 from San Francisco. Extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Moscone North Lobby for VMworld 2015. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signals from the noise. With new director set innovation here, two sets going on, the main cube over there, David Vellante interviewing, primary data. And I have the VC of primary data by coincidence. Ping Li, general partner at Excel partners. General partner at Excel partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. Yeah, good to be back, John. So you're one of the top dogs at Excel. You guys are doing extremely well, great investments. The world is changing, you're in the enterprise, one of the top VCs in the enterprise. You're doing a lot of deals. One of them primary data, as I mentioned, is on theCUBE live right now on the other channel. What are you seeing? What are you guys looking at right now? I saw you at LinuxCon scouring there. I also eat DevOps software, Linux. This is open source. Share what you're working on. You know, I think this is one of those periods of time and innovation where there's not just one trend that's going on. It's the confluence of like five different trends. And it's creating a tremendous amount of opportunity from a startup and investing perspective. And I think what you're seeing on the mobile proliferation, the cloud, a lot of this stuff around security, all these things are starting to come together. So we are investing along all those trends. We have companies that are trying to change how people and IT organizations think about how to secure their infrastructure from the endpoint, back to the data center, to the applications, to the data itself. We have companies in the container ecosystem that are trying to rebuild the compute stack around the new set of container technologies. I think it's a period of time we call the Cambrian period where all different types of technology are emerging. So I've heard you say words like, that's not a big enough idea to me and others, but that's really what's going on right now. There are big ideas that are viable. That seems to be the theme here at VMworld. You heard Pat Gelsinger laying out, essentially probably one of the best presentations I've seen him do, really laying out some leadership around the future. So the period of incrementalism is kind of over, especially in storage for instance. The cartel of EMC and NetApp and Pure is out there doing great. A new breed of startups are emerging in the enterprise. Could you share your opinion on what that looks like? The big ideas and the things that you look at, specifically on the kind of entrepreneurs you want to bet on. Yeah, I think Pat made a statement that 50 of the top 100 tech companies are going to turn over in the next decade. And I think that is probably an understatement. If I look at what's happening across the startup ecosystem, they are taking it on the incumbents in ways that incumbents can't react to because there's so many of these trends that are happening for the first time in such a fast pace, right? I take a look at storage. Five years ago, Flash was kind of a consumer technology. No one thought it was ready for the enterprise. Fast forward five years, companies like Nimble, Pure, Nutanix have taken that technology and re-changed the entire landscape and ecosystem for storage. And that one piece of technology is now being deployed in the cloud and the lots of other places on the server with Fusion I.O. And that's creating the opportunity for companies like Primary Data, which are building the software on top of those components to leverage storage virtualization, right? So I think you're getting these layering effect where each layer is creating an opportunity for another layer to abstract and to build bigger companies around it. All right, some quick fun facts. What's the size of the fund you currently are investing in and deal flow sizes you guys are deploying on series A's? What kind of numbers can you share? So we're a billion and a half venture and growth equity fund. You know, our venture fund still continues to do series A behind great entrepreneurs trying to solve big problems. And you know that- Round size is five to 10? Yeah, so the five to 10 series A and go after, you know, where we say it's not about the money you put in, it's, you know, what you do with the money, right? And, you know, with the cloud and open source technologies, it's pretty cost-efficient to build and get the initial prototypes and get the products to market these things. All right, so share with the folks out there, the Ping Li investment thesis. As you look at the landscape in the enterprise and the VMworld ecosystem, what's your thesis? Do you have an algorithm? I mean, I don't want to say patterns because pattern matching is not what the best VCs do. They tend to look at patterns in context to try to connect the dots. So what do you look at? What's your thesis for connecting the dots to see around the corner for the next big opportunity? Well, I think it starts with the entrepreneur. They're the ones that have to see around the corner. You know, hard job is to find the entrepreneurs that know how to see around the corner and answer all these things you just said. But, you know, I think it is the entrepreneurs that not only see the trend, but they can see where the trend will be in three years' time. Because the reality is, you know, once you start a company, it takes years to build. You're even the great ones, right? So you can't necessarily solve a problem that's here today. You have to see what the problem is going to be down the road and how that problem becomes bigger over time. And what about market areas that you're investing in? Obviously, you have the algorithm for understanding which entrepreneur, obviously, you're going to have to get the entrepreneur, as you see thousands of pages a year. What sectors are you looking at? Obviously, cloud, DevOps, you're the Linux conference, so you're there. What are you poking at? What are you networking into for meeting entrepreneurs? I think we've done, we have a broad portfolio of security companies from CrowdStrike to Tenable to Lookout. But I think we're just scratching the surface of security. I think we are IT organizations, consumers, enterprises are under attack from so many different angles that I think the attack factors are so broad that there's going to be more and more security companies that we're going to look to invest in. I think what we're seeing around the container ecosystem continues to be very interesting. I think it's very early, but it shows a lot of promise in terms of the value of the livers. I look at our portfolio companies who are a lot of startups that embrace leading technologies. They were the first to adopt AWS back in the day. They're the ones that are working on the container technologies and using the stuff that a lot of the Googles of the world have. There's still some blocking and tackling, kind of boring areas that are still money, huge money making opportunities. Yeah, for sure. Where there could be some efficiencies. Is there anything you could share there, sectors you like in terms of optimization? I won't say consolidation, but more those areas where there's just a lot of spend going on, whether it's when or backup recovery, primary data is kind of one of those crossovers between kind of a boring storage where they got a futuristic data play. Yeah, no, I think primary data, another company we're investing in called Cohesity in the backup space. They're all trying to generate efficiencies in this new cloud world. People are expecting much more agility in their infrastructure. They're expecting to be able to scale out and leverage commodity components, but they want all the manageability they have before. They want all the things that they had in the past, but all the new things as well. I think that creates a great opportunity for start-up centers. I know you're a humble guy, you don't like to chew your own horn, but what are your hottest deals that you're proud of, that you've done, that have exited, and what are the hot deals you have now? I know it's like asking a parent to say what's their favorite child, but what are the hot deals that have exited for you and the deals that are right now your favorites? Well, I think examples of companies are portfolio, I think are disrupting industries. I think Cloudera, what they're doing around big data and taking, not just Hadoop but other technologies to change how enterprises could derive value out of massive, massive data that they have. I think companies like Slack is changing how enterprises are going to be communicating and employees to do messaging and collaboration. I think companies like Lookout, which is basically saying iOS and Android, they need their own set of security stack on top of them to make them usable in the enterprise, in fact, they're for consumers as well, right, so. Did you do the Slack deal? My partner Andrew Proccia did the series A, yeah, so we've been in that for many years. Yeah, that thing's explosive, right? I think it's because it's solving a problem, right? That a lot of people ask. That's a new user experience. Yeah, it's- Software driven. In some ways it's new, it's new, it's new in some ways it bothers from a lot of the behaviors we develop on the consumer side and allowing the enterprise users who are consumers at the end of the day to have that same level easy use capabilities and collaboration. All right, final question for you, Ping. Share with the audience is watching something that's unique in the market right now that you think that they might not be seeing or might not be obvious that you can see as something that's a disruptive signal around this new way, this shift that's happened, this Cambrian period, I would agree, is pretty amazing. It was a perfect storm of innovation happening right now. What areas would you say, hey, you know, you might not know it, but this trend is really kicking it off. A trend that we're excited by is what we've been calling the APX world. If you look at companies like Uber, they're really just built on a couple APIs, right? A Maps API, Twilio, Payments API, and they obviously did amazing technology stitching it all together. But I think that's going to become the trend. There's going to be more and more companies that are going to be able to abstract their technology into an API that allows others to build on top of it. And that new layer, the APX layer, I think is going to be an area of innovation. APIification. Yeah, we have a company called Segment I.O, right? Which is an explosive company that's doing that around data. It allows you to connect a lot of data sources in a very seamless way. And the cloud also is powering all this dev ops. It all, I mean, I think the cloud has been the, no longer are you focused on the infrastructure, the computer storage networking, but you're building this kind of abstraction layer of that. We were talking on theCUBE yesterday that, you know, debating, we always debate with Weetmon research team, you know, who's winning Amazon. And we're like, okay, Amazon won game one of a double header. So that's how we all win public cloud. Game two is a different game, the enterprise. The rules are different. No one's winning that yet. Amazon's clearly not winning the enterprise. No, I think Amazon is making a lot of traction in the enterprise, but I think you see Azure, you see Google computing. And the game's not even in the early innings, still in the enterprise. It's very early. I think these, as explosive as these trends are, they also take time, right? The Cambrian period wasn't created overnight either, right? So I think all these things will take time to develop. A decade is a Cambrian, you know, period of time in one, Amazon won game one. Paying thanks for taking the time to come on theCUBE. Our new director set here in Moscone at VMworld. Great to see you, town of the pavements in Seattle. I mean, that's what it's all about in the VC world. Hostel, right? Yeah, try to do the next great deal. Ping Li, we excel partners here on the side of theCUBE. We'll be back with more after the short break. Thanks, Ron.