 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm in our Boston area studio and one of the things we always love to do is talk to startups and really find out, they're usually on the leading edge of helping customers, new technologies, conquering challenges. And to that point, we have the co-founder and CEO of N-Zero, that is Oahad Meislish, and we brought along with him, he's got two of his investors, one of his advisors. So sitting next to Maish, we have Ed Sim, who's the founder and managing partner of BoldStart Ventures, and sitting next to him is Guy Padarni, who is the founder of Sneak. So now you know, is the acronym for Sneak? If you didn't know that, I know I'd heard about the company a couple of years before that. And my understanding is, Guy, you're the ones that connected Oahad with Ed, who was the first investor. So Guy, let's, we'll talk to Oahad in a second, but tell us how the conversation started and what piqued your interest about what is now N-Zero? Yeah, I think, so it started with people. I mean, I think fundamentally, when you think about technology and you think about startups, it needs to be an interesting market, it needs to be a good idea, but it really first and foremost is about the people. So I've known Oahad from actually some work that is done at Sneak earlier on and was really impressed. It's just sort of his sharpness, his technical chops, and a lot of times it's like the bias for feedback. And then when he presented the idea to me around kind of making infrastructures go easy and I don't want to sort of steal his thunder, talking about it and about kind of engaging with developers for it, I thought that really, really, really resonated with me. I think we'll probably dig into it some more, but we live in a world in which more and more activities, more and more decisions and really more effort is rolled onto developers. So there's a constant need for great solutions that make on one hand, make it easy for developers to embrace these solutions. On the other hand, still kind of allow the right kind of governance and controls. And I felt like infrastructure as good was like a great space for that, right? Where we ask developers to do more, there's a ton of value in developers doing more around controlling these infrastructure decisions, but it's just too hard today. So anyways, I kind of, I like the skills, I like the idea. And I pulled in Ed who I felt was kind of a natural to kind of help with his experience with other startups that share a similar philosophy to kind of help make this happen. Awesome, thank you guys. So Ohad, let's throw it to you. Give us a little bit about your background, your team. Infrastructure as a code is not a new term. So I guess would love you to kind of weave into it. Why now is it becoming more real and why your solution is positioned to help enterprise? Awesome, first of all, thank you for having me. It's really, really exciting. And again, thank you for the opportunity. Regarding your question. So my background is technical. I was maybe still am a geek, started university at the young age of the age of 14 in parallel to high school. And, you know, start my career and on technical roles very early. I have now like 20 years of experience. This is my second startup and third company, as I mentioned, my previous company, services company provided services for SNCC and we became friends and later on, partners, investors, and so on. And, you know, we've seen a huge shift. We call the infrastructure as code as the third data center revolution. We look at the first one being virtualization about 20 years ago led by VMware and then ZenSource. The second obviously is the public cloud when companies started clicking buttons in order to get those compute resources. But now nobody is clicking those buttons anymore and instead writing, maintaining and executing that code, that infrastructure as code. And as Guy mentioned, you know, it made it much more relevant for developers to influence the infrastructure decisions and not just the app decisions. With that became many challenges and opportunities around infrastructure as code management and automation. And that's where we focus. All right, so Ed, you know, I'm sure like me, you've seen a number of companies, you know, try to climb this mountain and fall down and crash. So I feel like five years ago, I would talk to a company and they say, oh, you know, we're going to help, you know, really help the enterprise enable developers who are networking for storage, you know, for security or anything like that. And it was like, oh, okay, good luck with that. And they just kind of crash and burned or got acquired or did something like that. So, you know, I feel like, you know, from our viewpoint, you know, we've seen for a long time that growth of developers and how important that is, but that gap between the enterprise and the developers feels like we're getting there. So, you know, it gets similar to what I asked Ohad, why now, why this group, why the investment from your. Yeah, so I'll echo Guy's comment about the people. So first and foremost, I was fortunate enough to invest in Guy back in his primary company before he started to sneak and then invest to sneak. And there are lots of elements of M zero that remind me of sneak. The idea, for example, that developers are doing more and that security is no longer a separate piece of developing, it's now embedded kind of in what developers and teams are doing. And I felt like the opportunity was still there for infrastructure as code. How do you make developers more productive but provide that control plan or governance that's centralized so that environments can easily be reproduced? And the thing that got me so excited was the idea that Ohad was going to tie kind of cloud costs from a proactive basis versus a reactive basis, meaning that once we know that your environments are up and running, you could actually automatically tag it and tie the environment to the actual application. And to me, tying the business piece to the development piece was a huge, huge opportunity that hasn't been tapped yet. And so there are lots of elements of both sneak in M zero and we're super excited to be invested in both. All right. So Ohad, maybe just step back for a second, give us some of the speeds and feeds. You read your blog post $3.3 million of the early investment. How many people you have, what is the stage of the product and customer acquisition and the like? Sure. Yeah. So we just launched our public beta and announced the funding a couple of months ago led by a both start and another VC in Israel named Grove and 10 angel investors. Guy is the greatest investor among those and so on. We have some others as well. And now we have like 10 employees, nine in Israel, one in New York City. I am relocating after this whole pandemic thing will get better. I'm moving to the Bay area as soon as possible. That's more or less the status. And as I mentioned, we just launched our public beta. So we have our first few design partners and early like private beta customers now starting to grow more. Yeah. And how would you characterize what is the relationship between what you're doing and the public clouds? We understand, you know, in the early days it was like, Oh, well, cloud's going to be easy. It's going to just be enable it. It has been a wonderful tool set for developers, but, you know, simple is definitely not how, you know, I think anyone would describe the current state of environment. So, you know, help us give Ohad a little bit of what you're seeing there and, you know, how you deal with like some very large players and ecosystem. You know, our customers are the same as the cloud vendor customers. The cloud vendors provide great value with the technical aspect, the infrastructure. But once you want to manage your organization, you want to empower your developers, you want to shift left some decisions, you know, APM did shift left for performance. SNEAK is doing great shift left for security. I believe that we are doing similar things to cost. Okay. And you know, the cloud vendors are in charge of you being able to do some technical orchestration, but when do you need to tear down those resources? When do you understand that there is a problematic resource or environment and what exactly made it? What is the association? How you can prevent problematic deployments from even happening at first. So all of those management and automation and insight tied back to your business logic and processes, that's where we fit. And I think there was actually a lot of analogy if I can chime in on maybe an ownership aspect that happens in cloud. So we talk about cloud and oftentimes cloud is interpreted as the technical aspect of it. So the fact that it allows you to do a bunch of things in the cloud, right? You know, sort of renting someone else's hardware and then automating a lot of it. But what cloud also does and that definitely represents what we're doing security and I think applies here is that it moves a lot of things that used to be IT responsibility being a part of the application. So a lot of decisions, including one's related security and including one's related cost around anywhere from provisioning of servers to network access to when do you burst out and to the balancing of business value to the cost involved or the risk involved, those are no longer done by a central IT organizations but rather they're being done by developers day in and day out. And so I think that's really where the analogy really works with cloud is it's not so much like clearly there's an aspect of that that is that the technical piece of tracking how much does it cost in the on-demand surrounding of cloud but there's a lot of the ownership change of the fact that the decisions that impact that are done by developers and they're not yet well equipped to have the insights to have the tools to make the right decisions at the points of time. Yeah, no, thank you, Guy. And yeah, absolutely. Because cloud is just one of the platforms you're living on as you know, well from sneak that integration between what's happening in the platform where open source fits into it, the various parts of the organization that are there. So you've got some good background and I'm sure helps that you're an advisor to OHOD there to help sort through a little bit of some of those challenges. Yeah, I mean, Ed, I'd love to hear just in general your viewpoint on how startups are doing at monetizing things in the era of, you've got the massive players like Amazon and Microsoft out there. Look, the enterprise pain is higher than ever right now. Every Fortune 500 is a tech company right now and they need engineers and they're hiring engineers. In fact, many of the largest Fortune 500s have more engineers than some of the tech companies and developer productivity is number one front and center. And if you talk to CIOs, we just hosted a panel with the CIO of Guardian Life and the CPO of Price Line, they're all looking at, how do I kind of automate my tool chain? How do I get things done faster? How do I do things more scalably? And then how do I coordinate processes amongst teams? And as guy hit upon and OHOD as well, not just security, you know, there's product design being embedded with developers as product management being embedded with developers. There's finance now, FinOps, right? If you're going to spend more and more in the cloud, how do you actually control that proactively before things happen versus after or months after that happened? So I think this is going to be a huge, huge opportunity on the FinOps side. And, you know, the final thing I would say is that winning the hearts and minds of developers to win the enterprise is a tried and true model. And I think it's going to be even more important as we move forward in the next, you know, a few years to be honest with you. All right, so OHOD, you know, I think Ed talked about that the hearts and minds of developers absolutely are critical. When you look at the tooling landscape out there, the challenge of course is there's so many tools out there, you know, there's platform battles, there's developers that find certain things that they love and then there's, oh wait, can I have a general purpose solution that can help? You talk about this being the third wave, you know, how does this kind of tie into or potentially replace some of the, you know, the last generation of automation tools? How do you see yourself getting into the accounts and, you know, growing your, you know, developer base? It's, I think I have a very simple answer because, you know, now enterprises have two options. Either they go with productivity self-service or they go with governance, but they cannot have both. Okay, so if it's, you know, they're smaller or they have less risks, so they go with the productivity and they take those risks, take that extra cost, take that potential damage that can happen. But more we see the case of I cannot allow myself this mess, so I have to block this velocity. I have to block those developers. They cannot just orchestrate cloud resources as they wish. They have to open tickets. They have to go through some manual process of approval or we see more and more companies that understand that there is a challenge. They build in-house and zero of self-service combined with government solution and they always struggle doing it well because it's not their core business. So once you see the opportunity of, you know, more and more customers doing a lot of investment in in-house solution that do the same thing, probably a good idea to do it as a separate product. And also the fact that we have the visibility of different customers we can, very early, but for later on, add some pattern recognition and notice what makes sense, what is problematic and give those insights and more business logic back to the customers, which is impossible for them to do if they're only isolated on their cases. So us providing the same great solution to different companies, allowing them self-service combined with governance and then additionally, add those small insights later on. Yeah, I mean, I think what I love about what he said is that I don't think he even sort of said finance or cost at any time of those. So really, like he said, governance, right? And I think you can swap governance or you can swap the kind of the entity that's doing the governance for security, you know, for all of those. And that sounds just awfully familiar, you know, for Sneak, which really kind of begs the, you know, the answer to be, you know, to be the same. You know, it's the reason that M-Zero's approach is sort of promising and that it would win against competition is that, you know, it tends to be that the competition or the people that are around are focused on the governance piece. You know, they're focused on just sort of the entity that is the controlling entity. And I like to say, you know, that it's actually not about shift left. It's about the, if you want to choose a direction, it's going to be the sort of the top to bottom. So it's more about like these governance entities, whether security or finance, you know, they need to shift from a controlling mindset that is top down that, you know, it's like this dictatorship of sort of telling you what you should and shouldn't do to more of a bottom up element and allowing, you know, the teams that people kind of, you know, in the trenches, people actually make these decisions to make correct decisions. And in this case, correct decisions from a financial perspective. And then alongside that, the governing entity, they need to switch to being a supportive entity and enabling entity. And I think that transition will happen across many aspects of the sort of development, software development and definitely anything that requires that type of governance from outside of the development process today, that needs to change. Yeah, to chime in and add to Guy's point, development is so important. It touches every aspect of an organization. So I almost think about it as almost like a collaborative workflow layer versus being reliant on kind of one control entity, right? Developers always want to move fast, but you know, how do you kind of build that collaborative like get like workflow? And I think that OHOD and M0 is providing that for environment and finance. Guy is doing it for security. And there's lots of other opportunities out there like privacy as well. And I wouldn't be surprised if finance folks start getting embedded with development at some point in time, just like security is or design is or product management is as well, because that is probably one of the highest costs around right now for many companies. And they're all trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding much earlier. Yeah, there's been lots of discussion, of course, is you know, going beyond DevOps. So, you know, I think, you know, FinOps is in there. OHOD, you have a favorite term that you've had from your advisors yet as to how you categorize what you're doing in any final words on kind of that organizational dynamic, which, you know, we know so often it's, you know, the technology can be the easy part. It's, you know, getting everybody in the org, you know, pulling in the same direction. Yeah, you know, I think I'm looking at it on maybe a physical metaphor or just an example. If you just enter a developer's room, you might see a screen, a TV there with some APM, a data dog, a New Relic Matrix, and they care about, developers care about performance. They know very early if they did some wrong. And now they see more and more, you know, in those dashboards in the developers' rooms, things like SNCC to make sure you're not putting any bad open source package, which is, you know, has a security probability. What we believe is that now they don't have the right tools, the right product that they can be part of the responsibility of cost. And that's like somebody else's problem. In other rooms, you have those TVs, those screens, that show what is the cost. And maybe only later on in a waterfall kind of way, you try to isolate a root cause analysis on what went wrong. But there is no good reason why those graphs of the cost should be in the same rooms next to the APM and the SNCCs and to prevent those as early as possible. Maybe to change the discussion and build more trust between the developers that now seem not to care about the cost, because they used not to care like 10 years ago when we used to have, let's call it CapEx Cloud, okay? The VMware or even EC2 instances with the predicted pricing, that's old school. Now you have auto scaling Kubernetes. You have Lambda, those kind of things you pay per usage. So the possibility for an engineer to know how much their code is about to cost to the organization is very challenging now. If we tie from the developer up to the financial operations, we will provide better service and just better business value for our customer. Awesome, so final question I have for you. You know how I'm going to have you go last on this one is you kind of painted the picture of where things are going to go. So give us what success looked like. Ed, I'll start with you, give us out to 12 to 24 months as to M0 and this wave as to what should we be looking for? Success to me would be that every large enterprise has this on their budget line item as a must have. The market is still early and evolving right now but I have no doubt in my mind it's going to happen. And as you hear about many large enterprises saying that we were in the second inning of cloud migration, now we're in the fourth, that is what success will be and I know it's going to happen faster than we all thought. Yeah, I'll take the developer angle to it. Like I think success is really when developers are delighted or sort of they feel they're building better software by using M0 and by factoring this aspect of quality into their daily activities. And I think a lot of that comes down to ease of use. Like I kind of encourage folks to sort of try out M0 and see the cost calculation. It's all about making it easy. So what excites me is really around that type of success where it's so easy that it's embedded into their sort of daily activities and that they're happy. It's not a forced thing, it's something they've accepted and like having as part of their software development process. I fully agree with both Ed and Guy but I want to add on a personal note that one of the reasons we started M0 is because we saw developers quitting jobs at some places. And the reason for that was that they didn't give them self-service. They didn't empower those developers. They were blocked by DevOps. They needed to open tickets to do trivial things. And this frustration is just a bigger motivation for us to solve. So we want to reduce this frustration. We want developers to be happy and productive and do what they need to do and not getting blocked by others. So that's, I think, another way to look at it, to make sure that those developers are really making good use out of their time and going back home at the end of the day and feeling that they did what they're paid for and not for waiting for others to just allocate some cloud resources for them. All right, well, Ohad, I want to wish you the best. Absolutely. Some of the early things that we've seen, sometimes there are the tools that help. We've been talking, gosh, I think 15, 20 years about breaking down the silos between various parts of the organization. Some of the tools give you different viewpoints into what you're doing, help have some of the connection and hopefully some empathy as to what the various pieces are there. You really highlighted, there's nothing worse than I'm not being appreciated for the work I'm doing or they don't understand the challenges that I'm going. So congratulations on N-Zero. We look forward to following going forward and definitely hope to talk to some of your customers in the future, thanks so much. Thank you, thank you very much. All right, N-Guy, really appreciate your perspectives on this, thank you for joining us also. Thanks for having me down. All right, be sure to check out the kube.net where you can find all of the events we're doing online these days, of course, well as a huge back catalog of what we have in the thousands of interviews that we've done. Thank you to Miniman and thank you for watching the kube.