 Hello, welcome to theCUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. We're here with some SiliconANGLE and CUBE news. We have some funding announcement. Christine Yen, the CEO of honeycomb.io. CUBE alumni, great to see you again. Big news. Thanks for coming on here for this CUBE conversation and SiliconANGLE news. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me, John. So we just posted a story this morning. You guys had released a $50 million series D funding. Congratulations. It's a real big milestone in this market where there's a large percentage of people having a hard time raising money, yet early stage seed with the AI surge is booming. Cloud Native is booming. This is a tale of two cultural shifts of entrepreneurship and growth. And it's a leveling out. It's almost like, I won't call it a purge because that's like a little bit too over the top, but you're seeing a transition. This is where we're starting to see markers. So I really want to get into it. So before we get into that conversation that CUBECon coming up in Amsterdam, let's talk about the funding. Give us the news. How much did you raise? Give us the numbers. Who's in? Any new investors? Same investors? And what are you going to use the money for? Yeah. We're raising the series D, $50 million. Really excited to have, frankly, all existing investors back. This round was led by Headline, participated in by Scale Venture Partners, Insight Partners, as well as Long-Times Reporters, Storm Ventures and Industry. We are so excited to be able to raise this round and announce this round. This was a preemptive round, really driven by the level of interest and observability really hitting new heights last year between Gartner's Magic Quadrant, naming us as a leader and our O'Reilly book being released, Observability Engineering. It really feels like observability has finally moved from this buzzword that folks are curious about to a real established movement and that people are hungry for help understanding. Open Telemetry, of course, is a huge part of that. Last year, I think it became news that Open Telemetry was officially the second most active project as part of the CNCF. We've seen that at Kubecons and so we're really excited about the one coming up in Amsterdam. And the momentum around that project, again, it's just really testament to the level of interest and excitement around observability as a new way of understanding the more complex systems we keep building today. And we'll have them on, certainly at the Kube will be in Amsterdam as well. Maybe to every Kube gone there is. The bin, I didn't go last year, I had a little bit of a COVID problem, but that's gone. But I want to get into what you said. We talked before you came on camera about cloud native growth and this obviously series D is validation, obviously. But you have more future plans for the company. I'm sure there's probably growth in product, go to market, sales, growth. But the macro, I get that, but before we get into the specifics, there seems to be an underlying growth around how cloud, and we're calling it super cloud in our conversations, has created this whole effect where you can build a cloud company on top of the capex that Amazon, Azure have built. So you have all the capex players who have built billions of dollars in infrastructure. And you sit on top of that, that seems to be this cloud native sweet spot right now where you can have the benefits of cloud, but now build scalable platforms where you need the new cloud native observability. You need containers as a service. You need Kubernetes. This seems to be a trend. What's your take on this? Because you're in the middle of it. It seems like a new operating system is going to sit on top of the cloud for companies that don't even need to spend any capex. You know, I think the truth of the world that we're in is that every cycle, there's this paradigm shift in how we build software. Sometimes it is because there's a new technology that drags along a bunch of changes in how we need to deploy or how we need to structure our logic. Sometimes it's driven by social practices. New practices like platform engineering or SRE are changing how the humans building the software want to interact with the other humans. And along with that drives it to change in technology. And this is the beauty of tech, right? The world is just changing so quickly. The tools that we're using in building that future change quickly. And as far as observability is concerned, the tools that we then need to make sense of these new systems that we've built need to similarly keep up. And the CNCF has really been focused on this and absurdly is on the rise. And is that because of developer uptake or just the need for metrics instrumentation? Where's the growth coming from? Is it gaps? Is this evolution? Where's the tailwind? What's the big tailwind for you guys and observability? I think that a lot of this current excitement around open telemetry, I think it was rooted in the rise of tracing. Distributed tracing is a way of capturing telemetry from your software systems that is able to show relationships and connections in a way that is so much more important in these days where we have these complex distributed systems, whether it's across containers or microservices or clouds or serverless functions. All of these things play into needing in a more expressive data format to reflect what your logic is doing. And where open telemetry and honeycomb really shine is saying, hey, let's take the old data patterns that worked in our old simpler world and maybe set them aside and consider this new world, this new way of describing what the heck our code is doing and why it's not doing what we expect. That's the core problem. And that's why this problem that Honeycomb solves is never going to go away. The code that we think that we're writing is never exactly the code that is executing out there in front of our customers. And engineering teams are always going to need to figure out be able to close that loop. And you got to roll your eyes too when you see all the AI code being generated. It's only going to create more noise. I mean, come on, like, oh, it just writes my code. No, no, it's not the way it has to work. This is a huge issue around software supply chain. These are huge issues. So productivity aside, I mean, I could be more productive putting crappy code in the system with AI, but this is a new dynamic. What's your take on this? Just anecdotally, as this new wave hits with AI, not to go on a tangent, but you mentioned new code coming in. Very relevant. Honestly, AIOps, as a phrase, has been part of this world for years. And I think that like some of this AI generated code and some of the hype around it, the trap is always in believing that robots can do the work for you. AI is a tool. It is something that can augment your humans, can make them more powerful. And we are certainly, I won't give away anything that we're not ready to share yet, but I'll say that our interest is absolutely in how we can leverage some of these new technologies to build mega suits around your humans. Not robots. We're not trying to promise that we can do your work better than your engineers. But we thought we could make your engineers more productive, more insightful, more able to use these superpowers to get back to what the humans are really good at, which is being creative and solving problems. Yeah, I mean, AI should make good coders great and great coders exceptional. This is where, this is a human loop. They talk about the human loop. This is huge. This is back in the old, is there AI for AI management? I'm looking forward to talking more and it sounds like you've got some stuff going on there, which we'll try to get out of you in another interview, but stay on the news here, because I love some of the stories you guys are talking about in the press and our story. You guys have this approach around three pillars, logs, metrics and tracing. And you talk about socio-technical systems. Could you define that? What is socio-technical systems mean? Happy to. It is the acknowledgement that despite the focus on the technology that we're all using, ultimately the systems that we're building are a blend of the technologies that we use and the process, culture and humans necessary to build them. When we look at self-reengineering practices, so many of them, some misguided folks will say, oh, we just need to buy this new technology and all of our problems will be solved. And the truth is you can buy the technology, but you won't realize the value until you really start to think about how will my humans use this? How do I do the change management? How do I make sure that my practices are aligned with the technology investments I'm making, whether how you're architecting your software or the tools you're using to make sense of them? We think the two sides are irrevocably tied together. And that's why so much of our focus is, like I said, around making our customers' human teams be great through technology, never replacing or making promises we don't think we can do. I think people could go to the knee-jerk reaction. Oh my God, AI's going to sky net and they go dark. There's a lot of work that's been done over the years. I mean, AI has been a great discipline. I remember in the 80s, when I was getting my degree, AI principles were all, it was no compute. You had to build models. It was so hard to get into the game. I think what I like about cloud native and cloud is you can get into the game, quick build value and grow it. And I think when automation starts the conversation, you got to think about things like automatic instrumentation and observability, monitoring, all these things. This is a core part of your thesis for your company. Automating, instrumentation and observability for all. What's the next phase of growth for you guys with this investment? What are you guys going to focus on? What's next? Obviously open source is growing beautifully. We're seeing that continue to be the bedrock. I'm a big believer that that'll be a big part of the AI piece. We'll get that later. But for you guys, what's the future look like with the investment? Yeah, I think the things that we haven't already talked about include geo expansion. Right now we are heavily, many of our customers are in the US. We have some folks in EMEA and some folks in APAC, but we really want to have built a better solution to support the global software teams that we know are out there. I think what we're also really interested in is thinking about the entire development ecosystem. Ultimately, what does observability promise and Honeycomb really sell? We sell the truth about what your code is doing when you're not watching it. Well, who needs that? Well, it's going to be every other software tool out there that promises to make a change about what's going on in production. We have, today we have something like a hundred integrations already with partners like AWS and LaunchDarkly and CircleCI. But I think that there's a lot more there that we haven't, we've only begun to scratch the surface up. So, I'm very impressed with your, I'm impressed with the success. I remember our conversation in 2018, we were like speaking a whole nother language, but it was still the same game. Observability cloud native. Last time we spoke on theCUBE. Give an update on Honeycomb. What's the culture like for the company? I'll see success validate with this $50 million series D in this market. Huge congratulations on that. What are you guys doing for culture? What's it like to work there? Put a plug in for the company for people watching. I, my co-founder and I started Honeycomb after having been in Silicon Valley for years and having seen a lot of startups build really great products but lose their way. And so when we started the company, one of the things we committed to absolutely was being as thoughtful about building the company and the humans as much as the technology in the business. A couple of ways this manifested, in even in the boom times of a couple of years ago, when it feels like every company was very proud of doing things like forexing their headcount in a year or six-axing their headcount. I actually remember RVP engineering raising her hand and saying, hey, we cannot onboard more folks than two X growth. That's gonna be our bottleneck. We need to do this to retain our culture and our processes. And so that is where we will pause. And coming into 23, this means that we have been able to not have to turn to layoffs. We've been able to continue to be very thoughtful about how we grow and build our teams. And we actually published in our blog post around this raise that we earned a number of awards through comparably and Great Place to Work on how strongly our team feels about being a part of the Honeycomb team. Thank you for asking about that. I really take my hat off for you. Congratulations, that's a great culture. Being cool and relevant is great. And having a durable business that adds value and you maintain the growth wave, ride that growth wave. It's great success. And again, we've been following you guys for a while. And again, congratulations. And I'm so glad that you could come on theCUBE and share the news, Kristine. And good luck. We'll see you at KubeCon. And certainly, if not Amsterdam, we'll see you in Chicago. Awesome. Thanks so much. Looking forward to it. Kristine and co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb.io, Cube alumni, real player in the industry, making the right moves in a market that is going with the huge waves in cloud native. The AI trend is going to surge right into it. It's the confluence of the whole cloud. Next, Jan's here. Secure, we got you covered. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.