 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today on this kind of ongoing leadership conversation, reaching out to the community during these crazy times. We're two months into the COVID crisis and we're excited to have two of our favorite guests. One is a frequent guest, Greg Sands. He's the founder, managing partner of Costa Nova Ventures. Greg, great to see you. And he brought along Martina Lechenco, also from Costa Nova. Martina, great to see you. Is this, I think your first time on theCUBE, right? This is my first time. Nice to be on, Jeff, thank you. Great, and Greg, great to see you as well. Great to be here. So let's get into it. I mean, part of this conversation came from a lot of efforts that you guys are putting into really getting information out to the community. And I think, you know, if there's a silver lining and there's a couple here and there that have come from this is everyone is really trying to help each other out. So you've come up with something you call virtual office hours. Well, what is that all about? Is that new or is it just kind of a greater emphasis now that most people are working from home? Well, we've also always done a great deal of work with our portfolio on how to deal with changing times, how to graph, go to market, both sales and marketing onto what are often product-led and founder-led companies. And in a time of crisis, we felt like it was important to share that knowledge more broadly and to set up a venue where we can interact with a broader startup community. And hopefully in the process of doing that, we're useful. No, I just saw a quote. I think today or yesterday from Jim Hackett, the CEO of Ford, and it was, you know, I didn't have the playbook for the global pandemic, you know, in terms of kind of preparation and being able to pull something off the shelf to help work through this. So, you know, as we've gone through, say, mid-March, just this immediate full stop, unanticipated, kind of light switch moment, now we're two months in, what are the specific actions you've been giving to your portfolio companies and how has that changed over the course of the last 60 days? Well, I'll take a first stab at it and Martina, feel free to jump in if you've got additional thoughts. I think the first piece going back six, seven, eight weeks was we all had that hair on fire moment where you just have to understand where you are. And so I think that sense of situational awareness and how does it affect your customers and your market and figure out if the basics of the business, including, you know, including revenue rate and what's guaranteed and what's not and expense base and plan growth trajectory are any of those foundational elements, what you thought they were going to be and readjust them and replant. So almost every company went through two or three complete planning cycles, trying to understand where we are. And I think also trying to do that with a sense of authenticity and transparency and humanity because you're dealing with a company and people's careers and people's jobs. So now I think we're more at the place where we understand the foundation and you can more reasonably plan for the future. Yeah, I'd say I think what I've observed in our portfolio is people are through the shock and that's also true for all of the customers that they're trying to reach out to. And the big adjustment is what does our new normal look like? And Jeff, you know, before we started we were talking about how everyone has moved digital and virtual, so people did that initially because they had no choice, but now they're looking at the data they've been collecting saying, gosh, should this mean we should no longer do physical events because we're having five or 10x the amount of registration that we did before. Our digital channels are way more successful than they were in terms of outreach and awareness raising. And so everyone's looking at this moment and saying, how should we adjust our new normal even post COVID era and do things differently as a result of what we're learning from this time where we have to be constrained in what we did. Right, so Greg, you had an interesting quote in an article recently talking about, the harder challenge is going to be for people that are on this blitz scaling kind of run. And you've talked about, there's kind of two paths. There's growth at all costs and then there's growth within kind of a reasonable plan. Clearly, if you were growth at all costs and you're Uber or Lyft or one of these types of operations where your revenue just got turned practically off really significant challenge. So as you look at it from an investor point of view and what is a good rate of growth? What is kind of the way to build a company versus this kind of hell bit, a hair on fire, grab global market share at absolutely no, just spend, spend, spend, spend. Yeah, well, and so of course this is independent of the pandemic. I think it's the case that there was this orientation towards blitz scaling, towards we're going to grow as fast as we can. And one of the things, if you just think about a biological metaphor, growth is expensive, right? Growth takes a ton of capital, a ton of hiring, a ton of on ramping and the like. And you do all of that at very rapid speed and you tend to cut corners, have people poorly trained, drop balls on the floor and the like. So I think the generally speaking our experience is that our portfolio companies, partly due to our guidance, partly because we've selected each other, have been, look, we've got some very fast growers, we've got companies like Alation that have been here a lot, that have created brand new categories, but that they've done it with balance and they've done it efficiently. And that's always what we preach, it's always what we've believed in. And I think our companies are in much better shape as a result. Martina and I both grew up as young athletes. And one of the things that you learn as an athlete is you've got to be balanced. You don't know if your next step is going to have to be forward, back, left or right. And you've got to have all your sensors out and be paying attention to figure out where you ought to go. And if you're all in one direction, you can only go forward. And when the environment changes, you're toast. Yeah, it's really wild to see because whoever plans for literally like a binary turn off of a revenue stream and we're seeing it in hotels and obviously conferences and airlines and a whole bunch of industry. So it's pretty challenging. But for a lot of people, business still goes on and Martina, I want to jump into it with you because you've been a marketer in tech for a long time but man, oh man, the conference itself, the physical events, whether it be the big giant one like AWS re-invent, which had, I don't know, 50,000 people is going to outgrow Vegas to smaller events. Those are no longer an option yet. People are still delivering products. They still have messaging to get out. They still want to touch their community. How are you kind of looking at the new normal around marketing, both for the portfolio companies but also a little bit of a broader view? So I'll start with the broader view. I'd say in general and Dream Forces canceled, I mean, all these things have shifted so massively and all the major companies have simultaneously made that shift. And I think one thing that they are all seeing is they are getting a lot more registration. They're getting a lot more engagement. This happened at Atlassian where they rapidly made the shift to virtual. And what they saw was because they had that many more people participating in events that they had a much bigger social bump because that many more people were talking about what was happening simultaneously. And it also became this virtuous loop where more and more people were talking. It was creating this intrigue where people wanted to participate and see what was happening. So I think people are looking at that and saying, well, how does that affect our business? And how does that increased potential for evangelism actually positively convert towards future customer or more people talking about us in that positive way? So this is where they're looking at what they put out in market and seeing what they should learn from that. And I say, that's the number one recommendation I have for all of our companies is look at what the data is telling you and try to extract what your lessons are about this to what you're ongoing to normal should be from a marketing perspective. Yeah, it's such a good tip. There was so much focus at the beginning of this about what you cannot do in digital. You can't have the whole room chatter. You can't have the water cooler chatter. But on the other hand, there's so many things you can do in digital that you can't do in the physical. And by separating content generation versus content publishing, if you will, and then content consumption, and those no longer have to happen at the same one hour window where there's an available conference room for a breakout session at the Sands on Tuesday at six that I can't see because I want to see somebody else's conference Tuesday. I mean, there's so many things that you can do and kind of this democratization of the access to the conference, if you don't have the means, the time, or just the ability to get on a plane and fly to Vegas or to New York or San Francisco. So there's a lot of stuff you can do in digital that's different. It's just not the same as the physical space. So what are some of the other things that you're finding that are kind of unique and novel and actually really great? Well, one thing that you talked about is as it relates to events, it's not just the attendees being there. It's also the talent. A lot of times you would want talent but they're not available because they have a conflict or they can't accommodate that travel. Like I'm participating in a conference that's based out of London and they are having people that are, it's time zone, doesn't matter what time zone that you're in because they're like, oh, you could prerecord it, you can do it live if you choose. And so there's a flexibility that just wasn't there before, certainly as it relates to events. But in terms of novel stuff, people are reexamining things that they might have charged for in the past. So one company and our portfolio used to charge for their certifications and now they've made it free and they've had over a thousand signups in the last couple of weeks. And so that was a small program that they ran and it's now the single largest generator of new leads for them because they reexamined it and said, well, what assets do we have and how can we use them differently? And so I'd say it's not so much that people are doing monumentally new things that they haven't tried before but they're examining the equivalent of assets they have at their disposal and they're saying, well, how can we deploy them differently? And I say that the two things that are really bubbling up are, you just have to do things in an excellent way. Number one, and number two, you really have to do it in that much more empathetic way. Right, right. Greg, I want to go back to you, go ahead. Jeff, if I can add two things, I think there are some other things that it's worth noting that digital is uniquely good at. So one of which is inferring intent, which you don't necessarily get in the context of conferences. And the second is that as companies have dug deep and realized that they really need to take full advantage of their assets, one of the things that we find people really trying to do is to marry first-party data, their own data about their own customers and their own interactions with third-party data, which includes that intent data. And when you combine those together in a business-to-business marketing context, you can really do extraordinary things. And many companies have been under-optimized on that because they could rely on going to events and traditional face-to-face marketing activity. Well, to me, there's so many things, right? I mean, conferences were designed in an age where there was no telephone, right? And you sent letters and the speed of communication was weeks. And so, you know, that's how you had to get people together. But in today, in 2020, right? When information flows, it seems so waterfall to me to kind of squeeze everything in, especially for a big company into three days in Las Vegas in terms of all your product announcements, all your partner announcements, all these things, right? It seems completely against the trend of more of a DevOps world, which is if product group A is ready to roll, why do they have to wait to that date and wait for product B and everyone else? Not to mention that, you know, if you're some esoteric kind of cool thing that gets lost in this sea of product announcements and press releases and events, you know, does it really make sense? And what we're seeing is there's certainly an opportunity for what's called a rally moment, right? Whether that's a keynote or, you know, introducing a new CEO or, you know, we want to have this moment where we have singular focus. But as soon as that's open, let the content be free, right? Let people find what they want when they want. And to your point, Margaret, or excuse me, Martina, if people want to self-organize, you can actually have almost infinite long tail sessions if you give people a platform in which to organize versus being kind of this one way conduit of information, which is the old way of working, but not really the new way in which we find, consume and learn about things in 2020. It just seems so antiquated when we actually take a step back and think of how do we get our information today? And it's not wrapped up in one big giant splash moment. Well, Jeff, I want to pull on a thread a little bit that you just brought up, which is that the old way of doing things, and I'd say like old average, just there's no space for it right now. So I'm going to read through like five things that were in my inbox this morning that went into the auto delete pile, which is what everyone does every morning. Tomorrow's webinar, only three days left. Have you registered yet? This week in review. So those were the bad ones that went to the automatic delete pile. That's the average run of the mill stuff that all of us get every day. And I hope everyone that's listening to this stops sending them. And here's the ones that stood out. Why every startup CEO needs a chief of staff. So something that was specific, it told me more concretely why I should engage with what was being sent to me. It didn't tell me if it was an article or webinar, but it engaged me with content. And if you just look at Netflix as a platform, as an example of how they're very, very content forward and they're trying to find what specifically is going to get you engaged all the way down to the thumbnail level. That's what we are needing to do as marketers, where we're taking advantage of the knowledge that we have of our customers, where they are, and trying to create genuine connection with whatever it is we're trying to bring to them. With data, right? And you can maybe, all the stuff that Netflix does, it's so funny to me. The answers are all around us. We're just not looking in the right place. But I want to shift gears a little bit from marketing and talk about leadership. We've been doing a lot of these around leadership, because leadership is so important. And really the uncertainty, more even the tough times, I think it's the uncertainty that really challenges people. And you mentioned something, Greg, earlier about really the transparency. And I think there's so much to be learned in terms of being human in your leadership, showing vulnerability, admitting I'm a little scared too. I don't know what's happening. No one has been through this type of inexperience before. So from just a leadership perspective, again, what are you sharing with your portfolio companies? How are you advising people who are in this position because they're probably nervous and uncomfortable as well to lead these teams and to help them through this time of uncertainty. Well, it's an amazing and uncertain time. And frankly, everybody is challenged by it. Nobody's been through it before. Even those of us that went through 2008 and the 2000 and 2001, you know, e-commerce blow up at 9-11, this is different, right? It has a different cause and a different set of effects. I know in my case, I spent the weekend rereading Jerry Kelona's book, Reboot, which talks about leading from the heart and leading with transparency and leading with authenticity. And what we've been trying to do in working with our founders is, one, listen and be there and be a support and recognize that we don't know all the answers either. And so we're in it together. Second is to try to give them the confidence and the room to do that in leading within their teams. And then the third is to focus on a couple of things that I think are particularly important, which is, as I said before, situational awareness. You got to understand where you are. And the second is focus. So one of the things that everybody is finding, and we find it through with people's customers too, hey, we were going to do five things, now we're going to do two. So companies have got to narrow the scope. They got to figure out how to be in the top two for their customers that have to get done. Right. And so you got to do that from a strategic and execution perspective. You got to lead your team to do it. In order to rally around it, people have to understand the facts. They have to trust you and they have to know that your heart's in it. Yeah, it's almost interesting. The fact that everyone is separated, we have to communicate more, right? We have to communicate more frequently. And we had Darren from GitLab talking about the variety of types of communications beyond just your standard staff meeting and project updates to things like social things and happy hours and these things. So it almost feels like because we're forced into kind of scheduled communication, it's almost happening more frequently because you have to make sure it does than maybe some of the ad hoc stuff that might happen in the hallways or on a more informal basis. You find that happening or people really stepping up the scale in which they're making sure they're touching base with their team members? I'm definitely seeing that throughout our portfolio. So people are doing things like scheduled game nights that would have been more ad hoc in the past or specifically scheduling water cooler time. Or one of our companies has been doing specific meetings at a get-togethers of parents. How do you maintain your full-time job and actually co-parent or figure it out while your kids are doing whatever it is that they need to and being a part of home and working at home. And so they've definitely scheduled more but it's really been about acknowledging the whole self that is part of this unique time and that everybody's in the same boat. I think that is something that is really unique about this is that it is a global phenomenon. And so it's not sort of like, oh, this country or this state or this industry is facing this and all of us are facing this. And so to your point, Jeff, about what does it mean to be human and to connect? It is a time in which we are uniquely capable of connecting with one another and we all have the same way to do it. Like, I meet a bunch of new people every week and now we all start off actually seeing each other's homes and saying, oh, what is that? What book are you reading? And so it's almost an invitation to have a more personal connection. And I've definitely found, despite the fact that we're doing all these meetings virtually, I actually feel more connected to a lot of people than I would have normally. Law of unintended consequences you just never know. So last kind of topic to shift gears before I let you go is we're still in the business of investing. And as I'm sure you're seeing or starting to see now that the shock and awe is kind of over and people are starting to define new opportunities basically to reassemble assets, to reassemble delivery methodologies, to reassemble business plans. And I'm wondering, as you look forward now to kind of your next wave of investments, assuming everything's medium settled with the current portfolio, how is your investment thesis changing a little bit? What are you seeing in kind of a rejiggering of assets and business models that are going to take advantage of this new normal? Because sure enough, I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people in garages right now that are building those companies based on this new normal that are going to be leaders down the road. What are you thinking of? How are you thinking about what's going to happen later this year and 2021 and beyond? So we absolutely are continuing to invest. And so for quick context, we're seeding a up and down the stack of enterprise technology. So think of it as applied AI and the infrastructure that supports it, much of which is data and machine learning infrastructure, but also cybersecurity and DevOps. And I think for us, one of the things that showed up right away was this idea of we're all going to work in more distributed fashion. And I think many versions of that were, oh, we've got a new work from home app or the like. And we haven't actually found that those are the difference makers. What we think is that these business processes that tie together application logic and data and analytics and a collaboration layer, like in a nation so that you can collaborate on your data, you can collaborate while you're performing an absolutely critical business function. And what used to be tribal knowledge that was passed around in the halls is embedded in software and catalog. And so we're seeing lots of opportunities to do that, both in workflow context and in the context of data scientists and data engineers working on the data stack and developers in and around the DevOps ecosystem that we think are really interesting and acknowledge the fact that you can't assume that all the people working on this application are sitting in the same building and get to talk around the water cooler. So they talk about it in the application. I just want to add a little something to what Greg said in terms of the things that we're seeing really the importance of data right now. People are trying to refactor all of our operating plans are trying to say, what is this actually doing to our demand? And so the accuracy of data and the quality of it is more important than it ever has been and being able to do that wherever it exists. If it's frontline inside of a dashboard, if it's cleaning up stuff that's coming out of a data lake, people are investing in that infrastructure right now because they have the capacity to. So that's a place where we've seen, I'd say probably the least amount of change. And then the other thing that this has revealed are gaps in the technology infrastructure that wasn't available. So for example, supply chain, being able to identify all the elements of the mask or the ventilator supply chain. Those systems were massively disconnected and extremely manual. So people are looking at that saying, there are some gaps that still need to be closed in a big way with infrastructure and technology. And those are some areas that we're seeing very interesting and illuminated as a result of this time. Yeah, I mean, certainly we've been talking about really is this kind of a light switch moment in terms of digital transformation and whether that is kind of working from home, which is probably the top focus for a lot of people in the short term or whether that's an education. Suddenly everyone from kindergarten teachers to professors at Stanford had to suddenly learn to teach online with absolutely no preparation, no time to think about it. And then up into the data layer as well, because it's just this kind of ongoing democratization and now with distributed teams, you are forced now to make that data available to them really as a process as much as an objective to get it in the hands to do more things. So certainly a digital transformation accelerant like nobody expected. There's no more time to prepare and plan. It's ready said go now. So we see it over and over again. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for sharing the information. Just kind of last point. One of the things I think is so interesting about today's time is it used to be the power was held by the people that had the information. And really what we've seen and what you guys support is now that information is infinite and it's everywhere and you should be able to find it. Now it's more about who shares the information, who's a trusted source to filter to find the right information. Who can I go to? Who I know is going to give me stuff that's relevant for me. And I think you guys have really shown time and time again that in sharing information and helping others to do better you get kind of this multiplier effect that you wouldn't get if you're just kind of worrying about yourself. And I think it's such a modern way to think about empowering people. And as you said, it even makes you more powerful and more successful. So really a very different way than it used to be in terms of everybody kind of holding the information and he who had the keys had the information and that's completely turned up on site as had. That is absolutely right. And we're thrilled to be here talking about it with you today. Thanks for your continued support of the community and trying to help good people get the word out. Thank you. Thanks a lot. I say thanks for doing exactly what you're talking about which is getting the right information out to people so they can be better. All right. Tina, stay safe. Thanks for stopping by and hopefully next time we'll see you in person. You're watching theCUBE conversation, Jeff Frick here at Palo Alto studio. Thanks for watching. See you next time.