 Hey, welcome back to VMworld 2013. I'm John Furrier. I'm with Dave Vellante, my co-host. We are here live in San Francisco, covering VMworld for our fourth year. We started theCUBE in 2010. Dave and I was on a journey. We didn't know it would lead us. Who knows we'd be the fourth year in the headlining VMworld again for four years, but we have a special guest appearance here on theCUBE. We're excited. One of our first early guests ever on theCUBE at EMC World 2010, Steve Herrod. At the time was the CTO of a small company called VMware, and now it's exploding 23,000 people here at VMworld. Welcome back. No, thanks, this is great. You guys have grown quite a bit since I was last on theCUBE as well. So you're no longer a CTO of VMware. You transitioned out as a big time VC for General Catalyst. Tell us a little about your new role and what you're getting excited about. Yeah, it's a really fun role. So I obviously love VMware and I got a lot out of working with engineers who are trying to create new things, a lot of what you're seeing here. And I thought it'd be fun to even try and spread out more and look at all kinds of companies doing it left and right. I also spent a lot of time, we bought several companies at VMware and I worked with a lot of venture firms and I never saw myself there and I never saw someone who really dug deep into engineering groups and to technology and so I thought, why not? Might as well give that a try. So I'm trying to take a very technical look and an engineering organization look at companies and help them build really big successful things. So you were a really big impact at the VMware success as well as the whole team. Carl was talking about the success of the team but you were also blogging early. You were out in the community getting dirty with the tech geeks in the field, customers as well as engineers. Do you miss it? And do you miss the keynotes that Carl took over? I think Carl did a great job today. I think I've been replaced. So very good job on his part. Do you miss VMware? I miss it a lot, obviously. I miss a lot of the people that are here and obviously this type of event is unbelievable. I think it's the largest IT event there is now. So I can still come hang out. They haven't kicked me out yet. So compare and contrast your role here at VMware this year versus last year. Last year you would have been keynoting. How busy would have you been? And what did you do this year? You wake up late, you roll in. You know, I just, I kept coming by wondering if you'd let me show up on your show because I have nothing else to do so I appreciate that. Being humble as usual. No, it's very fun. It's really now it's about meeting interesting companies and trying to help them do something good. So I do a lot less scheduled time and a lot more meeting people. So General Catalyst is a really well-known firm, big firm. I don't have many experiences with them but from what I know about the reputation, very solid, done a lot of great deals. Tell us about the firm that you're at and what attracted you to General Catalyst? Yes, it's not super well-known in the West Coast. Very big firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and generally hadn't done a lot of work in enterprise infrastructure. There's a couple of companies that we're now involved with. Virtual Instruments and Data Gravity, both are here that we're trying to help out. But I saw the opportunity to help them grow on in Palo Alto, down where you are, chance to sort of expand onto the West Coast and then really to dive deeply into the area that I like which is the plumbing and the things that we do here. So I'll be driving a lot of the enterprise infrastructure deal-making that we do and hopefully making them very well-known on the West Coast as they are on the East Coast. So how do you approach investments? So you mentioned before you're trying to bring a little technical, a lot of times you know just sit down with VCs that go right to the numbers, try to figure out the IRR, whatever. How do you approach it? Yeah, it's interesting, because especially in this space that you all know very well, this is not the flash in the pan type of idea that becomes viral and takes off very quickly. Most of the companies that I'm very interested in take a long time to build and you have to get the product definition right and there's hard testing and there's really a longer life cycle for doing it. And so in that sense, I do think that two hardest things you have to do when you're starting something like this is really think about how the enterprise is going to accept products and how it's going to work there and then secondly, building a great team. And those are two things I feel I've done a fair amount of and so I think I can add that type of value in addition to the important things around how do you do financing and channel build out and all the other pieces. What's the most exciting thing that's getting you jazzed up these days? In the VCs, you see a lot of things, you see all the early stage creativity, you see some technology ideas and sometimes prototypes. What's getting you most excited? Segment, technologies, anything you can share? Yeah, I mean obviously I was working on a lot of what's going on and being announced here today and obviously I think a lot of the hybrid cloud world is very interesting, network virtualization. I'm personally very focused on what happens once you have these things in place. So trying to look a little further out, let's assume hybrid cloud is in place, let's assume network virtualization has taken hold. Now what? So I spent a lot of time thinking about what are the higher level networking services over time? How are you going to be doing interesting things around management and security in this new world? So do you think Flash is a bubble and we get a bubble with Flash and or are there blind spots that people aren't seeing with Flash if they think differently? To use the old Steve Jobs line, think differently and if you take Flash as a memory, not storage, that might open up some possibilities on the software side. So do you see anything out there that you're watching that's orbiting around that you haven't put your finger on yet? I wouldn't say it's definitely not a bubble in the sense that there's still a huge amount of things unrealized. Now it's been hyped as big as anything has, as you know. But I think we're just now seeing people that have taken a storage approach to it and now you're seeing with great companies like Pernix and even some of the stuff that VMware announced, how do you actually leverage it on the server side and sort of merge things together? So I think at a macro level what's exciting and again what you're seeing a lot of these days is how do you converge storage networking and compute into some sort of package? Can we go back to what the world looks like once the SDN and software defined storage takes place? What does that world look like? How do applications change and how is development different? How is value created differently? Well it's really interesting, just at a top level if you think about it, we behave based on how the infrastructure allows us to behave. We put things in the right place of a data center because that's the subnet that we were allocated. We file trouble tickets and we wait certain ways. So you kind of have to assume all this weird behavior that we've gotten into has to go away. And if you do that then you really wonder why am I placing firewalls in certain places? It shouldn't be that there's perimeters of the network in the modern world because I have mobile devices accessing it and things that are going on within the perimeter are just important. So you really start to just think about things that we take for granted as being done the way they currently are and just start thinking really creatively on that front. So obviously that opens up a lot of new opportunities, creates all kinds of disruption. Yeah it does, but I also think it's really core and the core value to anything that we're trying to do overall is how does it help one of the big problems that are out there? So everyone's been talking about it myself for several years too. It's at the end of the day you're trying to make things more efficient and faster moving. And you just have to really think about once that hurdles down, what's next? And that's really what most of the thought exercise is right now. Well we're psyched that you stopped by. We have Craig Nunez coming on next who's another CUBE alumni. He's been probably most of the CUBEs we've had coming on next. So thanks for coming on. I want to ask you one final question. What's the biggest surprise of the VC world that you didn't expect? You had a lot of experienced work with companies. Tell us, Sheriff, that's something that was unexpected. Yeah, the unexpected and probably the funnest thing about it is how many enthusiastic people with great ideas there are. My first week in the job, I wanted to fund every single thing I saw because it was really exciting and neat. But after you go for a while, you really hopefully develop a nose for what's not just great, but what's really, really great. And I didn't realize how many different ideas are out there that are quite exciting right now. Okay, Steve Harry with General Catalyst. Now VC, former CTO of VMware on the CUBE, stopping by sharing his insight and certainly we'll see more of you. Anytime you want to come on the CUBE, we'll want to hear the updates. Seeing what the future will look like when this stuff plays out, that's what he's working on. We'll be right back with Craig Nunes of HP right after this short break. Stay with us. Thanks.