 Listen, thank you all for coming. I'm going to get right into it. We're running a couple minutes late. I'm here to basically talk about, from a venture investor standpoint, the impact of OpenStack on the enterprise and really where I see opportunities for startups. So first, just a bit of background. I've been investing in IT for over a decade. I started Storm back in 2000. I just do enterprise IT, and I just do early stage. That doesn't necessarily make me any more qualified here than anyone else, but I've been doing this a long time. And I've seen a lot of different technology waves from optics to flash and so forth, SaaS and cloud's very interesting. And not surprisingly, we're spending a lot of time in private cloud, a lot of time in SaaS, and a lot of time in mobile. Those are the big areas right now. So I guess just to start off, I believe with complete conviction, more conviction than I had about anything else in the 12 years of investing, that OpenStack is going to fundamentally change enterprise IT. It's going to remake over the next five to 10 years. It's not going to happen tomorrow or next year, but over the next five to 10 years, enterprise data centers are going to get completely rebuilt. And from an investor standpoint, that's incredibly interesting because that sort of disruption is what gives entrepreneurs and startups, I believe, the opportunity to go out there and compete with the incumbents. And it's happening very quickly. When these sorts of things happen slow, the incumbents kind of have an advantage because it's not as though the large companies aren't very skilled and don't have a lot of great people working there, they do. What they're challenged with typically is being able to move quickly. And that's really where startups, the agility, that's where their advantage lies. And that's why I think a lot of the opportunities going forward in terms of OpenStack are biased potentially to startups. But it's not just OpenStack because there's a lot of interesting open source projects technically interesting. What makes OpenStack so interesting to me as an investor is the size of the market. There are billions of dollars at stake in terms of market share I would contend going forward the next five to 10 years. There's lots of numbers out there that people cite in terms of size of the market. Gardner has a $300 billion number that they like to cite in terms of size IT market. We can sort of argue about what that is. But what I think we can all agree on is it's enormous. And I don't believe that OpenStack is a winner-take-all market versus VMware versus AWS. All you have to believe that this is interesting from a startup standpoint is that it's very disruptive, it's happening quickly, and it's a big enough market to go build a big company. And I think that's something that we can all agree on. So why OpenStack and why not some of these other companies and projects out there? Some of the other speakers, as I've wandered around through the comments, has talked a little bit about this. I think it's an important question. There's kind of three areas. I won't talk about the technical aspects. I think technically OpenStack's got a lot of advantages, but I'll just talk about three. OpenSource, flexibility, and community. And so it's really kind of the wrong question, I guess, to think about why OpenStack versus the other and really think about kind of more what enables OpenStack to compete. So from an OpenSource standpoint, I just don't believe something as big as infrastructure. You can accomplish it unless you're doing it in the OpenSource community. It's just not possible. There's too many aspects that you have to execute on that any one company could possibly do it. You have to enable your users to access and modify and extend the code. I just don't think it's possible to do it any other way. Even if VMware or Oracle had unlimited resources, I just don't believe they could execute on the scope of the project like OpenStack. And notice I didn't say anything about free. I'll get to that in a minute, but I don't think it has anything to do with cost. Number two, in terms of flexibility, OpenStack is uniquely flexible, I think, to deliver to lots of different needs for different users. From a service provider that wants to scale out and scale out in sort of a cost-effective way where they're managing the infrastructure to an enterprise that wants to run their own private cloud. OpenStack can deliver against both of those sorts of requirements uniquely different than anybody else on that chart. And then finally, from a community standpoint, it's probably here at the summit. It's amazing that in two years, so many companies have come together behind an open-source project. And I can't think of anything, certainly in my lifetime, anything else that has been as quick to come together as OpenStack. VMware, Brocade, NetApp, IBM, HP, Rackspace, I mean the list goes on, it's amazing. It's unprecedented. And they're not all here, I would contend, for altruistic reasons. They're here because they know that there's billions of dollars of market share at stake. So those are the reasons why OpenStack, but I think probably a more important question for me as an investor and for anyone in the audience that's thinking about a startup is why now? As a venture investor, you get creamed if you invest too early in a market. Because time is not your friend. You've got a fund burn rate and people, big companies they can invest for the long term. As a startup, you're burning money the day that you start. You're on the clock. You've got to deliver value. And if the market's not there, you're in trouble. So why now? To me, OpenStack is a part of it. But what it really is, is that for the first time over the last couple of years, we've seen the growth of this publicly available menu of IT services that enterprises can look at, consume, compare, shop around. It's a game changer. Up until now, and again, the last couple of years, if you're inside of an enterprise, you're locked into buying the traditional gear and consuming that from your internal IT group and you're sort of doing business the way you've always done it. You try to optimize around your application a little bit more. You try to save a little bit of cost here. You try to do things a little bit differently. But by and large, it was the same old game. But now it's different. Because now in a lot of companies, and it's increasing every day, business units are in control of their own IT spend. And they're looking at IT and saying, if I can't get it at the same price or better than I can get it outside, I'm gonna go outside. I'm gonna consume it there. Just imagine, right? If you're a business unit, you're trying to make money. You're measured on profitability. And you're trying to buy storage. You can go outside and buy for 10 cents a gigabyte. And internally, you're getting charged $10 a gigabyte because your internal IT guys have bought traditional gear and that's the cost structure. What are you gonna do? You're gonna go outside. You're gonna go outside and buy it. And so I think it's fundamentally changing the game for IT. And I think it's great if you're a CIO or an IT manager, it's gotta be a very exciting time. Because you finally are, I think, enabled to take risks that you couldn't take before. Because if you don't, you're gonna lose, I think, I would contend your internal IT customers. So what this then drives is ultimately, economics do drive these decisions. I'm not a big believer that, hey, because you're a big brand name company that you can charge more for the same service. That works for some accounts, but by and large, that doesn't really scale and it doesn't really work. So ultimately, economics really do matter. Different customers have different issues. I mean, if you're a small company, you may wanna consume public cloud services. Bigger company, you may wanna build your own private cloud. But the economics really do matter and it's the whole picture of economics too, which I'm gonna get into in a second. It's not the cost of the hardware and the software alone. It's also the OPEX, it's the people, it's the management of that cloud. And what's great about OpenStack is really for the first time it enables enterprises to take advantage, it puts within reach. The web scale advantages that companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon get to have. But it doesn't deliver the whole picture because OpenStack doesn't manage itself. But it's a piece of the puzzle. And it's compelling. These graphs that I put up here, they're fictional. I don't want anybody to hold me to this exactly. There's just too many variables to try and compare it to. But what I can tell you is, anecdotally, within our own portfolio, you look at traditional infrastructure spend and how companies are spending, have spent money in the past in terms of kind of traditional storage, traditional compute, traditional kind of virtualization. You cannot compete from a cost structure with what you consume on the outside from companies like Amazon or Rackspace. You just can't do it. So the only answer is you have to do things differently. And OpenStack's a big part of that. So the OPEX, I mentioned a second ago, is a big part of the equation. Dropping the server to admin ratio is a critical part of your success as a startup and OpenStack's success as a project. If OpenStack doesn't enable customers ultimately or companies in the ecosystem enable customers ultimately to reduce OPEX, all you've done is shift one cost from one bucket to another. You haven't solved the customer's problem. I had a conversation recently with a CIO of a public company and I was, sometimes like probably a lot of you start talking about OpenStack, I get very passionate about how great it's gonna be and it's gonna take over the world. And he says, but Ryan, this all sounds great, but I don't have anybody that runs OpenStack inside my organization. What am I gonna do? I have a lot of guys that know VMware. I can scale that, I can buy more VMware licenses, I know how to operate that, but I have nobody that knows how to operate OpenStack. So it's interesting, but what am I gonna do? Go hire some OpenStack engineers, where do I get those guys? What if the project doesn't work? How do I know when to scale it? They're all legitimate questions from an enterprise standpoint. I think as a startup, they're important questions to think about. So let's talk specifically about the opportunity and I'll put it into three general buckets, I guess. First of all, OpenStack is complex. I think if there's one takeaway, at least for me personally, from the summit this year is that, the naysayers saying, oh, OpenStack's not production ready. Well, it is ready, asterisk, if you have an ops team that can execute against it. It is certainly not ready from the standpoint of any IT organization downloading and making it work. It is complex and it's evolving every single day with new code and new releases frequently. And it's sort of the trade-off, I guess, for building on commodity standard hardware is complexity at the software layer. It's a good trade-off to make, mind you, because software scales nicely as you build out your data center infrastructure as compared to kind of vertically integrated, tightly coupled hardware and software. But it's incredibly complex. That's where part of the opportunity is. The second thing is enterprises want solutions. They don't want technology. They're not interested in shiny objects in general. There's exceptions, but in general, they really don't care about, hey, OpenStack is open source. That's not what matters to them. They have a problem to solve. They're looking for a solution. They're trying to make money in their business and technology is an enabler of that. And they don't wanna solve OpenStack's problems. They wanna implement it or have someone else implement it, get it done, and then they wanna go home to their families just like the rest of us. And so I think thinking about it from a solution standpoint is really critical, not just thinking about it from a technical standpoint. And then finally, applications. And this is probably the farthest out kind of opportunity because I think in order for applications to really be successful as a category for startups, you have to believe that there's an OpenStack community out there of production clouds that you can go sell into. And also that's just not the case today. There's just not that many, but there will be. So this is something I think to be thinking about for the future and I'll give some examples of that in a minute. And by the way, I think all of this applies to big companies as well. So if you're with a big company and I think all these same concepts potentially apply to you too. So just real quick, just full disclosure. So as a venture investor, I'm sort of paid to take calculated risk. I don't have the baggage of an existing product line, existing customers. I get a clean sheet of paper in every single decision that I make for the most part. Many ways that's a great thing because I get to think about what's coming next and I'm not burdened by what has come before. You know, the downside is I don't have an existing sales force. I don't have existing marketing resources. So that's point one. Point two is, and this is probably the more important one, it's just my opinion. My wife often reminds me I state opinion is fact and she gets upset with me about that. What's most important is that you all believe in what you're doing and that you think it makes sense because there's no right and wrong answers here. This is all kind of conjecture about what I think is gonna happen in the future and what I think is interesting but the venture business is very humbling. I'm often wrong. So I'll put that as a full disclosure. So on the complexity front, I mentioned earlier one of the things about OpenStack it's open source and it's important because it delivers freedom in terms of ability to modify the code but free in terms of cost has nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing to do with it. In fact, open source and in particular OpenStack is incredibly expensive when you think about trying to implement it inside of an enterprise. And I think that's okay. Enterprises are willing to spend money. I just got done telling you how big the $300 billion market. I mean, it's not a question of dollars. They're willing to spend the money. But I think you don't wanna think about it in terms of it's free software. That's the wrong way to sort of approach it. You have to think about it in terms of what's the value that I'm providing. And I just put the chart of Red Hat up here just as an example for anybody that has a question about being able to build value in open source in the most basic way, no offense to Red Hat, it's a support model. They've done an incredible job with it and have built a very successful company. And the founder of Red Hat, Bob Young said that sort of his goal originally was to reduce the size of the OS market in general. And that probably will happen for infrastructure if OpenStack is successful. The overall market probably will contract a little bit. But those dollars will shift hands in terms of winners and losers. And that's what, at the end of the day, that's what really matters. So if you focus on complexity and really a solution for the customers and not increase complexity for them, i.e. walk in with something that makes their lives more complicated or causes more problems internally, you'll create value. And when you create value, you get paid for that. It sounds very simple. It's obviously a lot harder to do in real life. But from a startup standpoint, that's the way I think you ought to think about it. That's the way to play around the open source community. I get asked all the time, Ryan, you can't make money in open source, it's so hard, completely disagree. I mean, I think today it's far easier to make money in open source than it ever has been in the past. And it all comes from the fact that it is very complex, it's hard to implement. If you think about most of these IT organizations, they've been completely gutted over the last five years. They just don't have budget. They don't have the resources. They're smart enough. It's not a question of intelligence. They just don't have the energy or the time or the resources to deal with complexity. So you gotta do that for them. So what that kind of leads into then is solutions. And the picture on the left there, now it's sort of funny, but the point I guess is, look, you gotta stack up against your competitors. This is a big market, and there's gonna be big competitors in the competing with you and a lot of startups. I mean, just mark my words, next year or year from now, you're gonna see twice the number of startups out in the hall. There's not a lot of venture guys walking around the halls now. There will be next year. And it's a good thing. It's because people believe you can make money here. But you have to be able to stack up against your competitors. There's kind of two key points there that I wanna make. One is you gotta really focus on completeness of your solution as a startup. And part of it is in scoping it appropriately. In other words, if you produce a very large scoped project, one of the problems is you may not deliver the whole solution into the customer. And if you only deliver 80, 90%, you're just not gonna get anywhere because you haven't solved any problems for anybody. Yeah, that's shiny technology. It looks really cool. You'll find some technology evangelists that love to talk to you about it, but you're not gonna make any meaningful sales. I don't know if anybody's read the Lean Startup or is a fan of Eric Grease. If you haven't read the book, it's fantastic. He talks about minimal viable product. The basic idea is create the most minimal product you can with the most minimal amount of effort to generate sales and then iterate on that over and over and over again. And that's really what I'm kinda talking about there. Really think about that completeness of your solution, the most basic elements of where you're creating value and drive really hard against that. The second thing is partnering. I think it's critical if you wanna win. Most startups don't have unlimited resources. Certainly ones I'm involved don't have. I don't have unlimited resources and don't have the most amazing technology that just sells itself. And as a result, if you're gonna be successful and compete, you have to partner. The good news is the big companies wanna partner because they have holes but there's a right way to do it and I think a wrong way to do it. Let's give a couple points on that about partnering. Number one, you have to realize your partners don't care about your business. It sounds cold, I don't know, right? They don't care. They don't care about you making money. They don't even care really about your success. What they care about is their success. What they care about is their job looking good in front of their boss and them making money. And once you internalize that, it'll help identify who the right partners are and help kinda crystallize that framework in your mind. Too many startups kinda get in the mind, oh, this guy can sell a lot of my stuff. Ah, that's the wrong way to think about it. You gotta think about how they're gonna sell more of their stuff with your help. That's the key. Number two is find somebody that's mid-level in the organization that's gonna be your champion and really passionate about it. A lot of times I get asked, oh, hey, Ryan, can you make an introduction to CEO, VP of Engineering? Sure, yeah, we can do all of that. But the problem is those aren't the guys that are executing. It's the mid-level folks that are executing. And so you gotta find those people who are really passionate, who are gonna be your champions, who are gonna be really successful as a result of working with you to really push the ball forward. And it's important too to keep the scope small so you can achieve some success early, because building on some success is magical inside of an enterprise. As opposed to walking in with some grand scheme about how these companies are gonna work together in an LOI and all this stuff, and then nothing happens. So start small and work with the right people. And then finally, I'd say to a startup, don't work with other startups. It generally doesn't work well. It's just a mismatch. So big companies do a great job with small companies because they have a ton of resources, they've got a sales force, and generally they're slow into these new markets. And so they wanna find somebody who can help them go execute. So it's a natural fit. Also realize though that it's unstable because if you're successful, they're likely going to want to own that segment. And so partnerships are inherently unstable. They don't last forever. Just treat it like that. You're not getting married, you're just doing business together. But working with startups is tough because startups don't have resources. Priorities change. They're trying to focus on sales, they're focused on the next round of financing. It just doesn't work as well. So my advice is find the right big companies, find the right champions, and partner the right way. So just two examples really quick on solutions. I've put my money kind of where my mouth is. I started investing in OpenStack about 18 months ago. My first investment was a company called MetaCloud that just announced their offering here at the show. OpenStack basically has a service. They call it Managed Private Cloud and they solve this operational problem. So they go into a company and they've got several large customers now and stand up at OpenStack Cloud for those customers on those customers CapEx in their data centers and then they manage it remotely. So those customers get all the benefit of OpenStack without having to invest in any of the operational capability to run it. It's a pretty powerful offering. Going back to what I said about just a solution, right? It's the complete solution for those customers. The second company is SwiftStack. It's a company that I invested in just this past summer. That's another great company. A different sort of product offering but focuses on all the enterprise features and functionality that you need to deploy Swift. How do you scale, how do you automate, how do you orchestrate at scale inside of an enterprise? And as a consequence, we've been able to land some very large customers. In fact, the largest customer, CloudStack customer that's still got a bunch of storage in S3 just moves over to SwiftStack as a result. It's easy to build a couple of nodes of Swift. It's much harder to run petabytes. That's the problem that SwiftStack solves. So just on applications quickly, I'll talk about security first because I think this one's really interesting. So security is one of those areas I just don't think it's gonna get baked into the core project. Yeah, there's gonna be security at basic level but not every customer needs the same level of security. So why would you burden OpenStack with this big security framework? It doesn't make any sense to me. So I don't think it's gonna happen. I don't know, we'll see. But there's an opportunity then for a startup because there are some customers who are gonna require enhanced security models and there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do in terms of building hooks into OpenStack and running a security application on top. There's nobody doing it today as far as I know. Maybe there are, I haven't surveyed everybody. But it's a good example of, I think take it more as an example of an application. They'll be really powerful because imagine a service provider deploys OpenStack and they wanna run PCI compliance and they wanna be able to represent to their customer certain security levels and so forth or imagine like a government customer. How's a service provider gonna do that? Are they gonna invest in the R&D themselves? I doubt it. So that's an opportunity for a startup. Or something like automation. I talked about the OPEX versus the CAPEX. There's a lot of things that are being done in terms of automation but I think there's still a lot more that can be done to make it easier to reduce the number of people that you need to actually deploy OpenStack to really complete the whole solution. And there's a whole other thing, networking services and so forth. I mean the list goes on. I think there's a lot of things if we sit here and can kind of get creative about what could be in terms of the applications. By the way, please think about some questions cause I'm gonna try and save some time here at the end to answer any questions that people might have. So sort of a couple of additional thoughts as a venture investor. OpenStack as a community is really powerful from a marketing standpoint. You as a startup get to draft behind all of these big companies in terms of OpenStack and what it means. If you walk into a customer meeting and you have to evangelize OpenStack, it's not a customer. It's not who you should be spending your time with. You should be talking to people who are already convinced that OpenStack is the direction that they wanna go in. That's the beauty of OpenSource. There's this whole community, people can try things out, they can explore and by the time you get to them and they get to you they're already convinced OpenStack is the direction that they wanna go in. That's really powerful. Because it reduces the amount of time that you've gotta spend convincing people that OpenStack is the direction. You've gotta convince them that you have value. You've gotta convince them you've got a solution that they ought to pay you for. But you don't have to convince them about building a private cloud. And again, if that's what you're spending your time doing you're talking to the wrong people. You should be spending your time doing other things. Let the big companies spend their time trying to convince people to build private clouds. What that then I think kind of naturally blends into is from a sales model standpoint try to figure out ways in which you can gain insights into potential customers without actually directly calling on them. So in the case like MetaCloud they've got this product called Test Drive. It allows you to spin up and open stack instance via web browser. It's really cool if people wanna play with it they can give them an email address and they can play with it and they can check it out. It's a great way for customers to get a feeling for what MetaCloud can deliver and it's a great way for MetaCloud to sort of expose what it can do without ever having to make a phone call. It's very, very, very powerful. And along with that, my advice would be invest in the marketing resources, blogs, white papers. Swift Stack does a great job of this. If you haven't seen their website you should check it out in terms of just educational material that they put together for their customers. People may not end up being their customers. People may end up going somewhere else. But I guarantee you when people think about Swift they think about Swift Stack. Because it's likely someone's downloaded a white paper or seen a webinar or read a blog and has gotten educated via Swift Stack. And so when it does come time to buy something they're likely to get a call. Again it's just very powerful and it's not an expensive marketing program. It's a great way to do it. My final comment I make as far as thoughts here is focus on software and services with maybe one exception being storage which is a longer conversation. But I mentioned earlier the trend line is really about software on standard hardware. And if you're building on any sort of proprietary hardware or you have hardware dependencies the problem is your release cycle time is gonna be lengthened tremendously because you just can't move hardware as fast as you can move software. And number two from a venture investor standpoint it just costs a lot of money. And that's bad for you as an entrepreneur potentially because I mean you gotta raise more money. So for all those reasons and I just don't see any reason you need to focus on hardware you can just create a lot more value by focusing on the software and the service. Again with maybe the exception being storage today but maybe that will change in the future as well. So look I also think it's important to be part of the community. I'm not interested in meeting any startup that wants to talk to me about a fork or do something entirely different or whose view is hey I'm gonna make the customer sticky by kind of locking them in. I think if you're playing in the open source world and the open source community you have to be part of the community. You can't have it both ways. If you wanna build some proprietary fine go do it but stay out of the community because you just won't be successful. I think if you're not and you gotta you have to view it as your lock in is the value that you provide to the customers. That's your lock in. You have to be brutally honest with yourself every day. And open source is great that way because it forces you to be very honest every day about the value that you're actually providing because customers are able to go elsewhere. But focus on that value as you're locking as opposed to something that's proprietary and be part of the community. So I guess just in the interest of time here I'll just end on sort of a, it's positive note but look it's gonna be tough. I believe it's gonna fundamentally change opens I will fundamentally change IT but it's not gonna happen overnight. We're kind of at the peak of the hype cycle right now. It's fun. Kind of feels like a party. But it's gonna be tough. There's gonna be politics. There's gonna be bugs. It's gonna take longer. Something bad's gonna happen out there and get a lot of press. Press can't wait to jump on open stack failures. Trust me, the reporters just can't wait to write something negative. So you just kind of gotta stick with it. The picture up here just, I thought it was kind of interesting. It's just a funny story to digress. On the right, it's a picture of Warren Harding and a guy named Wayne Mary in 1957. On the right, it's a picture of El Cap and maybe you probably recognize it in Yosemite. Just to kind of tell you a story about, from a startup standpoint, you have to be, you have to have just complete commitment and just unwavering devotion to your success because everybody's gonna tell you you're gonna fail. These guys, it took them 18 months to climb El Cap. They started in the summer of 1957 and didn't summit until winter of 1958. They stopped and they took breaks, but in 1958, it took them 45 days, their last push, and the last day, they pulled an all-nighter to get the final bolts in to get up over onto the summit. And I think it's doubly tough for startups because not only are you an open stack which is maturing as a project, but also just as a startup, there's good days, there's bad days, you just gotta stick with it because I really think this is gonna fundamentally change IT and if you do, I think you'll be rewarded. I think we're part of a moment in time right now that is unprecedented for me as an IT investor and again, as the 12 years I've been investing. We're right on the cusp of something just remarkable happening and that fundamental shift where now that disruption occurs where startups can insert themselves and build products, build services, build offerings to go into these billion dollar markets. It's just remarkable and it gets me very excited. So with that, thank you. I'll stop there and hopefully see if there's any questions. Any entrepreneurs in the room? Camille, hey, yeah. So the question is business models. So yeah, I didn't mention when we were going through and talking about Red Hat, so my advice would be having a distribution and having a support model around that distribution, I don't think that's a good model. I'm just gonna say it as a startup, as a startup. For big companies, fantastic. I think it's great. If I was Red Hat, it's exactly what I'd be doing. HP is what I'd be doing, but if you're trying to sell a Goldman Sachs, a distribution and a support contract and HP's in there or IBM is in there, you're gonna lose. You may win some, but you're gonna lose. So I think you have to look at value beyond support. I also, I don't think service is a four letter word. Some venture guys may think so, but think about, you know, I was having this conversation with some of the other night, software as a service. I mean, look, there's lots of ways to build service offerings, managed service offerings that are, you know, very powerful. You know, obviously MetaCloud is one example. There's others. Security as a service. There's service models that make a tremendous amount of sense. And I think people should think about that because it solves that OPEX problem and not just a technical one. Yeah. Ha ha ha. No, no, I don't think freemium is dead. In fact, I think it depends on what your, what your business is, but the ability to derive some value out of a product or service at a minimal cost or nothing and use that as a lead gen funnel for an upgrade path, I think it makes a tremendous amount of sense. It doesn't make sense where it requires any sales effort or any cost to you as a company. So in other words, if you have to spend $1,000 per customer, I'm exaggerating here, but if you have to spend $1,000 per customer on that freemium service without knowing really what you're gonna convert at, yeah, I'd say that's a bad idea. But if you're spending, you know, 10, 30, 40, 50 bucks, that's worth it. And you can track what your lead conversion is and understand that and that makes a lot of sense. And what stage do you prefer to engage with us? You wanna be with us from beginning and working out what we should do or we gotta do something first and then we'll talk to you. I'm an early stage investor, so I talk to lots of entrepreneurs before they have anything. So yeah, early is fine. My advice, I guess, to entrepreneurs in general on that subject is it's certainly easier to raise money and meet with more entrepreneurs or more venture investors, rather, if you've got a product or a service or something you can demonstrate. Number one and number two is, I think it's an important question when you do think about visiting venture investors, what stage do they invest in? Because some do wanna see product service, they wanna see more progress and they're willing to pay you for it. But we tend to do very early stuff. We incubate a lot of stuff at Storm when we see good ideas. So we're willing to look very early. We'll be seeing investors. The best way to get connected to a venture investor is through their network. I mean, I'm really easy to find. You can email me, but I get a ton of email and I try to respond to everybody. But sometimes, like this week, it's just not gonna happen, because I'm traveling. But if you can find somebody that I know, that I trust, like for example, a portfolio company, like if you're in the open stack community and you know Swift Stack or you know the guys at MetaCloud, that's a great way to get to a venture investor. Or you know, there's a lot of other great companies here. Pistons backed by Tru. I mean, there's a lot of other great companies here that the same would be true. Recommendations via portfolio companies is great. Recommendations via other people I know is great. And then you can try just emailing folks too. The exit strategy for you, is it IPO, is it acquisition or is it sustainable, recurring returns and you take your royalties? So the question is, yeah, what's the exit strategy? I'd hope that every company I invest in could be a public company. If I could do that, it'd be fantastic. I wish that was the case. It doesn't obviously always work out that way. But I like to invest in companies that at least have the potential to be a public company. That doesn't mean they've got the right management team, they've got everything else sorted out because you gotta build those things at the right time as you grow as a company. You don't need a public company CFO on day one, for example, that'd be a complete waste of money. But you wanna see the opportunity being that big. And then along the way, you sort of evaluate, is our market big enough? Is our product differentiated enough? Are we executing well enough? And then you sort of see what comes. Generally speaking, for me, management always makes that decision. If management's willing to go forward and try and take a company public or continue to build value, I'm 100% behind them. Because it's so hard to find that combination that I'm delighted to just keep building value. But it's oftentimes management that says, hey look, we think it's hard, it's competitive, we've gotten a $300, $400 million offer, it's more money than I've ever seen before and they wanna sell. And that's okay too. But it's never really royalties. Yeah, it's either M&A or IPO. Yeah. Excuse me, sir, I have one question about the evaluation of the value of the startup. For example, as I just mentioned, you are mainly focused on the early stage investment. In terms of cloud computing. So do you have any strategies or advice on how to evaluate the valuation of a new startup in this area? So the question's really on how do I value startups in this area. That's honestly, it's a really hard question. It's one of those, you know, it depends which is a terrible answer. It has a lot to do with the team. So I can give you some things that affect it. How about that? That's how I'd answer it. I don't wanna sound like presidential debate or something. If you have a team that's executed before, you're gonna get a higher valuation. If you've built a product in this market and you've got customers, you're gonna get a higher valuation. If you can convince venture investors that it's a really big market opportunity, you're gonna get a bigger valuation. It's those sorts of things that kind of contribute to it. It's the best answer I can give. Hi Ryan, thank you for the presentation. One question about your valuation and advice to the different segment of a startup. For example, today we are in OpenStack Summit. That's about infrastructure, in changing the traditional IT infrastructure. And another category of startup is SaaS model. Or even further, far away from that, is consumer internet. Can you give some advice to founders in this infrastructure level? You mean relative to consumer? Yeah, so sure. So the question is relative, I guess, valuation, consumer versus infrastructure enterprise. So it's cyclical, I guess. If you would have asked me back in 2010, 2011, consumer was peaking. And if you didn't have a consumer company, a lot of venture investors weren't worth it. We didn't want to talk to you. They were looking for the next Mark Zuckerberg and that's all they cared about. For Storm we've always done enterprise. That's what we've always focused on. It may not be as sexy, but I know how to go build value there. On the consumer side, it has a lot to do with things like fashion and hype. And did you come from Facebook or Google, things like that? On the enterprise side, it matters more about what customers think. What's your value proposition? How big is the market? And then part of your question's exit multiples. Enterprise exit multiples in general are far better than consumer I would contend. What you hear about on the consumer side is the big ones. I mean, you hear about the Instagrams, right? With whatever it was, 15 people, 700 million. But on the enterprise side, there's a lot of workdays. Workdays are obviously a big one, but nicer. I think on the enterprise side, you can build great multiples. On the SaaS side, you're typically getting 10x kind of forward revenue. It's pretty impressive. Is it 100 times kind of no revenue? Like on the consumer side, no. But I think it's, at least from my perspective, the reason I focus on the enterprise is I just, I figure it's much more within my control in terms of understanding how to go create value. It's not as much about fashion. Anybody else? All right, great. Thanks, I'm getting the cut off. Thank you everybody.