 So, hey, everyone, I'm Steven Augustus, head of open source at Cisco. I've spent a few years in the cloud-native community and kind of open source overall, starting at a Cora little company named Cora-OS, maybe you've heard of it. Cora-OS, Red Hat, Heptio, VMware, now over at Cisco. Kubernetes steering, to-do group steering, open asset stuff, governing board, some other stuff. But Liz, want to take it away? Yeah, I mean, we've known each other for years through this whole community, right? I mean, kind of like Kelsey said, Kelsey and I go way back, Steven and I go way back. I've been involved in the CNCF for like a million years on the TOC and the governing board now. And at ISOvalent, I've been there for almost like, well, it's three years and about a week. And as chief open source officer there, and prior to that, I had some other startups quite so successful, some others that have been pretty done okay, or are doing okay. Yeah, I mean, I love this space. And as you probably all heard, we're doing a little thing, we're doing a little acquisition. So, you know, it's, you know, with the usual preamble that, you know, future-looking statements, et cetera, et cetera. But we are in the pre-closed state for the ISOvalent acquisition in Cisco. Really exciting, really exciting times. I think the biggest piece of this is to me personally, it's all of the conversations, what Kelsey said, it's what Liz said, I've spent a decent amount of time in space, Liz has spent a decent amount of time in the space. I'm looking out into the crowd and seeing, you know, seeing lots of former coworkers, seeing lots of former coworkers, current friends, current best friends, even, right? And a lot of the people at ISOvalent are friends that I've worked with multiple companies at this point, right? So like, when I heard this was happening, I was like, oh, yes, coworkers again. So just a brief, is anybody here? Well, who knows about ISOvalent? Who's heard of ISOvalent before? Okay, quite a lot of hands. I brought up this slide from 2020 with our co-founders, Thomas and Dan, who are looking extremely youthful, and really our mission hasn't changed at all since these kind of much earlier, this is from a pitch deck from 2020, you know, our background really strong in Linux kernel, in networking, in security, and particularly in the EBPF technology that we've been working on. And Sillium, which I'm hoping a few of you have used. Any hair here, Sillium? Yeah. All right, so I'm going to run very quickly through the history. So 2014 was when EBPF was started. Watch the documentary. Sillium's been around since 2016. It was another year until ISOvalent was founded. Then we started getting pretty quickly picked up by some cloud providers who wanted to use Sillium. We were very involved in the community right from the get go with things like EBPF Summit. In 2021, we contributed Sillium to the CNCF. More providers start picking it as their networking solution. Then last year, we graduated and right at the end of the year, just before Christmas, we got quite a fun Christmas present. That's a little Christmas present, right? So GitHub stars, kind of a nice thing to look at and see how your projects being adopted, not necessarily very concrete. What is much more concrete is money. And I haven't put a scale on there. But as you can see, really from for several years, we were getting a good multiplier on our revenue. So although I think it's incredibly important how engaged we've been with the community, it is also incredibly important as a business that you have paying customers. So the view from the Cisco side is a lot of what we've said already. We've got all of these experts with deep, deep expertise across the stack. We've got kernel networking, security, cloud-native experts, recognized events-first leadership. I think we are merely a small percentage of some of the brilliant people who get to work on and in and around the ISOVillain team. And so we've got TOC members. There are governing board members across multiple spaces. We've got Duffy in the crowd as well as Field CTO, but overall brilliant man. So looking at, so I think from the community angle, there's always this conversation about trust. You never really want to see the corporate goliath kind of swing in and go, yes, this is how you should do this thing. It's really about having that conversation in the community. And I think there's a very visceral reaction when you deal with kind of having that conversation between a large enterprise and a smaller company. And that's like, hey, we're in, I think one of the conversations I like to have internally is, so for context, I work for Outshift, which is Cisco's incubation arm. And if you've seen the news recently, we have a chief strategy officer, which is not a new chief strategy officer. Our chief strategy officer is also the chief of staff for the CEO. But we've combined the corporate strategy, development, corp dev, and incubation groups. So I work within the incubation group for Cisco. Cisco's OSPO and Cisco Research are the two groups within incubation that have a global mandate. So we don't just work in Outshift, we work across all of Cisco. And from that perspective, you often have to have this conversation in the incubation arm about when you're competing against startups. How do you compete against a startup when I think the difference in a startup is that there is an existential threat from the incubation perspective in a large corporation. If we mess up, someone might give us some more money and we try to do it again, and if something sticks and then we kind of put the machine behind it and run with it. If you're a startup and your idea doesn't work, you die. So I think there needs to be a recognition and understanding that the people who are working on these technologies day to day at startups, they're trying to build something to survive fundamentally. So when you ask, so having the conversation around build by partner invest, that's usually the conversation when you think of M&A. Is this something that we could replicate ourselves? And I think the answer is obvious. Again, it's that recognition that when the folks that work in ISOVALENT spend so much time in this space, respect that. Respect that and figure out how to work with it. So Cisco was a series A investor, kind of saw the various investors across the board, but we've been kind of looking at ISOVALENT since 2020 before that. And then really, the final bit from the Cisco view is a perception change. When I started at Cisco and roughly similar to you, so I started at Cisco in 2021. And I wish I could say it was just a passing comment from one person or so, but I got it pretty often. So I'm going to say it here. Wow, I didn't realize Cisco worked on open source. And so I think a lot of people recognize Cisco as hardware, networking. Yes, you want boxes in your data center, we can do that for you. And the very brief history that I've had in open source, I don't know, maybe seven years at this point, we have people with decades of experience in open source who have took projects to graduation, before there was even maturity models for projects, created that process, work across a bunch of SDOs and open source foundations before they were foundations. And I'm just a little guy in comparison. So that tells me that there is a perception problem. So part of this is, how can we learn the magic? How can we replicate it across Cisco? And how can we let these leaders with an ISOVALENT carry that torch across from business groups to business groups? All right, so I guess three principles that we've always had in ISOVALENT is foundational. The team, incredible talent, but not just talent, also the right values. I don't know if he was in the room for Tim's talk earlier, but he spoke about having a team that share values. And I think that's really important within ISOVALENT as well. And the culture is incredibly important. We spend a lot of time and energy investing in what our culture is. Technology obviously also incredibly important. And I have the privilege of working with some of the best minds in EBPF, in kernel networking, in cloud native networking. There's so much expertise available. And then also just having this really, you know, being determined to have successful customers who love working with us and who are successful because they've worked with us. And those three things I think are really crucial. At this point, I haven't said the word open source. Yeah, that's weird. Maybe we should talk about that open source. We should talk about open source. One of the reasons is because our culture, particularly on the engineering side, has been so based on people who've come from the kernel world, who've come from an open source world that it's kind of implicit. You know, we've really kind of embodied open source, I think, since day one and been really focused on getting that open source project into the hands of users, getting feedback from users. Also, I think from a kind of foundation point of view and the kind of things that we learn from, you know, being in environments like this, the importance of things like diversity, the importance of bringing in people from different backgrounds, whether we're talking about the benefits to the project, the benefits to our culture, you know, we're an incredibly distributed team. I think having that kind of trust and kind of transparency within the team has been super important. And we've tried to extend that to the community as well. I've got the kind of logo there from the EBPF Summit 2020. That was the event. I spoke with it. I wasn't at ICervalent at that time, but it was participating in that event and seeing how incredibly honest ICervalent and Thomas and Dan and all these people were with the community and how much they were kind of investing in making that summit successful for everybody who was involved in that technology. I loved it and, you know, that was what kind of pulled me into the organization. I think from the leadership level and the individual level, right? Again, there's so many brilliant, talented individuals across this team that each of them have their own value system, right? And part of that is like making good software. They're not just contributors and maintainers. They're users of these things. They're actually trying to solve problems that they themselves had, right? So seeing that form in the aggregate in a company, right? And seeing that being just a very honest waypoint for how ICervalent delivers and how ICervalent presents themselves in the community has been really impressive. So why do we do all this community engagement and what's kind of in it from a business perspective? That's fully your point. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We can say these points over again. They might land. Yeah, so being successful within the community and having people who are using the open source project really does help promote the project. I mean, it almost goes without saying but maybe it doesn't go without saying that if you have an independent person who talks about your project or talks about your paid product but it's more likely to happen for an open source project, that independent enthusiasm for your project is worth more than you can spend on actual paid marketing. And I think as we have these conversations of kind of like top-down, bottoms-up motions and you know, PLG, POG and growth, the, I think an important realization to have when you're interacting in open source spaces, right? Whether it's GitHub, your Slack channels, your Discord, your Metrix, et cetera, et cetera. That is, you're having a conversation with a potential user, with a potential customer, right? And each of the people within your group, within your company need to market to that, right? So every good, every bad interaction that you have across GitHub that counts, it shows up somewhere. And so again, not just being independent advocates of the software but being able to create those connections with people on, again, on a GitHub on a Slack channel in a very genuine way that allows them to, because you are never going to reach, you're never gonna reach full penetration of your audience, right? But having people who can advocate for you, having those champions within companies, right? I use this, I love this, every time I'm working with the maintainers, I'm having a great time, right? That counts for something, that counts for something in the sales conversation. And if you cast your mind back to that graph of GitHub styles and how the revenue kind of followed that, that kind of makes sense, because the more people who are using your project for free, the more people there are, some proportion of those people need some help or additional- Tell me about some of your enterprise, right? Exactly, exactly. And I mean, Stephen's talked quite a bit about the expertise that we have and sort of recognizing how talented people are, I guess, and how we've been able to teach and educate others in the community about the kind of technology that we work with and we find that, that's something we're very proud of and enjoy doing. And then also, we get to learn from the community, they teach us about what they need, they tell us about their problems, and that's really enabled some pretty innovative things out. That's your roadmap, that's your roadmap, right? People are telling you exactly what they need, figure out how to turn that into product, right? So, you know, you can create some amazing open-source software, which you are giving away, but that's not necessarily going to be sufficient for everybody and so long as there are enough people out there who want to pay for something that you're adding value with, whether that's enterprise features, whether it's support, whether it's the additional field hardening that we have in our enterprise distribution, whether it's that ability to work together as kind of design partners for some specific problem, these things are all adding value. And, you know, I just put a few of our customers up there, but, you know, there's a significant set of customers who are not, who won't feel comfortable if they're just using open-source solutions that they want somebody at the end of a phone, essentially, to, you know, help them when things go wrong. So, seeing a few choreos in the room, I want to talk about something that we did at Choreoise. So, I was on the customer success team, also eventually field engineering, spent a lot of time interacting with customers, we've got some folks in the room who are also using solutions architects, when we had something called field validation, right? So, when we released, every time we released a new version of Tectonic or Quay, core update, we have this process where we would step through, you'd have to assign at least two members of either, you know, a customer success field solutions architecture, and we would sit down and we'd run through the checklist, we'd see if the checklist was valid, right? We'd think about all the questions our customers were asking us, and we would, we had the ability to block a release if we could not validate that it would work for a customer. All right, so being able to have that feedback loop between folks who are working in the field, again, to that field hard and releases, being able to have some sort of feedback loop that you can ensure that your customers are gonna be successful because you're actually listening to them and you're building that feedback back into the product, so. So from the Cisco side, what are we gonna do? Again, Kelsey kind of touched on the imminent danger that you have when you've got the corporate Goliath comes and takes your baby, right? And I think for all of us who are very excited about the acquisition just as much, we spent time on kind of going through Twitter and Rastadon and Blue Sky and reading the comments, like reading the, never read the comment section, sometimes read the comment section, right? The, you know, and of course you're gonna see the, well, does this mean Sillium's dead? Well, oh, I gotta start learning this thing or that thing, right? And no, that is not what is happening. I remember having a conversation with our lead open source counsel who spends time doing, spends time on M&A and he goes, have you talked to Steven about this yet? And they're like, no, we're probably gonna bring him later. He's like, you should do that now. So during the tail end of the conversation, I spent time on TechDue diligence for this deal. And I think one of the biggest conversations that we had throughout that process was, don't mess this up. Do not touch them, right? This is magic, right? You have to respect the magic, right? So the idea is that we keep the team together, we understand the model, right? And that should be, that needs to be a blueprint. I think it's very easy when we, so my incubation group, we spend a lot of time like finding interesting startups and having conversations and sometimes those conversations turn into acquisitions. So there's lots of, I think there are lots of little pockets of, you can find multiple code forges across Cisco, you can find multiple collaboration tools across Cisco. And I think part of that is understanding how people work well, right? Understanding how those teams work well and not trying to mess it up, right? I think there is that eventual conversation about how does this integrate into the long-term strategy for this business group, for the company overall, but we need to continue investing in the customer experience. We need to make sure that we don't change the momentum of how ISOvalent is already having conversations with existing and potential customers, as well as how they are continuing to maintain the open source projects that we have. So what I see is this is an opportunity for us to, we have a few different things happening at Cisco that have just beautiful confluence, right? We have the, we're still pre-closed, but this is, we've got ISOvalent coming in, we just closed Splunk yesterday. We've just hired a new, so my peer on the legal side, an open source legal director, growing the open source legal team for exactly these kinds of conversations. So like, this is our opportunity to double down on our investment in open source, right? We already have leaders coming in from ISOvalent. We have leaders within Cisco. I see a few of them in the room. On the cloud-native, security, observability, networking angle, it is time for us to all get together and show up in force, right? I think it's very easy in those pockets of the company. We are a company of 80,000 plus people. It's very easy in those pockets to, again, this goes back to the, wow, Cisco, I didn't realize Cisco was doing open source before you joined, which is, frankly, it's not a great statement, right? So using this opportunity to say like, let's talk about what Cisco's actually doing, right? ISOvalent is one component of it, but from the cross BU angle, the way that, the way that EBPF in general, as a technology has the potential to penetrate across so many layers of the stack, right? So we're having conversations about security. We're having conversations about networking. We're having conversations about observability. Those are multiple groups within Cisco, right? Those are thousands of engineers. So this is a huge, huge opportunity, not just to work in, so ISOvalent will be landing as an entire unit, which will not be attached, within the security business group, but it's not just about security. It's about everything within Cisco. We have recently, within the last year in change, there was something called the Cisco, Cisco transformation office that was created with the intent of shifting our AR away from hardware sales and into more software-based revenue, right? So this is a component of it. Splunk is definitely a component of it. So Cisco is, I want to make it very clear, Cisco is not just a hardware company anymore. We haven't been for a very long time, and I hope that the moves that we have coming in the future will allow you to see that. I think we've got about one minute, and I really wanted to make sure we have time to share some of the lessons that, maybe we can, maybe helpful for other open source startups. So one is that value your time. I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with a maintainer on a different project who was talking about how much time he spends supporting for free, and then he named one of the world's top five biggest banks, and I'm like, why are you doing that for free? He's like, well, because they're using my pro... Yes, get them to pay for it. Yeah, somebody comes and tells you they've got a problem in production and it's really urgent and critical that they solve it, or they basically make it very clear that they have extremely deep pockets. Don't just give things away. Your time is valuable. They are sending you a massive signal, waving a big red flag saying we want to pay you some money. See those signals and act on them. So in investing in the community, I think we've talked a lot about this. I anecdotally spent some time as a KubeCon program chair and we had a few companies who would kind of dial in and go, hey, we've got really low acceptance rates to what's going on. You could submit 1,000 proposals that are not high quality and they will get rejected just the same, right? The problem, I think, in those situations is that you don't understand what the community needs because you're not spending time with the community, right? So I think you need to fundamentally, you need to get into the dirt, you need to invest in the community, you need to understand what they need. You need to be your community. And you need to understand who your community is and who are the people who are important to you, your project and your business. Don't get distracted by your competitors who will sometimes say things that are distracting and can be quite an emotional and time sink. And really you have to be very careful about how much time you invest in things that are not actually of any interest to your real community. People will try to burn your time and energy in unproductive ways. And the more you can ignore that, the more you can rise above it, the more you can just focus on doing the right thing for the people you care about, the better. Yeah, I think it comes down to being better, right? And again, realizing that each of those conversations that you're having, there are sales conversations. We got the sign, so I'm just gonna hit the last slide. Yeah, I found this quote on the Cisco acquisition slide and I think it does make it very clear that we are very well aligned. Cisco is aligned with the vision that ISOvalent has for investing in Sillium, open source, in building business on top of that. I think we couldn't have landed in a place that is better aligned. I'm so excited. So hopefully there's time to squeeze in a question or two. Oh, I got questions, sorry, folks. I'll get some to the audience too. Look, I think Cisco and you know this well, you're in a very important position in the stack. Every company, we've seen this with NVIDIA, made GPUs, they're going up the stack. But in their case, other vendors and their competitors are also part of their community. So I'm gonna challenge a little bit. When you work at that level at an open source project, you're going to attract all kind of people, other developers, other contributors and competitors, especially as good as that software was at that level of the stack. Going forward, you're probably gonna see a lot more competitors show up and I think they're gonna probably want to be in your community because they're gonna try to fill a gap, even if it's a perceived gap that is going to be left behind because whenever there's an acquisition of a startup, some companies or some people may elect to deal with companies that are not a part of a bigger one, how do you reconcile that statement? I mean, you are 100% right. We have already seen one competitor who is explicitly going out there and saying, oh, now that iSurveillance is being bought by Cisco, there, you know, you need to come to us for your vendor neutral solution. And I'm like, wait a minute, you are a vendor. How is your solution vendor neutral? Anyway. So yeah, I think it is, you know, and we wanted to hit on that last point, last, if we, I think Simon will leave more time, but I think it really does come down to that integrity component, right? Being better, right? We are, I think in this industry, you get to a point where as you go up the stack, across the stack, up, down, left, right, BA, BA, start of the stack, you see that it's impossible to finitely say like, okay, these people do this, these people do this and make it really easy. There is always going to be that co-opetition, right? Those, the frenemy situations that you have to, that you have to kind of deftly navigate, right? And I think a lot of it is a JV to quote, right? Where you're agenda on your sleeve, right? We know what we're doing. We are open source, we are open source veterans, continue to do that, continue to execute on the roadmap from the open source perspective, from the product perspective and have those conversations. Maybe those are opportunities to partner. I don't think they need to be opportunities for competition. I think also, when we donated, I don't like the word donated, contributed Cillium to the foundation, that comes with the essentially a guarantee that we can't change the license. Obviously that's been a contentious thing in the last year or two for other companies. I think the fact that we had the confidence that it's fine, we have so much expertise in the team and I think we were prepared to stand behind that expertise and say, other people can come and work on this code too. That's great, please feel free to build products on this project, but we feel so confident in the conversations that we've had with our users and our customers, that if we don't retain that advantage, we have screwed up, it's on us to do that right. So throughout the day, we had some venture capitalists come up to talk about the investment stages. Looks like Cisco was in one of those investment stages. In many ways, you've kind of been a part of the exit now. So what's the exit strategy? And so when you think about it, and maybe you touched on it in your talk a little bit here, you bring on this group to that buy versus build. Do we go and compete with the startup that has all of this expertise? You wanna bring them in instead, so you acquired a great piece of technology, great community that comes with it and some really great engineers, but I'm imagining lots of people who rely on this technology, some of them that have never paid for this technology. The question that tends to come up in moments like this is, how do you recoup this investment? This is business that we're talking about. This is the startup festival. We're gonna give a little bit of leeway here for business. When you think about a return on investments, in your mind, Steven, I know you can't speak for all of Cisco, so I won't put that spotlight on you. But when you think about return on investment, what comes to mind in terms of a product, technology roadmap, and then what the community looks like over time? Yeah, so I think on the personal level and for the open source program office, won the opportunity kind of on that last point that I hit for, this is a perception change, right? So I think some of the return on investment is having people understand that Cisco can be a trusted partner within open source communities and we have been in the past and will continue to be. From the, well, what are we gonna sell people, right? There are some things that are in the works that I cannot announce yet, that are directly related to the Isovalent acquisition. I think it was a pivotal moment in the conversation with the security business group that was, we could do this, and I think we're on the precipice of trying to do this. Why would we spend the time, spend the time trying to build something better than what already exists, right? So I think it's, there's a counterbalance of, well, what is the investment in engineering resources and marketing resources to get something new out there that is kind of already built, right? So we'll see that come to fruition in the next few quarters, but I think in terms of return on investment, I think it is split between the open source reputation and continuing to build upon that. And then the, well, what can we crank out? What can we crank out afterwards, right? So I think continuing to maintain Sillium Enterprise and some of the enterprise offerings within coming out of the Isovalent team and then also starting to build on top of some of those partnerships, those existing partnerships across, whether it be cloud providers, whether it be, you know, competition, frenemies in the space. Awesome, that's the time. Big round of a hand for our, thank you very much. Thank you very much.