 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and we're back. This is the HackReduce launch. We're here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, big data after dark. And we're here with Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix. Matrix Partners funded one of the companies we had on earlier, Squirrel and a number of others. Antonio, welcome. Thank you, thank you, Dave. It's great to be here. Congratulations on this launch. You guys are big supporters of HackReduce. We are sponsors. You can see us on the wall there. Yeah, so what do you think of this big data mojo coming back to Boston? A lot of great activity. Do you know what I love? I love that we've been able to turn guys that would normally never see anything other than the backside of a cubicle into the Hollywood stars of Boston. The more we can do that, the better we're doing our job. You know, I mean, the last decade, there was certainly plenty of innovation going on, but it just felt like it was a decade of post-Enron compliance. And it just didn't feel as exciting as it is now. What are you seeing as far as the big data community in Boston and what is Matrix view and angle on what's happening here? Well, there are two things that I'm seeing that are terrific here in Boston. Number one, we've got a whole generation of entrepreneurs that is young enough not to have been burned by what you call this lost decade of post-Enron cynicism. These guys really think they can change the world with a combination of algorithms and software infrastructure to make them work. That's terrific. The second thing I'm seeing is a bunch of proof points out there, whether it's Facebook and their 30 petabyte clusters or whether it's NSA and what Squirrel was able to do for them with their 100 petabyte clusters. It's a proof point that a lot of data, processing and analytics can actually make a difference in the world. What's happening with investments in early stage? I mean, you had that whole backlash with super angels in California. Entrepreneurs got really freaked out and didn't want to necessarily do business with VCs that had connections to super angels. It was really a mess. You guys stayed away from all that, but you're also doing a fair amount of early stage investing. Can you talk about that dynamic and why you're successful at that? Sure. So my view is that super angels, micro VCs, micro midgets, whatever label you want to apply, doesn't matter. The point is you need a partner who's going to help you build a business. And that means that somebody who's going to be with you through thick and thin, multiple rounds, up rounds, down rounds, flat rounds and somebody with domain experience that can bring a network expertise and the ability to understand how to not get you trampled by some of the elephants who've got here, IBM, Dell, EMC, VMware, all people that are here. And if you can bring those things to the table, who cares what the label is? I'd want you on my team as an entrepreneur. Yeah, okay, but what about the signaling issue, right? A lot of young entrepreneurs are concerned that if they bring a VC into the early round and then the VC doesn't go in the follow-around, it sends a bad signal. But you guys have partnered with early stage companies like Squirrel. And when we talk to guys like Orin Falkowitz, you know, he talks about you as though you're a trusted partner. Why is that different with you guys? And I know Chris Lynch has a, well, Chris Lynch, of course, was an entrepreneur. So there's that trust factor. You were an entrepreneur. How much of a difference does that make to young entrepreneurs? So my view is this, signaling only matters if the people you've gotten in bed with in the first round are not the people you ultimately want to be in bed with. If what you've got is people that will support you through multiple rounds, what you've done is you've gotten your syndicate, not at the A round, but at the seed round. And that's okay, because you know you're all on the boat and you're all rowing towards shore, equally hard. So I was very hopeful, Antonio, that the Facebook IPO was going to be a big draft, kind of like the Google IPO was, almost like the Netscape IPO was. Obviously I was wrong, big flop from that standpoint. But now we've seen companies like ServiceNow in the cloud, Workday, Phenomenal IPO. That's got to excite you. I mean, the IPO market is back, especially B2B. Doesn't it portend good things for the big data community? Indeed. And I would make a slight correction to what you said. The IPO market is back for revenue growth and strong EBIT.com companies. So when you look at a Workday, a Palo Alto Networks, what they're doing is they're profitable businesses that are growing at 50 to 100% year on year. We'll take those all day, every day. And you know, the great thing about it is the big data community is likely to give us quite a few of those. Well, the other thing too is a lot of these are obviously in SaaS and cloud, and big data gives cloud something to do. So, you can see the intersection there is really creating a lot of out. Yes, indeed, absolutely. There's an opportunity to bring big data, cloud, and a whole orchestration layer to combine the two in a way that lets people get insights, whether it's analytics insights, whether it's customer insight that's coming from signals you're generating in a way that we've never had before. I want to run something by you. So one of the premises we're working on with Jeff Kelly, who's our big data analyst, is that big data practitioners, the consumers of technology, are actually going to create more value than the suppliers of technology, which is rare in our industry. You've seen, you know, Microsoft's monopoly and Intel and many, many Cisco, many, many EMC others create, you know, trillions of dollars of wealth. But we see the practitioners as creating the value. First of all, do you agree with that? And if so, how does that, does that change the way in which a venture capitalist looks at investment opportunities? First, I completely agree with you. My view of the IT industry, and what makes it so exciting is each new layer creates an opportunity to commoditize something and then allows people to build applications or value in the form of signal that gets extracted from that layer. So 100% with you that it's better to be Zynga than Vertica. All respect to Chris. It's better to be Facebook than any of the Hadoop companies all respect to all the Hadoop companies. So I completely believe in this trend. And what's most exciting to me is if you think of 1990, four, five, six, all the way to 2002 or 2001 when Red Hat went public, the layer that was commoditized was the operating system. What Big Data does is the layer that gets commoditized is the database at scale and analytics built on top of that. Can you imagine if on the back of Linux we could build companies like Google and Facebook and LinkedIn, what we'll be able to build when that layer is that much higher and provides storage of structured data, unstructured data and analytics? I mean, the opportunities are endless. So Big Data becoming the new source of competitive advantage. Antonio, I've heard a lot about you. I really appreciate you coming on. It was great to meet you. Thanks. Thanks for having me. This is great. Keep it right there. Dave Vellante, Wikibon. This is theCUBE, we're right back after this.