 Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico where we are broadcasting the Blockchain Unbound event. This is a global conference where people from around the world are coming together from Silicon Valley, from New York, Miami, all around the world coming to talk about Blockchain, the disruptive nature of cryptocurrency and the decentralized applications and how it's changing the world, creating a lot of value, are here. And my next guest is Albert Santalos, the founder and CEO of 8Base, number 8Base. Albert, thanks for joining me. Thank you, John, it's good to be here. So before we get into it, we talked on camera a little bit about what you guys are doing. I want you to take a minute to explain what 8Base is, what you guys are doing, what are you disrupting, and what's the value proposition. So 8Base is software to build software. So if you're familiar with Wix or Squarespace for websites, we essentially do the same thing for this big category called enterprise software. And if you've ever been around enterprise software project, it's no fun, it's really expensive, takes a lot of time and it's fraught with danger and we make that easy and we empower a group of people called citizen developers, basically regular business people to build their own software without having to hire developers. You know, cloud computing has done a lot of great things. One of them is this notion of making coding easier. But blockchain is now a whole new growth phase on top of cloud computing and internet of things where you have new languages, so looking for Ethereum, to whatever, yet there's a demand for talent and there's now creative thinking involved. People rethink business models and reimagine either sovereignty or a business process, the creativities in the people, the business model, none of so the technologies although they are involved. So there's been a challenge for how do you make it easy? So you guys are trying to do that. What's the secret sauce, is it a tech play, is it a business play, cloud play, how do you guys look at that? You're striking at the essence of what we do. So if you think about blockchain, a lot of the work that's been done so far has been sort of protocol level stuff and the applications that most of us see on top of it are things that don't quite look like they're finished products, right? And it has to do with the fact that it's core engineers that are really trying to bring this all to the surface. So what we are is the next layer of infrastructure on top of that protocol level. And we excel at a beautiful user interface, it makes it simple for normal people to build these systems quickly and inexpensively without having to have an IQ of 140 plus, which is the people that do blockchain. You know, we've seen this similar movie before and I want to get your entrepreneurial background in a separate segment, but this is something that's actually happened. In cloud computing and in data science, you've seen the citizen analyst. Because data scientists, you have the code Python and a certain population that could do that. But what happened was people were building abstraction layers to make it really easy to wrangle data, use data science, visualizations, whether it's Tableau or whatever, that really changed the nature of what data science became. And now the benefits in the data analytics space is multi-fold, you're seeing examples of that. Talk about some use cases that you guys are doing and be specific with some examples of how you see it playing out. Is it, how much do they need? Is it a dashboard? How are you envisioning the product? What's it going to look like? Yes, so I mean, look, this has an enormous democratizing effect, right? So what you're talking about is that data science was hard to access, expensive to access, only a few people in the world really could do it. And then these layers of abstractions have facilitated a much wider group of people being able to do it. So that's exactly what we're doing. And we're at the same time bringing the development of software closer to where the requirements live because literally the people who are defining the requirements can develop their own software. And so what you're going to see is a rollout of blockchain and non-blockchain software just accelerated and put into the hands of more people which strikes at the heart of digital transformation. You know, we've all heard about the Steam digital transformation. It's businesses that if they don't evolve and adopt blockchain, AI, all these other things, they have a threat of being put out of business. That's where the big opportunity for you faces. And digital transformation certainly is going to reshape things. So the idea of having a blockchain-enabled app, you're going to make it easier for someone to do that. What use cases do you envision being the low-hanging fruit? As you guys go to the market, what are some of the use cases? Because developers still can contribute to your model. Explain how the role of a true developer, because I get the part of easy to program because that's natural, Lego-blocked, making it easy. How does it grow? How does it evolve? Yeah, so the citizen developer is what we've talked about until now, right? But there's something called the eight-base serverless chassis, which is the heart of the system. And in that part of our world, developers, so core engineers, can work to extend the platform. And in the process of that, they can earn tokens and basically create a business model for themselves. Either one-time payment or recurring payment. So eight-base will evolve very, very rapidly, not only through eight-base's development work and our development team, but through the world at large contributing new capabilities. Think of a blockchain, a new blockchain that comes out that's innovative. All they have to do is create an extension to the eight-base platform, and now that's accessible to all the eight-base users in the world. Let me get this right. If I unpack this, if I can connect the dots, you're essentially creating software to make people that want to write software really easy. So they essentially invoke something and it automatically writes the software for them so they don't have to. And then you have a development ecosystem that could add more to that, almost like a marketplace. Is that kind of getting it right? Yeah, so when you talk about writing the system, it's a yes and no. So one thing we're not is a code generator. So the software is created, but it runs inside of our environment because we think the environment is also more than half of the value that we add. We have a fully fault-tolerant, scalable, cloud-based environment so that the same people who want to develop don't have to worry about IT, right? So that's really, really important. The operation piece, you nail the operational piece. That's right, that's right. And it's fully self-service, so there's no human intervention. So people can try eight-base before they buy it without having to talk to salespeople, without having to drop a credit card, and without having to have implementation people involved. That sounds like a great cloud solution to me, and certainly cloud has proven that a set of services that has pushed button kind of capability, Amazon's been very successful, Amazon's web services with their marketplace. Why even provision code? Just click on it and use it. And by the way, in talking about Amazon, what we're doing, in my opinion, wasn't even possible 15 years ago, even though many of our competitors which stayed back to those days tried, things like Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud, many of the open-source things, including blockchain, are what facilitates what we do because we don't have to write it all, right? We can leverage these incredible underlying technologies and curate them in a way that makes it accessible to people. So your tailwind for your business is the open-source software market. Your differentiations, you're running all the operations for them so they don't have to. And so you have extensive, and you're also providing the value of having a blockchain-enabled capability for someone who's not trained. And a visual interface that normal people can understand in terms of building software. A no-code, what we call a no-code. Define normal. Well, most of the population, you know? Yeah, who are trying to grok, who want blockchain, what's the benefits of it? You guys abstract that away. Great, so ICO, you guys doing the fundraising? You guys doing an ICO? What's the plan? So we have plans for a token sale but I can't talk about it just yet. Okay, I respect that. Okay, cool. So that sounds like it's rocking and rolling. Let's talk about you. So we're just choking off camera. Big Hurricanes fan, Miami from Miami. Gonna get their mojo back. I love the chain. I love the chain that got the takeover. The turnover chain. Turnover chain, fantastic. Love to see the action energy there. But you also have a lot of success in the industry. Also, you have some scar tissue. As us guys, you know, growing up in that era where you have to provision your own stuff, go to venture capital, get the funding. It was a slog. I mean, I said many levels. And some got easier over time. Certainly Agile programming helped a lot. But now with cloud and now with this new marketplace where you have almost a global footprint capability. How do you talk to people and say, hey, you know, I've been there. I walked to school with no shoes back on the day and now it's so much better. How do you talk about this wave? I mean, because it's a bigger wave than anything we've seen before. It's a lot of things coming together at once. What's the- So I love this topic. So, you know, I've stood up a couple of venture-backed technology companies. Probably the one I'm best known for is CareCloud, which is backed by Silicon Valley VCs. And you know, I've raised a fair amount of angel investment and venture capital. And I appreciate the model, right? It's got its pros and cons. And when you talk about scar tissue, you know, all entrepreneurs have scar tissue whether they were funded or not, right? And so I also had a very unique experience because I was at the signing of the JOBS Act. I was standing behind the president at the White House. And at the time, I was beginning to sort of imagine what could become of that. And I did a PBS interview sort of like this. It was actually a debate. Talking about it back then. And I never would have imagined. You know, we were talking about things like crowdfunding and stuff like that. But never in a million years could I have envisioned what blockchain could have brought to all this and what ICOs would have looked like and what crowdfunding at a global environment. You know, up until that time, we thought of most of entrepreneurship as a U.S. phenomenon, right? And now it's very much a global phenomenon. So I'm very excited about what's coming. And I think it creates an incredible opportunity for entrepreneurs all over the world to sort of emerge and do what they do. Whether they know VCs personally or not, which is sort of part of the problem. And as long as, you know, this industry doesn't get too crazy, you know, we can sort of keep that under control and let it grow. I mean, my personal opinion, having a venture-backed company in the past, my current business, SiliconANGLE, theCUBE is self-funded, no outside capital. It's interesting is because there's three types of funding elements going on in this ICO bubble. The startup, and then the other interesting is that oh shit, we're going out of business, throw the hail Mary, okay? Pivot, that's what they call it now. We used to call it shit, we're going out of business. Now it's called AccuHire and Pivoting. And then the middle is really with the action is growth companies that actually have a business model and need growth capital at a scale and technology infrastructure has token economics built in. That's like where I see most of the smart money going. On the startup side, there's an argument for VCs because that's a good, a lot of my friends are VCs and they've been on the team. They need nurturing. They need advice. They need to have the network effect. They need to have that service provider. But some can go right through the value faster. So you've seen the startup category kind of bifurcate into I really want the VCs and to some I just want to get the first base, get this thing done and I'll reevaluate and then there's the holy grail which is token economics already built in, growth companies. Okay, so that being said, right? So from your perspective, when you look at like say the Jobs Act, you mentioned that. So I also find that there's new level of startups coming off, not just the tech entrepreneurs. In Washington DC I've covered in great detail with Teresa Carlson as the president, head of Amazon Web Services Global Public Sector. This is a tsunami of societal entrepreneurship where NGOs, because of the Jobs Act, can now invest in mission-driven startups. So what's happening is a level of entrepreneurs are coming in, solving stuff that would never get funded by a VC. I mean, talking about women's abuse app or missing exploited children or solving world hunger. These used to be philanthropy missions that when there's no more funding, everything's dead. Now there's entrepreneurship going on to people doing stuff that they know what they want to do but need to code. This is kind of where you're targeting. I mean, it's kind of a data point to validate what you're doing, right? So first of all, I love the fact that that's happening because things that are good for society obviously is good for everybody. But I would also say that beyond that, people are sort of, if you're lucky enough in life to find out what you're really passionate about, sometimes that always doesn't align itself with profits, right? So we're giving them an opportunity for people to live a more fulfilling life by following their dream and doing good by society, right? But at the end of the day, we have to be able to fund these things and we have to be able to support them and things like the Jobs Act and crowdfunding and stuff have really given life to this. Well the thing about NGOs in these new areas is that they don't have a lot of tech expertise. They have a lot of years of experience in the channels and their relationships and their mission, but now they're like, oh damn, I got to build something. So who do you turn to? This is kind of where the model of simplicity is really kind of key. So, 8Base is designed for exactly that. So when we think about where is 8Base used? First and foremost, we think small to mid-sized businesses that are looking to digitally transform, okay? Then we think of large companies where departmentally, people don't necessarily want to go to their IT department. They do what's called shadow IT. They build their own stuff. 8Base is a much better, much more compliant way to do that. And businesses to be able to cycle faster. But the last thing is entrepreneurs. So imagine, today we have all these platforms that make entrepreneurship easier. Well imagine if you could literally build your product very, very easily without having to hire developers. Think about how we're spawning companies left and right. So part of what we'd like to do is really be a catalyst for that type of economy over time. I mean, shadow IT, I've said on theCUBE many times, has been legitimized with the cloud. It used to be kind of a quiet little secret. They'd go around, put the credit card down, spin up some servers, get a little prototype, and then show the boss, let's double down on that. Similar kind of concept going on in this world. Get something going, show some momentum. You guys take care of that for everybody. Okay, so what's going on in Puerto Rico? Let's shift gears. We're here in Puerto Rico. What's your observation? What's the vibe here? I'll see, they're trying to bid themselves out, like, look, we want to be a haven for entrepreneurship, bring the local culture together. What are you hearing in the hallways here? What are you talking about? What's some of the observations? Yeah, I mean, so look, first of all, I'm a big fan of Puerto Rico. I live in Miami. So I've been to Puerto Rico many, many times. And this place has been hard hit by the hurricane. I love the fact that the government was able to reform the tax situation five years ago. And I think it's exactly that type of thing that will bring, sort of, that will spawn the type of innovation that we need here. All communities need to evolve, in my opinion, to technology communities. You've seen it, obviously Silicon Valley is the exaggerated example, but you've seen it in places like Detroit, New York, Austin, and even Miami is very, big part of the message I carry. When you live in an island, it sort of has an even different dynamic. But there's no reason why that can't emerge here in Puerto Rico. And I'm hopeful that these incentives, et cetera, will attract that kind of... It's a short flight to the mainland. It's entrepreneurial center. It's the United States, right? It's the United States. With digital, there's no boundaries with digital culture. Opportunity for them. That's right. Albert, thanks for spending the time. What's next for you? What are you going to do? Obviously, you've got your business you're building. Can you talk about your token sale? Well, we haven't literally launched the company yet, but we're anticipating that next week or the following, we're actually going to make our announcement. And then there'll be lots of announcements after that. Come on, give us a little bit more. You're teasing us here. Joey, today is our birthday. So we were incorporated in the Ides of March in 2017. Let's hope that's good luck. Albert Santalo, founder and CEO of 8Base, look for him. We'll be watching the news, trying to get some scoop here, but he's not giving in. Good job. Well done. Thank you, John. We back with more live coverage here in Puerto Rico for theCUBE's coverage of Blockchain Unbound. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.