimately took two and a half years and buying a big chunk of New Jersey Bank before we were able to allow you to connect your US bank and your European bank into Uphold to buy currency. So it's really Uphold, Coinbase, maybe like Gitbit, very, very few who've been able to crack that problem. We literally had to buy part of a bank to do it. So that's where I started. So I really looked at it very much as money, as a new monetary system. And I still see unlimited opportunities in that area. It wasn't until really a couple years later that I saw the block chain as the new architecture for the computer, and what I mean by that, is what Bitcoin proved was that if you gave people software and they ran it on their computer and they got paid in some funny kind of digital money, they would convert that money back into fee hock, you know, dollars, and they go buy more computers. And nobody asks anybody to be a Bitcoin miner, they just come and showed up the more, the bigger it got, the bigger the opportunity. And what's most interesting is when you make money or lose money, depends on your cost of power. So for most of these Bitcoin miners, they're near hydroelectric dams. So what I realized, and VideoCoin is in the area of video. It's a direct competitor with Amazon web services, everything they do in video. So there's, it's called encoding which is compress it, there's storage and there's streaming, three basic pieces. So what I realized was, two things: first of all, 20% of servers and data centers are not used at all. They're called zombies, right? So all of these people, the Airbnb, Uber model, they can all of a sudden start earning on assets that are doing nothing. But even if you look out into the future, if video mining, which is what we call it, ends up being like bitcoin mining, then what happens is that the whole thing works on the cost of power. It's not good for Amazon, if they have to be competitive solely based on the cost of power. >> Dave, so he's got an ICO going on, we looked Filecoin, right? So Filecoin was storage and that's infrastructure. You go to VideoCoin, we're streaming right now, we've got video. This is kind of like an interesting digital media infrastructure ... >> Well ... >> What's your take compared to Filecoin? >> What's interesting to me is that I'd love to get Halsey's input on, because you've got the full spectrum here. You started in publishing and now-- >> With five TV shows. >> Dave: Okay. >> Yeah, CNET had five TV shows. >> So right, and so very digital from the beginning and relatively ripe for disruption and then now into banking, which really hasn't been disrupted, but we all think it's coming. So that's an interesting spectrum. It's not Negroponte, I don't think, bits versus atoms, because you've seen, you know tax season get disrupted. That's atoms. So what are the factors that make an industry ripe for disruption? >> Well, I mean the obvious thing is really disruptive technologies, right? And so for the Internet, for me, it was, I started the company in '93 to be on commercial online services like AOL and I saw, I guess, the first browser in '93 and, actually at Sun, and it made me believe the Internet was going to be this incredible thing. And it was really seeing information coming in, and, you know, the Internet wasn't that big back then but I watched a gif of a storm, you know, from one of the weather centers, and so I realized that this information thing was incredibly interesting. And so what all of us did, the way I thought about it and seen it, is we're cracking open databases and we're just letting people have the information. And it was silly things like the ability for me to live in San Francisco but know what the weather was in New York and pack appropriately. This was the magic, I mean, we take all of this for granted. This was magic, right, at the time. You had to go out and buy a USA Today-- >> Check the stock price. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Call your friends in New York. >> Yeah, that was magic. So at a very high level, it was just access to information. At a very high level, what this is is combining information and money into a packet. Right? So now what we can do is, I can gather information from servers about what they're really doing and I can also be paying them at the same time. So you know, it would have actually solved a lot of problems around the Internet, because on the Internet getting paid was hard. And there were so many times we'd go into a meeting and we'd agree on the partnership but we didn't know who was paying who. You know? (laughing) Am I paying you for traffic or are you paying me for content or you know, how is that going? So this kind of comes with a built-in payment system, which I think is what makes it so incredible as a system. >> So we're-- >> And more stable, I am inferring, long-term anyway. Because that whole system that you just described on the Internet all blew up when the funding dried up. >> It blew up and I think, you know, I think there are certainly a lot of risks. The number one thing I would tell everybody in this area is, you know, be very cautious about what in you invest in. There were a lot of companies that, uh-- so my whole description was sort of the Internet bubble was that people say that, well, you know, nine trillion dollars was lost in investing. >> With everything that happened though. >> And when I-- >> The plus.com happened, everything happened. >> And what I said to the people is that it would be great if people had just invested in the survivors, but who knew what they were? The only reason the United States emerged, with, you know, with Salesforce and Ebay and Amazon, etc., the only reason that we emerged dominating the world was 'cause we invested in them all. Right? And so-- >> Even all those things that were called silly ideas actually happened. >> And they ended up happening. It was all a matter of timing, yeah. So you know, what's happening now is very much the same thing. You know, a lot of people are going to invest in a lot of bad ideas, right? But this is all necessary for the good ideas to get funding and for something big to come out of this. >> So I want to get your take on with the VideoCoin and in comparison, you mentioned Amazon, right? So our observation, obviously we're recording all these shows, Amazon web service, among others, the big guys are sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Look at the big whales, Google, Facebook, Amazon, I mean, we can't even run any ads on our site. We actually prefer to just push the content all over the world because it's hard to build a destination site. I mean, people going out of business in the media business. Video, your choices are Ustream now owned by IBM, Twitch TV became Amazon which was Ustream before that. Build your own custom player, set up a CDN, which is actually hard and expensive. Okay, so do I do Facebook live, again controlled by Facebook? So there's an opportunity that you're pursuing. Did you have that in mind? I mean, we see it every day and we know this, but luckily we have a good deal with Ustream, but the point is that is going to be up too. What's the alternative producers, content producers who have streaming, whether it's a pro set like this or someone who's going to have unlimited access to video streaming? >> So the real issues are cost and innovation, okay? And so Hanno Basse, who's the CTO of 20th Century Fox and one of our advisors, right? And all these media companies have the same problem. Nobody is watching broadcast anymore that'll cost them nothing and everybody's now streaming in, which is one-to-one and has a cost associated with it. So that's why, and even worse, videos going to 4k, 8k, VR, data that's going up like this-- >> Data isn't growing as fast either. >> So all these companies are confronted with all these costs and they can't monetize them. Google can monetize it, Amazon can monetize it. >> Tel cos ... >> Netflix, yeah. >> Ouch. >> But they can't monetize it, so it's all cost effectively and no revenue. So the one thing that we offered to VideoCoin by using all this research is we cut the cost 60 to 80%, so that's huge. The other thing is, in the early days, everybody bought Salesforce because it was cheaper. It was 1/10th of the cost. And I used to say to people, in the long run, it's going to be way more innovation, right? Because they're constantly, every quarter, rolling out a new version, right? And they're going to have the ability to connect, an API effectively, and the ability to connect, and the whole ecosystem can arise around that. And that's why their conference has 140,000 people, Dreamforce, because there's a whole ecosystem. >> It's sticky as hell too. >> That's right. >> Hard to get out. >> That's right. So while we are 60 to 80% lower cost, we're also effectively open source at the same time. So the ability to have a community arise and develop software. And so right now, you've seen this huge consolidation because it's actually kind of hard to build new kinds of apps on top of Amazon web services, right? But if you have this open system, and you have all these people are contributing code to it, all of a sudden, there are apps, video apps, that they'll be literally a whole new-- >> So you're going to have an open source contribution piece to your ... ? >> Yeah, I mean basically, everything we build is open source, right, so you know, all the way through to the network. So it creates a palate for people to start innovating in video. Because really what's happening is a lot of innovation is getting hurt by the fact these big guys totally dominate it, right? They don't want to see any innovation outside of the funds they bring you, right? >> Right, so you've heard my rap on this. I'd love to get Halsey's thoughts. So the big guys, you're right, have won. It's like centralization and victory. People here are saying, "No, we want to take it back." The premise that I hear a lot is there's been no innovation in protocols in, you know ... Google built gmail on SMPT, HTTP, DNS, it's all government-funded or academia. >> Yeah. >> And it's just a lack of innovation. >> That's right. >> And now, this is why I counter Warren Buffet and Charlie Monger, is no, we're building out a new set of infrastructure. >> That's right. >> Okay, so where do you guys fit into that? What are your thoughts, first of all, on that premise? And where do you guys fit? >> Yeah, I mean, look, you've got these huge companies that are totally dominant and even though they are, in fact, you know, innovative Silicon Valley companies by label, okay, they have all the same issues-- like I say to people, nobody today believes that anybody can put Amazon web services at risk. If I went to somebody and said, "You know Amazon web services which are worth 3/4 "of the value of the company, or 5/6, "depending on who you talk to, "there's going to be something after that." It would literally be a new concept because everybody's convinced this is Amazon's-- >> John: The winner. >> Yeah, this is their big, this is the way they make all their money-- >> Alright it's over-- >> Right, and if you say to somebody there is going to be a next thing, they would look at you like, you know, like you're foolish. But the reality is when you start changing some basic, underlying infrastructure in the Internet and you start doing things, decentralization, this is the word we're going to be using, you know, we're going to see it in solar power. And solar power is, you know, on a cost to benefit like this so, you know, it isn't going to be long before we're going to have power in our house legitimately, not like, you know, some science-fiction thing, we'll be legitimately powering most of our needs with solar that we connect because the cost is coming down so much. So we're going to see all of this decentralization happening. And in the world of computing, decentralization means that this is going to be the most efficient that computing can ever be. Because just compare using the Uber and Airbnb model of saying anything that's excess, let's turn into value. And I've heard that for every Uber driver, 15 cars go away, right? So the decentralization is going to have a profound effect on the economy and it's going to have a profound effect on these big guys. >> Oh, even those guys are going to get disrupted. >> They're going to get disrupted. And they're 20 years old, it's time for them to get disrupted, I mean, you know ... >> E-commerce is a 20, 30-year-old stack, some say 20, 20-year-old stack on e-commerce, all these things are ready, even what we would consider modern, you know, the miracle of saying oh the weather in New York. I mean that magic is here now in a new way. So I got to ask you the question-- >> Taken for granted. >> I got to ask you a question because you brought up that point. In your history of your career as an entrepreneur because you're doing stuff that's always new and cool, and probably before anyone else sees it, can you talk about some of the ideas that you've seen, not necessarily your ideas, as well others, where the investor said, "That's the dumbest idea "I ever heard"? What billion dollar opportunities have you seen emerge that investors have said, "That's the dumbest idea "I've ever heard"? >> Well, actually, the one that is Salesforce. No VC would put money in. It was really kind of backed by Larry Ellison and me early on. And what's so-- >> John: Google was a dumb idea. We want portals, not search. >> Yeah, so the bet that nobody would take in 2000 was that companies would take their sales information and they would put it in the cloud. Nobody would believe that. Not anyone. And so I used to joke, I used to say the only way it's going to happen is if the sales guy's been waiting two years to get his sales management system in place actually runs over the head of security in the parking lot. That's what it's going to take because it's outsourcing and, you know, the security guys say, "Oh, no, no, no, "we're going to lose all of our data", right? It didn't matter that Salesforce had way more security guys, you know, than these guys had and better, you know, working internally. Nobody believed in it. Literally nobody believed in it. >> This is your point about the decentralization, no one's going to believe, "Wait a minute, "that could never happen." So, in a way, the investor thesis should be, "I want to invest in the dumbest ideas," because that might be the best idea. >> It is. I mean the big, obvious ones that attract billions and billions of dollars, I mean, how many of those end up actually not turning into anything? Right? A lot of them, right? So CDAT was profitable on nine million dollars. I believe that Yahoo was profitable on three million dollars. I think Google was somewhere around 12 to 15 million dollars, right? So there are a lot of these business-- Amazon's obviously the outlier. >> John: It's still not profitable. >> Yeah, it's the outlier. But you know, a lot of these businesses were started by people who used a relatively small amount of money and were very creative. You know, you're going to hear this over and over again. Microsoft never needed any money. They accepted five million dollars from-- >> John: (mumbles) >> Yeah, so this happens a lot. And in fact, I think it's very dangerous when in year five, you're losing three hundred million dollars, right? I mean, five hundred, or whatever it is. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. >> What's the role of community? Because we heard the guy from Locktower Capital say something I thought was really profound, "I don't need VC because, if you're a startup, "you don't have to waste your energy on board meetings "and other things, you can build your business "and use the community as your benchmark." So this plays to your whole picking up the slack kind of thing in efficiency. So entrepreneurs can be more efficient in these communities. This is where the cryptocurrency Blockchain is thriving. What's your thoughts to that and how do you see that community interaction progressing? >> In my career, there's been a sea change in sort of the culture of technology and really everything, right? You know, when I started out, everything was very hierarchical. You know, it's like how far up the chain you got that measured how successful you were. Now it's how big is your network, right? And you know, I was talking to somebody the other day who said VCs are going in and they're measuring these companies' success by how many Instagram and Twitter accounts they have and there's massive fraud going on because people are buying these accounts to pump up their numbers, right? So people are starting to value by the breadth of your network. >> John: Reputable network. >> Reputable, yeah. >> John: Not fake network. >> Yeah, but what I heard is there's actually a Twitter application which I haven't seen that'll go in and tell how many of 'em are real and how many of 'em are not now. So really the community becomes almost the measuring stick for your value. You know, before I'd seen it, I had users. Today, everybody has community members. And so, it becomes sort of, kind of like everything I guess. >> And our media model is all community-based which is, we just naturally go there because that's where the data is. >> That's right. >> That's where the feedback is. >> That's right. >> I mean, I can't get feedback from Facebook and Google, they own the data, right? There's no letters to the editor on Facebook. There's only hate comments. >> But you know before Microsoft and all these came, you know, IBM dominated the world. Nobody ever thought they would go away. AT&T dominated the world and nobody ever thought that they would go away, you know. >> Alright, personal question for you, I got to wrap because I know you got to go. Appreciate your time, by the way. Great story, we could go on for another hour. Personal note, what is the most compelling thing that's moved you, as an entrepreneur, in the crypto market? Like, something that, it could be an anecdote, it could be a situation. When you look at this opportunity, as the world's going to eventually be re-instrumented with data, with new open source and community, what's something that's surprised you or moves you as an entrepreneur saying, "This is freakin' awesome"? >> So this hasn't been done yet but it will be done. So this is what actually motivated me to start Uphold was the ability to turn your phone into your bank and to be able to exchange money and primarily really solving the ability for the poor to be able to move money around without having 10 to 20 to 30% of it taken away. Everybody's talked about this, remittance, and so far, nobody has actually solved that problem. That problem is going to get solved. I mean it's inevitable that the phone becomes the bank. There are so many regulations that are designed to stop that and it's extraordinary. Once you get into it and you see all the ways that have been set up-- >> Byzantine system. >> this problem should have been solved long ago, right? And every phone should be a bank. I mean, it can be connected to a bank, but every phone should have my money in it. I should be able to send it to you instantaneously. >> It shouldn't be like getting into Fort Knox. >> Yeah. I mean, computers, banks have computers, they could make this happen today. They just don't want to. So I think the most profound thing for me is the problem is still not solved, that the problem I set out to solve, which is really creating a more equitable financial system. And we live in a country where the banks make about 37 billion dollars a year in bounced check fees. Think about that. Thirty-seven billion dollars in bounced check fees. So if you just take that out, you just take out, 'cause it all affects people in the lower socioeconomic scale, you create a revolution. Just getting rid of the bank fees that you'll pay for bouncing checks. >> Well, I mean the narratives, like the narrative of taking down gatekeepers or central authorities, is the premise of this ecosystem and you could take that example and apply it to thousands of use cases. >> And banks are rapacious, flat out. American banks are the most rapacious 'cause no other country would allow 37 billion dollars to be taken away in bounced check fees. >> Halsey, congratulations on your success again and great to see you on theCUBE. You're now a Cube alumni, so ... >> Congratulations. >> We hope you'll come back again. >> Yeah, thank you guys. >> We're going to get you in our telegram group, now you'll be 42 members, we just turned on last night. (everyone laughs) We appreciate it and congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for your insight and experience and commentary. Halsey Minor, experienced entrepreneur, pro, here in the trenches, establishing a great new venture. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)