 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE Pod episode seven. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We're theCUBE Pod, first 10 episodes getting out of the gate, getting cadence down. Dave, good to see you. Seventh episode of theCUBE Pod, where we're trying to get the most important stories that we're tracking all week long, digging into who we're talking to, sharing it out, what's going on in the world of tech, enterprise tech, and of course, love the rant sections we've been doing. Really been liking how we can riff on topics a little bit long form hour. I think after 10 episodes, we'll start looking at bringing in cube guests. But overall, getting our wheels on the track, so to speak, and getting into it. Well, I love it, John, because you got a beat on the news. I'm always heads down on Fridays, doing breaking into helices, and I pop up, and it's just a great way to reconnect. So thanks for making the time. Well, we got a lot of stuff to talk about this week has been a lot of news, a lot of weird stuff happening. Again, it's just an ongoing cadence of the tale of two worlds. We're living in a world of weirdness. Trump has indicted founders getting killed in San Francisco, the hardest funding market in the history of entrepreneurship of Silicon Valley and tech. Large funds are not doing well. It's a shift. On the other hand, you got the funding is abundant if you have AI in your business plan. So we're seeing a major shift. It just feels like some of the things we've been talking about, Dave, where the world is shifting culturally and starting to see some signs of brightness and then kind of like the purge and shift from old stuff that people are rejecting. And so a lot of stuff to talk about. To me, I mean, I think I was most impacted this week by the Trump indictment. Obviously seeing a president in the courtroom is just was absolutely ridiculous. But really what shook me was the death of Bob Lee, the creative cash app, CTO of Mobilecoin, and he was killed in San Francisco. He actually went to a car and car drove away. Even today, there's another story breaking this morning around how the former police commissioner was beaten up with a pipe almost killed because some people were smoking crack in front of his mom's house. She's like in her late 70s. And if the neighbors didn't come out, he'd be dead. So homeless lawlessness just continues in San Francisco. To me, it home, because you got a founder, tech founder. The Bay Area was Silicon Valley. Then everyone moves to San Francisco and you get the Bay Area in general. But San Francisco for the past decade has been kind of where everyone's been going for startups. And now you can't even walk down the street, Dave. And this is a absolute encapsulates the shit show that is San Francisco. Meanwhile, the week earlier last week, you had the biggest renaissance in San Francisco ever with the Woodstock AI conference, thousands and thousands of people. And so it's really just, it's a time of change. And it's just- Where was that, John? It was at like Rankone? I'm not familiar with it. It's like Southeast of- It's right where the Bay Bridge is. You know where Spear Street is. It's as you walk towards, it's on Main Street. Main Street's a short street between Market and where the bridge corner turns where the Bay Bridge is. It used to be a Gordon B show. They used to hang out in the old days, but it's an area that's commercial. I'd say it's not particularly bad neighborhood, right? Or it's just, I mean- No, it's San Francisco. It's all safe, but here's the problem. Like I said, with the homeless guys getting beaten up on the son gonna tell the people to get off their mom's porch in the Marina district, he almost got beaten to death if the neighbors didn't come out. So there's just a level of lawlessness in San Francisco right now where it's just bad. I mean, you see all the news. You were impacted. I mean, when was that? Three years ago? Four years ago? I think like six years ago, five years ago. By Moscone, right? Didn't you get maced? I was maced, exactly maced and attacked. And if I wasn't an East Coast ninja defending myself, I probably could have been injured seriously, but it was, I defended myself and had to fight back. Tell that story. I mean, I haven't heard it in a while, but it's kind of weird. I remember, I was welcomed back from the Marriott to go to get my car at 3rd Avenue parking garage. And as I was getting my parking ticket turned around, pressed a paying and getting the receipt ticket back and person's in my face with mace and going for the wallet, trying to attack me and get out of there. I didn't even see a weapon or anything. I was kind of like that maced. I was wearing my glasses at the time. So I felt like I wore my safety goggles in science class because it's probably saved me from being knocked down, but it was tough. It was like a really, really brutal maces. It was stinging. I couldn't even find my glasses. I could barely see for like 30 minutes. The person did run away, didn't get the wallet and I defended myself, but it's out in the open. Car break-ins is well-known in San Francisco. Homeless camp, meth, drug use. Areas that used to be safe to walk around Moscone are now encampments for homeless shelters. It's a real big problem. Didn't you get smash and grab too? Didn't you? Yeah, lost my bag. So did Danny Ryan when he was the CTO of CrowdChat, right? Yeah, just parked right in front of a bar to run in and meet someone. Literally for 10 minutes came out, bags gone, real laptop, and next thing you know, it's at the flea market in Oakland. So, you know, it's, I mean, smash and grab. Okay, break-ins, that's theft, but like you go to New York, that used to be like that in there, but this is like really bad. Like the homeless and the crime wave, the drug use, the lawlessness, it's a political issue. And this founder who was killed, you know, was literally dialing up, walking around and bleeding out on the streets. It's just happened two-third in the morning. No one knows kind of what happened, no suspect. And you know, it hits home when it's one of your own, but yeah, like, hey, you go move to San Francisco, pursue the entrepreneurial dream, and it's not safe. This is going to have an impact on entrepreneurship. So the city's going to get their act together. So that's that. Well, you know, Moscone, you know, that area around Moscone is not great. I mean, and it's a beautiful new facility, but it's so damn expensive, you know, with RSA coming up, it's the things sold out. I'm staying at the Pickwick, I think it's 600 bucks a night, because that's all I could get. And it's like, I mean, it's like, I remember somebody told me- Yammer moved to conference. They said, Oh yeah. Somebody who I won't name told me, you know, she knows, you know, expenses. She said it's three to four times more expensive for her to run a conference in Moscone than it is in Vegas. Three to four X. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that's real incentive when people get killed. And there's been stories of, you know, people flying in for a tech conference, you know, and they strayed to the Tenderloin area of San Francisco and get mugged or get killed. It's happened before. It's not as, they probably didn't want to publicize it, but it's just not safe. You remember we went to Hamilton in the Tenderloin? Do you remember that? I do. And we were walking down the street. It was open. People shooting up, you know, It's gotten worse. It's gotten worse, Dave, since then. It's gotten worse since then. So, you know, it's, it's not safe. It's just- Traveling packs, people. Traveling packs. Well, I think ultimately, San Francisco is very vibrant city anyway. I think it's going to come back, you know, it's a Bay Area. Everyone loves to come back. And it's just really a political thing right now. I think no one's disagreeing. You ask anyone in San Francisco, anybody. It's unanimous. That probably won't be one person who would agree with the statement that if someone said San Francisco's okay, it's not okay. There's unanimous revolts happening. It's just not okay. And I think we'll see what happens. I don't live there. We live in the Bay Area of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto. So it's like, you know, good down here, but different world. Deb and I were out there for, you know, our 25th and we went to Napa, but then, you know, we stayed in San Francisco for, I don't know, three days. And I wonder, I was like, you got to watch it. It was fine. It was great. We had no problem. Really didn't encounter, you know, any issues, went out at night, walking around during the day. So I'm like, okay, maybe getting better, but then you see a story like this. And it's like, crap, scary. So this is a bad other news. Just a lot of stuff going on around Elon Musk and Twitter. I mean, we should have a whole segment of the pot on Elon. These potter for just news. So just this week, two things that jumped out at me. One, he basically put NPR's Twitter handle as labeled state media, which is like Russian media. It's like state affiliated media, which is a complete insult. And what happened was state affiliate media tag is really bad. When prior to this tag, it said on there that they were an example of what isn't state this affiliated media along with the BBC. So clearly this is a, you know, one of those things where it's troll, I called it, you know, the troll century because he's basically trying to get at them some vendetta, but, you know, he has admitted it was a mistake, but that's because of the backlash NPR reported that. But obviously it was a little ding. This is a culture with Twitter now in this world where people get in power and they just want to rile up the other side. So I just have a problem with that. I think that was misuse. I mean, I like NPR. I find that they're okay. They're not always fast on the news. Like we're in the trenches, so we see things faster, but they do a good job. They do a good job of reporting. I mean, look, NPR is, it's passive liberalism. Okay, but it's not state-sponsored media. I mean, they do good reporting. I mean, and it's high quality, it's just ridiculous. They're good. I mean, you like them. That's my New York Times NPR. You can disagree with them most of the time, but they hire legit media reporters to report as best they can. They do bias and that's a different conversation, but bias in the media is changing. You're seeing now with these outlets like Twitter, people with all kinds of voices are coming in. I think there's gonna be a revolution reset on media in terms of this whole historical liberal bias. And I think that's overplayed. I think, yeah, I would see it, but definitely you're gonna start to see more calibration. I think there's a huge center centric population that is liberal and not hardcore liberal or left. They're liberal on social, maybe conservative on fiscal. I think that's an underrepresented audience in media. No, me, John. You know, me, I'm down the middle. It's like, I tell my friends on the left that actually, you know, Fox News, when they're not spewing actually has really good reporting. And I tell my friends on the right, you know, New York Times and NPR, it's actually really good reporting, you know, when they're not opining. That's the only way you can get, I don't know if you remember the show called the McLaughlin Group. I loved that show. That guy was great, John McLaughlin. And he was like hardcore Republican, but he would have people that were liberal on the show and they were really smart and they would debate and you'd get both sides. And it's like, remember, 60 minutes used to have the point counterpoint. That's gone. You have to like switch channels to get- Well, the scarcity is gone, right? So you have no, the scarcity is not there on media, unlimited media now. And so what's going on with Twitter in these areas, and this is generally my philosophy. And I think we'd look back, we'll be right on this. Trust matters, right? Reputation and trust matter. And the more transparent, the more voices are in the equation, the more data is going to come in and that's going to level things out. And the Elon thing with the NPR, it's kind of like a kid's game, you know, get off my lawn kind of thing, you know, making fun of them and we'll check more, kind of making a play troll at them. That's just one side. That's news today, breaking. And, you know, I have about 28,000 subscribers on our sub-stack and sub-stack is claiming and reported the verges carrying the story of New York Times, The Hill, Vismo, Axios, they're all carrying all the mainstream media are carrying it. Sub-stack says Twitter is unexpectedly restricting access to embedding tweets on authors posts there. So because sub-stack announced a timeline feature similar to Twitter. So what happens overnight, Dave? It doesn't work on Twitter. Now, you and I have talked about this. Remember back in the day with Lotus 123 and Microsoft Excel, the philosophy at Microsoft was, jobs not done till Lotus doesn't run. And then, okay, this is absolutely the exact same thing. This is a fire across the bow. And then also Twitter shut down the OAuth, but Twitter, Flipboard was impacted. The founder of Flipboard, Mike McHugh, former Netscape, former entrepreneur and other big startups tell me he was one of his companies. He's running Flipboard. They just shut off authentication with no notice. So if you're a Flipboard user, the fabricated news aggregator, you can't log in. So like, this is like the shit that they're doing. So if they continue to do this and they don't get it right, they're gonna lose users. And finally, the biggest troll of the century with Twitter was the Dogecoin logo on Twitter. He swapped out the bird for the Dogecoin logo. Now the bird's back today, but it was like a good three days. Such an ass hat move. The Dogecoin, now, and Dogecoin's up, I don't know what the number is, it was up to like 10 cents. So it was up like 30 plus percent that one day it shot up. That's like insider trading. You're using your platform to pump up your own stock. And Doge is just garbage. I mean, we know, I like crypto, but I like some good crypto, but Doge is nonsense. So this is trust issues. So like, I mean, I kind of like it on one hand. It's very sophomore kind of joke NPRC. I made you state labeled, you know, Oh, Dogecoin clever hack, you know, meme culture. But, you know, I get that sophomore kind of move. It's kind of funny. You laugh at it, right? But it's not, it's not going to have any impact positively in my opinion. It's only backlash in my, so like, I'm kind of like, well, is it really worth it? You know, trust, you lose the trust. I mean, if I were a Tesla shareholder, I'd be pissed. Like get back to, you know, business here. You got, you got some serious, you know, issues. You got, you know, competition coming in. You got to figure out pricing. You got how many EVC, you know, competitors are coming out of China and get focused. Come on, stop with Twitter. I guess, well, they just hired somebody to run it. Right. So that's right. That's right. Well, the other big news, obviously in the top line is Trump was arrested in 34 felony counts, which was weird. Again, this is, we don't want to, I want to spend a lot of time on Trump because it's really not an issue. But you know, Stormy Daniels that way back when there's some great memes going around. There was, I saw some last night because I've been indicted. They made a song out of it. I'm so excited, that song. And they go, I'm so indicted. And it was, it was good. It was on, it was all over. I don't like it because I just, I just think it props him up and rallies the bay. I just, you know what? I just, I wish Biden would just pardon him and end it. His, the Biden's base would freak out. All the Trump haters would freak out. Trump wouldn't know what to do. His head would probably explode. And then just go away. I just, I don't like him being the centerpiece in the news. I told you, I think last week he's dead to me after January 6th. I just, I don't like him being the center of attention. But, and it's, it's unbelievable. I mean, you see front page of the Wall Street Journal. You see, you know, a former president sitting there in the courtroom. I don't know. Well, you know, the Republicans had a losing streak on the midterms. They, they should have crushed it. They blew it. Trump's back in this thing. He's just toxic. It just kind of get out of the way. So, but it's just, you know, former president's thing in the courtroom indicted. It's just, it's bizarre. So, all right, Dave. Next topic. The continuing AI madness. I know it's April now, March madness was over, but AI madness continues. There is a real continuing shift on AI. The, the pitch book was reporting that the large funds are down. Every VC that I've talked to this week have talked to like a dozen VCs. They're all saying, this is the worst market they've seen. Even the dot com bubble wasn't this bad from a down market round standpoint. Seed rounds are up a little bit because it's, that's the discount goes to the VCs. The market goes down like this. It's a buyer's market for the VCs, not a seller's market. So A's are, so seeds are doing, doing seed rounds, but those are the new stuff. The future unicorns are going to be born. We'll get to that. A rounds up are dead. You've got to be crushing it to get funding. So, on one hand, it's this bad market, the worst everyone's ever seen. On the other hand, if you're an AI and you have anything with a prototype, you're going to get gushing funding. There's funding everywhere for that. So it's a really interesting time, Dave. And the question is, and you know, I'm very big on this big wave, is this wave going to take over? And is it real? That's, and I just think it's just ironic. You have a dead market here and a booming market over here. Really interesting dynamic. Isn't it? And I saw on Silicon Angle this week like, I don't know, five or six companies got between, you know, maybe some small seed rounds, three, four million, but even some more significant rounds. And, you know, and then you think about companies that were raising money during the tech boom and, you know, anybody selling into tech is really hurting, you know, their revenues or the growth rates are way down. A lot of these companies have, you know, just maybe 12 months or less of cash flow. You know, that's a concern. But I think the firms that are outside of selling to tech are doing okay, some of these startups, because they're VCs, they've probably done some layoffs, you know, they've cut their costs and they're hunkering down. The question you asked is a good one, is this real? I think it is. I mean, I think, you know, maybe like a lot of things, it's overhyped at the beginning, underhyped at the tail ended, but this may be, you know, the start of just a completely new wave of automation and innovation. That's what I think. I don't necessarily think everybody's gonna win, but I think it's real. I mean, to me, I think this is the biggest inflection point or wave in the history of the computer industry for multiple reasons. Because the perfect storm is here, it's like, it's all coming together. You got more compute power, silicon offload and abstraction layer of innovations, two killer ways to scale. You have software now being open source at an all time high and continue to grow. We'll be at KubeCon in Amsterdam in a week and a half. You got machine learning and AI now with large language models, computer vision, multimodal AI, just in the past 100 days I've changed everything. And then now infrastructure and tooling's up. So you have not only the applications, you got the tooling, data sources and actionable foundational models. And then you got foundational model ops. Some are calling it prompt ops, like DevOps for prompts, because prompting the AI is great. Now we're now a couple of weeks into people getting the chat GPT plugin. We did a little LLM with the Kube model that's now up and running in decades where there are transcripts and all the cloud guys and all the silicon's contributing at the bottom of the stack. So you have infrastructure and now this middle layer, lack of a better term, is filling in. There's gonna be at least six to 10 unicorns born from this wave that no one's seen yet. So this is what we're looking at. We are right there. It's happening right in front of us. Unicorns being born. The question is, what's a unicorn gonna look like? And I'll tell you this, it ain't gonna look like what it was before. I keep flip-flopping on whether or not open AI is gonna get first mover advantage. At first I thought no, and then I thought, well, maybe because they got the early data and then I'm playing around with Bard a little bit and seeing some other things come out. I like Bard because it said the cube was number one. I like that, but then you get this plug-in model. And I think a new business model is gonna emerge out of this that we really haven't even thought of yet. I think there are a lot of kind of conventional business models, search, advertising, but maybe there's an API model that comes out of it. But I think it's really hard to predict. Well, here's what I'm seeing right now. So I talked to four entrepreneurs this week, okay, on this one point, and I talked about a dozen last week on this other point around what's a real opportunity? So there's two general schools of thought here in Silicon Valley. One is it's a wave. It's happening on our beach right now. So we're gonna watch these waves. And there's, I won't call it venture hallucinations except where it's being used in chat GPT, but there's opportunity recognition hallucinations. And let me explain what that means. An opportunity recognition hallucination is something that gets pulled forward like the pandemic did with virtual events. You have this pull forward dynamic where things that are out in the forward range of the vision get pulled forward because of the AI advances. But because it's new and it looks like a shiny new toy, people go, wow, that's an opportunity and they throw money at it. It may or may not have longevity and be durable. So you have this kind of mirage hallucination dynamic going on in around opportunity recognition. Now this is a trap for VCs because you gotta be really smart to know which trend is gonna beach head or an ability to sequence to a bigger position. So if you can jump on a low hanging fruit or a mirage or a pull forward opportunity that leverages the AI, then you have to have a pivot to the broader durable opportunity. So this is what everyone's talking about in the valley right now. Everything looks good on paper with chat GPT. You can't tell the difference between what's real and what's not. So the mirage, these hallucination for ventures is coming. Forget the chat GPT being accurate. So this is going to be a capital market dynamic but right now, if you have AI in your business plan, you get funding, seed funding will be plentiful. So, you know, I know you've been experimenting with cube.ai and you know, cube GPT and I was on a call this week with Matt Baker from Dell and I saw him and I was like, I'm just going to try out the cube.ai. So I said, what does Matt, what does Dell's Matt Baker say about the cloud being a zero sum game? Cause he's always talking about that. He's always talking about that in the cube. And I said, Dell's Matt Baker believes that the cloud should not be thought of as a zero sum game, but as an operating model. He says the cloud operating models are characterized by democratization of technology access to resources, simplified commerce experiences, instant scalability and agility. And these characteristics have only been consistently provided by public cloud vendors. However, Dell is capable of bringing the same cloud experience to on-premises environment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then it was a link to a video. Now he would did the same thing for chat GPT, chat GPT, who the hell is Matt Baker? So that was a really interesting experiment, John, where, and you saw Bloomberg, what Bloomberg did, obviously have a bigger corpus of data than we do, but we got a pretty big corpus of data. And so every company on the planet has got to be thinking about this. What proprietary data do we have that we can, you know, use a foundation model to extract data and create new services for whether it is audiences or customers or whomever. This is exactly what this mirage comes down to. And I was just thinking about the, you mentioned Google and Bard. Google's going to have a great advantage with their corpus. I think they're going to hit the beach head that everyone who has no skills in entrepreneurial or technology will see as an opportunity will be vaporized by Google and Microsoft and Amazon. So you'll have the big guys taking that bigger market. Then you're going to see these unique opportunities like you're getting at with like people with proprietary data. I think that's the fusion of data that's going to be the killer app here. And that is like what we're talking about with Bloomberg having multiple decades of financial data. We just plugged in a decade of cube data, which I just did a query on the chat, thecubeai.com site that's in closed beta. And anyone listening wants to go to thecubeai.com. I asked it, what is cloud native networking? This is a topic we were just having in preparation for KubeCon, which is at the Linux Foundation. It came back with cloud native nevering is a new operating model, which is different from traditional IT managed focused on scalability, reliability by construction, which means that the applications are in charge and UX and you are essentially components. It involves security, being baked into everything from the beginning, as well as a closer working with UX designers and developers for shorter feedback cycles. The paradigm is here to stay for the few generations changing the way software engineering is approached. And the Cisco Executive Dominic Tornau with a link to the video three years ago. Now I could get better, but you know, for an alpha closed alpha, that's not bad. So every company will have data. The question is, is it in the right source? This is going to be, again, this is why I think that the Valley is excited about these pull forward opportunities. It's going to give people a chance to get in the game. And will Google have that data? That's the other question I have, right? Will Google do what it did to, you know, old media? Yeah. And I was, again, you talk about funding on Silicon Angle. I also, they wrote a story about Honeycomb.io, which is a MIT alumni founded it. She's amazing. Women led company. Yeah, and it sites off to her. And her big thing was as AI writes more code, it's going to be more bad code out there. So observability is changing as well. So AI is going to impact all kinds of the software side of the business. And we're going to, again, we're going to be at cloud native conference in Europe, Kubecon, the hottest names there are container and Kubernetes movement continuing. You're seeing, there's still estimated about 70% of enterprises are stuck in the virtual machine world. Only about 30% or so have converted to containers, Kubernetes, massive headroom. And they're all going to move over there. Kube, Fert is one. We'll talk to Stu Miniman at Red Hat about that. Developer productivity, security and the developer cycle. The AI impact has this human loop aspect. So in other words, the human's role in the coding is going to be continued. So you have people not so bullish on the AI and open source and software because on one hand, you can train it to do stuff but there's bias in the ethics and the algorithms. So the algorithms themselves are going to have all those bias issues. They're going to have all those potentially hallucination problems. They still need to be managed and checked by humans, maybe, but the use of the right code to check the AI. So observability becomes even more important and open telemetry is one area that we're going to look at. So that's that. And the other one finally is the Broadcom VMware outcome is going to impact the ecosystem. So if VMware stays with Broadcom, is it better for competition or worse? Some are saying that the acquisition helps competition. That's what I said. Yeah, that's what you said. Yeah, because people are like, well, let's take a look at Red Hat, see what they got going. Well, it's Nutanix got over here. It's good for competition. And like I said, I think last week or two weeks ago, it's up to Broadcom to make it more attractive for customers to stay and leave. And I think they're going to do that. That whole thing, don't get me started. It's too early for my rant. Yeah, don't get me right. So the other news is the semiconductor post you wrote on your breaking analysis was really strong. I think that also plays into what I believe to be part of the AI madness is the role NVIDIA is playing. You got Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, all players big time in what's happening with AI. It's just going to be pretty amazing. And this point counterpoints, I mean, the debate is strong. I mean, even in the open source community, you're like, oh, it's enhanced automation, improved security. It enhances observability and monitoring. And it scales, intelligence scales, streamlining application development, that's the pro side. Yeah, negative side is more complexity. And who put out this study that said it's going to cost 300 million jobs worldwide? Which again, you can't protect the past from the future. You know, humans have always been replaced, you know, by machines, but in this first time that's cognitive. But you know, that post last week with Ivana Dilevska from Spear Insights, you know, she came on the show and we were talking about how semiconductors usually lead a rebound in markets and semiconductors have rallied, but broader enterprise tech hasn't. And then you hear Samsung today in the news, steep fall in first quarter profit, dropping the level, because extended slump in the tech center hitting its memory chips business. So it's still really, really hard to predict, but the other piece of that research was that you're starting to see companies, and I've been talking to them, Snowflake, Cloudflare, Confluent, Hashi, Mongo, their growth rates are coming down and they're starting to come in line with the 20% hyperscale growth. These are companies that are, you know, billion, $2 billion versus, you know, 60, 70, $80 billion hyperscale companies. That doesn't make sense. These smaller companies should be growing faster than the broader cloud business. And so there's either a lot of sandbagging going on there or something's fundamentally wrong. And I don't think necessarily something's fundamentally wrong. I think their model is right. It's just, I think there's some conservatism in the numbers, but it's really hard to predict when it's gonna come back to how it's gonna come back. I think it'll come back in particular sectors, you know? I think oil and gas will come back maybe sooner than, you know, in transportation is cranking, but, you know, tech sector is down. And so it's, you know, on balance. And I think the consumer could, with unemployment being so low, could actually get us out of this mess. So it's just really, really hard to predict right now. And I don't trust anything that the government predicts. Yeah. I mean, it's a hard market to predict. I mean, I just, I can tell you out here in Silicon Valley, it's pretty bad. And again, it's the tail of two sides of the street. Are you on the sucky side, which is no funding, pivot central. Do you have enough runway or are you on the growth side? And it literally is almost becoming obvious which side of the street the winner is gonna be on. And it's clear to me, at least from my vantage point, I might be wrong, usually not, but I think I'm right on this one. You have a shift, just like when cloud came out. Remember when we first started talking to Andy Jassy around 2013, before we wrote the trillion dollar baby, we're like, trillion dollar, Tam, are you kidding me? We're like, yo, definitely it's gonna happen. And it did. At that time, cloud was considered like the junkyard dog kind of way to do things. Do it yourself, roll your own, but every single startup was on Amazon. If you were a startup in that era, you were on AWS, period. You didn't do your own, unless you had a specialized thing where you needed a box in your office or your garage, you bought a super micro box, whatever. If you didn't need that, you were in the cloud. Then everyone jumped in the cloud. That exact same dynamic is happening now at much larger scale with AI. AI related coding or mindset, systems, thinking, abstraction layers, data layers, things we've been talking about with data mesh, those kinds of moves are pretty obvious. So the due diligence on that is simply looking at fashion. Are you fashionable with AI? Meaning, do you look, are you actually doing the things that matter or are you stuck in the old ways? Even AI ops six months ago and two years ago was different. So you can say AI ops, old school or new school. So I think you have the two sides of the streets emerging and it's pretty obvious there will be a massive tsunami of companies, in my opinion, pivoting quickly. So if you're gonna see startups right now having board meetings going, okay, our runway is X. We've got two years of cash. Look around the company. We're not AI enabled. We better refactor now. So those companies are going to pivot. A percentage of them won't make it. So John, so go back to the .com. .com was there was a bunch of bullshit in the .com it just vaporized when it all blew up. Okay, then take a look at cloud. So post, you know, 2000, you know, post 9-11 really market slowly comes back. Now, and then, you know, Google does the IPO. Okay, and it was still not like super vibrant. Then you have, you know, the cloud gets announced. It's like tire kickers and, you know, experimentation. And then the financial crisis hits. And then you had a lot of CFOs saying, all right, hey, we got this cloud thing. Let's shift CAPEX to OPEX. And that was when the cloud, you know, Gary Lee got a foothold 2009, 2010. And then we started to seeing innovation on top of that. And then you had cloud, mobile, social and big data all sort of converging. We used to talk about that all the time in the cube. I do worry that a lot of this AI washing does feel a little bit like, I mean, look at what Databricks did, you know, with its generative AI people like that's a bunch of crap, you know, they just threw it out there. But so I worry about that, that there's a lot of crap that's gonna hit a lot of funding. And then they're gonna like, you know, swaps bit and then the whole thing's gonna crash. Then there's gonna be a lot of low quality. So I do worry about that. And I think, you know, then, and then everything, you know, once it settles, the winners. Yeah, well, first of all, I think that similar dynamics in play. Dotcom bubble is gonna vibe is here. Here's the difference. At that time, you look at the dates from 1995 to 2001, the internet web hits, but really from 97, 98 timeframe, it kicks into high gear. The browsers get out there, IE three launches, which was the monopoly, Netscape gets taken out. It all happened. So then within the two, three year period, all that bubble happened and then popped. There was no predecessor technology that was in play from a software development standpoint. It was old school software development. You had to get servers. The entrepreneurial agility was not there. Today, if you look at the companies that are in motion now that are on the wrong side of the street, they could pivot faster. They got cloud, they have engineering, they got open source. It's a lot easier for a clever, smart, enterprising shrewd entrepreneur to save their company if you're a founder than it was in that decade. So to me, it's gonna come down to the right moves. Can you actually pivot into the jet stream, if you will, of the, on the other side of the world? So that to me is gonna be the difference. And that is there, if you're sitting there, I'm looking, I'm checking out Substack. They did 12 mil. They had to release their numbers because of this crowdfunding sources, right? We mentioned them earlier with, they did in 2021, and they don't put their 22 numbers up, but in 2021 they had 12 million in revenue and 22 million net loss, and they had 55 million in cash in the bank. That's the kind of makeup you see some of these companies that have overraised. So you got a company, let's say, it's not Substack, say it's a company in the valley or where and they got, they raised 50 something zillion dollars, whatever. They got like 30 to 50 million cash on hand. That's a lot of cash. So that company with the tooling today can pivot faster to the new model if they make the right moves. So that was hard to do back in the days, Dave. What was your, there was no real internet industry right to the web. Yeah, you're right. You had many computers, but structurally it wasn't like, it was different. You're making a good point. I remember Peter Bell's company, Storage Networks, it essentially was the cloud, except it was cloud with, it had like, it was like storage cloud. It had EMC storage and compact storage and HP storage. It was just, it was just the data center. It was a data center. It was a big pipe, you know, with a big fiber pipe that was just, the economics were horrible. So you're actually making a good point there. We've got way more agile and low cost infrastructure for experimentation. I mean, Insik Ray, who was the one of the CTOs co-founders of Loud Cloud with Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Insik Ray is a partner at Vertex Ventures. He's get a lot of love because Ben Horowitz and Mark Andreessen get the big name headlines, but Insik Ray is a total player, great VC by the way, and Vertex Ventures. He told me about their cloud, because they were the one of the first clouds. It was a data center. They had tons of equipment. CapEx was off the charts. Remember, remember Insik Ray called me out at SuperCloud One, and he's like, yeah, you lost me at Oracle. He's such a great techie founder person. So anyone who's a hardcore techie, Vertex Ventures is a good plug to go to. But yeah, Dave, I mean, I just think that you're gonna see a lot of failure. And I've said this before in the pod, and I've been seeing it on Twitter. In nuclear winter, you have a lot of failure that becomes the fertilizer for the next big thing. And I've been talking to three good investors this week here in the Valley, all said the same thing, basically saying, in the next months and 12 to 18 months, unicorns will be born, new unicorns will be born. So I think there's a Netflix show coming out called Unicorn Hunters, but right now we're there. It's happening in our world. Enterprise, cloud, AI, data, our space that we've been covering for 13 years with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, it's happening on our doorstep. So this collision of innovations here and there'll be winners and losers. So I think it's gonna be a fun time to report on all this and watch and participate. And again, like I said, we have our own tech team and our own data. So we have the linguistics and language of what, 30,000 interviews, 10 years, 13 years of CUBE data to play with. So I'm very bullish on AI, but again, this is classic cautionary tale of you gotta know when to hit the straight and narrow, put the pedal to the metal and when to slow down. There's ethical issues, you got real reliability issues on some of the AI output. So there's gonna be areas where you gotta watch it, but stopping it that we talked about last week, I'm against that. I mean, yeah, before we go there, I mean, there was a lot of capital deployed during the pandemic to companies selling to the tech sector that were doing really well. The fundamental assumption around hybrid work and remote work and the whole unemployment thing, not unemployment, but hard to hire, right? And that started to change. So I think those companies are gonna be really tested. But yeah, TikTok. Well, let's take a break and we'll get to the next segment. Let's take a break and get this RSA ad in there. I wanna plug RSA. We're immediate sponsors, we're gonna do a little commercial for them. Also plug in KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, CNCF, part of the Linux Foundation will be at KubeCon. So let's take a break here and now listen to this ad and then we'll come right back. Hello, we're from April 24th to April 27th. The Global Cybersecurity Community will gather at RSA Conference 2023. On the agenda is arming you with the best practices and state of the art solutions to keep your organization secure and safe. Experience the countless opportunities to make valuable connections that can open up new doors. Access cybersecurity's biggest innovations and cutting edge ideas during the four days of sessions, key notes, skill building, experiences and more. Don't miss the chance to be stronger together. Visit rsaconference.com slash the theCUBE 23 to learn more and register and tell them John and Dave sent you. RSAconference.com slash theCUBE 23. Okay, we're back Dave. TikTok. Is that a rant or is this a segment? Um, could be both. We could go a whole show on TikTok. I, you know, I don't know if Dave Michela who's my former boss at IDC, he was listening to theCUBE pod last weekend. He sent me, he said, I don't know if you and John, I think I shared it with you. Saw my articles on this and he wrote an article called The TikTok Debate should start with reciprocity. Everything else is secondary. And he said, you know, he was listening to the, the energy and commerce committee on TikTok. I kept waiting for somebody to ask the most important basic question. Why should the United States allow China to have open access to America's vast social media market when the US firms can't do the same with China? So he's calling for reciprocity. And I think he's right. He's like, we're trying to make the argument based on security grounds, which is complicated. Why not just make it on economic grounds? I mean, hello. Yeah, that's what we were saying that. Did we say that? We did. We said that, well, what we said was that, that China, that US should force China to bite dance to sell to a US based company. What Michela did, he was pretty thoughtful. He said, look, just tell China, hey, you got two choices. Either we ban it or bite dance has to sell to, you know, US based company. And he said, they're not likely gonna choose the first one, even though they say, you know, they don't wanna do the latter. And so, but even if they balk, then now you're arguing fairness. And that looks, that makes China look stupid, right? If you say, we told them same rules, they walked away. So I think that's the right move. And nobody went there, right? They just went to, does it work on Wi-Fi? Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, like I said that, I think those, it's a show they're putting on for the cameras. And you actually, you pointed that out more specifically than I did. And I just think that the elephant in the room is that exactly what he was saying. It's like, there's both responsibility and also the fact that there is a security, which is also legit. You got a national security problem. You have a cultural problem. But ultimately, I agree. I completely agree with him, by the way, that, you know, you open up your market to ours, we'll up up your same. Yeah. Symmetry is a beautiful thing, be symmetrical. He said, he wrote, the big mistake, both the Trump and Biden administrations have made is to call for banning TikTok on national security grounds instead of economic ones. And now you're saying they could do it, but both. But he said, the Biden administration should announce that TikTok won't be allowed to operate in the United States unless and until American social media firms can operate in similar ways in China. And of course, China's not gonna, they're gonna object to that. But now you're putting it back on China. And they look like fools. Instead of us, you know, asking dumb questions in Congress. Well, we've been all over the TikTok conversation. It is big numbers. In fact, your daughter had a TikTok presence this move to YouTube, it's got 10 million views. Tell that story real quick. So Alicia has quite a TikTok presence and nothing on YouTube. 30 days ago, she started moving one video at a time. And by the way, she had to use YouTube's song library. Couldn't use, you know, cause copyrights. So it took a little while, but she won a day. Within 30 days, she has 10 million views and she's now authorized to monetize. So it was awesome. 30 days. So Ching, influencer. Yeah. What's her secret, you think? Besides she's beautiful and articulate. She's a micro influencer, you know? I mean, she's got her niche, which is fashion, not only fashion, it's like 60s and 70s fashion, right? So she's like born, should have been born 50 years earlier, but just sort of throwback. And she's got this unbelievable wardrobe of 60s and 70s outfits. And she loves, you know, music from that era and actresses from that era and fashion from that era. And she's done a lot of work. And that was her sort of degree, her masters, in sort of the societal influence of fashion. That's a great dance. It's a great that she can pivot off that hobby. And she was doing it for school. It's actually got into it, wasn't it? Like doing it for school and then kind of got into it. Yeah, well, so she's got her masters in art history. And so she just has a passion for it and she loves TikTok and loves Instagram. And so she just started making videos. Hey, why don't we, why aren't we of micro influencers in fashion? Well, we are kind of micro influencers in tech, right? I mean, you're gonna do parody sing-alongs now on TikTok? I don't know, get off my singing voice. Hey, hey, get off my cloud, it's rolling stones. Okay, smoke too much weed, my voice gets shot. I don't know, back in the day. Get off my cloud is a favorite stone song. We should definitely do a parody on that. All right, well, let's get into, let's talk more about rants now. Let's, what's your rant for the week? Well, you know, I mean, I hate to say it, but Lena Khan has added again, right? I don't know if you saw this, Illumina, right? She shut down, I say she shut down the acquisition of Grail doing gene sequencing. And again, it was based on the notion that this could hurt competition. So I just don't have any confidence in the government's ability to predict anything, whether it's, you know, transitory inflation or economic uncertainty or how soon a war is gonna end. And I don't have any faith that the FTC can predict whether or not this is gonna hurt competition. And so, you know, they're basically, they're killing not only big tech, they're going after big companies, they're going after all big mergers. It's just like instant negative reaction. And I just don't think that's right, this negative attitude toward business. And I think it's, I think we need to have a better private public partnership in this country. And I just cannot stand the rhetoric around whether it's at big tech or at successful businesses. It's just, to me, it's wrong. It's just un-American. Yeah, and then, you know, also the Amazon was getting hammered in the U-E-U story that came out this week. Did you see that too? That's, again, speaks to this kind of cat-backs. And Fitzy was talking about Charles Fitzgerald, our guy, our friend, we call him Fitzy. He was talking about the cat-backs. Like, how would they wanna regulate Amazon after they spent, Microsoft, Microsoft and Amazon spent billions of dollars on cat-backs. Like, you know, why can't it take advantage? It's a really interesting angle on that story. You know which one I'm talking about, right? I do. And it's like when people say, well, hey, you know, the government supplies all this infrastructure and all these companies are benefiting from this infrastructure. Well, you know, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple are building out, they build out all this infrastructure. And again, I've said a million times, if they're breaking the law, they should be punished. But this idea that, well, that acquisition might hurt competition, which I think the government just doesn't really understand. I've said that the government's actions have had less of an effect than market forces. Market forces will always, you know, rule. Let the market play out. It's killing me. I'm watching this trend toward the government trying to be puppet master and they're just not good at it. Yeah. I mean, it was happening out of the UK. So we'll see. I mean, it's a little bit of European thing. I would be out there in a week and a half to get some reporting out there. And KubeCon, we'll see. I just think that you can't say, oh, they're gonna harm competition. Well, they spent billions on CapEx and they have a good strategy and a good product. Oh, by the way, you can build on top of it too and build your own cloud, super cloud and super app. So a lot of people are not understanding the nuance of this next generation. Again, I think this is why these have these two sides of the streets. If you're gonna buck the trend, like the Europeans are doing here, that's just on the wrong side of history. That's like saying, you know, back when we were breaking into the business day, the mainframes don't let them go away. Come on, everyone knows they're a dinosaur. So it's gonna be interesting to see who holds on to the old and who stays and gets on the new wave. And that's gonna be key. Now my rant this week, it's a little bit different, right? It's like, I don't know if I wanna rant more about how the social media is becoming polluted more and more or the fact that the murder in San Francisco has just hits the entrepreneurial bullseye because remember in the past 15 years, there's been a big movement to San Francisco, not Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, San Francisco, San Jose, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, you know, Silicon Valley. And so San Francisco, so a huge uptake of tech firms. And now it's disaster. So we've always had a problem in San Francisco and it's always been on the news, homeless, all the social issues. But now people are leaving, going to Miami. This is my rant, that San Francisco has to get their shit together because the lawlessness has gotta stop. You cannot have people unprotected just walking down the street or people doing crack and meth in the doorstep of the grandma's house or your home. And then if you don't like it, they get beaten up with a lead pipe because they know the cops are gonna do anything. So that to me is a huge rant. I just don't think it's safe selling outside the grandma's house. Brendan, our producer is talking about, it's not just doing it, sleeping there, sleeping in cars. It's like stealing shit. You can't even park a car there. So again, this is just, again, nobody, you can't find one person that will take a pro San Francisco stance on crime. It is bad and it needs complete attention. Otherwise, those companies are gonna flee, they're gonna move to another state. And then Silicon Valley will end up being the safe harbor again. So, or East Bay, that's my rant. I was in, I mean, it wasn't a move out of San Francisco, I was at HPE this week in Houston. They moved out of Palo Alto, Page Mill, I think they did a stint in San Jose and then boom, they moved out of the state. And that was a state move out. But what are the tech billionaires saying about this, John? I mean, they got, they have an influential voice. What's Larry Ellison saying? What's Mark Benioff saying? I mean, they've got big presence in these cities. I think Benioff is too busy trying to save his company from private equity, right? So that's one problem. He also has a big building and as we reported last time on the pod, the vacancy rates are expected to go through the roof as leases terminate soon. So right now everyone's sitting on a lot of sub leases. When they expire, they're gonna expect a 65% vacancy rate. That's gonna be a blow to the Salesforce tower. Ellison probably doesn't care, he's not in the city. A commercial real estate. Not a lot of leadership on the tech community stepping up with the bucks or even on the influence. So, you know, there's Jason Calcanus saying, hey, vote for me for mayor. And you could cash for sure. One point said that she would wanna be mayor. But I think it's gonna take an outsider in my opinion, like a cash wish or like a Jason Calcanus to be that change agent, right? So you have to get out of this whole liberal anti-police vibe. Like you just, I mean, you just gotta have people to enforce the law, period. And then solve the homeless problem. So I think Seattle's doing a good job of trying to do this. They have people, great volunteer systems incentives. They have a big problem up there too, but you know, it's not as rampant as here. The big cities are brutal. The homeless problem is a mental illness problem. I mean, that's a health issue. And I don't think people oftentimes, I think people sometimes forget that or maybe they don't agree with it. It costs too, David, a little bit different out here. I mean, I would not disagree with you there, but one dynamic out here is that, you know, we have on our street here in Palo Alto and our office is campers everywhere now in Palo Alto to close them down trailer parks where people can have a reprieve, get back on their feet, but there's families. It's expensive, right? So if you've got a young family, you can't live in San Francisco. Rent control is going away, prices are going up for homes, it's like unlivable. So I think that's causing a little bit of a power dynamic besides the drug and the mental illness issue. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I feel like the problem's just gotten so much worse in the last 10 years. I feel like the homeless have all moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. And I mean, there's still homeless issues and there are still issues in New York and DC, but it used to be a lot worse. Now post COVID, maybe it's gotten worse, I don't know, but nothing compared to LA and San Francisco. It's bad, I mean, we'll see. I mean, this is like, what episode? Maybe it was the first one we talked about, the revolution that's coming. If I was in my twenties, I would be probably more organizing around who left us this mess? The boomers and the cultures change, right? So I think the cultural shift that's happening is we've been predicting for the cube for the decade and not only technology, but applications. And this is where I think I'm more bullish on the pro side of tech. Tech can be a force of good. And you mentioned leadership, I will say that the tech companies are stepping up leadership and sustainability, diversity, women in tech on diverse minorities, major efforts there, still not good numbers, but they're not BSing anyone. They're actually going through the motions and doing good work and working on that. So I think the tech for good angle's gonna come. That's gonna be like apps, technology that actually helps with some of these social problems. So I just haven't seen a lot good yet. I think that's an opportunity. First of all, tech is deflationary. What other industry do prices just constantly come down? Every year prices come down on a per whatever basis. Okay, great. Every tech company is all over ESG and sustainability. Every RFP has sustainability metric in there. Every big tech company has sustainability goals. Some are a little too far out, but they're starting to pull those in. I mean, tech CEOs take this really seriously. I mean, they're supportive of their workers. New York, they're like, get back to work. Tech, they look at a company like Dell. They're like, hey, bring your best self to work. You can work remote, we support you. HPE, they'll pay for a woman to have an abortion or a medical procedure outside that's illegal in the state. Now they do cap it, I don't know, $4,000 or something, but still they're doing the right thing. Tech is more good than bad. There's no question in my mind anyway. Yeah, I totally agree. Well, a lot of stuff going on, Dave. Got a lot of things to look at. I guess what I'm most excited about right now is that just in the past 100 plus days, so much has happened, like AI. So to me, I just continue to focus on the big story, which is the digital revolution, the digital transformation, business transformation of cloud, as we reported prior to reinvent with the exclusive with Adam Silevsky was, this next gen cloud was happening, but what's really happening on top of the cloud is super clouds happening, and you're seeing massive enablement, disruptive enablement happening with AI and data. And so just what's happening on the velocity of papers being shipped, if you go look at the academic papers hitting the market right now, it's amazing. It's new stuff that you haven't seen before. People are sharing just the acceleration of algorithms, open source, models, AI, that's gonna change all that dynamic. And I think that's the big story going on. And like I said, it's happening. We'll see how real it becomes and how fast it becomes real, but I think absolutely there'll be at least six unicorns coming out of this in all categories, infrastructure, provisioning, middleware, apps, every vertical, you're gonna see some new automating game-changing things. So that means the big story. It's not really a rant, the rant is get out of the way, let it happen. Anyone blocks it is blocking innovation. Now what you want is, you want to watch it carefully with the best people, not just the greed side. I mean, are we a market economy? Are we a capitalist society or not? I mean, do you want to stop that? I mean, it's worked, it's worked. Should there be guardrails? Yes, should there be regulation for banks? Yes. But- The question that I'm looking into now for the next couple of weeks as this wave goes is, in old ways like this where it was massive wealth creation, it was a cottage industry controlled by the VCs. Now with AI being so proliferated in every vertical, every use case, it's horizontal and use cases are everywhere. It's not just going to be controlled by the VCs. There'll be other capital sources driving this. So how does the wealth creation, who gets wealthy from this? Because now you have the global economy, you have governments looking at big tech. There's a spotlight on tech right now. So this is out in the open. What will happen next? And it won't look like the old VC formulas of the past, in my opinion. Yeah, but I think it might look different. I mean, the wealth gap's definitely an issue. I'm not saying it isn't, but I mean, you've got governments saying, well, we're going to- No, no, no, I'm saying from a wealth creation when things spawn out in new categories, the VCs were in the inside all from the day one, when they made the most money. That's the point I want to make, is that there is a wealth gap and I'm sort of acknowledging that and that's not a good thing. You gotta eat out the core of the middle class. But yeah, it's like the American dream. Hey, you got these wealthy people, they worked hard, they maybe got lucky, they made it, you can make it too. I mean, that message goes away, the big politicians saying you can't do stock buybacks. Well, it's the company's job to decide whether or not their stock is worthy of a buyback. And yeah, we all know it props up the stock. Now, granted, they shouldn't be using government money to do that. And so I get that. But still, the rhetoric toward whether it's big tech or big business or any business and successful people, the American dream, work hard, take a risk, you're going to get rich or you at least have a chance to do it. That's the American dream. And why do you want to take that away? Yeah, and I think you're right, the democratization of entrepreneurship is going to be great. I think it's going to be fun to watch, it's going to be fun to be part of. And again, it's happening in our area. It's happening in our neighborhood, enterprise, cloud, emerging tech. And John, you have a couple of Catholic boys on Good Friday here, missed the stations. But you know where I live out in the middle of nowhere, I'm surrounded by liturgy and the monks built these stations. I'm going to go kind of walk them. All right, we'll have a good, say some good prayers. All right, Dave, great, great pod. And everyone watching here, let us know we're going to do, this is episode seven. We're going to have 10 episodes. After 10, we're going to try to get the groove here. We'd like to get some guests in. If you have any recommendations, DM us, hit us up, bring in CUBE alumni, bring in thought leaders. How do we want to bring in guests? It's going to be our next innovation on this, figure it out and continue to let us know what you think. Send us notes on email, Gmail, DMs, all channels are open. This is the CUBE pod episode seven. Thanks for listening.