>>Hello everyone and welcome back to Motor City, Michigan. We're live from the Cube and my name is Savannah Peterson. Joined this afternoon with my co-host John Ferer. John, how you doing? Doing >>Great. This next segment's gonna be awesome about application modernization, scaling pluses. This is what's gonna, how are the next generation software revolution? It's gonna be >>Fun. You know, it's kind of been a theme of our day today is scale. And when we think about the complex orchestration platform that is Kubernetes, everyone wants to scale faster, quicker, more efficiently, and our guests are here to tell us all about that. Please welcome to Char and Andy, thank you so much for being here with us. You were on the Red Hat OpenShift team. Yeah. I suspect most of our audience is familiar, but just in case, let's give 'em a quick one-liner pitch so everyone's on the same page. Tell us about OpenShift. >>I, I'll take that one. OpenShift is our ES platform is our ES distribution. You can consume it as a self-managed platform or you can consume it as a managed service on on public clouds. And so we just call it all OpenShift. So it's basically Kubernetes, but you know, with a CNCF ecosystem around it to make things more easier. So maybe there's two >>Lights. So what does being at coupon mean for you? How does it feel to be here? What's your initial takes? >>Exciting. I'm having a fantastic time. I haven't been to coupon since San Diego, so it's great to be back in person and see old friends, make new friends, have hallway conversations. It's, it's great as an engineer trying to work in this ecosystem, just being able to, to be in the same place with these folks. >>And you gotta ask, before we came on camera, you're like, this is like my sixth co con. We were like, we're seven, you know, But that's a lot of co coupons. It >>Is, yes. I mean, so what, >>Yes. >>Take us status >>For sure. Where we are now. Compare and contrast co. Your first co con, just scope it out. What's the magnitude of change? If you had to put a pin on that, because there's a lot of new people coming in, they might not have seen where it's come from and how we got here is maybe not how we're gonna get to the next >>Level. I've seen it grow tremendously since the first one I went to, which I think was Austin several years ago. And what's great is seeing lots of new people interested in contributing and also seeing end users who are trying to figure out the best way to take advantage of this great ecosystem that we have. >>Awesome. And the project management side, you get the keys to the Kingdom with Red Hat OpenShift, which has been successful. Congratulations by the way. Thank you. We watched that grow and really position right on the wave. It's going great. What's the update on on the product? Kind of, you're in a good, good position right now. Yeah, >>No, we we're feeling good about it. It's all about our customers. Obviously the fact that, you know, we have thousands of customers using OpenShift as the cloud native platform, the container platform. We're very excited. The great thing about them is that, I mean you can go to like OpenShift Commons is kind of a user group that we run on the first day, like on Tuesday we ran. I mean you should see the number of just case studies that our customers went through there, you know? And it is fantastic to see that. I mean it's across so many different industries, across so many different use cases, which is very exciting. >>One of the things we've been reporting here in the Qla scene before, but here more important is just that if you take digital transformation to the, to its conclusion, the IT department and developers, they're not a department to serve the business. They are the business. Yes. That means that the developers are deciding things. Yeah. And running the business. Prove their code. Yeah. Okay. If that's, if that takes place, you gonna have scale. And we also said on many cubes, certainly at Red Hat Summit and other ones, the clouds are distributed computer, it's distributed computing. So you guys are focusing on this project, Andy, that you're working on kcp. >>Yes. >>Which is, I won't platform Kubernetes platform for >>Control >>Planes. Control planes. Yes. Take us through, what's the focus on why is that important and why is that relate to the mission of developers being in charge and large scale? >>Sure. So a lot of times when people are interested in developing on Kubernetes and running workloads, they need a cluster of course. And those are not cheap. It takes time, it takes money, it takes resources to get them. And so we're trying to make that faster and easier for, for end users and everybody involved. So with kcp, we've been able to take what looks like one normal Kubernetes and partition it. And so everybody gets a slice of it. You're an administrator in your little slice and you don't have to ask for permission to install new APIs and they don't conflict with anybody else's APIs. So we're really just trying to make it super fast and make it super flexible. So everybody is their own admin. >>So the developer basically looks at it as a resource blob. They can do whatever they want, but it's shared and provisioned. >>Yes. One option. It's like, it's like they have their own cluster, but you don't have to go through the process of actually provisioning a full >>Cluster. And what's the alternative? What's the what's, what's the, what's the benefit and what was the alternative to >>This? So the alternative, you spin up a full cluster, which you know, maybe that's three control plane nodes, you've got multiple workers, you've got a bunch of virtual machines or bare metal, or maybe you take, >>How much time does that take? Just ballpark. >>Anywhere from five minutes to an hour you can use cloud services. Yeah. Gke, E Ks and so on. >>Keep banging away. You're configuring. Yeah. >>Those are faster. Yeah. But it's still like, you still have to wait for that to happen and it costs money to do all of that too. >>Absolutely. And it's complex. Why do something that's been done, if there's a tool that can get you a couple steps down the path, which makes a ton of sense. Something that we think a lot when we're talking about scale. You mentioned earlier, Tohar, when we were chatting before the cams were alive, scale means a lot of different things. Can you dig in there a little bit? >>Yeah, I >>Mean, so when, when >>We talk about scale, >>We are talking about from a user perspective, we are talking about, you know, there are more users, there are more applications, there are more workloads, there are more services being run on Kubernetes now, right? So, and OpenShift. So, so that's one dimension of this scale. The other dimension of the scale is how do you manage all the underlying infrastructure, the clusters, the name spaces, and all the observability data, et cetera. So that's at least two levels of scale. And then obviously there's a third level of scale, which is, you know, there is scale across not just different clouds, but also from cloud to the edge. So there is that dimension of scale. So there are several dimensions of this scale. And the one that again, we are focused on here really is about, you know, this, the first one that I talk about is a user. And when I say user, it could be a developer, it could be an application architect, or it could be an application owner who wants to develop Kubernetes applications for Kubernetes and wants to publish those APIs, if you will, and make it discoverable and then somebody consumes it. So that's the scale we are talking about >>Here. What are some of the enterprise, you guys have a lot of customers, we've talked to you guys before many, many times and other subjects, Red Hat, I mean you guys have all the customers. Yeah. Enterprise, they've been there, done that. And you know, they're, they're savvy. Yeah. But the cloud is a whole nother ballgame. What are they thinking about? What's the psychology of the customer right now? Because now they have a lot of choices. Okay, we get it, we're gonna re-platform refactor apps, we'll keep some legacy on premises for whatever reasons. But cloud pretty much is gonna be the game. What's the mindset right now of the customer base? Where are they in their, in their psych? Not the executive, but more of the the operators or the developers? >>Yeah, so I mean, first of all, different customers are at different levels of maturity, I would say in this. They're all on a journey how I like to describe it. And in this journey, I mean, I see a customers who are really tip of the sphere. You know, they have containerized everything. They're cloud native, you know, they use best of tools, I mean automation, you know, complete automation, you know, quick deployment of applications and all, and life cycle of applications, et cetera. So that, that's kind of one end of this spectrum >>Advanced. Then >>The advances, you know, and, and I, you know, I don't, I don't have any specific numbers here, but I'd say there are quite a few of them. And we see that. And then there is kind of the middle who are, I would say, who are familiar with containers. They know what app modernization, what a cloud application means. They might have tried a few. So they are in the journey. They are kind of, they want to get there. They have some other kind of other issues, organizational or talent and so, so on and so forth. Kinds of issues to get there. And then there are definitely the quota, what I would call the lag arts still. And there's lots of them. But I think, you know, Covid has certainly accelerated a lot of that. I hear that. And there is definitely, you know, more, the psychology is definitely more towards what I would say public cloud. But I think where we are early also in the other trend that I see is kind of okay, public cloud great, right? So people are going there, but then there is the so-called edge also. Yeah. That is for various regions. You, you gotta have a kind of a regional presence, a edge presence. And that's kind of the next kind of thing taking off here. And we can talk more >>About it. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I, as you know, as we know, we're very excited about Edge here at the Cube. Yeah. What types of trends are you seeing? Is that space emerges a little bit more firmly? >>Yeah, so I mean it's, I mean, so we, when we talk about Edge, you're talking about, you could talk about Edge as a, as a retail, I mean locations, right? >>Could be so many things edges everywhere. Everywhere, right? It's all around us. Quite literally. Even on the >>Scale. Exactly. In space too. You could, I mean, in fact you mentioned space. I was, I was going to >>Kinda, it's this world, >>My space actually Kubernetes and OpenShift running in space, believe it or not, you know, So, so that's the edge, right? So we have Industrial Edge, we have Telco Edge, we have a 5g, then we have, you know, automotive edge now and, and, and retail edge and, and more, right? So, and space, you know, So it's very exciting there. So the reason I tag back to that question that you asked earlier is that that's where customers are. So cloud is one thing, but now they gotta also think about how do I, whatever I do in the cloud, how do I bring it to the edge? Because that's where my end users are, my customers are, and my data is, right? So that's the, >>And I think Kubernetes has brought that attention to the laggards. We had the Laed Martin on yesterday, which is an incredible real example of Kubernetes at the edge. It's just incredible story. We covered it also wrote a story about it. So compelling. Cuz it makes it real. Yes. And Kubernetes is real. So then the question is developer productivity, okay, Things are starting to settle in. We've got KCP scaling clusters, things are happening. What about the tool chains? And how do I develop now I got scale of development, more code coming in. I mean, we are speculating that in the future there's so much code in open source that no one has to write code anymore. Yeah. At some point it's like this gluing things together. So the developers need to be productive. How are we gonna scale the developer equation and eliminate the, the complexity of tool chains and environments. Web assembly is super hyped up at this show. I don't know why, but sounds good. No one, no one can tell me why, but I can kind of connect the dots. But this is a big thing. >>Yeah. And it's fitting that you ask about like no code. So we've been working with our friends at Cross Plain and have integrated with kcp the ability to no code, take a whole bunch of configuration and say, I want a database. I want to be a, a provider of databases. I'm in an IT department, there's a bunch of developers, they don't wanna have to write code to create databases. So I can just take, take my configuration and make it available to them. And through some super cool new easy to use tools that we have as a developer, you can just say, please give me a database and you don't have to write any code. I don't have to write any code to maintain that database. I'm actually using community tooling out there to get that spun up. So there's a lot of opportunities out there. So >>That's ease of use check. What about a large enterprise that's got multiple tool chains and you start having security issues. Does that disrupt the tool chain capability? Like there's all those now weird examples emerging, not weird, but like real plumbing challenges. How do you guys see that evolving with Red >>Hat and Yeah, I mean, I mean, talking about that, right? The software, secure software supply chain is a huge concern for everyone after, especially some of the things that have happened in the past few >>Years. Massive team here at the show. Yeah. And just within the community, we're all a little more aware, I think, even than we were before. >>Before. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think the, so to step back, I mean from, so, so it's not just even about, you know, run time vulnerability scanning, Oh, that's important, but that's not enough, right? So we are talking about, okay, how did that container, or how did that workload get there? What is that workload? What's the prominence of this workload? How did it get created? What is in it? You know, and what, what are, how do I make, make sure that there are no unsafe attack s there. And so that's the software supply chain. And where Red Hat is very heavily invested. And as you know, with re we kind of have roots in secure operating system. And rel one of the reasons why Rel, which is the foundation of everything we do at Red Hat, is because of security. So an OpenShift has always been secure out of the box with things like scc, rollbacks access control, we, which we added very early in the product. >>And now if you kind of bring that forward, you know, now we are talking about the complete software supply chain security. And this is really about right how from the moment the, the, the developer rights code and checks it into a gateway repository from there on, how do you build it? How do you secure it at each step of the process, how do you sign it? And we are investing and contributing to the community with things like cosign and six store, which is six store project. And so that secures the supply chain. And then you can use things like algo cd and then finally we can do it, deploy it onto the cluster itself. And then we have things like acs, which can do vulnerability scanning, which is a container security platform. >>I wanna thank you guys for coming on. I know Savannah's probably got a last question, but my last question is, could you guys each take a minute to answer why has Kubernetes been so successful today? What, what was the magic of Kubernetes that made it successful? Was it because no one forced it? Yes. Was it lightweight? Was it good timing, right place at the right time community? What's the main reason that Kubernetes is enabling all this, all this shift and goodness that's coming together, kind of defacto unifies people, the stacks, almost middleware markets coming around. Again, not to use that term middleware, but it feels like it's just about to explode. Yeah. Why is this so successful? I, >>I think, I mean, the shortest answer that I can give there really is, you know, as you heard the term, I think Satya Nala from Microsoft has used it. I don't know if he was the original person who pointed, but every company wants to be a software company or is a software company now. And that means that they want to develop stuff fast. They want to develop stuff at scale and develop at, in a cloud native way, right? You know, with the cloud. So that's, and, and Kubernetes came at the right time to address the cloud problem, especially across not just one public cloud or two public clouds, but across a whole bunch of public clouds and infrastructure as, and what we call the hybrid clouds. I think the ES is really exploded because of hybrid cloud, the need for hybrid cloud. >>And what's your take on the, the magic Kubernetes? What made it, what's making it so successful? >>I would agree also that it came about at the right time, but I would add that it has great extensibility and as developers we take it advantage of that every single day. And I think that the, the patterns that we use for developing are very consistent. And I think that consistency that came with Kubernetes, just, you have so many people who are familiar with it and so they can follow the same patterns, implement things similarly, and it's just a good fit for the way that we want to get our software out there and have, and have things operate. >>Keep it simple, stupid almost is that acronym, but the consistency and the de facto alignment Yes. Behind it just created a community. So, so then the question is, are the developers now setting the standards? That seems like that's the new way, right? I mean, >>I'd like to think so. >>So I mean hybrid, you, you're touching everything at scale and you also have mini shift as well, right? Which is taking a super macro micro shift. You ma micro shift. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. It is a micro shift. That is, that is fantastic. There isn't a base you don't cover. You've spoken a lot about community and both of you have, and serving the community as well as your engagement with them from a, I mean, it's given that you're both leaders stepping back, how, how Community First is Red Hat and OpenShift as an organization when it comes to building the next products and, and developing. >>I'll take and, and I'm sure Andy is actually the community, so I'm sure he'll want to a lot of it. But I mean, right from the start, we have roots in open source. I'll keep it, you know, and, and, and certainly with es we were one of the original contributors to Kubernetes other than Google. So in some ways we think about as co-creators of es, they love that. And then, yeah, then we have added a lot of things in conjunction with the, I I talk about like SCC for Secure, which has become part security right now, which the community, we added things like our back and other what we thought were enterprise features needed because we actually wanted to build a product out of it and sell it to customers where our customers are enterprises. So we have worked with the community. Sometimes we have been ahead of the community and we have convinced the community. Sometimes the community has been ahead of us for other reasons. So it's been a great collaboration, which is I think the right thing to do. But Andy, as I said, >>Is the community well set too? Are well said. >>Yes, I agree with all of that. I spend most of my days thinking about how to interact with the community and engage with them. So the work that we're doing on kcp, we want it to be a community project and we want to involve as many people as we can. So it is a heavy focus for me and my team. And yeah, we we do >>It all the time. How's it going? How's the project going? You feel good >>About it? I do. It is, it started as an experiment or set of prototypes and has grown leaps and bounds from it's roots and it's, it's fantastic. Yeah. >>Controlled planes are hot data planes control planes. >>I >>Know, I love it. Making things work together horizontally scalable. Yeah. Sounds like cloud cloud native. >>Yeah. I mean, just to add to it, there are a couple of talks that on KCP at Con that our colleagues s Stephan Schemanski has, and I, I, I would urge people who have listening, if they have, just Google it, if you will, and you'll get them. And those are really awesome talks to get more about >>It. Oh yeah, no, and you can tell on GitHub that KCP really is a community project and how many people are participating. It's always fun to watch the action live to. Sure. Andy, thank you so much for being here with us, John. Wonderful questions this afternoon. And thank all of you for tuning in and listening to us here on the Cube Live from Detroit. I'm Savannah Peterson. Look forward to seeing you again very soon.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22 brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to Licia Spain in Coon cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townson, along with Paul Gillon senior editor, enterprise architecture for Silicon angle. Paul, we're gonna talk to some amazing people this week. Coon, what the energy here, what, what, what would you say about >>It? I'd say it's reminiscent of, of early year, early stage conferences I've seen with other technologies. There is a lot of startup activity. Here's a lot of money in the market, despite the selloff in the stock market lately, a lot of anticipation that there are, there could be big exits. There could be big things ahead for these companies. You don't see that when you go to the big established conferences, you see just anticipation here that I don't think you see you you'll see maybe in a couple of years. So it's fun to be here right now. I'm sure it'll be a very different experience in two or three years. >>So welcome to our guest Q alum. BAAM Tobar the founder and CEO of Upbound. Welcome back. >>Thank you. Yeah, pleasure to be on, on the show again. >>So Paul, tell us the we're in this phase of migrations and, and moving to cloud native stacks. Are we another re-platforming generation? I mean, we've done, the enterprise has done this, you know, time and time again, and whether it's from Java to.net or net to Java or from bare metal to VMs, but are we in another age of replatforming? >>You know, it's interesting. Every company has now become a tech company and every tech company needs to build a very model, you know, modern digital platform for them to actually run their business. And if they don't do that, then they'll probably be out of business. And it is interesting to think about how companies are platforming and replatforming. Like, you know, as you said, just a, a few years back, you know, we were on people using cloud Foundry or using Heroku, you hear Heroku a lot, or, you know, now it's cloud native and Kubernetes and, and it, it begs the question, you know, is this the end that the tr point is this, you know, do we have a, you know, what, what makes us sure that this is the, you know, the last platform or the future proof platform that, that people are building, >>There's never a last platform, right? There's always something around the core. The question is, is Kubernetes Linux, or is it windows? >>That, that's a good question. It's more like more like Linux. I think, you know, the, you know, you've heard this before, but people talk about Kubernetes as a platform off platforms, you can use it to build other platforms. And if you know what you're doing, you can probably put, assemble a set of pieces around it and arrive at something that looks and can work for your business. But it requires a ton of talent. It requires a lot of people that actually can act, you know, know how to put the stick together to, to work for your business. It is, there's not a lot of guidance. I, we were, I think we were chatting earlier about the CSCF landscape and, and how there all these different projects and companies around it. But, but they don't come together in meaningful ways that you have, they act the enterprise itself has to figure out how to bring them together. Right. And that's the combination of what they do there organically or not is their platform. Right. And that changes. It can change over time. >>Do you think they really do. They really want to put these things together? I mean, there's, that's not what enterprise is like to do. They want to find someone who's gonna come in and turnkey do it all for >>Them. Yeah. And, and if there were, this is the, this is the things like EV every week now you hear about another platform that says, this is the new Heroku. This is the new cloud Foundry. This replaces every, you know, some vendor has, and you can see them all around here. You know, companies that are basically selling platform solutions that do put 'em together. And the problem with it is that you typically outgrow these, like you are, it might solve 80% of the use cases you care about, but the other 20% are not represented. And so you end up outgrowing the platform itself, right? And the, the choice has been mostly around, you know, do you buy something off the shelf that solves 80% of your use cases? Or do you build something on your own? And then you have to spend all your resources actually going through and building all of it. And that's been the dilemma, you know, people who talk about this as a platform dilemma, but it's been, it's been the way for a long time. Like you, every, we go through this cycle every few years and, you know, people end up essentially oscillating between buying something off the, you know, that's off the shelf or building it, building it themselves. >>So what's the payoff. If I'm a CIO and I'm looking at the landscape, I don't need to understand, you know, I don't know what a pod is to know that looking at 200 plus projects in co and at, in cloud native foundation and the bevy of, of co-located projects and, and conferences before the, even the start of this, what's the payoff >>Increasing the pace of innovation. I mean, that literally is when we talk to customers, they all say roughly the same thing. They want something that works for their business. They want something that helps them take their, you know, line of business applications to production in a much quicker way, lets them innovate, lets them create higher engineers that can, don't have to understand everything about every system, but can actually specialize and focus on the, the parts that they sh they care about. But it's all in the context of, you know, people want to be able to innovate at a very high pace. Otherwise they get disrupted. >>So I was at the, you know, my favorite part of coan in general is the hallway track and talking to people on the ground, doing cool things. I was talking to a engineer who was able to take their Java, stack their, their.net stack and start to create APIs between and break 'em into microservices. Now teams are working across from one another realizing that, that, that promise of innovation, but that was the end point. They they're there. Yeah. As companies are thinking about replatforming where like, where do we start? I mean, I'm looking at the, the C CNCF, the, the map and it's 200 plus projects. Where, where do I start? >>You typically today start with Kubernetes. And, and a lot of companies have now deployed Kubernetes to production as a container orchestrator, whether they're going through a vendor or not. But now you're seeing all the things around it, whether it's C I C D or GI ops that they're looking at, you know, or they're starting to build consoles around, you know, their, their platforms or looking at managing more than just containers. And that's a theme that, you know, we're seeing a lot now, people want, people want to actually bring this modern stack to manage, not just container workloads, but start looking at databases and cloud workloads and everything else that they're doing around it. Honestly, everybody's trying to do the same thing. They're trying to arrive at a single point of control, a single, you know, a platform that can do it all that they can centralize policies, centralized controls to compliance governance, cost controls, and then expose a self-service experience to the developers. Like they're all trying to build what we probably call an internal cloud platform. They don't know, they talk about it in different ways, but almost everyone is trying to build some internal platform that sits on top of, on premises. And on top of cloud, depending on their scenarios, >>You make an interesting point, which is that everyone here is to some extent trying to do the same thing. And there's fine points of granularity between now they're approaching it as you walk around this floor. Do you understand what all of these companies are doing? >>I'm not sure I understand all of them, but I, I do. I do recognize a lot of them. Yes. >>And in terms of your approach, you, you use the term control plane. What is distinctive about your approach? >>Very good question. So, you know, we, we end, Upbound take a, we we're trying to solve this problem as well. We're trying to help people build their own platforms, but let me, let me, you know, there's a lot to it. So let me actually step back and, and talk about the architecture of this. But if you were to look at any cloud platform, let's take the largest one. AWS, if you peek behind the scenes at AWS, you know, it's basically a set of independent services, EC two S three databases, et cetera, that are, you know, essentially working on different parts of, you know, like offer completely different pricing, different services, et cetera. They come together because they all integrate into a control plan. >>It's the thing that serves an API. It's the thing that gives it all a common feel. It's where you do access control. It's where you do billing metering, cost control policy, et cetera. Right? And so our realization was if the enterprises are platforming and replatforming, why shouldn't they build their platform in the same way that the cloud vendors build theirs? And so we started this project almost four years ago, now three and a half years called cross plain, which is a, essentially an open source control plane that can become the integration point for all services. And essentially gives you a universal control plane for cloud. >>So you mentioned the idea of if orchestrating or managing stuff other than containers, as I think about companies that built amazing platforms, enterprise companies, building amazing applications on AWS 10 years ago, and they're adopting the AWS control plane. And now I'm looking at Kubernetes is Kubernetes the way to multi-cloud to be able to control those discrete services in a AWS or Google cloud Azure or Oracle cloud, is that true? >>We kind have the tease it, the parts. So there are really two parts to Kubernetes and everybody thinks of Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform. Right? And you know, there is a sense that people say, if I was to run Kubernetes on everywhere and can build everything on top of containers, that I get some kind of portability across clouds, right. That I can put things in containers. And then they magically run, you know, in different environments. In reality, what we've seen is not everything fits in containers. It's not gonna be the world is not gonna look like containers on the bottom. Everything else is on top. Instead, what we're gonna see is essentially a set of services that people are using across the different vendors. So if you look at like, you could be at AWS shop primarily, but I bet you're using confluent or elastic or data breaks or snowflake or Mongo or other services. >>I bet you're using things that are on premises, right? And so when you look at that and you say to build my platform as an enterprise, I have to consume services from multiple vendors. Even if it's just one major cloud vendor, but I'm consuming services from others. How do I bring them together in meaningful ways so that I can, you know, build my platform on top of the collection of them and offer something that my developers can consume. And self-service on. That's not a, that's not just containers. What's interesting though, is if you look at Kubernetes and, you know, look inside it, Kubernetes built a control plane. That's actually quite useful and applicable outside of container scenarios. So this whole notion of CRDs and controllers, if you've heard that term, the ability, you know, like there are two parts to Kubernetes, there is a control plane, and then there's the container container workloads. >>And the control plane is generic. It could be used literally across, you know, you can use it to manage things that are completely outside of container workloads. And that's what we did with cross mind. We took the control plane of Kubernetes and then built bindings providers that connected to AWS, to Google, to Azure, to digital ocean, to all these different environments. So you can bring the way of managing, you know, the style of managing that Kubernetes invented to more than just containers. You can now manage cloud services, using the same approach that you are now using with Kubernetes and using the entire ecosystem of tooling around it. >>Enterprise has been under pressure to replatform for a long time. It was first go to Unix then to Linux and virtualize then to move to the cloud. Now, Kubernetes, do you think that this is the stack that enterprises can finally commit to? >>I think if you take the orientation of your deploying a control plane within your enterprise, that is extensible, that enables you to actually connect it to all the things that are under your domain, that that actually can be a Futureproof way of doing a platform. And, you know, if you look at the largest cloud platforms, AWS has been around for at least 15 years now, and they really haven't changed the architecture of AWS significantly. It's still a control plane, a set of control planes that are managing services. >>It's a legacy >>They've added a lot of services. They've have a ton of diversity. They've added so many different things, but the architecture is still a hub and spoke that they've built, right? And if the enterprise can take the same orientation, put a control plane, let it manage all the things that are, you know, about today, arrive at a single point of control, have a single point where you can enforce policy compliance, cost controls, et cetera, and then expose a self-service experience to your developers that actually can become future proof. >>So we've heard this promise before the cloud of clouds, basically, yes, the, the, to be able to manage everything, what we find is the devils in the details. The being able to say, you know, a load balancer issuing a, a command to, to deploy a load balancer in AWS is different than it is in Azure, which is different than it is in GCP. How do, how do enterprises know that we can talk to a single control plane to do that? I mean, that just seems extremely difficult to manage. >>Oh yeah. That the approach is not, you're not trying to create a lowest common denominator between clouds. That's a really, really hard problem. And in fact, you get relegated to just using this, you know, really shallow features of each, if you're, if you're gonna do that, like your, your example of load balancers, load balances look completely different between between cloud vendors, the approach that we kind of advocate for is that you shouldn't think of them as you shouldn't try to unify them in a way that makes them, you know, there's a, there's a global abstraction that says, oh, there's a load balancer. And it somehow magically works across the different cloud vendors. I think that's a really, really hard thing to say, to do as you pointed out. However, if you bring them all under a same control plane, as different as they are, you're able to now apply policies. You're able to set cost controls. You're able to expose a self-service experience on top of them, even, even if they are very different. And that's, that's something that I think is, you know, been hard to do in the past. >>So BAAM, we'll love to dig deeper into this in future segments. And I'm gonna take a look at the, the, the product and project and see where you folks land in this conversation from Valencia Spain, I'm Keith towns, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching the leader in high tech coverage.

(cheerful music) >> Hello. Welcome to this special nutanix.next coverage, theCUBE. We are in our remote studios in Napa today, with some two great guests talking about hybrid multicloud what that costs them. Tanu Sood, who's the senior director of product marketing, attending. Great to see you, and Saveen Pakala, VP of product management for platform at Nutanix. Great to have you on. A lot of cool things happening with hybrid cloud architectures. When people want to have more cloud and want it more invisible, they want it faster, they want it on multiple clouds, AWS, Azure, GCP, and others. So welcome to theCUBE coverage. >> Thanks so much, John. Thanks for having us here. >> Tanu if I start with you first on the, on the, what is driving the hybrid multicloud architecture? Is it just the fact there's clouds out there or are specific things that you're seeing that customers really want that's a need for their business? >> So you're right, John, over the past few years, we've seen cloud investments really taking off. In fact, last year in the midst of the pandemic, when the economy was showing a downturn, cloud spending was up by 30%. So organizations are looking to cloud for speed, for scale, for elasticity and for app modernization. However, the same organizations would also tell you that there are some workloads that will continue to stay on-prem either in the near term or permanently. So what they're really talking about is this hot notion of hybrid cloud, which is interoperability between their on-prem investments, their existing investments, and their public cloud investments. In fact, I would say Gardner in 2020, they did a survey and 75% of organizations actually talked about hybrid cloud being the preferred ID operating model and an overwhelming majority of those 80% who had public cloud in their infrastructure, They had two or more public cloud providers in their space. So that's the multicloud aspect of it. So whether it's happening as a happenstance audit to deliberate ID strategy, what we are seeing organizations take on, is this hybrid multicloud infrastructure. >> It's interesting. It's so funny to see the dynamics of the evolution, cause it's like, oh yeah, we got some thought, I want more cloud. I want more cloud. I want more cloud. Wait a minute. I want to give up the on premises piece. We've got Amazon, we've got- okay, we've got multiple things happening. How do you pull it all together? So Saveen, I got to ask you the blockers. What it is holding back? Because I mean, it's kind of like it happened, right? People replatforming with cloud, they're not giving up their data centers and or the on-premise component. >> Yeah. What's the blocker. Is it inertia? >> Yeah. Is it time? Is it evolution? Is it skills? What's that, what's holding everyone back? >> Yeah, you know, John, over the last several months quarters, what we have seen is that there are four typical issues that sort of come up. When customers start to look at their hybrid multicloud journey, the first one is, how do I move my on-prem applications, workloads to public cloud? Do I need to refactor the applications as I do that? How do I move that application from one cloud to the other and potentially move it back to the data center? And because the other link platform are disparate between these different destinations, it's usually very challenging. The next question then you come up with is Hey, after I move the application to the public cloud, what about management? Right? It, it is going to be different. It has its own island of infrastructure. The management tooling is different, the skillsets required are different, processes are different. So that becomes another challenge. Then comes the service levels. I'm still responsible for all the service levels, from a backup perspective. DR, security, performance that, you know, I was responsible for on-prem. I'm still responsible for those in the public cloud. And then lastly, I would say, you know, customers want to know that their investment is protected, right? As they move the workloads all around, they want to know that the licenses would follow them. They can actually take advantage of the licenses. they've already procured and not have to procure something new just to run the same workload. So those are some of the challenges that we've seen come up. >> I mean, it's always good to chat with you guys because I remember covering Nutanix back in 2010, there was kind of a new thing and everyone got on the same bandwidth and copied the hyperconvergence. And it was very similar on a whole nother level. It seems now there's another inflection point. I want to get your reaction, Tanu. You can, you can weigh in. That'd be great too. And get your reactions. Well, this whole shift from design thinking, which has been great for, for a decade or so to there's a whole other kind of conversation around system thinking and systems thinking is about platforms and it's about outcomes. But now with what you guys are discussing and launching this year, that next, is it's a systems concept. It's distributed computing. This is kind of a new kind of mindset. How do you guys see that evolving in the customer base? And how do you talk about that? Because this is something that is coming up, kind of like that design thinking mantra. It's like systems thinking, think about the impacts. Can you guys weigh in on your reactions to that? >> Oh yeah. So, you know, when you look at the systems level problem, right, it's really that of having the same platform, you know, be available at that multiple locations, wherever you want to run your workloads. That's not the underpin Penang or the foundation, if you will, of your system. And we've done, done just that with clusters, we have basically taken our hyper-converged infrastructure stack plus the hypervisor, plus the management stack, you know, that was running on-prem and we have essentially made it available on the public cloud. Right. So, so that's really the special thing about that is that it's a single infrastructure and single management plane across your private cloud and a public cloud, which really helps organizations to accelerate the hybrid cloud journey. >> And it was the impact for customers could be next, if you have that single layer, it's unify. >> Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a, you know, the problems and the challenges that I mentioned earlier, customers will be able to address all of them with, by leveraging something like flustered, sorry, customers will be able to deploy their workloads on private cloud or public cloud without having to, you know, have disparate management models, right. They can have a single, simple and consistent management model between private cloud and public cloud. They are, they will be able to meet the same service levels that they've been able to on-premise, whether it's VR, whether it's backup, whether it's security, whether it's performance and all along knowing that their investment is protected with Nutanix. As you know, we have licensed for affordability of owners, software licenses between private and public cloud. So these are all the benefits that are, that are very real. And, you know, customers really value when they think about overall problem statement, they have a can. >> And what's your reaction to systems mindset, system thinking in terms of customers and other, A list, if you're looking at hybrid cloud. >> Yeah. So John, as you talked about, right, we started from a place of making infrastructure invisible. You just taking a read that complexity of infrastructure. And now we have evolved it to the next level where we are really making clouds invisible. This whole idea of you could be sitting on any cloud, it could be private cloud, it could be any public kind of, multiple public clouds. You don't have to worry about the complexity. There's the software layer, layer that's sitting on top of that. That's really making that underlying layer invisible to you so that you can just get about doing your job. It's all about business outcome at the end of the day. >> By the way, I love the invisible mindset because that's also like, that's what DevOps infrastructure's code was supposed to be; make things invisible, make them programmable. And we got to see serverless and functions coming out. People are really getting excited by the ease of ability to just provision resources. This is a major wave, that's going to have a major impact to enterprises. How has this specifically impacting this hybrid cloud architecture? What do you guys do to make that invisible? Because customers are all like, no, one's deny- denying it's happening. They know like, okay, we know what's happening, like, but they don't know what to do. They're like, how do I start? Who do I hire? What do I change? What do I automate? These are questions. How do you guys see that? >> Yeah, look, I think customers repeatedly tell us that, Hey, ultimately I invest a lot in really making my enterprise IT repeatable, reliable and predictable, right? So after they're invested in the process, the tooling, the people, they want to be able to leverage that regardless of, you know, where the IT direction takes them. When it comes to public cloud, they won't be able to take the same investment that they've made and be able to leverage them and capitalize that on the public cloud. And that's really, you know, the problem statement that we're really focused on. Just making sure that your point to making the infrastructure invisible has to do with, you know, having a platform that hides all the complexity underneath and provides a simple, consistent, you know, framework, if you will, for the applications and the management, the people and the tooling. >> Saveen, tell me about Nutanix clusters. What's that about? What's the value? What's the pitch there, what's it- What's it all about? >> Yeah. In a, in a, in a nutshell, you know, clusters is simply Nutanix software stack delivered on public cloud. Really it's a, it's, it includes our ECI or the POS hyperconverged infrastructure, AHV hypervisor, and prison management plan. And it's the same stack that we have been, that we actually introduced 10 years ago, run by thousands of customers. And they've taken the exact same reliable, big stack. And we had available on the public cloud. And with that, you know, customers get some of those benefits that we talked about earlier. >> And it, talk about the use cases because everyone's talking about day one, day two operations, shift left for security. If I bring that stack into the cloud, what is the use cases that emerge just for the customer? >> Yeah, so John, that definitely some patterns that have emerged with customers you will have with cloud. And in fact, our viewers, won't be surprised to hear that disaster recovery is foremost. A lot of organizations are starting with disaster recovery on public cloud with mechanics clusters. This helps them avoid maintenance and investments in a secondary data center, just purely for disaster recovery, but it also gives some geographical separation and it gives them the regional cloud options so that they can still meet the data residency requirement, which as you know, is very key for especially companies that based in MIA Interestingly, most of these organizations that are looking at disaster recovery in public cloud using Nutanix clusters are also leveraging their investments in clusters and their cloud instances to drive capacity bursting. So using it when Dev desk or seasonal on-demand bursting. So when you're not using it for fail-over, for disaster recovery, the same cloud investments are being optimized for cloud capacity bursting. And then finally this workload migration, right? So either it's for data center consolidation or migration, or for app modernization. Our customers are looking to migrate some of their workloads to the cloud, but they want to do that quickly or in a timely fashion. So the idea is that you migrate them as is without any app refactoring right away with clusters, and then once you're on the cloud, then you can refactor at your own pace. You can modernize some components of your applications on an as needed basis. So those are the three use cases that we are seeing disaster recovery, capacity bursting, workload migration, but then to your point about day one and day two, operations. Day two operations that are really, really key. When you have public cloud investments, private cloud investments, and multiple public clouds in the mix, it could be really complex to have your IT operations in play, right? So this notion that Saveen alluded to earlier of a unified infrastructure and management plane that oversees your public cloud, multiple public cloud and private cloud in infrastructure, as well as provide operations, not just for your VMs, but also for your containers and storage is key for our customers. So, so this whole notion of easing up on day zero and day one operations, but also day two and day end operations is top of mind for our customers. >> That's really well put, I think that, that'll tying that layer, that horizontally scalable control plane, whatever you want to call it, it really creates a lot of value from the blocking and tackling meat and potatoes disaster recovery, to enabling the migration and replatforming, and then refactoring of those apps. I mean, this is the modernization trend. This is what people are talking about. So this is what people want. This, this is hard to do. And seems hard. Maybe it's easier with you guys. What, what's, what's holding it all back? Because these...I'm sold. I mean, I've been preaching this for years. Like this is finally coming at scale, and then, is it, is it multi-cloud that's the bottleneck or is that not yet fleshed out? Is it more, architectures are not ready? The containerization or the state stateful data apps? Aren't the tools aren't there? Can you guys give me a sense of why it's not going faster? Or is it going faster? >> Yeah. So maybe I'll chime in and let Tanu as well. So we, we introduced clusters late last year and we have seen a lot of momentum and a ton of interest from our customer base. And, you know, for the use cases that Tanu just talked about, that's already happening with many customers that are already well on their hybrid multicloud journey. And, you know, ultimately it comes down to just, you know, where the organization is in their journey. And, you know, especially if you're a Nutanix customer, very familiar with the stack, you know, for them taking the next step, taking, you know, with clusters in AWS, it's actually not that big of a jump, right. And, but if you're not on the platform, then you know, you, you know, some of the challenges we discussed earlier are the things that get in the way. >> It's almost like day one operations tend to is like innovation and day, day two operations is rain it in, you know, get the value. >> Yeah. >> Day one, get going and do some experimentation and day two, make it all operate cleanly. >> Exactly. >> You know, oftentimes, you know, we have conversations even in the forest. So second conversation, the topic gravitates towards app refactoring. When you know that there's a much more heavyweight and complex time consuming project. You can actually get to cloud without pre-factoring and do it at your own pace. And, you know, on your own terms, really. >> I think the migration thing is a huge thing. I mean, at that, I see a lot of that. And then once they get to the cloud, they go, Wow, I could do a lot more here. >> Yeah. >> And that just spawns more. It's a step function value there. And then as open source continues to grow, oh my, it's just, it's just a successful and we don't overthink it, just get to the cloud, understand the distributed nature of the on-premise piece. And boom, then go from there, you see that, that accelerated value distraction. >> And as Tanu said earlier, I mean, we are taking a much, much more of a holistic and uplevel view of management in this hybrid multicloud environment, including non Nutanix environments, right? So we're not stopping at just a Nutanix environment. So just to be answer, you're talking about containers, you're talking multicloud, but also talking about non Nutanix environments that you may have and, you know, give you that one sort of, you know, one single plain of glass, if you will. >> It's DevOps happening at the Dev is I've always been there, now, the OS is getting stronger and stronger. Now it's changing too the intelligent edge is around the corner. That's just another edge. That's just another premise in my mind. So again, this flexes with what you guys are thinking about. So I think the edge brings up a lot of action too. Big time. Exciting news. Let's extend this into the news. So you guys have some exciting news. Talk about what's new, what's the big stories what's breaking. What's exciting. What's the top stories coming this year? >> Sure, sure. So since we launched clusters late, late last year on AWS, we have focused on a couple of things. One is expanding the availability, right? So we have added multiple regions. Now the total number of regions, AWS regions that we support is 23. We also recently added support for AWS gov cloud for a US federal customers. And we have FedRAMP moderate authorization. So that's, which is very key for that customer base. We also added some really new and exciting capabilities such as elastic VR. Some of that Tana already mentioned. Hibernate and resumed, which is a very unique capability from clusters where you can hibernate and our clusters and, you know, give up all the betterment in order to compute, but still have your data intact in as three, just so you can resume it very quickly whenever the need arises again. And you know, last but not the least, we are super excited about bringing clusters to Microsoft Azure. This has been a long and strong partnership with Microsoft. And as you heard in the keynote, we are actually starting the preview at this event, and, you know, opening up to the customer so that they can get that firsthand feeling for the product and work with us in bringing the product to GA. >> And John- >> Multicloud world. Oh, sorry. Tanu, go ahead. >> No, so this is exactly what I was going to say. This is multicloud coming to pair, right? So we talked about hybrid cloud and now here we are with multicloud options for you. >> What's interesting is that everyone always, you know, as the trends change, you know, this is changing, that company's shifting and you guys have evolved beautifully. And I think the way people are leveraging cloud really shows their strengths and run the cloud actually highlights the strengths. If you play it properly, you can survive. I mean, look at snowflake. They don't even have a cloud. There are data cloud now. So, you know, if you bring, if customers can bring their, their architecture to the cloud, they can actually do a lot of re, rearchitecting and rechanging to modernizing their business. This is something that's kind of only in the past few years, that's come up. This is quite a big trend. Do you guys see the same thing happening faster or is it just we're inside the ropes? And we love it so much. (laughs) >> Yeah. Like I said, earlier, organizations that are at different levels of the journey, but we're seeing happening all around us. And we're embracing that. We're actually embracing that trend, Enabling that trend because we truly believe hybrid cloud is the more practical reality. And we want customers to have the cloud on their own terms and not feel like they have to, you know do something just because they're forced to, or they're not able to, cost-effectively or even technically for that matter. >> Oh John >> Okay, well- Go ahead, Tanu, sorry. >> I was just going to say that our CEO, Rajiv Ramaswami, puts it really well. The cloud is brilliant operating model, right. So it really should not be about variable workloads. It should just be an easy operational model for you to engage with. >> Yeah. I think you guys have a great strategy. And I think the invisible really rings true with me as well as that horizontally scalable control plane, because the innovation is happening, but the operations have to be reigned in and support the expansion as well. Which means you have to kind of focus on the fact that you've got to reign in the data and you've got to make it invisible. If you look at Lambda functions, and you've got serverless trend booming with the edge, it's got to be invisible and programmable. It just has to be. >> Exactly. Yeah. >> Great stuff. All right. Final question for you both, if you don't mind. Tanu we'll start with you. >> Okay. >> What's the big story this year at .next? If you had to summarize it and tell your friend that you're driving in the elevator up to the top floor, what's the big story that should be talked about? That's being talked about this year at .next? >> Taking unified infrastructure and management and having Azure in preview is really the big news here. So go to nutanix.com/azure, to learn more, show us your interest there, sign up for a test drive. It really is a very easy way for you to experience a product in action. And you'll just see how simple it is to deploy a hybrid cloud with clusters on Azure and under an hour. >> Saveen, final word for you. What's the big news? What's the takeaway? >> Yeah, look, I, I would say that, you know, your cloud on your terms is really the big news. That's driving everything they're doing back in the office billing products and ultimately, you know, delivering or making that whole hybrid cloud journey a reality for our customers. >> Tanu and Saveen, thank you for coming on, sharing that commentary on theCUBE coverage at .next. Thanks for coming up. >> Thanks so much John. Thanks for all. >> It was our pleasure. >> Thanks for watching. More coverage, stay tuned. (cheerful music)

>>hello. >>Welcome to the special key conversation. I'm John ferry, host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California, featuring star dog is a great hot start-up. We've got a great guest, Rob Harris, vice president of solutions consulting for star dog here talking about some of the cloud growth, um, knowledge graphs, the role of data. Obviously there's a huge sea change. You're seeing real value coming out of this COVID as companies coming out of the pandemic, new opportunities, new use cases, new expectations, highly accelerated shift happening, and we're here to break it down. Rob, thanks for joining us on the cube conversation. Great to be here. So got, I'm excited to talk to you guys about your company and specifically the value proposition I've been talking for almost since 2007 around graph databases with Neo four J came out and looking at how data would be part of a real part of the developer mindset. Um, early on, and this more of the development. Now it's mainstream, you're seeing value being created in graph structures. Okay. Not just relational. This has been, uh, very well verified. You guys are in this business. So this is a really hot area, a lot of value being created. It's cool. And it's relevant. So tell us first, what is star dog doing? What's uh, what is the company about? >>Yeah, so I mean, we are an enterprise knowledge graph platform company. We help people be successful at standing up knowledge graphs of the data that they have both inside their company and using public data and tying that all together in order to be able to leverage that connected data and really turn it into knowledge through context and understand it. >>So how did this all come about this from a tech standpoint? What is the, what is the, uh, what was the motivation around this? Because, um, obviously the unstructured wave hit, you're seeing successes like data bricks, for instance, just absolutely crushing it on, on their valuation and their relevance. You seeing the same kind of wave hit almost kind of born back on the Hadoop days with unstructured data. Is that a big part of it? Is it just evolution? What's the big driver here? >>Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's a great question. The driver early is as these data sets have increased for so many companies trying to really bring some understanding to it as they roll it out in their organizations, you know, we've tried to just try to centralize it and that hasn't been sufficient in order to be able to unlock the value of most organization status. So being able to step beyond just, you know, pulling everything together into one place, but really putting that context and meaning around it that the graph can do. So that's where we've really got started at, uh, back in the day is we really looked at the inference and reasoning part of a knowledge graph. How do we bring more context and understanding that doesn't naturally exist within the data? And that really is how we launched off the product. >>I got to ask you around the use cases because one of the things that's really relevant right now is you're seeing a lot of front end development around agile application. Dev ops is brought infrastructure as code. You're seeing kind of this huge tsunami of new of applications, but one of the things that people are talking about in some of the developer circles and it's kind of hits the enterprise is this notion of state because you can have an application calling data, but if the data is not addressable and then keeping state and in real time and all these kinds of new, new technical problems, how do you guys look at that? When you look at trying to create knowledge graphs, because maintaining that level of connection, you need data, a ton of it it's gotta be exposed and addressable and then deal dealt with in real time. How do you guys look at it? >>Yeah, that's, that's a great question. What we've done to try to kind of move the ball forward on this is move past, trying to centralize that data into a knowledge graph that is separate from the rest of your data assets, but really build a data virtualization layer, which we have integrated into our product to look at the data where it is in the applications and the unstructured documents and the structure repositories, so that we can observe as state changes in that data and answer questions that are relevant at the time. And we don't have to worry about some sort of synchronous process, you know, loading information into the graph. So that ability to add that virtualization layer, uh, to the graph really enables you to get more of a real time, look at your data as it evolves. >>Yeah. I definitely want to double, double click on that and say, but I want to just drop step back and kind of set the table for the folks that aren't, um, getting in the weeds yet on this. There's kind of a specific definition of enterprise knowledge graph. Could you like just quickly define that? What is the enterprise knowledge graph? Sure. >>Yeah, we, we really see an enterprise knowledge graph as a connected set of data with context. So it's not just storing it like a graph, but connect again and putting meaning around that data through structure, through definitions, et cetera, across the entire enterprise. So looking at not just data within a single application or within a single silo, but broadly through your enterprise, what does your data mean? How is it connected and what does it look like within context each other? >>How should companies reuse their data? >>Boy, that's a broad question, right? Uh, you know, I mean, one of the things, uh, that I think is very important as so many companies have just collected data assets over the years, they collect more and more and more. We have customers that have eight petabytes of data within their data Lake. And they're trying to figure out how to leverage it by actually connecting and putting that context around the data. You can get a lot more meaning out of that old data or the stale data or the unknown data that the people are getting right today. So the ability to reuse the data assets with in context of meeting is where we see people really be able to make huge licks for in their organization like drug companies be able to get drugs to market faster. By looking at older studies, they've done where maybe the meeting was hidden because it was an old system. Nobody knew what the particular codes and meaning were in context of today. So being able to reuse and bring that forward brings real life application to people solving business problems today. >>Rob, I got to get your thoughts on something that we always riff on here on the cube, which is, um, you know, do you take down the data silos or do you leverage them? And you know, this came up a lot, many years ago when we first started discussing containers, for instance, and then that we saw that you didn't have to kill the old to bring in the new, um, there's one mindset of, you know, break the silos down, go horizontal scalability on the data, critical data, plane control, plane, other saying, Hey, you know what, just put it, you know, put a wrapper around those, those silos and you know, I'm oversimplifying, but you get the idea. So how should someone who's really struggling with, or, or not struggling, we're putting together an architecture around their future plans around dealing with data and data silos specifically, because certainly as new data comes in there's mechanism for that. But as you have existing data silos, what do companies do? What's the strategy in your opinion? >>Yeah, you know, it is a really interesting question. I was in data warehouse and for a long, long time and a big proponent of moving everything to one place. And, uh, then I really moved into looking into data virtualization and realized that neither of those solutions are complete, that there are some things that have to be centralized and moved the old systems aren't sufficient in order to be able to answer questions or process them. But there are many data silos that we've created within organizations that can be reused. You can leverage the compute, you can leverage the storage that already exist within us. And that's the approach we've taken at start off. We really want to be able to allow you to centralize the data that makes sense, right. To get it out of those old systems, that should be shut down from just a monetary perspective, but the systems that are have actual meeting or that it's too expensive in order to, to remove them, leverage those data silos. And by letting you have both approaches in the same platform, we hope to make this not an either or architectural decision, which is always the difficult question. >>Okay. So you got me on that one. So let me just say that. I want to leverage my data silos. What do I do? Take me through the playbook. What if I got the data silos? What is the star dog recommendation for me? >>Sure. So what, what we generally recommend is you start off with building kind of a model, uh, in the, in the lingo, we sometimes say ontology Euro, some sort of semantic understanding that puts context around what is my data and what does it mean? And then we allow you to map those data silos. We have a series of connectors in our product that whether it's an application and you're connecting through a rest connector, or whether it's a database and you're connecting through ODBC or JDBC map that data into the platform. And then when you issue queries to the startup platform, we federate those queries out to the downstream systems and answer as if that data existed on the graph. So that way we're leveraging the silos where they are without you having to move the data physically into the platform. So you guys are essentially building a >>Data fabric. >>We are, yeah. Data fabric is really the new term. That's been popping up more and more with our customers when they come to us to say, how can we kind of get past the traditional ways of doing data integration and unified data in a single place? Like you said, we don't think the answer is purely all about moving it all to one big Lake. We don't think the answer is all about just creating this virtualization plane, but really being able to leverage the festival. >>All right. So, so if you, if you believe that, then let's just go to the next level then. So if you believe that they can, don't have to move things around and to have one specific thing, how does a customer deal with their challenge of hybrid cloud and soon to be multi-cloud because that's certainly on the horizon. People want choice. There's going to be architectural. I mean, certainly a cloud operations will be in play, but this on-premise and this cloud, and then soon to be multiple cloud. How do you guys deal with that? That question? >>Yeah, that's a great question. And this is really a, an area that we're very excited about and we've been investing very heavily in is how to have multiple instances of StarTalk running in different clouds or on prem on the clown, coordinate to answer questions, to minimize data movement between the platforms. So we have the ability to run either an agent on prem. For example, if you're running the platform in the cloud or vice versa, you can run it in the cloud. You are two full instances that start off where they will actually cope plan queries to understand where does the data live? Where is it resident and how do I minimize moving data around in order to answer the question? So we really are trying to create that unified data fabric across on-prem or multiple cloud providers, so that any of the nodes in the platform can answer question from any of the datas >>S you know, complexity is always the issue. People cost go up. When you have complexity, you guys are trying to tame it. This is a huge conversation. You bring up multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. And multi-cloud when you think about the IOT edge, and you don't want to move data around, this is what everyone's saying, why move it? Why move data? It's expensive to move data processes where it is, and you kind of have this kind of flexibility. So this idea of unification is a huge concept. Is that enough? And how should customers think about the unification? Because if you can get there, it almost, it is the kind of the Holy grail you're talking about here. So, so this is kind of the prospect of, of having kind of an ideal architecture of unification. So take us, take me through that one step deeper. >>Well, it is, it is kind of interesting because as you really think about unifying your data and really bringing it together, of course it is the Holy grail. And that's what people have been talking about. Um, gosh, since I started in the industry over 20 years ago, how do I get this single plain view of my data, regardless of whether it's physically located or, uh, somehow stitched together, but what are the things that, you know, our founders really strongly believed on when they started the company? Was it isn't enough. It isn't sufficient. There is more value in your data that you don't even know. And unlocking that through either machine learning, which is, of course, we all know it's very hot right now to look at how do I derive new insights out of the data that I already have, or even through logical reasoning, right? And inference looking at, what do I understand about how that data is put together and how it's created in order to create more connections within the data and answer more questions. All those are ways to grow beyond just unifying your data, but actually getting more insights out of it. And I think that is the real Holy grail that people are looking for, not just bringing all the data together, but actually being able to get business value and insights out of that data. Yeah. >>Looking for it. You guys have obviously a pretty strong roster of clients that represent that. Um, but I got to ask you, since you brought up the founders, uh, the company, obviously having a founders' DNA, uh, mindset, um, tends to change the culture or drive the culture of the covenant change with age drives the culture of the company. What is the founder's culture inside star, dog? What is the vibe there, if you could, um, what do they talk about the most when you, when they get in that mode of being founders like, Hey, you know, this is the North star, what is, what's the rap like? What's the vibe share? It takes that, take us through some star star, dog culture. >>Sure. So our three founders came out of the rusty of Maryland, all in a PhD program around semantic reasoning and logical understanding and being able to understand data and be able to communicate that as easily as possible is really the core and the fiber of their being. And that's what we see continually under discussion every single day. How can we push the limits to take this technology and your gift easier to use more available, bring more insights to the customers beyond what we've seen in the past. And I find that really exciting to be able to constantly have conversations about how do we push the envelope? How do we look beyond even what Gartner says is five or eight years in the future, but looking even further ahead. So there >>They're into they're into this whole data scene. Then big time they are >>That they are very active in the conferences and posts and you know, all that great. >>They love this agility. They got to love dev ops. I mean, if you're into this knowledge graph scene, so I gotta, I gotta ask you, what's the machine learning angle here, obviously, AI, we know what AI is. AI is essentially combination of many things, machine learning and other computer science and data access. Um, what is the secret sauce behind the machine learning and, and the vibe and the product of, of, uh, >>Yeah, a lot of times w we, the way that we leverage machine learning or the way that we look at it is how do we create those connections between data? So you have multiple different systems and you're trying to bring all that data together. Yeah. It's not always easy to tell, is this rod Harris the same as that rod Harris is this product the same as that product. So when possible we will leverage keys or we'll leverage very, uh, you know, systematic type of understanding of these things are the same, but sometimes you need to reach beyond that. And that's where we leverage a lot of machine learning within the platform, looking at things like linear regression or other approaches around the graph, you know, connectivity, analysis, page rank, things like that to say, where are things the same so that we can build that connections in that connectivity as automatically as possible. >>You don't get a lot of talks on the cube. Also. Now that's new news, new clubhouse app, where people are talking about misinformation, obviously we're in the media business. We love the digital network effect. Everything's networks, the network economy. You starting to see this power of information and value. You guys carved the knowledge graph. So I gotta, I gotta ask you, when you look at this kind of future where you have this, um, complexity and the network effect, um, how are you guys looking at that data access? Because if you don't have the data, you're not going to have that insight, right? So you need to have that, that network connection. Is that a limitation or for companies? Is that an, um, cause usually people aren't necessarily their blind spot is their data or their lack of their data. So having things network together is going to be more of the norm in the future. How do you guys see that playing out? Yeah, >>I think you're exactly right. And I think that as you look beyond where we are today, and a lot of times we focus today on the data that a company already has, what do I know? Right. What do I know about you? What, how do I interact with you? How have I interacted with you? I think that as we look at the future, we're going to talk more about data sharing, but leveraging publicly available information about being able to take these insights and leverage them, not just within the walls of my own organization, but being able to share them and, uh, work together with other organizations to bring up a better understanding of you as a person or as a consumer that we could all interact with. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, Metcons law still holds true that, you know, more network connections bring more value. I certainly see that growing in the future, probably more around, you know, more data sharing and more openness about leveraging publicly available. >>You know, it's interesting. You mentioned you came from a data warehouse background. I remember when I broken the businessmen 30 years ago, when I started getting computer science, you know, it was, it was, there was, there was pain having a product and an enabling platform. You guys seem to have this enabling platform where there's no one use case. I mean, you, you have an unlimited use case landscape. Um, you could do anything with what you guys have. It's not so much, I mean, there's, low-hanging fruit. So I got to ask you, if you have that, uh, enabling platform, you're creating value for customers. What are some of the areas you see developing, like now in terms of low-hanging fruit and where's the possibilities? How do you guys see that? I'm sure you've probably got a tsunami of activity around corner cases from media to every vertical we do. And that's, you know, >>The exciting part of this job. Uh, part of the exciting part of knowledge press in general is to see all the different ways that they are allowed to use. But we do see some use cases repeated over and over again. Uh, risk management is a very common one. How do I look at all the people and the assets with an organization, the interactions they have to look at hotspots for risk, uh, that I need to correct within my organization for the pre-commercial pharma, that has been a very, very hot area for us recently. How do we look at all the that's available with an organization that's publicly available in order to accelerate drug development in this post COVID world, that's become more and more relevant, uh, for organizations to be able to move forward faster and the kind of bio industry and my sciences. Um, that's a use case that we've seen repeated over and over again. And then this growing idea of the data fabric, the data fabric, looking at metadata within the organization to improve data integration processes, to really reduce the need for moving data without or around the organization as much. Those are the use cases we've seen repeated over and over again over the last >>Awesome Rob. My last question before we wrap up is for the solution architect that's out there that has, you know, got a real tall order. They have to put together a scalable organization, people process and technology around a data architecture. That's going to be part of, um, the next gen, the next gen next level activity. And they need headroom for IOT edge and industrial edge, uh, and all use cases. Um, what's your advice to them as they have to look out at and start thinking about architecture? >>Yeah, that's, it's a great question. Uh, I really think that it's important to keep your options open as the technology in the space continues to evolve, right? It's easy to get locked into a single vendor or a single mindset. Um, I've been an architect most of my career, and that's usually a lot of the pitfalls. Things like a knowledge graph are open and flexible. They adhere to standards, which then means you're not locked into a single vendor and you're allowed to leverage this type of technology to grow beyond originally envisioned. So thinking about how you can take advantage of these modern techniques to look at things and not just keep repeating what you've done in the past, the sins of the past have, uh, you know, a lot of times do reappear. So fighting against that as much as possible as gritty is my encouragement. >>Awesome, great insight. And I love this. I love this area. I know you guys got a great trend. You're riding on a very cool, very relevant final minute. Just take a quick minute to give a plug for the company. What's the business model. How do I deploy this? How do I get the software? How do you charge for it? If I'm going to buy this solution or engage with star DOE what do I do? Take me through that. Sure. >>Yeah. We, uh, we are like, uh, you've sat through this whole thing. We are enterprise knowledge graph platform company. So we really help you get started with your business, uh, uh, leveraging and using a knowledge graph fricking organization. We have the ability to deploy on prem. We have on the cloud, we're in the AWS marketplace today. So you can take a look at our software today, who generally are subscription-based based on the size of the install. And we are happy to talk to you any time, just drop by our website, reach out we'll we'll get doctors. >>Rob. Great. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. That gradients said, looking forward to seeing you in person, when we get back to real life, hopefully the vaccines are coming on. Thanks to, uh, companies like you guys providing awesome analytics and intelligence for these drug companies and pharma companies. Now you have a few of them in your, on your client roster. So congratulations, looking forward to following up great, great area. Cool and relevant data architecture is changing. Some of it's broken. Some it's being fixed started off as one of the hot startups scaling up beautifully in this new era of cloud computing meets applications and data. So I'm John. Forget the cube. This is a cube conversation from Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.

prepare for the extraction point we've been briefed on all the important stories and events in the world of emerging information now it's time to extract the data and turn it into action live from the silicon angle studios in the heart of Silicon Valley this is extraction point with John furrier okay we're live back in the palo alto studios i'm john furrier for the extraction point we extract the signal from the noise and my special guest today i'm excited to have here is Paul Martino who is the founder of aggregate knowledge and also storied entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who now lives in Philly with his family comes out here Paul is known for among other things being a great entrepreneur tech geek loves tech loves to build build startups started one of the first social networks with Mark Pincus called tribe started his own company funded by Kleiner Perkins with his partner Chris law called aggregate knowledge which is booming and doing great and now more famous for being the first round investor in zynga company that is exploding with revenue as Kleiner Perkins said is the of all their portfolio comes in the history more than Google's made more money faster than anybody Paul Martino welcome to the extraction point great to see you John as always awesome to see you first I got to start with your now I forgot to mention that you're actually running a venture firm so in addition to being famous with Zynga you're running bullpen capital so first give the folks out there an update and first confirm or deny you were in the first round of Zynga or not yes the the first round of Zynga there were several institutional investors and several individual investors Morocco me Reid Hoffman were individual investors Avalon Union Square accelerator ventures and foundry where the institutional investors in that first round Peter was Peter Thiel yeah Peter was also an individual investor in the first round so that's officially the first round investors of Zynga we have clarified that and that is now hot on the books but now you're you've been successfully founded aggregate knowledge you know have a CEO running that what's the update with aggregate knowledge yeah so great guy runs that company as a guy you need to meet and have on this show Dave jakubowski aggregate knowledge really went in a direction where all of the focus was on providing data and analytics to the major ad agencies and John John Nelson who started organic one of the first agencies is now the CEO of Omnicom digital joined the board and I said look we got to get a guy who's an ad heavy in here and jakubowski was previously the GM of microsoft adcenter and had a senior position at specific media and we brought him in and he's just been kickin butt our greek knowledge has really really made a significant significant contribution in the area of data and analytics for these major agencies and he was very able to bring in a crew of people know exactly how to run that business so you're a big fan of big data then mm-hmm oh yeah we just had a big special yesterday on Big Data mentioned about it so that's cool we're going to get into a lobbyist I was just kind of get the small talk out of the way here your current role is the founder of bullpen capital right so bullpen to me I'm a baseball not I love baseball bullpen means you go the bullpen for relief right yep thank God close the game out hopefully or mid-innings relief so tell us about what bullpen is it's a special fund as I know from reading talk to you to target an expansion of this new seed and explosive new funding environment Bryce plain force right I'll tell you how we got the name at the end too so here's what happened I've been investing with a lot of the so-called super angels and that's kind of a misnomer because they really are actually in some cases actual small venture firms to I've been investing with a lot of them since they got off the ground Josh Kopelman from first round is one of the first investors in aggregate knowledge mike maples was an early advisor to the company I've known Jeff claw be a who run soft tech since he was at Reuters and with the late 90s and so I've worked with these guys done a lot of investing and we were me and my buddies Duncan Davidson rich Melman were sitting around over summer of 09 doing a little bit data analysis right another big data assignment we realized that as more and more these seed funds got created they were creating an inventory of companies that weren't quite ready to go to the traditional venture guy but we're also difficult to bridge from just the seed guys because the see guys at that time didn't have really big funds so wait a minute you've got some really good companies here is to clarify the for the folks out there seed funds don't traditionally have follow-on big funds like a VC firm right that's what you're referring to yeah they tend not to have as bigger reserve so if a big fun writes you a five-million-dollar check and you stub your toe you can probably get some more money to get through the hardships but a lot of the the new super angel funds or smaller funds and you get a five hundred thousand dollar check and if you need another five hundred thousand dollars it can frequently be very difficult because they make so many investments with smaller reserves yeah and so you've got dave McClure clavey a maples first round capital true ventures made the first round truevision more traditional VC then say dave McClure and mike maples and claw VA they're out doing some really good work out their funding really good company spending a lot of time I know I've seen them working their butt off yeah they need some air support right they need some cover the little bullpen is that that's you come in and say hey for your stars they're going to rise up yep and so that's exactly right so what happens is here's what the analysis we did turned out of their portfolio thirty percent of their portfolios in aggregate quickly are really exciting companies you know and they quickly go up to a venture auction and the guys and sandhill rotor excited about it about twenty percent of their deals you know that they don't like too much it's kind of just floating there yeah that you know the entrepreneur wasn't a fit that team didn't execute that left fifty percent of their deals in the middle which they kind of were too early to tell as Mike maple sometimes says they were in an extended learning and discovery phase they hadn't quite figured out what their models yeah and this de pivoting stuff's going on right now the Marcus changes turbulence so these guys are right and so you look you look at some examples and you go well wait a minute for every zynga that goes up into the right immediately go look at the stories of chegg and modcloth and etsy and quite frankly the in-between round on twitter and for everyone Zynga that you find that just hits it out of the park the right way there were four to five companies that went through that hard intermediate round that it was difficult in the environment where you have only a potentially thinly capitalized seed fund in front of you go get through that difficult point I said guys you need a bull pen and way we came up with the name is I'm involved in a deal with Chad Durbin who used to pitch for the Phillies and now as a relief pitcher for the cleveland indians and he was in our office and we were talking about this idea and Chad said yeah it's kind of like you're building a bullpen for the seed guys I'm like that's exactly right that's the name we got to go with and so fortunately I was involved in in this company called showcase you which is actually cool cited suppose for recruiting for college scholarships for a collegiate athletes right you're a high school student you throw 80 miles an hour left hand it and you're in 10th grade how do you figure out where the right scholarships are so Durbin and some of the Phillies where the original investors in this company called showcase you it's actually a cool company as the combine work out online basically fries for the high school kids and because the high school kids sometimes are in tough geographies to get to you're in you're in a small rural area in Nebraska how do they find out that you're the guy who can throw 89 miles an hour great so I mean this VC market so basically you're referring to with bullpen right now is an innie and you've been in our sprayer so you live through classic you know classic financing your last company financed by kleiner perkins and a tribe i forget who financed tribe yet Mayfield was the lead investor may feel again another traditional VC firm all tier 1 VCS although may feel people are you now is slipped a little bit that's some of their key partners who have slipped away but they've all moved on what you're really referring to is there's a new dynamic of entrepreneurship going on now we're now there are some break outcomes that just need a little bit more time to mature in the old model they just be kind of closed down the VC guy would be on the Bora has just a pain in the ass and you know really not growing and do another round it's they get kind of lazy in a way if they got 10 10 boards are on so with the super angels and the fact that does take a lot of cash to start a company you've got more deals getting done so the the Y Combinator the Dave McClure's and chef claw va's in the mike maples and sometimes SiliconANGLE labs which we're doing here is telling you about right we're funding companies the more [ __ ] is funded a better will you come in as you keep them alive longer just wreck the pivot possibly that's right and so what happens is right now the venture industry is being disrupted the same way the venture industry has funded companies that have rupted other industries they are being disrupted in the exact same way and the disruption happened from below as always happens it started in seed stage now in order for the disruption to go all the way through there need to be companies that come after seed stage investors that have the same philosophy and mentality pro entrepreneur easy terms operating people who get their hands dirty to get deals done you need that in the B stage and in the sea stage and here's what our prediction is John our prediction is a few years from now there'll be a company that comes after bullpen that does series c and series d financing or mezzanine financing but the same philosophy is bullpen and then DST s at the end of that chain and you can imagine building companies that go all the way to liquidity that you got money from maples first bullpen second this unnamed company third and you went quasi-public with DST and you've bypassed the entire venture scheme entirely and the entire institutional public markets complete liquidity wealth creation companies creating jobs I mean this is new paradigm I mean this isn't amazing I mean this is a potentially amazing point in the history of us finance the idea that you could go two billion dollar outcomes by passing not only the public markets on the back side but the traditional venture ecosystem on the front side I mean that is a disruption if ever there was one amen I mean hi and with you a hundred percent the other some people who will argue regulation is if market forces first of all I'm a big believer in market forces so I think what you're doing is clearly identifying an opportunity that dynamics are all lying lining up entrepreneurs are validating it and so but the questions are regulations I mean first of all I'm anti-regulation but as you start to get to that liquidity and some are arguing I even wrote a blog post about saying hey you know basically Facebook's public merry go buddy what do you say to those guys this is the change in the history of this financial asustor we want the government regulating this yeah so my co-founder of both i started bullpen with two really good guys Duncan Davison who was the founder covad was advantage point for years asking them to buy government regulation would go bad i mean what happened then because of the I lack warsi like Wars but only that the some extent covet doesn't exist unless the telco 1994 happens through in some ways a creation of the government to good point it's social right but but think about it the arbitrariness of government as opposed to a well-thought-out centralized plan so anyway so Duncan sometimes uses that phrase you know he talks a lot about the way in which the government you know that the worst thing you can ever hear is I'm with the government I'm here to help right i mean that's about the way it goes but his point around the the the new quasi public markets is money we'll find a way yeah and when sarbanes-oxley happens and it's tough to go public and you're a CEO like Pincus who's running one of the great all-time companies in Silicon Valley at Zynga he says you know going public is not an entrance is not an exit it's an entrance that's that's this quote what why would I why do I need that headache I mean I was just talking with Charles beeler who sold for the hell dorado he sold to compel in one of his investments to dell for over a billion dollars and and 3 para nother firm he wasn't on that one that was sold to HP during storage wars he's talking about the lawsuits literally this shakedown of immediately filed lawsuits you know you could have got more money so this is this public markets brutal no doubt no doubt i think what you're doing is a revolution I'm all excited about this new environment again anything with his liquidity wealth creation with the engine of innovation can be powered that's fantastic look back the startups okay get back to where you're playing yeah the history of Silicon Valley was built on the notion of value add some have said over the past 10 years venture capital has not been truly value add and some were arguing value subtract and then just money so what you're talking about here is getting in and helping me stay alive what's the value added side of the equation mean I know that a lot of these folks like like like ourselves here it's looking angle McClure Xavier and maples and true ventures they roll their sleeves up first round capital right before we can only provide so much it kind of expands right you guys are filling in the capital market side right how are you guys helping out on the value add because a lot of those companies may be the next Twitter right you've got a bridge to finance that's right allow them to do the pivot or get the creative energy to grow and they hit that market if they hit that hit it going vertical you got it kind of sometimes nurture it you guys have a strategy for that talk about the so let me let me give you my perspective on that so I think 10 years ago when you're starting a company the name of the venture firm was more important than potentially the partner on your board ten years later the name of the firm matters much less and it's the name of the partner and it's the operating experience that that partner partner brought to bear and you go talk to the 24 year old entrepreneur verse the 34 year old entrepreneur the 24 entrepreneur 24 year old entrepreneur wants a guy like you or a guy like me on his board he wants have been there done that started a company was a CEO exited it got fired hired people fired other people scar tissue scars knowledge experience exactly and if a good friend of mine who's in the traditional business I'll leave his name out of it he sometimes says the following phrase the era of the gentleman VC is over and what he means by the era of the gentleman VC is over is you know if your background is you were a junior associate who came in with a finance degree in an MBA and it never started a company you're not going to get picked by the entrepreneur anymore in 10 years from now almost everyone in the business is going to have a resume that looks more like a Cristal Paul Martino a mark pincus that you name all the people who we've started our companies with if there's a lot more hochberg with track record certainly with with the kind of big companies in the valley just in our generation yet started with netscape google paypal right now i want to see facebook is and then now's inga either the ecosystem is just entered intertwined I mean for every failure that spawns more success right so that's right that's a Silicon Valley way yeah well a tribe was tribe was a perfect example of a successful failure tribe was not a successful outcome but it was in many ways a very successful way to actually pioneer what became social networking you know investments got made into Facebook as a result of that Zynga in aggregate knowledge were both the outcrops of what was learned to some extent the original business case of Zynga was remarkably simple there is a ton of time being spent on social networks and after you get done finding your buddies and looking at photos what do you do and Pincus is original vision to some extent was let's have games to play and that insight doesn't happen that way unless you don't do tribe and go into the trenches and get the scars on your back and your in your your second venture of our adventure right at the tribe was aggregate knowledge was similar concept people are connected I mean you got to be excited though I mean you know you were involved in tribes very early on all the stuff that you dealt with activity streams newsfeed connections the social science you know the one that one of the nicest pieces of validation of this recently was over in q4 of 2010 seven of the patents that me Chris law Elliot low and Brian Waller wrote got issued now they're all owned by Cisco Cisco bought tribe in the end they bought the assets in the and the patent filings but there are patent filings that go back to 2002 on the corner stones and hallmarks of what social networking really is that we wrote back then that have now issued order granted or sitting in the cisco portfolio and well that's kind of like a consolation prize and that there wasn't a big outcome for tribe it is very validating to see that those original claims on really cutting-edge stuff have been had been issued and I'm excited about that you should be proud i'm proud to know your great guy you have great integrity you're going to do well as a venture capitalist i think you people will trust you and you're fair and there's two types of people in this world people who help people people who screw people so you know you really on one side of the other you're you're not in between you're truly on the on the good side I really enjoy you know having chatting with you but let's talk about entrepreneurship from that perspective about patents you know I'm try was an outcome that we all can relate to the peplum with Facebook of what Zuckerberg and and those guys are doing over there that's entrepreneurship so talk to the entrepreneurs out there yeah hey you know what you do some good work it all comes back to you talk about the the Karma of entrepreneurship a failure is not a bad thing it's kind of a punch line these days I'll failures are stepping stone to the next thing but talk about your experience and lets you and i talk about how to deal with faith for those first-time entrepreneurs out there in their 20s what just give them a sense of how to approach their venture and if it fails or succeeds what advice would you give them yeah well like winning and losing is important part of the game I mean certain companies are going to be successful in certain ones art and if you go and start ten unsuccessful companies maybe this isn't exactly the business for you but that said how you the game is important as well and if you're a high integrity guy who gets good investors and you make quality decisions and let's say the market wasn't a fit you're going to get the money the second time because people said you know I work with that guy that guy really did a good job you know they never got it quite right but this is a guy learn the right lessons so when I'm coaching a first-time CEO and i'm the CEO coach of a couple guys now you know i'm looking for someone who's sitting there going hey i not only want to do this to win and be successful but i want to learn i I want to do this better than no one no one walks in and says I learn from my failure I hope I'm successful I mean you let it go and say hey I'm gonna be successful I want to win failure is not an option but failure happens right i mean you know it's bad breaks that mean but but here is the key less I tell this to all of the entrepreneurs I work with you will not be successful if you're making mistakes that were made by those before you if you make novel mistakes you're in good company right and so only ever make a novel mistake I made a good example this is one claw and I started Chris law and I started aggregate knowledge aggregate knowledge was the original business model was around recommendations and there were dead bodies in front of us there was net perceptions there was fire fly and she was in the office this morning with Yazdi one of the founders of [ __ ] cast with it man yeah so predictive analytics residi what did we do we went out and we I flew out and met John riedle University of Minnesota who was the founder of net perceptions I dug up yes d i got these guys on my advisory board and while aggregate knowledge was not successful in the recommendation business and pivoted into the data management thing we made novel mistakes we did not repeat the mistakes of met perceptions and firefly and so i think that's an important important lesson to an entrepreneur if you're going into an area that has dead bodies in front of you you better research them you better know who they are you better know what happened and you better make sure that if you screw it up you at least screw it up in a way which none of us could have predicted yeah that's the only way you're going to get a hall pass on that well let's talk about talk about some of the hot Renisha of activity saw so you're in that sector where you're feeding the seed the super angels in the first rounds early stage guys and it's a good fit what about some of the philosophies on like the firms out there there's of this to this two philosophies I just taught us to an entrepreneur here you met on the way out a street speaker text and there at seven you know under a million dollars in financing hmm series a yeah and then you got in the news yesterday color 41 million dollars building to win magnin flipboard a hundred million dollars i got this is these guys that we know i mean there are yep our generation and a little bit around the same time and certainly they have pedigree so remember the old days the arms race mentality right when the sector at all costs right that's kind of what's going on here i mean some of the command that kind of money there's actually an auction going on what do you make of that I mean bubble is an arms race so so rich Melman inside a bullpen de tu fascinating analysis he looked at the full portfolio of 28 took about 20 of the best super angels by the way the super angles are all different some are micro vc summer buying options etc so so first off super angel is a weird word but it's everybody from Union Square and foundry on one side first round and flooding but any take the top 20 or so of these guys and look at their portfolios what's amazing about their portfolios is the unlike 10 and 20 years ago in prior tech bubbles there are not 20 companies doing the same thing when you categorize them yeah ten percent are in ad tech ten percent our direct-to-consumer consider but like forty percent are one-offs that is this is I think one of the first times in the history of venture that forty percent of the deal flow is a one-off unique business idea that there aren't 30 guys going to do and I think that the importance of that to what happens in this next stage of the tech boom we don't know what that means yet because back in the day well we need to just we're venture firm we need to disk drive company okay so your venture firm you've got your disk drive companies and I'll 20 venture friend knows if drive out and created the herd mentality everyone talks about with venture yep mean I was an opponent on a talk on here in the cube and I don't think I actually put in a blog post but I called the era of entrepreneurship like with open sores and low cost of entry with cloud computing and now mobility the manure of innovation where you know in the manure that's being out in the mark place mushrooms are growing out of it right and these you don't know what's going to be all look the same in a way so how do you tell the good ones from the bad ones so it's hard right so you have a lot of one you have a lot more activity hence angel list hence the super in rice so so the economics and the deal flow are all there the question is how do you get them from being just a one-off looked good on paper flame out the reality yeah well look in my opinion seed stage investing is about investing in people and I think when big firms trying to seed stage investing there's an impedance mismatch a lot of times because they want more evidence they want to know did the market work to the management then this is this is an early stage venture and am I going to want to go in a foxhole with this person and in many ways the good super angels are instinctive investors who are betting on people that they want to be in the foxhole with and yeah did they do it before do they know how to hire people is the market reasonably interesting but guess what they're probably gonna pivot three times so wait a minute at the end of the day you got to invest in people later stage venture is not you can look at discounted cash flows you can look at mezzanine financing you can do traditional measures but if you're going to invest in two people who have a prototype and need five hundred thousand dollars you're investing in people at that point what do you think about the OC angel is I'm a big fan of and recently was added thanks to maybe out there but even though i'm not i don't really co-invest with anyone else other than myself maybe you guys would bullpen but but if that's a phenomenon you don't have angel list which is opening up doors for deal flow companies are getting funded navales getting yeah a ton of activity nivea doing great job with venture hacks i get y combinator which I called the community college of startups they bring in like they open the door and I mean that an actually good way don't mean that negatively I mean they're giving access to entrepreneurs that never had access to the market right and now you have Paul Graham kind of giving the halo effect or thrown the holy water on certain stars and they get magically funded but yesterday at an event and they're they're packed right I've heard from VC saying I'm not invited because I didn't wasn't part of the original investment class so it seems that Y comma day is getting full yeah so do you see that you agree is there will be an over lo y combinator you know kind of like I've TED Conference has you know Ted they'll be you know y combinator Boston little franchises will be like barcamp for sure I mean look and look at techstars they franchise they'd I was over there with Dave Tisch in New York there's TechStars New York after those TechStars older in techstars seattle there is no doubt in my mind that right now there is an over investment in the seed stage meaning that there is a little bit of a seed bubble going on that's not necessarily bad though because in terms of raw dollars there's not a bubble yet Rory who's over at rafi it smells like a bubble it looks like a bubble but when you look at the mechanic when you look at the actual total dollars it's not a bubble rory who has a hinge recent Horowitz been said that that it's a boom not a bubble yeah so don't be confused it looks like bubbles and booms kind of look together the same right I actually I'm not quite sure I had the exact data right but here's the quick summary if you take a look at venture capital investment as a percent of GDP historically it's been something like point one percent of GDP in the bubble back in 99 it went to one percent something like it went 10x higher right now we're still at point one percent but since it's very much centered around the seed stage investing you see this frothiness in the sea but until that number goes from point 1 percent of GDP back up to one percent there's no real bubble because the tonnage of money hasn't come in yet and so so it's starting but this is what a tech boom feels like the early stages are excitement and lots of ideas and lots of flowers blooming and then the big money comes in because John I'll bet you're your brother and your sister and your mom haven't invested in a tech startup back in 99 video there's no public market that supports seven in a way that's a good and bad star basement yeah there's no fraud going on and most of the companies that are out there whether their lifestyle business or seed or bullpen funded are actually generating income the entrepreneur he has any earlier Mike was saying that he could a business deal so people are kind of like saw the old bubble and said shoot I don't want to do that again I gotta have at least revenue right and so companies didn't seem to start out with cash so you know that because you invested it but you know Pincus was getting some cash flow in the door from day one that's right that company was company was profitable the first day it started basically so talk about you know so I'm with Paul Martino by the way with bullpen capital entrepreneur wrote the patents on social networking which he sold the cisco when they sold the company now with bullpen capital huge dynamic you're a company out there this is exactly the positive dynamic you want to see because mainly you know dave mcclure jeff clavier mike maples have been kind of getting their butts handed to them in the press about super angels not having the juice to kind of go anywhere and it's been kind of a negative press there so you know this is the kind of void that's been filled by you guys to show the market that look at this there's a road map here so even though that the McClure's and clubs don't have big funds that there's a path to follow on financing so that the vc's can't shut them down and i've heard some pc say that so a lot of traditional venture guys would like to say that you know this little disruption we nipped it in the butt and it stopped after the seed stage but that's not the history of disruptions the history of disruptions are they start from the bottom then they get ecosystem support and then they grow and they disrupt the incumbents and I think we're halfway there so so the Angel gate thing that Arrington reported on was interesting because you know essentially what happened there it was a lot of him fighting Ron Conway I was not happy you can't be happy about competition I mean this is competition that increases prices right so you know in the short term prices have been inflated on valuations true or false that's true but but but I think I think the whole way angel gate was reported was absurd the most Pro entrepreneurial venture people perhaps in the history of the business are the guys who were supposedly at those tables I mean mike maples Jeff claw VA josh cop and Ron Conway fired his guy that was there I I understand suppose again suppose a key are right these are the most Pro entrepreneurial venture guys in the history of the business so I think that turned into something that it never was yeah well I mean that's the thing you know good for content producers who want page views I got to create some drama and you know as you know SiliconANGLE doesn't have any banner ads on our site quick plug for us we are motivated by content not page views so thanks for coming in today no but seriously I mean there's a there's a black cloud over the super angels has been since Angel gate I've heard privately from VCS that super angels it's been kind of a scuttlebutt they're misaligned just rumors I completely overblown and you know their business model threatens the incumbents and you know someone needed someone needed a piece of fodder to start a you know start a techcrunch discussion right there's no doubt that the market is need in need of a new ecosystem for the early stage because individual angels traditionally were wealthy individuals but now you have people with more experience like yourselves and entrepreneurs from google and facebook etc coming out and doing some things okay so next topic more on a personal kind of professional note k last final question is I know you got to run appreciate your time you're a technologist a lot of folks don't know that you're hardcore computer science guy and our model southern angles computer science meet social science right in your wheelhouse so with that just kind of final parting question what gets you excited technically right now I mean I'll see you have roots in both comps I and social Iran Zynga's early investor roster you got a bullpen capital you're looking at a lot of deals outside of that you as a computer scientist geek mm-hmm what gets you jazz what do you see in the horizon that's not yet on the mega trend roster that kind of you can't put your finger on it truly we might really get a good feeling well so I think you'll be disappointed with this answer because I think it's now cross the chasm to start being one of those mega trends it's called consumerization of enterprise and that's now the buzz word for it but what is it really mean and why do I think it's for real look you've got cool self-service applications for everything you can go do home banking by logging into a portal you can go to an ATM you can go do these things but you know go bring a new laptop into your big stodgy fortune 500 company and you know it's like getting a rectal exam right you know we got to install this we got to give you this private key yet that's TSA it writes like going through TSA exact idea that IT inside of big fortune 500 companies is going to stop being this gatekeeper to new technology I think look how long do you think it'll be until pick your favorite fortune 500 company the IT people know how to deal with the ipad 2 but how many people bought an ipad 2 into the off already everyone and so this to me is going to be the big next deck the next decade are going to be self service offerings for the enterprise getting around a very frustrating gatekeepers inside of you know the IT department etc and that's going to lead to an awesome boom of everything from security to auditing to compliance etc that's the convergence question Paul Martino my friend entrepreneur great guy venture capitals now on the good side helping the seed Super Angel micro VCS great to have you consumerization of IT that hits the cloud mobile social it's everything so that I was buzzword compliant on that great job great to have you know you're busy got to have you in again thanks so much for time that's a wrap thank you very much great thank you John