 I'm doing great, how are you? Thank you for coming on again. If you guys haven't seen the other interviews we've had with him, we've talked about several different things in the past couple of days with you. You guys can go to siliconangle.tv and everything will be archived there. You're going for the cube alum record here. Actually, I think Pat Gelsinger has it, but you're right there. How many times has Pat been on here? Let's see, you're getting close. I think Pat's been on what, five times? Let's see, you had twice at, this is your fifth time. No, I didn't. You had twice at VMworld? They did twice there? Two segments? We count the Heineken one as twice. We did the press conference with Heineken. That's right, that's right. And then you did a big interview with me. You might even have them here. You did a big interview with me and Heineken, and then you and I. If the listeners are demanded, you've got to deliver, right? Yeah, of course. Give them what they want. They want Phil. We even got Dave away from HP's show too, right? Yes. That was nice. I took the red eye in last night. They weren't too happy. You guys were hanging out at Epcot yesterday. We were watching the fireworks at the Epcot Center. I didn't stick around for the fireworks. I'm kind of bummed now. It was good. Like I said to Cali last night, I was tweeting. I said it wasn't the same without my kids. Having the kids at Disney, there's nothing like that. Epcot's not my favorite. I like Disney World a little better. Yeah. You mean Magic Kingdom? Yeah. Like the rides? Space Mountain or whatever it is. I need a real education in the Disney World experience because there are all these different parks and all these different sections and I don't honestly know much about it. I've never been. This is my first time even on the property. You've lived a deprived childhood. I know. Parents, what were you thinking? Do you watch all the time? Oh, no, they're not. It's cool actually. Talking tech on theCUBE. It's confusing. It's daunting for the first time Disney visitors, right? You try to back through all that stuff. You're good at simplifying things. Maybe you could come up with a new product there to help the Disney visitors figure out where they need to start. Disney for dummies, right? Disney for dummies, exactly. I'll think that's all right. Maybe you can also simplify Tech Startup World for us as well. It was funny last night seeing you with customers. You love customers, don't you? Yeah, I guess I'm an outgoing kind of guy that likes to talk to people. They like you. Well, it's kind of weird. Customers, they're friends now too, right? You know, when you're negotiating the deal to get in the door with them, they hit you hard and tell you they don't trust you and all that stuff. But after you get to know them and you deliver a form, you're kind of being friends with them. I think that's a good learning. You can never, never know friends. That's right. I'm real sincere. They are friends. I really appreciate what they've done. It's more fun to like who you're dealing with versus how to be a vendor for them, right? Let's see. Last time I talked to you, we were at VMworld. And the three-par acquisition was going forward. And I was asking you, you were a real poker face about it, you know? And so now, look at this. Wow, bang. Dell, is that a culture shock for you? It's, you know, the cultures are really similar. There's just a lot of them, as the way I describe it. We had 600 employees, they got 110,000. So, you know, that's a little different there. But, you know, I used to work at IBM. So it's a little bit of deja vu for me to go back to the big company. There's just a background for a CEO of a startup and a couple of startups. I mean, you were a math teacher, right? Junior high math teacher, yeah. Taught junior high math, algebra, all that kind of stuff. So, I mean, when you teach math, I guess to little kids, you got to be able to take complex ideas and simplify it. Is that kind of where you hone that skill? I think it helped. You know, I remember when I started at IBM, they used to, you know, rank the classes, one to 30 or whatever. And I did real well in those classes because most people are smarter than I am. They're books. I went to Harvard and MIT and all that kind of stuff. I went to the University of Northern Colorado. But what happened is they couldn't present. They couldn't react on their feet, you know, be dynamic. Be fluid, right? I learned how to be fluid as a math teacher. In junior high, you really better be fluid because you don't know what's going to hit you every hour, let alone every day. So you worked for IBM, which obviously, IBM, you know, I was saying to Cali, she's a little younger than I am. But you remember IBM used to have 50% of the revenues of the computer business and 60% of the profits, actually. That was true monopoly. And getting training at IBM was like getting training at Xerox. It was unbelievable. You know, this is 82 for me. So I was kind of at the tail end of the big hiring curve at IBM, but back then, they didn't really have any computer science degrees. You know, so they trained the industry, really back then. My training was a year long. So I'd literally, I'd go to Dallas for a month. I'd come home for a month, go to Dallas for a month. Wow. And it was, they had a fake company. Actually, just sorry, I couldn't remember the name. It's the Armstrong Sporting Goods Company. They had a fake company down there. They had their own annual report. You'd call in the CEO one time, the CFO, another day, you know, sell typewriters one day because back then, I mean, I had typewriters all the way to mainstream. What are typewriters? I know, you don't know. So you'd have to learn to talk their language. That's right. And they did this in Dallas. I mean, it's time to Dallas. Oh, no, I can't. I mean, I just live there. Is that really it? Yeah. It's a fun city, actually, yeah. It's a good city. Yeah. Chaparral Creek, do you know what that is? No. That's where we stay there. Have to look it up. So what got you into the startup business? I mean, how'd you do that? Yeah, that was, you know, I looked back and I don't know what was I thinking I did this. But so I was at IBM, you know, I did the fast track career. We ended up moving to Minneapolis. It was the branch manager there. And then right before I left IBM was the business executive charge of the PC and networking group there. But I didn't want to, you know, they would want me moved to our Monk, New York. I had four kids. That didn't sound real good. You're in a commission job, a non-commissioned job in New York. I mean, it's like really going backwards in your career. But I always wanted to do something entrepreneurial. You know, even as a little kid, I used to do things like, you know, start your own little companies or whatever you do there. I was a ball boy for the Denver Nuggets. You know, I do entrepreneurial things, I guess. So they, I went to work for a small software company. And the thing that was really good there is it got sold for just a little bit of money. It wasn't really a big success. But the CEO let me help him raise money. You know, you don't learn about fundraising at IBM. So he let me kind of vicariously learn through him. He raised the money, but I got to see how he did it. And that was, it ended up being a very key skill for me. That was a Minneapolis based company. That was a Minneapolis based company called Protea Software. Protea Software. That's one of the hardest things for people to get into, you know, their own business because you have to have so many different skills. Yeah. Finding that right mentor or finding that right partner to help train you in those areas is key. And it's not really, if you think differently, let me know, but it's hard to force that. Yeah. You know, I mean, how do you find that person? You know, a little bit, it's a little luck, frankly. Yeah. You have to seek it out a little bit too. But fundraising, if you're going to start your own company, it's a very key thing. And you know, there's a lot of strategies you can do. And even when you do it with them, you don't, you got to either have, you don't. I honestly think on that stuff, you either have it or you don't. Yeah. It's different than selling, but it's similar to selling, but it's different. But, you know, we, I would say there's three big risks in the startup. You got the first one is financing. If you don't have the right money or enough of it, it's probably not going to work. I actually think it's storage. If you get in a lot of technology companies, if you get overfunded, it can actually be bad too. Sure. Because you get sloppy. You get, you know, you're not quite as lean, mean, and tough as you should be. You got to find that balance. Yeah. And then, so number one is financing. Number two is the technology, which obviously is key what you're going to do. And number three is distribution. And most people focus on number two too much, frankly. And VCs in venture capitalists don't focus on number three enough. Distribution is, it's, it's key. You can have a mediocre product. And if you have a great distribution strategy and sell a lot of it, you're going to do better than the guy who has the product. Everyone's going to wait to come by for them. So how did you learn that distribution part? I mean, what was your focus there? Yeah, I think that there it's, you got to react to what the market's like there. So, you know, I'll give you an example. The first storage startup I started there, you know, not only were we a new company, but Sands were a new concept. So you better be pretty hands-on and direct because no one else knows what it is. So you better control whose telomotor it is. So now with the compelling we saw in 2002, you know, Sands are ubiquitous. Everybody knows about it. There's a lot of people been educated on that front. It's too complicated. So now is how do you get to as many people as you possibly can. Yeah. And so we, we had a lot of innovations, but I think one of them was we interviewed the, everyone's going to use the reseller channel. But they usually say, well, we'll do 20% direct and the rest through the channel. Yeah. And we talked to them. They hated it, you know, because they were competing with their vendor all the time. So we went 100% channel and helped to scale ourselves. Innovation in the distribution was the real secret there. So, so when you, John and Larry, started your first company, you knew those guys before obviously, right? Yeah. Actually, I didn't. Larry was my next door neighbor. Okay. So that was kind of how we met and he worked at a different company. But, and if you, you know, if you know us, we're totally different personalities. So we weren't hanging together on Saturday night. You know, we'd see each other more in the lawn, but you know, you weren't hanging out. I was more sports, he was cars, you know, it was different personalities. How'd John come into this? John and Larry go way back. They, you know, grew up in the same neighborhoods that they'd worked at four different companies together. Okay. So when Larry said, well, let me introduce you to John, we met at a little sandwich shop and the rest is kind of history then, right? So, there's really luck, you know, location, location, location. Yeah. My next door neighbor, right? So you had had some experience raising money from the software company. And then how'd you fund Zyotech? So we started out there, the original $886,000, not that I remember exactly how much you raised there. And how many cents? There was some, was some angel investors. So we started with angel investors. We, you know, there's a, the Olympic Hills Country Club bar is where we raised most of it, honestly, you know, we found that one guy that kind of was kind of a rainmaker for us introduced us to a lot of individuals there. There's some fun stories actually about that. I remember the first check I got was a guy, Joe Newman, and we did the presentation to him and he said, Phil, come out in the parking lot with me. I don't know if I'm going to get beat up or what, but he pulled out his checkbook, wrote a $50,000 check and said, make sure I get in the deal. I'm going to Vegas tomorrow and I don't want to miss it. Wow. I've never seen Joe since. That's the last time I saw him. Yeah. But you kept checking. He made 30X's money, so he's a pretty happy guy. I think he was real happy there. So we raised that and then we went over to venture capital, you know, traditional venture capital and you raised that in total about $20 million. And the compelling raised about $53 million and we did all venture there. So compelling in some ways was easier to fund because you'd done it before. You'd sold the company. So you went from the angel investing to the sort of, I guess the A round of the VC. Where were you at in the company? I mean, East Coast, West Coast, it's really different. I don't know what it's like in Minneapolis in terms of do you had to have some traction? Did you have to show, was it, you know, showing a business plan? What was the climate like back then? The first company, yeah. The first company, yeah. Series A. So they kind of... Where were your revenue once? What we always try to do is, you raise some money and you want to have it take you to a milestone and plus I say six months because it really takes about six months to close around. People think they can do it three, but it's six months where you really figure out start to finish. So I'll give you an example. Yeah, the idea, we raised the first venture round after we had the first kind of CD unit or alpha unit. So you'd kind of proven that some of the technical concepts were going to work and then a little bit of time there. And then the next night, you know, you might have that money last year long enough until maybe you're at the five million in revenue mark, you know. So you always want to get enough to take it a milestone plus six months is what I always do. And then did you do another raise after the Series A? Yeah, we did a series, three rounds. Three more rounds and then ended up selling the company to Seagate, right? To Seagate, yeah. And then... But it's, fundraising is really hard. It's really time consuming, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there like, all right. And because Christian, how did you get started? How do I get started? Where do I go? Do I, you know... And it's just like you said, you know, you got it. And if you're in Minnesota, it's a little tougher too because a lot of the VCs have left that town. Yeah. So and, you know, you hear the expression that I'm not going to invest in somebody that's not 30 minutes of my doorstep. Well, they're all in Silicon Valley, so... Yeah, they hate travels. That's a long drive to Minnesota. Yeah. And then they're afraid of the weather, you know, these things. So that was a challenge too. And then Compel was a little different though. We'd been successful. We'd made people out of money, so that helps get people on the door, obviously. But it was 2002. And VCs were licking their wounds in 2002. And they were looking for, hey, get to whatever, do 5, 10 million and show me a profit and then I'll come in. Yeah, so... Yeah, they think we don't need you. Well... There's always, as I say, VCs are always motivated to say maybe. Yeah. You know, the longer they wait, the more desperate you get for the money. And then the other thing is the more they get to see how well you're doing, before they put their money at risk. How are you sure that you needed VC money rather than... Because you talked about getting a little bit of angel and, you know, versus family investment versus angel and VC. Yeah. So here's what I always tell entrepreneurs, they ask for advice is figure out the kind of thing you're trying to do, how much money you're going to need for 5 years. And that determines what kind of money you need. So if you have an idea that might take a couple hundred thousand dollars for your total of investment there, that might be families and friends. Yeah. If you're going to need a couple million, you might be able to do that with angels. But if you're going to need 20, 30, 40 million to build a data storage company or whatever, you're probably going to go to VCs. You can definitely get them. And it's really important to figure that out up front because I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs raise any money they can get early on and you can actually plant cancer that's going to kill you later on. Yeah. Talk a little bit. If you have like a hundred angel investors, the VCs aren't going to touch you later on because they don't want to deal with that many smaller investors because when times get tough, it's tough to control those kind of numbers of people. Sure. Another example, you might get some strategic investors to invest in you, but that'll prevent another one from buying you. So you've got to be careful. You've got to have a long-term plan on that front there. So 2002, the dot-com bubble exploded. Then 9-11 just crushed the technology industries and it was a very slow recovery and so you raised the money in 2002. And of course, even companies like EMC at the time were reeling out of the net app, hurting. And so you were coming in and said, hey, we got a better idea than what these guys have. That must have been, like you say, a little hard to pitch the VCs on it. How'd you do that? Well... The charm. That's right. Come on. How could he not? A smart VC, ultimately, they're investing in the team. So I think we had the team, we got the help there. It was actually a fun story we had. I mean, Charles Beeler. Yeah, that's right. He was the first guy. He was great. He's been a key guest a couple of times. Charles Beeler and Jeff Hink were the first two. So we actually had a closing dinner a few weeks ago and we got all those guys together. They were telling the story actually when I first went to pitch them on the investment idea. I asked them if I could bring my daughter, who was a senior in high school at the time, and she had to do some project where she had to watch, you know, some business event happen or whatever. So I had her sit right behind me and they said, you know, the TRI daughter behind you, it was a sympathy investment. So that was funny there. But we had, the other thing I'd tell the entrepreneurs, get a compatible investor. Don't just get the money. It was some of you may not like hanging out with a little while later. And our VCs were fantastic. So they weren't vulture capitalists. They were friends too. We ended up being friends with them. Yeah, but I mean, that's hard, right? It's hard to tell the good ones from the bad ones. So you got to do a lot of homework as an entrepreneur, don't you? We got, you know, you got to talk to your peers and a lot of them won't be honest, because if they got the money from them, they're not going to say anything bad about it. Oh yeah, we love those guys. So you got to, you really got to, you know, scratch a little deeper before you do it. And it's hard when you're starting a company, you're kind of desperate to get the investment. So I just talked to my brother-in-law who was starting a company yesterday and, you know, you got to get the right kind of investors and you could see them struggling with that right now already. So that's good. And then you were a part of this, what I'd call the storage renaissance, you know, you had guys like a compelling data domain, three-par that were solving real problems. I mean, that's kind of where it starts, right? If it says, I got to solve a problem, and it's true, you guys were solving a problem, which was complexity in storage, right? You used to say, and it's probably still do, we wanted to bring all these mainframe class features down to the small, mid-sized business. It's, you know, I think the first thing that happened was once network storage came in, there was room for innovation. So, you know, in the old days, we had the direct-attach storage. Once the open system went to network-attach storage, you could come out and do some innovation and do some creative things. And a lot of the innovation is really kind of similar to what happened to the mainframe renaissance. So, you know, Hierarchal Storage Management was out there, you know, VM was a, you know, mainframe operating system, not like a virtual machine, right? It's, there's a lot of, you know, history repeats itself there. G-dupe is the only new thing I found. When I left the storage business 10 years ago and came back, it was G-dupe was the only thing I'd never seen before. I just talked to a customer and said that, am I Carnegie Mellon? They said, yeah, we had thin provisioning back in 1980, you know, so. I talked to the data on theCUBE here about the, in that decade, though, where all this innovation's come out, the legacy vendors really didn't provide it, though. I mean, I don't think, you know, look at primary storage, you know, storage tracking at a platter level, replay architectures, live volume. None of them come from a legacy vendor. They've all say they have it now, but the innovation came from, you know, more nimble, fluid companies. It was interesting because you were here at IBM, you weren't in the storage group. I was actually a storage specialist in the mid-80s. Oh, okay, good, I didn't know that. So in my little first staff job, I was the guy who'd go out and sell the mainframe DASD devices. So you remember well, systems managed storage, full-pup analysts at IDC. And of course, IBM, at the time, was everything. So I said, I'm going to make my name as a storage analyst because I'm going to know SMS better than anything. So I would read all the technical documentation. And I was like a little mini geek, but here's the thing, when I left the business and came back, I had a CIO consultancy and did a software company and came back and said I wanted to do the research thing. One of the first companies I met was Compellant. They gave me a briefing. I don't know why they chose me. And they described what you were doing with automated tiering. And I said, no way. This is like SMS, right? Does it really work? And they said, yeah, sure. And I remember calling up my colleague in Florida saying, you got to check this company out. And of course, you never know whether it's true or not. You see so many stories. And so he looked at it and said, this is fantastic. And then obviously, we watched you guys explode. So it's a good call. It's good. We have a lot of software features and they're all by themselves really good, but they kind of all work together to make each other better. We use the replays in our tiered storage. We use the replays in our replication. So it's neat how they all work together. Thin provisioning helps the replication and the power of multiple features working together, written by one team, not snapped on from somewhere else, which others have tried to do. Yeah, the clean slate. So you did that very successful. I wonder if you could talk about the whole, we were talking about raising money before, East Coast and West Coast VC seem to be somewhat different right now. East Coast a little bit more conservative. West Coast, do you think we're in a bubble? I think for the social media side there's a big bubble going on. I think in storage there was one in the early 2000s. A lot of people made money on exit strategies back in 2000. Then there was kind of the hiatus there. There's a little bit of a bubble, I think. Is that a good thing? It seems like there's another storage one coming on now, too. There's a lot of... What's kind of surprised me, it's kind of coming on now. Is a bubble a good thing or a bad thing for entrepreneurs? It's good things for the entrepreneurs because the money flows a little quicker. For business in general. Bubbles, it hurt, the last one, but this one feels like there's more innovation going on. Innovation cycle here. And storage is right at the center of it, too, which is kind of neat to see that activity there. Let's talk about that a little bit because 2010, John Furrier, my co-host coined the term, storage is sexy. In 2010 was a sexy storage year. A lot of acquisitions. You're saying you're seeing another big spate of storage investments. Where is it? The cloud? The on-ramps? They try to tie it on to other trends. Some is... So it's like marketing hype, if you know what I mean, but you get the flash stuff, you got the cloud stuff, you got the... They tend to grab on a trend and go with it here. One thing you've got to do is you've got to evaluate is that a feature or is that a company? When you look at these investments and the features don't make it. Some VCs fund those things, but that's a big challenge. If you look at the 2000 class, not many made it. There's a lot of money invested and not many made it. Some of those guys raised $150 million and didn't make it. A lot of NAS and Sand companies didn't quite do it. I think you could have the same thing happen here, but if you make it, you can make it big. The blueprint is, you saw in your class great innovations, great companies. Isilon, Data Domain, Component, 3par, and then ultimately they get sucked up by the whales. Larry Ellison started it. Remember he used to say he used to denigrate other companies saying they're writing checks, not code. Then he changed the game. He started writing checks and buying all these companies. He got more money and started to ask the checks. He made some good calls. I haven't heard that. It's a good Monday. Hey, when you're talking the Cube this morning. You could have the lines. Finger tips. But do you think you'll ever see a company emerge from Startupville and actually gain critical mass? I guess NetApp was the last one. You guys had to think about it. We were absolutely focused on it. To get such an attractive offer you got to do what's best for your investors. You're public and you have to take care of the investors there. The other thing is you got to get the skills quick as you can. You don't want to be a small player because all the consolidation going on right now, the integration, you have to have the cloud to integrate with all these other vendors. By yourself it's tough to get the attention because it's going to be tough. It's always been. Still a lot of opportunities. One of the things to scale and to get bigger and not be a small player is people. How do you choose the right people? You had with partners very good relationships. When you start hiring. It's critical to get that there. More eyes on the prize. Have more people interviewing. Make sure it's a cultural fit. Some people talk about their cultures but they really don't know what it is. Did you write down your culture? Did you have a statement? No, we said two words. It's positive, aggressive. We talked about that. It's always been the case. It's real. You can see it from the customers. It's not a casual relationship. It's positive because it's like don't bash the competition. You can talk factually what's different but don't disparage. That's my IBM roots. It's how each other work with each other. You want to be collaborative as opposed to competitive. You want to compete but you don't want to do it no matter if somebody has to lose. Positive, aggressive is pretty important. I found though that when the people join the team if they're not positive aggressive they actually self-select out of the company eventually. They came from a very political environment. They bring some of those habits and they don't work after a while. They leave because politics doesn't work as good, that type of thing. That culture is really important and if you get the agriculture you're going to attract the right kind of people. We did till the Dell acquisition we really had not used headquarters. We hired 500 or some people all from references and referrals from employees. We talked about this at VMworld. You said it's actually an advantage that we're in the middle of the country in the Republican Valley and we don't have to be in the East Coast. There's a lot of talent from a CDC. Yeah, there's a Minneapolis there used to be IBM in the bunch and all but one of the bunch companies was based in Minneapolis. People forget that. What happened though it didn't develop a strong venture community so that's where all the entrepreneurial the money wasn't there. That number one of the three bullets I talked about earlier but really strong engineering talent and culture, they stay there they keep working for you. They work hard. It's just a good place to do business I think and see a little bit more technology start coming out of there. A lot of storage too. People don't realize that at C&T and Seagate does all the high and dry development Cray, there's a lot of Q-Logic's got big operation Veritas, that's Mantec. Can we back up for just a second? Earlier you said to ask yourself whether it's a feature or a business when you're determining investment, right? Well the web and software that's a very easy determination but in the storage business where are those determining factors? I think you could look at a couple ways. One is can you be a hundred million dollar company? If you have little features you might get to 20 or 30 that kind of thing there. I think it's kind of got to be a system that's probably going to be bought by somebody else. It's not going to last as a company so if you're going to make something a little bit better it's probably going to get a feature. I don't know what the right way to look at it but when you see it you can tell it's it or not. That's a good angle if you're a feature company maybe 10, 20 million somebody will pick you up. You need that other company to make your sales too or a systems company you got the whole thing to people used to call you a feature company but you weren't a feature company. You had a lot of features feature rich. They used to say the same thing about three par about data domain and you see all three of those companies got to a hundred plus million that's a good kind of benchmark there. But that's interesting you said people were calling them a feature company is it easy to make that mistake in how you're assessing it? The guys who didn't have the features were calling it a feature company. They were just trying to It was our friend Joe Tucci Joe Tucci who's been on Acute twice by the way and we love but hey he's competing. Their feature companies will have it all but the difference is they have a lot of those features but I've talked to customers about them and it's not the same. I've talked to them they don't turn them on they may say they have it's a check box we got that too it works right they can play a lot of customers that way. The feature company I said it was Freudian but he asked about interviewing another tip I give on interviewing is that if somebody brings something up multiple times in an interview it's pie like if they say I only want to work for an ethical company I want to make sure everyone's honest here right after I start going you're dishonest they want to convince you that they are what they aren't right so it's people tell you a little bit from what they say as much as what they don't say Were you doing the hiring yourself? We did a lot of it yeah I know you were using headhunters but you personally Oh yeah the first I don't know how many employees interviewed every one of them At what point did you stop? We probably got to the 100 mark you always let the manager hire I mean I just was one of the interviewers I wasn't like the you couldn't blackball anybody or whatever you give your feedback because ultimately the manager's got to build their team so you have to trust them there to find the right person to do that That first layer is that real important and those are the strong personalities you got to make sure that they they fit the culture too they're the ones that are going to do that for you If there's one pitfall that a startup makes and all of that we've talked about and even that we haven't where do you think that one point is I mean that's a That's a hard question I should have handed it to you You know I I kind of hit a little bit there People tend to all get to the distribution later You know start thinking about that in the original business plan why you're developing the product you should really be just as innovative on how you're going to distribute how you get the word out and nowadays there's so many ways to do it I mean look at this the social media there's so many unique ways that are that I'd start right away create a buzz get it going So you're done? With the show? No I was done like starting company I think Wow that was a rude way to get them off I think yeah, are you done yet? Okay Callie you got something better over there It takes a lot of energy to do this You know you're taking the calls at midnight on Saturday when those first few systems go out So I don't see myself doing any other companies but see me get this one with a billion dollar mark for Del and see what happens after that That's the milestone? I may do some do something in more philanthropic areas or something like that but no plans yet Well thanks very much for all your support here Can I ask one more question? We don't have to let them go right now No So you were talking a little bit about the customer that made you tear up here at the Dell Storage Forum and I was wondering if you could go into a little bit more detail on that Yeah it was actually one of the business partners but he we had the Q&A session after the keynote so we had several questions the last question you always hear that when the mic should be passed around and Winslow Technology Group got Winslow stood up and just said hey I want to thank you I started a business with the guys and it wasn't the product it was kind of you guys you know the team and he mentioned my partners and Brian Bell and Marty Sanders you know he works really closely with there Scott Horst and Mike Beach but he said you know I started a business on you risked everything on it and you guys have always been there for me you know helped me out when I needed it kind of worked there and my customers took a lot of risk they bet their careers when they bought your product and it was pretty neat and that's kind of the way you ended the it was kind of like I joked that was my brother that just talked there right but it was kind of like it almost looked planted but it wasn't it was very very very neat to hear that so basically he was risked by buying everything his family his kids he used to be a salesman for large storage vendors and now he's starts his own reseller business and now he's got I don't know employees and you know it's awesome it's really neat it was neat that's really neat to the impact they have on people is very important you know employees and customers and so that's why that's what makes me motivate it's a big part of why you do it that's it exactly it's a school teacher right you still want to help the kids right these are big kids now did you miss teaching I do miss a little bit I can tell I like presenting so that's why I coached all those years though too so yeah you were saying telling me that I thought it was baseball but you told me it was basketball basketball football and no softball I had an article where they coached softball I've never coached softball basketball football I did a little bit of volleyball but those are the two big ones basketball and you played hoops ever south high school played football more of a tennis player though that was a split end a slow good hands didn't do baseball because you were playing tennis yeah tennis is the the big summer sport I'll give you a thumbs up on the tennis and you still play tennis right as well yeah but it's on my wife I'm at we both went to college on tennis scholarships and you golf to a golf not very good my good let's play I know very good I thought you were going to say no it's terrible so you can just he looks like he's playing all the time yeah he does tan fit look how you ready to go nothing to do with golf right you see my golf game you know I don't play much golf we'll check it out you're a tennis player then I was I used to play every sport on the planet I was a tomboy when I was growing up so tennis was one of my favorite ones yeah well good thanks a lot you guys good seeing you guys I wish we were back tomorrow so we could have you back I know come out to Minneapolis we'll do it daily a daily show come up and build a studio right thanks