 Okay, we are back here, live in Silicon Valley. This is a special presentation with theCUBE, Silicon Angle Media, Wikibon on theCUBE, presenting Big Data SV. The theme is Follow the Money. And our next panel is with the people who write the big fat checks, the venture capitalists, and we stalk them, follow these guys, we'll just follow, we'll find out all the action. So I am super excited to have with me Ping Li, who's a general partner, an Excel partners, friend of theCUBE, has been on theCUBE many times, and he's on the Midas list of Midas Touch investors, also an investor in Cloudera and a variety of big data companies, and we've been following Ping's career and certainly the big data investments with Excel over the years, and been fantastic to watch, and certainly got a great perspective from Ping. Frank Artali is managing director at Ignition Partners, former executive at Microsoft, you're familiar with NT, you all know what that is. Frank was a big leader in that initiative and has a lot of great history, also an investor in Cloudera as well, a variety of other investments. So guys, welcome to the panel, so follow the money, that's the theme. A lot of money's being spent, that came up earlier on Twitter, where's all that money going, and why isn't there more billion dollar companies in big data, where's all the apps, where's all the exits, and certainly Ping, you've had great success with Cloudera as an investment. What's going on with big data? It hits, misses over the past five years, what's your view on it, are you happy with it? Progress, obviously Cloudera's a success since that point, but other investments in general, how would you grade the ecosystem in general? Well, I think that my first observation is, I think it's over here early, despite all the activity and conversations around big data, I think this is a technology cycle trend that's gonna last much more than five years, 10, 15 years, right? If you look at the relational database market, how long that took to kind of ecosystem to get built and get formed, I mean we're talking decades. Now I think technology cycles happen faster now than they did in the past, but I still think we're in the first, second, or third endings of kind of this big data build out. And if I look backwards, I think a lot of the innovation has been around the data management platforms, the Hadoops, the Sparks, and all the underlying technologies that I think will drive a lot of the next generation platforms for applications to get built on. And frankly, I think if you look forward, the application ecosystem on these new platforms is still very early, it's still very nascent, right? Whether it's BI tools, ERP tools, CRM tools, all these different applications that we have used over the last decades to make our lives better as a business user productivity. I think they're all gonna get re-platformed and leverage a lot of these new big data technologies whether it's a duper spark or whatever in order to deliver better experiences for users. And that's just gonna go. So re-platform has been a theme we've heard. So the question for you then is what were the hits and misses? I mean back then, I mean first of all, it was Wild West back then, and Hadoop in 2010, 2011 was like no one even knew what that was. So you made a good bet on your thesis with, say, Cloudera, but what were the hits and what were the misses if you'd look back? And talk a little bit more about that re-platforming and where that is now. Yeah, I don't, I think it's early to predict hits or misses in our business. You never predict these things until they actually happen, then you seem really smart. They're still swinging right now. Yeah, I think it's really early. Yeah, there'll be some long deaths. There's gonna be long deaths. You know, look, I think early on there were 50 different types of NoSQL databases. I think that's definitely a much smaller list right now with Couchbase and a few other ones that have seemed to have getting a lot of traction. So I think that in of itself has consolidated. Early on there were a lot of different ways to do batch processing. And I think Hadoop kind of became the one that embraced a lot of it. There were 15 different file systems. So I think a lot of things have consolidated at that layer. I think the things that at the application layer, a lot of them have gotten off to slower starts just because it took a while for the underlying technologies to take hold. So we're looking forward to seeing how some of those evolve, whether it's some of the BI players. Yeah, I mean, I'll just add to this too is that in terms of what we, many people think about these things as being databases, especially in the situation of the Hadoop, let's just say stack. I mean, what people should really understand it's more like an operating system for data than just simply a store. Yes, it does storage, but it does an awful lot of processing. So it just takes a little bit of time for people to make the transition from their thinking around the relational world to what we're in right now. And this is not like the time back in say the early 1990s where we made the transition and folks like us were around back then, made the transition from mid-range and mainframe systems to distribute it. By and large, back then it was really just getting the same type of tech, if you will, deployed on smaller systems and deployed. What we're dealing with right now is really a completely different enabler. So for someone who is working on IMS on a mainframe system to work on an index file system on Unix, it wasn't as much of a leap as someone going from say something like SQL server today to using something like cloud era. And so the echo pink statements here, it's we're in early days and to say that there's been swings and misses. There's certainly been a lot of swings, but the misses are still, I think those stories are still to be played out. But if history repeats itself, we do have consolidation. We had tens of databases back in the 90s and then you end up with about three, right? And so we'll see what happens, but we're pretty confident that it is early days and this is a, let's just say an area that we look forward to more on the enabling side. We don't want to hear about problems. There aren't problems here. These are about creating businesses which couldn't exist otherwise. So let's talk about the platforms for a second, because I think the replatforming brings up your point about the old days. And the old days, platforms were land grabs. Microsoft, where you worked, had a great platform, had an operating system and application monopoly or a competitive advantage, I should say. So with now with cloud era, for instance, when I talked to Amarawa Dala when you first did the investment guys, he was a scale out guy from Yahoo, basically said scale out's the future on commodity hardware. Yet all the big whales, as Jeff Kelly talks about, are scale up guys. So I want you to talk about this notion of what horizontally scalable cloud and scaling up coming together in that platform. Is it ownable? Is it an opportunity? Is open source change the game? What's your take on that? Yeah, so just like to look at, again, how things are, we never like to say it's different this time. But the enablers here, right, the thing that's something like Hadoop as an example that we're using or things like elastic databases like this elastic processing enable is that you can think about a customer or an organization or a scientist or anyone can think about having an application that can need at a given point in time tens of thousands of nodes of processing. Now if you're saying you're a scale out person, you have to go allocate all of that upfront. Even if you say, well, I'm gonna use cloud resources. You know, it's really hard to go kind of string that stuff together. And so when Amar talks about using scale out and elastic and commodity parts, he's saying that this kind of technology enables applications that just couldn't be thought of in a scaled up world because you have to plan for all of that capex upfront. Now with the availability of cheap cores either on something like Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, you can just go after those cores at the time you need them. And so it really frees up the people's minds in terms of the kind of applications can be built. So I mean, now there are times where maybe a scale up thing would have certain advantages instead of sort of the old world where you had certain types of query processing that required memory locality but those things were different. They came out of the relational world with certain types of SQL calculus which let's just say don't apply in these different types of applications. I think, don't underestimate Moore's law. I mean, I think what Intel continues to do in the data center has provided over the last decade has created a whole new ecosystem of building software applications and software platforms, right? And I think that's, and we're just harnessing, this software is harnessing all that innovation and translating that to the applications now, right? So I think, if I look at our portfolio and the type of applications we're building, they're assuming really, really powerful, efficient commodity hardware that can scale out and they're looking for software platforms and they're not really databases anymore, the data management platform that can harness the value of this at scale, right? So I think that's the innovation that's already happened, right? So now the question is, how do you package all that hardware and software and deliver that into an application for an end user, a business person to actually get value out of it? So what are you guys investing in that? In terms of when someone walks in the door, we were talking on theCUBE today with the entrepreneur, he said ML is the new SQL, machine learning is the new SQL. Things like that are happening, internet of things happening and you're talking about in memory with sparks, recent success in silicon analytics, insight engines, all those stuff's happening. It is an operating system that's going on on the internet called cloud or whatever you wanna talk about it, but as investors, how do you make sense of it? What are you investing in? What's gonna get your attention and from the money making standpoint, beyond like the small, that could be a double or single, what's the home run pitch that you're looking at? I'll start. This doesn't apply necessarily to big data, I mean just in general, if you can pick a point in time anytime what folks like us do, we try to look at things that are applicable to let's just say all businesses or businesses of all sizes. And so if you look at, so we use history as a guide, right? And it doesn't always necessarily repeat itself but it sometimes does rhyme. And you find all the things that might have happened in the past and you attempt to make, we attempt to look at things we can make a bet on things that sort of mimic things that happened in the past. And so if you looked at things that happened, let's just say around the database, although we're not a database in this context, more like a complete data management or operating system for data, what are all the things that happened in say, when clients server took hold? Well, you have productivity tools that suddenly hooked up to databases, right? And that freed up the data from someone requiring like a software developer to go write a program. So we like things that's kind of like free up that data. Then there are types of productivity applications that are enabled because of the availability of data. And so as people start living in data and we like to look at those things. But in our minds we always ask ourselves, is this a thing, like a class of thing, that any company would say more than 1,000 employees would be likely to purchase one of or need. And that may be something that affects the end user or something that makes the infrastructure protected or secure, something that makes the IT professionals life easier, they're not going away. So that's sort of how we look at things or how I look at things I know. Ping and I talk about these things all the time as well. We're much, again, using history as a guide is I think in the venture world people say pattern matching is something that we do. Your home run pitch, fastball, care ball, what are you looking for for ideas and things? I have to be, I think right now, pretty much every part of the enterprise stack is available for disruption to build a massive company. We are dealing with changes in the last couple of years that I think are incredibly profound, right? Starting from the scale-out stuff we're talking about, where hardware and compute now is kind of pervasive and elastic, right? We're talking about cloud-based software that can take advantage of that. We're talking about mobile platforms that didn't exist before. We're talking about operating systems. We're talking about containers. I mean, there's a complete rejuvenation of the data center. There's a foaming of the mouth ready to write checks. It is a huge opportunity to say. No, I think there's constant talks about the bubble and the tech and in my view is that there's going to be some amazing companies, large companies get created because these are fundamental shifts that are not going back and they're very horizontal in how they impact people. So you're saying there's waves coming? There's a lot of waves coming. This is one wave now, so let's go into that. So I got to ask you, so I was there when you announced the $100 million big data fund and the thesis there was, oh, there's going to be a lot of apps. I think that was like three years ago. I also had a chat with Pat Gelsinger right before Paul Moritz went to Pivotal before they spun that out and they had this big vision, mainframe in the cloud. It just never happened because there was other things that needed to get fixed which kind of stalled the plan. So I don't think the thesis was incorrect but I want to get your perspective on the timing, right? I mean, the apps are coming, you mentioned that. So what's your take now? I mean, obviously network virtualization, VMware's working on that, Pivotal's having their success. Is it the same trajectory? Is apps still going to be the big thing as people realize they have all this data and they're data-full and they have solved their own problems? I mean, is that what you're looking for? What's your take on that trajectory of the apps? I think data-driven applications are just starting to emerge and applications take time to build but one of the companies that we were able to work with last year, RelateIQ, that ultimately called by Salesforce was essentially that, right? They were building off Hadoop, they were leveraging cloud software, running on a scale out hardware and they were processing all the data and redefining CRM, right? They were re-looking at how people interface with their relationships and their contacts and how to build a network and it was all data-driven. It wasn't built on the legacy stack, it was built on the new stack and the way that I've always thought about it is, look at what's happening in the consumer world, from web 1.0 to web 2.0 or whatever version of the web we're on now, the Facebooks, the Twitters, all these guys have built their applications to be data-driven from day one, whether it's the feed, people you may know, that experience is making the user get more value out of these applications. If you look at the enterprise apps, they don't do that. No one likes their enterprise applications, no one gets any value out of their enterprise applications and I think that's starting to change because they're using the same stack, the same technology underpinnings that the consumer guys, frankly, invented because they had no choice, are now being used in the enterprise. So I think a lot of these new, we're going to use just one example, we're seeing a lot of other people that are using these new technologies to build very innovative applications. So why did they sell? I mean, would they sell because they were a feature of someone else's or the global expansion? I mean, this is a question we were talking about on theCUBE today as there is M&A opportunity there's not so bad thing in exits and exit. If you can make it globally, then you can be that billion dollar company. If you can't, then you might be acquired. So that's a reality that people are facing. Is there a reason why they got acquired because it was a better fit for someone to fill their portfolio? Is that a trend that you see and see more of? Look, I think a lot of the incumbent companies are going to have to do M&A in order to kind of stay ahead of this change. And I don't fault them. I mean, if you look at what's happened, some of these trends have happened so quickly. Like five years ago, maybe two companies in our portfolio was built on AWS today, 99% of them are. I mean, mobile, like how many people had iPhones? Five years. These things have happened so quick that I don't expect the incumbents to be able to react to some of these changes. Well, buyers out there like the IBMs and the VMwares. They're buyers for the startups. You guys there. I mean, so they're looking for innovation and Frank and I were lamenting earlier, we hope not all our companies sell because I think we think some of them have a lot of legs to build really interesting things. Frank, the consolidation is not necessarily a bad sign. There's more waves coming and the market's shifting. Consolidation can be a good thing, right? I mean, what's your take on that? I mean, do you agree that it's not necessarily a bad thing if Jeff Kelly's research is somewhat accurate? Yeah, so just in terms of consolidation, when a class of technology becomes more mature, buyers get comfortable when they can actually buy something from a company of size, right? So typically what we've seen in the last few years or the last 10 years is that large buyers of technology, again, enterprise IT organizations, are willing to try things from smaller organizations, but for them to make them a big bet, they like to go with a leader. And so consolidation will usually produce a leader. And so it is definitely a good thing as long as you're invested in the leader. Well, cloud also requires speed to market. So I've heard some from the big buyers of the startup saying, hey, if they can't go global, they're in a bridge to that. So it can be a win-win in that case. Do you see that happening in most of big companies like the IBMs of the world? So is the question in terms of? On startup, and I'm like, okay, I got some venture funding. I either got to get sales quickly or look for a buyer or this is the classic probably board meeting that you guys go out and walk into. So to be clear, right, like Ping and I don't get paid for getting a company started, putting one round of investment and making a small amount of money for our investors. That's not we do. When we make an investment, every investment we make, we're thinking that it can be a global standalone company. We don't make an investment and say, oh, this would be a great thing to sell to XYZ buyer for 50 million bucks. That's not what we do for a living. There'll be a consolidation of venture firms very quickly if that was the norm. Now that being said, at some point in a company's life, the management team together with the investors do make a decision and say, hey, what is it gonna take for this company to be a durable standalone entity? And there's a bunch of variables that go into making that decision. What kind of company is it? How much capital is it gonna take? Can it get there in a meaningful amount of time before maybe a larger company wants to come and do the same sort of thing? But by and large, if there's a large enough total available market and you're part of one or two first movers for a high technology where customers are willing to pay and get behind you, then you can usually attract enough capital to keep going and get to be that company, at least to have the perception of being a global company. And it does take a while. I mean, look at companies that are really now just barely global companies, even like Citrix Systems, a place that I worked, even today, like most of its revenue is still, they're probably still overweight, right, in U.S. versus the rest of the world, probably at least I would say two thirds, as opposed to if you translate that to a Microsoft, which is only 28% U.S. Okay, so I got some questions from the Twitter sphere. So a couple of them coming in. How well have you guys done backing startups that build tools, not apps? Or can you comment on that tool thing, and I'll throw in my little two cents on there. Do you have to have a platform, or can you just stand alone with an app or a tool or is platform kind of an inherent, you know, substrate within the app framework? I mean, I have so, yeah, so in terms of just hard examples in the Ignition portfolio, one of our top companies is actually a tools company, it's called Xamarin, it starts with the letter X. Great couple of guys building a mobile application development platform. It'll be actually more than that. It'll do some more things at the runtime and what have you. But it is something which is sold largely to enterprise IT folks that are building enterprise mobile applications. And so that's an example of a tools company that we like. We have not had success with anything that's sold, let's just say software development frameworks or tools to other professional software developers. Because those are the last folks that like to pay. Yeah, and I think the reality is even the tools companies that do become widely adopted end up becoming platform companies over time. So if it just stays as a tool company and it doesn't get broader in terms of the surface area of the problems it solves, then it's probably hard. So you bring up a good point. That's not a bad thing. You can come in and enter the market on a narrow scene with a tool and then sequence to a platform position. No, a lot of times some of our best companies have started office tools and people are like, hey, let's just use this thing. What is this thing? Next thing you know becomes widely adopted. I've always said if you say you're a platform you gotta target on your back from the day one. It's hard to sell a platform. No one knows what to do with a platform. Especially if it's a new category. Awesome, so a fun question came in. When do you see artificial intelligence hitting the scene? Obviously with wearables, internet of things. How far away from full artificial intelligence if you can even define what artificial intelligence is. So I'm sure you get a lot of guys coming in and talking about the big idea. So you seeing AI hit the radar? We do see it. Well, we do see it. We definitely see it. It's unclear. See the ideas or not. Well, it's all depends on what you consider AI. But obviously in the gaming world and Anki, the iPhone car, I mean there's a lot of different applications. What are the horizontal scale ones? It's still a little early. So the next question is what project with the next Spark? No pun intended in the Hadoop area. What's Spark? What's the next kind of big wave or idea you're seeing that's enabling either creativity, innovation, investment outside of, say, Spark? So an open source project or just a way to throw dollars at where wealth can be created? Yeah, I think, well, I mean it's just, that's a really broad question. I think it goes back to some of the things that Ping was saying earlier around applications. And so I'm not saying that the investment area is over for infrastructure. But if I had to look at two equally exciting things and one was infrastructure and one was an application that made all of our lives as professionals easier, I'd tell you which one I'm investing in. The one that's, yeah, the app, yeah. Well, I guess, go, kid, what's the name of the company again? No, I agree, I think it's awesome to see all these innovation at the infrastructure platform layer and I think some of them will pierce through. But when I talk to CIOs, they're just digesting what's currently there right now and getting value out of that is enough of a challenge today and finding the use cases and the workflows to really leverage those platforms. So I think the more applications, as Frank says, it helps the digestion of the existing stuff would be, I think, the first order. And then I think then there's not always new applications break the platform, then there's new innovation there. So this thing will just keep going. And CIO said to me one time, he said, if someone walks in and sells me another platform, I'm gonna shoot myself. So there's a lot of digestive pain from the million dollar, 10 million dollar platform, rolling it out. They want more like Amazon. They wanna stand up something quick. So you've seen that same thing? Yeah, I mean, I think it's getting increased. I mean, the thing that Saul comes back to is agility and velocity of development. If you look at how people are building applications today, it's a very different world than it was 10 years ago. Okay, so I gotta put you guys on the spot for a fun question. Cal or Stanford in terms of innovation in Silicon Valley? Computer science departments. Which ones you've seen the most action come from? Let's see if they answer this one. It's a tough one. Actually, it really depends on what. It's also doing really interesting things. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the AMP Lab at Berkeley, it's been phenomenal in terms of the innovation. The output has been really great at Berkeley, for sure. I still like, I'll take an alternate. I think, I think. Washington, because you're from Seattle? No, I'll say Cambridge University in the UK. If you wanna go have a trip and check out that computer lab, that's a lot of innovation there as well. So that brings up the fun question. Is computer science obviously changing permission? You see how I ducked that? I mean, that's a good question, yeah. You can't win with that when you're at VC. Everything's great. Computer science is great. What disciplines are you seeing in terms of right now? I'll say computer science has been the rage, engineering degrees. Are you seeing cross-disciplinary? We had, I'll say machine learning brings up math, computer science. Is there new faces, new disciplines you're seeing? Walk on the door? Design. I think design is probably one of the most needed talent right now in building killer applications. I think that's, if I look across our portfolio, people need more data guys, they need more design folks. And design hasn't evolved much beyond colors. Two fields and a button. Yeah, this is now how to create and experience the part programmers, the part artists, the part creative. So I think it's a really difficult skill set. Okay, we're gonna get some questions from the crowd so we have the microphone running around. But before we go there, my final question is the big data cloud, you can stand up and start it pretty easily. Open source has been a great thing. We're seeing amazing first class citizens with open source in the enterprise now. It's awesome for entrepreneurs. So what size checks is a series A? What are you guys writing checks? I mean, Excel, you guys are a huge firm. I mean, entrepreneur comes in and says, hey, I only need a million fives. Is that too small? Call me when you need 20 million. Obviously, you know, Andreessen Horwitz throws a lot of cash around. What is the round size? Is there the pattern out there? Do you need to see something? I'm obviously gonna go, oh, of course you're gonna do early stage. As a series A, what's the average sizes that you guys are put into work? Cause your time is limited, right, you guys? So what's going on in the VC world? And then we'll open it up to some questions. Size of checks, your time, feeder networks. What's some of the landscape thing going on VC? I think it's better probably to look at just a broader set of data than what's coming from just from two firms. And I think the median data shows that series A, I know this is kind of a wide range. Four million, more like typical towards eight to 10, if it's towards the higher end of that. And but I think how, at least how we try to look at it, we don't look at it so much as a check size. For us, of course, we're motivated by greed to some degree. We wanna own as much of the company as we can. But also we look at what it's gonna take for the company to get to its next milestone. And that next milestone will logically be a series B. So for every company, it's gonna be a little bit different. If it's maybe something where it's, some folks that have a unique algorithm around doing something, maybe it's only gonna be a handful of people working for 12 months, that's gonna consume a lot less cash than something that's gonna be a big infrastructure play. So the answer is, it really depends on the company. Yeah, I mean, I always say the business strives the funding. The funding doesn't drive the business. So I mean, last year I did $2 million series A and I also did a $15 million series A. So there's really no, two very different businesses though, right? So they have different requirements. But there's a lot of fun data that you can go after that you can go after and you can get the median and average numbers. I'll give you some. Well, you know, I didn't ask any questions on the bubble. I know you gotta run. So I personally think it's very bubble-ish, but the waves are coming. We're seeing it all through the industry. So as long as the waves are coming, it's great. Any questions from the crowd? We got a microphone for the guys writing the checks, following the money, these guys there. I'll speak of a comment on the bubble thing. So I mean, in any given year since we had server computers, have we consumed less cores than the year before? Of course not. And as long as that trend continues, this is the industry to be in. Yeah, I agree. It's a great growing market. Question from the crowd. My question is that, when will enterprise app marketplace take off? As you know, mobile app marketplace has been there for many years. I'm talking about enterprise app on cloud. Enterprise apps on cloud. Mobile's been around for years. When's that gonna take off? Yeah, things like, you know, I'm not sure you guys are familiar with AWS cloud marketplace, AWS marketplace. There are a lot of enterprise apps. Google is working on that. There are others like that. That's for infrastructure and service. And for Salesforce, they have SaaS marketplace. It's called app exchange, right? Things like that. I mean, I think it depends on what categories, but a lot of them are taking off, right? Slack and the messaging space is an example of enterprise app that's exploding. So... Amazon's had great success with their marketplace. People can download apps and they get low cost of sales. I mean, it's fantastic, right? There's been, you know, slow marketing apps on top of force.com that have done very well. So, you know, I think, you know, and I don't think the mobile app and enterprise app ecosystem are different. I think right now every app that we look at on the enterprise side is mobile first out the gate. So I think those two worlds are converging as well. Yeah, and largely for in-house written enterprise applications, there are certain challenges related to access to data securely. And but largely, if you look at some of the way that the networking infrastructure is being enhanced in the public clouds, that a lot of those challenges will, let's just say, become diminished over the course of the next year or two. You have an A that was sufficient to get you to the milestones for a B. Traditional B milestones are repeatable sales model and revenue growth. Any more color on where you have to get to to qualify for a B? So since I answered the question earlier. So for me, when I think about, again, depending on the size of the A, now sometimes if it's a supersize series A, you may even want to get beyond that. But in general, you know, the way I think about a series B is getting to product market fit. And there has to be some sort of metrics around that. So it may or may not be a revenue number. I think we have time for one more question. Because I know Frank's got to catch a plane. Appreciate your time coming on. But one more question? Over there. To the right. All right. Hi, thanks for your time, guys. So just a question about companies which go, IPU and companies which try to remain private. So for, I mean, they are an extreme and like cottonworks which went public, like with really less market cap. But if you look like pure storage of some other companies, they have new tonics, they have like a huge market cap and they're still private. So what are the thesis or their thoughts behind it? This is behind going public. Well, as fast as possible. Yeah, some companies try to go as fast as possible. Some are trying to be private. That's a good question. What do you guys think? I mean, are they jumping the gun early? Is it a window issue? Is it that they jump? I'm new to the business. I haven't been up and bowed in an IPO yet, but. Well, I mean, the reason they go public is because you need to raise money. I mean, you have no other, that's why companies, big reason why they go public is they need to raise money, right? So, you know. And the PCs can get liquid too, but they don't always sell. Yeah, a lot of times you're locked up, et cetera. So I think that's the primary motivator to go public, right? And then if you can raise capital as a private company, then that's the question of, do you go public or do you go private? And a lot has to do with kind of what the company wants to achieve. Have you raised $300 million on a private round? That's like the old days of going public. Yeah, I mean, the reality is going public has certain constraints to the business, right? Michael Delta is coming private because he didn't want to deal with the other. Right, so I think a lot of companies, I feel like they still have a lot of innovation. There's things they want to do without the constraints of being public, will stay private for a bit longer. The hassle is like in reporting and attention, right? Well, I mean, it's like when you operate, again, when people say going public, the actual, the way to really think about it is operating as a public entity is what it really means. And that means that there's, like you were saying, there's levels of disclosure. There's some benefits of that. Some folks feel that a company that is operating publicly by definition is more transparent and can be more trusted, but that really is meaningless since most of the larger private companies effectively operate as public entities from an internal governance perspective. So I think when people say, well, it's just a hassle to be public. Once you get big enough, you're really operating that way anyway. But I mean, this is just another pool of capital. And it's- You still have the certain hurdles to go public though. You can't just go public for- I think the point Frank made that I want to emphasize, going public is very different than being successful as a public company. And I think time will tell which companies are actually going to be successful as a public company, which means you need to have a real business model. You need to be predictable and needs to be durable and all that stuff. Uber just added another billion to their private round today. So I think a lot of companies stay private because they want to make sure they have all those pieces together. So when they go public, they can be successful for many years to come and continue to grow. So I always say like, don't look at the date the company goes public. Look at them in two or three years from now and see how they did. Guys, thanks for your time Frank. I know you got to catch a plane, but I'd like to give you a final word. What's the outlook? Just share with the folks watching and also here in the room and the big data industry is changing. Obviously you can add in mobile apps and other fabric kind of stuff within the big data world. I said, operating system mindset. What's your final walk away guidance, advice in terms of you're looking at writing checks, you're evaluating the landscape. What's your guidance for this industry? Yeah, and so every day I look at myself at the end of every day and ask myself what I've learned. And I learned something new and that makes it a good day. When I can just tell you it's for the last, I guess I first met the folks at Cloudera, I guess it was maybe in 2008 timeframe. And it really opened my eyes to a set of things that I just thought were not possible from an application perspective. And just my parting thought is that don't accept, you can't accept the status quo. You have to think bigger and it's these big ideas that were just not possible because of things like cost, because of size, because of speed. So we don't have to accept the limits anymore and or at least in the current timeframe and also some of the things that Ping was talking about in terms of what the folks at Intel or other microprocessors folks do around in terms of Moore's law. We're gonna have an opportunity right now to think bigger than we've ever thought before. It's not just about operational savings. That's unfortunately the world that Enterprise IT lived for so long. We're in that replatforming now. So I think it's just the most exciting time to be an Enterprise IT in a long time. Ping, your final thoughts and guidance and learnings and advice? You know, I think just to add to Frank, I think it's an unbelievable time as we said earlier to be an entrepreneur in the Enterprise software IT space. So I think the only thing I would add is it's the team is so important. So if you're starting something or you're joining something, I don't think you can overemphasize that dimension because every good idea will have lots of people doing it. And it's the team that has those instincts and the subtle ability to see around the corners, two steps ahead, et cetera, et cetera, are the ones that are gonna build a great opportunity. So that's one thing that we constantly obsess about is finding those entrepreneurs and that can build those teams and those teams that can build those great companies. Guys, thanks for your time. I know you're really busy. Give everyone a round of applause here for the venture capital, Bing Lee, Frank Artali. Okay, now we're gonna adjourn to the party room next door. Thanks for your time. I know we're a little bit over. I appreciate your time and thanks for everyone for coming for Silicon Angle, theCUBE, Wikibon.