 We're back in Boston, the CUBE's coverage of AWS Reinforced 2022, my name is Dave Vellante. Steve Mulaney is here, he's the CEO of AVIatrix. Longtime CUBE alum, sort of a collaborator on SuperCloud, which we have an event August 9th, which you guys are participating in. So thank you for that and welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, great to be here as always. Back in Boston, yeah. I'd say good show, not like blow me away, we were at AWS summit in New York City three weeks ago. I heard it took three hours to get in. Out of control, I heard, well there were some people too, maybe three, but they expected like maybe nine, 10,000, 19,000 showed up, now it's a free event. Yeah, 19,000 people, Steve. Oh, I didn't know it was that many. It was unbelievable, I mean it was packed. So it's a little light here and I think it's, because you know everybody's down the Cape. They are down the Cape or Rhode Island, it's after the fourth. The thing is that we were talking about this, the quality people are pretty good though, right? This is, there's no lucky lose, it's everybody that's doing stuff in cloud, they're moving in, this is no longer, hey what's this thing called cloud, right? I remember three, four years ago at AWS, you'd get a lot of that kind of stuff, the summit meetings and things like that. Now it's, we're full on deployment mode. Even here in 2019, the conversation was like, so there's this shared responsibility model and we may have to make sure you understand it. I mean nobody's questioning that today. It's more really hardcore best practices, how to apply tools, do's and don'ts and so it's a much more sophisticated narrative I think. Well, I mean that's one of the things that Aviatrix does is our whole thing is architecturally, I would say what does network security belong in the network? It shouldn't be a bolt-on, it shouldn't be something that you add on, it should be something that actually gets integrated into the fabric of the network. So you shouldn't be able to point to network security. It's like, can you point to the network? It's everywhere, point to air, it's everywhere. Network security should be integrated in the fabric and that wasn't done on-prem that way. You steered traffic to this thing called a firewall but in the cloud, that's not the right architectural way. It's a choke point. Operationally adds tremendous amount of complexity which is the whole reason we're going to cloud in the first place is for that agility and the ability to operationally swipe the card and get our developers running to put in these choke points is completely the wrong architecture. So conversations we're having with customers is integrate that security into the fabric of the network and you get rid of all those operational issues. Explain that, how you're not a checkpoint but if you funnel everything into one sort of place in the company. So we are a networking company. It is cloud networking company. So we were born in the cloud, cloud native week. We are not some on-prem networking solution that was jammed in the cloud. And wrapped in a stack, wrapped in a VM or something like that. No, no, no, and looking for wires, right? That's VM series from Paloaldea. It doesn't even know it's in the cloud, right? It's looking for wires. And of course, multi-cloud because, you know, Larry Ellison now, could you believe that? On stage with Satya Nadella talking about multi-cloud. Now you really know, we've crossed over to this is a thing. Whoever would have thought you'd see that. But anyway, so we're networking, we're cloud networking. Of course it's multi-cloud networking. And we're going to integrate these intelligent services into the fabric. And one of those is networking. So what happens is you should do security everywhere. So the place to do it is at every single point in the network that you can make a decision and you embed it and actually embed it into the network such that when you're making a decision of does that traffic need to go somewhere or not, you're doing a little bit of security everywhere. And so what it looks like a giant firewall effectively, but it's actually distributed in software through every single point in the network. Can I call it a mesh? It's kind of a mesh, yeah, it's a fabric. Okay. It's a fabric that these advanced services, including security are integrated into that fabric. So you've been networking, you know, much of your career. 37 years. All your career, right? So, yeah, Cisco, Palo Alto, Nicera, probably missing one or two. But so what do you do with all that stuff that's out there? Sonautics. Keep going. Yeah, I think that's it, that's all I got. So what do you do with all that stuff that's out there? You rip and replace it? In the cloud, you mean? Yeah, all this infrastructure that's out there. What is it? Well, you don't have it in the cloud, right? And so right now what's happening is people, look, you can't change too many things if you're a human. You know, they always tell you, don't change a job, get married, and have a kid or something all in the same year. Like they just do one of them because it's too much. When people move to the cloud, what they do is they tend to take what they do on-prem and they say, look, I'm going to change one thing. We're going to go to the cloud. Everything else, I'm going to keep the same because I don't want to change three things. So they kind of lift and shift their same mentality. They take their firewalls, their next-gen file. I want them. They take all the things that they currently do and they say, I'm going to try to do that in the cloud. It's not really the right way to do it. But sometimes for people that are on-prem people, that's the way to get started. And not screw it up. And not screw it up and not change too many things and look, I'm just used to that. And then I'll go to change things to be more cloud native. Then I'll realize I can get rid of this and get rid of that and do that. But that's where people are. The first thing is bring these things over. We help them do that, right? From a networking perspective, I'll make it easier to bring your old security stuff in. But in parallel to that, we start adding things into the fabric. And what's going to happen is eventually we start adding all these things and things that you can't do separately. We start doing anomaly detection. We start doing behavioral analysis. Why? Because the entire network, we are the data plane. We see everything. And so we can start doing things that a standalone device can't do because not all the traffic's steered to them. You can only control what's steered to you. And then eventually what's happening is people look at that device and then they look at us and then they look at the device. They look at us and they go, why do I have both of this? And we go, I don't know. You don't need it. Well, can I get rid of that other thing? That's a tool? Sure. But you don't have to. And there's not a trade-off. There's not a trade-off. You don't have to. No, right now people will do belts and suspenders. Because it's just, who has too much security? Nobody. They're going to do belt suspenders, anything they can do, but eventually what will happen is they'll look at what we do and they'll go, that's good enough. That happened to me when I was in Palo Alto Networks. We inserted as a firewall. They kept their existing firewall. They had all these other devices and eventually all those went away and you just had an extra firewall. Just through attrition. Through attrition. You're like, you look and you go, well that platform is doing all these functions. Same thing's going to happen to us. The platform of networking, it's going to do all your network security devices. So any tool or agent or external device that you have to steer traffic to, it's going to go away. You're not going to need it. And you're talking multi-cloud, obviously. And then I want to do the same thing whether I'm in Azure, AWS, Google. That's all about the same. Yeah, same architecture, same experience, same set of services, true multi-cloud native, like that's what you want. And oh by the way, skills gap, skills shortage is a real thing. And it's getting worse. Because now with the recession, you think you're going to be able to add more people? Nope, you're going to have less people. How do I do this in a multi-cloud world with security and all this kind of stuff? You have to put the intelligence and the software not in your people, right? So speaking of recession, as a CEO of a well-funded company that's got some momentum, how are you approaching it? Do you have like, did you bring in the wartime consigliary? I mean, you've been through downturns before this. Are you the- I'm on wartime already. Okay, so tell me more about how you're kind of approaching this potential downturn. So recession didn't change what we were doing one bit because I run it that way from the very beginning. So I've been around 30,000 years. That's what Frank Slutman told me. He's like me. You know what he said? Yeah. Or maybe I'm like, no. Because he said, you know, people talk about, you only do things that are absolutely necessary during times like this. Always. I always do things that are only- That's all I do. Absolutely necessary. Why would you ever do things that aren't necessary? You'd be surprised. Most companies don't. Recession's very good for people like Snowflake and for us because we run that way anyway. I constantly make decisions that we have to go and dip. There's people that aren't right for the business. I move them out. Like I don't wait for some like sequoia, stupid rest in peace, the world's ending, fire all your people. That has no impact on me because I already operate that way. So we kind of operate that way. And we are like Satya Nadell even came out and kind of said, I don't want to say cloud is recession proof, but it kind of is. We are, look, our top customer spends five million a year. Nothing. We haven't even started yet, Dave. That's minuscule. We're not macro. We're micro. Five million a year for these big enterprises is nothing, right? Nadell is now starting to count people who do billion dollar agreements with him. Billion over a period of number of years. Like that's the scale. We have not even begun to- He's got multi-billion dollar agreements now. We haven't even begun to understand the scope of what's happening in the cloud, right? And so, yeah, the recession's happening. I don't know. I guess it's impacting somebody. It's not impacting me. It's actually accelerating things because it's a flight to quality and customers go and say, I can't get gear on on-prem anyway because of the shortage, get chips. And that's not the right thing. So, guess what? The recession says, I'm going to stop spending more money there and I'm going to put it into the cloud. All right, so you opened up Pandora's Boxing. I want to ask you about your sort of management philosophy. When you come into a company to go lead a company like that, what's your approach to assess the team? Who do you decide? How do you decide who to keep on the bus, who to throw off the bus, put in the right seats? And how long does that take you? Doesn't take long. When I joined, we were 38 people. We're now 525. And my view on everything, I've never met Frank Slubin but I guarantee you he has the same philosophy. You have a one-year contract, me included. Next year, the board might come to me and say, you were the right CEO for this year, you're not next year. Ben Harwitz taught me that. It's a one-year contract. There's no multi-year contract. So everybody in the company, including the CEO, has a one-year contract. So you would say that to the board. Hey, if you can find somebody better. And you know what, I'll be the first one to pull myself, fire myself, and say, we're replacing me with somebody better. Right now there isn't anybody better. So it's me, so okay. Next year, maybe there's somebody better or we hit a certain point where I'm not the right guy. I'll pull myself out as the CEO. But also internally the same thing. Just because you're the right guy this year we hire people for what you need to do this year. We're not going to, we don't hire, oh, like this is the mistake a lot of companies make. Well, we want to be a billion dollars in sales. So we're going to go hire some loser from HPE who's worked at a company for a billion dollars. And by the way, has no idea how they became a billion dollars in revenue or billions of dollars. But we're going to go hire them because they must know more than we do. And every single time you bring them in what you realize, they're idiots. They have no idea how we got to that. And so you don't pre-hire for where you want to be. You hire for where you are that year. And then if it's not right, and then if it's not right you'd be really nice to them. Have great severance packages, be respectful for people and be honest with them. I guarantee you Frank Slutman's not, if you're not just had this conversation with a sales guy before I came into here. Very straight conversation northeast hockey player mentality. We're straight. If you're not working out or I don't think you're doing things right you're going to know. And so it's a one year contract. That's what you do. So you don't have time, you don't have the luxury of time. So that's probably the hardest part of any leadership job is people don't like confrontation and they like to put it off but you don't run away from it. You just say, hey. It's all in a confrontation. That's what relationships have built. Why do war buddies hang out with each other because they've gone through hell, right? It's in the confrontation and it's actually with customers too, right? If there's an issue, you don't run from it. You actually bring it up in a very straightforward manner. And say, hey, we've got a problem, right? They respect you, you respect them, da-ba-ba. And then you come out of it and go, you know, you have to fight. It's like a look with your wife, you have to fight. You don't fight. It's not a relationship. You've got to see in that tension is where the relationship is built. See, I should go home and have a fight tonight. You got to have a fight with your wife. You know, you mentioned Satya Nadella and Larry Ellison. Interesting point, I want to come back to that. What Oracle did is actually pretty interesting, doing it for their use case, you know? It's not your thing. It's like low latency database across clouds. Who would have ever thought that? But we love it. Because it drives multi-cloud. It drives, and I actually think we're going to have multi-cloud applications that are going to start happening. Right now you don't. You have developers that kind of will use one cloud. But as we start developing, and you call it the super cloud, right? When that starts really happening, the infrastructure is going to allow that. Networking and network security is that bottom layer that Aviatrix helps. Once that gets all handled, the app people are going to say, so there's no friction. So maybe I can use Autonomous Database here. I can use this service from GCP. I can use that service and put it all into one app. So where does the app run? It's a multi-cloud app. Doesn't exist today. But what's going on? No, that doesn't happen today. It's going to happen. But that's kind of what the vision was, you know, seven, eight years ago of what that would be. The original premise of hybrid. Right, right. I think Chuck Hollis, the guy who was at EMC at the time, he wrote this piece on, he called it private cloud, but he was only describing hybrid cloud, application running in both places. That never happened, but it's starting to. I mean, the infrastructure is getting put in place to enable that, I guess is what you're saying. Yep. Yeah, cool. And multi-cloud is becoming not just four plus one, there's a lot of enterprises, it's becoming n plus one. Meaning you're going to have more and more, and then there won't be infrastructure clouds like AWS and so forth, but it's going to be industry clouds, right? You've talked about that. Again, back to super cloud. You're going to have Goldman Sachs creating clouds, and you're going to have AI companies creating clouds. You're going to have clouds at the edge, you know, for edge computing, and all these things all need to be networked with network security integrated, and comes back to Aviatrix. You mentioned Ben Horowitz, that's Mark Andreessen. All companies are software companies. All companies are becoming cloud companies, or they're missing opportunities, or they might get disrupted. Every single company I talk to now, you know, whether you're Heineken, they don't think of themselves as a beer company anymore. We are the most technologically advanced brewer in the world. Like they all think they're a technology company now. Whether you're making trucks, whether you're making sneakers, whether you're making beer, you're now a technology company. Every single company in the world. We are too. We're building a media cloud. You know, John is laying that out, and that's what we've got developers doing. That's our future, you know. Cool, hey, thanks for coming on, man. Thank you. Great to see you. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there, and we'll be back right after this short break. It keeps coverage. AWS Reinforced 2022 from Boston. Keep it right there. You're getting tired. How many interviews?