(electronic music) (background party chatter) >> All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Cube. Coming up, Bryan Talebi will be here with Ahura A.I? >> Ahura A.I. >> Ahura A.I. Bryan Talebi here with Ahura A.I. We are at The Cube post party networking event, special on the ground, extended coverage. Bryan, we were at The Futurist, not The Futurist Conference, The Future of Blockchain which was the Monaco Crypto Summit over at the Grimaldi Center. Now we're at the VIP gala, the prince is here, a lot of action's happening. You had a chance to look all the presentations we have all the heavy hitters here, kind of a movement going on, right? >> Absolutely. Well, first of all, I think it's absolutely amazing that Prince Albert II put this all together. He obviously understands the future and understands technology. It's absolutely brilliance. And Julio as well, I mean is incredible. So I take off my hat to all the people that put this event together and the speakers were brilliant. I mean, did you see all the speakers the technologies that they've built have the potential to radically transform billions of people's lives. >> It's interesting, you know, I've been covering crypto for a very long time and watched it emerge and then start exploding. And there's always been, and I saw this with the web too early on, legit versus not legit. And all early markets have the hype cycles go down and up, and you always kind of have that but now you're starting to see legitimate tie-in between physical digital assets where, and the confluence of the business value, societal value, government value, all across the spectrum. Every vertical, every use case is got a decentralized vibe going on right now because it's a forcing function. And, and here in Monaco, the price and the king they're leaning into it cause I think they see the future because they could answer their legacy. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And look, you're absolutely right about this because this downturn that we're facing, especially this new crypto winter, I think is the best thing that could possibly have happened to the crypto space because what it's doing is pushing out the let's call them the less than honest brokers within the crypto community, the people that were just in it for a buck, the pump and dumpers and so forth it's really pushing those folks out. And the companies that remain are the true technologists that aren't looking at crypto as just a speculative asset, but rather an underlying technology that can transform the way that we engage with the world in a decentralized way. >> Bryan, you know, we didn't mention in the intro but you also do investment. >> I do. >> You also have a lot of things going on. You got a great history, great pedigree of seeing the waves of innovation the best. That's something, an investment question, like are you in it for the money or are you in it for the make it happen mission? That becomes kind of like the probing question. Someone comes to the table, "Hey, I need some cash. We do funding." What's your exit strategy? "I want to make an exit in two years." Okay. You're out. (Bryan laughs) (John) But it's almost that easy now, right? >> Sure. >> (John) To figure out who's in it for the money. >> Sure. >> (John) Who's in it for the mission. Yeah, the mission's successful. You make a lot of money. >> That's exactly right. Look, one of my mentors once taught me is, money like power is only amassed in great amount if indirectly sought because money by itself is not intrinsically a motivator. And so, what we do at our AB+ Ventures, my venture capital fund, is we only invest, not only in companies that are impact driven and have the capacity to impact a billion people, but we invest in founders that are climbing their third or fourth mountain. So these are people who've already made their money. They either had a couple big exits at over a hundred million dollars or they became rock stars or they became astronauts. They did things where they achieved the highest levels of achievement. And now are building technologies because they believe that they're going to impact the world in a meaningful way. >> They kind of know it's important, right? They made some money, they've been successful. They have scar tissue and experience to apply almost I want to say for the legacy of it, but more for value. >> Yeah. >> For everybody. >> Absolutely. >> All right. So I got to ask about what your current venture, I know you got some good action going on. It's growing pretty good. As they say in golf, it's middle of the fairway. It's growing, got momentum. It's a turbine market. You probably has some offers on the table. I mean, I could imagine all the AI you got going on. Blockchain, very attracted. It's a hard problem, but it's the first inning. Not even. >> Yeah. >> What going on with the company? >> We're very early. Look, we've been building our technologies, the deep tech platform we've been building for four and a half years. There's a whole bunch of offers on the table to buy us. But look, the reality is right now is a fantastic hiring opportunity. There's a lot of amazing talent out there that now wants to come to us, which is great. Number one, number two, if you look back to the 2000 Dot-com bubble, what you saw is all of the companies that didn't really solve real problems went away and it left a more oxygen in the room for the companies that were really solving problems that needed to be solved. And those are now all trillion dollar companies. So, >> Well, Brian, you and I both got a little gray hair. So let's talk about the Dot-com bubble. The other thing, I'll add to that, by the way great commentary, is that everything that was like bullshit actually happened. People bought pet food online, >> Right. >> Groceries delivered to their house. So to your point, the things actually happen. See the visions and the aspirations were correct, timing and capital markets spree. >> Sure. >> Is there similarities going on in crypto? Is it the crypto winter, weeding out those pretenders? Is that what you're saying? >> Well, there's definitely a lot of similarities there but if you look at the example that you use, right, pets.com versus Amazon, people are still buying pet food online. I buy all my pet supplies for my two puppies online. However, if you look at the reason that Amazon works is because of their supply chain and the innovations that they created on being able to deliver anything to you within a day or two days in an extremely cost effective manner. It wasn't just because they had a website and they did some hand wavy stuff to say isn't this a good idea. You actually have to have the underlying operational capability and innovation from a technology standpoint to make it happen. And so, when we talk about crypto over the past number of years, and I've been in the crypto space for a long time, as you have there's been a lot of hand wavy stuff. There's been a lot of people like, "wouldn't this be a good idea?" but then you have the true operators that are able to find the underlying competitive advantages that actually make it work. And that's what I'm interested in. >> I'd love to get your thoughts on that. First of all, great point if you look at like, I was just commentating earlier I was asked the question what I think, and I said, well, I do a lot of lot of reporting and analysis on cloud computing. I watch what Amazon Web Service has done from many, many years ago. And all the followers now. Scale data, higher level services, they're all happening and it's creating a lot of value. Okay? That's going to come to crypto. And so, okay, the dots aren't connected there yet, but you've got this, but one of the things that has proven to be a success criteria, ecosystems. When you have enabling technology like DigitalBits, for instance, is kind the main powering of this ecosystem here, the value that's being created on top of it has to be a step function or multiple of the cost or operational cost to deploy the platform. Okay, so that's kind of in concert with everyone else. You product decentralized, what's your thoughts on that? Because now you have a lot of potential ecosystems that could connect together cause there's no one centralized ecosystem. >> (Bryan) Absolutely. >> But what is, what, how do you get that? How do you square that circle? So to speak. What's your take on that? How does ecosystems play into defi, decentralization, de-apps blockchain? >> So what you really talking about is interoperable, right? So again, if we use an analogy, if we look back to the late nineties, when Web 1.0 was really flourishing and then in the 2000s where everybody created their own websites, people went to the world wide web, but every company had their own website. They had their own social media platform. They had their entire Salesforce platform or what have you. So everyone had their entire separate organization. And so, I suspect that the future of crypto is going to be very similar, where there's going to be a bunch of different metaverses, a bunch of different ecosystems, but someone's going to come along, and I think there's a number of people on the back end that are actually working on this, Some of them are really brilliant, that are going to create an interoperable mechanism for people that jump from metaverse to metaverse from chain to chain in a completely easy experience from a user experience standpoint where you don't have to have a PhD in crypto, so to speak, that doesn't exist, but you don't have to have that level. >> Well, if you're working on crypto for the past five years you've got a PhD. >> Basically. >> The thesis is, you're still alive producing. (Brian laughs) Well, that's a good point. So I'm looking for like, this defacto enabler, right? Because TCP/IP was an example in the old days, you know, the levels of the stack that never, TCP/IP is part of the OSI model. It's just interconnect. That layer, nothing got above it, was open. It was just hard and top that TCP/IP the rest was all standard. Ethernet, token ring add that data layer and then cards. That worked, the industry could galvanize around that. I'm waiting for the crypto moment now, where, what is going to be that cloud (indistinct), Kubernetes and service matches and whatnot. What, is there anything on the horizon that you see that has that kind of coalescent ecosystem, let's get, if we all get behind this, we all win. Rather than chasing crumbs. >> Sure. >> You know, the bigger pie, rising tide, all that stuff. >> Well, so I think there's a really interesting analogy from a couple of hundred years ago on this. So most people don't realize that when the United States first had their railroad system which was the innovative infrastructure play at the time each state or each region had their own systems they had different size railroad. So what would happen if you were trying to ship a bunch of grain from one part of the country to the other you would take it by a train. You get to a train station, you'd have to take everything off, put it on a different train, on a different set of train tracks. You would go a couple states over. You'd have to do that again, go a couple states over. You have to do that again. Eventually what happened is the federal government came in and said, hey, we need to create a system of policies around one set of rules for all trains and all logistics across the country. And so, I do think there's a role for governments to come together, along with the operators and the companies to work collaboratively together to say, hey, what are the regulations? What are the rules of the road? How do we make sure we get all the scam artists out of the system? How do we create a system that actually works for everybody? Now, there's always dangers there, right? You have regulatory capture. Sometimes the government, oftentimes they're slow, they don't understand the technology. So they come down with a heavy hand. And so if it's done properly, and it's not just the United States alone, by the way, it's all the countries in the world. Now at this point, it's a global effort. >> There's money involved, too. >> Exactly. But if we are able to bring together people that are much smarter than me from the public and private sectors as well as the nonprofit sectors, together to come up with one set of rules I think that will enable crypto to massively expand across the entire globe. >> What are you passionate about right now? I know you got the investment fund for, you know, helping society and the planet, you get your project with your startup company, AI is in a hot area. What's going on? What's your top goals for the year? >> So there's two things. Number one, my company, Ahura A.I. is my baby. It's where I spend 70, 80 hours a week. We invent a technology that enables people to learn three to five times faster than traditional education. >> (John) Is that so? >> Because I believe that education is the first step. It's the first variable, that impacts all of the sustainable development goals, impacts the world in a very real way. >> And you're not wearing your UA pin. >> I'm not wearing my pin, I always point to it. >> I wanted to grab it, I saw it earlier. >> But then the second thing I'm super focused on is existential risk. Look, so I throw a lot of events where I bring together four categories of people, CEOs of impact driven companies, investors, whether they're VCs or billionaires or family offices, global experts, and celebrities that want to use their influence for good in the world. And one of the speakers that I had at one of my events is a guy at Stanford who runs their lab on existential risk and what he told the group, and what he told me, is according to Stanford and all the researchers, there's a one in six chance that we're all going to go extinct by 2050. One in six, that's a dice roll. And so to me, the most important thing I can do is bring people together that have capacity, have resources, have capabilities, to address these drivers of existential risk because selfishly, I don't want to live in a dystopian Hellscape. >> Exactly, yeah. Bryan, thanks for coming on. We're going to get back into dinner. Great to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> The Cube after dark, extended hours. Look at us, we're going the whole day. VIP gala, Prince Albert, the team, DigitalBits, The Cube, all here at the Yacht Club in Monaco. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back to Vegas guys, Lisa Martin and Dave Lanta here wrapping up our coverage of day two of snowflake summit. We have given you a lot of content in the last couple of days. We've had a lot of great conversations with snowflake folks with their customers and with partners. And we have an alumni back with us. Please. Welcome back to the queue. Mike Palmer, CEO of Sigma computing. Mike. It's great to see you. >>Thanks for having me. And I guess again >>Exactly. >>It's fantastic me. >>So talk to the audience about Sigma before we get into the snowflake partnership and what you guys are doing from a technical perspective, give us that overview of the vision and some of the differentiators. >>Sure. You know, you've over the last 12 years, companies have benefited from enormous investments and improvements in technology in particular, starting with cloud technologies, obviously going through companies like snowflake, but in terms of the normal user, the one that makes the business decision in the marketing department and the finance team, you know, in the works in the back room of the supply chain, doing inventory very little has changed for those people. And the time had come where the data availability, the ability to organize it, the ability to secure it was all there, but the ability to access it for those people was not. And so what Sigma's all about is taking great technology, finding the skillset they have, which happens to be spreadsheets. There are billion license spreadsheet users in the world and connecting that skillset with all of the power of the cloud. >>And how do you work with snowflake? What are some of the, the what's the joint value proposition? >>How are they as an investor? That's what I wanna know. Ah, >>Quiet, which is the way we like them. No, I'm just kidding. Snowflake is, well, first of all, investment is great, but partnership is even better. Right. You know, and I think snowflake themselves are going through some evolution, but let's start with the basics of technology where this all starts because you know, all of the rest doesn't matter if the product is not great, we work directly on snowflake. And what that means is as an end user, when I, when I sit on that marketing team and I want to understand and, and connect, how did I get a, a customer where I had a pay to add? And they showed up on my website and from my website, they went to a trial. And from there, they touched a piece of syndicated contents. All of that data sits in snowflake and I, as a marketer, understand what it means to me. >>So for the first time, I want to be able to see that data in one place. And I want to understand conversion rates. I want to understand how I can impact those conversion rates. I can make predictions. What that user is doing is going to, to Sigma accessing live data in snowflake, they're able to ask ad hoc questions, questions that were never asked questions, that they don't exist in a filter that were never prepped by a data engineer. So they could truly do something creative and novel in a very independent sort of way. And the connection with Snowflake's live data, the performance, the security and governance that we inherit. These are all facilitators to really expand that access across the enterprise. So at, at a product level, we were built by a team of people, frankly, that also were the original investors in snowflake by two amazing engineers and founders, Rob will and Jason France, they understood how snowflake worked and that shows up in the product for our end customers. >>So, but if I may just to follow up on that, I mean, you could do that without snowflake, but what, it would be harder, more expensive. Describe what you'd have to go through to accomplish that outcome. >>And I think snowflake does a good job of enabling the ecosystem at large. Right. But you know, you always appreciate seeing early access to understand what the architecture's going to look like. You know, some of the things that I will, you know, leaning forward that we've heard here that we're very excited about is snowflake going to attack the TP market, right? The transactional market, one of the transactional database market. I, yeah. Right. You know, one of the things that we see coming, and, and one of the bigger things that we'll be talking about in Sigma is not just that you can do analytics out of snowflake. I think that's something that we do exceptionally well on an ad hoc basis, but we're gonna be the first that allow you to write into snowflake and to do that with good performance. And to do that reliably, we go away from OAP, which is the terminology for data warehousing. >>And we go toward transactional databases. And in that world, understanding snowflake and working collaboratively with them creates again, a much better experience for the end customer. So they, they allow us into those programs, even coming to these conferences, we talk to folks that run the industry teams, trying to up level that message and not just talk database and, and analytics, but talk about inventory management. How do we cut down the gap that exists between POS systems and inventory ordering, right? So that we get fewer stockouts, but also that we don't overorder. So that's another benefit, >>Strong business use cases. >>That's correct. >>And you're enabling those business users to have access to that data. I presume in near real time or near real time, so that they can make decisions that drive marketing forward or finance forward or legal >>Forward. Exactly. We had a customer panel yesterday. An example of that go puff is hopefully most of the viewers are familiar with, as a delivery company. This is a complicated business to run. It's run on the fringes. When we think about how to make money at it, which means that the decisions need to be accurate. They need to be real time. You can't have a batch upload for delivery when they're people are on the street, and then there's an issue. They need to understand the exact order at that time, not in 10 minutes, not from five minutes ago, right. Then they need to understand, do I have inventory in the warehouse when the order comes in? If they don't, what's a replacement product. We had a Mike came in from go puff and walked us through all of the complexity of that and how they're using Sigma to really just shorten those decision cycles and make them more accurate. You know, that's where the business actually benefits and, >>And actually create a viable business model. Cuz you think back to the early, think back to the.com days and you had pets.com, right? They couldn't make any money. Yeah. Without chewy. Okay. They appears to be a viable business model. Right? Part of that is just the efficiencies. And it's sort of a, I dunno if those are customers that they may or may not be, but they should be if they're not >>Chewy is, but okay. You know, and that's another example, but I'll even pivot to the various REI and other retailers. What do they care about cohorts? I'm trying to understand who's buying my product. What can I sell to them next? That, that idea of again, I'm sitting in a department, that's not data engineering, that's not BI now working collaboratively where they can get addend engineer, putting data sets together. They have a BI person that can help in the analytics process. But now it's in a spreadsheet where I understand it as a marketer. So I can think about new hierarchies. I wanna know it by customer, by region, by product type. I wanna see it by all of those things. I want to be able to do that on the fly because then it creates new questions that sort of flow. If you' ever worked in development, we use the word flow constantly, right? And as people that flow is when we have a question, we get an answer that generates a question. We have, we just keep doing that iteratively. That that is where Sigma really shines for them. >>What does a company have to do to really take advantage of, of this? I, if they're kind of starting from a company that's somewhat immature, what are the sort of expectations, maybe even outta scope expectations so they can move faster, accelerate analytics, a lot of the themes that we've heard today, >>What does an immature company is actually even a question in, in and of itself? You know, I think a lot of companies consider themselves to be immature simply because for various constraint reasons, they haven't leveraged the data in the way that they thought possible. Good, >>Good, good definition. Okay. So not, not, >>Not, I use this definition for digital transformation. It very simple. It is. Do you make better decisions, faster McKenzie calls this corporate metabolism, right? Can you speed up the metabolism of, of an enterprise and for me and for the Sigma customer base, there's really not much you have to do once. You've adopted snowflake because for the first time the barriers and the silos that existed in terms of accessing data are gone. So I think the biggest barrier that customers have is curiosity. Because once you have curiosity and you have access, you can start building artifacts and assets and asking questions. Our customers are up and running in the product in hours. And I mean that literally in hours, we are a user in snowflake, that's a direct live connection. They are able to explore tables, raw. They can do joins themselves if they want to. They can obviously work with their data engineering team to, to create data sets. If that's the preferred method. And once they're there and they've ever built a pivot table, they can be working in Sigma. So our customers are getting insights in the first one to two days, you referenced some, those of us are old enough to remember pest.com. Also old enough to remember shelfware that we would buy. We are very good at showing customers that within hours they're getting value from their investment in Sigma. And that, that just creates momentum, right? Oh, >>Tremendous momentum and >>Trust and trust and expansion opportunities for Sigma. Because when you're in one of those departments, someone else says, well, you know, why do you get access to that data? But I don't, how are you doing this? Yeah. So we're, you know, I think that there's a big movement here. People, I often compare data to communication. If you go back a hundred years, our communication was not limited. As it turns out by our desire to communicate, it was limited by the infrastructure. We had the typewriter, a letter and the us postal service and a telephone that was wired. And now we have walk around here. We, everything is, is enabled for us. And we send, you know, hundreds and thousands of messages a day and probably could do more. You will find that is true. And we're seeing it in our product is true of data. If you give people access, they have 10 times as many questions as they thought they had. And that's the change that we're gonna see in business over the next few years, >>Frank Salman's first book, what he was was CEO of snowflake was rise of the data cloud. And he talked about network effects. Basically what he described was Metcalf's law. Again, go back to the.com days, right? And he, Bob Metcalf used the phone system. You know, if there's two people in the phone system, it's not that valuable, right. >>You know, exactly, >>You know, grow it. And that's where the value is. And that's what we're seeing now applied to data. >>And even more than that, I think that's a great analogy. In fact, the direct comparison to what Sigma is doing actually goes one step beyond everything that I've been talking about, which is great at the individual level, but now the finance team and the marketing team can collaborate in the platform. They can see data lineage. In fact, one of our, our big emphasis points here is to eliminate the sweet products. You know, the ones where, you know, you think you're buying something, but you really have a spreadsheet product here and a document product there and a slide product over there. And they, you know, you can do all of that in Sigma. You can write a narrative. You can real time live, edit on numbers. You, you know, if you want to, you could put a picture in it. But you know, at Sigma we present everything out of our product. Every meeting is live data. Every question is answered on the spot. And that's when, you know, you know, to your point about met cap's law. Now everybody's involved in the decision making. They're doing it real time. Your meetings are more productive. You have fewer of them because they're no action items, right. We're answering our questions there and we're, and we're moving forward. >>You know, view were meeting sounds good. Productivity is, is weird now with the, the pandemic. But you know, if you go back to the nineties here am I'm, I'm dating myself again, but that's okay. You know, you, you didn't see much productivity going on when the PC boom started in the eighties, but the nineties, it kicked in and pre pandemic, you know, productivity in the us and Europe anyway has been going down. But I feel like Mike, listen to what you just described. I, how many meetings have we been in where people are arguing about them numbers, what are the assumptions on the numbers wasting so much time? And then nothing gets done and they, then they, they bolt cut that away and you drive in productivity. So I feel like we're on a Renaissance of productivity and a lot of that's gonna be driven by, by data. Yeah. And obviously communications the whole 5g thing. We'll see how that builds out. But data is really the main spring of, I think, a new, new Renaissance in productivity. >>Well, first of all, if you could find an enterprise where you ask the question, would you rather use your data better? And they say, no, like, you know, show me, tell me that I'll short their stock immediately. But I do agree. And I, unfortunately I have a career history in that meeting that you just described where someone doesn't like, what you're showing them. And their first reaction is to say, where'd you get that data? You know, I don't trust it. You know? So they just undermined your entire argument with an invalid way of doing so. Right. When you walk into a meeting with Sigma where'd, where'd you get that data? I was like, that's the live data right now? What question do you want answer >>Lineage, right. Yeah. And you know, it's a Sen's book about, you know, gotta move faster. I mean, this is an example of just cutting through making decisions faster because you're right. Mike and the P the P and L manager in a meeting can, can kill the entire conversation, you know, throw FUD at it. Yeah. You know, protect his or her agenda. >>True. But now to be fair to the person, who's tended to do that. Part of the reason they've done that is that they haven't had access to that data before the meeting and they're getting blindsided. Right. So going back to the collaboration point. Yes. Right. The fact we're coming to this discussion more informed in and of itself takes care of some of that problem. Yeah. >>For sure. And if, and if everybody then agrees, we can move on and now talk about the really important stuff. Yeah. That's good. It >>Seems to me that Sigma is an enabler of that curiosity that you mentioned that that's been lacking. People need to be able to hire for that, but you've got a platform that's going here. You go ask >>Away. That's right in the we're very good. You know, we love being a SaaS platform. There's a lot of telemetry. We can watch what we call our mouse to Dows, you know, which is our monthly average users to our daily average users. We can see what level of user they are, what type of artifacts they build. Are they, you know, someone that creates things from scratch, are they people that tend to increment them, which by the way, is helpful to our customers because we can then advise them, Hey, here's, what's really going on. You might wanna work with this team over here. They could probably be a little better of us using the data, but look at this team over here, you know, they've originated five workbooks in the last, you know, six days they're really on it. There's, there's, you know, that ability to even train for the curiosity that you're referring to is now there, >>Where are your customer conversations? Are they at the lines of business? Are they with the chief data officer? What does that look like these days? >>Great question. So stepping back a bit, what, what is Sigma here to do? And, and our first phase is really to replace spreadsheets, right? And so one of the interesting things about the company is that there isn't a department where a spreadsheet isn't used. So Sigma has an enormous Tam, but also isn't necessarily associated with any particular department or any particular vertical. So when we tend to have conversations, it really depends on, you know, either what kind of investment are you making? A lot of mid-market companies are making best technology investments. They're on a public cloud, they're buying snowflake and they wanna understand what's, what's built to really make this work best over the next number of years. And those are very short sales for us because we, we prove that, you know, in, in minutes to hours, if you're working at a large enterprise and you have three or four other tools, you're asking a different question. >>And often you're asking a question of what I call exploration. We have a product that has dashboards and they've been working for us and we don't wanna replace the dashboard. But when we have a question about the data in the dashboard, we're stuck, how do we get to the raw data? How do we get to the example that we can actually manage? You can't manage a dashboard. You can't manage a trend line, but if you get into the data behind the trend line, you can make decisions to change business process, to change quality, accuracy, to change speed of execution. That is what we're trying to enable. Those conversations happen between the it team who runs technology and the business teams who are responsible for the decisions. So we are, you know, we have a cross departmental sale, but across every department, >>One of the things we're not talking about at this event, which is kind of interesting, cause it's all we've been talking about is the macro supply chain challenges, Ukraine, blah, blah, blah, and the stock market. But, but how are you thinking about that? Macro? The impacts you're seeing, you know, a lot of private companies being, you know, recapped, et cetera, you guys obviously very well funded. Yeah. But how do you think about, I mean, I asked Frank a similar question. He's like, look, it's a marathon. We don't worry about it. We, you know, they made the public market, they get 5 billion in cash. Yeah. Yeah. How are you thinking about it? >>You know, first of all, what's the expression, right? You never, never waste a good, you know, in this case recession, no, we don't have one yet, but the impetus is there, right. People are worried. And when they're worried, they're thinking about their bottom lines, they're thinking about where they're going to get efficiency and their costs. They're already dealing with the supply chain issues of inventory. We all have it in our personal lives. If you've ordered anything in the last six months, you're used to getting it in, you know, days to weeks. And now you're getting in months, you know, we had customers like us foods as a good example, like they're constantly trying to align inventory. They have with transportation that gets that inventory to their end customers, right? And they do that with better data accuracy at the end point, working with us on what we are launching. >>And I mentioned earlier, having more people be able to update that data creates more data, accuracy creates better decisions. We align that then with them and better collaboration with the folks that then coordinate the trucks with Prologis and the panel yesterday, they're the only commercial public company that reports their, their valuations on a quarterly basis. They work with Sigma to trim the amount of time it takes their finance team to produce that data that creates investor confidence that holds up your stock price. So I mean the, the importance of data relative to all the stakeholders in enterprise cannot be overstated. Supply chain is a great example. And yes, it's a marathon because a lot of the technology that drives supply chain is old, but you don't have to rip out those systems to put your data into snowflake, to get better access through Sigma, to enable the people in your environment to make better decisions. And that's the good news. So for me, while I agree, there's a marathon. I think that most of the, I dunno if I could continue this metaphor, but I think we could run quite far down that marathon without an awful lot of energy by just making those couple of changes. >>Awesome. Mike, this has been fantastic. Last question. I, I can tell, I know a lot of growth for Sigma. I can feel it in your energy alone. What are some of the key priorities that you're gonna be focusing on for the rest of the year? >>Our number one priority, our number two priority and number three priority are always build the best product on the market, right? We, we want customers to increase usage. We want them to be delighted. You know, we want them to be RA. Like we have customers at our booth that walk up and it's like, you're building a great company. We love your product. I, if you want to show up happy at work, have customers come up proactively and tell you how your products changed their life. And that is, that is the absolute, most important thing because the real marathon here is that enablement over the long term, right? It is being a great provider to a bunch of great companies under that. We are growing, you know, we've been tripling the company for the fast few years, every year, that takes a lot of hiring. So I would've alongside product is building a great culture with bringing the best people to the company that I guess have my energy level. >>You know, if you could get paid in energy, we would've more than tripled it, you know, but that's always gonna be number two, where we're focused on the segment side, you know, is really the large enterprise customer. At this point, we are doing a great job in the mid-market. We have customer, we have hundreds of customers in our free trial on a constant basis. I think that without wanting to seem over confident or arrogant, I think our technology speaks for itself and the product experience for those users, making a great ROI case to a large enterprise takes effort. It's a different motion. We're, we're very committed to building that motion. We're very committed to building out the partner ecosystem that has been doing that for years. And that is now coming around to the, the snowflake and all of the ecosystem changes around snowflake because they've learned these customers for decades and now have a new opportunity to bring to them. How do we enable them? That is where you're gonna see Sigma going over the next couple of years. >>Wow, fantastic. Good stuff. And a lot of momentum, Mike, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about Sigma, the momentum, the flywheel of what you're doing with snowflake and what you're enabling customers to achieve the massive business outcomes. Really cool stuff. >>Thank you. And thank you for continuing to give us a platform to do this and glad to be back in conferences, doing it face to face. It's fantastic. >>It it's the best. Awesome. Mike, thank you for Mike Palmer and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube hopefully all day. We've been here since eight o'clock this morning, Pacific time giving you wall the wall coverage of snowflake summit 22 signing off for today. Dave and I will see you right bright and early tomorrow morning. I will take care guys.

(upbeat music) >> Hello there and welcome to a special Cube conversation here at The Cube's Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier. Join with me for this special Cube Conference, Stu Miniman with Wikibon and The Cube co-host as well just up at Amazon Web Services Summit. Stu, great to see you again. Our next guest is Ben Golub, who's the executive chairman and interim CEO of Storj, pronounced storage. So it's a really hot cryptocurrency, blockchain based storage solution. I should say decentralized storage, not necessarily cryptocurrency, but tokens are involved, encryption. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, it's good to be back. >> Formerly Docker CEO and now advising at Mayfield Fund as a venture partner and also interim CEO of a hot-- >> Yeah really exciting company. And I'm really excited to talk to you about it today. >> So let's just jump into it. So obviously the ICO craze is awesome and we've always speculated that the blockchain and the decentralized applications are coming is going to be the real action. But yet it's going to create efficiencies where there's inefficiencies. >> Sure. >> Venture capital is one of them and that's why the ICO craze is going. People are raising a boatload of money that they probably wouldn't have gotten that amount. >> Wouldn't have gotten, yeah no dilution, things like that. It's interesting yeah. >> So give us an update on Storj or storage. How much in ICO did they raised, whitepapers out there? It's peer to peer, give a quick, take a minute to explain what the company's doing. >> Yeah well I guess that I should probably start by saying that I think that blockchain is bigger than just cryptocurrency, and decentralized is bigger than blockchain, and Storj is primarily a decentralized storage company. So we're about decentralized apps and the whole thing would absolutely work even if we were just using dollars. But I think it does make it a whole lot more exciting. And so the company, kind of unique in the crypto space in that we actually had a running service that was providing real value, before we did the large token sale. And the token sale raised about $30 million. Fortunately they took about 10 of that in Ethereum and Bitcoin which rose up. So there's a good deal more than that in the bank account right now. >> John: Hopefully they converted to fiat currency. >> And then they converted to fiat along the way. >> It's at an all-time high of $20,000 right now. It's like $7,000, something like that. >> Yeah, so you know, didn't sell everything at the peak, but didn't sell at the-- >> Yeah, so we've been having many blockchain and crypto or token-based economic kind of things. But the real question is what's happening? Now we know the action's been on the infrastructure side. We look at all the top hedge funds, Polychain, amongst others. They love these deals because it's infrastructure. Is that where the action is and how are you guys looking at that because at the same time, there's a wave of decentralized applications also known as Dapps coming on. So there's a relationship going on between how fast the infrastructure can go, and then how applications are going to work with either on chain or off chain dynamics. >> Sure, sure. So maybe it would be helpful to give you a sense of what it is that we do. 'Cause I think that if you do that, then I think it makes sense in the context of decentralized infrastructure, decentralized apps, but also actually traditional infrastructure as well. I've always been searching for a company that I could describe at Thanksgiving. I've never succeeded, so I always end up saying that I'm in computers, and fixing somebody's printer. (laughing) But I guess if I were to describe Storj at Thanksgiving, I'd say it's basically the Airbnb of storage, or the Airbnb of disc drives. So Airbnb, people have lots of condos or vacation properties that aren't being used all the time, and so Airbnb brings them together with people who want to rent those, and they're the largest hotel company in the world, without owning a single property. And we're kind of doing the same thing with Storj, in that there is, first of all, this explosion in the amount of data that's getting created. It would fill a stack of CD-ROMs to Mars and back this year. Yet the price of cloud storage hasn't come down. And 90% of all the disc drives that are out there are only about 10% utilized. So seems like a problem that needs a solution. And that's what we've done. We've basically brought together a very large network of individuals and companies that have spare storage capacity and matched them up with people who need storage. The really cool aspect, there are many cool aspects about it, but one of them is that basically if you want to store on the Storj network, we take your file, you encrypt it, so we never hold the keys. You encrypt it, it's all scrambled up, we break it up into between 20 and 80 pieces, and we spread those out across 150,000 or so nodes that we have in our network. So it's super cheap, but it's also super secure. Great performance because the data's way out at the edge. And super available because there's no storm or power outage or idiot tripping over a power cord that can take out your storage. >> So, Ben, you touched on, first question I was going to ask, of course, trust and security. Storage I absolutely have to worry about, so it sounds like that's at the core, but there's a number of dynamics going on in the industry. Object storage was great, let's spread it out, let's make it more decentralized, but most of the core storage industry is speeds and feeds and latency's super important, and even when you start getting to distributed architecture, I worry about that latency. So what are kind of the use cases, what are some of the key customer issues? Is price a big piece of it? Or what solutions does Storj solve that others can't? >> I always said when I was at Cluster, which was a storage company that there were four things that mattered in storage. There's certainly price; there was security; as in I don't want anybody to be able to access it; there's availability, I never want to drop or lose files; and finally there's performance, how fast I can get it. And so for a huge range of use cases that involve files, basically everything that object storage is kind of used for today, the design of our system is actually much better because we've encrypted it locally and then spread it out, you really can't attack it. First of all, you'd have to figure out... So a would-be attacker who wanted to find one of your files in the storage network would have to figure out which of the 80 or the 20 nodes out of 150,000 it's located on. If they found one of those, and they got the small portion of the file that's there, they wouldn't be able to do anything with it 'cause it's encrypted. Even if they were somehow able to decrypt it by stealing the key from you, not from us... >> So encryption and immutability... >> And immutability, right. So you get all of that. So for the security piece, it's great. For the availability piece, I never lose a file. It's really, really good, because if you just look at the math, the chances that somehow... You can basically lose 10 out of 20 nodes and still be able to recover your files. And all of our nodes are run by different people, different power supply. >> So let's take a step back. How many nodes are on the network now, you said? >> 150,000 now, run by 70,000 farmers, is what we call them. They're not miners, 'cause they're not just solving that problem, they're just producing something of value. 70,000 farmers, and then we have on the network right now, over 50 petabytes of data, which is a really large amount, and yet, we don't run a single data center. >> Have you guys raised any venture at all, or is it all ICO proceeds? >> There was a small seed round that was done, before the ICO craze. But other than that, it's all-- >> And how many people are working on the company? >> 25. >> So you guys are a classic startup. The working product, how does that look now? Is it on the blockchain, is it off the chain, how's it working, Bitcoin? >> So I've described to you what the product does. So far nothing I've described to you involves blockchain. The way the economics work is that as a user, somebody who wants to store on our network, we quote a price in dollars. You can either pay us in dollars or in the Storj token, and as a farmer, you get compensated with a Storj token. And that's done, of course, using blockchain we're actually part of Ethereum. >> Is that ERC-20 token? >> ERC-20 token, yeah. There are also interesting things that we are working on using blockchain for things like you just mentioned, data integrity, so I can make sure that if I'm doing a snapshot of a database, and I want to make sure that it's exactly what it is, nobody can tamper with it, et cetera, then that's a perfect use of blockchain. But using blockchain for the stuff I was talking about before, like figuring out where the shards are and making sure that they're uptime and reliable, that's actually stuff where blockchain isn't the best answer. >> Ben, tell us a little bit about the customers that you find there, 'cause storage administrators, that role's been changing a lot, but the typical storage administrator, if you tell them, "Oh yeah, I'm doing some distributed thing, "somewhere else, and paying in crypto-currency," they'd be like, are you kidding me? I want this thing that I can lock and hold and guard with a gun. >> This is like anything else, there's an adoption curve, and right now it's clearly very much early adopters. And actually similarly to Docker and similar to the cloud in general, it's developers who are leading the way. Developers are saying, oh, wow, I can write to the storage network in the same way that I would have written to S3, only it's cheaper, for many use cases, more performing, and not centralized, so I'm not trusting one cloud provider. So for certain use cases, this is fantastic. >> Are there certain cloud native apps that you're finding have strong affinity here? >> Yeah, so basically what we have affinity with right now, and let's be clear, this is early days. I wouldn't recommend that people store their most sensitive data on this, but-- >> Not Oracle certified yet, is what you're saying? >> We're not Oracle certified, no. (laughing) Basically anything involving a large file that you're not writing to very frequently, but you're reading a lot, or that's getting read by lots of people around the world, we're a really good solution. It's one of the things I think I mentioned to you. So we've got 150,000 nodes. They're located in I think it's now 180 countries, and all over the U.S. So if you want to get your data close to the edge, the people who are consuming your data are really close to the edge, this is actually really good. And because it's spread across so many, you get the benefit of parallelism, so it's super fast, in addition to being super safe and super secure. >> How does it work for the farmers? Because we have video files, so we would love to spread our video files on the Storj network. So let's just say... >> I'd do a special deal for you, too, you know. >> Of course, yeah, get a little token action going on both sides, Cube coins. But the availability thing is concerning. Whose computers is it being stored on? Is it extra capacity? Is it servers? Is it people's home computers? What's the, is it that kind of model? >> Sure, so basically yeah, we, just as Airbnb measures reputation, we measure reputation, too. And so if you don't have a good reputation, certain characteristics, we won't send data to you. What it basically means is you've got to have dedicated hardware and a dedicated connection. So we do have people who are running things in their home, but it's not a laptop, it's not on your phone. But if you have a disc drive that's connected with reasonably high capacity and reasonably well connected, then you'll establish good reputation. But what we are seeing is we are seeing a lot of universities, a lot of small businesses, some data center operators who have spare capacity or just want to use us as like, be both a farmer and a user. So backup and get stuff on their capacity as a good idea. And interestingly enough, we also are getting a lot of people who were Bitcoin miners and bought equipment, which is good quality equipment, but there's such an arms race in doing that. >> So they abandoned, because it was too hard for them to get coins. >> It's too hard to make money, right, and very expensive, specialized equipment, and in our case, basically general high quality equipment works well. >> What's the profit model? How do the farmers make money? Take our Cube videos, as an example, so I'm paying you guys, and you're distributing those tokens? >> You're paying us and you're paying us either in dollars or tokens. And then farmers get compensated in tokens. Right now, about 60 cents on every dollar goes to farmers. And farmers get more storage based off of their reputation. We charge people based on both how much you're storing as well as how much bandwidth egress that you're doing, and we compensate farmers exactly the same way. >> It's handled through a consensus protocol that you guys have? >> Yeah, yeah, so the payment and assessing reputation we actually use good distributed blockchain as well there, right, so you're not counting on Storj to be in the middle there. Now, with the remaining 40 cents, which I think is actually the really interesting part, we keep some of that, we put some back into the network, but what I'm really excited about is that this is now a way for us to economically empower demand partners as well. The first thing we announced was FileZilla, but we have lots of other open source projects waiting in the wings, and we're happy to share with them. So as opposed to centralized cloud, where it's really hard to make money as an open source company, we're not an open source project in our case, right? We're happy if you're sending us users and data, to give you a really meaningful percentage. >> Any kind of freemium model you guys are playing with? I can imagine this being pretty interesting, because S3 democratized and lowered the cost barrier, obviously with cloud. >> S3 has been great for many things. >> How low are you in terms of the disruption? You guys are probably going to have to come in and undercut S3, is that the strategy? Or is that the price value? >> I think what I learned from my time in storage, is price is important but you have to be really safe and available and reliable, 'cause people's data is really important. But we looked across a pretty broad set of use cases, in comparing us to the traditional cloud providers we're probably a third. And we could go lower. What I think is really interesting in our case is that the economics just work really well. So from our perspective, if you're a farmer, you've already got, it's spare capacity, you don't need any more electricity to run this thing, you've got bandwidth, right? You don't need to hire any more people. So it's almost pure margin for a farmer, which is great for them. And so we can give economic value to farmers, we can give economic value to our customers, we can give economic value to partners. >> Any kind of economic models you can share in terms of what someone would make? Let's just say that I had this big music library that's not being used anymore, and I had a-- >> Well, as a customer of course, if you've got data that you want to store on our network, you'll save a lot of money, and it's probably a third of what you might pay. >> But is there any kind of, if I'm a farmer, I want to join the network? >> But if you're a farmer. >> How much am I going to make? >> It really depends on how much you're storing and how good your connection is, but as a farmer, I think you can make decent money. This could probably be I don't know off the top of my head, $20, $30 a month per drive, which isn't bad, and certainly much easier than making money-- >> So it kind of depends like the Airbnb model, depends how well you're using-- >> How well you're used. So some people earn less, some people earn more. And again, for most of the farmers, this is pure margin. >> Great, we got a couple back to back rooms, Stu. We should get some drives up there and get on board. We could pay for the cameras. >> And look, I think for videos, you guys would actually be a perfect use case with a lot of the stuff that's going to be coming out later this year. You get both storage and CDN like things for free, in the sense that because-- >> I'm really glad you brought that up, 'cause I want to ask you about Videocoin, 'cause Halsey Minor has Videocoin, another ICO, he raised $50 million. We covered that on Silicon Angle. But he's trying to democratize Acromi. Is that similar to what you guys are doing? >> I guess you could say yeah, we're further democratizing object storage, democratizing S3, but I think we can also democratize Acromi, we can democratize Isilon, there's certain other really exciting things that are-- >> What other services, you mentioned CDN, so it's not just storing the information, but that global dispersion, what does that enable? >> It used to be that people had a really big difference between archival which is slow, hard to get at, and CDN, right? And but actually, given the way that we're doing this thing, we can be pretty seamless. Pay archival for stuff that's staying in archival, but go up market if you're going to be having a lot of people read it. >> So I got to ask you about the, obviously, security. You're looking at it for additional services around redundancy, I can see that being a nice headroom for you. On a personal note, you've been involved in a lot of industry companies that have done very well, entrepreneurial success. >> Ben: Why am I doing this? (laughing) >> I can tell you're having fun. How could you not have fun, it's a whole 'nother generation of innovation, disruption coming, a whole 'nother price point. So what's it like, are you having fun? And if you could talk to your 22-year-old self right now, 'cause I wish I was 22 right now in this market-- >> Are you saying I'm not 22? >> How do you explain this? And when you go to parties, even in the Valley, and people say, "Man, you're crazy, it's a fricken' "scam out there," how do you explain to 'em this revolution? Because this is like a special, unique wave. How would you talk about that? >> Actually I describe it the same way to people in the Valley the same way that I described at the beginning, which is that blockchain is bigger than cryptocurrency, and decentralized is much bigger than blockchain. And Storj is first and foremost decentralized. It's about decentralized computing, decentralized storage, supporting decentralized apps, keeping the internet from ending up in the hands of just three people, three companies, which I think is really important. But also I feel very good that, to the extent that Storj does touch on cryptocurrency, that we've done it the right way. We had the service working first before we did the token sale. We raised what now appears to be a modest amount in the token sale, tried to be very transparent and at the forefront. >> You probably could've gotten more if you wanted to. >> Probably, right? But we were trying to be forefront in terms of governance and transparency, and I think that it'll probably be a good thing, just as it was kind of a good thing that the bubble burst in the late '90s and you got rid of a lot of such not great companies and not such great operators. I think that the current corrections, or whatever, in the crypto market I think will-- >> Like pets.com is gone, but DogeCoin still exists. (laughing) >> So I'm sure that somebody has a crypto base pets.com or webvan lurking in the wings somewhere. Kodak just did it. >> I got to ask you, you're super smart. You went to some really good schools, I think Princeton, Harvard Business School. So you got a good education, so I got to get your take on the whole token economics vision. 'Cause this is, if you look at outside the tech trends, there's actually new economic models that are coming out. Have you looked at token economics? New liquidity on the one side, you've got sovereignty, you've got consensus. These are not just tech issues, these are society issues. What's your vision around that? How are you viewing it? What's the upside? How is this shaping the future? >> Yeah, I think if you're a token network, you sort of have to have some central bank chops as well, right? And we actually have a central banker. >> John: So you have a chief economic officer? >> So we don't, no, we have an advisor-- >> John: Public policy. >> I actually had a degree in public policy at one point. But we need to think about the token supply in the same way you'd think about the money supply. We're backed by something real, so it's sort of like having currencies backed by gold. We need to make sure that the market grows and the network grows. And my fundamental belief is that the more the network grows, the more people use it, the more value that we're able to provide, that'll be good for token economics in the long run. In the short run, though, what we've done, is again, we price based off of dollars, and we compensate farmers based off the token based off of the spot price. So for farmers, we've tried to remove any need to worry about volatility or things like that. >> So I want your reaction-- >> Or the price. >> I've said on The Cube multiple times that in the old days of venture startups, the CTO was everything. You had to have a great CTO or VP of engineering and great senior executive team on the entrepreneurial team. Now it's almost like the chief economic officer is a critical piece, 'cause you've got public policy intersecting with economics. You've got new kinds of math that's not technical algorithm but it's kind of business algorithms. >> It is, business algorithms. Just like any economy, the money supply matters. And people's trust in that money matters. And the supply matters. All that stuff like that, and stability matters. So I think absolutely this new breed of network based token companies will have to worry about that, and probably should think about a chief economics officer, but it doesn't mean that you don't also have to have a great CTO and great technology, 'cause that's how you make the network valuable and grow. And one of the reasons that gave me both excitement and comfort about going to Storj is that the economic model works, fundamentally, even if the crypto's not there. >> John: 'Cause technology is decentralized. >> Decentralized storage makes sense even if you're buying and selling it with dollars or pounds or rubles, or whatever. >> Ben, great to see you, thanks for coming in and sharing the Ben Golub School of Economics, Public Policy for Tokens. You can give a class at Stanford on that soon, although that's the competition's school. >> Maybe, yes. Slightly different. We still like them. >> Great to see you, congratulations. Storj, pronounced storage. Great, successful ICO, hot startup, really, an example of the infrastructure opportunities of a new decentralized infrastructure that can be and will soon, we think, it will be critical infrastructure in a whole new way. Great to see you. >> Ben: Really good to see you, great to be back with you. >> It's the Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)