 from Vienna, Austria. It's theCUBE, covering .next Europe 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Media's live coverage from Nutanix .next in Vienna, Austria. Worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage. Thrilled to have to the program. First time guest who just came off the keynote stage, Ben Verweyen, who is the general partner of Keen Venture Partners and was former CEO of Alcatel Lucid. Ben, thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. All right, for our audience, you on the keynote stage this morning, we're talking about disruption. You have a good view of what's happened in the marketplace. You said you worked for some very large companies, went through some challenging transitions and now we're working with some of the smaller companies there, so just give our audience just a brief summary of what brought you to what you're doing today and what you do in your day job. So disruption is not an aim and goal in and by itself. It's more an observation from the outside that people who try to do something better or try to do something new cause to other people. That's what we call disruption. So I've worked over the last 40 years almost. I was large, big corporations. I was the CEO of BT. I was the CEO of Alcatel Lucid, for example. And those companies, big, large companies, was the big installed base of products and services where many people are very happy with and other people are not so happy with. They have to change and adapt in order to keep fulfilling the tasks that they have. And that is sometimes a kind of linear process. You make the next generation of products sometimes very disruptive because you have to do something completely different. Most of the time companies can do that themselves. Sometimes they can't. And then somebody from the outside takes over. That's the disruption we're talking about. And I've been at the big size of cooperation for, as I said the last almost 40 years, now helping small and scale up companies in Europe to fulfill their potential. And that's not just by capital. We do have capital, but it is by helping them to think through how they can become more effective faster. When you talk about disruption and growth and especially startups, there's a natural tendency for people to talk about Silicon Valley. One of the discussion points on the panel this morning was how do you get those pockets of innovation? What advantages does the European economy have versus Silicon Valley? So I wonder if you might be able to summarize that piece of it as to why Silicon Valley isn't the center of the universe or the only place that growth and innovation happens. So it is certainly Silicon Valley's a remarkable place. I mean, lots of very important, great things happen there. But it's not the only place and it's not the only model. There are different models. As I said this morning, I think talent, talent is everywhere. It's about enabling talent to do something that is disruptive in a positive way because they have an idea or a concept and they can bring it to a global audience. Sometimes it helps to be in a crowd. Sometimes it helps to stand out because you are somewhere that it's not such a crowd. And we have a very diverse model nowadays in the world. We tend to see it from the Western lands. Well, I'm also on the board of a company in India. If you take the Eastern lands, the world is very, very different. Household names for a long time were basically Western names. Think again, they also come from Asia nowadays and they build very, very quickly. So the idea that we have one set of, this is how you have to do it type of rules and it's called Silicon Valley is not true. Okay, and the point you made is that that diversity of cultures doesn't Silicon Valley. I think they have, you know, not only the universities there, but it seems to be influx of global talent to participate in there. So, you know, if you look to passports, diversity in passports, you know, Silicon Valley is a remarkable place. People come from everywhere, but that doesn't mean that the DNA is not an American DNA. It's a very American DNA, which is great to a certain extent. It's monolithical in a way to a certain extent. And there are other parts of the world where you have a very different type of cultural backgrounds that also contribute. It's not, in my view, one against the other, it's end, end. I just said it's not true that you have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful. It's not true that you are global because you have people from different passports working together. Culture, DNA is a little bit more than that. Another thing I found very interesting is talking about small and big companies needing to work together. I've worked for some really big companies and it seems most people in big companies spend most of their time trying to figure out how to work with the other people in their company. Sure they partner, but it's challenging because you've got kind of that gravity internal always pulling you in. Versus a small company, you've got such limited resources that, you know, you're going to need to be able to reach out, to be able to do more. So this is one of the interesting dilemmas. If you're a small company, what do you aspire to become? Why you've started to become big? And but in the journey, on the journey to become big, you say, oh those big companies, you know, they fight internally, one department against the other, it's true, but why do you then aspire to become big? Because you want to be successful. And if you're successful, you will have to deal with different set of complexity than when you're small. What I've noticed is that innovation, truly thinking out of the box, used to be was in the four walls of the company and that was very hard to organize. Then we realized that you had to go out and reach out to people from the outside. So we had internal type of venture capital. And I've done that, you know, when I was, I was BT, we set up a fund and when I was at El Cattel, we set up a fund, very hard to do from in the company. So what you need to have is a kind of open-mindedness where the idea may come from everywhere and you go and work together and run with it. This type of networking company has one big hurdle. And a hurdle is the human nature to be scared of sharing. And the whole idea is you need to create a sharing economy. Okay, so things like open source, are you a strong proponent of open source as part of that? It's one of the components of that. I'm not religious about it in the way that, this is the way to go forward and therefore the other one is not. What you have to have is the ability to use pick and choose. Pick and choose. And the only way you can do that in larger organizations if you get permission from the top. So in my past life, what I thought my role was as a CEO was not to be smarter than the rest of them but give them the license to be smart. And that enabling capability is also true in a smaller company. Give them the license to reach out. I love that. So Ben, you know, Keen Ventures invest in technology companies. What are the segments and sectors that you're focusing on? So we're focusing on areas where we have some expertise. Me and my partners, my partners have done it themselves. They have, one of them has created TomTom from a 20 million company to a two billion company in five years time. So my background is much more from the corporate side but if I look to where we have something to add more than money, we're looking to the developments around internet of things type of technology where the internet is not just technology but it really means something. So that's the first area. The second area is where you can use software both at home and in the office. It used to be that you went to the office to be in all what's there. I think lately you go home and you think why don't I have this in the office? So that type of environment and the third one is what we call convenient transacting where you make a substantial difference and a momentary difference for your customers because of smarter ways to go to market. Okay, and that last one, you know, faster ways I think about like Amazon one click or even the kind of Uber is, you know, someone that changed that transformation. The other examples you could give me maybe to understand. Yeah, so there are companies that for example can predict what churn is going. So instead of doing marketing for everybody, you know exactly which part of your customer base has a problem. Now those type of abilities to bring true benefits, that's what we're looking for. But actually, if I may say- So there's a personalization there you're saying? Yeah, yeah. If I have a million of customers, can I single out that one person? And nowadays was a big day that you can. But what I want to say is actually if you ask me the question, where do you invest? When do you invest? We invest, we have a philosophy that says human capital first. So we're going to work with the company before we go and even talk about money. And when we work with them and help them and create them, it's very possible that we help them to go to bigger things without investing in them. But it's also possible to know and understand the entrepreneur at the end of the day. It's people business. Another thing you spoke about on the panel was really understanding what society needs, things that can make an impact. I'm curious, IOT, the Internet of Things piece. I've heard medical health care is an area that that's focused. Are there other areas that excite you of the Internet of Things because people here just centers and devices and trillions of pieces? Where are the people in the mix and how will this help society? So interesting thing is that a subject becomes available and then needs to be hyped. That's the phase you should stay out of it. Absolutely stay out of it. Because if it's the great story, it's the compelling story. It may be a compelling story for a journalist. It's certainly very seldom is something that has legs and run in the market. So Internet of Things is nothing else than make technology available to really solve an issue that matters. When it's still in the hype phase, it's nice for a TV program, probably not nice to invest. So we are still in the early days, but I think Internet of Things and supply chain makes a lot of sense. It's not sexy, but it makes a lot of sense because it delivers on a continuing basis something that is really beneficial. I think productivity is something we struggle in the economy with. And without productivity, there's not a really chance to enhance the economy as a whole. I think Internet of Things can help to do something significant around productivity. Yeah, you also spoke in the keynote about how just the buying power for the average family, it's gone down over time. You consider yourself kind of optimistic, pessimistic. What do we need to kind of help society as a whole with jobs, where they're earning power, being able to, as you said, have a house, have a car, put your kids through college. So it depends where you stand. If I go to India and I go there on a regular basis, every single time I realized, the first time I came there 30 years ago, the middle class was maybe in the tens of millions, it's now in the hundreds of millions. In a very short period of time, they have been able to lift hundreds of millions of people into a situation, concrete situation that they have choice. They can send their kids to college, they can do something. That is phenomenal. At the same time, if I fly westwards, I see the situation that if you were privileged 30 years ago, not necessarily privileged today. So am I optimistic or pessimistic? I'm realistic, I hope. And what I see is there is a middle class that was that struggles to stay the middle class and that we need to think through what does it mean. I see chances for people that had no chance in the past will have a chance in the future. And you need to find the balance because change cannot be winners and losers. Change has to create opportunity. And I think we're struggling a little bit at this point in time. Does the current global economic environment, things like Brexit, the U.S. economy, impact your investment philosophy? Absolutely, it impacts everybody. Now, it doesn't need to be just a negative, you have to look to it, but it should pause all of us because we have this knee-jerk reaction to want to go back to yesterday's world. I mean, the whole idea of Brexit was take back control. The whole U.S. election, as far as I have seen, that was about make America great again. If I look to Europe, there's a lot of, let's get the borders back in. It's like whether the policies of yesterday will deal with the problems of tomorrow, I don't think so, but we haven't found a narrative to convince people, be with me, stay with me because it will be better. So, then most of our audience is in the technology industry. Yeah. Last question I have for you is, people are looking out in their careers. What advice would you give people as they're doing their job today and looking towards tomorrow? So the big change of technology has been that it was a kind of enabler to allow other people to do their job. So you would go to technology to get maybe something faster done or better done, but not what it is today, part of the strategy. So what I would say if you work in technology, you have to take that responsibility to the next level. Technology will be a platform, a platform that it was, an ingredients of success in the future. So if you work in technology, be loud. Make sure that everybody in the organization knows what is available. Make sure that you look outward and not inward. And the last point is, be proud of what you do because you do a hell of a job. All right, well, Ben Verwein, thank you so much for joining me. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Nutanix.next conference in Europe. You're watching theCUBE.