 Okay, we're back live. This is SiliconANGLE.com's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host, Jeff Kelly, from Wikibond.org, your chief research, big data guy, and Rob Solomon, ex-president of theCUBE. Now a venture partner at Excel announced, I guess hit the news today, it was all over the buzz. SVP at Yahoo in your day, you've been an investor in the past. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, excited to be here. So, obviously being a venture partner is kind of like you get brought into the club, right? The club of VCs, and you know, Excel's a great firm. Great reputation. Tier one, obviously Facebook was the IPO that just pretty much saved Silicon Valley. I mean, those are my words. Really a lucrative and catapulted, you know, and put them on the map again in the consumer space, but here we're at the enterprise space. So, you worked at Yahoo, I saw Omar Awadallah out there. You have a lot of experience on the consumer side, so why don't you get your take on the consumer? You know, some say it's a bubble, and the enterprise is the hottest area in the planet, we're here for that event. Just what's your take on this consumerization trend in general? Sure, so there's been a lot of talk about consumer being a dead space, but if you think about it, there's billions of people using Google and Facebook and Twitter, and there's a whole host of new companies that are coming, and we haven't heard of them yet, and they'll be bigger, or as big as some of those companies. The other thing that's interesting is, a lot of the enterprise software is very similar to consumer software and the way that people use it, so there's this consumerization trend going on, which is really important if you think about making software easier and easier to use, more people can use it, and that's good for enterprise. And this consumerization trend is not going away. No way. Can you share some insight in what you've learned? Obviously Groupon was a high flyer, and Yahoo essentially did a lot of things that build their own bare metal, do their own big data. They actually invented Hadoop with Doug Cutting and created that whole big data movement, which is now obviously out there. What is some of the practices that you're seeing that successful entrepreneurs are doing with tech? Sure. So in terms of product development, in the old days we used to rely upon our gut to make products, and there's some of that still, but if you look at all the data and information you can get when you're building products, it's pretty amazing, and that's informing a lot of product, to station and product making decisions. So big data has been around forever. If you think about Yahoo and Google, part of the DNA of those companies. So big data is a really big buzz term now, but we had a group at Yahoo called Data Insights and Data Mining back in 1999. So data's been around forever, and it's important to how products get built. Jeff, what's your take on the big data movement with these consumer companies? What's your angle on it? Well, it's interesting you mentioned how kind of consumerization of IT. So for me, I try to look at the different ways. So what you're trying to do is really as monetize data in the enterprise. So for me, the business value, the proposition is a little bit easier to understand in the enterprise. What's the, in your mind, what's the distinction? What are the, how do you measure success from a big data perspective in terms of a consumer approach versus an enterprise approach? Yeah, so I think one of the big things on the consumer side is A-B testing. You can really quickly and easily put one piece of software against another and figure out which is optimal for achieving your goals and results. That's a form of big data. If you look at how Google monetizes, they use data to figure out how to get their ads more and more and more relevant. So it is probably the most important thing at Google is relevance and they're using data to make things more relevant. So that's part and parcel of their entire business. So I don't even know that you can separate the two things. Right, talk about the VC world again because obviously now you're coming back into the fall. So talk about the announcement. You said it was out there for a while. Was it officially announced today or something broke in the story? What happened? I joined Excel about four weeks ago, five weeks ago, and we decided to announce it today in conjunction with our new marketing and PR partner, Stephanie. It's, you know, so joining the company. So what do you think about the VC? Obviously, you know, with the angel market exploding with like micro angels or super angels, what are they calling them these days? I don't know what they're calling them. You got the Y combinator out there. You got Angel list. You know, you have a whole disruption and VC firms seem to be vertically integrating. Is that because entrepreneurs need to scale up faster? Is it just a trend of a bubble? Is it, what do you take on that? I think it's evolution. Obviously it's cheaper. It's become cheaper and cheaper to start companies. So it makes it easy for more angels to exist. A lot of young company founders need coaching. So I think like Y combinator is fantastic to help these entrepreneurs along. Platforms like Excel have a global approach and they can go from seed early stage all the way up through growth and look at different sectors. So it's an exciting time. You know, things have changed. It's not like the old clubby environment that existed 20 years ago. It's more transparent now. Much more transparent. You know, entrepreneurs speak their mind. You know who entrepreneurs love and sometimes you know who they don't love. So it's important. And you have Twitter out there to always equalize everybody. Yeah, absolutely. Great equalizer, all this data. So scale out open source is a theme that we've been talking about for a long time. But now you're seeing it hit mainstream. You know, I remember talking to Mike and Omar at Cloudera and among other entrepreneurs early on like four years ago. This whole notion of commodity hardware, open source is going to be a real revolution. It is. You've been involved in large scale operations. Those entrepreneurs that kind of hit that tipping point get a product out there. We had the guys from Australia on earlier, Excel funded, you know, self bootstrapped it up and ramped up sales, no sales force. A lot of these entrepreneurs are going to hit that lightning strike or hit that oil. What do you want to call it? And then faced with scale. What's your philosophy and advice to those guys when they realize, wow, I just bootstrap this up. I put it up on AWS. Oh my God, I got lightning in a bottle. I need to scale. What's your general philosophy and advice there? Hold on tight and don't let go. No, I think the most. Don't screw up. Don't screw it up. Yeah, I think what's important is you always have to build a great product. If you can't build a great product, you'll lose that audience. So it's important to ride the slips streams properly. So when the iPhone came out, there were a bunch of mobile game companies that were developed. You know, they couldn't have flourished before that because the platform didn't exist. So when you get that opportunity to scale up, you know, make sure you have the right resources, the right product strategy and you take advantage of that time in space. It's very hard to find those moments when you can scale up a company quicker than we've ever seen in the past. So don't screw it up. What's your take on mobile? Obviously, we're trying to get Rich Wong on, some of the other guys here at Excel who invest in mobile. The enterprise is a little bit obvious, complex, consumerization of IT, but in general, building an app for a mobile phone just seems to be like the old days of pre-packaged software where the companies that are successful build it right out of the box. Right. Right. Not a lot of iteration. You build darn downloading as much. Unlike the web, it's pretty agile, you know, constantly pushing updates. So there's been kind of a debate in the community around, you know, agile works great on the web, publish, publish, publish, iterate, iterate, iterate, but not so much for mobile. Do you have an opinion on that? Do you agree, disagree? No, I think I agree. I think the reality is you have to make a product so simple and graceful and elegant that people will use it. If you put too much into it, it just won't work on that little screen. So developing in a native format and getting it right is critical. In the old days with CD-ROMs and packet software, you had the ability to patch things up and it was kind of expected. Nowadays, it better work like television where you turn it on and it automatically just works and does what it's supposed to. Yeah, it puts a lot of pressure on the QA, that's what's going on. Absolutely. And simplicity, I mean, I think that's one theme that we've been hearing, Jeff, on these mobile apps, don't overbuild, be simple. Yeah, be simple. And use data to inform your development process. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. When you're evaluating a potential company you might want to invest in, what are the things you're looking for in terms of how they use data to inform their either product development or the way they're growing their company? You know, big data is, there's certainly big data applications out there and that's an important space in and of itself, but even for those applications or those companies' startups that are not focused on the big data space, I would imagine it's still important that they're using data to validate the things that they're doing. I'm just curious, what do you look for in a company that you're potentially going to invest in in terms of how they use and look at data? Yeah, so the more analytical the product team and the development team the better and if they can truly leverage data to build better products or understand the markets more deeply, you know, those are special entrepreneurs, they're few and far between and the deeper understanding they have with being able to understand the data and to find signal in all that noise, the better they can deploy product, the better they can understand markets, the better they can build their business. I think it's critical, it's hard to find those folks because nowadays, you know, almost anyone can create a company, it's fairly easy, but those with deep insights and deep understanding of how to leverage data will tend to have a better chance of being successful. Do you tend to see kind of serial entrepreneurs who maybe have done this before tend to be the ones that understand that a little bit better or are there some characteristics you're seeing in the ones that are successful in leveraging data? I think it runs the gamut of brand new 23-year-old kid who's never done it before, who's just super smart and deeply analytical to seasoned entrepreneurs who are old, like me, 45, and have been through it a few times and understand how important the data is. So I think data is the great equalizer. You don't have to be a seasoned entrepreneur to leverage it and understand it. You just have to be smart and understand the power of it. That's a great point. I'm going to use that quote, data is the great equalizer for entrepreneurs out there. Yeah, and I'm 47, so we know, we've been around the block, been around the track a few times, as you said, I've got scar tissue to prove it, as Bud Colligan would always say. But I want to ask you about kind of what you want to do in Excel. Obviously, it's a life decision. A lot of people come in as venture partners because they're seasoned executives like yourself and they're in between a spot where they want to be. Not sure they want to be a career VC. Do you want to be a career VC? Or is this where you want to just, you know, roll your sleeves up and get active again? What's your motivation? Is there, can you share? Yeah, the main motivation is, you know, I've been fortunate to work at some great companies like Yahoo and Side Step Kayak and Groupon and learned a lot in each of those situations. And I'm looking forward to rolling up the sleeves, getting the hands dirty and helping young companies grow into those next generation of special companies. I love doing board work, so excited by that. And most importantly, I'm excited to find new things. And it's really hard now, it's more competitive than it's ever been, but, you know, all three of those things excite me a lot about this role. And any reactions to all the press? You good, bad, ugly? What do you think about the overall press feedback? Oh, God. I mean, I haven't just looked at the web, I did see some headlines. You know, Excel's a great firm, global platform. Anytime Excel does something, there's going to be a lot of press around it. So I was fortunate to be part of the team. Well, congratulations on your new role and entrepreneurs going to really be satisfied. And you got a lot of experience and a lot of the young guys need mentoring and they need to find it. I sure hope so. So thanks for coming theCUBE. This is Rob Solomon. Inside theCUBE here at the Stanford Excel Symposium, exclusive coverage from SiliconANGLE, we'll keep on with you right back with our next guest after this short break.