 Welcome everyone to this CUBE Conversation featuring Momento. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and today I'm very excited to be joined by Daniela Miao, the CTO and co-founder of Momento. Daniela, it's great to have you. Thanks for joining me today. Hi, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. Super excited for our conversation today. Yeah, me too. It's our pleasure. Tell the audience a little bit about Momento products, services, mission, give us that context. Well, at Momento, we have built the very first truly serverless cache. We are here to help developer work much faster and not have to worry about the painful infrastructure management of traditional caching. Awesome. Then we're going to break that down during this conversation. One of the things that is hot, hot, hot right now is generative AI. Everyone's talking about it. I think even my mom was talking about it the other day. I'm not even kidding. What it's going to do for the world, pros, cons, but in your opinion, what's the broader theme here? Well, I think generative AI is exciting as new as that term is. What it represents has really been around for a long time, and it just represents innovation and the pace of innovation, and how it's faster than it's ever been before. Customers and end-users, folks like my mom and your mom, they're expecting things to happen faster and faster. They're expecting applications to be even more interactive and give them instant gratification, a moment that they have a need for information or for something. As a result, the platforms around us is expected to innovate faster than ever before, and with that theme coupled with a number of startups that's popping up in the space, just means that daily lives, our lives are going to be transformed, and this creates a virtuous circle of customers expecting more, and as a result, developers have to innovate faster and come up with even more productive ways to get their work done. Absolutely. The one thing I think nobody's going to be resetting is their expectations on how quickly we can conduct any transaction in our personal life and our business life. We just want things to work and we want them to know enough about us without being creepy to really deliver that personalized experience. Daniela, one of the things I noticed on the website, the gomomento.com website was believe in serverless. As I was joking with you before we went live, it reminds me a little bit of Ted Lasso, the believe sign which I love, but talk to me about why you believe in serverless and what was the catalyst to launch the company in 2021? Well, the initial idea really came from my co-founder, Kwaja, who's the CEO and my own experiences working in the world of databases for over a decade. Serverless does not mean you're not working with servers. Serverless just means that we, as the database and infrastructure experts, we take on the painful infrastructure management on behalf of our end users and our customers, and we abstract away the complexity so that they have more time and energy to focus on what really differentiates their product and it allows them to innovate faster than their competitors perhaps. So to us, serverless really is just a way to accelerate development, reduce cost, reduce complexity, and simplify our end users architecture. So the believe in serverless, I really love Ted Lasso as well. It's really about a state of mind, which is the same as in the show, is that we believe that we should be able to take on the painful and the really, a lot of the time, very time consuming, and there's different tuning and benchmarking that you have to do very, very low down at the database and caching level. And we believe that we can do all of that on behalf of our customers, so really they're just focused on their business, their product and their features, and something like incorporating generative AI into their product, which everybody is doing nowadays apparently. Yes they are. One of the things I heard you say in our very beginning, Daniela was true serverless. You talked about serverless, what's true serverless and how does Momento deliver that? So we at Momento actually follow a very strict litmus test for what true serverless means. There's a few things, like it's instant start, there's no waiting for servers to come up because of course in the world of true serverless there are no servers. But we handle that really behind the scenes, like I said, it scales to zero, when you're not using it you should not be paying for it. A lot of the painful aspects of traditional infrastructure management comes down to the fact that you often over provision for your highest traffic peak or this big event that's happening on your website and you sort of have to have enough servers to serve that big peak and then you're too afraid to take it away for the next time that that happens. So it has to be able to scale to zero when you're not using it or when the traffic on a particular application is not very high. There's other things like there are no maintenance windows. Yes, software and hardware has to be upgraded and maintained all the time but that should be completely invisible and not felt by the end user. So that's something that we also manage on behalf of our customers. Now of course this concept of simplicity, low cost and increased productivity is very, very attractive for a lot of businesses. So serverless has become a bit of a term that gets attached to a lot of marketing. So in cases where services are not naturally serverless they do get slapped on with that label of serverless as well and this is sort of not specific to any company, specific companies but it's broadly applicable to a lot of startups and even big cloud vendors are doing this as well. So that's why at Momento we put a lot of effort into evaluating and also sort of helping to promote the idea of true serverless with the limits test that we have. Got it, thanks for clarifying that. You mentioned scale I saw on the Momento website that the mission of the company is to remove the need to manage caching by providing a service that works at any scale. But talk about caching, why it's traditionally been so difficult and how does Momento ease those difficulties? Yeah, so there is something that I actually used to say all the time and I still say it is it's always too early or too late to add caching. So let me break that down a little bit. Caching is traditionally very attached to databases. So as sort of this concept of what a lot of people view as optimization, when you're a small startup or when you're starting out as a business you're never gonna focus on optimization. So that's why it's too early to add cash. What do I mean by too late? Well, because you never focus on it when you're little and when you're just starting out with a business when you quickly hit that point of growth where you just sort of exploding in popularity all of a sudden all these problems are happening all over your architecture. No one really has time to go and add a cash. And by the way, at that point your database is also scaled to something that is of a crazy size and it becomes very risky to change anything around it. So that's why it's too late to add caching at that point is oftentimes not worth the risk. And what ends up happening is people just deal with painful database scaling issues or they throw a ton of money at the problem which a lot of fast growth companies do decide to do. So that is why caching is too difficult. To time it right is very difficult and to configure it right. And you have to take time to make it secure and make it highly available. And time is a precious resource when you're growing out of them as a fast growth company. So the difficulty of managing your cluster is growth exponentially with the size. Every business wishes to hit that exponential growth. Once you do some of the largest companies when they get there what they end up doing is they hire and they grow in-house their own caching teams. So on momentum really we just we wanna be able to handle that for other companies instead of having every company go and have to build it from scratch. So it sounds like caching is a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to me a little bit about some of your customer conversations where they typically are too early too late and how you come in there and help them understand and really kind of find that goldilocks moment. Yeah, totally. So to us I think the ultimate goal is to make it so seamless and so frictionless that it's not like this big thing that you have to tackle even when you're small. It's always easier to integrate it more seamlessly when your architecture is at a simpler stage and then we scale with you, we grow with you. A lot of the time we find that folks shy away from caching it is a difficult problem. They shy away from caching because they see the barrier to entry is too large. So really we wanna reduce that barrier to entry to basically essentially zero. When it's so low effort then you're not really gonna think about how much effort you're gonna have to put in in order to integrate it into your stack. We work with companies of all sizes. So as I mentioned, we work with a lot of small startups that's just getting started and they just can't be bothered to manage caching infrastructure on their own. And they can get started with momentum with just a couple lines of code with a few clicks. It's really easy for those folks. We also work with large enterprises that have existed for decades and decades. And there are lots of case studies, IoT companies, media entertainment companies, gaming companies has been around for a while. We've helped them do an entire migration of sorts to move on to momentum. And there we're able to deploy our in-house caching experts, our engineers on site with them and really work hand in hand and provide a bunch of developer tools to really ease that transition. Some of it is really seamless and really just plug and play. Sometimes we joke about how it takes much, much longer to actually push through the paper contract than it does to actually do the coding and the technical exercise to move to momentum. And we've done that a few times now with a few enterprises as well. So can you talk just about some of the momentum caching use cases that you guys are helping customers to solve? Yeah, of course. So one of the most common use cases is caching for traditional databases. So caching for RDS or Aurora. So for instance, for one of our customer Saturn, they have this Postgres managed database on AWS. And the way traditionally to scale something like that is you go in and you change the server type to the next biggest server instance type. Oftentimes you're doubling the capacity even when you may only wanna grow it by 10 to 20%. So a lot of the additional capacity, you're just over provision and you're leaving it there or hopefully one day the customer workload grows to that size. So with something like caching on top of it, you are able to really utilize and offload a lot of the traffic to your cache thereby saving a lot of your money on the databases. And so something like Amazon RDS, Aurora, Amazon RDS, MySQL, Amazon RDS, Postgres, those are all popular databases that we provide caching on top of. Others use us with even services like DynamoDB, a very beloved developer product as well. But with any database, there are certain limitations and for caches, we're able to handle a lot more load than the traditional databases allow. So that's sort of one of the most common use cases that we serve. Got it. And thanks for mentioning that customer story. That was gonna be my next question. I know how important customers are to memento. It's on your website, you guys talk about, we work backwards from the customer. What are some of the business outcomes that customers are achieving? I imagine faster time to market, improved developer productivity, but give me some of those like really substantive business outcomes that companies can expect to achieve when they work with you. Yeah, I think the most, maybe boring in a sense, but most substantive is money, is cost. In this day and age, a lot of companies are focused on their infrastructure spend. I will bet you that for a lot of companies, databases or any kind of storage, data storage is one of the top three line items when you look at your cloud spend. So for one of our customers, Wise Labs, they make security cameras and they're an IOT company. We essentially went in with a very friendly intro. We went in where it's Amazonias. So we went in and we try to just look at their architecture overall. We try to look for areas where they can be optimized. And we work together on a lot of different optimizations over the years. They're one of our first partners and customers. We've been able to help them save hundreds of thousands of dollars, not just by sort of providing services as a part of Momento, but really by just collaborating on some of the architecture inefficiencies and looking for areas where we can be helpful in general. Like I said, we have in-house experts of infrastructure. So that's really ultimately where the bond between Momento and its customers gets solidified is by providing real impact to the business. And those savings have not stopped. We're still in the middle of collaborating and finding more opportunities. And you got to think about the total cost of ownership as well. Of course, there is the hard dollars that show up on your cloud bill. But apart from that, there's a lot of additional engineering cycles that we were able to save them so that they're able to deploy these engineers to newer projects and bigger features for their customers and their consumers. So big outcomes that the technology is delivering for customers. Talk about availability work and folks get their hands on it. I saw on the website, the AWS Marketplace, but give us an idea of where customers and prospects can go and test this out. You know, on our website, we recently launched a brand new console, the Momento console. I time myself now. I know I'm very familiar with our product, but even as a newcomer, I've seen a lot of other customers do this. In under a minute, you can get started with your own cache. It's instant. It becomes available instantly to you. And then you can start writing items and putting data inside and retrieving data all within under 60 seconds for myself. You know, I think I've said on Twitter that anybody taking more than 60 seconds, I'll buy them a coffee or send them a free Momento sticker. It sounds like it's all about speed. It also sounds like, and this is gonna be a silly pun, that there's a lot of momentum at Momento. So talk to me, wrap us up here with, what's some of the things next that your customers and your prospects can expect from Momento? Yeah, I think bigger, faster, cheaper cache. We're always looking for ways to innovate. We're big fans of Amazon. That's where we came from. And somebody said that customers will never want more expensive products. They always want cheaper and cheaper. But more exciting is, we also have Momental Topics that we're working on. And it's already launched and it's in sync preview right now. It's a messaging system pops up. So a lot of gaming customers are really excited because they're able to build chats and leaderboards and a lot of exciting real-time interactions, applications on top of Momental Topics. And of course, we are working on sort of transformative technologies as well in the general VAI field, looking at ways that we can stay relevant and help sort of catapult some of our fellow startups into success as well by backing their databases and their general VAI infrastructure. Awesome, lots of good stuff coming. Danielle and Mia, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE as part of this CUBE conversation. You were awesome. We're gonna be keeping our eyes on this space. Thank you so much, Lisa. It was such fun to talk about Momental and Serverless with you. Yeah, you got great, great energy. We wanna thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin. Keep it right here for more action on theCUBE as you know, your leader in hybrid tech event coverage.