 Hey everyone, good afternoon. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante, live at CrowdStrike Falcon 23 from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. We've had a great day talking with CrowdStrike execs, customers, the ecosystem is thriving. There's a lot of moments in here. About 4,000 people. We are very pleased to welcome Mike Santonas, the president of CrowdStrike, to theCUBE for the first time. Welcome, Mike, great to have you. Thank you for having me. We're already excited for your keynote tomorrow, so maybe you could job a few nuggets to your audience about some of the things you might be sharing tomorrow, maybe, maybe not. Tell us a little bit about, you've been with CrowdStrike what, seven years now, seven plus years? Seven and a half, I think, a little over. This must be your seventh Falcon. It is my seventh Falcon. Talk about the evolution of it because from what I understand, this is my first, it's almost doubled from even just last year. It's a small conference, as you can see behind you. Like it's a small thing that we're doing. Look, it's growing incredibly from the early days where there was a small group of just fanatical customers, loyal customers, to now having over 4,000 people, over 4,000 loyal customers, incredible partners, other tech companies from startups to more established security vendors. I mean, it's just, it's been amazing. The feedback has been phenomenal. Well, the strategy's working. Go back a couple of years, when you guys sort of set in place this notion of TAM expansion, building up more modules, doing some killer acquisitions, I mean, that's how you got log scale, right? So take us through, like don't go all the way back, but take us back a couple of years and how that journey has transpired into where you are today and give us a glimpse as to where you see it going. It's a really good question and actually it does go back to the start because when George started the company, when he co-founded the company, his vision was to build a platform. His vision was to have a single agent that was creating data and putting all of this machine-generated telemetry into the cloud so that you could use it to solve complex problems. The first problem that he looked to solve was to solve the fact that all of these endpoint solution products were failing from all the legacy vendors and he built a detection tool. So it sat underneath your Mac fees and semantics and SOFOS and trend and it would tell you all of the things that those products would let through and a couple of years later an analyst called at EDR, that's how it kind of started. Well that strategy hasn't changed but what has changed is today we have 23 modules that solve a number of different problems but that platform was built from the day one which is why we benefit from this today. Yeah, it was like Swiss cheese coming through right back in the day. So much stuff got through and then, okay and so now you're here, you announced at Black Hat Charlotte AI. Why is that transformative and how do you expect people to adopt that? Well there's a couple of different ways to look at them and this technology is really exciting. If you think about what we can do with generative AI, generative workflows, incredible business benefit to make us more agile, to reduce complexity, to help companies be more efficient. The sad reality is is technology that's not just available to us, it's available to the adversary. So one of the things that I worry a lot about is generative AI could potentially create a huge shift in the time it takes an adversary to successfully attack another company. You know we could see for example attacks taking seconds that used to take hours or days. So we've been thinking about this technology, how can it benefit our customers. Very excited about Charlotte and we're super excited for people to see it today and I'm going to be doing a little bit more tomorrow. But it's all about time, it's managing time, it's helping people be faster, more efficient. Charlotte's not going to make the decision for you but it's going to put the data at your fingertips and help you make better educated decisions a lot faster. For someone who is, so many people are novices when it comes to AI, how will Charlotte, how do you see it as really transforming the novices into experts, is that one of the potentials? Well it is one of the potentials because the biggest thing in security I mean it's such a complex topic. You know for me I've been doing this sadly, you know every time I say it, two and a half decades, it's been a while that I've been doing this. So for me it's all I've ever done, it's all I know it's natural to me but to a lot of people that I knew, these aren't easy problems that you need to solve. So one of the things that we think a lot about with Charlotte is how can we make a novice user more experienced? I don't want to say tier one to tier three analysts but make them solve more complex problems a lot faster because security is all about speed. There's a reason why there's a Formula One car over there to win in Formula One you have to be the fastest. To win in security you need to be the fastest, you need to be faster than the adversary. But it's kind of an interesting question you're asking Lisa because you know in a way we're all going to become experts at prompt engineering like we were with Google search. Remember in the early days of Google search you had to put a plus sign in and put quotes in and now you just ask it and you get an answer back and it's kind of similar with generative AI where sort of learning how to interact with the system but to your point, I think one of the things it'll help with is the acronyms. I mean security is intimidating for a lot of people. I mean you think about what happened, what was it the MGM or the Caesars hack? I mean the social engineering, I mean a lot of that is just awareness. Don't click on links and what does all this stuff mean? And people I think up till recently have seen security as just sort of somebody else's problem. And that's changing, isn't it? Well it is changing because it's impacting every person. There's not a person in your extended group of friends or family that's not been impacted by cyber attacks. And I remember when I started my career, no one in my friendship circle had a clue what I was doing and now everybody talks about it. My parents talk about it. They see it in the news. It impacts so many different people. But the thing that I would say, even though there's a lot of discussions around generative AI, it's a complex technology. It can't solve everything and it can create a lot of problems. So when you think about this type of technology you'll hear about things like hallucinations. Think of it as non-deterministic AI. If you build bad tech in this area you could ask one of these models, the same question multiple times and get widely different answers. So we've been spending years working on this to give people this outcome that they can rely on, they can trust, they can use safely and securely. So that's why there's so much buzz about Charlotte at the event today. Well let's follow up on that because you're right. I mean generative AI is generative. So it doesn't give you the same answer. It does hallucinate a little bit. So how have you addressed that problem? Well so this category of non-deterministic AI can be very problematic because again if you ask JVT a question multiple times you will get widely different answers. And we've played around with different models from different vendors and they can actually make up answers. If they don't have an answer they will make one up. And that can be very problematic. With authority. With authority. So in this area here where you're asking a question and you're getting a response, well you need to make sure that that response is very accurate. Otherwise somebody could make a decision with very damaging impact because that decision that was provided by the tool was incorrect. So you know we've been spending a lot of time taking a non-deterministic AI technology and moving it to more deterministic. So you ask a question and you get a response. That response is very accurate. When did your gen AI sort of initial research start? Well contrary to popular belief, AI didn't start sort of October, November last year. When the company was started this was the concept. Use artificial intelligence, use machine learning to help solve the problem in a much easier way. So this is part of our DNA. We call it DNA I should say. We call ourselves AI native because it's part of everything that we do. So we've been building different teams and different models to solve different problems for how do we process renewals? How do we help with support? There's a lot of things that we've been using, different technologies, it's not just in the product. One of the things that we talk often about at security conferences is the significant skills gap that's been there for a long time. How do you see Charlotte AI and even CrowdStrike's role in helping to dial down some of that or minimize that gap for some of your customers? You know it's probably not an exciting answer for you but you know this skill gap thing which I have no shortage of opinions on, like many things. You know there's lots of different ways to solve it. You know at the end of the day if we're all trying to hire the same person from the same university it doesn't matter what sector if it's security or other sectors you're always going to have a skills gap. The thing that I like is if you look at some of the CrowdStrike as some of the most talented people that we have they didn't go to the university that I went to. They didn't have the same sort of career plan that I went through. Some of them were lawyers. Some of them started off totally different backgrounds but they were inquisitive. They brought something special that they've learned security and they've become some of the best people that we have. Some of the best people that I know in the industry didn't do a computer science degree. And that's how you solve the skill gap. Find people that just think differently that are passionate about stopping bad people and the rest we can work out. But Shala and things like that can help. Training, make you more efficient, help you learn the topic. But you bring an interesting point because what's the number? Is it like three million unfulfilled jobs or something like that? It's a huge number. And so AI definitely will help close that gap just in terms of allowing people to do more with what they have. But also your point being if you look outside of the typical hardcore sec ops pro, like you've been in it you said for a couple decades, but you're saying that others with the right characteristics, whatever, curiosity, intelligence, et cetera, could actually thrive in this environment. I was at a conference a few years ago and a young lady walked up to me and she was in scrubs, she was a nurse and she said, I hate this. Like I love being a nurse, but it's just I want to get into cyber. And asked a whole bunch of questions around what do I need to do? And we had this 20 minute conversation and I saw her a couple of years later and she said, I've done all the courses, I'm learning, I got my first job, which was awesome. So we need to find different people that come from different backgrounds because I've got to tell you, if we all hire the same people, not only is there a skills gap problem, the adversary knows how we all think. So having people that approach the problem in a different way is phenomenal. If you go to a software programmer that thinks the same way, they're also going to QA the product the same way. Get people that think in a different way, you build better products, you solve the problem a much better way and that's how we solve some of these skill gap problems. What are the characteristics of somebody? Some young person comes and says, Michael, I'm interested, but I'm not a geek, I'm not really a computer science person, but what are some of the characteristics you would look for in a person? I want to understand, is that person passionate about the topic? Do they want to learn more about it? What have they done about it? Have they gone and done a course? I want to understand, are they resilient? This is not an easy job. If you're taking a beating from an adversary for three days in a row, it's not an easy thing to do in this long hours. We'll have those conversations and try to understand a little bit more about them. Can they think laterally, are they good problem solvers? Do they don't have to necessarily be a salesperson or they don't have to be a malware researcher? There's a lot of things that we do at CrowdStrike and one of the things that I'm super proud of is the intern program that we have. We have an intern program across all of CrowdStrike and we convert over 60% of those people into CrowdStrike as the following year and that's been a phenomenal program in just wildly different backgrounds. I wonder if chefs would make good cyber experts, right? They're going through a lot, they get a very high stress job. Is this a lot of pressure? Being a chef, solving problems, making stuff up when you have to- Being creative. A few ingredients. Anyway, I digress. I want to talk about platform consolidation. It's a good time to be a platform player. Platforms are beating products in the market. What are you seeing in terms of consolidation? Why are the consolidators winning and the shared donors? What's the future look like for those guys? Well, it is a good time to be a platform company if you really have a platform. So like AI, platform has become a big buzzword. Everybody has a platform and the big thing that's important to us is we built this from the ground up. It is a single agent. It is that single cloud architecture. It's very easy to deploy. We've already seen a lot of keynotes from customers today talking about how easy it has been to roll out the crowd-strike technology. And unfortunately, when there's so much excitement around platform tech, everybody has one. So there's a lot of vendors that will go and buy 15, 20 products, they talk about a platform. The reality is the products were never built to work together, they're not integrated. And what ends up happening is the customer suffers because they have to be the systems integrator to get those products to work. So for us, customers are saying to us, especially in this macro, I don't know if it's going to get better or worse, but what I do know is customers are saying to us, well, what else can we do with you? I've bought three modules, four modules, five modules. We don't even talk about customers to Wall Street now about four, five, six module adoption. We talk about seven, eight, nine modules that customers are adopting. And soon that'll become eight, nine, 10 and that'll keep growing. And they just love that fact that they deploy the agent and they just keep building on top of it. And we end up having a use case conversation. What can you solve for us? And then they turn on a capability. How do you know a platform when you see one? What are the characteristics of a platform versus sort of a platform washing? Well, you want to make sure that it is truly an integrated solution, that there is one management console, that there is truly one agent. You want to make sure that you don't have a vendor that's playing games by sort of making multiple UIs look like one or multiple agents look like one. We've seen that over the years in the industry. It's being able to use data once and reuse it to solve many different problems. So it's these little technical things. You don't want to collect the same data multiple times. So it's understanding all of these characteristics which is why I always tell people, if you want to buy a product, test it. Have a look under the hood. You're not going to buy a card just from a brochure. So you want to understand how it's built, how it's put together. And that's super important. And then you can, I think the other, those are good answers by the way. And I think as well, to me, Falcon Foundry is another indicator that you've got a platform because you can essentially add value for workflows on top of that. Yeah, look, I'm super excited about that one. Foundry being an app generation platform. Well, app generation tool within the platform, I should say. So we're giving customers the ability to have the power to use no code or a very low amount of code to solve bespoke use cases where they want to have a workflow to solve a very clear thing using the power of the platform. So the data that's already being collected that I talked about, collect once, reuse many times, the platform has the ability to have a response based on a condition and carry out an action. So we've already been talking to people about it saying how we're going to use this for patching. I've got some cool demos that I'm going to do tomorrow. I'm excited to see what customers are going to come up with. I think it's going to blow us away. All the innovative ideas that we're going to see very quickly. How have your customer conversations evolved as the cyber landscape has changed so much in the last few years alone? Ransomware is a household where obviously here, we're sitting at Caesars, which was hit recently, MGM was as well. It's now not a, are we going to get hit? It's when, it's what's going to be the consequence. How have those customer conversations really evolved and gone up the stack in the last couple of years? Jesus, tough question because there's a lot of different aspects to answer. I mean, one of the big things that you touched on, I mean, there's so many attacks going on. So now obviously, you know, a lot of people want to get ahead of that, but you know, the reality is as successful as we have been, there's still half of the industry still using a lot of legacy technology. So, you know, a lot of the conversation still is helping people solve some of the basics and educating people around the tradecraft that the adversary actually uses. But what I can tell you is we are speaking to more and more people that are saying to us, look, the good enough security that I keep getting, you know, shoved down my throat is not okay. You know, I want the best of breed. I want to stop the breach. How can you help us? How can we do more? Consolidation is a big conversation right now. People are saying, well, how many products from other vendors can you turn off by adopting your platform? Which is great. You know, it makes the conversation a lot bigger. It's a lot more strategic. And I've got to tell you, I mean, if I think about George, our CEO, and Sean Henry, our CSO myself, we're doing more bordering conversations today than we ever have because people just want to understand how big this problem is and what do they need to do because people know, unfortunately, if you get breached, it costs the fortune. Productivity loss, incident response costs. Brand reputation. Yeah. But Mark Bowling said from ExtraHop, he said $15 million, I guarantee you, I could have secured the MGM for a lot less. Look, I mean, a lot of those issues have a lot of complexities to them. Of course, yeah. But that one. I feel for those teams. They're doing it tough right now. I hear you, but that one with the social engineering, it's like, whoa, here's your password. Oh, goodness gracious. But it's an interesting conversation to have, right? Because if you go to a lot of, go to RSA, you don't see this here because we've, you know, we've got a great group of technology vendors here. But you go to RSA, there's a lot of people that talk about their AI and we stop everything autonomously and, you know, there's always buzz and hype and that doesn't actually help the industry because the reality is an adversary doesn't wake up in the morning thinking about malware. An adversary wakes up thinking about how I'm going to monetize you. And I'm going to do that anyway I can. Now, if I can do it without malware, I'm going to do it. If I can social engineer you, I'm going to do it. They just want the outcome, which may be to get money or to get defense secrets, whatever that is. Now, if you go to a conference and you think, geez, I can solve the world with this new silver bullet, unfortunately, you may find that you're going to be caught out. And I think that happens to a lot of companies. And that's part of coming back to your question around what are we doing? We educate people that the trade craft they actually, that the adversary actually uses and saying, this is what you have to be across. If you can't stop the breadth of these issues, sadly, you probably will get compromised. And that's the reality. It is the reality. But education and awareness is important. And that's why it takes your ecosystem too because you can't do it all. Absolutely. Mike, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. It's been fascinating talking to you about really the evolution of CrowdStrike, what you're doing with AI, how you're helping customers evolve and really face what will continue to be a persistent threat. We look forward to your keynote tomorrow morning. Thank you. All right. We're our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from CrowdStrike Dalkon23. Guess who's next? George Kurtz, CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, sits down with Dave Vellante next. You don't want to miss it.