 Welcome to In the Cloud. I'm your host, Stu Miniman, and happy to have a special pre-Amazon re-invent show. We're going to be talking about cloud computing, of course, on In the Cloud. I'm going to be digging in specifically to open source. Open source has been around for a number of decades. I remember when it first came out, it was the transition from free software to talking about open source. It has gone through a lot of changes over those decades. And the big question we're going to look at today is with cloud computing, what does it mean for open source? And really happy to welcome to the program my first external non-Red Hat guest, Jerry Chen. Jerry and I have both lived through a lot of these changes. Just in case you don't know Jerry, he's a partner at Greylock, very well-known venture capitalist firm. And Jerry's resume is one of those things that if you had drawn up a successful tech person, you start with your undergraduate at Stanford, you get your MBA at Harvard, and then he worked at VMware. The term virtual desktop infrastructure started with Jerry. Cloud Foundry, he open sourced it, then he goes on as part of the V-Mafia investing in all the companies. He's the guy that funded Docker. So I would not be sitting where I am today working in the cloud group at Red Hat if it wasn't for what Docker had done. And he's invested in a number of companies. I've had the pleasure of knowing Jerry for a long time and interviewed him many times back at Docker cons and Amazon re-invents and the like. So Jerry, thank you so much for joining me and great to see you. Stu, thank you for having me. I don't know who you're talking about with the intro, but it's a pleasure that I could be here and not that other guy. Yeah, yeah, well, no, that is awesome. So Jerry, we've got a lot to talk about. You wrote a bunch of articles. I've loved, you know, since you've been a VC, every once in a while, you put out these nice thoughty pieces with the framework and how you're thinking before you get into all the cloud and open source discussion. Maybe tell us a little bit, you know, your role today. What's, you know, where do you invest? What's your investment strategy at a very high level? Sure. Thanks, Stu. Like you said, partner at Greylock. I typically do early stage enterprise software. So we're talking series A, series C. I try to go in early back-rate founders in amazing markets. Sounds easy, but it's actually really hard because the markets are, and we're talking more about, they're debate, they're dynamic, they're changing a lot. It's finding these world-class founders that either have a point of view on what the world should look like or have some deep technology or an open source project, which I'm sure we'll talk about as well, and then try to go in early, be a partner to these founders. And so I do everything with cloud software, like Docker, Kato Networks, Rockset in the database space, Chronosphere in the observability space, then SaaS applications, Blend, mortgage software, Gladly, customer support software, Instabase, kind of document workflows. So all things up and down the stack I look for, and it's been fun. It's been at Greylock eight and a half years now, feels like just yesterday, you and I were at VMworld, you know? Yeah, yeah, no, it's amazing. So, and you said, it's easy to say, just find great people and bet on them and everything, but the technology, the open source piece, let's get into the big topic of open source. I think back, talking to Paul Moritz, many years ago, when Pivotal got moved out of EMC and VMware, and was like, why are you doing open source? And his response was, it's moving so fast, we have no choice but to be there. And I mean, Paul was a longtime Microsoft guy, and was not necessarily like, yay, open source. It was like, hey, that's the way it is today, and that's how we're going to do things. What's your general thinking about the role of open source in the IT world, and how's that been changing in the last decade or so? Yeah, I think Paul had this insight that he repeated to me at VMware when we were building Cloud Foundry was, open source more or less has natural network effects. All platforms have natural network effects. So to get Cloud Foundry as a piece of software that's relevant in the world, and you look at Docker, you look at database software or operating systems like Linux, getting more developers means more work on the project, which means the project crews more value to the customers and has that virtual cycle. So the insight there was open source and Cloud Foundry was needed in order to build natural network effects to kind of win that piece of open source platform of service. So I think fast forward 10 years later, gosh, it's been over 10 years since we did Cloud Foundry, and you look at what's happened now, both in open source as a way to build software and more or less open source as one, right? Open source is your browser, is in your iPhone or Android phone, it powers the cloud, it powers your database. So one, open source as a way to build software has one. The number two, the great transition the past couple of years is cloud and mobile. Cloud as a distribution mechanism to get software into your hands has one, right? And so these things aren't necessarily two separate trends, they're related and tied so closely together that both open source as the fundamental way software is built today and cloud as the main way software is distributed today are the trends of the past 15 years. Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch Jerry, back when I just get to sit back and watch all of these players here. I mean, you watch Microsoft, who was the definition of a proprietary company now is very active in open source. Over half of Azure is now running on Linux that they partnered with us at Red Hat. Google, of course, open sourced a number of technologies, and Amazon has had an interesting relationship when it comes to open source. There was a narrative a few years ago that like, well, yeah, open source from a development standpoint but cloud has killed the monetization of open source because just you'll make something open source and they will just deliver it as a service. It feels like that has changed in the last year or so but let's love to get your input and thoughts as to that relationship with the cloud players against the cloud players, their participation in both the creation of open source and the monetization aspect. Look, I think open source is a way software is built. It's not a business model, right? I think people kind of lump these things together so let's separate the two. So open source, the way software is built, shared, distributed, collaborate on, the business models are different ways to sell the product to the market. And there could be things like support for on-premise software. It could be things like distributed through the cloud as a SaaS service. So it's not just open source that had to change the business model. It's all software stew, right? It's, you know, look what happened, C-Ball in the CRM space to Salesforce.com, you know, that's cloud and arguably, you know, there's open source under these Salesforce.com but the way SaaS has changed application software like CRM has changed as well. VMware, a company I worked at for almost 10 years, that was proprietary software. The way VMware needs to monetize has changed the past 10 years now working with all the big cloud providers. So open source, again, companies like Red Hat or MySQL that Oracle bought or more recent companies like Kafka, Confluent, Hashley, Corp, Docker, et cetera. Now the way those companies monetized, either A, selling on-premise open core products or support, right? Depending upon your flavor of productization or number two, selling a cloud hosted version of your product. So all of a sudden, you know, the flywheel that I described in some of my blogs, thank you, like castles.com or graylock.com slash castles is there's a problem awareness, solution awareness trial. Before you had a problem in an open source solution and you tried it by downloading the software and you ran it on your own laptop or own data center. That can still happen a lot of open source, right? Discover the product and GitHub, whatever, or Slack or Discord community. Now you get from discovering the technology, learning about it on Discord or whatever, downloading it, but oftentimes of downloading or running it, you just click run it in the cloud and there's a free or cheap version hosting the cloud. So all of a sudden, Stu, the line between open source and cloud hosted proprietary SaaS blurs, like look at MongoDB as a great example. Start as open source, still as open source, but if you were downloading, you know, container of MongoDB, now Mongo Atlas, the cloud hosted version is, you know, entirely in the cloud is a cloud service. Still got a lot of open source, but you know, there's a lot of not open source stuff around MongoDB Atlas. Because that's how they actually run the software. And so the value quite frankly has changed most of the software bits itself, but a lot of value in cloud is how you operate it, how you run it, how you scale it, how you secure it, how you support it. And a lot of that stuff in the open source world or the cloud world today is not necessarily open source. A lot of that's proprietary closed or IP. Yeah, I want to, you made a really good point, something that we actually say at Red Hat too, you need to separate that, you know, what are you creating and then what's your business model? You know, our CEO, Paul Cormier says, we are an enterprise software company. We just happen to have an open source development model. Jerry, when it comes to, you know, understanding that nuance between how I develop and how I sell, you know, for years everybody would said, well, when is there going to be the next Red Hat of something? We were the first billion dollar, you know, open source company. We're still the only multi-billion dollar open source company. We had some, you know, amazing IPOs, peers of us in the industry, you know, GitLab and HashiCorp, both one IPO'd, both sent in around $200 million of revenue, which is great and a great growth rate. But, you know, we always felt, you know, and I talked to Red Hat for years and now being here, we are so focused on being open source. Hashi and GitLab are very similar in that aspect. But as you said, a lot of other companies, it's like, well, there's some open source and then I wrap around it. It's open core or I create different models. You know, some of our largest growth areas right now are the cloud services where we have, you know, an SRE team and we manage all that, but the software is all open source. So when you're working with the companies that you have, how do you help them work through that? You know, what is free? What do I pay for? You know, freemium is tough. You know, your friends at Docker, you know, had, you know, millions and millions of people using it, but that monetization path was a challenge. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you can argue that Red Hat was the first maybe only a billion in revenue. I think there'd be multiple companies out there that will be billion soon too. You can argue Amazon cloud is open source company and well over a billion in revenue, right? Look at, you know, what underpins, you know, S3, EC2, you know, Elasticsearch, etc. on Amazon is all open source. So, you know, I think that the, you mentioned Red Hat's own business model managing open source now for your customers. Those models are starting to blur, right? So what is an open source company? What's not an open source company? It's on some spectrum from, you know, pure support and down to the bits and to write me a check to like, hey, I'm going to write it for you in the cloud and you know, Amazon's all over here and increasingly more and more of the software companies and starts I work with are over here, right? And the key is like, you got to look more like a cloud service, not just because you're trying to compete in Amazon, right? I mean, talking more about how Amazon, Google, Azure and the rest are now monetizing open source like we talked before, but also it's how customers want to consume the software. You know, and it's all of a sudden, the API vacation of the cloud, right? Everything now isn't just a repo that you can download. Now everything wants to be in API. So all of a sudden he had this, you know, programmable cloud for lack of a better term where there are a bunch of open source bits running the cloud, you can call being API or whatever and just run your database, run security software, run analytics software. So look at companies I'm involved with, like Kronosphere and Rockset, both have tons of open source, Rockset's a real-time database, call it like real-time snowflake. Kronosphere is observability at scale, like Datadog, Prometheus, et cetera, both have a lot of open source in them, but their main form of monetization is running as a service, like a SaaS company. And increasingly, we're directing most startups in that direction, not always, right? Searching companies, regulatory industries, insurance, finance, et cetera. A lot of that still has to be on-premise, in my data center, et cetera. More or less, they're like government clouds, there's VPCs, and so that model again is blending, but more or less, we're guiding our companies to look more like a cloud company than it is, call it Red Hat circa 2004, if that makes any sense. Yeah, no, no, it absolutely does make sense. You know, Red Hat, we've been talking about open hybrid cloud for about 11 years now, but you're right. Where do Linux start? Linux started in the data center. Jerry, I said, Red Hat might be the company that is most associated with Linux, but you would not have Google if it wasn't for Linux. Sure. Amazon, if it wasn't for Linux. Where I might parse with you a little bit as to your characteristics from an Amazon standpoint is, Amazon is probably one of the best at monetizing open source. How many billions of dollars do they do a year that is open source related? They contribute. We partner with them. We love to see them embracing open source more. I sure wouldn't call them an open source company nor would I if I talk to, you know, the new CEO, Adam, I don't think he would characterize them as an open source company, but that is as it may. Talk about how you partner with the cloud providers. The your Castles article really have some good discussion of this point because, you know, going into re-invent, it's what's Amazon going to announce? What are they going to, you know, blow up a certain category or will there be some key partners that are now less relevant? So how do you make sure where do you where do you attack? Where do you partner? Where do you, you know, stay away from the giant Castles of the big three? As you have an article. Yeah, a city that adds on keynote every year, there are VCs and fanners waiting for to see what they're what what shoe is going to drop this year, you know. And I'll be honest, I'd say Amazon getting to a category today is good and bad, right? It's competition. It's companies that they own they own the top of funnel, right? They own the developer credit cards. But in many ways, Amazon in a category is validation. This category is legitimate, right? Because Amazon, as you know, Google, Azure included are so customer focused, so customer oriented. So the fact that, you know, AWS or Azure or Google saying, hey, analytics matters or real time databases matter like Snowflake is kind of validation that, yeah, customers out there. So I think there's a couple of ways you work and compete. So it's always this, you know, complicated dance, if you will. In many ways, you have to kind of leverage the strength of the cloud. You're probably built on the clouds, right? So as all the startup, you're probably using, you know, S3 EC2 or whatever services at Google, Azure equivalent. You're trying to get into their marketplace as distribution, right? Because again, the cloud folks have top of funnel and we can talk about how open source lets you have top, top of funnel. Because if you own an open source project, you own a community, then they start with you, not with Amazon. So I think open source as a community strategy, the community does have to be open source. Community could be closed source, whatever, but if you own the community, that's even better top of funnel to monetization. So one, you got to try leverage Amazon's strength there. And number two, you know, you compete head on in different ways, right? I'm like, I'm not afraid to fund companies competing head on against companies or services Amazon, Azure, Google. Look at snowflake versus redshift, right? Look at conflict versus kinesis. There's examples of companies out there that are building services that are complete competition to Amazon and doing well. We talk about Mongo Atlas versus DocumentDB, right? So there's plenty of space out there to either A, innovate around intellectual property, deep IP. B, owning a community and audience, the developer, it doesn't need developer, it could be a practitioner, right? A data science persona, right? I'm involved in a company called TrueEra, the only data science persona. Maybe you can monetize them. Or C, trying to do some jiu-jitsu where basically you say, hey, I'm going to basically own the distribution from Amazon and leverage their technology to get to my customers. And it's an awkward dance and it's fun because it changes every year and change every quarter. And so the ways you compete with Amazon today, leveraging them, competing with them, avoiding them, that's going to change year to year. And so I think the pace of innovation, the pace of startups, as you just do from your time in your seat, just watching founders, just being founders and speaking CEOs come by, the pace of innovation has accelerated, the dancing is going faster, the pivoting is faster. And I'm excited because I still think there's plenty of white space to compete against the clouds. Yeah, it is exciting times. It feels a little different than some of the other waves that we saw, Jerry. There were certain times where are you going to get escape velocity and go public? Are you going to go get acquired? You look at somebody like Amazon, they are very judicious as to where they make acquisitions. It's not like you look at it and say, oh, hey, we built something great that is incremental, what Amazon is doing. It would feel like there's more of a chance that Amazon will find some way at chipping away your value proposition rather than buying you. At the same time, valuations, I'd love your comment on these. I don't know, I look at some of these valuations and I'm just like, like, hey, just to take it out of our space so we don't get in trouble. You know, look at the EVs that are going on right now. Tesla stock, a complete rocket ship, Rivian came out and in its first week of trading is worth $160 billion. And I think there's 16 of them actually on the roads right now. So and it's an amazing cool truck and even a partner of Amazon, I got to see one in person at an Amazon show and it is really cool. But I can't wrap my head around it. Maybe it was my econ professor when I did my MBA, taught me certain practices that aren't in place anymore. So, you know, what is the path for the startups that going public versus getting acquired, some of that dance that goes on, as you said, that's a little bit different in this cloud era than it was in the past. Yeah, look, valuations in both private and public are higher than they have been for. Multiples are higher than have been for. They haven't like, I can't really comment intelligently on the public market like you do. If I could talk about the stock market and the multiples, I would have a different job, you know, I'll be behind a Bloomberg terminal trading stocks. I say the following on the bull market why the valuations are high. It's because the investors in Wall Street, you can argue, are becoming realized how valuable the cloud is in sassets, right? And so remember when the first sass comes in public, workday, sales for service now, et cetera. The street didn't really understand the power of recurring revenue, the vantage of sass hat. And all of a sudden, I think a sass companies and cloud companies now are going public increasingly, both private and public, we see that these markets are a bigger, bigger than we've ever imagined. Two, the model of sass and cloud is stronger and more resilient for a bunch of reasons, right? You're collecting for better data. You have more intimacy with the customer. And so the valuation, the multiples are going up because we realized that these cloud companies and sass companies can keep growing and growing. The past two years during COVID has showed that, like what's been the most antifragile part of the economy the past two years? It's been tech, right? All of a sudden, we're working behind a camera on Zoom or Teams all day. We're ordering food via Instacart or Uber Eats or DoorDash, right? All that stuff is based on the cloud. And all of a sudden, you know, when you're buying products through e-commerce and Shopify or Amazon Retail's business, you realize, holy cow, one, the technology powering these business models is incredible. And two, these markets are bigger and bigger. So the bold case to you would say is investors, myself included, Wall Street investors as well and the public markets are realizing that these markets are bigger. These business models are better and more resilient and more sticky when they're subscription based and therefore going higher in price. That said, to your other question, going public versus MA, etc., you know, some of the old line companies do not have the same hundred times multiple that some of these startups do. And so can they do M&A at these prices? I don't know. Or is going to be all IPOs at these prices? I don't know. You know, it's not for me to decide and figure that out. My job as a Series C, Series A investor is trying to get at that inception moment, the idea moment, the ideation moment of these companies and get them on the right track towards an IPO and hopefully, you know, the street recognize the value. But like all things, it does take time to come to BC, you know, connect the story of the company to the Wall Street perception of the story. And who knows? I'm bullish, clearly. You know, I'm still hold on to my stocks, right? Be it Roblox in the metaverse or gaming or Coinbase and crypto. You know, I'm still bullish on these companies. You know, I'm been a long-term holder of Amazon stock myself, right? From years and years ago, VMware as well from years and years ago. So I'm so excited. And that's also, this is not stock advice video. So please do not take anything. Yeah, no, absolutely. Sorry. I hear you there. What one of our audience members did post in there stonks. So, you know, requisite to, you know, you know, our Wall Street bets blog or vlog of B like at the five o'clock hour. We'll move to that. Awesome. Yeah. We'll have, you know, the bar at the Venetian of the plot. So we'll have some discussions as to where we should put our bets down. And hopefully it's better than the blue light wheel. You mentioned in some of the articles you wrote about, some of the technology areas that are really getting in a lot of tension. So the ones I'll call out, you're welcome to go where you are. You know, artificial intelligence and machine learning, definitely something, you know, I've seen, we've seen at Red Hat as big growth tends to be very vertical focus, you know, as opposed to, you know, back in the big data world, it was, you know, I mean, you were a board member for for Cloudera. It was, seemed very broad as to where it was going. AI and ML, like every industry and sub industry has their own solutions. So there's just so much proliferation there. And then the area with, I believe you said, unlimited opportunity is security because we know at the end of the day, there's always room for more schools and more areas to help us because there was no shortage of attacks out there when it comes to security. So I'll leave those as the two, starting or any place else that you think kind of the, the hot technology areas, especially, you know, if it's open source and cloud related. That's only a few trillion of market cap out there to talk about, Stu. Easy question. You know, security for sure. We can start and just comment quickly because it's so broad in the surface area. It increases, right? So there's always going to be more bad guys trying to get at information, be it, you know, sovereign hackers or, you know, commercial hackers. And so there's always going to be a need for more tools, right? Is it, when you talk to CSOs and CIOs, there's an infinite budget appetite for security for obvious reasons and throwing compliance, throwing everything else there, it makes sense. But that's kind of been an evergreen market for, for, you know, two decades. I would say AI, to your points, Stu, is super interesting because, you know, there was a horizontal category of big data, be it cloud era, or, you know, you can argue, Redshift, Snowflake, Rockset are all horizontal technologies in terms of data, big data, real-time database, et cetera. Horizontal categories like Chronosphere and Analytics and observability, but then machine learning gets more and more vertical, like you said, on purpose because the data and the models you build have to have some domain to train on. And so one way to compete against the big cloud guys who are going to be very good at horizontal is go vertical. So you mentioned like Rivian, right, in terms of EVs. You can argue self-driving car companies, be it Waymo or Aurora or whatever, that's the ultimate vertical in terms like the knowledge they have around roads and autonomous driving is hard to replicate in a horizontal fashion. So I think companies in healthcare are involved in one called notable health that's focused on healthcare machine learning. So I think machine learning breaks down through two categories. One, generic tools like a data robot to help you out or a company like TrueAra in AI quality control that help you out or verticals like healthcare, financial services, consumer personalization where you have specific models trained around a problem set. And I think right now both markets are great. I think you're going to see AI baking to areas in the company. Security companies will all have ML, right? SaaS comes all ML. Observability companies will all have ML. So pretty soon I think it becomes ingredient in all these technologies. So we're super bullish on that. I don't know what other areas of technology we look at. We look at AI. We look at security. We look like next gen SaaS companies, right? All aspects of CRM, HR, productivity like next generation of the notions, the air tables, the world. Thigmas company that Greylock's been lucky to be involved with, right? Those guys are doing great. So we're super excited about some of these next gen productivity tools as well. Me personally, I love cloud. I love data. I love big SaaS companies. Yeah. And as you said, Jerry, you know, we're talking about trillions of dollars of opportunity there. So that's pretty awesome. I saw there was an analyst recently that said that, you know, we always look at what percentage of applications live in the cloud. We're sitting somewhere 20, 25%. The prediction was by the time we hit the middle of this decade, we could hit 50% of it being in the public cloud. So one of our audience members, Greg Nierman, said, hey, there's an interesting article that, you know, somebody you and I both know Martin Casado wrote an article looking at, you know, what is the opportunity cost of doing it in the public cloud versus doing it in your own data center. So you touched on some of the reasons why people keep it in their data center, but, you know, I have plenty of thoughts on repatriation and some of those financial arguments, but it would love, you know, your take on that. You know, Martin's great. And the work you did there, I think is super insightful, but it's not really a paradox per se. He admits, I think in a blog or a Twitter that growth is rewarded above all else. So the reason why a lot of startups go cloud first, even though it could be expensive is a dollar of growth is rewarded better than a dollar of margin right now by street. And I think the argument is at some point in time and scale, you can actually reduce your costs if you repatriate it to your own data center, and if you had better margins, Wall Street also reward that as well. Right. So I think it's it's a question of in your life cycle as a company, you know, when does it make sense for you to at some size or scale repatriate your workloads under the data center and is that possible? So I argue that for some companies at some scale that totally makes sense to right. You're not growing as fast and you're trying to, you know, so a dollar growth, you know, like you are your growth stock or your income stock, right. There's nothing in between. And so I think earlier in your life stock you're focused on growth at some point in time on a focus on margins and maybe repatriation or cutting costs or automating workers away is a way to do that. You know, there's some companies I don't think it's possible increasingly if you're building your cloud company first on Amazon, Google or Azure and you're using things like Lambda or services built there, it's going to be very, very hard to repatriate. And I know Amazon and Google and Azure are all having versions of their technology stacks on premise for you to do that for your data center. But, you know, cloud isn't just where it's also how, you know, it's not just I'm located in, you know, EC2 East or EC2 West or, you know, Google Zone in Northern Europe. It's also I have the advantage to your point of SREs and folks at Google running supporting the back end of the stack. And so I think for some category companies totally make sense to repatriate for a bunch of companies never make sense to repatriate. You know, it's just you're not the scale. You're relying too much at cloud services to build your thing and you rather spend your dollars and employees launching the next product versus optimizing the cost of the second one. And all these companies have this life cycle and, you know, once you hit some asset topic ceiling of your first life cycle, if you're running out of growth, maybe, but, you know, dollars or donuts, I think most CEOs rather find the next curve to ride, you know, hyper growth curve to ride then try to optimize cost there. Yeah, I agree, Jerry. One of the reasons I've been so bullish for many years on cloud is you get to tap into that innovation and that ecosystem that is built around it. And to your point, it's less about the where, but, you know, what could you be doing instead? So we do see, you know, all the big players extending their reach so that the public cloud isn't just, you know, US East and West and the like, but it's now coming closer and closer. We're seeing them extend their reach. You know, yes, their hybrid solutions getting into the data center have been a little bit of a long growth to actually mature. And as edge comes into the play more and more, can I access the same services? Can I live in those environments? So it's an area to watch. It's definitely interesting times in that space. Boy, Jerry, we've covered a lot of ground. I wonder, and just step back for a second. You know, you've now been a VC for eight years. You said you spent about a decade at VMware. You've worked for some consulting companies in the past. When you look at, you know, new people coming to the market, you know, what advice do you give them? You know, I love being back at a big company. You know, we hire interns and many times we convert those interns into full time people. And I love spending time with them because they're just out of school and they've used cool new technologies. And often they don't have the baggage that you and I have for being around for decades because, like, I need to be able to unlearn much of what I've learned so that I don't get stuck in my ways. So, you know, what's exciting you about the next generation? What advice do you give people as to like, hey, here's some areas where, you know, you need to gain experiences and these sorts of things to work at a startup or be, you know, really valuable in your later in your career. You know, I love working in tech. You and I both have spent our careers here because I think working technology is living in optimism. You know, and I think you have to be an optimist to be working technology and to invest in startups because most of these companies won't work. And, you know, my job is saying no more than saying yes. I love to say yes to every company, but fundamentally, when the moment I stop being optimist about things working, let's do, and taking on Amazon or Red Hat as a startup, then I got to find something else. And so, number one, I think we're lucky and I'm very lucky and grateful to work in the job I have. Number two, for young folks coming into new jobs or technology, I always say the following is, find the smartest people and follow them. You know, I joined VMware because it was a small company, but it had brilliant people, right? The smartest engineer or smartest product people, smartest sales people, smartest marketers, not just like technologists, but the smartest freaking people that I ever worked with and to follow them. Number one, just follow all the smart people. That led me to Greylock. And number two is, don't be afraid to take risks in your career, you know? And it's every day you have an opportunity to, no, not just do dumb risks, but like, if you want to make your way in a Red Hat or Amazon or Google or a startup is you got to take some risks because there's no risks, there's no reward, right? Both in your career as a founder, as executive, you know, and to be intelligent about the risks you take and have some framework or decision criteria. But, you know, if you want to get ahead, take risks, right? Because if you get noticed, you'd be successful. And I was lucky enough at VMware early in my career Stu to take a bunch of risks, be it build VDI, build Cloud Foundry and every investment I make now Greylock is a risk. And some work, some don't work. But, you know, follow the smart people and don't be afraid to take some risks. It's great advice. I wonder, Jerry, one of the challenges with taking risks is many big companies if you fail, that could be detrimental to your career. You know, you work with startups, you know, in the valley all the time, it's, you know, do I have to do the pivot? So, what's the role of failure in that whole discussion? Well, two things. I'll make the plugs to do a startup because there's a risk taking is tolerated. You know, I think for big companies, it's, I understand the whole risk go of your career failure because, and I think start bigger companies and smaller companies need to create a culture for risk taking, you know, you know, we talked a lot about Amazon, the whole any, you know, not NGS, the Jeff business is always day one philosophy, right? So, one, companies being small should always reward risk taking and that's a whole separate conversation you know, I can have around leadership and culture. Number two, quite frankly, I wouldn't worry too much about that. And it's easy to say for my seat, but if you're smart and you're talented, you're not going to be unable to find a jobs too, right? I mean, the number of open recs or portfolio is along as my arm times a thousand, right? So if you're a smart, talented person, you're going to find an opportunity out there. If you're around smart people and they see you're talented, they will give you more and more opportunity even if you do fail. I failed a lot of VMware. There's a bunch of products that never worked. VMware Ace, early product, my first product, great product, really didn't work out. You know, I lived beyond that because dying green, a mentor of mine, figured out like, let Jerry take more risks. You know, let's create VDI. Let's take a risk there. So one, I get the risk taking. I get the theory of career. If you're talented and smart, there's plenty of jobs, opportunity for you out there. If you're not talented, not smart, not capable, whole separate question, then that question is, how do I get talent? How do I learn? How to build my skills? So I'm a level of confidence that I can take risks. And we talk about that separately too in career building. But if you're working technology and we're in this incredible boom of startups, big companies, market cap, you know, et cetera, I wouldn't be too afraid. You know, so don't take a risk tomorrow and blame Jerry Chen or Stu. They blame Stu, not blame Jerry. But you know, if you're taking smart risks, if you're doing decisions, if you have some rationale around it and how and why, that theme people will get it. All right. So Jerry, final thing, right after Thanksgiving here in the U.S., Amazon reinvent, I heard it has sold out, which means there will be 20,000 in person, which is about what it was in 2015, which is hard to believe how many years ago that was. I remember going to the early Amazon re-invents and talking to you there. I'm looking forward to being there in person. So hopefully people come find me. I'll be by the Red Hat booth a bunch and, you know, open for some meetings. Jerry, look, give you, give a quick plug. Which of your portfolio companies are going to be there and what are you looking for? I'll be there. So I just got my tickets. So two things, one plug for, I guess, my company's rock set, real-time database, kind of real-time snowflake will be there. You know, a couple of the Greylock companies will be there as well. You should go to, you know, greylock.com slash castles to read more about my thoughts. Find me on Twitter at Jerry Chen. You know, my DMs are open. So if you have great startup ideas or have friends or great founders, feel free to reach out to me. And then my emails on the website at greylock as well, Jerry.Chen at greylock.com. So please look me up. Follow me for more of my random musing thoughts about cloud or tech or bourbon, if you will. And then still, I will see you at Amazon Reven in a couple of weeks. Awesome. Well, Jerry, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. And yeah, definitely looking forward to seeing you at the show. All right. And thank you for joining me. We will have one more episode here in 2021. Hard to believe. We're almost to 2022. So join me. We're going to take a break for reinvent. So it'll be four weeks from today. Actually going to have Brian Gracely, a good friend of mine. Also here at Red Hat, the strategy, if you know him from the Cloudcast. So hope you will join me then. Let me know what guests you'd like to see in 2022. And thank you for joining me in the clouds.