 From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, covering ACG Silicon Valley Grow Awards, brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Mountain View, California at the ACG SV Awards, the Grow Awards 14th annual. We've been coming for a couple of years, about 300 people celebrating. You know, really, there's a lot of networking and it's an interesting organization. Check it out. We're excited to have our next guest. He's Nick O'Keefe, partner of Arnold and Porter. Nick, great to see you. Likewise, great seeing you. Great to talk to you. So we were talking a little bit off camera. You came to Silicon Valley in 2000 and saying you've seen a lot of changes in those 18 years. Yes, it's phenomenal. I mean, it's epitomized by the great gathering that we have here today. As I was saying earlier, you know, when I came, I'd worked in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was sort of a bigger version of Silicon Valley and it's just kept growing. Now, you know, the practice between East Coast and West Coast has converged. I mean, there's some of the biggest, you know, most successful companies in the world are based here now and doing some of the biggest deals. And it's just incredible in such a short period of time how that's happened. And as I was indicating earlier, you know, one of the things that really opened my eyes to how successful Silicon Valley is is I opened up the Middle East offices to another law firm, right about the time of the Great Recession. And it seems like every country is trying to emulate Silicon Valley. You know, we advise on how they could replicate it, what kind of laws they'd have to put in place, what kind of ecosystem they'd have to build. And there's just something really unique here that it's really difficult to emulate in different countries. Because it's all industries, right? All industries tend to aggregate and congregate around usually a specific location or one or two. You think of financial services in New York and London because, you know, you get the people and those people leave and start new companies. You have the schools that drive people in there. So it's tough to replicate a whole ecosystem if you don't have all those components. And then as it gels for a while, I think the barriers to entry become even higher. So you get different versions of it, but really not the same. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we have all the ingredients here. We have the great educational institutions, you know, Berkeley, Stanford. You have the financial institutions or the venture money, very sophisticated population. I mean, it's just wonderful living here and just so many smart people around that, you know, you can't just lift them up and put them somewhere else. I mean, they all have ties in the community and yeah, it's very tough replicating it. What's interesting about financial services, you mentioned, you know, typically that's been a New York based practice, but with Vintec, you're seeing some of that migrate over here, you know, cryptocurrencies, a lot of that technology is being developed here. And that's really a convergence of financial services and tech and Silicon Valley is the hub of that. Yeah, I really think that Stanford and Cal don't get enough credit in Santa Clara and some of the other schools, but those two particularly, because they attract a really great talent. They come, the weather's great. They've got a culture of innovation. They've got very nice connections with the local business community. So people don't leave. So you've got this constant influx of smart people and they stay where a lot of other places, even great academic institutions don't necessarily have the business climate, the weather climate or kind of the ecosystem to keep their brightest there locally. So I think that's just a huge driver. Yeah, absolutely, I completely agree. And there's, even if they don't stay, they still maintain their ties here. You know, people from all over the world come to study here as you're indicating. You know, I'm doing a deal currently with some Chinese people who did graduate research locally and they formed a very successful startup in China that we're currently doing a deal with. And the fact that Stanford, they couldn't be where they were if they hadn't gone through Stanford and they developed ties with the region and with the companies in the region. So they're very much sort of a diaspora of Silicon Valley the way they've operated. Right. What is your take on China? Because to me, China is the big competitor. That's the one, I think, where there's the potential because they've got a huge internal market. They're really good at fast following. And you look at Alibaba Cloud and some of the big, big players over there, I think that's really where the biggest threat to the current US incumbents is going to come. It's very interesting. It's sort of too faceted. On the one hand, obviously a huge population and as the country develops, ultimately within the fairly near future, the first national product is expected to overtake the US. But you have sort of a different culture and they have the same challenges as everyone else does to sort of replicate Silicon Valley. I don't think they'll ever take Silicon Valley take that crown away from them. And I think what I'm seeing now in a couple of deals is so the current administration is obviously trying to defend the US trade position but it's having deleterious effects in that it's preventing Silicon Valley companies from growing and from doing deals. You know, a lot of the Chinese funds are looking to invest in the US where there's currently some regulations that are expected to be proposed next month that could inhibit Chinese investment in the US. So that's not good for Silicon Valley. So the attempt is to sort of protect the US economy but I can see certain effects that are happening that are not helpful. So it's interesting. There's sort of a symbiotic relationship between development here in the US and development in other countries and it's difficult to fight it because you can have weird effects. I think the US, it's just a unique country and I think it'll always be unique. And I personally, I don't have a fear that China is going to somehow usurp the position the US occupies or India and other huge country. I'm just very bullish on Silicon Valley and the US generally. Yeah, it is amazing because I've been here, I've been here a little bit longer than you and it just keeps reinventing, right? It's just wave after wave after wave. It was originally Silicon and microprocessors and then it's software and then it's IoT and now you see all the automotive people have innovation centers here. So wave after wave after wave just continues to come and then we're going to have 5G and this whole kind of move to asymptotically approaching zero cost of store compute and networking and infinite basically amounts of those on tap. This really opens up a huge opportunity. It really does, yeah. And a lot of it's going to come from here. Yeah, all right, Nick. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and stopping by. You bet, my pleasure. All right, he's Nick O'Keefe, I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE from the ACGSV Awards, Grow Awards in Mountain View, California. Thanks for watching.