 Live from Cube headquarters in Palo Alto, California. It's the Silicon Valley Friday Show with John Furrier. Over and you're listening to the Silicon Valley Friday Show. I'm John Furrier, November 11th here in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto. And joining today is my guest Jeff Frick and Tom Joyce, former executive at EMC and Dell EMC now out looking and talking to everyone in Silicon Valley. And this is a show titled today is massive disruption. Obviously the world has disrupted the election on Tuesday. Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States. I actually take a screenshot and say, like, I just couldn't believe I'm on the screen. Donald Trump, next US president, I'm just blown away. Now you told me 20 years ago Donald Trump was going to be the president. I told you two weeks ago. Tom, I mean, thanks for coming in. Appreciate you being our guest today. Talk about the impact on technology, industry, also the entrepreneurship. I've been talking about a lot of the VCs. Looking for your next opportunity. You're talking to everybody. But you were involved in the Dell EMC merger, which I got completely wrong. I told students, no way. In fact, EMC might buy Dell. Completely wrong on that. Yes, last week I was saying Hillary Clinton was going to run the table on Donald Trump. Donald Trump wins. So a lot of fear in that could happen, but I had no, I completely thought he was going to never get it. In fact, after that so-called tape in the van about women, I'm like this, absolutely he's dead in the water. I think Hillary kind of thought the same thing. So we're going to talk about the elections and really nothing else to talk about. There is some highlights. I just have a sit down on Monday night with Andy Jassy, the CEO and exclusive one-on-one in Seattle, and we were up there for the Cloud Native Conference, which is about developers. And certainly that's a big disruption story, but overshadowed by the election, Jeff. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah, I think it is amazing. It shows that nothing is safe. And I think what people are losing in kind of the 50-50 split of the people is that Trump, he beat the Republican Party too, if you recall. They weren't behind him. Andy beat the Democratic Party. Andy beat the kind of the classic East Coast media. So it's really, I think, a statement on people are kind of pissed off with the status quo, regardless of your sides, because the Republicans weren't behind them either. This is not a Republican victory. It's really, I think, a referendum on the old ways, and people are ready for a real change. I mean, it's just amazing. I mean, I think looking at the Facebook feeds when Mike Linda was distraught, I mean, she was emotionally torn. As everyone else was, they're protesting, and no one even knows what they're protesting. But obviously, Trump did not resonate with women, honestly, that was clear. And my Facebook feed is lighting up with people outraged by this. And, but the issue is, is that how did this happen? I mean, you look at what happened. You know, I have posts on Facebook and me and a lot of engagement on. I mean, I wrote this morning, journalism needs a spanking big time, because they were part of it. I mean, they were clearly promoting Trump, I mean, Hillary. And I think that resonated with the opposition. I think Silicon Valley also was heavily on Hillary. Well, you know, I mean, I will tell you, flying back and forth to Texas in my last job every couple of weeks, you get different perspectives. And my whole family lives in Florida, and you know, they're all older people and they're retired and they're on fixed incomes and so forth. But even with that, talking to people that were for Trump, I had no clue. I couldn't conceive of Trump winning. Because of all of the input that we got. I mean, sometimes you're living in this echo chamber and you wonder if out here we got it wrong. But the reality is, I don't think people in Texas or Florida or a lot of these other places even, even if they intended to vote for Trump, thought it would happen. So it was a huge mess. Well, the other thing I think it came up, we were talking to Bev Crair at Grace Hopper. And I think it was a really insightful observation that she made. We're like tech, right? Amazon recommendation engine shows you things that it thinks you like based on other things that you've bought. In the media now, we're getting the same thing. Your recommended stories are probably based on the stories in which you've already clicked on. So you get this polarization on the edges to get self-reinforcing things. And Bev made an interesting statement. When the main media was the newspaper and we all read the same one, they had to be more centrist because everybody read the same article. Doesn't happen anymore. Now you can just get your own echo chamber regardless of the point of view in which you hold and the algorithms is a lot of knock on Facebook. You know, those things are supporting that, right? Well, they had fake news. Facebook was actually getting dinged for fake news. Zuckerberg was actually defending it last night on his live feed. But essentially, no, they're getting called out for fake news. CNN just actually got called out for staging a fake interview. The media failed. I think Silicon Valley failed big time. Data science failed. I mean, where the hell's Nate Silver? He completely missed it. So much for big data, right? Big data has failed. So, you know, this is an absolute change in my mind. If you get all that, the politics aside and what Trump's all about, to me this is actually a signal of where the path's going. We talked about it last week. WikiLeaks exposing data, data-driven world. And I think the journalism piece really highlights the fact that it's a failed model. But the data thing is interesting though, because what doesn't come up enough in the big data discussion is how to lie with statistics. I mean, you can get any hypothesis supported with statistics. You have so much data now. You watch the sports, you know. The Durant and Curry are the highest scoring pair after an Olympic season within the first 10 games of the season who haven't played on a Sunday yet. I mean, the ridiculousness in which you can support any hypothesis based on the power today, it just reinforces this echo chamber. Like you said, Tom, it's easy to support your own view, even with data. Well, there's a lot of group think. I mean, this is what you're talking about on Facebook. You get the bubble and you get the self-reinforcing. Oh, Hillary's going to win. In fact, at Wednesday in Seattle, we were up there watching the election results come in at an event with CloudNata, which is a developer conference. They had TVs up and it was very celebratory. Everyone's like, hey, we're going to celebrate Hillary's win. It went from like, wait a minute, to shock, anger, and then everyone went back to that room. It was an absolute crater. Everyone thought Hillary was going to win and you break that down, you say, you know, what happened? You know, my take on it obviously is the resonant with the middle of America. But if you look at California, which clearly won with Hillary, and if you look at the East Coast, you can see the differences, right? There's pretty much red everywhere, but California, obviously all blue, is actually stepping out and people were saying, hey, we should separate from the union and break up into six different states, which I find ridiculous, but. It's ridiculous, yeah. Well, what's the irony, right? One of the ironies is one of the big signature moments of the debates was when Hillary asked Donald, will you accept failure graciously? Will you accept loss graciously? And when he did respond with the right answer, there was a huge hubbub. Well, now the tables have been flipped and people are not accepting defeat graciously. A lot of people are. I'm actually surprised at the number of people who are not happy about the results that are still publishing posts saying, you know, we're in this together, we're still one country. It's part of what makes us great. We have to move forward. So that's encouraging. But a lot of people are not acting in the same behavior they would have expected the other side to do. I mean, let's talk about the impact guys on this, because I mean, one of the things that I look at right now is post-election, really can't do anything. It was how our governance state works, our country works, was not a rigged election. As people were saying, it was actually vote. Trump has a mandate to govern. So I personally respect that, but, you know, I'm not, I'm not happy with the results personally and that people aren't. But what does it really mean? And I look at people in two perspectives. Are you causing a civil war kind of behavior? Or are you admitting it and then getting involved? Because there's two types of people out there that I'm seeing on the social networks. People who are just enraged, you know, they will go against the system, but they'll do it in a violent way. Versus others are saying, hey, I'm pissed off, let's dig in and try to get more involved and make a change. So I think the impact to this is gonna be one on a societal basis. The political science and social science couldn't have been more exciting in terms of helping change the direction. But also the technology industry is gonna be impacted. So, you know, Silicon Valley certainly went all in on Hillary and I'm wondering what the impact, the backlash is with Trump. Outside of Peter Thiel, no one was supporting Trump, at least publicly. What are your thoughts on impact of the industry? Well, you know, I think at our age, right? It's different than these kids. Folks that are early stage, you know, young engineers, young people in the startup community, they haven't had a loss like this. You know, over 35 years of voting, we've all lost. Everybody's experienced what happens. You get four years or eight years of a person you don't like in the White House. And like, life goes on. You go back to work. You may not like how things turn out, but you go to work the next day and you know, I didn't have a job this time, but I still went to work. I went out and started to meet with people and you know, underneath this, it's really a separate phenomenon that the technology disruption is happening, is unstoppable, will continue to happen, almost regardless. Now the economics may change. You know, what happens with the debt markets is fundamental. What happens to the equity markets is fundamental. But the technology disruption is going to continue. And the question is, how do you play it? You know, how do you play that in terms of, you know, where you get your investment from? Where the growth is? Where the opportunities are? Well, it's interesting, Jeff. Technology disruption, actually. Some, I'm arguing, cause Trump to win. And let me explain. Twitter, technology company in Silicon Valley. He used Twitter aggressively to differentiate himself. Facebook, you mentioned some of the group thing, but that still was part of the social distribution. And some are saying that technology like Uber are putting people out of work in areas that don't get technology. So there's a backdrop and some narrative around, not that I agree with 100%, but there's a narrative around, hey, technology is eliminating jobs. I mean, Dave Vellante always talks about, will jobs be displaced? Where do they go? So I think you got a tech scene here. And I think Silicon Valley is going to come out stronger from this, in my opinion, because of the epic fail of all times here in Silicon Valley with this election. I think people are gonna rally and step up because Silicon Valley, this was the first time you start to see Silicon Valley be more political. The policies are being impacted. Well, I mean, look, I've spent a number of years now running businesses that have gone through a process of globalizing. Right or wrong, they've gone through a process of globalizing. A lot of US based jobs and a lot of them are in China, a lot of them are in India. I mean, that's just the way it's been. And we've all adjusted to that reality. We figured out how do you develop products where you've got some people in California, you got people in India, might have people in China. And the economics are different, the behavior is different, but now that's how a lot of us do it. And we've also seen a lot of folks come here with the visa structure and so forth. The biggest question in my mind, not really short term, but over the next four years is how does that change? How does it change the fundamentals operationally and how does it change the behavior between different groups of people that are trying to work together in different parts of the world? And I think that's a big question mark. The second big one is what happens with debt, access to debt? Because in the mature technology industries like Dell with Silver Lake, and now with the business that we, I was running that we just sold to private equity, it was driven by availability of cheap debt to a lot of companies in the private equity industry. Does that change? Does it get stronger? So I think the dust needs to settle, but those in my mind are two of the biggest factors in technology that people aren't really focused on yet. Well, and the other thing is who's he going to put in positions of power, right? Who's going to be a scavenger? He's making a lot of assignments. They're talking about John Corzine, I think from Goldman potentially in the treasury. So I think from a Wall Street and a business point of view, he's clearly, you know, a friend of business, but I think the leadership thing, but to your point, John, social, it's the Arab Spring. The voice, the voice is not singular anymore. It comes from all over. So it could be lies, not lies, truths, but there's no single point. There's no Walter Cronkite that we all watched at six o'clock. And it makes me actually want to do more politics and I was talking to Rob Hover, our editor-in-chief, and like, you know, we have to get involved in the political conversation on SiliconANGLE.com. We're going to look at that. We have the tech truth, obviously, which we're funding the nonprofit. And this is important. I mean, I think the data is really critical. It's not the New York Times anymore. It's not about those papers, CNN, they're failed. They completely failed this election, in my opinion. This is about data because now we're connected in a network. So that is the key. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it was also about people, though, too. I mean, I was in Dubai what six weeks ago and the people I talked to, they didn't want to talk about the business. They wanted to talk about, are you idiots really going to elect this guy? And, you know, I've gotten LinkedIn messages and tweets of the last couple of days, like, what happened from people in UAE and places like that, you know, people that are really scared? And if I was still running the business I was running, I would be talking to my folks in India, I'd be talking to my folks in China, saying, look, you know, we're going to work together. Nothing is really changing in terms of our relationship. It's an unprecedented election. If you look at this, and that's why the protests I'm not too hardcore on because it was kind of an unconventional election. So the unconventional responses warranted, in my opinion. You got to give Trump, you know, a shot to look at what he can do. You think about Trump is, he went radical on the campaign because he had no other, he's underfunded, he was under, he had no chance of winning unless he took it to fighting style. And I think that was a strategy, he stuck with it. And he won. The second thing is Trump was a Democrat. So he's got some liberal, he's also a businessman. So the question is, will he go radical right wing or will he be a centrist and do the right thing by not overplaying his hand on the Supreme Court to undermine Roe v. Wade? Will he come in and be pro-business, obviously building America, but not kill the international thing around protectionism? So this is what I'm looking at. And again, this is all gonna thread back to Silicon Valley, back to Wall Street, back to business. And, you know, we're gonna come back and talk about the vibes on the street after this break. And then we're gonna get into our VC selection of the week, which is bullpen capital. And we're gonna try to get ahold of Paul Martino on the phone, who's one of the partners over there. Let's see if he picks up. This is the Silicon Valley Friday show. I'm John Furrier, and we'll be right back. I remember when I had such a fantastic batting practice, I walked by a couple of sports writers in that era. Paul of Famer, Reggie Jackson. It was like, you can rock at it out there. I kind of hope I didn't leave it out here. Reggie Jackson. When the game started, I got back in that moment. I got back in what was live, what was now. Goodbye. I went and did something with ESPN earlier this year. With Steph and Curry, they said, Reggie, we want you to come up and watch his practice, his pre-game. You know, it was very similar to your batting practice where people come out and watch, et cetera. And I watched the dribbling exhibition. I watched the going between the legs and the behind the back and the fancy passing, et cetera. And I watched the shots. And the guy asked me what I thought of the show. And I said, well, it's a cool show, but I'm going to see all that tonight. He does all that. He put it into the game. Yeah, I said, so it's not a show, but that's his game. Mr. October. I think our world now, with the instant gratification of sending out a message or tweeting to someone or whatever, certainly in the moment, is about what our youth is and who we are today as a country, as a university. Congratulations, Reggie Jackson. You are CUBE alumni. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. I've been an analyst with Wikibon and a co-host of the CUBE since 2010. It's been an exciting journey working with the CUBE. We get to go out to so many shows, help extract the signal from the noise, interact with such a wide variety of clientele, both practitioners, thought leaders, the big-name industry people. And we've helped some people raise their profiles in there, especially love working with those practitioners. We've seen them move their careers forward and move their businesses forward as they take advantage of technologies and practices that they've learned, talking with us, working with our research people, and working with their peers. This is Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching the CUBE. You're listening to the Silicon Valley Friday Show with John Furrier. Hey, you're listening to the Silicon Valley Friday Show. I'm John Furrier. My guests this week, Jeff Frick and Tom Joyce, executive in the industry, prospecting, looking for his next opportunity to run a company and or help digital transformation. Guys, we just talked about the election. I'll see, just didn't talk about it. But the other thing I didn't mention was I had a one-on-with Andy Jassy. How about disruption? I had a one-on-one with them. Jeff, he's a sports fan. He's got a sports bar in his basement. I know, I saw your picture. Had a two-hour conversation. Andy Jassy's the CEO of Amazon Web Services and he's awesome. He's just like, has, he's got the tiger by the tails. He's disrupting the world and actually has leveled the playing field because now it's a cloud game and he's just kicking ass and taking names and he was totally candid. Now, you know, I've been reading Mark Hurd, Andy Jassy, all these execs, Michael Dell. It's funny, they're all perfectly scripted but here's the thing. I like to see who's got the good script and who can actually connect the dots and put some little breadcrumbs out there. Andy Jassy really did a great job. He's stayed on in matches but also shared a little bit about the future and it's all about the cloud. He's like, data center, why would you need a data center? Now, you were just at Dell EMC so you know, they have data center business but he's talking more long-term. Thoughts on- Did you ask him if he and Jeff are gonna bring an NHL team to Seattle? I forgot to ask that question. I was too busy trying to get some forward-looking statements from him. Which you'll see an article come out. I'm gonna put a feature story on it but this is about the next wave of disruption. Again, back to the whole election. The world has changed. The fact that Amazon Web Services, a book company, e-commerce company now has one of the best infrastructure businesses, powering applications, powering social networks. This is what's going on. The election points to that. And this is all about the disruption. I mean, this is a massive disruption. Yeah, I agree. I think it's a wipeout. And I think it's a, having been inside of HP for five years inside of Dell for a year. What was interesting is, not to talk too much out of school. I'm a big fan of Microsoft. I actually prefer the Microsoft cloud stuff to the AWS stuff. And I see a big change in terms of how customers are actually adopting that. But in the business that I was running, I didn't spend any CapEx last year because we were doing it all on Microsoft cloud. Well, that's amazing. So talk about that decision. Imagine this. I'm not gonna get in trouble with Michael Dell here but I'm inside a server company. I didn't buy any servers for a year. Why? Because I had a really distributed engineering organization with like 950 software engineers, right? And when we needed to do something new we just spun it up in the cloud, right? Now there are opportunities to play that for hardware companies. There's different ways they have to do it and there's a lot of customers who are gonna still buy hardware, but I didn't. And nothing held us back. And that was a big change for how I would have done it two years ago or even one year ago. But when I saw that I'm like, this thing is this thing's over. All right, so your focus is now on innovation. It's getting those guys productive. It's not on do we have enough storage? Do we have enough infrastructure capacity? Just looking at it. You're listening to Tom Joyce, former Dell EMC executive, former executive at HP and also EMC and obviously Jeff Frick. Guys this segment really is also is where we do the VC of the week. And this week our selection was between Sherpa Capital and Bullpen. I tweeted out last night but we're gonna go with Bullpen Capital. Paul Martino, the founder over there, Duncan Dave's also another partner. They've added more staff but these guys were contrarians. In fact, Paul Martino predicted the election and with Trump because he was, he grew up in Bucks County, which is the bellwether predicted every election. It kind of represents in Pennsylvania, all the elections. So he had a gut feeling but also he's a great entrepreneur. Paul Martino, founder of Bullpen Capital is what I call blue collar entrepreneur. He was started tri one of the first social networks. He sees things early. He's got a great gut instinct, invested in Zynga. He's invested in Fandle early. Saw that whole trend towards the democratization. Super smart guy, graduated from Princeton, computer science, but he's kind of a blue collar hustler and he recognizes hard work, lives on the east coast but kind of a contrarian. He started Bullpen Capital because of all the seed capital coming in. He created a nice bridge formation where he actually funds companies that get the hustle going but aren't VC ready? Meaning the VCs, it used to be like when VCs would look at a deal, oh, that's got hair on it. That's the term that they say, meaning it's got baggage or a bad capital structure or it might not have the growth trajectory. Paul's team actually looks at that in the spirit of betting and hustle and say, hey, I like that company. We're going to come in and formally bridge you. So he's played a big role on the entrepreneurial ecosystem but he's also got a good sense of that. So Bullpen Capital is doing some great work there. I think my critique of them is they don't do enough of it in there and they got to get out more action in Silicon Valley and more on the east coast. That's kind of my take on them. Thoughts on your guys and the formation of the VC world and how that impacts. Well, it's just interesting. There used to be a very short list of top VCs, right? It was Kleiner, it was Sequoia. There's a few more than it fell off. And we've seen, especially on the enterprise side, a lot of guys that are younger, they're hustling. It's not kind of the traditional group. And as we've talked about on other shows, John, they're out working. People aren't coming to them all the time. They're out at AWS, reinvent. They're out at these big shows. They're looking for the innovation. So I think it is a hustler's market. My only comment on Philly is we got to do a Cube gig at Philly. I've been waiting to do a Cube gig at Philly. I talked to Josh in first round capital. We got to do a Cube gig at Philly. Paul's had his success and failures, but he's made a lot of money recently. So I think he's actually got a box, and he's a big Philly's fan, so we should talk to him about that. But the blue collar thing is interesting, because if you look at Y Combinator, I once said when Y Combinator came out from Boston here, I said it's the community college of entrepreneurship. And I didn't mean as a negative, I meant it as the elite schools like the IVs and Stanford, you go there, and the VCs are very clubby. Traditionally, they've been clubby in here, and that they would, you have to get it through a recommendation. And then what you saw in the past 10 years with Web 2.0 and now with Cloud is that anybody can start a company. An immigrant coming to the United States, it could be a young entrepreneurship that's not on everyone's radar, that can become a rockstar literally overnight. And I think that's the key. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me when I haven't really dealt with the VC community for about a year and a half, two years. And in that period of time, everything changes like five times. But stepping back into it and having a lot of meetings with folks, what I also see though is a lot of the larger established VCs stepping down and trying to do more seed and not taking as many of the big bets, trying to get earlier into some of these things. And they're not always really well set up to compete with guys like this who are really capable of doing it, retail on the ground, spending time with people. I think the- The seed market is a tough market. You gotta have a good nose for the deal. It's a tough market. You gotta have a good nose for the deal. It's hard to put a billion dollars to work at seed transaction levels. It's just a transaction. But they are gonna compete with some of the folks that have been doing seed and angel investing to a greater and greater extent. Yeah, that's what I think. But you gotta get past the seed run. I think that's what bullpen's done. And the best winners now are coming in the seed and they're going, what I call cradle to grave. Like an Andreessen Horowitz plays this. They get early and they take it all the way through and they don't share. It used to be a sharing culture. So let's try to call Paul up on his cell phone and see if he picks up. I mean, Paul is like, I call him the Reed Hoffman of blue collar entrepreneurship because Reed Hoffman, he's the founder of one of the social networks. Paul was also one of the founders of one of the first social networks. And just get all the credit that the Reed Hoffman gets but let's see if we can get Paul on the phone here. Okay, come my little blue cube. Okay, let's see if he picks up. Hello. Hey, Paul Martino. John Furrier, you're on the Silicon Valley Friday show with Jeff Frick and my guest, Tom Joyce, former executive at EMC, HP Dell looking for work, talking to VCs. Hey, you got a second? Okay, what's going on? So we're just highlighting bullpen capital as the VC of the week, talking about how cool you are and how your firm's doing a great job. We had some critique on you, talk behind your back, but you can check that out later. I'm sorry, wow, I've probably picked up the phone. You know, that's why we're gonna make it up to you. So Paul, look, I just wanna just get you on because we've been talking about the election as well, all in the intros, that's pretty much the news. I did kind of weave in one of the big things that happened this week, but it's overshadowed by that, was my one-on-one with Andy Jassy up in Seattle this week for a two-hour exclusive interview, not videotape, but it was gonna come out in a post about this massive disruption we're seeing right now. I mean, the election points to it. I've been watching your Facebook feed. You called, you've been seeing the trends. You grew up in Bucks County, which calls all the elections. You had a good sense of this. And you know, as an investor, you've made some good bets too. What's your take on this? And where did you see the action coming from that gave you the indication that this was possible? Yeah, so more contrarian than anything. People say, are you a liberal or are you a conservative, that kind of stuff? But really, if I can describe till my ideology, it's contrarian. And so clearly, from a Silicon Valley perspective, the Trump election is as contrarian as it could have possibly been. But if you were looking at the data with kind of a dispassionate set of eyes, to see that this could have happened. So I actually wrote to my partners the day of the election. I said, look, I've been crunching the models. And John, I know you know this background, but I'm a high-performance computing and predictive modeling guy. So big data. I did my PhD work in that. This is the world I come from. So I sent the following note to my partners the day of the election. I said, look, I think the trading markets have this wrong. I think Trump's about a one-in-three shot. I think Hillary is in the lead. But he's about a one-in-three shot. And by the way, if he wins, he's gonna live with over 300 electoral votes because the Rust Belt is gonna vote in a correlated way. And that's basically the letter I said to my guys. And my guys then, of course, once the election happened, said, how come nobody else anywhere sent a note like this? And literally, I mean, you read the pundits, you read Huckington Post. Not a single person said that. And I don't think it was that I was so much smarter than the other people. I think I was able to check my biases at the door and just look at the data, which, oh, by the way, is the same kind of way we pick our companies at bullpen. Hey, Paul, Jeff Frick here. The question for you, you would think after Trump went from last place out of 17 people to win the Republican candidacy, that maybe people would have said, he's not such a long shot as it may appear on the surface. But that didn't seem to factor in at all. But the one guy who actually saw that, that was then Hillary for it. So, Nate Silver, he basically got the Trump primary totally wrong. He said, my bad. And then, even though he's a bit on the left, he started working more at the data. And the weekend before the election, he had Trump as almost the same number I did. He had Trump at about 35%. But he was pillory. The guy from the Huffington Post goes, Nate Silver, you're being irresponsible. He is at most a one to 2% chance to win. And every other model's got a 90% plus. What the hell is wrong with you? And he bent and he calmed to it, and then he changed his model to about 16, 18% the day of the election. Paul. But it's funny. You can almost see that he had it right and he didn't have the courage to stick with it. This is about getting the courage. Again, putting all the biases at the door, I love how you said that because, again, I was the same way because I live in Silicon Valley and I'm from the party of business. That's what I'm, I guess I'm kind of a contrarian too, but I'm a blue collar guy myself. And I like to check my biases at the door because I don't like to make a bet. I'm in the party of business. I want to make money. I want to grow and things. So, I got to get your take on this. I mean, this is about the media failure. We have a seven-year-old self-funded media business, SiliconANGLE Media, 35 employees and growing, kicking ass, taking names. Again, contrarian, true, but the media fail here is an epic fail, in my opinion. You point out some of the biases. I mean, I just saw this morning, Trump, I mean, CNN had a stage interview with protesters. I mean, the bias on the media here has been out of control and you looked at the data as if you were a reporter. Now, you're not. You're just, you're in the investment business. But this was a media fail. Your thoughts on that? I know you've been sharing some links. I couldn't agree with you more. And I know you and I have gone back and forth on various Facebook posts about this. And what's really funny now in the aftermath, you had about half the germ was to were wrong, right, God, what was I, you know, a wake up, I need to get out of my bubble. And you know, I must admit, I really appreciate that. The people who said, you know, us being all in for Hillary, being in our own bubble was really a problem. But you know, it scares me and then we'll get to why the bias happened. There's this other half of them that doubled down. I mean, to me, there's now a portion of the press that is completely hopeless. You know, the editor of the New Yorker writes this article at 2.40 in the morning after it happened, which is basically like, you know, all these awful people in the country made this happen. You know, everybody go to hell basically. You know, but other people, the guy from CBS yesterday, wrote an article basically saying, hey, you know, we had a systematic failure here. We better look at ourselves as to why this happened, how we let this happen. You know, maybe making fun of those people in the Midwest who had lost their jobs, were struggling with drug addiction and had no hope saying, check your white privilege at the door. Maybe that wasn't the best strategy for reaching out to them. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's awesome. And again, the impact though also is catastrophic. And we were talking last week on our show about the WikiLeaks and I said to Jeff, not one of those WikiLeaks has been debunked, meaning no one's come out and said they've been doctored. But it brought up a different issue, which is now getting back to data science and data. We're now living in a social network. You started one of the first social networks. Now, you know, I was saying earlier, giving you props that you're like the Reed Hoffman that nobody knows you're out there. You've been a pioneer and a contrarian and successful. But if you look at the data, right, if you look at this and say, where's the data? Okay, that is the key right now. And so the impact of WikiLeaks was, there wasn't a smoking gun, but the data was reinforcing what you were saying around people's perceptions. So this is going to not just be for politics, Paul. This is going to impact a lot of things. And I know you funded FanDuel, which was a really radical approach was kicking ass and the betting systems and all these kinds of social technologies. What does this mean for technology intersecting with social justice and social good and political science? Your thoughts on that? Right. So look, obviously getting hacked is not exactly a great outcome. And see, it should have otherwise been available to us. And I think that's what the lesson is going to be. The lesson is going to be if you know that you can get hacked or if you know that there's cameras or you know that there's a world in which information is way more readily available than you think it is, maybe being transparent about what you're up to is the only viable strategy forward going. I mean, we adopt this as our strategy right on our website. We put it on our website. Here's the three things you need if you're going to be a bullpen company. Here's how we pick our company. I can't tell you that a number of people said to me, well, Paul, isn't that your secret sauce? Isn't that the proprietary technology? I'm like, yeah, it is, but I'm going to tell you what it is. And if you think you're better at it than me, go right ahead and try and do it. You know, I just think that if it's got to be proprietary what you're doing in the long run, your advantage just does not exist. If you can't tell them what you're doing and do it because you're better than them, you got a really hard future in the new world. Paul, I want to come back on break. We're going to hold you on the line, but that's exactly what Andy Jackson and I were talking about. Open always wins. Open always wins. And scale matters. Scale matters and execution. And having the best product. That's Paul Martino on the phone. He's going to stay with us. We're going to take a short break right now to go to our sponsors, but we'll be right back with more after the short break with Paul Martino, Jeff Frick and Tom Joyce. Great conversation. Paul, stay on the line. We'll be right back. Since the dawn of big data. Awesome. The Cube has been there. Connected with executives, practitioners, entrepreneurs, thought leaders. But you're not a thought leader anymore. You're a futurist. That's the new trend. Futurist is the buzzword. No, I'm not. I'm very much living in the past. I don't like the future. And I don't think much of the present. And John Cleese. There's a lot of people out there who have no idea what they're doing, but they have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they're doing. And those are the ones with the confidence of stupidity who finish up in power. That's why the planet doesn't work. Knowledgeable, insightful and a true gentleman. And the guy at the counter recognized me and said, are you listening? Yes, I'm tweeting away. I'm tweeting. I'm tweeting away. He has got rude that way. F***ing keyboard. John Cleese joins the Cube alumni. Welcome, John. You got a phone call, you need to answer. Hold on, let me check. The Cube is a comfortable place. You come inside the Cube and we have a conversation. Almost as if it were a chance meeting. And we have a discussion about a particular topic. Our philosophy is everybody's expert. Everybody's passionate about something and has real deep knowledge about that something. Well, we want to focus in on that area and extract that knowledge and share it with our communities. Folks who have never heard of it before come in the Cube and say, well, this is really cool. What you guys are doing, it's unique. It adds value to the community and adds value by really sharing information. I can't tell you how many people stop me at conferences or on the streets, on our airport, say, hey, I love your show. People that I've never met before, they say to me, I know you. You don't know me. I watch the Cube. I queue up your videos. I listen to them while I'm on the treadmill. It helps me learn, expands my knowledge. Thank you. So it's really an honor to be part of that community. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching The Cube. You're listening to the Silicon Valley Friday Show with John Furrier. The use of the Silicon Valley Friday Show, I'm John Furrier. Joining me today is Jeff Frick and Tom Joyce and special call in VC of the week, Paul Martino, who picked up. And when the benefit of picking up is we don't trash you behind your back and we get some commentary. Paul, thanks for spending the time. We appreciate it. Coming on, appreciate that. We had a great commentary in the last segment around the impacted election and really appreciate your commentary as a geek in data analytics and you get your PhD in this area, high-scale computing. Now let's talk about the impact of technology. It's obviously election behind us. The game has certainly changed. The trajectory of our country is gonna be shifting and I always said to people on Facebook, if you don't get involved, you're part of the problem, not the solution. So it's an opportunity to let Trump go do his thing. We'll keep a critical eye on him, certainly with Silicon angle. But more importantly, it's game on for a new trajectory and we're gonna see how it plays out. But the impacts are unknown and certainly there'll be impact on Silicon Valley. There's gonna be impact on technology. There's gonna be an impact on ratings, which we touched on. Guys, let's talk about this segment, the impact on Silicon Valley, technology, globalization. Paul's on the East Coast in Philly. We're here in Silicon Valley in our little bubble that's now been busted up. It's a global, the world is flat. I saw Thomas Friedman at the IBM event. And this is now happening, thoughts. Yeah, nothing is safe. Absolutely, I know things I posted on my webpage once this out to my friends in Silicon Valley. I said, you gotta remember the Mike Tyson quote, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And to some extent, it's once you get punched in the mouth, once you get your bubble burst, once you realize that there's other work around you, the way that you behave in these situations really tells you who you are. As an investor and board member, it's in a situation like this, I wanna see how my CEO operates now. When everything's hunky-dory, great up into the right, you definitely have a different person than when you're in a spot where you got punched in the face. So I'm actually quite interested to see if Silicon Valley CEOs operate now that they realize there is another world out there. Yeah, that's a great point. Tom Joyce was actually commenting on our opening segment that a lot of the young kids who are protesting never lost before or seen it, an epic loss before, and he was commenting, we have Paul, you were talking about, I mean, Tom, you were talking about that notion of just getting back to work versus all the cuddling going on. People are sending memos out saying, it's okay, like it's a tragedy and an election and a democracy was a tragedy. And all this cuddling at all these universities, it's ridiculous, like it's an election. This is how the system works. It's a land of laws. You might not like it, but get up and get involved. Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, we all, I have kids, right, the first instinct is, all right, how do I explain this to my kid who's sitting next to me and other ones in college at a big party to celebrate Hillary Clinton, right? They haven't experienced this before, but the next day I realized, well, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna go to work and I'm gonna do my job and I'm gonna figure out how to play this. I'm gonna watch closely. And the message to them is kind of go to school because, I mean, frankly, Mondale didn't win, Dukakis didn't win, and the country went on. And yeah, I'll tell you what pisses me off the most, to be honest with you, no matter what side you are on. The people who are saying I'm gonna go to Canada, that's BS, either you're an American or you're a patriot or you're not. And we all kind of have to pull our boots straps up and get going forward. And I think the comment about the entrepreneurs is key. I mean, day one after the market fell apart in 2008, I was sitting in a startup that couldn't raise money. All right, what do I do now? And this isn't that bad. It's adversity. It's a deal with a dynamic nature of the world. I mean, this is the disruption. So the disruption- What do I do now? To Paul's point is how you act will define who you are as a person and a leader. And so Paul, what's your take on that? I mean, what are you advising? Well, I'll tell you one thing. I will tell you one thing that upset me a couple years ago and really upset me yesterday. And I think this is something everybody in the left-right center can ferry and not can ferry and FOMO guy and Silicon Valley needs to get on board with. And the Grubhub CEO comes out and basically says, hey, look, you know, you Trump supporters, you know, you can feel free to resign. And you guys remember what happened to the CEO of Mozilla a couple of years ago because of a campaign contribution, campaign contribution to a stance that the then President Obama had. He was ousted by his board at the result of political contribution. And the Grubhub CEO, and it's unclear how explicit he was about saying Trump supporters need to resign from my company. We need to all get together and say that behavior is unacceptable. That it's un-American. That it's un-Silicon Valley. That it's unmeritocracy. But you know, we need to make sure we embrace everyone. We talk about diversity or about diversity of political opinion. That's gotta be on the list too. And I'm really strong on this topic. I will not tolerate that for my CEOs. I don't think anybody in Silicon Valley should tolerate a thought police firing people because of who they voted for. You know, that's exactly that. You know what? He brought up a good point and that was Derek Elich or EH or whatever he said. But he also invented JavaScript. So it's not like he was just like some suit. The guy was a player. And by the way, he donated 10 grand, which is in the scheme of things is like pennies these days, right? It's 10 grand. It's like, you know, writing a check to anybody. I mean, the guy from Facebook donated $34 million to have Hillary elected. $34 million. Yeah, the thing that gets me is, I think Paul, what you touched on is we've lost the ability to have civil discourse with difference of opinions and have a conversation about it and agree to disagree. And now it becomes this inflated thing regardless of the size. Yeah, but the double standard, hold on. We've lost that. That's important. He's talking about a double standard. He's talking about people who play the diversity card in an angry way, but yet don't balance it out on the other side. And that's what the journalist didn't do either. And this is a huge issue of this all. The Mozilla guy and then the Grubhub, whatever his name is. I just heard rumblings about that. It's unacceptable. It doesn't foster any collaboration. It just separates and creates silos and more less transparent environment. I mean, it's to me, huge issue. Paul, thoughts. And I'm going to be the guy calling you out. Start believing your own, but yet it's up into the right. And everything is perfect. You need somebody in the room. I talked to a friend of mine who was a Democrat strategist here in Pennsylvania yesterday. And he said, a lot of the hands that were run here in Pennsylvania were explicitly directed at women, explicitly directed at the gauche behavior of Donald Trump. And he said, at one of the meetings, he said, you know, maybe we should make some ads to talk to the men of Pennsylvania too. Maybe we should make some ads talking about Mike Pence and his positions. And they all said, no, get out of the room. We don't need that opinion. We're going to stick with this strategy. You know, we don't need you in this meeting. That's the kind of behavior that potentially calls from the campaign because Pennsylvania was so important. That's the kind of behavior when I see them, I start off. I get furious at the CEO for enabling to happen. Paul, let's talk about venture capital and funding in the marketplace and media. Obviously, Jeff, and I've been riffing on the NFL ratings going down. This all points to a couple of disruptions going on. One is new opportunity, new entrance entering the market. You funded FanDuel, seed financing. There's a lot of other competition for NFL. People are on Snapchat 24 seven, mind share and other things. Thoughts on investing in this disruption and your thoughts on the NFL ratings. We're looking at founders with non-traditional backgrounds. You're going to look at all of the really successful stuff in our portfolio. Husband and wife team starts a fantasy sports company in Edinburgh, Scotland. Nobody's formed in Calais and Edinburgh, but people with not exactly the traditional time of the background. And you know what's common about these companies is a lot of other venture people didn't give them the right time of day because they didn't fit in. The fact that those kind of built-in biases are across the system on that one. Well, first of all, we believe in the contrarian. We're a media company founded by people who had no media degrees of any kind. But NFL has been talking- Not a qualification. By your standard, we're still an outlier though. We're still contrarian. Outliers are key. Obviously that's a success. We've seen that. NFL is not an outlier. They've been doubling down on their billion dollars. Certainly I'm a Tom Brady fan. So I am not a big NFL fan, but the ratings are down and they're scratching their head going. What the hell's going on? They blame the election. They blame baseball. There's a lot of blame, but all those excuses are gone and I don't think it's going to change. Is it a condition of just attention or is there underlying causes to this, your opinion? Well, I was gonna say, just the consumption patterns, to me it seems like it's bipolar, right? You're either totally into your fantasy and you watch your app and you watch your guys score points throughout the day or you go to Red Zone. Why would I go to Fox or CBS or NBC when I could watch Red Zone commercial free? Well, I think there's that and I think the other thing is my son and all his friends, they play football. Son's captain of the football team plays every down. Doesn't watch football on TV. Doesn't watch anything on TV. They can't get them to watch TV. Why is that? Just because he's distracted? That's not the medium. They consume things through anymore. They just don't want to do it. They don't want to sit in one room and watch TV. They've cut the cord. And you know, it's funny to me just to say, knowing nothing about this and having no data, the folks that were ahead of it were like world wrestling. You know, they were using the technology early. The NFL's not, they've been beholden to the old novel. Well, Paul brings up the point about the Kaepernick. The Kaepernick reinforces the vibe, which is I want entertainment. I love football. I don't want politics jammed down my throat. Well, I think that's a big factor. Short term. It might not be the reason, but I think he might be right on this that, you know, whether you agree with him or not, this is an issue. Wait a minute. I want to watch football. Not some bullshit media thing. I mean, that's such money on broadcast linear television. They're stuck with it. It's difficult. They're the one that's going to get this. Commerce can disrupt them. The people who are 16, 18 years old, they've never watched the game from beginning to end. They'll go watch all the clips and talk about all the way in which it's consumed. I think that's right. Yeah, fantasy. Completing non-linear fantasy. It's fantasy. All this points to the frigging non-linear. Yeah. So if the Colin Kaepernick thing goes away, right? I don't think the dynamic changes. I think they have a fundamental long-term problem. I think it's like WikiLeaks. It's not a smoking gun, but it's a reinforcement of the core audience, which is like people who aren't on. So I think that's one. So I just got the one. There was an erosion at the young side for all of the primary reasons that we're talking about, but there was an erosion of people at the more 65 and up Rust Belt area because of the modeling. And that's why the dresses it was. It was one of the others, maybe it began a few points, but the fact that they lost younger and older people all at the same time, that's surprising. And if you look, the drop in demographic is across the board as opposed to just the young people. And that's also why maybe the quality of the product and the parity in the league is something to look at as well. Paul Martino, thanks for taking the call and really riffing with us, really appreciate the commentary and all insight was phenomenal. And the, obviously discussed with the impact would be great. Love to bring you back for another segment. I wanted to talk about the blue collar entrepreneurship trend that's going on that we talked about last week. I have to do that another time. Thanks so much for picking up. Appreciate it. Good time. All right, Paul Martino, great entrepreneur. I mean, you can tell he's an entrepreneur, right? So let's wrap up the show, massive disruption. You know, he's a passionate entrepreneur. He's not a VC. He's not, even though he got a PhD from Princeton in a technical degree, he's not the, he's not your, you know, old, you know, Harvard MBA, Stanford MBA, you know, elite VC. He's a hustler. He's been an entrepreneur and now very successful picking contrarian companies. This is the model. This is the outliers are now the new standard. Guys, disruption, let's wrap this up. Election, what it all means. Good job. Well, you know, I think the election creates a bunch of unknowns. But again, my point of view is the trend we're on from a technology standpoint is really kind of unchanged. It's a question of how do you play it short-term? How do you deal with the financing issues? What the financing environment's gonna change? How do you deal with the internationalization? I think that's a big factor for most of these companies which are already global and integrated and have people from all different kinds of cultures. And that needs to be managed really, really well. If I'm a CEO, if I'm a manager at every level, any level, I'm talking to all my people. Like you said, not shutting people out but being inclusive and bringing in the customers and employees around the world. I mean, that's step number one. And then all you can do at our level, certainly at my level, is to hope and be hopeful that Trump can somehow pull this through and do a great job. I mean, that's what a patriotism is about. This is why I'm on this and this is why I'm focusing on this. Not to highlight Trump's win and support him that way, but it's more of highlighting that in today's Veterans Day, by the way. So, you know, thanks to all the veterans. This country is about freedom, right? This country is about choice and freedom. Has laws, he won, let's see what he does. He was a liberal, he was a Democrat. Maybe he will go to the middle and surprise us all by putting in the right Supreme Court and do the right thing. But what Paul Martino was talking about is, and Jeff, we've been talking about is that the entire world has changed. You can use every example, how people consume NFL football, the millennials. They're the ones protesting. Most of the people protesting are the younger generation that's never seen a loss in an election. You're seeing non-linear TV like the Cube and what we're doing, you're seeing cable collapsing, ESPN didn't hit their numbers. New York Times, the paper of the authority of record has failed miserably. The selection highlights venture capital thing that he's talking about. This is the new disruption. It's changing the consumption of life. Yeah, and I think, you know, life is not easy. Life is hard. And I think a couple of the topics today that are really important today, you need to seek out the other point of view. You need to seek it out. It's not gonna come to you based on your recommendation engine. Seek it out. Look at other new sources. Read other people's opinion. You really need to do that. And then you gotta go to work. You know, at the end of the day, if you don't get the negative, you're not gonna learn what's really the problem. You gotta seek that out. Don't read your own headlines and buy into it, right? Before we end this show today, Tom, I want to give you a chance to share your thoughts. What's going on in Silicon Valley? What's the observations? You know, as we get past this shock and gloom and talk about the optimism of what's possible, the world's changing, this is still gonna go on. What are the things you're looking at? What are the cool things that you see? Man, you know, it's super fun for me right now to go out and talk to folks and look at things. And it's really encouraging. I mean, this area is just such a hotbed of activity and creativity. And, you know, so it's, I'm enjoying it. I'm still in the early stages. I can kind of take as long as I want, but there's a lot of smart people doing cool stuff. I do think, though, that there is a lot more investment in hard problems, hard technology. I think the days of, hey, we created an app and it's not really fun. That stuff's all dead. I think the smart VCs are really trying to find hard problems that are truly changes in how the technology works. And so, you know, regardless of Trump or the NFL or anything else. No, there's exciting changes. I think that there's an acceleration happening in terms of real hard technology. Well, certainly the political science world is awesome right now. Social science is awesome. These are areas that are bursting with solutions that are needed. I think the young people are pumped and they wanna just get past and understand the future. Certainly, you know, we love, transportation is being disrupted here in Silicon Valley. So even though the bubble was burst a little bit, which I would kind of agree with Paul on, Silicon Valley will always survive. It's always gonna be inventing. It's very awesome. It's reinventing and reinventing. And then people gotta just check their bias at the door, move on with their life and have some fun. Go to work. This is the Silicon Valley, you're listening to the Silicon Valley Fright Show. We're doing our share, going to work. Have a great weekend, everyone. Thanks for listening and subscribe, share. Share the love, share the podcast, share the videos. I'm John Furrier. You listen to the Silicon Valley Friday Show.