 So, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media co-host of theCUBE. We are in our studio with special guest Dheeraj Tolia, who's the CEO and co-founder of Casten. Hot startup in the cloud native space, doing some very interesting things. Really kind of a modern approach to bringing software development data and cloud all together. Welcome to this conversation. A great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Congratulations on all your success. I know you guys have done a lot with your seed funding. Take a second before we get into some of the things that I think are the most important stories in cloud native, which is Kubernetes, obviously it's a hardware coming back out of CUBECon. What's going on with Casten? Talk about the company, when you were formed, how many employees? I know you did the seed rounds. Just talk about what you guys do. Great, so Casten is a company, for those of you who are curious, it's actually a German word means container, so it's very apropos for what we're doing. We were founded over a year ago at this point in time. We're based here in California in the Bay Area. We did a $3 million seed round. We, it was angel only, so an institutional, lot of interest from people that are working with other entrepreneurs in the cloud native ecosystem. People in the industry. People inside, kind of inside the ropes, kind of, with the individuals. Yeah, so personal investments from, you know, all the top five cloud companies as an example, folks that have been funding other co-founders for a while, so we're very happy to have them in our corner, in particular, Majeed Gil, sits on our board. So he's had multiple successes, both in terms of investments and personally, so we're so happy to have him as one of our backers. And, right, so we are roughly nine people right now, all local, people with a lot of both startup and enterprise experience. So it's the right set of people. It's a very diverse group of people, so we're very happy with the team we've put together here. Yeah, diversity just was at Sundance and even on the film side. Some of the most successful virtual reality companies are Stanford Symbolum Systems majors. Huge diversity interdisciplinary dynamic, and I want to drill into that. Okay, so no Series A yet, so no board members from VCs, I'm sure they're knocking on your doors, clamoring down on some of the success you have. But what's different about your approach you guys are taking? Is the positioning assessed? What's the product? How do you guys make money? What are you seeing that? Okay, great question. So at the very high level we're focused on making it very easy for enterprises to deploy, manage, build, stateful applications in the cloud native way. In terms of how we see people adopting it, I think that there's been a tremendous mind shift as well as an ecosystem shift where we see this blurring of lines between applications and infrastructure. So one of the unique insights we saw ourselves was that to approach this problem, we need to come at it from a developer first point of view and application first point of view instead of like I'm a recovering infrastructure person coming at it from the bottom up where you think about disks and volumes and storage arrays. This is really about the application, it's about the cloud, it's about the deployment model, it's about how we enable and empower developers but also operators in these large scale environments and make it and get through the right balance of responsibilities between the two. And that's really what's resonating with the customers we work with today. Yeah, and certainly the cloud native trend has been the hottest day, and it's exciting for me because early days of the Clouderati, 2008, 2009 timeframe, you saw the first generation DevOps and these are folks who were open source guys and gals who had to build their own stuff from scratch. I used to say, eating glass and spitting out nails, hardcore techies. Then as it goes mainstream with cloud computing, this is the modus operandus that people want to program in, just infrastructure as code as it's been called, this now is mainstream. It's okay, given that, we've been covering that till the cows come home. But now you're talking about orchestration, you're talking about some of the next level thinking which is how to make things easier, how to automate, how to make it so the developer doesn't have to do the provisioning and all that stuff. This is key, okay, I get that. Now everyone goes, oh no, where's my data? That seems to be something that you guys seem to be taking an attack. What are you guys doing specifically around data management because now data is now not only part of the app, it's a critical linchpin to the value creation in whether it's collective intelligence or any kind of coolness at the app level is data-driven. What do you guys do? So a great question. So when we talk about data management, somewhat of a nebulous term, but to make it more concrete, we really care about protecting your data, making sure it is safe in particular when you're working across multiple environments, multiple clusters, multiple clouds. But we care a lot more about, as you talked about, enabling and making it simple. So what does data mobility look like? What does data manipulation look like? So whether you're talking about moving entire application stacks with the data across clusters in the same cloud or across multiple clouds, those are some of the things we make it very easy for people to do because it is highly relevant and these are the odds that come from, and it's not just the CICD environment, but also talking about production environments and operator challenges there. So more concretely, when we look at use cases for a product involving disaster recovery, involving data protection, backup and recovery, multi-cloud migration, that's where we come in with our customers today. Okay, so to go back in my generation when I was growing up in the business, when we had to build all of our own stuff, build our own stacks, that's how old I am, remember those glory days? You had data architects. Yes. And it was siloed based. Your app was your database and schemas and all that good stuff. But now data is horizontally scalable to cloud. Beautiful thing, right? So this is a key dynamic. What do companies and developers specifically have to think about when they think about being a data architect? Because every conversation I go into, it's like, oh, what's our data layer strategy going to be? This is important because now workloads are sharing data. So you might have two workloads, A and B sharing data. That's kind of outside the current old guard mentality. Yes. What are you guys doing there? Do you see that as something that's important? It's important, right? So what's happened is a lot of power and responsibility that's shifted the developer from the former data architect role. Sometimes it would be a database engineering team, et cetera. And we want to empower that. There's still challenges, especially when you look at things like compliance, auditing, when you have sensitive data at play. So we make some of those things easier from having auditing compliance features in there. But what we really care about is, and some of this we also do it in an open source manner, that is we work with people to make sure that developers don't slow down. They can pick down technology stacks, where they store the data. And it's all really part of code for them. But from the operator, from the architect point of view, they have visibility into that. That's what they really care about. Who's the operator? The fine operator in that context. Okay, it's a great question. The operator tends to be one of two people. It tends to be the people that care about infrastructure, but keeping the lights on. That's what they worry about. So this would be the data. Yeah, what used to be IT guys, now it tends to be the DevOps team, the SRE team, et cetera. But so they have been transitioning into this role as you see skills change over time too. Or sometimes it will be the team that used to be a former database engineering teams. As an example, they used to provision this, but now their goal is, and we hear this from customers, is that we care about developer experiences. It's not about shipping binaries and patches anymore. This is about making sure for our users, we can make our developers fast and empower them. So how do they deliver that without getting in the way, but still getting some of the things they used to do earlier, that is being able to make sure that it is stored in the same manner, that is it services the needs of the broader business, whether other groups using it, whether it be disaster recovery, business continuity. So all of those, so we want to be able to empower both sides of this party, so they feel comfortable moving into this new world today. You know, I go back to the open stack days when, and still going on now, you see them more in the cloud native, the distinction between stateful and stateless applications. What's your reaction to the growth of stateful applications? Is it growing? How is it growing? What is some of the characteristics of how that is shaping out with stateful applications? So let's talk about sometimes even misconceptions that the community has today, that platforms just communities are not ready for stateful workloads. We definitely believe that is not true, and it's not just us, they're a plethora of companies using stateful applications in production today. It is, it was late, initially we saw the compute part handled, you know, more advanced scheduling orchestration that you saw in terms of multiple flame works with Kubernetes vending the game. We saw a lot of networking innovation in there, including service measures, which I know you have covered a lot in detail earlier. But now we're seeing data come into play, and that is the third leg of the stool that we believe it'll be important for real life large scale production workloads in these environments. With new features being geared in Kubernetes 1.9, such as the whole workloads category with other open source frameworks popping up to support that out of tree, we see a lot more people feeling comfortable going deploying stateful applications. But what they really want is the same ease of use and flexibility that they had with stateless applications. And that is a gap that still needs to be bridged in the multiple people working on that. Okay, I got to ask you, since you're an expert here, we have a lot of our audience is learning about the space. So, you know, we talk and we're having some fun here about some of the most important stories in cloud native. But some people just don't even understand the difference between stateless and stateful in context to unlocking business value. So there's a lot of now people coming in saying, okay, I get DevOps, where's the business value? What does some context is? So what is in your definition the difference between stateless and stateful applications? So the way I look at it is when I look at stateless applications, it is much easier to blow them away, bring them back anywhere you want because they might have some cash state but nothing persistent, right? And generally all those apps depend on persistence where it's stored outside of your cloud native environment. We want to bring that in when you talk about stateful applications. But it's not just that, it's also the model of building stateful applications is changing, where you get polyglot persistence where people using like, if you use GitLab as an example, they use Redis, Postgres and other data services all in the same app. You want as a part of being embedded within your application and you want, you're also getting shorting of data. What used to be a large monolith database the same way we see microservice evolution on the stateless side of things. We're seeing the same thing on the stateful side where data sets are getting broken up logically into multiple distinct components that are managed and operated independently. So let's talk about that for a second because stateless applications was an approach people took because it was easier, right? And it was relevant at that time. But it's been said certainly in theCUBE many times, it's hard to do stateful applications. Why is it hard and what are the benefits of doing it? Okay. It's hard to do stateful applications because A, there's a greater risk. You never want to lose your customer's data. So you treat it with slightly more care. Some of the primitives, especially when you look at the cloud native world weren't ready 18 months ago as an example, whether you talk about things like the container storage interface, whether you talk about things like stateful sets, whether you talk about applications that come with a notion of permanent. Sometimes they remember their host name, the IP address. And we see a lot of traditional applications moving into this environment too. But that has been fixed by the community which is a very amazing thing. And they've approached it with a developer force focus. The benefits of bringing it into this environment are tremendous because you get this business agility side of things, not just developer agility where you can move much faster because you don't depend on external resources anymore. You get the advantage of being able to clone application stacks at a click or at an API call level. You get the advantage of being able to take these applications and port them across multiple places because these primitives that are provided by underlying container orchestration layer make it so much easier to do so. So there's a lot of advantages to bring it into the fold source to speak than leaving it outside right now. I was talking to someone in the industry I won't say their name without outing them but I was like, oh man, it's so hard. It's complete bullshit. Stainful application is never going to happen. It can't scale or the scale is the problem. So I got to ask you if you can address that because if you go down this road the enterprise is going to start thinking about the most important thing which is scale. What are the challenges that enterprises have with Stainful at scale? Okay, that's a great question. So there are two or three different kinds of things. The obvious thing, especially that jumps a developer's mind when it comes to scale is things like performance, right? But I think there's only one aspect of things and there are scale out systems when you think of Cassandra, et cetera that are getting a better handle on some of those issues. But more important when we deal with scale especially from the enterprise point of view as far as state is concerned people care about visibility, right? Show me where all my state is as developers are constantly changing architectures, constantly deploying. They have scale issues when you spread across multiple clouds with multiple clusters. So help me manage some of those things. They have issues around compliance of the state which is much larger, especially as it gets segmented out, right? Because it's not just we know customers that are running hundreds of instances of MongoDB as an example in some of these environments. And just trying to wrap the minds around managing all of that at scale is another issue. So these are all the things that enterprises think about when they talk about scale and not just performance scale or IOPS scale but it's about management scale. How do you guys solve that problem? So we solve it by a number of different ways. First of all we believe in treating the problem as an application first with the application first approach. So we think of it as the application first so it doesn't matter how many volumes you're using or how many disks or even if you're not using shared storage because you have no single point of failure in modern cloud native database systems. So there is that. And then that's the uniform encapsulation that we provide high levels of abstraction on to give people an easy view to see what's unmanaged, what's managed in the system, where do I have workloads? It's something you show up instantly so we can notify about that. So those are all the things that we make it easy. Apart from just monitoring things like health of the system, validating things which are table stakes right now. So I've got to ask you, as you see this evolution happening, you guys are at the forefront of it with your startup and again, congratulations. Like what you guys are doing. But the challenges in the enterprise are, well, where do you have a data management solution? You must get that a lot. So I got to ask you, when you roll into a customer or potential customer that you have now, you say, hey, well, we got this cover. We can do stateful applications. We're application centric. We're doing DevOps, we're doing the lines are blurring. You should look at us and the clients, whoa, hey, you know what? I already got a data management provider in my application. What do you say to that? It's a good thing. We see that not across a large fraction of our customers. We definitely see that across some. The majority of reasons why sometimes we don't see it or how we responded this is the large fraction of tools out there used to cater to what now we say legacy environments, but they tend to be very server or VM centric thing. Things that don't move, things that are constantly on scaling up and down, things that are quite static. When you go look at tools that come up from large companies in the storage vendor space as an example. So one of the things that we help provide this is tools that are cloud native themselves that can adapt to cloud native workloads that are built first for a cloud native world. So that very easily resonates with customers. And the other thing we talk about is extensibility. Again, when you talk about data management solutions right now, they don't really, they operate at the infrastructure level. So they can't figure out what it means to take a consistent view of a large distributed Cassandra system as an example, or how to stitch together things such as consistent across multiple data stores. We have an extensible framework that allows people to inject their own code into our system that says, you know, I want to do things in a custom manner. I want to do things that's particularly to my context, my enterprise. And we help enable that, which again, none of the existing data management tools can do today. Okay, so you guys have, this is what they call, you call the K10 platform. It's a K10 platform and the extensibility part I talked about is called Canister. It's an open source project. You can find it on GitHub. And- Did you guys sponsor that? Is that a different one? That is sponsored by us. So we did evolve that as again, based on what customer needs came out to be. And we said this is something that doesn't make sense for us to hold. We would like to build a community around it. We would like to see people contributed and be the common place where people can share recipes of blueprints for managing- So Canister is a community approach. Yes, Canister is definitely. How's it going? What's the uptake on that? It's good, right? So apart from get up stars, we have people on the Slack channel. We have people reaching out independently. We have people that have asked us, how do they develop their own blueprints for more complicated workflows? So even though we released it roughly a month ago at this point in time, the input we've gotten both on public and private channels has been really good. Great, okay, that's awesome. Well, I want to shift gears a little bit, talk about multi-cloud. It's the hottest story in tech. Some even are arguing what the hell is multi-cloud. Just have an app in, I have 365 on Azure and I'm doing something on Google TensorFlow and I'm running some stuff in Amazon. That's multiple clouds, but it's not the same workload, right? I don't consider that multi-cloud per se. I think that's multiple clouds having a workload from a company. So with that, what are the biggest problems customers are facing with multi-cloud, in your opinion, because you guys are kind of teasing this out. You've got Kubernetes and all this stuff going on. What are the challenges with multi-cloud? So because we help customers in multiple public clouds, we see a lot of this. In terms of a target category for enterprises, the vast majority, I'm talking 85% plus are in multiple public clouds. Different reasons, we can talk about that why, but then multiple public clouds. And what we see for them is that there's a spectrum. Their multi-cloud doesn't mean one thing. We see people at different degrees on the spectrum. Small minority care about check boxes, insurance, that is push, come to shove, help me move to different cloud, but really the majority of use cases we see is not about moving on a daily basis and application between cloud A to B, but they see problems in terms of I want this application to run on cloud A and B and sometimes and C because they have a global footprint and they might not always have the cloud provider of choice region in the region they want to expand into. Before you go further, I'll just double down on that because that seems really easy to just go, oh, we're just going all three clouds. But you got S3 on AWS. I just got a different storage. So each stack has its own coding. And that's a problem. So is it a problem or how bad is it? It is a problem. So let's talk about two or three things happening that helps solve this. So some of it's a problem. Kubernetes has done a great job in particular of abstracting some of those things away, not all of them, but some of them away. There are other new abstractions coming out such as the open service broker that originated in the cloud foundry movement and now has been picked up by multiple different platforms that's again helping abstract some of these differences away. We help with some of the management as well as portability across these environments because we can take care, you're making sure policies, management, all of that looks the same no matter what cloud provider you're working on and we understand the underlying infrastructure and we translate business level or operator level objectives into infrastructure level objectives. So there's some that we do to also help in that space. So overall, I think the situation is much better than it was say three years ago in terms of being able to do some of this. Obviously the devil is sometimes in the details but now we are, it's getting. The goal is not to hire a whole development team for each stack. Exactly. That's kind of the end game that we're trying to get to. Yeah, you want a small delta versus a large delta. Yeah, some customization. I mean if you look at the open source distribution maybe 10% and 90% reuse or using abstractions. And that is a realistic goal that I believe most people are pragmatic and shooting for. How has Kubernetes and Kastin helping specifically solve the multi-cloud problem? It's a good question again. Right, so Kubernetes again, so let's talk about a customer base, right? A lot of people are picking Kubernetes even though sometimes they squarely on-prem because they know they will be moving to public class sometimes a compliance issue, sometimes a roadmap issue but they know they're moving there and this gives them the abstractions that they're not tied into a particular infrastructure underneath whether it be a VMware-based platform, open stack and tunnel or some public cloud vendor. They're picking that with that golden mind because a lot of the concepts are a cloud neutral. What we do is we help take also some of the data around it. Data that might be sitting on a storage provider of choice and make that cross-cloud portable either by doing it at the application layer which is a great thing or by able to understand the differences between clouds if you just click a button or call an API you can say, I want to migrate this entire application stack including services, configuration, your state, your container images, all of that into a cloud, into a different cloud, a different region. So we take care of all the complexity for our users, for the developers, for the operators. So I got to ask you the cloud question that I always like to squint through all the marketing height from the cloud vendors and that is regions matter, right? So when you're talking about regions there's some locality issues that need to come up that could impact safe code and services. GDPR in Europe is one and even in Asia specific there's also some geopolitical things going on and hackers and malware out there so you got security and whatnot. How should a company look at the region and the multi-region approach on each cloud which then is complicated and it's even more complicated when you do that across multiple clouds. That's the future that's coming down the street very fast. What's your view on that? So there is a lot of buzz around this, a lot of things being proposed. I think people need to take a more nuanced look at this compared to some of the things I see out there where speed of light is an issue especially when dealing with multiple regions. So either we architect applications correctly to be able to handle that and sometimes again some of these newer cloud native data stores have the ability to hide some of that performance gap in there. But overall when we look into architecting things this is about how do you deploy different application stacks at different clusters and maybe it's global load balancing to shard across them as an example. But we see a number of newer emerging patterns of building applications that's making it much more feasible to do as things go over. So I do not think enterprises should be scared into adopting some of these approaches. I think multi-region within the same cloud provider is definitely the first thing people should try and then moving out across which is again the adoption pattern we see within the enterprises we work with. So let's talk about the entrepreneurial journey of your company. Obviously you're the co-founder. Yes. You're in an environment now where it's been pretty brutal and you can almost see a lot of trends really jumping out now. And we were doing theCUBE the 10th year doing SiliconANGLE ninth year at theCUBE. And I covered all those companies were funded before 2012. Go big or go home. A lot of them, that was pre-cloud. I mean if you think about it they didn't see the visibility mocking Amazon or using Amazon. Didn't see Amazon and now the cloud as that disruptive enabler. So the wave is getting sucked out for the big tsunami coming. So it exposes that water that now's, you see all the clams and crabs running around. What's different? I mean, because now you can get things faster done. You got nine people. A lot of entrepreneurs are trying to crack the code of how to be successful in this environment with cloud, with data, new dynamics never have seen before. So I think from the entrepreneurial side of thing, the thing in my advice is to figure out what is the unfair advantage that small teams have? There's always this challenge, right? This is equivalent of five, eight years ago people would say, what if Google did this and before that what if Microsoft did this? I think where does the unfair advantage for smaller companies come from in these environments? Now a traditional go big or go home approach doesn't work anymore. What we have found a lot of success with is concentrating very hard on customer needs and their pain points. Before force line of code was written, we really spoke to customers to say, what are your pain points? And that's when we also started latching on to write this multi-cloud thing. Where generally we see a lot of solutions working, being provided by some of these cloud providers, but they're tailored for the particular cloud. They do not fit the enterprise model of working across different providers. So helping with that pain point, helping with that portability has been really good for us in particular. But it's also, I do not treat public clouds as competition. I do look at them as partners because I think there is a win-win situation. We've been very, very happy with some of the conversations we've had with some of the bigger cloud providers out there. We have joint customers, things of that nature. And that has been very successful in terms of that operating model. Because I think a lot of people realize this is not a zero sum game. On, if you're looking at just on-prem environments it's less than a zero sum game these days. But being a part of a rapidly expanding system I think the pie is going larger and I think there are less incentives to be seen as strictly competitive versus a partnership play there. Well, great to chat with you. I want to get your respect because I think it's completely changed, it's interesting. But as an entrepreneur now you're optimized for something different. So it sounds like a lot of product management going on really early, really fast, a lot of iteration. You're funded by angels and friends in the network so you have a good advisory funders or backers and three, the role of the community. These are new dynamics that are accelerated in the front end, all kind of going on at the same time. Just react to that and share what you think of that, those dynamics, any examples, do you agree with it and how important are they? So let's see, I think in particular community is one of the most important things and it's not just paying lip service to that but I believe the community has been very empowering for the end users, the developers, the people everyone really cares about. It definitely impacts us as to how we build for it. Having empathy for other people, a lot of those things make a very significant difference and community is something that we start thinking of first. Even when we were instilled, we wanted to make sure that no matter what we did was- Define community, open source community, customer community, peers, there's a strong overlap between those things right now. Our peers, our colleagues at different companies trying to tackle the same space are part of the open source community, a part of the cloud native community. So I think when you look at the Venn diagram, there's actually a very large intersection in the middle. So all of those really are more, have come together a lot closer than they used to be a few years ago where open source was different from commercial vendors. No, there's a very strong mixing and the thing is how do we move the community forward and that's also how we think about things here. And so that's a very big thing. The support system around you and in particular, it's amazing in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, I've known people working in different places trying to get companies off the ground. The support system is amazing and not just for our investors, but the number of people that have no financial ties to us, have no vested interest in us that benefit and help we've gotten from them has been amazing off the charts. Well, I got to ask you, Niraj, I mean Silicon Valley is supposed to be like the cesspool is the worst place on the planet, it's evil. You're obviously an example of what's going good in Silicon Valley. Cher, in your opinion, if people ask you, hey, what's going on in Silicon Valley these days? Is action happening there and what's it like there? So it's a good point to make, right? We see a lot of stuff in the press and a lot of the articles are not complimentary and I'm not trying to say that those aren't real problems but I'm very glad that we are talking about those problems and we're diving into this and we're making sure that the next generation of companies that emerge hopefully do not suffer from that, right? We care a lot about that at Casten. We've built a very diverse team, even though it's small right now, people that underrepresented and I've always had that history of doing that even in the previous groups I've led because it creates for stronger teams. I see people, more people getting, being aware of the challenges being faced and we're working together to also go solve and address some of this. So this is one of the things where you can't throw the baby with the bath water but we have to figure out what's wrong, what isn't working, go work on fixing that while retaining the things that have given the valley a unique edge and I'm very proud of being a part of that. You could lead by example rather of being a social justice warrior throwing mud around and obviously highlighting what everyone already knows of being aware of it's something that we've been promoting and it's also too humanizing it, making it human and having proper conversations rather than people putting their head in the sand or running from it, running from these problems. Okay, so I got to ask you on a personal question. We're kind of older, you're a lot younger than I am. Obviously you can tell that difference but there's a lot of great young guns coming up. Men, women, all kinds of great talent. They're coming in, they don't even, they don't know what a local host is. They don't even know what, they've never installed a patch. A new set of programmers, developers, artists, creatives are coming into the software business, changing the game because it's really interesting. Dev Ops is happening. What's that culture look like in your observation when you recruit people, when you talk to people? What are these young developers interested in and what are they good at, what are they gravitating towards? What are some of the observations you could share? So sometimes there's also, you know, there's overlap between young developers and millennials and sometimes I believe millennials get a bad rap. When working with those communities, I see a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of passion, a lot of ambition. I see a lot of community driven stuff. They care about how they make an impact outside of the particular role they're playing and I think those are all things that it makes sense for companies to help enable as well as leverage. So when we see these new breed of developers coming in, I think it's about, you know, if someone doesn't want them, please send them my way, more than happy to take them because they're just so passionate about getting stuff done. What are they coding and what language is they, can they write lines to see, are they writing in C or are they, what language is they programming? So the way we look at it as a problem is I think programming language is a secondary. They worry about what does it take to get the job done. So they're adaptive. Yeah, exactly, right? So when you talk to them just because they don't know what local host means to it, doesn't mean they can't pick it up. If they discover they need to figure that out as an example. So sometimes they'll come at it with other higher languages focused but then they will quickly adapt to either new different styles that they really want to learn to or they'll adapt to new programming languages, right? So to give you an example, in our company, we use Go as an example. It's very popular for especially for doing application infrastructure focused on. But the majority of people when they came in did not know Go as an example. I think maybe one person was really well-worse with it and the rest of the people just picked it up because it was the right tool for the job. They learn, they learn the basic data structure and they can jump in. It seems to be something that they pride themselves on. Be multi-code, multi-coders. All right, another personal question for you to end the segment. If you could talk to your 23-year-old self now, if you were 23 now knowing what you know, what would you tell yourself right now? Does motivation, observations, rules of the road, how to be successful, what would you say to your own 23-year-old self who's coding away all those great opportunities? Oh, I know very well what I would tell my 23-year-old person because I've learned it the hard way, right? So, I came out with a strong technical background but I think what I tell my 23-year-old is concentrate on two things. That is concentrate on the soft skills which will really, really help in terms of making a greater impact on people around you, on the industry, no matter what it is. Involving the communication, leadership. We've talked about community. So the soft skills that help you leverage that and optimize for growth. And this is something people sometimes tend to fool themselves about. Personal growth in particular, right? Where people tend to fool themselves where they get comfortable in a place and they're like, yeah, I'm learning but in reality, I think taking more risks, taking more chances, making sure in an environment that you can learn from people. And this is not about small company versus large company, just to make it very clear. Always be learning. Yes, always be learning. And I think those are the two concrete things I would tell myself. I would also tell myself to move to the Bay Area but I already did that. Because of just being in the technology space. And raising money. What would your advice be to yourself? How's he doing a good job right now? So raising money, start five years before you want to go raise money. You don't want to show up at someone's door and ask for money. And that'd be the first time you interact with them. Because, and this is about being genuine. This is about being authentic. But it is about making sure you build those relationships. People have a chance to know you. People have a chance to see what you've done. And being a part of that ecosystem I think will really help when it actually comes on to you wanting to do something. And that has really helped me. Yeah, and the other advice we hear a lot in theCUBE is the successful entrepreneurs have paid it forward. Yes. They always are giving back. And always be learning. Great to have you on theCUBE. Great to be here. Neeraj Choliya, co-founder and CEO of Castin. Hot new startup. You getting a new round of funding? What's happening? You want to announce that here? Or is that happening? We'll talk again in a few months from now. I'm sure you got a lot of easy and nothing to do. A great, great success in the hot space. Cloud native. It's the hottest market in cloud computing. As we all know, what's going on in cloud. That is really, really shaving up to be a really, really big market. Real impact across the board from data analytics, application development down to the infrastructure and creating new opportunities for wealth creation and innovation and invention in AI, entertainment. You name is happening. This is theCUBE conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.