 And we're here in the Silicon Valley and hi, so who are you? Hi, I'm Ness. I'm the CEO here at Chateau and welcome to our office. So that's cool. This is the office you have here in Mountain View, which is the Silicon Valley. Yeah, exactly. We're in Mountain View, California, a few miles away from all the large internet companies you all know about. Is Google just down there, right? Yeah, it's just down there, exactly. Okay, and lots of other. Exactly, everybody's here. Maybe Facebook there and the Apple there or something like that. Facebook there, Apple there, yeah. Everybody. Everybody's here. Okay, so let's go in and check out the shadow USA. Come in. All right, cool. That's some sofas. And here's a bunch of guys and girls. So what's the status here in the USA? So here in the USA, in the US office, there's about 40 of us. Here you have the marketing team, which is sitting on the desk. You have over there in the small room, you have our testing room. That's where we run quality assurance and make sure that everything works fine for our US users. On this side here, you're going to have all the customer success people, so making sure that everything works fine for them. So here's a Friday afternoon. Everybody's here, right? Yeah, exactly. Everybody's here. No, Friday afternoon is kind of a light there for us sometimes. Yeah, people working from home. And so there are less people right now in here. A bit further, you have operations and you have HR, you have operations and you have infrastructure in the back. Infrastructure as a team that takes care of our data centers. So without mentioning specific names of the competitors, but all the big guys, everybody's trying to do cloud gaming right now, but you're actually doing it. Yeah, so I mean, when we started a few years ago, nobody believed in cloud gaming and it was like an uphill battle for us all the time to convince people that cloud gaming was possible. Now everybody knows that this is the future of gaming and indeed we have a product and we believe it's extremely strong. Let's just go in this room over here for a second. You have like a demo room where we can check the ghost for a second. Yeah, for a second. So I've been using Shadow for a year and I'm really impressed with how well it works. It really works. So here you have a ghost which is an arm-piled little thing client basically and you're connecting to a giant computer performance. Exactly, basically your computer is in the data center and so you have like the full power of a high-end gaming PC which basically fits in here. So actually the PC is not here. So when you move the mouse, it's just like it's right here. So you have zero latency, you can go around and you can see when I move like that, it just happens immediately. You don't feel anything and whenever we see someone try Shadow they have to just a few seconds, they forget this is cloud gaming, they just enjoy the game and that's it and that's really the key for people naturalizing their own Shadow. And here you have a couple USB hosts, four USB hosts and HDMI that goes out, it's gigabit internet. This little thing uses very little power. Yeah, it's also Wi-Fi on Bluetooth and yeah it uses seven watts of power compared to like the 400 watts of a regular gaming PC so you're also not having too much noise, not having too much heat and saving on your electricity bill. And you can run it on any computer, cheap computer, you can run it like a Windows client, it just works. You can run it on a bunch of phones, on tablets, on the smart TVs. Exactly, yeah, it works on any device. This is a little bit thanks to the timing also, right? It's got to do with the timing of the internet, now it has low enough latency. It's thanks to Amazon and Google and everybody, Facebook, they invested a lot in speeding the internet up, right? All over the world. I mean yeah, for sure. Cloud gaming has been an idea that's been going on for a while and the good thing for us is that we are exactly at the right moment to be able to enjoy great quality internet networks. Like 10 years ago maybe there was a little bit too much noise. 10 years ago it was not really possible, like in terms of bandwidth as much as in terms of latency, it was much harder to be able to do anything. So it's not so much, it's not only the bandwidth, bandwidth of course is improving, but especially the latency, right? Because I guess the companies like Google, they don't want people to wait when they search. It has to happen fast. It has to optimize everything. And you are basically taking advantage of the better network. Well, it's true, but to be honest, like up to... Cloud gaming is really one of the first technologies that is so latency sensitive. When you're so latency sensitive, where latency is so important to the experience, right? When you're watching Netflix for example, so where it works is that Netflix is actually going to buffer the movie that you're watching, because it actually knows what happens next in the movie. When we are streaming to you, we don't know what happens next. We don't know when you move, when you shoot next. And so that's the difficulty for us. But it is important for example when you search, you want the result to come quickly. So that kind of work they've done there, you've really tapped into it. That's also true. The other cool thing that I heard that you're doing is that you work with all the ISPs and you try to make sure that they have as few hops as possible to your data center. So, indeed, so like the whole key thing here for us is to be able to control the experience from the beginning to the end, from where the image is generated, from where the computer is actually running to where you are using Shadow. And so that means we have to be really good at making data centers, at connecting data centers to the internet, and making sure the image is going to travel correctly to your local device so that you have the best framing quality and the best latency possible. And so indeed, we optimize like every step. So that's optimizing the way we connect with ISPs. That's optimizing the way we capture the frame. That's optimizing the way it's decoded on your hardware in the end. Like every step of the way needs to be optimized and that's really the secret sauce if you want to what you're doing is to be able to do everything right. So my understanding Shadow is an awesome French still startup or not really? I mean starting growing up like crazy? There's 200 of us now. I don't know if we're still qualified as a startup or if we're something different. There's 200 people, about 40 here and about 160 in France. We're more and more an American and French company we kind of boast now. But the American market if you can catch it which is not easy for European companies right? In general very few have been able to figure it out like Spotify or something and so hopefully it's going great. How's it going? Can we walk around a little bit? So you have you have you have employees just playing games the whole day? That's what we do. Well it's Friday right? People aren't doing anything. Do you want to introduce one of the guys here? For sure. Game testing. This is Claire. Hello. Hey. This is Vincent who manages the retention here in the marketing team. Do you see how he's retaining our users here? Making sure everything works right so people are happy. So are you able to win all the tournaments? Maybe not win but you know I try. We had to keep track of the Overwatch League we felt it would be unfair for him to compete there with so many other willing competitors. What is this game there? Overwatch? Yeah I'm playing Overwatch right now. Overwatch is one of the top most popular things right now? It's pretty up there. It's popular in the office for sure. We have a big team of people that played here. So this is playing on Shadow right now too. So what do you do? Other than play games? Good question. I manage the game. I can't stop. You can answer while you play right? Yeah definitely. I manage retention and engagement so my job is I want to teach people how to use Shadow how to use all the functions and really make it easier for people to play games on Shadow. So what I heard is that you have a pretty good what do you call it, churn? People also in the US are very happy with the service? Yes. A lot of good feedback on the service. I mean for me especially I even have a really good gaming laptop but I can't play max settings on Overwatch on my laptop. You're also balancing at the same time on one foot? Exactly. Just to make it Just to add some challenge right? If I play without it it's not fair to the other guys. It's a very good test. So I guess you can't guarantee everybody in the US has perfect bandwidth but hopefully more and more ISPs that are hooked into your data center in a nice way and you have more data center? You don't only have California right? No so what we ask from our user is to have a minimum of 15 megabit per second as an internet connection and we currently have four data centers in the US that cover about 80% of the population and so we have one here in Santa Clara for the first one, we have one in New York one in Dallas and one in Chicago and so that's how we cover most of the US. 80% that's pretty much, that's a lot. 80% yeah that's a lot we're still missing some key states. It's just the last 50 million people. You have 200 something million maybe who can potentially sign up. I'm just saying like in terms of if you say 80% of the US population not everybody games but yeah so are you able to provide it to everybody who orders? So the way we work is that we really try because we are developing our own data centers it's something which is complicated, which is costly and so the way we manage it is that we try to match our data center growth with our user base growth so we really try to keep those two in sync and to make sure we always have the infrastructure we need for our users. Nice. I think it's really awesome, not just for gaming I use it for video editing I do all my 4K video editing on Shadow for last year. I could potentially do it on Chromebook but it's a question of the Android app client support everything, of course you have support on Android to do all the different Yeah, so that's one of the key things about Shadow is that we're doing cloud gaming and if you want that's our key entry point to the market but really what we're providing because we know that gamers don't just game on their computers we know they do a lot of those things they do video editing they do picture editing they go on the internet, they go on Netflix they do whatever they want and so it was important for us to actually provide that's why we give a Windows 10 computer and not a catwalk or a game so you can install any app and also any game actually so even the games that came out like 10 years ago that you absolutely want to play because it does run on Windows 10 well you can play it. That's why it's potentially going to remain a differentiator for Shadow because potentially some of the big company competitors are going to want to have exclusive games or something like that and they want to sell like a Netflix subscription and you just give freedom because they can do whatever they want they can subscribe to something or they don't have to that's really the point for us to give the freedom to our users of what they want to do with that computer that's really awesome do you want to introduce some of the other guys around here for sure, yeah so we have Jackson here hello with one of the lead of our customer success teams yeah, yeah, I'm Jackson I'm part of the help desk team one of the three team leads here pretty much we're the welcome mat, the vanguard the kind of traffic directors for any sort of problems, questions, issues lovely comments you may have so there's like a community a discus and all the other stuff for sure, you have a full community on discord they've come to us from anywhere from our Chicago data center in New York, Texas here in California and we also talk to them all the time we have a special phone room over here for any of our phone calls that you may send our way does the discord happening there? yeah, actually it's active just all day pretty much, yeah all of our countries essentially and you have thousands of users in there in the US discord? yeah, definitely we have a semi-weekly AMA town hall fashion in there tons of people piling in and asking questions it's quite a lovely community what's going on in here? so that's really Clay's room Clay, you want to show your room? yeah I'm here, I'm back so what's happening in your room over there? so in here is where we'll create anything from our 2D content so images for Twitter, Facebook soon Instagram as well as our live content so we have our shadow news twitch stream shadow games not really looking like this but that is our background a bunch of screens here live streaming from a high quality camera you do the shadow news USA, right? yeah, it's the shadow North America on Twitch and then on top of that we'll also film our videos so if you ever see an over the shoulder gameplay capture it could actually happen right here right now Simon is working with me and we're signing deals with influencers so we can start getting more content from their side there's lots of cool stuff happening Twitch is huge and live YouTube gaming huge definitely shadow brings down that cost of entry for anybody who wants to start creating that content be it live be it YouTube instead of the massive rig and figuring out how to set it up open a shadow account how awesome is it that kids I like saying kids the kids are able to just get access to huge gaming PC definitely cool PC master race and now today my son and I game on laptop side by side and the image quality is exactly the same as what I was doing last year with a $6,000 PC that's man blowing it's just $1 per game it's game changing $35 per day per month so that's totally affordable annual plan you get discounts so you're cutting the cost per month you're getting the quality and system never have to upgrade you got a system problem the teams you just met are there online to take care of you it's to me we're making PC a console developers can design to our hardware they now are delivering that game to how many tens of thousands soon to be hundreds of thousands of people by designing to one PC configuration so we're solving for game developers down to the gamers yeah this is today and tomorrow is cloud gaming what's going on here so this is the current phone support so you getting an issue you call in there's our man another one I'd like to where did he go there's a bunch of rooms here esports guy he's walking around anybody familiar with esports has probably seen him in content with some top teams around so when you talk about esports they are demanding gamers very demanding gamers and what do they think about shadow so far I've got amazing quotes I'm not sure which ones I'm allowed to release or state at this time but like in general without saying exactly in stuff do they compare with a local PC and do they think they can't feel a difference or is that the goal right and that's exactly the quote I've been getting from them is top tier esports athletes I've worked with and put shadow in front of them and side by side they tell me they forget that they're not on a local PC it's winning that was good for me I'm good and actually there's this thing about the latency from the mouse to the data center that's one thing and it's very low already but maybe one of the more important things for esports is the latency between one player and the other and let's say they're all playing on the shadow there's no latency there's a lot of different ways it can be solved at the tournaments a lot of that's in place and that's what James is working to set up so hoping that we'll be able to show you guys a tournament soon completely run on shadow and also the other thing is that a shadow data center has very good low latency to any other gamer like better than you would be able to do from home oh definitely you're not going to I mean you couldn't let's say some kind of game share solution that a PC gamer may have figured out you're never going to get the quality anywhere close to what you can with shadow and that's where even it's kind of funny with facebook trolls so they know the best and I was like oh that's not possible because of the latency and try it they should try it or even better tune into one of our live streams we have shadow games just get in and watch one of my community managers Ajax he streams all the time put the camera on his hand you can see it to the game and I guess maybe the other thing they could do is sign up and if they're not happy do you refund like or something or maybe they just risk one month if it doesn't work there there's the paid trial so you don't even have to sign up right now you could actually just opt in on the paid trial we create a blade for you get your shadow going it's just like the right product but it's in that non commitment and little short time and separated cost otherwise what they can do they can ping test right there's some way to ping to check your pain we do that I would have to get with them because on the social side I just send those links to the people direct when they hit me up let's introduce some of the other guys around here actually this man right here this is this is one of our community favorites he hates cameras this is why I love putting them on camera and this is the infamous Cabe Johnson he's become iconic in everything from our discord to some of our streams incredible value here Shad awesome Ari is the old timer the man I need to know something this is who I go to I might hand him over to you for a little bit thanks a lot so who are you? I'm Ari I've been in the company pretty much since the beginning we were still 30 employees I was in the French office back then and I moved here almost a year ago in California to help starting the office here so how's been the experience here in California have you tried to live in the US before? I visited New York as a kid and that's it so I moved here from scratch we were still in the office of like 30 people and it has been amazing so far we grew a lot actually as you can see there's way more people now and it has been a great experience so I'm European right I'm half Danish half Swiss and I want to see the Europeans take over the world I like that kind of thing I like this feeling too are you having the experience you're having where you are coming here to the US and you're trying to take over and be big in the US? so actually yeah it started like that we are a real French company that started in Paris so in the capital of France and we wanted to expand Shadow all over the world so we wanted to conquer one of the biggest place which is the US one of the biggest markets it's crucial you can't do this stuff without the US I mean especially in tech we're in the art of Silicon Valley so we had to be there they sent a few people here just to try to see how it could work and it has been great so far now we're in the US so we also have to play the game with these rules and this has been also amazing what are the rules what do you mean? I mean when you are in the US there's a lot of things you need to adapt to even the people we're working for it has been working with it has been great to use people with experience from the US market from how to work here to work together when we were just a French company that started with a lot of people that were junior like myself it has been great to take the experience of the Silicon Valley to also kind of upscale our game we were good at being like a small startup in France and thanks to the US experience we've been able also to like jump up and become a bigger company do you mind maybe sitting there? so this is part of the shadow baby let's say the secret sauce a little bit because you don't just you don't just run on a regular cloud stuff you build your own cloud exactly so this is one of the first versions of what a shadow server looked like of course it had changed a lot now in our data series there's a custom PCB kind of thing and everything or a custom configuration yeah we tried to make it custom so it changed a lot from that and now it's even more specific now it's maybe top secret the latest it is kind of our little sauce what's special about this? so what is special is not exactly about how the server blade is done it's mostly about the fact that we're doing the end to end solution so most of this service and in general you don't do end to end so you don't master all the components of your service just to rely on a lot of things on the or end we wanted to provide as much as we can to our customers so we're doing our own data centers we basically just rent an empty room and we build all our servers and make sure that they're compatible with our technology because we want to optimize as much as we can so we pick extremely precise components that have been tested and optimized to work with Shadow is this a bunch of GPUs there exactly these are the p5000 it's the one that are currently equivalent of a GTX 1080 exactly and there's boom boom boom boom like four or more yeah four yeah there is four of them in this one and with two big Xeon exactly and this is fully stacked of RAM normally and then I guess hard drives and stuff somewhere else maybe or something yeah it's somewhere else so actually one of the big challenges that we had creating Shadow is the storage storage is something that is really hard to conceive to have high performance and still have a lot of space for our customers so we had to develop new technologies to make sure that it was like as high level as we wanted for it because I've been using Shadow for a year so I'm a lucky guy I have one of these terabyte things I have 1.256 terabyte on my Shadow I watched the Shadow news in French the French Shadow news which is so cool every week and the talk is that something's happening eventually maybe you can't really say but potentially I mean people have certain storage for their apps and games and stuff like that well let's not get into what you have so people basically have their Shadow they log in whenever they want they can use it 24 hours a day if they want but usually total sleep maybe that's your business model of sleep because you get a dedicated GPU you don't share it but you know what I mean yeah exactly it is more to share I mean you log in only when you log in exactly so on the meantime other people can use the GPU when you are not logged in but what we really wanted to do is to make sure that once you're connected you have your own GPU that's part of our end-to-end solution when you're connected you have access to your storage you have access to your RAM and to your GPU and CPU the other users that are next to you in the Dacron an impact on your performance that's what we wanted let's go close to the kind of dream office here so this is the Shadow of the Ghost can you explain a little bit what happens in Paris so what all the engineers you have over there every day they're doing lots of work and trying to re-opt it to keep innovating all the time exactly so in Paris all our engineers are there we also built all the software technology that is used for Shadow the streamer has been a big part of it of course we're streaming a video so we wanted to optimize that so we had a team that created that from scratch what happens if you click the exit so here you have a full Windows computer exactly and it's basically a Windows computer yep it's Windows 10 computer so you can install every software you want so I guess you have experts in virtualization I've been a really big part of Shadow actually our lead engineer he's the guy right there does he want to be in video? I don't know he's a bit shy he's a developer so they have to keep quiet but this guy have been a big part in creating the virtualization of Shadow because Shadow is all about optimization it's easy to create a virtual computer having a virtual computer that have the grade of a eSports PC but that can also have low latency and all that is really hard so it required a lot of optimization on the virtualization side on the streaming side and also on infrastructure as I was saying before because you need to make sure that the connections of people are not going to limit the usage of Shadow this is why now with optimization we've been able to require only 15 megabits per second there's probably a lot of other things happening in Paris what else can you say about what's happening over there for example at one point the CEO he went into some kind of a cabin it was called the Chaban which in French there is a contraction of Shadow and cabin and for example I guess you have some of the best Linux and Windows and all kinds of hackers that optimize the way you get the minimum latency which is really the big deal here you don't want to see any delay when you click things are just moving and the different clients and all the different platforms and soon you'll have a couple things that are officially announced that you will have multiple screen so you will be able to have one Shadow one Ghost with one screen for another one that's kind of like what's announced so it has been announced that we're working on extra screen I don't know yeah you can't say it's the timing I'm a little bit but I think what's been announced is that you can run for example one on a Ghost the other one on another computer and then just go for one screen like you have dual screen or triple screen this is something that has been announced that will be really soon is testing you're going to be able to connect to your Shadow Ghost or another device as a primary one and on another device being able to use the Shadow app as a second screen so if you put two devices next to each other you'll be basically able to use it as a dual screen monitor for your Shadow and another thing I'm testing a little bit from my fast internet you can connect USB host you can connect anything you want even devices and the keyboard mouse and everything it just works so there is four USBs on the Shadow Ghost and they're slightly different there's two USB 2.0 that are optimized for mouse and keyboard because this is the Shadow Ghost that is going to analyze the inputs and only send the inputs so it's going to be way faster and you're going to gain some some later you're going to some optimized for keyboard mouse and some optimized for like mass storage some kind of stuff so the other ones are going to forward the entire USB so you'll be able to use peripherals that requires drivers if I plug my large tech mouse in the USB 3 ports it will be detected in my windows as this mouse the G903 but it's better to plug the keyboard mouse in the USB 2 ports they won't be recognized by usually you plug your mouse and keyboard on the 2.0 ports so they're optimized for latency for low latency and you can use the other ones that still have low latency but just a bit more for peripherals that need that requires drivers just here for a second I saw here this is some old stuff right this was the first generation what do you call it this one was our prototype for Shadowbox can you open this? sure we can open it so this is the prototype this is actually one of the first prototype when we wanted Shadow to run on that it was his ghost no that was even way before the first Shadowbox we wanted to run Shadow on that it was working but we couldn't have the performance we want I'm pretty sure this is an ARM CPU I mean it's maybe we don't have to pull it off but so the ghost is definitely an ARM CPU and then you had a version here that was using an X86 it was an AMD I think right? so it's an AMD some kind of AMD that was for the you call it the box? yeah the box this prototype is exactly the same board as the early bird box that was for our first 500 users in France and then we had the Shadowbox that was also released in the US and Europe but the cool thing is that this awesome stuff is just optional you can't run it on anything totally so this is just a thing client in case you don't have already a computer that can run Shadow or if you want something that is fan less really small that you can transport easily otherwise for example here we have the Windows app so if I do control Windows F I get out of the full screen and I can see that I'm just on a regular regular laptop and if I do let's say like this this is the little client software you have running on Windows and then you can have some settings you can check some different things and once you've chosen what you want for example you can prefer speed over reliability or enable the USB microphone or automatic resolution other stuff you can just start just launches in to your data center and you need to log in and then and this one is actually the same laptop running the same game except it's not using Shadow so here when I press start I'm logged in to my Shadow and I'm at the same point of the game this is running on the local computer these are the ASX and computers so this is running on the computer you can barely move this is like a $2,000 computer this is what you kind of say 1500 to $2,000 performance this computer is actually pretty expensive we pay them 5 or 600 because they still have a 9.5 in it they don't have a graphics card but when you play the Shadow PC configuration it's kind of worth $2,000 exactly with the components we've put in it we have the processor we have the P5,000 in it so yeah this is kind of expensive if you have high performance gaming experience for example here the Tomb Raider is running on very high settings and they're not the real problem so what would be awesome to hear is that you are in the next not very many months you're just going to be world famous as one of the big success stories from Europe that just come over to cover the cloud so right now our goal is really to expand a bit everywhere we've been a lot of people asking Shadow around the world so we started with the United States because it's a requirement in tech and soon we'll be nationwide in the United States right now there's still some states that aren't covered by Shadow but soon exactly right now there's Colorado that is not covered by Shadow there's also Florida Florida is missing but Texas is happy Texas is fine and Arizona Denver these kind of things are not too far hopefully or maybe they're also waiting and then California is pretty happy California is happy, Chicago is happy Canada is more or less waiting they're waiting I'm in Copening and I'm connecting to Paris but it'd be nice if there was a Scandinavia there in the center I could maybe say 5 or 10 milliseconds there's a data center in Amsterdam that's the closest one and then there is I think a bunch of people in Asia would be happy if they could use this there's a lot of people asking about Shadow in Asia I think they want to play in Hong Kong they want to play in Taiwan they would love to play in Taiwan and they'd love to play in Korea and Japan it's a real big challenge to open a new office it has been a real challenge to open the US office for example and of course we're looking forward to expand we're planning things more slowly but you're getting the hang of it you're getting used to it and soon you'll be able to cover everything I guess every time we do things like that we always kind of start from scratch but we're learning a lot and with this experience hopefully it'll be easier and easier to also deploy and kind of conquer the world South America, they love to play I'm sure there's a bunch of Brazilians watching this YouTube video we have so many people in Brazil that they have a good enough play