 Welcome to the show, Lee is a neighbor of mine in Palo Alto. So great to see you. Also, you used to work at VMware. So we're going to try to get you to talk about all the dirty stuff going on and the good secrets that they won't tell us about. And Scott Detson, the famous entrepreneur. You've done a bunch of startups. Now, peer storage, heavily funded. Well, heavily funded. It's a relative term, right? Depending on how you look at the world these days. Hardware is expensive. Welcome to the startup panel. So we're going to jump right in. So we had originally on the schedule more studies, but our desk is a little bit short. So we're going to just roll through two at a time. So thanks for coming. So the first question we'll go right down the line. What's going on in place right now with startups? Obviously, last year at VMworld, we had a startup panel. I mean, a VC panel. We didn't have a startup panel. There wasn't a lot of startups that were kind of at a level where good funding environment, customer acquisition was going. What's it like today out there? I think the opportunity for startups in Silicon Valley today is outstanding. The breadth of innovation that I see is more than I think I've seen in my 20 years in the valley. And I think so much is up in the air, right? We've got cloud computing. We've got mobile. We've got open source. We've got changes to the storage landscape with solid state technologies. You put all this together, there's just lots of disruptors that entrepreneurs can jump on. We heard the super geeks earlier, Amar Awadallah, super respected in the PhD and basically virtualization in that whole world and the VMworld guy talking about system software. I mean, you look at the legendary company like Ulet Packard, disclosure I worked at for nine years back on the good old days when it was Ulet Packard. They're like struggling in this whole, what do we do with the PC division and autonomy, land grabbing. It's like they're groping to get to the future. And that's going on. Those are big companies, yet a whole nother inflection points going on in another part of the tech business which is emerging and like a thermal of growth. Amar talked about SSD and storage layer, talking about essentially system software with the cloud. What's going on? Lee, you've been around the block. Start us off on this. Come on, help us, help us digest the chaos. I think it's been interesting just to see how storage has emerged as such a key part of the critical infrastructure. You know, storage for many, many years is just a sleepy kind of back end, you know. I care about storage. Boring, storage. And I care, what's that, what's sexy? Well, the applications are sexy, right? I mean, that's where you really want to spend your time. Well, storage was just kind of, you know, that's how I boot from, you know, to get started. Well, in the last, you know, four or five years I think what we've seen is that storage is becoming a key innovation, a key differentiator for companies. The valuations, even while startups have struggled a little bit in an economic time, the valuations for storage companies have been phenomenal. Companies that get equal logic, compelling data domain. I mean, you keep going and watching. So, and then you're starting to see companies like VMware enter the mix. The VSA product, for example, right, is bringing a whole new set of innovation, EMC, with project lightning. These are initiatives that are showing that storage can be a critical differentiator for your company. Well, project lightning, is that like a real project or is that like an announcement? I mean, seriously, EMC is like a big huge, they're one of the incumbents. They're the market leader. And they own the customer. So, obviously they're saying, okay, we got to go there. So, obviously project lightning is a commitment. And so startups want to nip at the heels of the big guys. So, how do you guys do that in this market? And obviously, this evaluation issue, sir, there's some funding going on, but there's a real opportunity. Scott, you know, you've been this in the place before as an entrepreneur, you go out and you get a market and you want to get a position and grow it and differentiate. So, how does startups compete and how are you planning on competing? I mean, Pure in particular, your product line, I mean, that's going right at the EMC and you want to go in there. So, how are you going to do that? Well, nipping at the heels is definitely the wrong approach as an entrepreneur. You've got to get out in front of the big guys with something that's revolutionary. And you know, the way we're trying to change the game is to make flash affordable. Everybody loves the performance and the green qualities of flash. It's power and space efficiency. It's just too expensive. You know, if you buy flash from the market leaders, you're paying typically north of $50 per gig and we're getting in under five, right? So, that transformation can definitely change the landscape. So, differentiation is on changing the game, not trying to run at their pace. Kind of throw them off pace, you're saying. Kind of throw them off balance. You know, I would say you want to focus on a market disruption as an entrepreneur, right? So, you need to do something and it can't be two or three X better than an incumbent because that's not enough to carve out some real estate. You've got to do something 10X better than the incumbent and if you do that well, then you've got the shot. All right, well, let's talk about that. Customer acquisition. Lee, you and I were talking on the phone prior to VMworld. You've been around the block and you've seen storage become storage. To storage is sexy. To storage is now a real enabler and totally integrated into the package with SSDs and flash. So, you've got a lot of customers. So, what are they saying to you and how are you going to grow your customer base? Is it going to be direct sales and same question for Scott? So, I think Scott's got a really good point about just the disruption element that you have. In our case, what we did is decided that instead of treating storage as storage only, we would treat storage and virtual servers together as a common platform. We have scale out storage along with embedded virtual servers. That converged infrastructure that we brought, we have over 500 customers today running converged infrastructure in a market where it's the video surveillance market and they don't even know that they're running converged infrastructure. These are ex-police department cops. So, your solution, you packaged up in a solution. We packaged it up and what they wanted was they wanted the value of saying, I've got a green play, I've got a management, I've got a higher availability and I've got a whole economic play by having all of this in a converged sense. We're now bringing that to the virtual desktop space. Once again, having a common platform by bringing servers and storage together distinctly different than anybody else. We look at Cisco bringing virtualization into switches, that's UCS or VCE, right? You've got VMware, obviously, bringing more virtualization features into the servers. We don't see anybody else bringing virtualization into the storage element. That's distinctly different. And so, you're a little bit more further along than pure storage is on the startup cycle. So, you guys are out there growing. Scott, you're out there, you got some money, you got some technology differentiation. How are you going to out muscle EMC, for example? They're a huge sales force. They got relationships with their customers, they're golfing, they're going to the Caribbean, all the stuff that EMC does effectively really well. And you're a startup. Do you change the game on the customer acquisition side? Do you go indirect? I mean, what do you do? I mean, you've got to, these are big decisions. They are neat. And again, if you're trying to out muscle the big guys, you've got really no chance of success. But what we're showing in our booth here at VMworld, we've got a 64 gigabyte LUN on vSphere 5. You can now make these large LUNs. We've got 1,000 VMs running inside that single LUN, and everything is performing sub millisecond onto and off of the array. If you were going to try to do, and this fits in for you, that's the storage footprint. If you tried to do that with conventional disk, you would have to have a much larger deployment. So build a better mousetrap, and you've got a real shot, right? As long as you're, if you've got a 10X better mousetrap, and then you've got to still mix it up on the business side. We are looking to leverage partners and so on to hopefully have success. Okay, so we're going to swap out, but I want to ask one final question. Okay, so quickly talk about what you're doing here at VMware, particularly to your startups, because obviously it's important, the ecosystem, and they're promoted. Last year they said $15 for every dollar spent. We'll go to the ecosystem. We're going to ask Todd Nielsen that if that happened this year, so we're going to get the data on that. But so talk about one, your role here, and how that's going to really propel and help customers. And two, what other startups can do to either get into this ecosystem or this marketplace, and what they should work on and how they should focus on. So let's start with Scott. So, in terms of startups getting VMware excited, I mean, you need to look at things that VMware customers are trying to accomplish, like virtualizing performance critical workloads, like Oracle, for example, or doing large-scale VDI. Those are two other things we're demonstrating in our booth. We found as long as you can deliver that compelling value proposition to the VMware user, you can generate a bunch of excitement. But that's the right way to get VMware excited is to go straight to the customer and do something that their customers can't do today with the conventional technologies. Okay, Lee, and your take on this is you worked at VMware. We find the same thing, right? Is that the bigger companies get consumed by maintenance. This is the hard part, right? I mean, you go and you launch something new, VMware 5.0, right now you got all the maintenance, all the transition pass. You really look to startup companies to go provide something that just can't be done outside. And so that's how you acquire customers. And once you acquire customers, then you become interested for a whole lot of reasons. Okay, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com. We are the startup spotlight here with two senior entrepreneurs who've been around the block. They know what they're doing. You heard the message, get out there, deliver value to customers, and you can do it. You can change the game on the big guys. Don't try to go head-to-head with the incumbents. Change the game, take advantage of this inflection. Guys, thanks for-