 Paul, welcome. It's good to be here. Thank you for just pointing out quickly that I'm Executive Chairman of Pivotal, not Foundry Foundation. I haven't taken your job yet. That's all right. You do a better job. Actually, I was reading an old article in Wired magazine. Recently, you can still find it from 2011 talking about the creation of Cloud Foundry, right? The story we're going to walk through today dynamically with the living history will give us a chance to go back and see what actually happened. But if you read in the 2011 Wired article by Kate Metz, talks about what's the vision for Cloud Foundry. It hasn't changed. We're just still executing on what you laid out originally. So just going back into history, you joined VMware as CEO during a pretty dynamic time. Growth was stunning, created an ad hoc standard that is still dominating data centers. Tell us a little bit what that was like. That was a huge transition, obviously. You learned about how markets grow and how to provide value. You know, I've been fortunate enough to see a couple of the waves of the industry. People forget that I'm old enough to have actually started my career working on mainframes back in the late 1970s. And while VMware was doing very well and still is doing very well, it was clear that the next generation of computing was starting to emerge. Before VMware, actually, I had started a company, and we were the very first small startup company out of Seattle, and we were the very first users of Amazon Web Services, of EC2. I remember in the beta test phase, they actually, one day, by accident, created two instances of our app. And that really had us scratching our heads for a whole day trying to figure out what the hell was going on, because it's like whack-a-mole. They could bring it down and just sprang up somewhere else, et cetera. That actually sounds a lot like Cloud Foundry. Now it's by design, though. So a group of us, and so people had already seen what was happening at Amazon, and people had seen what was happening at Google At that time, they called it the Borg Engine, which was the big provisioning system that they used to provision their apps internally. And it was clear that there was really going to be a need for two things. One was a system that allowed people to more easily develop and deploy and manage applications at scale and reliably, so there was need for those kind of services. And secondly, there was a group of us who felt that we would like to see the cloud area evolve in a different way, if not go back to being like the bad old days of the mainframe, where if you wrote an app for IBM in the 1980s, you're probably still paying IBM for the privilege of running that application, if you haven't managed to shoot it in the head by now. That is, in fact, true. And so there is the potential that the same thing could happen in the cloud era, that you could write an app for one of these clouds and essentially be held captive to it. And if people choose to do that, that's fine. But we thought that that shouldn't, of necessity, be the case, and that there was the opportunity to do for the cloud era what Linux had done for hardware in some sense, or provide not only a very highly functional abstraction layer, a set of services, but do it in a way that allowed people more choice as it went through it. And in addition, a lot of us had seen the good and the bad of the open source world. And I certainly had, and others had a strong feeling that not only should we make, was there the need for an open and open source layer for the cloud, but it should be done on principles of governance that really accentuated the good parts of open source as opposed to the bad parts. And I think to your credit and to the others who've put a lot of effort into the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we have something that obviously can be improved and that we should be learning all the time. But it does, I think, provide an example of how to do open source right in some sense. Yeah, the things that we try to do or increase inclusion, we try to maintain a high velocity at the same time. And there's kind of a tension there. And a lot of open source projects solve it by not allowing new people into the core, not finding new ways to bring new thoughts in or creating heresies around new thoughts. So we're managing a delicate balance, but I think we're growing at a pace that is exciting the velocity has really continued. As you probably know, there's this sort of underlying philosophy of governance by contribution as opposed to governance by belonging to a particular set of people that are then self-perpetuating. And I think it's very important that we keep that underlying philosophy there, that if somebody, whether it be individual organizations, willing to really put the time and the effort into it, they can earn their way into having real influence and meaningful influence on the direction of the technology. I think it's a real opportunity to do something that down the line, people will say that they're glad they did that. They got it right. It's not the only open source project that you're involved in right now, though. You also had a hand in MIFOS, which is an open source Kiva, effectively, open source microfinance to make people. It's a little different from Kiva. So just taking a step backwards, I've come to really appreciate open source because it is, amongst other things, the way that the industry is found to standardize. If you go back long enough, like I've been in the industry, you either had highly proprietary projects or you had standards committees. And standards committees weren't that functional, which meant that the highly proprietary projects tended to win out. And standards committees aren't synonymous with high velocity. Exactly. Whereas open source has proven to be a way whereby the industry can not only contribute but standardize going forward. And it's done in a very constructive way. So you tend to get standards that actually work in practice as opposed to only in theory. So with that in background, one of the things I've been interested in is how do we bring technology to bear in the developing world as well as the developed world? So the MIFAS started as an effort to provide essentially open source automation software for microfinance institutions. These are community banks, if you like, community lending associations, popularized by people like the Grameen organization in Bangladesh that spread all around the world. So about 12 years ago now, we started an effort to do that. And like all good software, it's had to have been rewritten several times along the way. The latest incarnation is actually proving to be very successful and it's used by over 150 organizations around the world now. To me, the most interesting thing about it now is we're going to rewrite it again, version 3.0, to really make it in the sense that I think there's been a lot of conversation around today to be really a cloud native application. And I think this could be an interesting opportunity with a lot of people who've talked about it where technology actually incubates fast in the developing world and then comes back into the developed world. So what we're really talking about now is open source banking software. And so I think you're going to see open source now go beyond traditional infrastructure where it's obviously taken roots into other areas that people would have never considered it before. But I think the dynamic is there. That's pretty stunning, the idea of an open source bank running on open source banking software. And most bankers in the United States would run screaming into the arms of the lawyers or from the regulators. So the idea that helping the underbanked get banking services and using that also as a place to prove that this stuff can be reliable, safe, secure, and then maybe have a boomerang effect where it can come back to developed countries and educate regulators. It's kind of a fascinating topic that open source could lead that way. That's one of the interesting possibilities here because there's tremendous interest in governments to give all of their citizens access to electronic money. And to have electronic money, you've got to have a bank account. The money has to go somewhere. So we're seeing whole countries, particularly in Latin America, making a decision to try and have everybody in the country stop using cash because it's a way of improving anti-corruption, tax collection, et cetera. Countries like Ecuador are considering basically giving you a lower rate of sales tax if you use a debit card and making it illegal for employers to pay their employees in cash. But to do that, you've got to give everybody in the country now a bank account. And you need a much lower cost basis for doing that. So they are really getting behind this notion of modern, cloud-native, open-source banking software. The interesting thing, if it can be proved out in that environment, is it could solve a dilemma that the first world countries have right now, which is they've got banks that are way inefficient sitting on 40 and 50-year-old software that's too inflexible. I've had certain banks tell me that they're actually seriously considering having to do a good-bad-bad bank, not for bad loans, point of view, because of bad software point of view. But the regulators are scared stiff because they only want to move to a proven platform. So it's kind of an interesting journey we're going to be going on here. There's a whole stack of stuff that sticks to that. I think if we can really show what modern, cloud-native software is, I know there was discussion earlier by Justin Smith about how to handle security from a different perspective. That's the kind of thing that if we can bring that into not only infrastructure, but down to the banking software, that could further show how you can do a very high value activity on this kind of platform in a very different way. On open source, now, we're now fairly advanced in open source. There's some statements being made recently about hyperledger and others that open source is appropriate for things that are so important to society that we can't afford for them to be controlled by a single entity of any kind. But when you went to VMware, I took a job at Microsoft responsible for open source at Microsoft. And let me tell you, that was a hard job. So you came out of a great successful career at Microsoft from one very proprietary company into VMware, a very proprietary company. Then you hired in the team to build this amazing cloud, Cloud Foundry. And you decided to open source it. For me, looking back at your history in that moment, that's not an obvious decision. Was it obvious to you at the time? How did you get the religion? Well, a number of things. First of all, by 2006, 7, 8, there were very successful open source projects out there, not to mention Linux, at least which is Linux. So it was clear that open source was a proven model. Secondly, enterprises were starting to realize that, in some senses, open source was the safe choice, not the risky choice, because that was the way that, as we said earlier, industry was starting to standardize and cooperate. So that was where the ecosystem was going to build, so businesses were starting to realize, hey, if they're not aligned with the ecosystem, they could cut themselves off for the future. But also, there was this perspective, if you look at a lot of the advances in waves of technology, there's usually at least one closed winner and one open winner. Yes. If you look back in the PC days, Microsoft was the closed winner. Eventually, Linux caught up there in the phone space. You've got iOS. You've got Android. That dynamic playing out. You can have a debate about whether Android's truly open or not, but it makes the point. We know who the closed winner of the cloud is. We do. It doesn't take any IQ to figure that one out. The question is, how and when will an open winner emerge? And even in 2008 and 2009, it was clear that that dynamic was going to play out. So that combination of factors actually made it a very easy decision to open sources Cloud Foundry. And I think it'll be a great thing for the whole industry if we can show how you can have an open technology and good governance. If you look at what you were saying earlier talking about Bitcoin, for instance, there is an example of where the governance model was not thought through. And it's now actually paying the price for that. Wonderful technology, tremendous innovation, but nobody actually thought through, partly because they were anti-government. It's many reasons. It's hard to. I used to think governance was a four-letter word. I'm like, waste of time. You rocked it. There's a difference being government and governance. But that's why when you go out on these endeavors, you've got to be thinking about this not just from a technology point of view, but from a governance point of view. And for those of you who may not have ever looked into it, I think there's a lot that Sam and very good work that Sam and others have done around Cloud Foundry to make sure that this ecosystem has good governance. We want to provide great economic opportunities. And one of the things that attracted me to this challenge was actually your original vision of Linux for the Cloud. But the elaboration of that was how do we create a platform that's running in every data center in the world that's creating a unified opportunity for packaged applications, for packaged services? How do we unlock well-behaved economic markets so we create the sustainable global scale open community and open ecosystem? So I think that's an extraordinary idea. What do you think is missing? Where do you want to see us go? If you could help us kind of set our agenda for the hard problems we should be working on for the next few years to unlock that, because you've built markets before. This is kind of the next time, and maybe at an even bigger scale. Well, you made the key point. At the end of the day, you've got to provide economic opportunity or economic value for a very large community of people. This can't be where all the economic value can be siphoned up by one company. We need to build the inside that. That's already there. Somebody's already doing that. We've got to do the other model. And so I think continuing to make sure that we can have a very healthy ecosystem, meaningful competition almost at every level of the system, both at the subsystems, the system itself, the apps built on top of that. And then, of course, you've got to make this. You've got to prime the pump. You've got to get to a certain level of functionality before others will be attracted to the ecosystem. So I think continuing to execute, building out Cloud Foundry itself so it gets to a critical mass where customers are starting to derive real value of it. And I think that was one of the great things to see about this particular conference, 2016, is we really saw quite a wide variety of customers who really now started to get value out of the platform. So if we can continue to execute while fleshing the system out, making sure that the interfaces are open so many people can plug into it, and then above all, keeping it secure and easy to use because without that, you won't get the end customers who at the end of the day are the real intended beneficiaries of all of this using the system. Yeah, I was talking to Doug Stafford earlier today. They're doing amazing work at Allstate, adapting the business and the digitization all around the platform. But where we are right now is they still have to write 100% of the code. It's all bespoke, all brand new microservices. So that's kind of a stage of maturity for the platform. And we agreed that if we can deliver on this vision of packaged software running on Cloud Foundry, they should be able to buy 90% of the packaged apps, microservices that they need, and just build 10% through it. You just got to make sure that you're consistently delivering that functionality down the road. I can remember the day it makes some people shudder to see this. I can remember going around begging people to write Windows applications. Hard to imagine. Microsoft had to supply all the apps themselves. We had stupid things like Paint, et cetera, but just still with us, believe it or not. It's actually a very good pixelator. It has actually a lot. I actually find myself using it now, which I never did in the pause. But that will come. If we could, as somebody said, you can look incredibly strategic if you just have good execution. Yeah, absolutely right. Any thoughts on how we should measure success going forward as we get into that ecosystem vision? I think none of this makes sense unless we have end customers using this. So the number of applications that are being deployed and used by end customers is obviously the primary metric of success. But then in addition to that, to your earlier point, it's the number of companies who are benefiting economically, whether by writing microservices, providing consulting services, all of that spectrum. But it's a feedback effect between those two. We're going to focus on building that economy. I think we come at this with so much respect for you and what you've built, and despite the fact that you're not the executive chairman of the foundation, but the executive chairman of Pivotal, Dr. Nick, I think, was right, calling you the grandfather of Cloud Foundry. I didn't want to offend, so it turns out that you're actually a grandfather. Exactly. So what I wanted to do and what the team decided to do was to offer you. We'd like to invite you to recognize your status. Well, this is a whole lot better than the T-shirt I got lost to. The Cloud Foundry jacket. So please give it up for Pomerates. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Sam. So much. I really appreciate it. Thank you for getting the way back. Cheers.