 Welcome back to Detroit, guys and gals. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We've been on the floor at KubeCon, Cloud BetaCon North America for about two days now. We've been breaking news. We would have a great conversations, John. We were going to be, we love talking with Kube alumni whose companies are just taking off and we get to do that next again. Well, this next segment is awesome. We have a former Kube host, Brian Grace Lee here, who's an executive of this company and then an entrepreneur who we're going to talk with. She was on the Kube when it just started. Now they're extremely successful. It's going to be a great conversation. It is. Edith Lavinius here, the founder and CEO of Scylla.io. Just don't mention Brian Grace Lee. You know Brian. He's the VP of product marketing and product strategy now at Scylla.io. Guys, welcome to the Kube. Great to have you here. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much for having us. So, talking about what's going on, this is a rocket ship that you're riding. I was looking at your webpage. You have some amazing customers. T-Mobile, BNW, AMEX, the firm marketing guy must be like, this is just- But you can't feed it. You can't feed it. You can't feed it. I mean like, you know, for giant companies like that, giant brands, global, to trust a company of our size, you know, it's trust. It's great engineering. It's trust. Yeah, it's fantastic. Edith, talk about the fast trajectory of this company. How you've been able to garner trust with such massive organizations in such a short time period. Yes, I think that mainly is just being the best. Honestly, that's the best approach I can say. The team that we build, honestly, and this is a great example of one of them, right? I mean, we're basically getting the best people in the industry. So that's helpful a lot. We are very, very active on the open source community. So we're basically linking it anyway. And by doing this, they see us everywhere. They see our success. You know, you're starting with a few customers. They're extremely successful. And then you're just creating this amazing partnership with them. So like, we have a very, very unique way we're working with them. So hard work, good code, smart people, experience. That's all you need? That's simple. Why doesn't everyone do it? It's really easy. All good, congratulations. It's been fun to watch you guys grow up. Brian, great to see you kicking button in this great company. I got to ask about the landscape because I love the service mesh con you guys had on a co-located event on day zero here as part of that program. Pretty packed house. A lot of great feedback. This whole service mesh and where it fits in. You got Kubernetes. What's the update? We're, it's because everything's kind of coming together. You know, it's like Jello in the refrigerator. It kind of comes together at the same time. Where are we? I think these are the way to think about it is and it kind of mirrors this event perfectly. So the last four or five years all about Kubernetes, build Kubernetes. So every one of our customers are the ones who have said, look, for the last two or three years we've been building Kubernetes. We've had a certain amount of success with it, right? They're building applications faster deploying. And then that success leads to new challenges, right? So we sort of call that first Kubernetes part sort of cloud native 1.0. This, and this show is really cloud native 2.0. What happens after Kubernetes? Service mesh is that what happens after Kubernetes. And, you know, for us, Istio now being part of the CNCF huge standardized people are excited about it. And then we think we are the best at doing Istio from a service mesh perspective. So it's kind of, you know, perfect, perfect equation. I'll turn it on like, listen to your great cloudcast podcast plug there for you. You always say, what is it and what isn't it? What is your product and what isn't it? Yeah. So our product is so, you know, from a purely product perspective, it's service mesh and API gateway. We integrate them in a way that nobody else does. We make it easier to deploy, easier to manage, easier to secure. I mean, those two things ultimately are, if it's an internal API or it's an external API, we secure it, we route it, we can observe it. So if anybody's, you know, you're building modern applications, you need this stuff in order to be able to go to, go to market, deploy at scale, all those sort of things. Talk about some of your customer conversations. What are the big barriers that they've had or the challenges the solo IO comes in and just wipes off the table? Yeah, so I think that a lot of them, as Brian described very rarely, they had a success with Kubernetes, right? Maybe a few clusters, but then they basically started to on-ramp more application on those clusters. They need more cluster, maybe they want multicloud. And they mainly wanted to enable the team, right? This is why we're all here, right? What we wanted to eventually is to take piece of the infrastructure and delegate it to our customers, which is basically the application team. So I think that that's where they started to see the problem, because, you know, it's one thing to take some open source project and deploy it very little bit, but the scale, right? It's all about the scale. How do you enable all those millions of developers basically working on your platform? How do you scale multicloud? What's going on if one of them is down? How do you fell over? So that's exactly the problem that they have. Which is critical for us. COVID is, as bad as COVID was as a global thing, it was an amazing enabler for us, because so many companies had to say like, you know, like if you're a retail company, your front door was closed, but you still wanted to do business. So you had to figure out, how do I do mobile? How do I be agile? If you were, you know, if you were a company that was dealing with like used cars, like your number of hits were through the roof because people were, you know, regular cars weren't available. So we have all these examples of companies who literally overnight, you know, COVID was their digital transformation enabler, and the scale that they had to deal with, the agility they had to deal with, and we sort of fit perfectly in that. They re-looked at, you know, what's our infrastructure look like? What's our security look like? We just happened to be right place at the right time. And they had skillset issues. And the remote work combined with modern, upgrade, gun to the head almost kind of mentality. And we're really an interesting company. Most of the interactions we do with customers is through Slack. Obviously it was remote. So we have this, like, we would probably be a great Slack case study in terms of how to do business because our customers engage with us with engineers all over the world. They look like one team, but we can get them up and running in a, you know, in a POC, in a demo, get them through their things really, really fast. It's almost like going to the public cloud, but at whatever, you know, whatever complexity they want. That's workload. So a lot of momentum for you guys, silver linings during COVID, which is awesome. We do hear a lot of those stories of positive things, the acceleration of digital transformation and how much as consumers, we've all benefited from that. Give one example, Brian, is the VP of product marketing of a customer that you really think in the last two years just is SoloIO's value proposition on a flatter? I'll give you one that I think everybody can understand. So most people, at least in the United States, you've heard of Chick-fil-A, you know, retailer, everybody likes the chicken. 2,600 stores in the US, they all shut down. And their business model, you know, it's not good food, but great personal customer experience. That customer experience went away literally overnight. So they, you know, went from barely anybody using the mobile application and hence APIs in the backend to half their business now goes through that to the point where, A, they shifted their business, they shifted their customer experience and they physically rebuilt 2,600 stores. They have two drive-throughs now that, you know, instead of one, because now they have an entire one dedicated to that mobile experience. So something like that happening overnight, you could never do the ROI for it, but it's changed who they are. And it's, you know. So, you know, things like that, that's an example I think everybody can kind of relate to. Stuff like that happened. Yeah. And I think that also what's special is, honestly, like you're probably using a product every day, you just don't know that, right? I mean, when you, you know, when you're swiping your credit card, or when you're ordering food, or when you're using your phone, honestly, like the amount of customer or even the space, it's like so, every industry. How many customers do you have? I think close to 200 right now. Yeah. How many employees, can you give me some stats? Funding, employees, what's the latest statistics? We took, we recently found like a year ago, $135 million for a billion dollar valuation, so we are unicorn. Nice. I think when he took it, we were around like 50-ish people. Right now, we're probably around 180, right? And we're growing, like we probably will be 200, we will quick. And I think that what really, really special, as I said, like the interaction that we're doing with our customers, we're basically extending the team. So for each customer, it's basically a slack channel. And then there is like a lot of people, we are totally global. We have people in, you know, in APAC, in Australia, New Zealand, in Singapore, we have in the MIA, right? So we're like, UK and, you know, Spain and Paris and other places. And of course, all over US. So your use case on how to run a startup, scale up. Yeah. And then a complete clean sheet of paper. We had to. And what happens? You got slack channels as your customer service, collaboration, slash productivity. What else did you guys do differently that you could point to that's, I would call a modern technique for entrepreneurial scale? So I think that the few things that we're doing different. So first of all, you know, in solar, there is, you know, honestly, like there is a few things that differentiated from in my opinion, most of the companies here. Number one is, look, you see this? This is a lot, a lot of new technology. And one of the things that the customer is, nervous the most is choosing the wrong one. Because we saw what happened, right? I don't know. The orchestration war, right? Choosing and also integrating multiple things at the same time. Exactly. And this is, I think we're soloist expeditions coming to play. So I mean, we have one team that is dedicated like open source contribution and working with all the open source community. And I think we really good at picking the right product. And basically, we usually write, which is great. So if you're looking at Kubernetes, we went there for the beginning. If you're looking at something like Service Machestio, we were all in envoy proxy, right? Another process. So I think that by choosing these things and now Cilium is something that we also focusing on, I think that by using the right technology, so first of all, you know that, you know, it's very expensive to migrate from one to the other if you get it wrong. So I think that's one thing that solar is really good at. But then once we actually getting those quarter, we basically very good and go and leading those community. So we're basically bringing the customers to the community itself. So we are leading this by being in the TLC members, right? The technical oversight committee. And we are leading by actually contributing a lot. So if the customer needs something immediately, we will patch it for him and walk upstream. So that's kind of like the second thing. And the third one is innovation. And that's really important to us. So we pushing the boundaries. NBN, right? What we announced a month ago with Google. That was- The book that's out? Yes, the NBN. It's basically a modern STO, which is the future of STO. We worked on it with Google and the NDA and we were listed last month. This is exactly an example of us basically saying, we can do it better. We learned from our customers, which is huge. And now we know that we can do better. So this is like the third thing. And the last one is the partnership. I mean, honestly, we are the extension team of the customer. We are there on Slack if they need something. Honestly, like there was a reason why our URL rate is like 98.9 and our net extension is 135%. I mean, customer are very happy. You deploy it, you make it right. Exactly, exactly. I think the other thing we did, and again, this was during COVID. We didn't want to be a shelf work company. We didn't want to drop stuff off and you didn't know what to do with it. We trained nearly 10,000 people. We have something called Solo Academy, which is free online workshops. They run all the time. People can come and get hands-on training. So we're building an army of people that are those specialists that have that skill set. So we don't have to walk into shops and go like, well, okay, I hope six or months from now you guys can figure this stuff out. They're like, they've been doing that. And stuff, friends, he's their friends, he's their friends. Well, the other thing, and I got to figure out as a marketing person how it is, we have more than a few handfuls of people that like, they've got promoted, they got promoted, they got promoted. Like we keep seeing people who deploy our technologies who because of the stuff they're doing, they're doing it at scale, they're doing it like they keep getting promoted. They keep getting promoted, right? They're telling us. That's amazing. It's a powerful sort of side benefit. It's come out of this. Absolutely, that's a great thing to have for marketing. Last question before we ran out of time, you and I ate it, we're talking before we went live. Your sessions here are overflowing. What's your overall sentiment of KootCon 2022 and what feedback have you gotten from all of the customers bursting at the seams to come talk to you guys? Yeah, so I mean, I think first of all, there was the pre-event which we had and it was a lot of fun. We talked to a lot of customers, most of them is 500, a global successful company. So I think that people definitely, I will say that much, we definitely have the market fit, right? People are interested in this. Brian described very well what we see here, which is people try to figure out the cloud native 2.0. So that's number one. The second thing is that there is a consolidation which I like, right? I mean, STL becoming right now a CNCF project. I think it's a huge, huge thing for all the community. I mean, we're talking about all the big three cloud, we partner with them. I mean, I think this is a big sign of, we agree, which I think is extremely important in this community. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you so much. And where can customers go to get their hands on this? STOLO.IO? STOLO.IO, yeah, absolutely. Awesome, guys, this has been great. Congratulations on the momentum. Thank you. The rocket ship that you're riding. We know you've got to get to the airport. We're going to let you go, but we appreciate your insights and your time so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It's our pleasure. Thanks. For our guests and John Furrier, this is Lisa Martin live in Detroit. I'm going to think about that for a second at KU-Con 2022, Cloud NativeCon. We'll be right back with our final guest of the day and then a show wrap. So stick around.