>> From New York City, it's theCUBE! Covering Automation Anywhere Imagine, brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Midtown Manhattan at the Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019. We we're here last year, it was about 1,500 people. And really, Automation Anywhere is really hot in the RPA space, Robotic Process Automation, but it's really a lot more than that, it's not just automating some processes, it's really about new ways to work, personal digital assistants, and really changing the game. We're excited to have our next guest, first time on theCUBE. He's Prince Kohli, the CTO of Automation Anywhere. Prince, great to see you. >> Thank you, Jeff, good to be here. >> Yeah, so you weren't here last year, so I'm curious to get your general impressions of the event and kind of the scene here with the Automation Anywhere ecosystem. >> Of course, I wasn't here last year, I heard a lot about it, but the sense of excitement, the sense of growth, and the sense of opportunity that is there in everyone. The number of customers who were here and were excited to be here, partners who were here and were really happy to be here, and of course, the team, my own team. It just, just the sense of excitement, and the fact that we are on a hockey stick, in terms of growth, is just palpable. >> Right, so I'm curious to get your take, you've been in the Valley for a long time, and really the RPA theme is about digital workers. In fact, they get roles, they get names, they talk about 'em on stage like they're people. And the idea is that we all have our own assistant, which has been talked about forever but maybe you kind of had an offshore person you could help dial in your laundry, nothing like what we're talking about today. So, as you look back at the evolution as to how we got here, what's your take on the role of a personal digital assistant? >> That's a great question. The way, in my view, the way it evolved was that it is similar to cloud computing. I think the idea that these things could happen. I mean, you know, Star Trek had it, right? >> Right. >> So I think those things have, as an idea, have existed, but usually it was in fantasy. But what has happened in the last five or ten years, is that computing, the need for automation across applications, the need for work to be less mundane, the need for creativity in our human jobs, those have become really important. And therefore the definition of work is evolving. What can be automated therefore must be automated. And it is not automation within an application, it is automation across applications, across processes, across whichever applications, from whichever vendors there may be, without changing the application itself. And that, with the tenurial of AI and acceptance of AI, I think has allowed people to start accepting the notion of a digital worker. >> It's pretty interesting, one of the topics of the keynote was that the people were the integration point between (laughs) a lot of these systems, super inefficient. And what I think is interesting on the AI front and the automation, the place I see it's just a little bit every day, is on Google, or an app that most people are familiar with, whether it's Google Maps, and suddenly it's got restaurants on it, and suddenly it's got reviews on it, and suddenly it's got Street View or whether it's now on the email where suddenly it's guessing my response, it's auto filling even before I start to complete my email. And it really shows that it's this ongoing continuous innovation empowered by AI and a boatload of data that lets these applications do, as you said, things that before would be considered magical. >> Absolutely, and if you look at the digital worker paradigm, right? It's not, if you look at a great example of a digital worker, for example an AP clerk, an account payables clerk. Think of an invoicing function, an invoice comes in, someone has to read it, interpret it, the (coughs), excuse me, the format of invoices are very different across vendors. Reading, interpreting, tying it to a PO, making sure the PO is correct, making sure the PO is valid, was issued at the right time, the item is not late, someone has signed up, there are so many things one has to do. And a person has to do all that today. But it is really very boring work. There is, you just follow a set of steps, there is not judgment involved, really. What an AP digital worker allows you to do (coughs) is to be able to read the document, interpret it, take all the steps that are necessary, and then be able to do that job 24 hours a day, and allow the offloading of this mundane, boring work, right, from a human. So they can be more creative, they can actually make the process better, as opposed to just following a set of simple rules. >> Right, finishing one of the earlier conversations too, and then defining that process so that you can automate it, you're going to unwind inefficiency, you're going to unwind biases, you're going to unwind a whole bunch of stuff to get it to the automated process. So there's all kinds of secondary benefits beyond simply freeing up your time to do more creative work. >> That is correct, and I think, as you said, there are biases, there are also things that must work together in enterprise and today don't. And you know, the vendors, the application vendors are not going to do that, it is not in their own interest. So someone has to, and we are the fabric that brings it together. >> Right, and just people as an integration point, I thought that was classic, that's like the worst place you want to be. And then the other concept that I think doesn't come out enough is a lot of people can be thinking about RPA as a rip and replace for the people. It's not rip and replace at all, it's really augment, just like you augment with your laptop, your phone, other software applications that you're working with every day. >> It's a great point, we have never seen any customer, even talking about ripping and replacing people. What they're trying to do is give people the tools and the augmentation necessary for them to make their own life better. And that improves the moral of the employees, that improves the company's productivity, of course, right, and probably the best output, the best of vidimation that, it improves their customer satisfaction. Because customers are able to create cards faster, are able to get responses faster, claims get adjusted faster, all these things work very well. >> Right, it's interesting, when you sit back and look at the whole technology stack, some really fundamental changes in microprocesser power, networking speed, storage, now the cloud that puts all this access together, and then you add the AL, and the machine learning on top of it, it's really kind of this crazy perfect storm of technologies that are coming together, that are enabling this, which we really couldn't do before, all those pieces weren't there. So if look forward, as CTO, what are some of the things you're excited about, how do you see this evolving, over the next little time, and mid time, I never go longtime, longtime is forever in the future we don't even guess. >> Longtime, I can predict one thing for sure about long time, that whatever we say today will be wrong, in the long-term. Short and medium-term I think we probably will be right. I think short and medium-term, what I see happening, is that AI becoming a part of pretty much every layer of every product, for us for example, as an intelligent RPA platform, AI is embedded in the interaction with the application, interaction with the screen, interaction with the person, interaction with the document, so whichever way we interact with the outside world, as well as how we get better ourselves, AI is embedded in that. And then we use many third-party AI's as our own part to add AI enabled skills, for example understanding if a insurance claim should be denied or not, a credit card should be issued or not. So all these things become part of how AI helps us in day-to-day. So I think that will be the biggest change, I think people, the example that you brought up, right, Google email. I don't think that people predicted that with the first use of AI, in Google, but it is very useful, I use it all the time, because it happens to get better all the time, it knows all my phrases, it knows how I respond, I think that'll happen again and again. >> Right, right, it's just like spell-check, the great unwashed AI that we've all been using for years, and years, and years. Alright Prince, so, the final word is really, I think that's important, is, you're talking about the intelligence. It's not just a process that we apply software to, but this ongoing iterative intelligence applied, whether it's machine learning, or AI, to make it better, and better, and better. It's not just going to be static. >> Not at all, not at all. I think it understands what it needs to be doing, and it then provides ideas on how it could be doing better, and then it integrates those ideas back. Everything gets better over time, and everything that a human finds repetitive, high volume, boring, will eventually get farmed off, to an augmentation, additional worker, additional system. >> And oh, by the way, the number of open rec's is still not going to go down, right? >> Because, you know, if you remember the ATM world, as an ATM started coming in people started worrying tellers will go away and the number of jobs will go down. Actually banks are doing really well, right, and they started hiring more people. The nature of the job changes, the value that humans provide go higher and higher, but that's what happens, eventually. >> Alright Prince, congratulations for you for jumping on a rocket ship, I'm sure it's going to be (laughs) a really fun ride, and having us here at the show. >> Excellent, thank you Jeff, thank you so much. >> Alright, he's Prince, I'm Jeff, your watching theCube, we're on Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019 in midtown Manhattan, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (energetic music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR this is breaking analysis with Dave vellante over the past decade cloudflare has built a Global Network that has the potential to become the fourth us-based hyperscale class cloud in our view the company is building a durable Revenue model with hooks into many important markets these include the more mature DDOS protection space to other growth sectors such as zero trust a serverless platform for application development and an increasing number of services such as database and object storage and other network services in essence cloudflare could be thought of as a giant distributed supercomputer that can connect multiple clouds and act as a highly efficient scheduling engine at scale its disruptive DNA is increasingly attracting novel startups and established Global firms alike looking for Reliable secure high performance low latency and more cost-effective alternatives to AWS and Legacy infrastructure Solutions hello and welcome to this week's wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we initiate our deeper coverage of cloudflare we'll briefly explain our take on the company and its unique business model we'll then share some peer comparisons with both the financial snapshot and some fresh ETR survey data finally we'll share some examples of how we think cloudflare could be a disruptive force with a super cloud-like offering that in many respects is what multi-cloud should have been cloudflare has been on our peripheral radar Ben Thompson and many others have written about their disruptive business model and recently a breaking analysis follower who will remain anonymous emailed with some excellent insights on cloudflare that prompted us to initiate more detailed coverage let's first take a look at how cloudflare seize the world in terms of its view of a modern stack this is a graphic from cloudflare that shows a simple three-layer Stack comprising Storage and compute the lower level and application layer and the network and their key message is basically that the big four hyperscalers have replaced the on-prem leaders apps have been satisfied and that mess of network that you see and Security in the upper left can now be handled all by cloudflare and the stack can be rented via Opex versus requiring heavy capex investment so okay somewhat of a simplified view is those companies on the the left are you know not standing still and we're going to come back to that but cloudflare has done something quite amazing I mean it's been a while since we've invoked Russ hanneman of Silicon Valley Fame on breaking analysis but remember when he was in a meeting one of his first meetings if not the first with Richard Hendricks it was the whiz kid on the show Silicon Valley and hanneman said something like if you had a blank check and you could build anything in the world what would it be and Richard's answer was basically a new internet and that led to Pied Piper this peer-to-peer Network powered by decentralized devices and and iPhones and this amazing compression algorithm that enabled high-speed data movement and low latency uh up to no low latency access across the network well in a way that's what cloudflare has built its founding premise reimagined how the internet should be built with a consistent set of server infrastructure where each server had lots of cores lots of dram lots of cash fast ssds and plenty of network connectivity and bandwidth and well this picture makes it look like a bunch of dots and points of presence on a map which of course it is there's a software layer that enables cloudflare to efficiently allocate resources across this Global Network the company claims that it's Network utilization is in the 70 percent range and it has used its build out to enter the technology space from the bottoms up offering for example free tiers of services to users with multiple entry points on different services and selling then more services over time to a customer which of course drives up its average contract value and its lifetime value at the same time the company continues to innovate and add new services at a very rapid cloud-like Pace you can think of cloudflare's initial Market entry as like a lightweight Cisco as a service the company's CFO actually he uses that term he calls it that which really must tick off Cisco who of course has a massive portfolio and a dominant Market position now because it owns the network cloudflare is a marginal cost of adding new Services is very small and goes towards zero so it's able to get software like economics at scale despite all this infrastructure that's building out so it doesn't have to constantly face the increasing infrastructure tax snowflake for example doesn't own its own network infrastructure as it grows it relies on AWS or Azure gcp and and while it gives the company obvious advantages it doesn't have to build out its own network it also requires them to constantly pay the tax and negotiate with hyperscalers for better rental rates now as previously mentioned Cloud Fair cloudflare claims that its utilization is very high probably higher than the hyperscalers who can spin up servers that they can charge for underutilized customer capacity cloudflare also has excellent Network traffic data that it can use to its Advantage with its Analytics the company has been rapidly innovating Beyond its original Core Business adding as I said before serverless zero trust offerings it has announced a database it calls its database D1 that's pretty creative and it's announced an object store called R2 that is S3 minus one both from the alphabet and the numeric I.E minus the egress cost saying no egress cost that's their big claim to fame and they've made a lot of marketing noise around about that and of course they've promised in our a D2 database which of course is R2D2 RR they've launched a developer platform cloudflare can be thought of kind of like first of all a modern CDN they've got a simpler security model that's how they compete for example with z-scaler that brings uh they also bring VPN sd-wan and DDOS protection services that are that are part of the network and they're less expensive than AWS that's kind of their sort of go to market and messaging and value proposition and they're positioning themselves as a neutral Network that can connect across multiple clouds now to be clear unlike AWS in particular cloudflare is not well suited to lift and shift your traditional apps like for instance sap Hana you're not going to run that in on cloudflare's platform rather the company started by making websites more secure and faster and it flew under the radar and much in the same way that clay Christensen described the disruption in the steel industry if you've seen that where new entrants picked off the low margin rebar business then moved up the stack we've used that analogy in the semiconductor business with arm and and even China cloudflare is running a similar playbook in the cloud and in the network so in the early part of the last decade as aws's ascendancy was becoming more clear many of us started thinking about how and where firms could compete and add value as AWS is becoming so dominant so for instance take an industry Focus you could do things like data sharing with snowflake eventually you know uh popularized you could build on top of clouds again snowflake is doing that as are others you could build private clouds and of course connect to hybrid clouds but not many had the wherewithal and or the hutzpah to build out a Global Network that could serve as a connecting platform for cloud services cloudflare has traction in the market as it adds new services like zero trust and object store or database its Tam continues to grow here's a quick snapshot of cloudflare's financials relative to Z scalar which is both a competitor and a customer fastly which is a smaller CDN and Akamai a more mature CDN slash Edge platform cloudflare and fastly both reported earnings this past week Cloud Fair Cloud flare surpassed a billion dollar Revenue run rate but they gave tepid guidance and the stock got absolutely crushed today which is Friday but the company's business model is sound it's growing close to 50 annually it has sas-like gross margins in the mid to high 70s and it's it it's got a very strong balance sheet and a 13x revenue run rate multiple in fact it's Financial snapshot is quite close to that of z-scaler which is kind of interesting which zinc sailor of course doesn't own its own network that's a pure play software company fastly is much smaller and growing more slowly than cloudflare hence its lower multiple well Akamai as you can see is a more mature company but it's got a nice business now on its earnings call this week cloudflare announced that its head of sales was stepping down and the company has brought in a new leader to take the firm to five billion dollars in sales I think actually its current sales leader felt like hey you know my work is done here bring on somebody else to take it to the next level the company is promising to be free cash flow positive by the end of the year and is working hard toward its long-term financial model or so working towards sorry it's a long-term financial model with gross margin Targets in the mid 70s it's targeting 20 non-gaap operating margins so so solid you know very solid not like completely off the charts but you know very good and to our knowledge it has not committed to a long-term growth rate but at that sort of operating profit level you would like to see growth be consistently at least in the 20 range so they could at least be a rule of 40 company or perhaps even even five even higher if they're going to continue to command a premium valuation okay let's take a look at the ETR data ETR is very positive on cloudflare and has recently published a report on the company like many companies cloudflare is seeing an across the board slowdown in spending velocity we've reported on this quite extensively using the ETR data to quantify the degree to that Slowdown and on the data set with ETR we see that many customers they're shifting their spend to Flat spend you know plus or minus let's say you know single digits you know two three percent or even zero or in the market we're seeing a shift from paid to free tiers remember cloudflare offers a lot of free services as you're seeing customers maybe turn off the pay for a while and going with the freebie but we're also seeing some larger customers in the data and the fortune 1000 specifically they're actually spending more which was confirmed on cloudflare's earnings call they did say everything across the board was softer but they did also indicate that some of their larger customers are actually growing faster than their smaller customers and their churn is very very low here's a two-dimensional graphic we'd like to share this view a lot it's got Net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis and this cut isolates three segments in the etrs taxonomy that cloudflare plays in Cloud security and networking now the table inserted in that upper left there shows the raw data which informs the position of each company in the dots with Net score in the ends listed in that rightmost column the red dotted line indicates a highly elevated Net score and finally we posted the breakdown those colors in the bottom right of cloudflare's Net score the lime green that's new adoptions the forest green is we're spending more six percent or more the gray is flat plus or minus uh five percent and you can see that the majority of customers you can see that's the majority of the customers that gray area the pink is we're spending Less in other words down six percent or worse and the bright red is churn which is minimal one percent very good indicator for for cloudflare what you do to get etr's proprietary Net score and they've done this for many many quarters so we have that time series data you subtract the Reds from the greens and that's Net score cloudflare is at 39 just under that magic red line now note that cloudflare and zscaler are right on top of each other Cisco has a dominant position on the x-axis that cloudflare and others are eyeing AWS is also dominant but note that its Net score is well above the red dotted line it's incredible Palo Alto networks is also very impressive it's got both a strong presence on the horizontal axis and it's got a Net score that's pretty comparable to cloudflare and z-scaler to much smaller companies Akamai is actually well positioned for a reasonably mature company and you can see fastly ATT Juniper and F5 have far less spending momentum on their platforms than does cloudflare but at least they are in positive Net score territory so what's going to be really interesting to see is whether cloudflare can continue to hold this momentum or even accelerate it as we've seen with some other clouds as it scales its Network and keeps adding more and more services cloudflare has a couple of potential strategic vectors that we want to talk about and it'll be going to be interesting to see how that plays out Now One path is to compete more directly as a Cloud Player offering secure access Edge services like firewall as a service and zero Trust Services like data loss prevention email security from its area one acquisition and other zero trust offerings as well as Network Services like routing and network connectivity this is The Sweet Spot of the company load balancing many others and then add in things like Object Store and database Services more Edge services in the future it might be telecom like services such as Network switching for offices so that's one route and cloudflare is clearly on that path more services more cohorts at innovating and and growing the company and bringing in more Revenue increasing acvs and and increasing long-term value and keeping retention high now the other Vector is what we're just going to refer to as super cloud as an enabler of cross-cloud infrastructure this is new value uh relative to the former Vector that we were just talking about now the title of this episode is what multi-cloud should have been meaning cloudflare could be the control plane providing a consistent experience across clouds one that is fast and secure at global scale now to give you Insight on this let's take a look at some of the comments made by Matthew Prince the CEO and co-founder of cloudflare cloudflare put its R2 Object Store into public beta this past May and I believe it's storing around a petabyte of data today I think that's what they said in their call here's what Prince said about that quote we are talking to very large companies about moving more and more of their stored objects to where we can store that with R2 and one of the benefits is not only can we help them save money on the egress fees but it allows them to then use those object stores or objects across any of the different Cloud platforms they're that they're using so by being that neutral third party we can let people adopt a little bit of Amazon a little bit of Microsoft a little bit of Google a little bit of SAS vendors and share that data across all those different places so what's interesting about this in the super cloud context is it suggests that customers could take the best of each Cloud to power their digital businesses I might like AWS for in redshift for my analytic database or I love Google's machine learning Microsoft's collaboration and I'd like a consistent way to connect those resources but of course he's strongly hinting and has made many public statements that aws's egress fees are a blocker to that vision now at a recent investor event Matthew Prince added some color to this concept when he talked about one metric of success being how much R2 capacity was consumed and how much they sold but perhaps a more interesting Benchmark is highlighted by the following statement that he made he said a completely different measure of success for R2 is Andy jassy says I'm sick and tired of these guys meaning cloudflare taking our objects away we're dropping our egress fees to zero I would be so excited because we've then unlocked the ability to be the network that interconnects the cloud together now of course it would be Adam solipski who would be saying that or maybe Andy Jesse you know still watching over AWS and I think it's highly unlikely that that's going to happen anytime soon and that of course but but in theory gets us closer to the super cloud value proposition and to further drive that point home and we're paraphrasing a little bit his comments here he said something the effect of quote customers need one consistent control plane across clouds and we are the neutral Network that can be consistent no matter which Cloud you're using interesting right that Prince sees the world that's similar to if not nearly identical to the concepts that the cube Community has been putting forth around supercloud now this vision is a ways off let's be real Prince even suggested that his initial vision of an application running across multiple clouds you know that's like super cloud Nirvana isn't what customers are doing today that's that's really hard to do and perhaps you know it's never going to happen but there's a little doubt that cloudflare could be and is positioning itself as that cross-cloud control plane it has the network economics and the business model levers to pull it's got an edge up on the competition at the edge pun intended cloudflare is the definition of Edge and it's distributed platform it's decentralized platform is much better suited for Edge workloads than these giant data centers that are you know set up to to try and handle that today the the hyperscalers are building out you know their Edge networks things like outposts you know going out to the edge and other local zones Etc now cloudflare is increasingly competitive to the hyperscalers and those traditional Stacks that it depositioned on an earlier slide that we showed but you know the likes of AWS and Dell and hpe and Cisco and those others they're not sitting in their hands they have a huge huge customer install bases and they are definitely a moving Target they're investing and they're building out their own Super clouds with really robust stacks as well let's face it it's going to take a decade or more for Enterprises to adopt a developer platform or a new database Cloud plus cloudflare's capabilities when compared to incumbent stacks and the hyperscalers is much less robust in these areas and even in storage you know despite all the great conversation that R2 generated and the buzz you take a specialist like Wasabi they're more mature they're more functional and they're way cheaper even than cloudflare so you know it's not a fake a complete that cloudflare is going to win in those markets but we love the disruption and if cloudflare wants to be the fourth us-based hyperscaler or join the the big four as the as the fifth if we put Alibaba in the mix it's got a lot of work to do in the ecosystem by its own admission as much to learn and is part of the value by the way that it sees in its area one acquisition it's email security company that it bought but even in that case much of the emphasis has been on reseller channels compare that to the AWS ecosystem which is not only a channel play but is as much an innovation flywheel filling gaps where companies like snowflake Thrive side by side with aws's data stores as well all the on-prem stacks are building hybrid connections to AWS and other clouds as a means of providing consistent experiences across clouds indeed many of them see what they call cross-cloud services or what we call super cloud hyper cloud or whatever you know Mega Cloud you want to call it we use super cloud they are really eyeing that opportunity so very few companies frankly are not going after that space but we're going to close with this cloudflare is one of those companies that's in a position to wake up each morning and ask who can we disrupt today and very few companies are in a position to disrupt the hyperscalers to the degree that cloudflare is and that my friends is going to be fascinating to watch unfold all right let's call it a wrap I want to thank Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast as well as Ken schiffman who's our newest addition to the Boston Studio Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help us get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at silicon angle thank you to all remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen all you're going to do is search breaking analysis podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com or DM me at divalante if you comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai they got the best survey data in the Enterprise Tech business this is Dave vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's extended coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in Monaco at the Yacht Club, part of the VIP Gala with Prince Albert, DigitalBits, theCUBE. theCUBE and Prince Albert celebrating Monaco leaning into crypto. I'm here with Natasha Mahfar, who's our guest. She just came on theCUBE. Great story. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Tell the folks what you do real quick. >> Sure. So I actually started my career in Silicon Valley, like you have. And I had the idea of creating a startup in mental health that was voice based only. So it was peer to peer support groups via voice. So I created this startup, pretended to be a student at Stanford and built out a whole team, and unfortunately, at that time, no one was in the space of mental health and voice. Now, as you know, it's a $30 billion industry that's one of the biggest in Silicon Valley. So my career really started from there. And due to that startup, I got involved in the World XR Forum. Now, the World XR Forum is kind of like a mini Davos, but a little bit more exclusive, where we host entrepreneurs, people in blockchain, crypto, and we have a five day event covering all sorts of topics. So- >> When you host them, you mean like host them and they hang out and sleep over? It's a hotel? Is it an event? A workshop? >> There's workshops. We arrange hotels. We pretty much arrange everything that there is. >> It's a group get together. >> It's a group get together. Pretty much like Davos. >> And so Natasha, I wanted to talk to you about what we're passionate about which is theCUBE is bringing people up to have a voice and give them a voice. Give people a platform. You don't have to be famous. If you have something to say and share, we found that right now in this environment with media, we go out to an event, we stream as many stories, but we also have the virtual version of our studio. And I could tell you, I've found that internationally now as we bring people together, there are so many great stories. >> Absolutely. >> Out there that need to be told. And the bottleneck isn't the media, it's the fact that it's open now. >> Yes. >> So why aren't the stories coming out? So our mission is to get the stories. >> Wow. >> Scale stories. The more stories that are scaled, the more people can feel it. More people are impacted by it, and it changes the world. It gets people serendipity with data 'cause we're, you know, you shared some data about what you're working on. >> Yeah, of course. It's all about data these days. And the fact that you're doing it so openly is great because there is a need for that today, so. >> What do you see right now in the market for media? I mean, we got emerging markets, a lot of misinformation. Trust is a big problem. >> Right. >> Bullying, harassing. Smear campaigns. What's news, what's not news. I mean, how do you get your news? I mean, how do people figure out what's going on? >> No, absolutely. And this is such a pure format and a way of doing it. How did you come up with the idea, and how did you start? >> Well, I started... I realized after the Web 2.0, when social media started taking over and ruining the democratization . Blogging, podcasting, which I started in 2004, one of the first podcasts in Silicon Valley. >> Wow. >> I saw the network of that. I saw the value that people had when normal people, they call it user generated content, shared information. And I discovered something amazing that a nobody like me can have a really top podcast. >> Well, you're definitely not a nobody, but... >> Well, I was back then. And nobody knew me back then. But what it is is that even... If you put your voice out there, people will connect to it. And if you have the ability to bring other people in, you start to see a social dynamic. And what social media ruined, Facebook, Twitter, not so much Twitter 'cause Twitter's more smeary, but it's still got to open the API, LinkedIn, they're all terrible. They're all gardens. They don't really bring people together, so I think that stalled for about almost eight years or nine years. Now, with crypto and decentralization, you start to see the same thing come back. Democratization, level the playing field, remove the middle man and person, intermediate the middle bottlenecks. So with media, we found that live streaming and going to events was what the community wants. And then interviewing people, and getting their ideas out there. Not promotional, not getting paid to say stuff. Yeah, they get the plug in for the company that they're working on, that's good for everybody. But more share something that you're passionate about, data. And it works. And people like it. And we've been doing it for 12 years, and it creates a great brand of openness, community, and network effect. So we scaled up the brand to be- >> And it seems like you're international now. I mean, we're sitting in Monte Carlo, so I don't think it gets better than that. >> Well, in 2016, we started going international. 2017, we started doing stuff in Europe. 2018, we did the crypto, Middle East. And we also did London, a lot of different events. We had B2B Enterprise and Crypto Blooming. 2019, we were like, "Let's go global with staff and whatnot." >> Wow. >> And the pandemic hits. >> I know. >> And that really kind of allowed us to pivot and turn us into a virtual hybrid. And that's why we're into the metaverse, as we see the value of a physical face to face event where intimacy's there, but why aren't my friends connected first party? >> Right. How much would you say the company has grown from the time that you kind of pivoted? >> Well, we've grown in a different direction with new capabilities because the old way is over. >> Right. >> Every event right now, this event here, is in person. People are talking. They get connections. But every person that's connecting has a social graph behind them that's online too, and immediately available. And with Instagram, direct messaging, Telegram, Signal, all there. >> It's brilliant. Honestly, it was brilliant idea and a brilliant pivot. >> Thank you for interviewing me. >> Yeah, of course. (Natasha and John laugh) >> Any other questions? >> That should do it. >> Okay. Are you going to have fun tonight? >> Absolutely. >> What is your take of the Monaco scene here? What's it like? >> You know, I think it's a really interesting scene. I think there's a lot of potential because this is such an international place so it draws a very eclectic crowd, and I think there's a lot that could be done here. And you have a lot of people from Europe that are starting to get into this whole crypto, leaving kind of the traditional banks and finance behind. So I think the potential is very strong. >> Very progressive. Well, Natasha, thank you for sharing. >> Thank you so much. >> Here on theCUBE. We're the extended edition CUBE here in Monaco with Prince Albert, theCUBE, and Prince Albert, DigitalBits Al Burgio, a great market here for them. And just an amazing time. And thanks for watching. Natasha, thanks for coming on. Thanks for watching theCUBE. We'll be back with more after this break. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage, extended coverage of the V IP gala event. Earlier in the day, we were at the Monaco crypto summit, where we had 11 years, all the fault leaders here in MoCo coming together. It's a global event. It's an inner circle. It's a beginning, it's an ELG overall event. It's a kernel of the best of the best from finance entrepreneurship government coming together here with the gala event at the yacht club in Monaco. And we got a great lineup here. We have Sherman elder wish from decentralized investment group here with me. She and I was just talking and we're gonna have a great conversation. Welcome to the cube. Thank >>You so much. Thank you for having me. >>It's kind of our laid back to not only have an anchored desk, but we're kind of have conversations. You know, one of the things that we've been talking about is, you know, the technology innovation around decentralized, right? You've been an entrepreneur 9, 9, 9 years. Yes. Plus you're in a region of the world right now where it's exploding. You're in Dubai. Tell your story. You're in Dubai. There's a lot of action what's happening. >>So to Dubai is, is really the bridge between the east and the west. And it's grown. I've, I've had the privilege of witnessing Dubai's growth for over 16 years now. So I've been based in Dubai for 16 years. I'm originally from Jordan, lived in 11 countries. You can call me a global nomad home is where my suitcases and where I, you know, where I'm, I'm literally with my friends and community and the work that I do. So I've been there and I've witnessed this grow through working with the government there as well. So nine years ago, I jumped into the world of entrepreneurship. I specialize in art and education. Also, I work extensively now in decentralized with decentralized investment group. So we specialize in defi game five and also digital assets. So it's a beautiful time to be in Dubai right now. And witness that growth in web three, there's going to be a summit that's actually happening in September. And so it's attracting all the global leaders there with the government there. So they're really investing in, >>You know, the date on that. >>Sorry, >>You know the date on that? Yeah. Oh, >>September. They're going to be September, either 27th or >>28th. So later in the month, >>Yes. Later in the month of September. Okay. So it's very exciting to be a part >>Of that. Well, I love you're on here cause I want, first of all, you look fabulous. Great. Oh, thank you. Great event. Everyone's dressed up here. But one of the things I've been passionate about is women in tech. And I know you've got a project now you're working on this. Yes. Not only because it's it's needed. Yeah, but they're taking over. There's a lot of growth. Absolutely. The young entrepreneurs, young practitioners, absolutely young women all around the world. Absolutely. And we did a five region women in tech on March 7th with Stanford university, amazing. And Amazon web services. And I couldn't believe the stories. So we're gonna do more. And I want to get your take on this because there are stories that need to be told. Absolutely. What are, what are the, some of the stories that you're seeing, some of the, some of the cautionary tales, some of the successes, >>Well, you have, I mean the middle east right now is really a space, especially in Dubai, in the UAE, the growth of women in entrepreneurship, the support that we have from incubators, there, there is a hunger for growth and learning and innovation. And that is the beauty of being there. There are so many incredible stories, not one that I could say right now, but each and every story is exquisite and extraordinary. And what's really amazing is that you have the community there that supports one another, especially women in tech. I'm, I'm actually one of the co-founders of made for you global, which is a tech platform, which attracts entrepreneurship, female entrepreneurs, and really helping them kind of grow to their potential or maximize their potential. And we're actually going to have it on web three as well and integrate it within the blockchain. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of passion for, for growth in women, in tech and, and there's so many incredible stories to come, not just one, so many. And I invite you to come to Dubai so I can introduce you to all >>These incredible. So I'm really glad you're inclusive about men. >>Of course, we're inclusive >>About men, >>You know, men and women. I mean, it's a community that brings together these ideas. >>Yeah. I will say I had to go the microphone one time because I love doing the Stanford women in data science, but they, and we have female, a host. I just wanna do the interviews right there. So smart. I said, Chuck, can we have the female interviews cuz you know, like, okay, but they included me. Oh yes. But in all serious. Now this is a major force because women entrepreneurship make up 50% of the, the target audience of all products. Absolutely. So if, why, why isn't there more developers and input into the products and policies, right? That shape our society. This has been one of those head scratching moments and we're making progress, but not fast enough. >>Absolutely. And you know what, especially after COVID, so after COVID we all learned the lessons of the hybrid models of being more flexible of being more innovative of being making use of our time more effectively. And we've witnessed like an increase in women in tech over the years and especially in web three and decentralized investment group invest heavily into women and in tech as well, >>Give some examples of some things you're working on right now, projects you're investing in. So >>We're, well, everything that we do is inclusive of women. So with game five, for example, we specialize greatly in game five through our subsidiary company, based in the us, it's called X, Y, Z, Z Y it's gaming. And actually many of our creative team are women who are the developers behind the scenes who are bringing it to life. A lot of basically we're trying to educate the public as well about how to get meta mask wallets and to enter into this field. It's all about education and growing that momentum to be able to be more and more inclusive. >>Do you think you can help us get a cube host out there? Of course, of course they gotta be dynamic. Of course smart of course and no teleprompter of >>Course. And we would love for you to come so that we can really introduce you to >>All well now, now that COVID is over. We got a big plan on going cube global, digging it out in 2019, we had London, Bahrain, Singapore, amazing Dubai, Korea. Amazing. And so we wanted to really get out there and create a node, right? And open source kind of vibe where right. The folks all around the world can connect through the network effects. And one thing I noticed about the women in tech, especially in your area is the networking is really high velocity. Absolutely people like the network out there is that, do you see that as well? Absolutely. >>Because it's a, it's a city of transition, you know? So that's the beauty of Dubai, it's positioning power. And also it's a very innovative hub. And so with all of these summits that are coming up, it's attracting the communities and there's lots of networking that happens there. And I think more and more we're seeing with web three is that it is all about the community. It's all about bringing everyone together. >>Well, we got people walking through the sets. See, that's the thing that about a cocktail party. You got people walking through the set that's good. Made, had some color. Rachel Wolfson is in the house. Rachel is here. That's Rachel Woodson. If you didn't recognize her she's with coin Telegraph. Oh bless. I don't know who they, the Glo is as they say, but that's how he went cool to me. All right. So betting back to kinda what you're working on. Have you been to Silicon valley lately? Because you're seeing a lot of peering where people are looking at web three and saying, Hey, Silicon valley is going through a transition too. You're seeing beacons of outposts, right? Where you got people moving to Miami, you got Dubai, you got Singapore, you got, you know, Japan, all these countries. Now there's a, there's a network effect. >>Absolutely. It's all about. And honestly, when I see, I mean, I've been to Miami so many times this year for all the web three events and also in Austin and GTC as well. And what you see is that there is this ripple effect that's happening and it is attracting more and more momentum because the conversations are there and the openness to work together. It's all about partnerships and collaboration. This is a field which is based on collaboration communities. >>Awesome. What are some of the advice advice you have for women out there that are watching around being an entrepreneur? Because we were talking before we came on camera about it's hard. It's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart. Yeah. As Theresa Carlson, a friend of mine used, used to say all the time entrepreneurship was a rollercoaster. Of course, what's your advice don't give up or stay strong. What's your point of view? >>Honestly, if you're passionate about what you do. And I know it sounds very cliche. It's really important to stay focused, moving forward, always. And really it's about partnerships. It's about the ability to network. It's the ability to fail as well. Yeah. And to learn from your mistakes and to know when to ask for help. A lot of the times, you know, we shy away from asking for help or because we're embarrassed, but we need to be more open to failing, to growing and to also collaborating with one another. >>Okay. So final question for you while I got, by the way, you're an awesome guest. Oh, thank you. What are you what's next for you? What are you working on right now? Next year? What's on your goal list. What's your project? What's >>Your top goal? Oh my gosh. >>Top three, >>Top three, definitely immersing myself more into web three. Web three is definitely the future getting made for you global on the ground and running in terms of the networking aspect in a female entrepreneurship, more and more giving back as well. So using web three for social good. So a lot more charitable, innovative kind of campaigns that we hope to host within the web three community to be able to educate, to innovate and also help those that are, that need it the most as >>Well. Shaman, thank you for coming on the cube. I really appreciate it. And thanks for coming on. Thank you >>So much. >>I'm so grateful. Okay. You watching the queue, we're back in the more coverage here at the after party of the event, it's the VIP gala with prince Albert and all the top guests in Monica leaning into crypto I'm John furier. Thanks for watching.

(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 everyone to the Cube's extended coverage here at the yacht club here in Monaco with prince Albert and the cube, great coverage, big gala event around blockchain and, and crypto we're here at tally Friedman creative director at NFT basil. Great to see you again. Great >>To see you again. Thank you so much for having >>So what's going on? What are you doing here? What's up. >>So I am here helping put together this incredible event, helping to raise awareness, spread education about all the amazing innovation that's happening in the tech in the NFT space, hoping to encourage mass adoption and bring more passionate and talented minds to the space. And that is my main goal of everything that I do. Well, >>You can appreciate the, the agenda here, all the influencers, top dogs and, and, and finances are here, entrepreneurs, but big metaverse vibe, obviously NFTs kind of bundled in cause NFTs are becoming quite part of everything. Absolutely. And as a creative director, you gotta love the creativity coming out of the, the meta metaverse right >>Now. You know what? It kind of feels like anything is possible. And as someone who has that ability to contribute to a space and directly see the impact that the work you have, you know, has as an outcome on, on not just the industry, but the, the rest of the world, and to have the ability to start creating a legacy that other people will soon follow suit on is, has been pretty incredible to experience. I must say, >>You know, tally's been a cultural movement as well. A lot of the younger generation, a lot of gen Z wants this. I mean, I, I could see the in alignment, but certainly true. I mean, you can see nobody wants the old way, inadequate, antiquated ways of email and web surfing webpages. Well, the social media, >>The funny thing about the metaverse is, is that it's actually existed for quite some time. I'd say the term has almost resurfaced in popularity, in association with the blockchain. So now when we think of the metaverse, it's obviously associated with web three cryptocurrency NFTs, but the original term was actually coined in a 1980s novel about it was a science fiction novel. And it, it's funny to see how that term just really encompasses everything that we've predicted. And I have this thing with science fiction where I think humanity almost reflects our fears, but our hope simultaneously, when we talk about dystopia, it's what we're seeing unravel before our eyes. And what we predict and almost know will be the ultimate outcome, but because there's so much uncertainty, what's that gonna look like? How's that gonna affect our day to day lives? And I think we're witnessing right now, the, you know, all the incredible directions, >>Tally, have you dabbled in some of these metae Metasphere environments because this bar, if people are playing music, people are getting together and there's quite the self-expression. >>Absolutely. So I plan a lot of events in the metaverse I'm a metaverse event planner. I helps build our NFT gallery for NFT basil in the metaverse. I think it's really interesting to bridge the gap between fi physical and digital worlds. And when we host a physical exhibition simultaneously host that metaverse exhibition for people who aren't able to attend in real life, >>How do they do that? Is it software? >>So for the most part, what event, I mean, yeah, for an event I work with decentral end a lot. I find it has the best user interface for people who aren't so familiar with, you know, setting up a wallet, getting onboarding onto web three, using cryptocurrency newbies. Exactly. >>So I can't fly the event, but I want to experience the event. >>You type the web address into your browser, NFT, basil.xyz. You can walk around and explore, create your own avatar, have fun. It's gamified life. >>What's the feedback been from some of the attendees, what do they end up doing? What's the pattern they end up, they end up like chatting or mingling, or is it, does it match like life or they just kind of high-fiving each other. Is there a lot of shitter chatter smack being toed around? >>So I think the thing with the metaverse is that a lot of people who are critical of the metaverse are, are saying, why would I replace a real life experience with a digital one when I can talk face to face like we're doing right now. But I think the purpose isn't to replace physical experiences, because there's nothing quite like, you know, having an in-person interaction, but it's about enhancing the digital experience. >>Well, but here, here we're face to face. Okay. We're having a first time experience together. And it's lovely. I have friends, you have friends, we have social grant, people who are instantly online, why can't there be a first class citizen, me connection between our meta version and maybe a friend pops as a hologram right here and chance to chime into the conversation. And you know, that's not far away, >>It's it's happening right now. And the, the beauty of metaverse events and hosting metaverse conferences is an event such as the one today requires so much coordination. People flying in from all over the world, booking hotels, changing time schedules, jet lag. There's so much that goes into it. When you can connect people and have such a similar level of immersiveness. And if not more immersiveness than you would in real life, you have audience members who are able to actively engage with what you're doing. Ask questions live without having to raise your hand and come up on stage and without the technical barriers of, >>And being part of a group. >>I mean, community's >>Organism is everything. It's everything. It's an organism. It's connective tissue. It's not a software mechanism. Absolutely. It's a group thing. Absolutely. All right. So I gotta ask you, what's the coolest thing you're working on right now that you can share with folks. >>I am so passionate about what we're building out at NFT basil. I, I could talk about it for hours, but we really specialize in transforming luxury. One of one physical assets into digital NFTs. And I think it's a different approach than most people take to web three in the NFT space. Because when you think of NFTs, you think of, you know, generative drops, PFP projects, but we're taking real world tangible value and enhancing it through technology. >>Awesome. Tally, thank you for coming on. Dinner's being served with the prince. Thank you for coming on the Q. I really appreciate. Thank you so >>Much. It it's >>Been a pleasure. Thank you. Okay. We're here. The extended edition of cube coverage late night. Now the dinner with the gala event, the cube and prince Albert here in Monaco for an exciting evening. I'm John furrier with the cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCube's extended hours. Things are starting to settle down. Dinner has started being served. We're here with Prince Alvarez, has an invitation for the VIP gala. Part of Monaco leaning into crypto, we're reporting on it. Not our normal set, more of an after hours vibe. We're here with Iman Bashir, found of Craftly.ai. Thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I love your story. You're a coder, built some code, started a company. Now you're the CEO. You hired some people to wrap around support you. Now you're running the show. What a great story. How did you get here? Give me the origination story >> Basically, for as long as I can remember, I've been an entrepreneur. My parents have stories of me being too young to babysit, but I would create a babysitting agency and have sent babysitters out or I would sell my lunches. Throughout school, I would always find some kind of entrepreneurship endeavor. And when I came out of school, I kept finding myself lacking the necessary skills to really do a startup. And so that's when I discovered coding. And I took myself through coding boot camps, and I started websites and I'm like, no, I want something more perpetual. I want to make money when I sleep. And then from there I found search engine optimization. So how to get to the top of Google. And I started working really quickly with like really big companies. And immediately I realized my full budget's spent on copywriting. And so that's when I discovered you could have that written by AI. Not going to replace you, but it's there to enhance you. And so built an AI copywriter. >> And so what does it do? >> Basically you type in a couple words. It could be anything, any use case. So product descriptions for eCommerce, blog articles for any company really, web copy, even does songs. Or your next breakup text, which we'll get to that. But it does basically anything. You type in a couple words and it generates text for you. All original and plagiarism free. >> Okay. Can you write our blog post for us? >> Yeah. >> Say, hey, we're covering the crypto-con in Monaco. >> Could even do a summary of this interview, yeah. >> Well, we get that transcribed in the cloud. We'll get that in a second. First. I love the story. Okay. So now you're the CEO. Great application. So imagine you're scraping pages. You looking at summaries, doing any extraction, looking at word combinations. What were some of the tech behind it? >> We use, we leverage a bunch of different models. We use GPT3, which was founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, all major players that basically allows you to pull 175 billion parameters of data. Anything before it was 2 billion. So now you're talking, I'm able to pull like basically the whole internet. And from there we added different models to provide learning and to get the best quality AI out there. There's a lot of bad quality. And so from there, we're able to take it, mix and match, and have it formulate the best things. >> So where are you now? So you're in your journey, the CEO, how many people in your staff, what's the status? >> So right now we have eight full time people and a bunch of contractors. Before I was the lead developer. But now as the company's growing, I have to take a backseat and be more in a sales role versus being the one to develop it every single day. And so right now we're hiring more developers as we go. >> So the funding options must be off the charts. Offers coming in left and right. >> So tons, but definitely we're in a different market environment than we were two months ago. So as you may have heard, crypto's down, possibly, but so we were - >> On temporary basis, not truly down. >> But in the beginning, I wanted to hold as much equity as possible by bootstrapping, proving concept, doing it. I have a lot of the background and skillset to have it there. So I hired the best people. And once we prove concept, we were prepared to raise and then the market kind of slowed us down. So right now, luckily our company is self-funded and supporting itself. >> Good. >> So we're making money. We're profitable. >> What you want to do. >> Yeah. >> As much as possible. >> Yeah. And so right now we do, we are looking for growth options, funding options. We're talking to a lot of people. That's why I'm here in Monaco. But it's a good place to not be desperate. It's a good place to not need the money, but. >> You know, I always said when I was running companies and to my team, my a friend gave me great advice. You can't go out of business when you have money in the bank. >> Yeah. >> So don't run out of money. >> Basically. Luckily our product, it's a subscription basis and it's a monthly, so we're making money immediately. >> All right. So I got to ask. What's the biggest challenge you've had and putting this because it's great, great story. You're really impressive. Great vision. You coded your own product. Now you got put the team around you. >> Yeah. >> What's been the challenge. How have you handled the grind? Cuz it's, the joy in the grind can be fun. >> Yeah. >> But then it gets complicated. Start adding people to the mix and you got to get milestones. You're self-funding. Which by the way, self-funding is the hardest part. >> Yeah. >> It is difficult. >> Yeah. >> Most people think like raising a big round is the top of the mountain. No, no, no, no. Self-funding is the A-1 player. That's an A play move, A player move right there. >> Definitely. I would say if I were to go back I would get funded a lot earlier, especially with the market conditions eight months ago. But one of the biggest struggles I would, I feel I have faced was just being a younger founder. Sometimes you're, there's imposter syndrome in your, within yourself. But otherwise, a lot of times people don't take you seriously immediately. Everyone always assumes that I'm someone's girlfriend at an event. Or I, they say that's cute when talking about your business. And so you have to deal with that. Yeah. Or one time I was at a conference and someone asked how I funded the company. And I said, I created ancillary revenue streams to be able to support it. And their response was, oh, I love it when my OnlyFans funds my business. And that, immediately, >> Oh my God, that is... That is total. >> But now I use it as fire to ignite me and kind of prove everyone wrong. But I definitely would say that the journey of falling in love with the journey and realizing that no matter how big you get, your problems only get bigger. So it's choosing the right problems to solve and realizing that every day there's going to be a fire. Just living in the moment. >> Well, you're such an inspiration to me and anyone. I'm going to share your story because what you just talked about, a lot of people, being a startup, you're eating glass, you're falling on your face. You're tripping all the time. Hopefully you don't get hurt. But when people make comments like that to you, given how smart you are, and how brilliant you are, how beautiful you are, that is just unacceptable. And I think that is just a really weird thing. Like that has to change. It's like, its so unacceptable. >> I feel like the world's heading in the right direction and it's up to people to use those setbacks to ignite them and push them forward, which I'm trying to. >> You know, I was, I read a book about trauma and how trauma defines you, right? >> Yeah. >> And trauma is little trauma, family trauma and and trauma's defined >> All perspective. >> Trauma's defined as not like, oh, something dire, like little things could be like little traumas. Oh yeah, I was offended by my brother. This happened there. So experiences define you. >> Yeah. >> And I think one of the things that you just mentioned is you've made it stronger, made you stronger. >> Yeah. >> The comments made you stronger. >> Oh, I definitely see, even everything that I've been through. And this is the same for a lot of first time founders. All my previous companies I've had the blessing of working with like an older mentor that had done it before. This was the first where I kind of was on my own. And when you do that, now, if I look back on the last year and a half, I could probably do the same thing in a week. Once you do it the first time you really do learn. >> I'll just tell you. You're brilliant, beautiful. You're very impressive. >> Thank you. >> Theresa Carlson, who used to run all Amazon's web services, business and public sector. She's a Renaissance woman. She's an amazing friend. Great power. That's she always, she always says to me, and she's like you know, my father was a basketball coach. I can handle with those men. And she would say, but she said it with proud, like leaning in like, hey, that's life. I'll take what life gives me. And I think that's a lesson we're seeing more of. Because you're seeing a lot more women in tech. I did 30 interviews in Europe, the past March 7th. Okay. In three weeks. >> Yeah. >> So a lot of stuff. Well, thanks for coming on. We got the events starting. I'll let you go. Thanks for sharing your story. >> Thanks for having me. >> Well, what's next for you? What's next? >> Next is, I'm going to I'm going to build the word processor of the future and be the future of writing. >> Okay. And thank you for coming out. >> There you go. I appreciate it. All right. This is theCube coverage here at the event. we'll be back with more after this break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage of the Monaco Crypto Summit here in Monaco. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube, and Lauren Bissell here, founder and CEO of Immutable Industries, focused on the advancement of technologies in art, entertainment, blockchain across multiple sectors. Great background in entertainment music, complying that into the convergence and to crypto. Welcome to theCube. I appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. Thank you guys for having me. It's been an incredible day so far. >> So we were just talking before we came on camera, your background and just the people you've worked with in the music industry. You've been there for a very long part of your career, from the beginning. Now you're on the wave of Web3, crypto, DeFi. There's a confluence of refactoring businesses. We're seeing that impact. And I think a lot of people, finance and entrepreneurial, the best brains are coming into the sector because it's an opportunity, clearly, to reset and refactor old antiquated business models and practices, in a new way to achieve the same things. Better, faster, cheaper >> Exactly. Better, faster, cheaper, is good sometimes, other times that's... We will see. But I think for me, coming in from the music industry was something that, I honestly never expected to be involved in blockchain and futuristic tech. It's always something that I admired, but I didn't really see, "Okay. Here's how I can be involved in that." I was obsessed with it. But as I was sort of progressing my career as a music producer, I saw so many issues with the industry. The way capital came in, the way that it was distributed. I mean, these things are still happening today. But I was just constantly looking around for better solutions and how to make this work in a better way. In 2017, when I started really diving into crypto, that was something where I saw a huge opportunity for the entire industry. The music industry is notorious for just sort of being behind the curve when it comes to new tech. And it's a shame. When you're in an industry that's full of art and innovation, you would think that it's something... It's an industry that would embrace this position. Maybe some people do this, and I applaud those people very much. But in general, the music industry is kind of behind. We live a little bit in the Wild West. Not in the futures way, but kind of in the old way. I'm just really excited to be able to bring these things into the industry. >> It's interesting. I'm not in the industry, in the music side, but I've been on the software industry, where you had the proprietary software, the rights, and people used to build software. And then when the company went under, the software was gone, lost forever. And in around the late eighties, nineties, open source movement happened, and it just changed everything. And I think, to me, I feel like this is a similar structural inflection point in change, where rights are changing. People are still holding onto like, "He can't use the copyright." And I even saw a stat that said, with AI now, you can actually copyright every single melody, every single note in music. So that means like, "Who the hell's going to develop anything?" So are even rights even matter? So rights, ownership, art, mixing. Funny story of my son, a year and a half ago, mixed an old song from a band that wasn't around, and it became a TikTok sensation. Hundreds of millions of listens, and then the Spotify and Apple account was making like 20,000 a week, and DistroKid cut him off. Because someone went back and claimed the copyrights. But it was a mix of a couple of different pieces of the song for a new melody. But because that wasn't his work, the middle man killed the account. >> Right. But if there had been maybe an easier solution for him to go get those rights. So I actually used to be a rights and royalties negotiation specialist. I was on the phone with labels, every second of every day. From a producer standpoint, you're trying to find something that works for the artist, something that works for the label, something that you can arrange in perpetuity, if possible. But it's just... Again, there's so many people that have to just get on the phone- >> Like a busy gen system of like- >> Yeah. >> Weirdness >> Right. >> What's the solution? >> I mean, right now one of the favorite... It's super simple. Smart contracts related to publishing and royalties. Now you still need, probably in the interim, someone to go out and... The old school job for someone in rights and royalties is sitting in a restaurant and listening to see if the music is being played, and then you write it all down on a piece of paper. I mean, that's quite old school, but that still happens in a lot of places. So we can kind of move into smart contracts for the payment systems, and eventually we can move into AI, to actually detect what music is being played where. Just to go, not really on a tangent, but it's like, "Okay. Well, are we taking a job away from someone who's supposed to sit in a restaurant and listen to the music?" Well, I think we're developing a lot of new jobs by needing to generate this software. This is more- >> I've heard that. We've heard that argument before, "Oh! Bank tellers are going to be put out of business by the ATM machine." Turns out there's more branches now. >> Right. >> Okay. There's a total waste there. I mean, people say that are like... I mean, but it does bring up the next gen, the creator, the young artist, the ability to collaborate with smart contracts, the removal of the middle person in all this, the intermediaries. That's really the key, right? >> I think it is the key. And like I said, before removal of the middle person, some people would look down on that. I think it's more efficient systems. When you have more efficient systems, you have more efficient societies, you can create bigger and better things. So is there a change process that has to happen there? Yeah, of course. But this is humanity, this is history, this is what happens. >> Okay. So you're a pro, you've been through- >> I just embrace that. >> You've been through the business, you got the scar tissue, you got the experience, you got the brains. Now you're here in the front of a new generation, a lot of pioneering going on, a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion. Some people... Blood's spilling on the ground. There's a lot of stuff going on, that is opportunity. What are you up to? How are you attacking this market, how do you look at it, what's on your mind? >> Yeah. I mean, so what's funny, I've actually been spending the last few years, sort of directly advising individuals and companies in the music industry. So everyone from artists to label executives, content distribution executives, licensing teams and publishers, and sort of explaining, "Here's how things work. Here's how we think they're going to go. And here's how, instead of running away from that and trying to block your artists from using that system, we can actually use this to enhance the financial pie of the music industry, instead of just trying to steal a piece of everyone else's pie." That's what I really want to do, is, the industry pie can get bigger. We don't need to steal your blueberries. It's just- >> They're picking up crumbs and fighting over crumbs >> Exactly. The industry changed, and I understand why it's scary. I really, really do. I've lived through this. But it's going to be- >> What do they say? What's your advice to them, and what's their reaction? Is it like, "Yeah, you said that you'd get lip service." Or like, "Yeah, we're trying my best. I'll stop drinking, I promise." I mean, I've heard... I tried last week. I mean, are they actually getting it done, or they don't know what to do? >> Yeah. Well, I think it starts with individuals. I actually spent a lot of time working with individuals on education and how they can take that information to their companies or implement that in their companies. It's on sort of a corporate level. It is slower. That's okay. That's expected. But educating sort of individuals, like I said, that's what I've been doing for the past few years, is what's really been helpful. Because if you just kind of do this overnight, I understand it's not going to happen overnight. But being able, like I said, to figure out, "Okay. We grow the financial pie for the whole industry." This accumulates, this helps the health of the industry. Like I said, I grew up in the industry. I care a lot about the industry. I actually want to see good things happen- >> Positive change. >> It's in my heart, in my soul, to make the music industry- >> So Lauren, I got to ask you. So as you see the industry changing, and it's going to be hard to get people to go through transformation. >> Yeah. >> They have to get there. Otherwise, they'll be extinct. And we kind of see that. Is there new brands emerging that have a clean sheet of paper? Because I'm a far young artist, I'm saying to myself, "Okay. If I can write my own ticket..." And by the way, brands become platforms is a big trend you're seeing with NFTs and- >> Yeah. >> And these great Web3 platforms. So I got more social power, I got collective intelligence, I got network effect, I got fans. All that's tappable now from a monetization standpoint. >> Yeah. >> Are there new agencies, new brands, emerging that's artists friendly like this? >> I mean, that's one of the reasons we're here, to begin with. I'm obviously just going to mention Digital Bits, because they're literally creating NFTs for brands. I'm here because I believe in what they're building. Their model is applicable to brands, it's applicable to artists and athletes. I actually truly believe in what they're building and how they're doing it. NFTs is a faster way to achieve what we thought we were going to achieve with sort of the tokenization of a person or an individual brand. NFTs, I think, is a better way to do that. Obviously NFTs are tokens as well, but it's a different type of thing than an ICO. >> It has more versatility and it's got the same kind of characteristics- >> Yeah. I think you can build more community with it, you can maintain the value of the token itself, the non-punchable token itself, a little bit better, and you can build community around it. >> What are some of the companies you're advising and people you're advising? Are they record labels, are they executive, like an executive coach on one end, business consultant on the other? >> Yeah. >> What's some of the range of... >> So I actually advise a couple of brands, I can't completely speak about in the music industry, but from the executive position, I do advise individual executives from the label and the content distribution side, on sort of how to implement futurist tech into their company a little bit better, and sort of what the real things that are going on, the new things that are going on. I actually just took on a role for a company called Cyber Yachts, which I'm really excited about. This one's just going to be fun. International music, entertainment, fun. >> Do you need some media up there? We'll have to do interviews on both- >> Yeah. You can come on the metaverse yacht and the physical yacht, if you want to. But- >> Monaco's a great place for that. >> We will be here. >> All right. >> Absolutely. >> So tell me about the future of some of these big agencies you mentioned? Because if you look at the market right now, if you zoom out, content is king, distribution is Kong. That's what they say. There's a lot more distribution now more than, it seems, content. That's maybe on some perspectives. But it seems like there's a lot more outlets looking for better content. >> Always. >> Do you agree that distribution's hungry for the content, or is there more content than distribution? >> I think it just depends on the type of content. If you look at the content that's being distributed over, say social media, for example, there's a plethora of content. >> Yeah. I guess I'm not- >> There's actually, now, this new hierarchy there, where you have to really scrap to get to the top. So in a weird way, you're seeing that sort of mimic. We see how societies work. So now that's become very hierarchical, and that's almost mimicking the way the traditional industry has been developed. So we go through these cycles. >> It must be hard for a record label to try to do the A and R job, when you have more artists emerging from TikTok, Instagram, the social networks, or- >> I would say their job's probably gotten easier. >> Do you think because of the filtering? >> Well, yeah. Now you can view so much talent in a tiny amount of time online. Now, do I know what they are like lives, do I know how they perform? No, I got to go figure that out. But before you had to go to clubs and sit in there, and run around a city. You can only be in so many places at one time. >> You got to chase content down, look it down. >> Yeah. >> All right, so what's the most exciting thing that you think is happening in the whole crypto world, that's people should pay attention to, that's going to impact some of the mainstream? What's the most important things, do you think? >> Well, something that's actually, somewhat unrelated to music, which is government adoption. Sorry, but hands down, that is the most exciting and important thing that's going on right now. >> Adopting it and embracing it is important. >> Adopting it, embracing it, new regulations coming out. >> Are you happy with the progress? >> Yeah. I mean, it takes time. But right now we're the biggest sort of country that sun is, El Salvador. >> And now Monaco's leaning in. >> Now Monaco is obviously leaning in, that's... It's exciting. It's really exciting. >> Well, to me, I think Digital Bits, so when you climbed in earlier, is that, there's a legitimate crossover between the physical asset, digital asset world, and now the kind of the tough parts, the in between the details and the gaps, the contracts, the royalties. >> Yeah. >> Compliance. What does that even mean? >> Right. >> How is that going to get sorted out? Do you think this is going to settle itself out on its own or self govern, a little bit of a iron hand in there, or... >> It'll be a mix. I mean, there's a lot of trial and error going on right now, as far as governments. Like I said, there's really only a few places in the world that are doing it. I applaud these places for their bravery because... Don't get me wrong. It's going to be a struggle. There's going to be failures and successes, and being willing to be one of the countries that does that, that shows some grit. I really respect it. >> And the upside is if they get it right, it's huge. Lauren, final question. What are you up to next, what's on your mind? What are you working on beyond this consultancy? What's around the corner for you? Where do you see the self dots connecting in the future? >> Well, I'm really... Right now I travel quite a bit. I spend a lot of different... A lot of time at different conferences. I spoke earlier a little bit about an education program that I'm developing with an alliance with Draper University in El Salvador. So I want to finish the programming for that. We're going to scale that out across multiple countries. And that's everything from education for governments and education for people that, maybe just recently heard of Bitcoin and they don't even know how to go about seeing what it is. >> 5G in emerging countries is pretty potential there. >> It is. Absolutely. >> Great stuff. Lauren, thanks for coming on theCube sharing. >> Thank you so much. >> I appreciate it. Lauren Bissell here on theCube, I'm John Furrier, live in Monaco, for the Monaco Crypto Summit, Digital Bits. We got a big gala event tonight with Prince Albert in attendance. A lot of action, a lot of big news happening here. All the players are gathered for the inaugural Monaco Crypto Summit. I'm John Furrier. We'll have more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage in Monaco. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. Monaco Crypto Summit is the event and there's a big conversation later at the yacht club with Prince Albert and everyone else will be there, and it'll be quite the scene. And Rachel Wolfson is here. She's with Cointelegraph. They're the media partner of the event, the official media partner of the Monaco Crypto Summit. She's also MCing the event on stage, presented by DigitalBits. Rachel, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> So I know you're busy, thanks for taking the time cause' you got to go jump back in and moderate, and keep things on track. This isn't an inaugural event. So DigitalBits has exploded on the scene. I just saw a thing on YouTube news around this soccer player in Rome, has DigitalBits logo on their jersey. They're a big to do cause everyone's popular and they got a couple teams. So real world, kind of, assets coming together, what's going on in the event that you're MCing? What's the focus? What's the agenda? What's some of the conversations like? >> Yeah, definitely. Well, it's a great event. It's my first time here in Monaco and I'm loving it. And I think that Monaco is really becoming the next crypto hotspot. Definitely in terms of Metaverse and Web3 innovation, I think that we're going to start seeing a lot of that here. That's what we're seeing today at the Summit. So a lot of the presentations that we're seeing are really focused on Web3 and NFT platforms, so for instance, obviously what DigitalBits is doing. We watched a video before the break on Ecosystem and the Metaverse that people can join and be a part of, in terms of real estate, but we're seeing a lot of innovation here today with that. I moderated a great panel with Britney Kaiser, Lauren Bissell, Taross, I'm blanking on his last name, but it was about blockchain and how governments are implementing blockchain. So that was also really interesting to hear about what the Ukrainian government is doing with blockchain. So there's kind of a mix, but I'd say that the overall theme is Web3 and NFTs. >> Yeah. Britney was mentioning some of that, how they're going to preserve buildings and artifacts, so that in case they're looted or destroyed, they can preserve them. >> Right. I think it's called the Heritage Fund. And I just think it's such an interesting use case in terms of how governments are using blockchain because the best use for blockchain in my opinion, is recording data, and having that data be permanent. And so when we can have artifacts in Ukraine recorded on the blockchain, you know by being scanned, it's really revolutionary. And I think that a lot of governments around the world are going to see that use case and say, "Oh wow, blockchain is a great technology for things like that." >> So DigitalBits had a press conference this morning and they talked about their exchange and some other things. Did you attend that press conference or did you get briefed on that? >> I did not attend the press conference. I was prepping for my MC role. >> So they got this exchange thing and then there's real interest from Prince Albert's foundations to bring this into Monaco. So Monaco's got this vibe, big time. >> Rachel: Right. There's a vibe (John chuckles) >> What does it all mean, when you're putting in your reporting? What do you see happening? >> So, I mean, I honestly haven't covered Monaco actually ever in my reporting. And John, you know I've been reporting since 2017, but the vibe that I'm getting just from this summit today is that Web3 and NFTs are going to be huge here. I'm speaking, I haven't... You know, there's a panel coming up about crypto regulations, and so we're going to talk a little bit about laws being passed here in Monaco in terms of Metaverse and digital identity. So I think that there are a few laws around that here that they're looking at, the government here is looking at to kind of add clarity for those topics. >> I had a couple guests on earlier. We were talking about the old days, a couple years ago. You mentioned 2017, so much has changed. >> Yes. >> You know, we had a up and down. 2018 was a good year, and then it kind of dived back and changed a little bit. Then NFTs brought it back up again, been a great hype cycle, but also movement. What's your take on the real progress that's been made? If you zoom out and look at the landscape, what's happened? >> Right. I mean, well, a lot has happened. When I first entered the space, I initially came in, I was interested in enterprise, blockchain and private networks being utilized by enterprises to record data. And then we saw public blockchains come in, like Ethereum and enterprises using them. And then we saw a mix. And now I feel like we're just seeing public blockchains and there's really... (John chuckles) But there's still our private blockchains. But today, I mean, we've gone from that in 2017 to right now, I think, you know, we're recently seeing a lot of these centralized exchanges kind of collapsing. What we've seen with Celsius, for instance, and people moving their crypto to hardware wallets. I think that the space is really undergoing a lot of transformation. It's really revolutionary, actually, to see the hardware wallet market is growing rapidly, and I think that that's going to continue to grow. I think centralized exchanges are still going to exist in custody crypto for enterprises and institutions, and you know, in individuals as well. But we are seeing a shift from centralized exchanges to hardware wallets. NFTs, although the space is, you know, not as big as it was a year ago, it's still quite relevant. But I think with the way the market is looking today, we're only seeing the top projects kind of lead the way now, versus all of the noise that we were seeing previously. So yeah, I think it's- >> So corrections, basically? >> Right. Exactly. Corrections. And I think it's necessary, right. It's very necessary. >> Yeah. It's interesting. You know, you mentioned the big players you got Bitcoin, Ethereum driving a lot. I remember interviewing the crypto kiddies when they first came out, it was kind of a first gen Ethereum, and then it just exploded from there. And I remember saying to myself, if the NFTs and the decentralized applications can have that scale, but then it felt like, okay, there was a lot of jocking for under the covers, under the hood, so to speak. And now you've got massive presence from all the VCs, and Jason Ho has like another crypto fund. I mean, >> Right. you can't go a day without another big crypto fund from you know, traditional venture capitalists. Meanwhile, you got investors who have made billions on crypto, they're investing. So you kind of got a diversity of investor base going on and different instruments. So the investor community's changing and evolving too. >> Right. >> How do you see that evolving? >> Well, it's a really good point you mentioned. So Cointelegraph research recently released a report showing that Web3 is the most sought after investment sector this year. So it was DeFi before, and Web3 is now leading the way over DeFi. And so we're seeing a lot of these venture capitalist funds as you mentioned, create funds allocated just to Web3 growth. And that's exactly what we're seeing, the vibe I'm getting from the Monaco Crypto Summit here today, this is all about Web3. It's all about NFT, it is all about the Metaverse. You know, this is really revolutionary. So I think we're definitely going to see that trend kind of, you know, conquer all of these other sectors that we're seeing in blockchain right now. >> Has Web3 become the coin term for Metaverse and NFTs? Or is that being globalized as all shifted, decentralized? What's the read on it? It seems to be like, kind of all inclusive but it tends to be more like NFT's the new thing and the young Gen Zs >> Yeah want something different than the Millennials and the Xs and the Boomers, who screwed everything up for everybody. >> Yeah. (John chuckles) No, I mean, it's a great question. So when I think of Web3, I categorize NFTs and the Metaverse in there. Obviously it's just, you know the new form of the internet. It's the way the internet is- >> Never fight fashion, as I always say, right? >> Right. Yeah. Right. (John chuckles) It's just decentralization. The fact that we can live in these virtual worlds and own our own assets through NFT, it's all decentralized. And in my opinion, that all falls under the category of Web3. >> Well, you're doing a great job MCing. Great to have you on theCube. >> Rachel: Thanks. I'd like to ask you a personal question if you don't mind. COVID's impacted us all with no events. When did you get back onto the events circuit? What's on your calendar? What have you been up to? >> Yeah, so gosh, with COVID, I think when COVID, you know, when it was actually really happening, (John chuckles) and it still is happening. But when it was, you know, >> John: Like, when it was >> impacting- shut down mode. >> Right. When we were shut down, there were virtual events. And then, I think it was late last year or early this year when the events started happening again. So most recently I was at NFT NYC. Before that, I was at Consensus, which was huge. >> Was that the one in Austin or Miami? >> In Austin. >> That's right, Austin. >> Right. Were you there? >> No, I missed it. >> Okay. It was a very high level, great event. >> Huge numbers, I heard. >> Yes. Massive turnout. (John chuckles) Tons of speakers. It was really informative. >> It feels like a festival. actually. >> It was. It was just like South by Southwest, except for crypto and blockchain. (John chuckles) And then coming up, gosh, there are a lot of events. I'll be at an event in Miami, it's an NFT event that's in a few months. I know that there's a summit happening, I think in Turkey that I may be at as well. >> You're on the road. You're traveling. You're doing a lot of hopping around. >> Yes I am. And there's a lot of events happening in Europe. I'm US-based, but I'm hoping to spend more time in Europe just so I can go to those events. But there's a lot happening. >> Yeah. Cool. What's the most important story people should be paying attention to in your mind? >> Wow. That's... (Rachel chuckles) That's a big question. It's a good question. I think most, you know, the transition that we're seeing now, so in terms of prices, I think people need to focus less on the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum and more on innovation that's happening. So for instance, Web3 innovation, what we're seeing here today, you know, innovation, isn't about prices, but it's more about like actually now is the time to build. >> Yeah. because the prices are a bit down. >> Yeah. I mean, as, you know, Lewis Hamilton's F1 driver had a quote, you know, "It takes a team. No matter who's in the driver's seat, it's a team." So community, Wayne Gretzky skates where the puck is going to be I think is much more what I'm hearing now, seeing what you're saying is that don't try to count the price trade of Bitcoin. This is an evolution. >> Right. >> And the dots are connecting. >> Exactly. And like I said, now is the time to build. What we're seeing with the project Britney mentioned, putting the heritage, you know, on the blockchain from Ukraine, like, that's a great use case for what we're seeing now. I want to see more of those real world use cases. >> Right. Well, Rachel, thanks for coming on theCube. I really appreciate it. Great to see you. >> Thanks, John. >> And thanks for coming out of your schedule. I know you're busy. >> Thanks. Now you get some lunchtime now and get some break. >> Yeah. Get back on stage. Thanks for coming on. >> Rachel: Thank you. >> All right. We're here at the Monaco Crypto Summit. Rachel's MCing the event as part of the official media partner, Cointelegraph. Rachel Wolfson here on theCube. I'm John Furrier. More coverage coming after this short break. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

okay welcome back everyone we're here live in monaco for siliconangle thecube's coverage of the monaco crypto summit i'm john furrier your host we're here with al berger the founder of the digital bits blockchain digital bits is presented it's an open ecosystem they're the main presenters bringing everybody together al burgia is the man of the hour al great to see you cube alumni great to see you again john thanks thanks for having me back on the show it's been this is an inaugural event yeah you you and your team put together the digital bits foundation um the digits blockchains enabling technology the proof is in the pudding as i always say now you're seeing companies building on top of the ecosystem why monaco this is inaugural event what's going on here what's the motivation what does all this mean all this stuff coming together share uh why monaco i mean there's uh it's part of this next chapter for us things are happening in monaco and and um um we've yet to unveil that and we thought you know what better place to unveil what we're doing in monaco other than to do it in monaco so that was really the genesis of what gave birth this idea to have the monaco crypto summit um but that evolved beyond just sharing the nexus of it all there are organizations that here that have come from all over the world and will be sharing for the first time how they're also utilizing the digital bits watching not bad to come to monaco in the summer though it's pretty pretty nice area beautiful views yeah summer time in monaco is always great but this inaugural event first of all i love the name so congratulations on the name i think it's got a lot of legs to it i think this will be something that's going to be around for a long long time so it's a good good call there there's a lot of other dynamics going on prince albert's got some involvement he's interested in crypto we're going to hear more about that in the yacht club presentation later tonight you got startups companies building on top of the capabilities of digital bits you know you and i have talked in the past on the cube about the technology um your technologists uh followed a lot of your adventures to success and exits multiple exits in tech silicon valley knows you everyone knows you know around the world it's kind of like a cloud game but it's decentralized you've got infrastructure platform applications um there's super applications and decentralized device to all kinds of new stuff going on so you have a stack kind of going on here in a decentralized way and been validated by all the big names jumping in and changing their business models and horowitz you name it now a global financial markets converging on this huge opportunity around crypto and d-apps everything's happening so what's your reaction to someone who's been through many cycles built companies and sold them and been successful what's your analysis i mean this journey is then different and you has a unique some similarities but definitely some unique characteristics in prior journeys uh in in you know venturing off to found a company and so forth and for me it's been obviously the traditional way um you know prior to this obviously it was in the valley and and had uh uh quite the journey um what i would say this time is um with all that's happening in blockchain and cryptocurrency it's the amount of say capital formation the amount of people involvement in into an early technology into an evolving technology and there's various subcategories now across nfts metabours and um and all things fungible um there's a global stage immediately and um and it sort of creates these sort of mini vortexes of getting more people involved um it's it's kind of some semblances of like the dot-com bubble in a sense but with a much bigger ecosystem um in comparison to what we saw in the 90s um the thing about blockchain is that it it needs to the more successful blockchains out there need to evolve into becoming as decentralized as possible and so as to use your analogy of stack i mean it is incredibly important to have contributors at all layers protocol layer application d app layer in many corners of the world but it all starts with an idea so it's really hard to go from point a to point b um like any other new opportunity and so for us it's been a journey we're evolving in this next chapter um and a lot of that will be evident today throughout the course of the summit we'll start to see and start to feel even more so how uh the digitalbits ecosystem is is becoming more and more decentral we're going to see a bunch of folks coming on us off stage are going to come here sit down on thecube and chat with me about their opportunities how would you describe for the folks watching now what's going on on stage here all day and then obviously there's a vip gala tonight at the yacht club with prince albert in attendance and his team and a bunch of big power players what's happening here what's the what's the vibe what's the purpose what's being presented can you just quickly share uh take a minute to explain what's going on so relative to to the summit um it's you know organizations uh platforms um there's there's uh a few metaverse uh platforms here that will be um i mean they've been in in existence but they'll be unveiling um their connection and how they're leveraging the digital business watching for the very first time and so um but also other categories as well even um soon here massive multi-billion dollar real estate development all coming to um the digital blockchain so this is the physical world massive uh resort um real estate development completely being tokenized you just had some success in digital assets obviously the roma team i saw the announcement on on youtube was pretty big um you get digital bits on the jersey a new player so caught my attention you got sports teams you got here you got applications people building on top of digital bits why for us it yeah vision is needs to be supported by a strategy um from inception it was finding ways to take an enterprise go to market strategy and and uh some of it may be a bit of trial and error in the early you know onset from 2017-18 when it when the journey kind of began for the digital biz blockchain but um also part of it is timing and one of the things that we saw more recently again kind of like the journey and the stack you're referring to before nobody foresaw the pandemic nobody foresaw that the whole world would be at home staring at a screen um and figuring out what to do with their time and many of the world for the first time began to learn about blockchain and cryptocurrency for the first time in the onset of this pandemic and so that became a huge accelerant for the space and so um another quote you know i've i'll take away from you that i you know recall you saying many years ago um you need to have a horse on the track to be in the race yeah we're very fortunate to have a horse in the track by having already a number of years of development um awareness so that when there's kind of like these market shifts that can become an accelerant we're in a position to to move with the industry um and so it's been an incredible couple of years i mean it was great for you guys yeah and so there you know there's different contributors in the ecosystem some some that i'm affiliated with that have done things in the sports space um and other things that i'm not affiliated with there's a lot of things that again are emerging today that are happening in different categories or themes of metaverse for example um and i'm humbled by it just simply by the virtue of the fact that they're utilizing the digital that's watching but i had no um stake in building what they've built in terms of this is enabling technology so just to kind of pivot off you said yeah the pandemic was a tailwind now for um this movement for many reasons one people sitting at home boy hey this is technically vegas work on the blockchain two the future of work or the future of how things are organized is was remote work remote work is like next door neighbor to decentralization like i mean come on you're talking about people going this is not the future is not where it used to be that kind of galvanized a lot of people and also the business models have shifted so now post pandemic everything's hybrid which is virtual physical so that's the perfect storm so total acceleration agree um and we're seeing the traction now what's interesting about what you guys are doing is you're enabling people to build apps on it that's the platform and and that's that's again what i want to ask you is i had people always ask me what's digital bits so i'm going to ask you what is digital bits well digital bits is both the name of a blockchain it's also the name of a cryptocurrency the native cryptocurrency of the digital bits blockchain and so um it began 2017 as a fork of stellar in terms of the original repository um and you know there's a question i was asked earlier today in a press conference of like oh there's all these blockchains well we're still in this like early stage uh this early part of this uh evolution and so i i don't necessarily see a lot of what's happening out there as competitive but rather complementary because in unison you know there's different use cases different categories uh where kind of a blockchain can find its array of adoption in in this sort of phase of it all um for us um we've been referred to as a few different things one of which is you know the aspiration become this blockchain for brands i think today we'll learn that it's become much bigger than that in terms of its capability it's not necessarily that um it's as a result of new technology it's the tech a lot of this technology has been there it's just how it's being exploited and used um we're unveiling today for example and part of now this chapter for me is working with um community um developers hold on before you get there so okay i see digital bits i love the name by the way so thanks for that you kind of get to the news now you have a press conference take me through the press conference what's the news what are you guys announcing here today so the press conference we we did share not everything uh there's more um uh likely in store by the end of today that's not on the agenda uh and and maybe i'll be back on the show later today um we will have you back we'll find out come on but in terms of in terms of what we shared so far at the press conference um uh it was centered around two key themes i wanted to um obviously talked about the array of things to come today but focus on some of the things i'm directly involved in one of which was nico swap and the other are the number of things involved here within monaco so in terms of nico swap um by way of nane nico and in the spirit of decentralization nico in ancient greek means victory for the people so we thought that was a fitting name for the platform it's a decentralized exchange platform on uh the digital bits blockchain um filled with liquidity pool technology automated market making technology it's it's but by way of comparison digital bits is version of let's say a uniswap but lower cost faster and so forth and there's a number of organizations here today that will uh are announcing that they're deploying on nicos bringing their token to the digital bits blockchain and and launching um on on nicoswap so we're i'm super excited about that this is you know part of evolution and part of fostering decentralization um and so what that enables is by virtue of uh being able to again help helping other organizations getting their horse on the track the common denominator for us is digital bits it's um you know the fact that every application every utility token every nft you know does require digital bits including the digital bits currency to provide that security to to be used for gas fees and and and so on and so forth so um the blockchain itself the cryptocurrency it's kind of a common denominator beneficiary uh the one way you can kind of think of it um but yeah we shared a lot around an ecoswap um uh what it looks like and um its key functionality and and who are some of the organizations that are uh on on board day one the other part of the press conference today we shared um was more monaco centric digital bits in monaco and this journey is just beginning uh it's super humbling it's super exciting for me to be a part of it um there is again no real particular order there's a an ecampus that's focused around cyber security and blockchain education for both private sector and public sector so um academia so skills government issues solve some skill gap correct right it's an organization a financial institution a whole department needs to know more about blockchain how they can leverage it um digitalbits um is the blockchain um that is forming the first part of the curriculum for this ecampus that's launching here in monaco with uh uh an organization called amvini the other thing uh that we shared and announced uh today is that um the first sov first and only sovereign cloud in europe is the monaco cloud as recently launched what makes it soft and in essence is a few aspects of its characteristics but digital bits blockchain nodes are being deployed in the monaco cloud um and so beyond the nodes that already exist it's um the network is further being let's say hardest to bring your scale in resiliency you know the whole thing around censorship resistance right the more nodes there's a huge strategic aspect to obviously deploying nodes in in sovereign clouds um and so in europe the first for that is the monaco cloud so we're really honored to be working with the team there and mvne and so forth for that and then um and then as well um a number of months ago we began a journey with the prince albert of monaco foundation um the the chair president is uh prince albert and um the uh vice president ceo is olivia windham who was in attendance at the uh at the press conference as well and um and we unveiled um the foundations uh platform entirely built on the digital bits blockchain uh utilizing the digital bits cryptocurrency um as well as uh nft ticketing and so forth uh so we unveiled that we showcased that for uh for members of the press um how it will be used and and so forth some of the questions you got um i mean it went everywhere from um there was a regulatory regulation question related to europe um to questions around decentralization what are what are we doing how do we compare to uh proof of work you know why why digital bits a big part of that is i think we have a lot of common values with um the foundation of prince albert foundation uh around the environment being eco-friendly and so on and so forth and so um um questions of that sort you know how what do you know what's the next chapter look like and and how how um is more and more decentralization in my view going to be fueled and you said you got some announcements you can't talk about um coming okay so is that what's that going to be related to you get a little bit of teaser on that is it going to be something how big we be massive is it the grand finale or is it it's not a finale the unveiling it's an op unboxing of a new deal what's what's what is it a deal is it technology um it is uh um it's it's um large uh organization um that um is is leveraging uh both um the digital bits watching and digital body swerve that one okay good well al thanks for coming on and congratulations we will catch up with you either at the end of the day here on the live program or we will be at the yacht club in monaco yacht club tonight for the big event we hope to be live there but if not we will report on that yeah thanks for having me john all right congratulations digital [ __ ] really rocking the world here in monaco love the name digital bits makes tons tons of sense platform to enable applications this is the future you're going to start to see this decentralized model that kind of looks like cloud computing but not it's a technology enabling the creative and the and and the application transformations to decentralization it's coming almost every single category will be centralized we'll be covering a blanket on the cube i'm john furrier thecube thanks for watching [Music] you

hello welcome everyone to thecube's coverage here in monaco i'm john furrier host of thecube the monaco crypto summit is happening we're here for the full day and tonight at the yacht club for special presentations crypto team is here digital bits and the industry's gathering and we get some great guests lined up throughout the day our first guest is michael gord co-founder and ceo of gda capital michael welcome to thecube cube great lunch on so we're kicking off the day here we got a lot of a lot of commentary around crypto and also we're in monaco so kind of a special inaugural event why this event why are people gathering here in monaco monaco has traditionally been a top financial jurisdiction but and there has been crypto events here before but never with participation from from prince albert so this being the first event first blockchain focus event in monaco that has participation from prince albert has brought a has brought a global audience and the fact that digital bets is intending to there's a a lot of excitement and and what uh what digital bits is going to be coming to market with yeah and i think i talked to alberto the founder and ceo of digitalbits um i've known him for many years he's a tech guy by heart but he's been in the trenches doing a lot of work over the years in crypto and one of the things i think digital bits has nailed this first the name's amazing but they got real deals i saw our announcement a couple days ago less than 48 hours roma soccer team has a new player they brought the big roll out digitalbits is on the uniform on the front of it huge crowd great visibility so this is a real trend where the the assets of physical and digital coming together there's certainly a lot of hype and a lot of kind of like cleaning up right now in the market but this train is definition is happening training has left the station there's been a lot of over the past decade a lot of startups building in the on blockchains and some of those startups have become big companies but big traditional enterprises have been slow to adopt digital assets and uh digitalbits is really well positioned to bring a lot of those and bring a lot of enterprise participation to the blockchain yeah i mean we met a couple days ago and we were talking in um at the hotel um you're you've been at this for a while you got some great successes talk about your firm what are you guys doing gda what are some of the things you're working on uh you're doing some investment what are some of the angles you're taking bets you've made things you're looking at yeah so i'm a serial entrepreneur and investor i've been focused on the mainstream adoption digital assets for the last decade went about that in in various different ways as i have as i've matured but the way our business looks now is uh is focused on bridging the gap between institutional capital markets and the blockchain and helping institutional capital participate in the market um so we help digital assets with their with their public offering we've gotten into traditional public markets through uh the blockchain moon acquisition corp spac that one of my co-founders is director of we have a brokerage business that does a few hundred million dollars about the transaction volume collateralized lending business we just started some some funds principal investments and then we incubate our own companies internally in category new categories like the metaverse nfts and um other things like that so pretty diversified across the boxing cabinet market at this point and in general looking to create solutions to um help the traditional capital market and the boxing cabinet market get get deeper exposure here you know it's interesting i hear you're speaking about the um how you guys are handling your your view of the landscape multiple moving parts on the investment thesis a lot of integration of instruments and vehicles it's a new creative structural change i mean if you look at just the money how crypto and the future of money this this cultural shift it's also some structural change on how to invest how to manage the investments how to bring on like incubation into most capital public private at the same time on the other side of the coin you have the entrepreneurial energy of um a lot of entrepreneurial ideas you see a lot of creative artists the creator culture has emerged in the past year and a half as a massive wave but to me that's just an application on top of the new infrastructure if you look at all the big investment houses that are pouring billions of whether it's industrial horowitz or other big vcs moving and shifting it's all the same game it's the infrastructure platform applications and it's but it's different it's not what we used to see because it decentralized how do you react to that what's your view on that concept you see it the same way yeah i think that there's everything with blockchains is novel but almost all of it we've seen before so um we've had games before now with the blockchain we have the ability to earn income by playing games we've had exchanges before but they've always been a centralized organization that everything that is now built on blockchains exists in the traditional internet or capital market or game industry or or whatever uh that you know there has been art for generations there's been uh now the ability to have art on the blockchain with provable nft like every everything is innovative because of the decentralization aspect but it's not it's not the first thing the first time that we've seen any of this stuff it's almost interesting you're seeing it recycling all the same concepts on the old web kind of come in the new web and there's also a gen z angle especially the metaverse metaverse the constant theme i'm seeing is hey you want to watch sports you can watch in the metaverse and do it differently and not have to attend so you know the whole pandemic has shown us that hybrid virtual and hybrid is coming together and so i see a huge tsunami of innovation coming from just the tailwind post pandemic i think still massive value in a real event like this us being able to sit in front of each other as real people is uh not replicatable in the metaverse but to be in monaco is not possible for everyone because uh visa reasons because they have something you know it's just you have to be here today is not possible for a hundred percent of the world or for a sports game or for a concert or for a music premiere movie premiere really anything that's happening in the real world is not the metaverse is not gonna replace the real world but it is gonna create a massive additional audience to anything that's happening in the real world that anyone around the world can participate and how amazing would it be for uh for someone from zimbabwe someone from sydney and someone from brazil to all be interested in what digital bits is doing in monaco and what prince albert is you know how how how how the monarchical crypto summit is looking to position monaco in the future of cryptocurrency the kind of theme of this event and they have the amazing fortune to meet in the metaverse it doesn't replace well i mean i think i mean i think this is a great point this to me is going to be the holy grail in my opinion i agree if you look at the notion of presence we're face to face we're here there's people here so we peace we see each other in the lobby maybe he's out sightseeing at dinners so when you have that face to face that's the scarce resource right that's going to be the intimacy sometimes it's not even just to learn about what the pro what's going on but if we're present here how do we create that same experience when you have presence not just some icon chatting but like just movement knowing that you're there connected to people first party is going to be no one's really done it well i think the metaverse is to me is showing the path to being a first-class citizen digitally with a real-time event it's new so it is possible to communicate in the metaverse through through a microphone so if if you're beside someone then similar to the real world you can say you know hey how's it going what do you think about the presentation or or whatever you want and if you're speaking in a conversational way then the person beside you will hear what the person down the hall might might not um it's also that i've i've seen new features in certain like experiences that are coming to market that kind of take the google hangout or skype yeah like video infrastructure and put that in so we could choose to have our cameras on which is it's getting better but it of course doesn't replace real presence there's no doubt in my mind that in near future soon sooner or later there's gonna be a guest sitting right next to you that's not here okay there will be a hologram model where people will be interviewed will have capability to visualize that person they'll be in a metaverse they'll be queuing up for interviews this is a game this is a mind-blowing thing i mean if you just think about that concept that we could have participation in real time here with expressions with their with their digital expression their icon whatever whatever their nfts are so i think this is going to be the blending of how communities gather and i think ultimately how truth and and journalism and news is going to change so to me yeah we're super excited we're here obviously because we want to get the stories and you know we love what digital bits is doing prince albert certainly a relevant figure on the global stage um i think this is a signal for a lot of things to come indeed indeed all right so final question before we move on what's your hottest thing you got going on what are you looking at what are you most excited about um well just just this conference um we've got quite a lot of of companies we have exposure in that are that are presenting and a lot of them are coining new new new niches of the market so um we have uh um we've spoken about a lot about the metaverse we have you know i'm and i think the metaverse is probably the the thing that i'm overall most excited about i think it's the next multi-trillion dollar market that feels like bitcoins in but in addition to that we have the first regenerative finance platform that is that is presenting here that's using decentralized finance and and blockchain technology to create a model that people can earn income while mining carbon credits essentially with an objective of having first boxing all blocking protocols but eventually creating a leader board of carbon positive businesses where businesses will challenge their competitors to be more carbon positive in a way that actually earns them earn some income outside of the potential value what's the name of that company that's kyoto protocol uh we have the first entertained to earn a company that is is presenting here it's playgood um the first uh e-commerce metaverse platform so integrated directly into e-commerce without needing to i think the future of the metaverse is is social links you have you know finest in the metaverse and you have all of the all the logos of metaverses that you have experiences in which is cool yeah that that's uh but then you're you're going out of the native website instead of having a um instead of you know native to the to the website having a metabolism experience so they're doing that um yeah really cool awesome final question one more final question i got for you because you made me think of it so metaverse obviously hot is there going to be an open metaverse you start to see walled gardens and you got facebook they got slam dunk by the u.s uh in terms of monopolistic move for buying a exercise act which you know i can i i don't think that was a good move by the u.s i think i let him do that but but there they're they're kind of the wall garden model the old facebook i mean decentralized about open yeah historically if we go back in time there's always open and closed infrastructure in the internet um there was there is companies building open infrastructure companies building closed infrastructure and we could have been talking in 1992 about whether the private intranet will create mass adoption or the open internet will create mass adoption and not that the the intranet is probably is even today still a multi-billion dollar per year business but it's not a multi-trillion dollar per year per year you know infrastructure like the public internet same with the blockchain in 2012 2013 um private blockchains were all the rage by banking raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build up private boxing infrastructure and private blockchains are generating probably today still multi-billion dollars of revenue annually but they haven't accrued multi-trillion dollars like the public watching has i think the same thing will be in the metaverse there will be open and closed infrastructure um but event and there already is close you know fortnight and and games are are essentially closed metaverses just without ownable land um i always look at the i'm old school i look at aol they had they monopolized dial up internet like where the hell did that go you know history so again yeah we don't know it's going to be maybe a connection a connection point between these open metaverses we'll see maybe i'm investment update michael thanks for coming on thecube appreciate you kicking off the event here monaco crypto summit powered by digital bits presented by digital bits uh the company really and behind all the innovation here and the companies i'm john furrier with more coverage after this short break thanks john [Music] you

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit live in Washington D. C. A face to face event were on the ground here is to keep coverage. I'm john Kerry, your hosts got two great guests. Both cuba alumni Shannon Kellogg VP of public policy for the Americas and john would ceo tell us congratulations on some announcement on stage and congressional john being a public company. Last time I saw you in person, you are private. Now your I. P. O. Congratulations >>totally virtually didn't meet one investor, lawyer, accountant or banker in person. It's all done over zoom. What's amazing. >>We'll go back to that and a great great to see you had great props here earlier. You guys got some good stuff going on in the policy side, a core max on stage talking about this Virginia deal. Give us the update. >>Yeah. Hey thanks john, it's great to be back. I always like to be on the cube. Uh, so we made an announcement today regarding our economic impact study, uh, for the commonwealth of Virginia. And this is around the amazon web services business and our presence in Virginia or a WS as we all, uh, call, uh, amazon web services. And um, basically the data that we released today shows over the last decade the magnitude of investment that we're making and I think reflects just the overall investments that are going into Virginia in the data center industry of which john and I have been very involved with over the years. But the numbers are quite um, uh, >>just clever. This is not part of the whole H. 20. H. Q. Or whatever they call HQ >>To HQ two. It's so Virginia Amazon is investing uh in Virginia as part of our HQ two initiative. And so Arlington Virginia will be the second headquarters in the U. S. In addition to that, AWS has been in Virginia for now many years, investing in both data center infrastructure and also other corporate facilities where we house AWS employees uh in other parts of Virginia, particularly out in what's known as the dullest technology corridor. But our data centers are actually spread throughout three counties in Fairfax County, Loudoun County in Prince William County. >>So this is the maxim now. So it wasn't anything any kind of course this is Virginia impact. What was, what did he what did he announce? What did he say? >>Yeah. So there were a few things that we highlighted in this economic impact study. One is that over the last decade, if you can believe it, we've invested $35 billion 2020 alone. The AWS investment in construction and these data centers. uh it was actually $1.3 billion 2020. And this has created over 13,500 jobs in the Commonwealth of Virginia. So it's a really great story of investment and job creation and many people don't know John in this Sort of came through in your question too about HQ two, But aws itself has over 8000 employees in Virginia today. Uh, and so we've had this very significant presence for a number of years now in Virginia over the last, you know, 15 years has become really the cloud capital of the country, if not the world. Uh, and you see all this data center infrastructure that's going in there, >>John What's your take on this? You've been very active in the county there. Um, you've been a legend in the area and tech, you've seen this many years, you've been doing so I think the longest running company doing cyber my 31st year, 31st year. So you've been on the ground. What does this all mean to you? >>Well, you know, it goes way back to, it was roughly 2005 when I served on the Economic Development Commission, Loudon County as the chairman. And at the time we were the fastest-growing county in America in Loudon County. But our residential real property taxes were going up stratospherically because when you look at it, every dollar real property tax that came into residential, we lose $2 because we had to fund schools and police and fire departments and so forth. And we realized for every dollar of commercial real property tax that came in, We made $97 in profit, but only 13% of the money that was coming into the county was coming in commercially. So a small group got together from within the county to try and figure out what were the assets that we had to offer to companies like Amazon and we realized we had a lot of land, we had water and then we had, you know this enormous amount of dark fiber, unused fibre optic. And so basically the county made it appealing to companies like amazon to come out to Loudon County and other places in northern Virginia and the rest is history. If you look today, we're Loudon County is Loudon County generates a couple $100 million surplus every year. It's real property taxes have come down in in real dollars and the percentage of revenue that comes from commercials like 33 34%. That's really largely driven by the data center ecosystem that my friend over here Shannon was talking. So >>the formula basically is look at the assets resources available that may align with the kind of commercial entities that good. How's their domicile there >>that could benefit. >>So what about power? Because the data centers need power, fiber fiber is great. The main, the main >>power you can build power but the main point is is water for cooling. So I think I think we had an abundance of water which allowed us to build power sources and allowed companies like amazon to build their own power sources. So I think it was really a sort of a uh uh better what do they say? Better lucky than good. So we had a bunch of assets come together that helps. Made us, made us pretty lucky as a, as a region. >>Thanks area too. >>It is nice and >>john, it's really interesting because the vision that john Wood and several of his colleagues had on that economic development board has truly come through and it was reaffirmed in the numbers that we released this week. Um, aws paid $220 million 2020 alone for our data centers in those three counties, including loud >>so amazon's contribution to >>The county. $220 million 2020 alone. And that actually makes up 20% of overall property tax revenues in these counties in 2020. So, you know, the vision that they had 15 years ago, 15, 16 years ago has really come true today. And that's just reaffirmed in these numbers. >>I mean, he's for the amazon. So I'll ask you the question. I mean, there's a lot of like for misinformation going around around corporate reputation. This is clearly an example of the corporation contributing to the, to the society. >>No, no doubt. And you think >>About it like that's some good numbers, 20 million, 30 >>$5 million dollar capital investment. You know, 10, it's, what is it? 8000 9000 >>Jobs. jobs, a W. S. jobs in the Commonwealth alone. >>And then you look at the economic impact on each of those counties financially. It really benefits everybody at the end of the day. >>It's good infrastructure across the board. How do you replicate that? Not everyone's an amazon though. So how do you take the formula? What's your take on best practice? How does this rollout? And that's the amazon will continue to grow, but that, you know, this one company, is there a lesson here for the rest of us? >>I think I think all the data center companies in the cloud companies out there see value in this region. That's why so much of the internet traffic comes through northern Virginia. I mean it's I've heard 70%, I've heard much higher than that too. So I think everybody realizes this is a strategic asset at a national level. But I think the main point to bring out is that every state across America should be thinking about investments from companies like amazon. There are, there are really significant benefits that helps the entire community. So it helps build schools, police departments, fire departments, etcetera, >>jobs opportunities. What's the what's the vision though? Beyond data center gets solar sustainability. >>We do. We have actually a number of renewable energy projects, which I want to talk about. But just one other quick on the data center industry. So I also serve on the data center coalition which is a national organization of data center and cloud providers. And we look at uh states all over this country were very active in multiple states and we work with governors and state governments as they put together different frameworks and policies to incent investment in their states and Virginia is doing it right. Virginia has historically been very forward looking, very forward thinking and how they're trying to attract these data center investments. They have the right uh tax incentives in place. Um and then you know, back to your point about renewable energy over the last several years, Virginia is also really made some statutory changes and other policy changes to drive forward renewable energy in Virginia. Six years ago this week, john I was in a coma at county in Virginia, which is the eastern shore. It's a very rural area where we helped build our first solar farm amazon solar farm in Virginia in 2015 is when we made this announcement with the governor six years ago this week, it was 88 megawatts, which basically at the time quadruple the virginias solar output in one project. So since that first project we at Amazon have gone from building that one facility, quadrupling at the time, the solar output in Virginia to now we're by the end of 2023 going to be 1430 MW of solar power in Virginia with 15 projects which is the equivalent of enough power to actually Enough electricity to power 225,000 households, which is the equivalent of Prince William county Virginia. So just to give you the scale of what we're doing here in Virginia on renewable energy. >>So to me, I mean this comes down to not to put my opinion out there because I never hold back on the cube. It's a posture, we >>count on that. It's a >>posture issue of how people approach business. I mean it's the two schools of thought on the extreme true business. The government pays for everything or business friendly. So this is called, this is a modern story about friendly business kind of collaborative posture. >>Yeah, it's putting money to very specific use which has a very specific return in this case. It's for everybody that lives in the northern Virginia region benefits everybody. >>And these policies have not just attracted companies like amazon and data center building builders and renewable energy investments. These policies are also leading to rapid growth in the cybersecurity industry in Virginia as well. You know john founded his company decades ago and you have all of these cybersecurity companies now located in Virginia. Many of them are partners like >>that. I know john and I both have contributed heavily to a lot of the systems in place in America here. So congratulations on that. But I got to ask you guys, well I got you for the last minute or two cybersecurity has become the big issue. I mean there's a lot of these policies all over the place. But cyber is super critical right now. I mean, where's the red line Shannon? Where's you know, things are happening? You guys bring security to the table, businesses are out there fending for themselves. There's no militia. Where's the, where's the, where's the support for the commercial businesses. People are nervous >>so you want to try it? >>Well, I'm happy to take the first shot because this is and then we'll leave john with the last word because he is the true cyber expert. But I had the privilege of hosting a panel this morning with the director of the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency at the department, Homeland Security, Jenness easterly and the agency is relatively new and she laid out a number of initiatives that the DHS organization that she runs is working on with industry and so they're leaning in their partnering with industry and a number of areas including, you know, making sure that we have the right information sharing framework and tools in place, so the government and, and we in industry can act on information that we get in real time, making sure that we're investing for the future and the workforce development and cyber skills, but also as we enter national cybersecurity month, making sure that we're all doing our part in cyber security awareness and training, for example, one of the things that are amazon ceo Andy Jassy recently announced as he was participating in a White house summit, the president biden hosted in late august was that we were going to at amazon make a tool that we've developed for information and security awareness for our employees free, available to the public. And in addition to that we announced that we were going to provide free uh strong authentication tokens for AWS customers as part of that announcement going into national cybersecurity months. So what I like about what this administration is doing is they're reaching out there looking for ways to work with industry bringing us together in these summits but also looking for actionable things that we can do together to make a difference. >>So my, my perspective echoing on some of Shannon's points are really the following. Uh the key in general is automation and there are three components to automation that are important in today's environment. One is cyber hygiene and education is a piece of that. The second is around mis attribution meaning if the bad guy can't see you, you can't be hacked. And the third one is really more or less around what's called attribution, meaning I can figure out actually who the bad guy is and then report that bad guys actions to the appropriate law enforcement and military types and then they take it from there >>unless he's not attributed either. So >>well over the basic point is we can't as industry hat back, it's illegal, but what we can do is provide the tools and methods necessary to our government counterparts at that point about information sharing, where they can take the actions necessary and try and find those bad guys. >>I just feel like we're not moving fast enough. Businesses should be able to hack back. In my opinion. I'm a hawk on this one item. So like I believe that because if people dropped on our shores with troops, the government will protect us. >>So your your point is directly taken when cyber command was formed uh before that as airlines seeing space physical domains, each of those physical domains have about 100 and $50 billion they spend per year when cyber command was formed, it was spending less than Jpmorgan chase to defend the nation. So, you know, we do have a ways to go. I do agree with you that there needs to be more uh flexibility given the industry to help help with the fight. You know, in this case. Andy Jassy has offered a couple of tools which are, I think really good strong tokens training those >>are all really good. >>We've been working with amazon for a long time, you know, ever since, uh, really, ever since the CIA embrace the cloud, which was sort of the shot heard around the world for cloud computing. We do the security compliance automation for that air gap region for amazon as well as other aspects >>were all needs more. Tell us faster, keep cranking up that software because tell you right now people are getting hit >>and people are getting scared. You know, the colonial pipeline hack that affected everybody started going wait a minute, I can't get gas. >>But again in this area of the line and jenny easterly said this this morning here at the summit is that this truly has to be about industry working with government, making sure that we're working together, you know, government has a role, but so does the private sector and I've been working cyber issues for a long time to and you know, kind of seeing where we are this year in this recent cyber summit that the president held, I really see just a tremendous commitment coming from the private sector to be an effective partner in securing the nation this >>full circle to our original conversation around the Virginia data that you guys are looking at the Loudon County amazon contribution. The success former is really commercial public sector. I mean, the government has to recognize that technology is now lingua franca for all things everything society >>well. And one quick thing here that segues into the fact that Virginia is the cloud center of the nation. Um uh the president issued a cybersecurity executive order earlier this year that really emphasizes the migration of federal systems into cloud in the modernization that jOHN has worked on, johN had a group called the Alliance for Digital Innovation and they're very active in the I. T. Modernization world and we remember as well. Um but you know, the federal government is really emphasizing this, this migration to cloud and that was reiterated in that cybersecurity executive order >>from the, well we'll definitely get you guys back on the show, we're gonna say something. >>Just all I'd say about about the executive order is that I think one of the main reasons why the president thought was important is that the legacy systems that are out there are mainly written on kobol. There aren't a lot of kids graduating with degrees in COBOL. So COBOL was designed in 1955. I think so I think it's very imperative that we move has made these workloads as we can, >>they teach it anymore. >>They don't. So from a security point of view, the amount of threats and vulnerabilities are through the >>roof awesome. Well john I want to get you on the show our next cyber security event. You have you come into a fireside chat and unpack all the awesome stuff that you're doing. But also the challenges. Yes. And there are many, you have to keep up the good work on the policy. I still say we got to remove that red line and identified new rules of engagement relative to what's on our sovereign virtual land. So a whole nother Ballgame, thanks so much for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you appreciate it. Okay, cute coverage here at eight of public sector seven Washington john ferrier. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

>> From around the globe, it's the Cube! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Well, welcome back to the Cube and our IBM Think initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called SARIE, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a, a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless - and IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Elhadji Cisse who at IBM is the MEA head of payments which of course is middle East and Africa. Elhadji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. >> The pleasure's all mine. >> Good. Well, thank you for joining us. And let's, let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. >> All right. So if you look at the countries, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in much of the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provides lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses' point of view. And even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less traceable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash, all of that has to be taken into consideration. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of the crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that will enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. There's a segment within that called the FSDB, the financial sector development program. And that program, within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital environment for the, for the kingdom. >> So when you think about the scale of this, I mean it's almost mindblowing in a way, because in many cases we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would, share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and, and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have a different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right. And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving towards the same goal in 2030, I think it's mind blowing. >> Yeah, it is. It is, John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities. We have team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India. I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much. Every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia: the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates, such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there. All of them needs to be onboarded into this including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the keys to this that we have is that our partners, MasterCard and Saudi payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide ourselves into three teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the motto of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, MasterCard, or Saudi payment. We all went together and addressed every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us become successful with this engagement. >> So let's look at the initiatives specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch all phrase, but this truly is a almost a magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads, what's going to be done where and how, and by whom. And then this integration that has to go on with that, not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. >> Yeah. So if you look, if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put in a central entity, which is the payment hub that is, that will handle all the payments solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that have a medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be Azure 222 enabled, which is the new language that we will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility, otherwise we will never going to be successful. You cannot come to a country and say everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. No, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration from the beginning. We knew this would be a challenge and we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to go to mitigate those, such as the WTX, which is the Webster transformation exchanger that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222 or to Azure 222 or to any type of format that the customer have, any of the customer would be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the on boarding aspect. A lot of banks, again depending on their maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to be, to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the rational testable service virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a test as opposed to in the normal circumstances, purchasing additional hardware additional software, additional components and doing that, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who're ready for any type of non-functional requirements testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarded and make us successful in this deal. >> And you raised a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, you know, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, right? Very small towns, very small institutions whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place. And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here. Because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying, because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this, this example again, on the integration layer, we've enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature or they could go to MQ which is a low level of, I won't say a low level, but a very old fashioned way of communicating. On that aspect, they not only they have two protocols to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agree and we have an end check on the language that they're going to be using. And this integration layer or the system of integration that we have built that enables us to add that flexibility on both entities. >> So this was just launched. I mean literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess, reasonable implementation. >> That's a great question. Actually, the average is 24 to 30 months. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually a 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the Azure 222, billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies. We have the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of these component within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. >> We'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. It is a remarkable achievement. It really is. And you know, and you've talked about some of the the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs. Greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships, I imagine market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. >> So it will change a lot. And the impact in the economy, like I said this is going to be on a three-fold. One, from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time in making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and be able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget in your annual transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business, it will tend to having more people coming in and stealing them from you either your employees or your customers or anybody else. But having a cashless business nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay how much tax you will need to pay by end of the year without you doing the calculation. That information was already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash all of those costs will be going away. This is why the country wanted to go into a cashless society. >> Well, it's a fascinating endeavor. And certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real time payments and really making a significant difference in in how services are delivered in the kingdom and Elhadji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today and talking about it and and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. >> All right. So we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Elhadji is doing and what IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallace and thanks for joining us here on the Cube!

(gentle music) >> From around the globe, it's the Cube! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Well, welcome back to the Cube and our IBM Think initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called SARIE, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a, a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless - and IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Elhadji Cisse who at IBM is the MEA head of payments which of course is middle East and Africa. Elhadji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. >> The pleasure's all mine. >> Good. Well, thank you for joining us. And let's, let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. >> All right. So if you look at the countries in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in much of the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provides lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses' point of view. And even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less traceable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash, all of that has to be taken into consideration. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of the crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that will enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. There's a segment within that called the FSDB, the financial sector development program. And that program, within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital environment for the, for the kingdom. >> So when you think about the scale of this, I mean it's almost mindblowing in a way, because in many cases we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would, share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and, and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have a different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right. And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving towards the same goal in 2030, I think it's mind blowing. >> Yeah, it is. It is, John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities. We have team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India. I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much. Every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia: the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates, such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there. All of them needs to be onboarded into this including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the keys to this that we have is that our partners, MasterCard and Saudi payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide ourselves into three teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the motto of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, MasterCard, or Saudi payment. We all went together and addressed every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us become successful with this engagement. >> So let's look at the initiatives specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch all phrase, but this truly is a almost a magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads, what's going to be done where and how, and by whom. And then this integration that has to go on with that, not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. >> Yeah. So if you look, if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put in a central entity, which is the payment hub that is, that will handle all the payments solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that have a medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be Azure 222 enabled, which is the new language that we will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility, otherwise we will never going to be successful. You cannot come to a country and say everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. No, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration from the beginning. We knew this would be a challenge and we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to go to mitigate those, such as the WTX, which is the Webster transformation exchanger that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222 or to Azure 222 or to any type of format that the customer have, any of the customer would be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the on boarding aspect. A lot of banks, again depending on their maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to be, to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the rational testable service virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a test as opposed to in the normal circumstances, purchasing additional hardware additional software, additional components and doing that, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who're ready for any type of non-functional requirements testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarded and make us successful in this deal. >> And you raised a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, you know, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, right? Very small towns, very small institutions whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place. And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here. Because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying, because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this, this example again, on the integration layer, we've enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature or they could go to MQ which is a low level of, I won't say a low level, but a very old fashioned way of communicating. On that aspect, they not only they have two protocols to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agree and we have an end check on the language that they're going to be using. And this integration layer or the system of integration that we have built that enables us to add that flexibility on both entities. >> So this was just launched. I mean literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess, reasonable implementation. >> That's a great question. Actually, the average is 24 to 30 months. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually a 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the Azure 222, billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies. We have the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of these component within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. >> We'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. It is a remarkable achievement. It really is. And you know, and you've talked about some of the the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs. Greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships, I imagine market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. >> So it will change a lot. And the impact in the economy, like I said this is going to be on a three-fold. One, from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time in making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and be able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget in your annual transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business, it will tend to having more people coming in and stealing them from you either your employees or your customers or anybody else. But having a cashless business nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay how much tax you will need to pay by end of the year without you doing the calculation. That information was already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash all of those costs will be going away. This is why the country wanted to go into a cashless society. >> Well, it's a fascinating endeavor. And certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real time payments and really making a significant difference in in how services are delivered in the kingdom and Elhadji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today and talking about it and and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. >> All right. So we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Elhadji is doing and what IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallace and thanks for joining us here on the Cube!

>>from the Keep studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, I'm John Furry with the Cube. We're here for a special Q conversation, housing with remote, where in studio most of the time. But on the weekends, I get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts, and he I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local community, especially this time of Cove. It you have local community work, local journalism suffering, but also connected this and connected experiences was gonna make. The difference is we come out of this pandemic a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan. True is the vice president of engineering for Chemical. Did you? They make a nap coat local be TV, which basically takes over the air television and streams it to an app in your local area, enabling access to many your TV and on demand as well. For local communities, it's a phenomenal project and its unique, somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's gonna be something that's going to really put Dan, thank you for coming along and chatting. Thanks >>for having me appreciate it. >>Okay, so I'm a big fan. I've been using the APP in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket. I might be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new application, and this is the focus of the conversations. Q. Talk Amazon is a big part of this. Talk about your local be TV that you are protected. This platform for broadcast television has a unique hybrid cloud. Architecture. Can you tell us about that? >>Certainly. I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television eso unlike a lot of products on the markets, you know, like your Hulu's or other VM PV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that. Ah, we have to be able to receive, um, over the air signals in each market. Um, many channels that serve local content are still over the air, and that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and unavailable to many users. So that's part of our value. Proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but, uh, allow the station's themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. Eso that's sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers. But then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way. On. We do that in our cloud platform, which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon service. >>Let me take take a breath. Here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon. So such a using a lot of the plumbing take us through what the architectures ram is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >>Yeah. So, um, obviously starts with some of the core services, like easy to s three already us, which everybody on planet uses. Um, we're also very focused on using PCs were completely containerized, which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. Um, and one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because they're container services wired into all the other services, like cloud, What metrics? Auto scaling policies. I am policies. Things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way. Um, and use those services too much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. Um, we also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use kinesis and red shift to collect real time metrics from all of our markets across the U. S. Uh, that allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex each l systems like Kafka and other things. Um, as well a stored in a, uh, large data lake like red shift in Korea for analytics. And you know, things like that. Um, we also use, um, technologies like media Taylor s O, for example, one of the big features that, uh, most stations do not have access to Israel. Time targeted advertising in the broadcast space. Many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance. Um, and not personalized, obviously. You know, for that reason. Where is one of the big features we can bring to the table? Using our system and technologies like Media Taylor is we can provide real time targeted advertising, which is a huge win for these stations. >>What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys are? Offer broadcast station partners because you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast ages as well, but also your enabling new broadcasters to jump. And it's well, what are some of the unique capability that you're delivering? What is that? It's on the table there. What are you doing? This You >>well again. It allows us because we can do things centrally. You know as well as the local reception allows us to do some interesting things. Like if we have channels that, um, are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, Um, then we can easily put them in other markets and get them even more of years. That way we have the ability to even do, like hyper local or community channels, you know that are not necessarily broadcasting over the standard antennas, um, but could get us a feed from, you know, whatever. Zip code in whatever market and we can give them away toe reach viewers in the entire market and other markets, or even just in their local area. So, you know, consider the case where maybe a high school or a college you know, wants to show games or local content. Um, we provide a platform where they can now do that and reach more people, Um, using our app in our platform very, very easily. So that's another area that we want toe help Expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, Um, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want toe, um, reach their community more effectively, or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets? >>No, I think just is not going to side tension here. I talked with your partner. Jim longs to see you guys have an amazing business opportunity again. I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that follows in. It has huge passion of local journalism. You see awesome efforts out there by Charlie Senate from the ground Truth project report for America. They take a journalism kind of friend few. But if you add like that, did you business model ought to This local journalism you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app of video. And now it Koven. More than ever. I really want to know things like this. A mural with downtown Palo Alto Black lives matters. I want to know what's going on. Local summer restaurants, putting people out of sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to, like, next door or very Laghi media, whether it's the website. So again, I think this is an opportunity to that plus education. I mean Amazon educated Prince, that you can get a degree cloud computing by sitting on the couch. So, you know, this is again. This is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint, but you're providing essentially linear TV toe because in the local economy, So I just want to give you a shout out for that because I think it's super important. I think you know, people should get behind this. Eso congratulates. Okay, I'm often my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud steps. I think what super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly and what you've done here, you delivery of the benefits of Amazon of the goodness of cloud you, especially in stand up a metro region pretty quickly try it. And it pretty impressive. So I gotta ask you what? Amazon services are most important for your business. >>Um, well, like I said, I think for us it's matching the central services. So we sort of talked about, uh, managing the software, the AP eyes, um, and those kind of the glue. So, you know, for us standing up a new metro is obviously, you know, getting the data center contracts and all the other you know, >>and >>ask yourself, you have to deal with just have a footprint. But essentially, once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. Right? And we could be starting channels >>literate >>literally within half a day. Um, so that's the rial win for us is, um, having all that central blue and the central management system and the scalability where You know, we can just add another 10 20 5100 markets. And the system is set up to scale centrally, um, where we can start collecting metrics their cloudwatch from those data centers. We're collecting logs and diagnostic information. Eso weaken the type health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is saying and not crazy. We don't need a 24 7 knock of 1000 people to do this. Um, you know, and do that in a way that, you know, we, as a relatively small company can still scale and do that in a sensible way, a cost effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size. But at any size, um, you want to make sure if you're gonna go into 200 plus markets, that you have a really good cost model. Um and that's one of the things that where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things and an efficient, scalable, reliable and cost effective way. You know, the cost for us to go into the New Metro now is so small, you know, relatively speaking. Um, but that's really allows. What allows us to do is a business of now. We just opened up New York, you know, and we're going to keep expanding on that model. So that's been a huge win for us. Is evaluating what Amazon could bring to the table versus other third parties and or building our own? You know, obviously which >>So Amazon gives you the knock, basically leverage and scale the data center you're referring to. That's pretty much just to get an origination point in the derrick. Exactly. That's right. It's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in making sure they got all the normal commute back of recovery in the North stuff. It's not like a heavy duty buildup. Can you explain that? >>Yeah. So one thing we do do in our data centres is because we are local. Um, we have sort of primary data centers. Ah, where we do do trance coating and origination of the video eso we receive the video locally, and then we want to transport and deliver it locally. And that way we're not sending video across the country and back trying to think so that that is sort of the hybrid part of our model. Right? So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. Right? So we essentially have another container cluster using kubernetes in this case. But that kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the Central Service, and then from then on, it just we just go into the Central Service and say, Stand up these channels. Um and it all pops up >>with my final question on the Amazon pieces is really about future capabilities Besides having a cube channel, which I would love to head on there. And I told my guys, We'll get there. But what is this too busy working around the clock is You guys are with Kobe tonight? Yeah, sand. I can almost see a slew of new services coming out just on the Amazon site if I'm on the Amazon. So I'm thinking, OK, outposts. The opportunity from a I got stage maker machine learning coming in any value for user experience and also, you know, enabling in their own stuff. They got a ton of stuff with prime the moving people around and delivering the head room for Amazon. This thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon could see them winning with this. I'm certainly I know using elemental as well. But for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the road map or what? You might envision the future looking like, >>Well, I think part of it. I think there's two parts. One is what are we gonna deliver ourselves, you know? So we sort of talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local beauty product. Um, but we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. Um, and you know, for example, you mentioned prime. And a lot of people are now realizing, especially with Cove, it and what's going on the importance of local television. Ah, and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how how we can be the provider of that local TV content, you know, um and that's really a lot of stationed are super psyched about that to just, you know, again looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach. You know, we're basically the way that we conjoined those two things together between the station's the other video platforms and distribution mechanisms and the viewers. Obviously, at the end of the day, um, you know, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff this interesting to them. You know, like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay area stations, but the news is still may be very focused on L. A or San Francisco or whatever. Um and so being able to enable, uh, you know, the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion, uh, is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform. And, you know, if you were perspective, so we're hoping to do that in any way we can. You know, our main focus is make local great, you know, uh, get the broadcast world out there, and that's not going anywhere, especially with things like HSC tree. Uh, you know on the front. Um, and you know, we just want to make sure that those people are successful, um, and can reach people and make revenue. And, you know, >>you got a lot of it and search number two. But I think one of the things that's just think about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on that Just, you know, current market value investing versus kind of game changing shifts is that you guys air horizontally, enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases. I was pointing out from my perspective journalism, you know, I'm like, I look at that and I'm like, OK, that's a huge opportunity. Just they're changing the game on, you know, societal impact on journalism, huge education, opportunity for cord cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV. I gotta ask you, you know, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute by our pretending that this person from this making I amenity after I don't understand is it Isn't this just TV? What are you doing? Different? Because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco. I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago in San Francisco. I get that. You know why? Why is this important? Isn't this just TV? Can I just get on YouTube? Mean Tic tac? Well, talk about the yes >>or no. I mean, there's TV, and then there's TV, You know, as you know, um and, you know, if you look at the TV landscape just pretty fracture. But typically, when you're talking about YouTube or who you're talking about, sort of cable TV channels, you know, you're gonna get your Annie, you're going to get some of your local to ABC and what not? Um, but you're not really getting local contact. And So, for example, in our Los Angeles market, um, we there are There are about 100 something over the air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like you lose your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe 1/2 a dozen or a dozen, right? So there's like 90 plus channels that are local to L. A. That you can only get through an antenna, right? And those air hitting the type of demographics. You know, quite frankly, some of these other players or just, you know, don't see is important >>under other minorities. Back with immigrants, you know, hit the launch printers of our country. Yes, >>exactly. You know, So, you know, we might see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other. You know, um, minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's again Why, you know, we feel like we've got something that is really unique. Um, and that is really underserved, you know, as far as on a television sampling, Um, the other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels are underserved themselves in terms of technology. Right? If you look at, you know, at insertion, um and you know, a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live tv out there. It's very focused on the o t T market. So again, going back to who lose and >>the utility well, over the top of >>over the top. Yeah. Um and so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while, you know? And I sort of mentioned, like the way ad buying works. You know, it's still sort of the traditional and buying that happens a couple weeks in front. Not a lot of targeted or anything ability. Um, And even when we get to the HSC three, you're now relying on having an H s street TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etcetera, etcetera, which is again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps, you know, using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies. So not only the ad insertion and stuff we can do for the life stream, Um, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations, uh, that they really don't have right now, unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Nielsen, which a lot of local small stations don't do s so we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that they're really looking forward to and really excited >>about. I gotta ask you, put you on the spot. He'll because I don't see Andy Jassy. It reinvented might. Hopefully I'll see him this year. They do a person event. He's really dynamic. And you just said it made me think he tends to read his emails a lot. And if your customer and you are. But if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevators like, Hey, why should I pay attention to? Did you? What's why is it important for Amazon? And why is it important for the world? How does it raise the bar on society? >>Well, I think part of what Amazon's goal And you know, especially if you get into, you know, their work in the public sector on education. Um, you know, that's really where you know, we see we're focusing with the community on local television and enabling new types of local television eso. I think there's a lot of, uh, advantage, and, um, I hate the word synergy, but I'm going to use the word synergies, you know, um, this for us, You know, our goals in those areas around, you know, really helping, you know, Uh, you know, one of the terms flying around now is the dot double bottom line, where it's not just about revenue. It's about how do we help people and communities be better as well? Um, so there's a bottom line in terms of, uh, people benefit and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue, Right? And you know, that's very important to us as a business as well is, you know, that's why we're focused on local TV. And we're not just doing another food. Go where it's really easy to get a night. The national feed. You know, it's really important to us to enable the local, um, community and the local broadcasters and local channels and the local viewers to get that content, Um, that they're missing out on right now. Um, so I think there's a energy on that front A so >>far, synergy and the new normal to have energy in the near normal. You know, I think I think Kobe did. >>And you know, um, and some of the other, uh, things that have been happening in the news of the black lives matter and, um, you know, a lot of things going around where you know, local and community has been in the spotlight right and getting the word out and having really local things versus 100. Seeing this thing from, you know, three counties away, which I don't really care about, it's not telling me what's happening down the street, like you said, Um, and that's really what we want to help improve and support. >>Yeah, I know it's a great mission is one we care a lot of cute. We've seen the data content drives, community engagement and communities where the truth is so in an era where we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're gonna start to see things. That's what we're seeing, a lot of things. And as more data is exposed as you turn the lights on, so this week that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal and thrive. So, to me, big believer in what you guys are doing local be TV is a great mission. Wish you guys well and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case. Technically, I mean to me. I think the technical superiority of what you've done. Abilities stand up. These kinds of networks with massive number potential reach out of the gate. It's just pretty impressive. Congratulations, >>Right. Thank you very much. And thanks for taking the time. >>Okay. Dan Drew, vice president of James. Did you start up? That's a lot of potential. Will. See. Let's go check out the comments on YouTube while we're here. Since we got you, let's see what's going on the YouTube front year. Yeah. The one question was from someone asked me, Was stiff from TV Cres that William Dan, Great to see you. Thanks for taking the time on Sunday and testing out this new zoom home recording my home studio, which I got to get cleaned up a little. Thank you for your time problem. Okay, take care.