 From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, covering ACG Silicon Valley Grow Awards, brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for the 14th annual Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley Grow Awards. We've been here for a couple of years now and it's a big event, 300 people coming in to talk about really an ecosystem of helping other companies grow and we're excited to have the new CEO, Drew Freeman. Drew, great to meet you. Thanks, Jeff. Yeah, pleasure to be here. Yeah, so you've been here like two months, I think, so what attracted you to the opportunity? Well, it's kind of an exciting organization, actually. I've been working with ACG Silicon Valley for a little while now, doing some programming with them around autonomous driving in the connected car. And I got to know my predecessor, Sally Para, through that and through the course of the discussions. She's a wonderful salesperson. She kind of sucked me into the role and here I am. So what is the mission for people that aren't familiar with ACG? Essentially what we are is an organization that's dedicated towards providing networking opportunities, education opportunities, programming for C-level executives and other senior-level executives at companies to help them develop their career and also grow their businesses. Okay, and like you said, Sally's been at it for 13 years, she's stepping out of the role which opened up the opportunity for you. So what's kind of your charter now as you take the baton from Sally? Fresh enthusiasm, fresh energy, fresh face. What are you excited about? Yeah, so, of course, it sounds silly, but to take things to the next level, whatever that means, but to try to identify a vision for the organization going forward, maybe find some new areas to develop content around, attract some sponsors in the technology domain and bring content that will maybe continue the thought leadership area. So we are recognized as a thought leadership within the community here in Silicon Valley and also within the greater ACG community. But we want to really kind of notch that up a little bit. We're bringing in some university sponsorship now and really kind of looking at some of the leading edge areas that Silicon Valley is kind of on the tip of the spear, essentially, globally for innovation. And we want to make sure that we're putting that content out really to our community. Right, and this is the Grow Awards. This is an awards banquet, a celebration tonight, but you guys do a number of different types of events throughout the year. So what are some of the formats of the different ways that people can get involved? Right, so the one that most people are aware of is our keynote panels, because those are open to a larger audience. Typically we get about 100 people there at these events. We bring in a panel of experts and we have a discussion on some topic that's quite current at the moment. But we also have a public board circle where people who are on public boards of publicly traded companies will have a discussion within that smaller group of people about relevant topics. We have a C-suite circle where C-level executives come together, we bring in outside experts that will come in and talk about things like economic trends or whatever the current issues are and then they have a robust discussion around that topic. We have an M&A circle. We also have kind of an accelerator environment where we have younger companies, sometimes startups, sometimes mid-market companies where we bring in some experts that kind of help them pop the hood and look at what some of the strategic issues are that they might be facing and et cetera. Okay, so that's all great, but let's talk about the stuff I know you're passionate about and it's so fun right now and that's autonomous vehicles. It's a really crazy time in the industry. You've got changes in the players, you've got changes in the propulsion, you've got changes in the ownership structure, you've got so many changes happening in the autonomous vehicle space and all the ecosystem around it. I just love to get your impressions. You've been playing in that space for a long time but in the automotive space, but to see the changes really accelerate driven in the large part obviously by Tesla and Elon Musk and we're here at the Computer History Museum. They got the great little display over there with the Google cars which they now Waymo and they have to keep changing them out because it went from the little bug looking thing now they're driving the van. So I just love to get your impressions as to the speed, some surprises, not surprises as we see this autonomous vehicle trend coming down the pike. Yeah, the technology is evolving at a remarkable speed. You know, that's being driven largely by the availability of increased processing power. You need to address the data bandwidth power as well. You've got to move a lot of data around the car to address this technology and that's really pushing the envelope of what cars can do. The industry itself still needs to make sure they can bring that to the market in a way that the market will accept that people in Main Street USA or Main Street Europe or Main Street Asia are going to be comfortable driving in. Car ownership is going to change a little bit especially in urban areas. People may not choose to buy a car in the urban areas. They may choose to do car sharing but in the Midwest, I think car ownership is still going to be a key element and it's not clear yet how ready people are to have a self-driving car as part of their own ownership. So the technology, while we can demonstrate it works, still needs to be demonstrated that works in a way that make people feel comfortable and so I think there's still a lot of innovation to be done in the software, in the AI, the machine learning, that makes people feel comfortable with that and there's a lot of great companies working on that. I'm amazed every day at the companies developing not only the sensors and things that enable the perception of the vehicle to improve but also the AI around that. But honestly, I think the rollout making it available to you and I on the street, it's going to be a lot slower than I think a lot of us have been thinking about for a while. Yeah, the trust issue is so interesting to me because on one hand, people do have to have some trust and we've talked to like Phantom Auto and some other companies that are trying to insert a person back in at some point in time to help with that trust. On the other hand, you have people driving the Teslas, especially or at least that's the ones we hear the most about that's a level two assist that people are treating like a level five fully autonomous vehicles and unfortunately there's been some fatalities and they're not level five vehicles so it's really two opposite extremes that we see people in their interaction with these things and they want it to be fully autonomous today and it's not but people are treating them that way. That's weird. Yeah, and I think that's one of the risks, right? I think level three is one area where I really think you probably will not see a lot of. I think level four where you can basically have fully autonomous but in a geofenced area will I think be the first area that really takes off. So on campuses in maybe urban areas that are fenced off from other vehicles, I think you will see that develop first. I don't think mixed mode traffic where you have a lot of vehicles where they're fully autonomous but you're going to expect the driver to be paying attention all the time and willing to take over the vehicle at any minute. I don't think that works. The human brain doesn't work that way. No, it doesn't work. It's funny, we were at a Ford event and they were taking us around on one of their, it was a press event. So they had the sampled driver guy ready to go and then they had a guy sitting in the right seat with a laptop checking things out. This poor guy in the left seat and he had his hands like a half an inch from the wheel on both sides was completely alert and ready to go. I'm like, you couldn't do this for more than 15 minutes or 20 minutes. It was the worst of all worlds for this poor guy. So it is going to be interesting that intermediate phase and it's going to be complicated but it's clearly coming at an incredible rate of speed. Right, exactly. And then you also have to manage, how do you manage the traffic when you have mixed mode, when you have human driven vehicles combined with autonomous vehicles. How do the autonomous vehicles react to human driven vehicles and how do the humans react to autonomous driven vehicles and we haven't really figured that out yet. Right, right. And then there's all the other law of unintended consequences with what do you do with the parking structure. I think curb management is an interesting thing that's really been highlighted lately in San Francisco with all the electric scooters that are now littering the sidewalks which nobody ever really thought about when they rolled out hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of scooters all over San Francisco. So good opportunities and crazy times ahead. And that's the beauty of this, right? All of these things actually create opportunities. You just have to stick with it and look at solutions and there's no shortage of really talented creative people to go address these opportunities and it's so fun to be involved in it right now. All right Drew, well congrats on your new position and we look forward to watching ACGSV evolve. Thank you very much. All right, he's Drew Freeman, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from the 14th Annual Grow Awards. Thanks for watching.