 From New York, it's the Cube. Covering Escape 19. Welcome back everyone, it's Cube coverage for the first inaugural multi-cloud conference, Escape 2019 here with, we are here at Bassam Tabar who's the CEO of UpBound Hot Startup that has not yet released their product but they're working on it. Good friend of the Cube, Cube Alumni. Bassam, good to see you again. Thank you, yeah. Thanks for coming on. Glad to be back on the Cube. Well, we know you guys are beavering away, digging away at the product, building it out. You have a very compelling background coming into the cloud world. You're here at the multi-cloud first ever conference. That's right. It's been hybrid cloud. This is like being billed as the first multi-cloud conference. A lot of technical people here. Lots of. A lot of industry insiders. Setting the foundation is one theme I'm hearing and then together theme is data. Yeah. These are the two dynamics. What's your take on this multi-cloud conference opportunity? Look, I think it's really interesting. It reflects kind of what's happening. Multi-cloud's becoming a reality. More and more people are, whether they like it or not, are actually using multiple vendors and they're trying to figure it out. So I think it's great that we now have a forum. They're likely to be more. We're doing one of our funds at GitLab in the next coupon, which is kind of cool. But, so getting all the right people in here focusing on the data problem, focusing where we look at this from a universal control plane standpoint. There are lots of people here talking about the economics of this and what it means for venture capital in the next five years and what it means for acquisition patterns in M&A. There are lots of really interesting aspects that are being covered today. Yeah, it's a classic inaugural conference where with the organic community you have a range of personas, entrepreneur, founder, executive, venture capitalist, all kind of having those candid conversations of what to do next. That's right. They kind of all get multi-clouds here. The question is, what's it going to be? What's it going to be? Well, I think I was trying to figure that out. I think, honestly, anything that makes it easy for enterprises to do this massive lifting and shifting of infrastructure and being able to control their data and deal with multiple vendors, the world is increasingly heterogeneous. That's another way of saying multi-cloud is just dealing with the heterogeneity. And it's going to be more and more heterogeneous because if you look at the trends, it's hard to imagine that all innovations are going to come out of one cloud company. Right? So if that's not the case, then you have people innovating, people creating all sorts of new platforms and infrastructure, ways of dealing with data, ways of dealing with networking, or ways of dealing with storage or databases and everything else. Now that you've got all this innovation happening, whether it's open source communities or not, right? And then as an enterprise user, I want to consume it. Well, I have to deal with the heterogeneity. How do I consume it? How do I bring it together? How do I make sense of it? How do I get it all secured? How do I get it all under my compliance department? Those are the opportunities around multi-cloud. And it is a reality. So at some level, I'd be hard-pressed to find someone that says, I'm using Amazon or Google or Azure only and not, say, using a boutique cloud or another service or something else. Everybody's got some set of services that are part of it. I mean, multi-cloud and multi-vendor, two words that you go back to the history of the computer industry. That's right. Multi-vendor is a heterogeneous environment. It is. It's a great benefit to that. But all of that was based upon the lock-in fear. And we hear in some of that here. What's your view of lock-in? Where's the lock-in? Because if value creation is the lock-in, the Red Hat guys give it a talk about Walmart, cloud versus niche clouds. It's all open source. So where's the lock-in? Yeah, I don't know if I would subscribe to this as solving the lock-in problem. Every time you use a vendor at some level, you're relying on them. If they have a good service, you're kind of tied to them. But the more interesting aspect to me is having a choice. So being able to say, I'm going to pick the best database vendor out there, one that suits my problem, and being able to do that without having to let go of the integration aspects of it. Like, if I have to choose a database SaaS service that I really like, but the cost of doing that involves me creating a new vendor, doing some custom automation and custom integration, figuring out monitoring, figuring out logging, doing billing, doing metering, all of that stuff so that I can actually just consume one amazing service, that's a really large hurdle to kind of step over. And so I think part of multi-cloud is reducing the friction for being able to use things that you choose to. Do you have any commentary or advice for other founders or other CEOs or even any younger developers? Because the classical trained software developers, they think a certain way. They either were pipelining it differently, not doing Agile, or they're trained at Agile, but now microservice is a whole other ballgame. How do you get people to think microservice is when they've been classically trained, Agile. Like waterfall, you're saying? Oh, waterfall, both. I mean, I think there's a lot happening right now. I would start, honestly, I would start with looking at some of the best practices around building modern services and things like Kubernetes and others help, microservice adoption and all that stuff. But yeah, I mean, start with, honestly, starting with a bunch of open source is probably not a bad place to be. But then find vendors that actually can support and run what you want to do. Final question, tell us about your company, what's going on with you guys? Give an update on UpBound, what's going on? It's going great. We're growing, we launched this project called Crossplane. Like, late last year, it's doing great. We're getting a ton of adoption on it, we're super happy with it. And we're growing the company, we're almost tripled the company this year, which is fantastic. And working on a SaaS offering that we're excited about. Hopefully, we'll come back here and talk about it when it's- And you guys hiring, looking for people, what's this update doing? Yeah, we're hiring on the engineering side, we're hiring on the product side. It's a startup, so you never stop hiring. Not for the faint of heart. Definitely not. What's up, thanks for coming on, sharing your insights. Yeah, absolutely, always. Here at the multi-cloud inaugural event, Escape, here in New York City, Escape 2019, I'm John Furrier of theCUBE, back with more after this short break.