 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Well, welcome to the special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California. In our remote studio, we have a quarantine crew here during this COVID-19 crisis here, talking about the crisis and the impact of business and overall work. Joined by a great guest, Dustin Kirkland, CUBE alumni who's now the chief product officer at Apex Clearing. This COVID-19 has really demonstrated to the mainstream world stage, not just inside the industry that we've been covering for many, many years, that the idea of at scale means something completely different and certainly DevOps and Agile is going mainstream to survive when people are realizing that now. And no better guest than have Dustin join us who's had experiences in open source. He's worked across the industry from Ubuntu, OpenStack, Kubernetes, Google, Canonical, Dustin, welcome back to the CUBE here remotely. You looking good? Yeah. Yeah, thanks, John. Last time we talked, I was in the studio and we are talking over the internet. This is a lot of fun. Well, I really appreciate it. I know you've been in your new roles since September, a lot's changed. But one of the things why I wanted to talk with you is because you and I have talked many times around DevOps. This has been the industry conversation. We've been inside the ropes. Now you're starting to see with this new scale of work at home, forcing all kinds of new pressure points, giving people the realization that the entire life with digital and with technology can be different. It doesn't have to be kind of augmented with their existing life. It's a full on technology driven impact. And I think a lot of people are learning that and certainly healthcare and finance are two areas in particular that are impacted heavily. Obviously people who worry about the economy and we're worried about people's lives. These are two major areas. But even outside that there's new entrepreneurs right now that I know who are working on new ventures. You're seeing people working on new solutions. This is kind of bringing the DevOps concept to areas that quite frankly weren't there. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to that. Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, the whole world has changed in 30 short days. You know, we knew something was amiss in China. We knew that there was a lot of just danger for people. The danger for business though, didn't become apparent until vast swaths of the workforce got sent home. And there's a number of businesses and industries that are coping relatively well with this. Certainly those who have previously adopted or have experienced doing work remotely, doing business by video teleconference, having resources in the cloud, having just people and expertise who are able to continue working at nearly 100% capacity in 100% remote environments. There's a lot of technology behind that and there are some industries and in particular some firms, some organizations that were really adept and were able to make that shift almost overnight. You know, maybe there were a couple of bumps along the way. Some VPN settings needed to be tweaked and Zoom settings need to be changed a little bit. But for many of this was a relatively smooth transition and we may be doing this for a very long time. Yeah, I want to get your thoughts as an interest before we get into some of the product stuff that you guys are working on, some other things. What's your general reaction to people in your circles, inside the industry and tech industry and outside? What are you seeing a reaction to this new scale, work from home, social distancing, isolation? What are your observations? Yeah, you know, I think we're in for a long haul. This is going to be the new normal for quite some time. I think it's super important to check on the people you care about. And before we get into pen and tech, check on the people you care about, especially people who either aren't yet respecting the social distancing norms and impress upon them the importance that, hey, this is about you. This is about the people you care about. It's about people you don't even know because there are plenty of people who can carry this and not even know. So definitely check on the people that you care about and reach out to those people and stay in touch. We all need one another more than ever, right? I manage a team and it's super important, I think, to understand how much stress everyone is under. I've got over a dozen people that report to me. Most of them have kids and families. We start out our weekly staff meeting now and we bring the kids in. They're curious. They want to know what's going on. So first five, 10 minutes of our meeting is meet the family. And that demystifies some of what we're doing. It actually keeps the other 50 minutes of the meeting pretty quiet in our experience. But it's really humanized an aspect of work from home. It's always been a bit taboo. We laugh about the reporter in Korea whose kid and his wife came in during the middle of a live on-air interview. There's certainly, I've worked from home for almost 12 years. Those are really uncomfortable situations until about a month ago when that just became the norm. And from that perspective, I think there's a humanization that we're far more understanding of people who work from home now than ever before. It's fun to have heard people say, my wife didn't know what I did until I started working at home. And took comments to seeing people's family and saying, well, that's awesome. And just bringing a personal connection, not just this software mechanism that connects people for some meeting. And we've all been on those meetings. They go along and you're sitting there and you're turning the camera off so you can sneeze, all these things are happening. When you start to think about that beyond it being a software mechanism that it's a social equation right now. People have shared experiences. This has been an interesting time. Yeah, then just sharing those experiences. We do a thing internal on our Slack channel every day. We try to post a picture. We call it hashtag recess. And at recess, we take a picture of walking the dogs or playing with the kids or gardening or whatever it is, going for a run. Again, just trying to make the best of this, take advantage of, you know, it's hard working from home but trying to take advantage of some of those once in a lifetime opportunities we have here. And my team has started pub quiz on Fridays. So we're mostly spread across in the U.S. And so we're able to do this at a reasonable hour. But the last couple of Fridays, we've jumped on a Zoom, downloaded a pub trivia game. Most of us cracked a beer, a glass of wine or a cocktail. You know, it actually puts a punctuation mark on the end of the week. It's a period on the end of the week because that's the other thing about this, man. If you don't have some boundaries, it's easy to go from an eight or nine hour normal day to 10, 12, 14, 16 hour days. Saturday bleeds into Sunday, bleeds into Monday. And then, you know, just the rat race takes over. You got to get the exercise. You have a routine. That's my experience. What's your advice for people who are going to home for the first time? Do you have any best practices? Yeah, so I actually had a blog post on this about two weeks ago and put up almost a shopping list. Some of the things that I've assembled here in the work from home environment. It's something I've been doing since 2008. So it's been there for a good long while. It's a little bit hard to accumulate all the technology you need. But I would say most important, have a space, some kind of space. Some people have more room or less, but even just a corner in a master bedroom with a stand up desk, some space that is your own, that the family understands and respects. The other best practices, set some time boundaries. I like to start my day early. I'll try to break for a little bit for that recess, see the family some, and then knock off at a reasonable hour. So establish those boundaries. Yeah, I've got a bunch of tips in that blog post I can shoot you after this. But it's the sort of thing that, be a bit understanding too of other people in this situation for the first time, perhaps. So offer whatever help and assistance you can and be understanding that man, things just aren't like they used to be. That's great advice. Thanks for the insights. I want to get to something that I see happening. And this always kind of happens when you see these waves where there's a downturn or there's some sort of an event. In this case, it's catastrophic and the way Vector didn't like this and the impact as we just discussed. But what comes out of it is creativity around entrepreneurial activity and certainly reinvention businesses, reforming, retrenching, resetting, whatever word pivot, digital transformation, there's plenty of words for it. But this is the time where people can actually get a lot done. I was always commenting in my last interview that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth when he was sheltering in place and Isaac Newton invented calculus. So you can actually get some work done and you're starting to see people look at the new technology and start disrupting old incumbent markets because now more than ever, things are exposed, the opportunity recognition becomes clear. So I want to get your thoughts on this, you're a product person, you've got a lot of product management skills and you're currently taking this DevOps to financial market with FinTech and your business. So you're applying known principles in software and tech and disrupting an existing industry. I think this is going to be a common trend for the next five years. Yeah, so on that first note, I think you're exactly right. There will be a reckoning and there will be a ton of opportunities that come out of this for the already or the rapidly transformed digital native digital focused business. There will be some that survive and thrive here. I think you're seeing a lot of this with the popularity of Zoom that has spiked recently. I think you're going to see technologies like DocuSign being used in places that, some of those places that still require wet signatures but you can't get to the notary and then sign a, I don't know, a refi on your mortgage or something like that. And so I think you're going to see a bunch of those. The biggest opportunities are really around our education system. I've got two kids at home and I'm in a pretty forward thinking school district in Austin, Texas, but that's not the norm where our teachers are conducting classes and assignments over Zoom. I've got a kindergarten and a second grader, right? There's somewhat limits to what they can do with technology. I think you're going to see a lot of entrepreneurial solutions that develop in that space and that's going to go from K through 12 and then into college. You think about how universities have had to shift and cancel classes and what's happening with graduation. I've got a six and an eight year old and I've been told I need to save $200,000 a piece for each of them to go to college, which is just an astounding number, especially to someone like me who went to an inexpensive public university on a scholarship, saving that kind of money for college and just thinking about how much more efficient our education system might be with a lot more digital, a lot more digital education, digital testing and classes, while still maintaining the college experience and what that's going to look like in 10 years. I think we're going to see a lot of changes over these next 18 months to our education. Dustin, talk about the event dynamic. Physical events don't exist currently. Certainly even when they do come back, they should and they will. The role of the virtual space is going to be highlighted and new opportunities will emerge. You mentioned education. People learn not just for school, whether they're kids, whether they're professionals. Learning and collaboration work tools are going to reshape. What's your take on that marketplace? Because we got to do virtual events. You can't just replicate a physical event and move it to digital as a complex system. Boy, yeah. I mean, you're talking about an entire industry. We saw the Google events, Google Next, Google I.O., the Microsoft events, just across the, I'm here in Austin, Texas, all of South by Southwest was canceled, which is just, it's breathtaking. When does that come back and what does it look like? Is it a year or two or more from now? What do, events is where I spend my time and when I get on a plane and I fly somewhere, I'm usually going to a conference or a trade show. Think about the sports industry. People who get on a plane to go to an NFL game. John, I don't have all the answers, man, but I'm telling you that entire industry is rapidly, rapidly going to evolve. I hope and pray that one day we're back I can go back to a college football game again. I hope I can sit in a CUBE studio at a CUBECon and open stack or some other conference again. Hey, we should do a rerun because I was watching the Patriots game last night. Tom Brady beating the Chiefs October from last year was one of the best games of the season, went down to the wire and I watched it and I'm like, okay, that's Tom Brady still in the Patriot uniform on the TV. I mean, do we do reruns? I mean, this is the question right now. There's a big void the next three months. What do we do? Do we replay the highlights from the CUBE? Do we have physical get-togethers with Zoom? Which would you take on how people should? Yeah, you know, the reruns only go so far, right? I'm a Texas Aggie, man. I could watch Johnny football in his prime anytime, but I know what happened in those games. They're just not as exciting as something that's a surprise. I'm actually curious about e-sports for the first time. You know, what would it look like to watch a couple of kids who are really good at Madden football on a PlayStation go at it? What would other games that I've never seen look like? In our space, it's a lot more about, I think, podcasts and live content and staying connected and apprised of what's going on. Making, we locked up there for a second. Yeah, I think it's going to be really interesting. I'm still following you guys. I certainly see you active on social media. I'm sort of more addicted than ever to live news. And in fact, I'm ready to start seeing some stuff that doesn't involve COVID-19. So from that perspective, man, keep turning out good content and good content that's pertinent to the rest of the rest of our industry. That's great stuff. Well, Dustin, take a minute to explain what you're doing at Apex Clearing, your mission, and what are you guys excited about? Yeah, so Apex Clearing, we're a fintech. We're a very forward-focused, digitally-focused fintech. We're well-positioned to continue servicing the needs of our clients in this environment. We went fully remote the first week of March, long before it was mandatory. And our business shifted pretty seamlessly. We worked through a couple of hiccups, provisioning extra VP and IP addresses, and upgrading a couple of service plans on some of the software as a service we buy. But besides that, our team has done just a marvelous job transitioning to remote. We are in the broker-dealer and registered advisor space. So we provide the Clearing services, which handles stock trades, equity trades in the back end, and the custodial services. We actually hold Safeguard, the equities, that our correspondents, we call our clients correspondents, their retail customers end up holding. So we've been around in our current form since about 2012. This was a retread of a previous company that was bought and retooled as Apex Clearing in 2012. Very shortly after that, we helped Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment, a whole bunch of really forward-looking companies reinvent what it meant to buy and sell and trade securities online and to hold assets in a robo-advisor like Betterment. Today, we are definitely well-known, well-respected for how quickly and seamlessly our APIs can be used by our correspondents in building really modern e-banking and e-brokerage experiences. So you guys have a platform? Are you guys like a DevOps platform or get API? We're more like a software as a service or bend tech and brokerage. So our products are largely APIs that our correspondents use their own credentials to interact with and then using our APIs, they can open accounts, which means get an account number from the systems that allows them to then fund that account, connect via ACH and other bank connectivity platforms, transfer cash into those accounts and then start conducting trades. And some of our correspondents have that down to a 60-second experience in a mobile app, from a mobile app, you can register for that account if you need to take a picture of an ID, have all of that imported at your tax information, have that account number associated with your banking account, move a couple of hundred dollars into that banking account, and then if the stock market's open, start buying and selling stock in that same window. Great. Well, I wanted to talk about this because to the earlier bigger picture, I think people are going to be applying dev ops principles, young entrepreneurs, and also, you know, reborn if you will, professionals who are old school, IT or whatever, bring it and moving faster. And you wrote a blog post I want to get your thoughts on, you wrote it on April 2nd, how we've adapted Ubuntu's time-based release cycles to fintech and software as a service. What is that all about? What's the meaning behind this post? You guys are doing something new, unique, or? Yeah, to this industry and to many of the people around me, even our clients and customers around me, this is a whole new world. I've never seen anything like it. To those of us who have been around Linux, open source, certainly Ubuntu, OpenStack, Kubernetes, it's just it's standard operating procedures. There's nothing surprising about it necessarily. But either it's some combination of the financial services world, just the nature of proprietary software, but also the concept of software as a service SaaS, which is very different than Ubuntu or Kubernetes or OpenStack, which is released software, right? We ship software at the end of an Ubuntu cycle or a Kubernetes cycle. It's very different when you're a software as a service platform and it's a matter of rolling out to production some changes in those changes then going live. So I wrote a post mainly to give some transparency, largely to our clients, our correspondents. We've got a couple of hundred customers that use the Apex platform. I've met with many of them in a sort of one-on-many, one-to-one, one-on-many basis, where I'll show up and deliver the product roadmap, a couple of product managers will come and do a deep dive. Part of what we communicate to those customers is around now, around our release cycles. And to many of them, it's a foreign concept that they've just never seen or heard before. And so I put together the blog post. We shared it internally and educated the teams and it was well-received. We shared it externally, privately with a number of customers and it was well-received. And a couple of them, actually, a couple of the Silicon Valley-based customers said, hey, why don't you just put this out there on Medium or on your blog or under an Apex banner because this actually would be really well-received by others in the family, other partners in the family. So I'm happy to kind of dive into a couple of the key principles here and we can sort of talk through it if you're interested, John. Well, I think the main point is you guys have a release cycle that has the speed of open source to SaaS and FinTech, which again, proprietary stuff is lower, monolithic. Yeah, no, the key principle is that, we've taken this and we've made it predictable and transparent and we commit to these cycles. And so, you know, most people may be familiar with Ubuntu releasing twice a year, right? April and October, Ubuntu has released every April and October since 2004. I was involved with Ubuntu between 2008 and 2018 as an engineer and engineering manager and then a product manager and eventually a VP of product at Anonical. And that was very much my life for 10 years oriented around that. In that time, I spent a lot of time around OpenStack, which adopted a very similar model, OpenStack's released every six months just after the Ubuntu release. A number of the members of the technical team and the committee that formed, OpenStack came out of either Ubuntu or Anonical or both and really helped influence that community. It's actually quite similar in Kubernetes, which developed independent generally of Ubuntu. Kubernetes releases on a quarterly basis about every three months. And again, it's the sort of thing where it's just a cycle, it happens like clockwork every three months. So when I joined APEX and took a look at a number of the needs that we have, our correspondents have our relationship managers, our sales team, the client facing people in the organization, one of the biggest items that bubbled straight to the top is our customers wanted more transparency into our roadmaps, tighter commitments on when we're going to deliver things and the ability to influence those. And you know what, that's not dissimilar from any product manager's flight anywhere in the industry. But what I was able to do was take some of those principles that are common around Ubuntu and Kubernetes and OpenStack, which by the way, are quite familiar, that we use a lot of Ubuntu and Kubernetes inside of APEX. And many of our correspondents are quite familiar with those cycles, but they'd never really seen or heard of a software as a service, a SaaS vendor using something like that. So that's what's new. You've got some cycles going on. You've got schedules. So just looking here, just to get this out there because I think it's data. You did it last year in October, November, mid-cycle in January of this year. You've got a couple summits coming up. Yeah, that's right. So we've broken it down into three cycles per year, three 16 week cycles per year. So it's a little bit more frequent than the twice a year Ubuntu, not quite as frenetic as the quarterly Kubernetes cycles. 16 weeks times three is 48. That leaves us four weeks of slack really to handle Thanksgiving and Christmas and end of year holidays, Chinese New Year, whatever might come up. I'll tell you from experience, it's always been a struggle in the Ubuntu and OpenStack and Kubernetes world. It's hard to plan around those cycles. So what we've done here is we've actually just allocated four weeks of a slush fund to take care of that. So we're at three 16 week cycles per year. We've versioned them according to the year and then an iterator. So 20A, 20B, 20C are our three cycles in 2020 and we'll do 21A, B and C next year. Each of those cycles has three summits. So to your point about, we'd get together back in the, but before everyone stopped traveling, we very much enjoyed twice a year getting together for KubeCon. We very much enjoyed the OpenStack summits and the various Ubuntu summits inside of a small company like ours. These were physical. We'd get together in Dallas or New York or Chicago or Portland, which is the four places we have offices. We were doing that basically every six weeks or so for one of these summits. Now they're all virtual. We handle them over Zoom. When they were physical, we do the summit in about three days of packed agendas Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Now that we've gone to virtual, we've actually spread it a little bit thinner across the week. And so we've put some holes in the day, which has been an interesting learning experience. And I think we're all much happier with the most recent summit we did, spreading it over the course of a week, accounting for time zones, giving ourselves everyone lunch breaks and stuff. Well, we'll have to keep it checking in. I want to certainly collaborate with you on the virtual digital, check your progress. We're all learning and iterating, if you will, on the value that you can do with these digital ones. Try to get that success with physical, not always easy. Appreciate it. You're looking good, looking good and safe. Stay safe and great to check in with you and congratulations on the new opportunity. Yeah, thanks, John. Appreciate it. Dustin Kirkland, chief product officer at Apex Clear, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, checking in with a remote interview during this time where we are getting all the information of best practices and how to deal with this new at scale, the new shift that is digital, that is impacting and opportunities are there. Certainly a lot of challenges and hopefully the healthcare, the finance and the business models of these companies can continue and get back to work soon. But certainly the people are still, sheltered in place, working hard, being creative, bringing the coverage here in theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.