 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. This is theCUBE virtual. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE. theCUBE, you're normally there in person this year. It's all virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. We're doing the remote interviews and we're bringing in commentary and discussion around the themes of re-invent. And this today is public sector, Worldwide Public Sector Day. And the theme from Theresa Carlson, who heads up the entire team is to think big and look at the data. And I wanted to bring in a special CUBE alumni and special guest, Alan Cohen, who's a partner at Data Collective Venture Capital or DCVC, which we've known for many, many years. Founders Matt Oko and Zachary Bogue who started the firm. Over at about 10 years ago, we're on the really the big data wave and have grown into a really big firm. Thought big data, data collective, big ideas. That's the whole purpose of your firm, Alan. You're now a partner. Retired, I mean, a venture capitalist over at Data Collective. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. And great to see you as well, John. Thanks for being so honest this morning. I love the joke about being retired as the VC game. It's not a retirement for you. You guys made, you made some investments. Data Collective has a unique philosophy because you guys invest in essentially moonshots or big ideas, hard problems. And if I look at what's going on with Amazon, specifically in the public sector, genome sequencing now available in what they call the open data registry. You've got healthcare expanding huge, you got huge demand in education, real societal benefits, cyber security contested in space, more contention and congestion in space. There's a lot of really hard science problems that are going on that the cloud and AI are enabling. You're investing in entrepreneurs that are trying to solve these problems. What's your view of the big ideas? What are people missing? Well, I don't know if they're missing, but I think what I'd say, John, is that we're starting to see a shift. So if you look at the last, I don't know, forever, 40, 50 years in the IT and the tech industry, we took a lot of atoms. We built networks and data warehouses and server farms. And we kind of created software with it. So we took atoms and we turned them into bits. Now we're seeing things move in the other direction where we're taking bits, software, artificial intelligence, massive amount of compute power, which you can get from companies like AWS. And now we're creating better atoms. That means better medicines and vaccines. We're an investor in a company called Abcelera, which is the therapeutic treatment that J&J has taken to market. People are actually spaces and commercial business. If it's not a science fiction novel, we're investors in planet labs and rocket labs and propellous space. So people can see right down to you sitting on your terrace of your backyard from a satellite that was launched by a private company without any government money. You talked about gene sequencing, folding of proteins. So I think the big ideas are we can look at some of the world's most intractable issues and problems and we can go after them and turn them into commercial opportunities. And we wouldn't have been able to do that before without the advent of big data and obviously the processing capabilities and now artificial intelligence that are available from things like AWS. So it's kind of payback from the physical world to the physical world from the virtual world. Capella Space was featured in the keynote by Theresa Carlson. Great to tie that in, great tie in there. But this is the kind of hard problems and I want to get your take because entrepreneurs, it reminds me of the old days where you didn't go back to the dot-com when that bubble was going on and then you got the different cycles and the different waves. The consumer always got the best kind of valuations and got the most attention. And now B2B is hot. You got the enterprises super hot, mainly because of Amazon. They didn't let you into the DoorDash IPO obviously this morning. DoorDash IPO, I didn't get a phone call for friends and family and one of their top customers, they started Palo Alto. We know them. Instacart, DoorDash. These are companies that are getting massive information. Airbnb. Zoom. The post-pandemic is coming. It's going to be a hybrid world. I think there's clear recognition that there's some economic values or digital being digitally enabled and using cloud and AI for efficiencies and velocity of new things. But it's going to get back to the real world. What's here? There's still hard problems out there. I mean, all the valuations are going to be food delivery. Well, yeah, there's always hard problems but what's different now and from a perspective of venture and investors is that you can go after really hard problems with venture scale level of investments. Traditionally, you think about these things as like a division of a company like J&J or General Electric or some very massive global corporation and because of the capabilities that are available in the computing world as well as kind of great scientific research and we fund more PhDs probably than any other type of background for founders. They can go after these things. They can create, we have a company called Pivot Bio and I think I've spoken to you about them in the past, John. They created a series of microbes that actually do a process called nitrogen fixation. So it attaches the nitrogen to the roots of corn, sorghum and weed. So you don't have to use chemical fertilizer. Well, those microbes were all created through an enormous amount of machine learning and then where did that machine learning come from? What does that mean? That means climate change. That means more profitable farmers. That means water and air management. Well, major issues in our society where if we didn't have the computing capabilities we have today, we wouldn't have been able to do that. We clearly would have not been able to do that as a venture level of investments to get it started. So I think what's missing for a lot of people is a paucity of imagination and you actually have to take these intractable problems and say, how can I solve them? And then tear it apart to its actual molecules just a little inside joke, right? And then move that through. And this means that you have to be able to invest and work on things. These companies don't happen in two or three years or five years. They take sometimes seven, 10, 15 years. So it's life work for people. But we're seeing that everywhere. I mean, Rocket Lab, a company of ours out of New Zealand and now out of DC which actually launched the last Capella Space satellites. They print their rocket engines with a 3D printer, a metal printer. So think about that. How did all that come to bear? And it started as a venture scale style of investment. So Peter Beck, the founder of that company, had a dream to basically launch a rocket once a year, once a month, once a week and eventually to once a day. So he's effectively creating a huge, huge upswing in the ability of people to commercialize space. And then what does space do? It gives you better observability on the planet not just from a security point of view but from a weather and a commerce point of view. So all kinds of other things that looked like they were very difficult to go after now start to become enabled. Yeah, I love your investment in Capella Space because I think that speaks volumes. And one of the things that the founder was talking about was getting the data down is the hard part. He's up there now, you can see everything but now I got to get the data down because say the wildfires in California or whether things happening around the globe. Now that you have the observation space you got to get the data down there. This is the huge scale challenge. Well, let me give you something that's also, so we are in a fairly difficult time in this country right because of the COVID virus. We are going to maybe as quickly as next week start to deliver even though not as many as we'd like vaccines and therapeutics into this virus situation literally in a year. How did all these things, obviously one of the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes and maybe of the past century, how did that happen? How did all that, well, the ability to use computing power in assistance in laboratory, in development of pharmaceutical and therapeutics is a huge change. So something that is an intractable problem because traditional methods of creating vaccines to take anywhere from three to seven years, we would have a much worse public health crisis. I'm not saying that this one is over, right? We're in a really difficult situation but our ability to start to address it, the worst public health crisis in our lifetime is being addressed because the ability of people to apply technology to accelerate the ability to create vaccines. That's a great point. Absolutely amazing. Well, let's just pause that. Let's double down on that and just unpack that. Think about that for a second. If you didn't, and then the Amazon highlighted this on Andy Jassy's keynote, carrier, which makes air conditioning, they also do refrigeration and transport. So one IOT application leveraging the cloud is they, we call it cold chain, managing the value chain of the transport, making sure food and in this case, vaccine, they saw huge value to reduce carbon emissions because of it. The waste involved in food alone was a problem but the vaccine, they had the cold chain. Can you imagine? Maybe this year the cold chain is more valuable than the block chain. Yeah, cold chain sounds like a band, cold play. I had to get that in, Linda loves cold play. But if you think about like where we are to your point, imagine if this hit 15 years ago or 20 years ago. You know, you two was just hitting the scene 20 years ago, 15 years ago. So, you know, that kind of culture, we didn't have Zoom. Education would be where? We would be Skyping, there's no bandwidth. So I mean, you know, the bandwidth wars, you would live through those in your career. You had no bandwidth, you had no video conferencing, no real IOT, no real supply chain management and therapeutics would have taken what years? What's your reaction to that? And compare and contrast that to what's on full display in the real world stage right now on digital enablement, digital transformation. Well, look, I mean, ultimately I'm an optimist because of what this technology allows you to do. I'm a realist that, you know, we're going to lose a lot of people because of this virus, but we're also going to be able to reduce a lot of pain for people in potentially death because of the ability to accelerate these abilities to react. I think the biggest lesson and the thing that I look for, and I hope for so when Teresa says, how do you think big? The biggest lesson I think we've learned in the last year is how to build resilience. So all kinds, parts of our economy, our healthcare systems, our personal lives, our education, our children, even our leisure time have been tested from a resilience point of view. And the ability of technology to step in and become an enabler for that of resilience. There's like, people don't love Zoom school, but without Zoom school, what work is going to do? There is no school, right? So, which is why Zoom has become an indispensable utility of our lives, whether you're on it too much or you got Zoom fatigue, doesn't really matter. The concept, I mean, what we're going to do call into a conference call unless you're a teacher, right? And you know, so how are you going to, you're going to do that? The ability to repurpose our supply chain and you know, we see this, we're going to see a lot of change in the global supply chain. You're going to see whether it's read domestication of manufacturing or tightening of that up because we're never going to go without PPE again and other vital elements. We've seen entire industries repurpose from B to B to C. And their ability to package, deliver and service customers. That is, those reforms are resilience. Yeah, and taking that to the next level, if you think about what's actually happening on full display, and again, on my one-on-one with Andy Jassy prior to the event and he laid this out on stage, he kind of talks about this, every vertical being disrupted. And then Dr. Matt Wood, who's the machine learning lead there, and Swami says, hey, you know, cloud compute with chips now and with AI and machine learning, every industry vertical, global industry is going to be disrupted. And so, you know, I get that. We've been saying on the queue for a long time that this is going to happen. So, you know, we've been kind of on this wave of horizontal scalability and vertical specialization with data and modern applications with machine learning, making customization, really high fidelity decisions, or as you say down to the molecule level or atomic level. But this is clear. What I found interesting, and I want to get your thoughts because you have one been there, done that through many ways of innovation and now investing, leading investor in this area. You made up a word, I like it. Jassy talks about leadership to invent and reinvent. Can't fight gravity. You got to get talent hungry for invention, solve real world problems, speed, don't complexify. That's his message. I said to him in my interview, you need a wartime conciliary because he's a big movie buff. I quote the Godfather. You know, you don't want to be the Tom Hagan. You don't want to be that guy. You're not a wartime conciliary. This is a time, there's times in companies, a history's where there's peace and there's wartime. Wartime being the startup trying to find its way and then they get product market fit and you're growing and scaling, you're operating, you're hiring people to operate and then you get into a pivot or a competitive situation and then you got to get out there and get dirty and reinvent or reimagine and then you're back to peace. Having the right personnel is critical. So one of the themes this year is if you're in the way, get out of the way. You know, and some people don't want to hold onto the past, that's the way we did it before. I built this system. Therefore it has to work this way. Otherwise the new way is terrible. The main frame, we got to keep the main frame. So you have a kind of an accelerated leadership mantra happening. What is your take on this? Because that would be the thing I would be told if you're going to, if you're going to, if you are going to use mob related metaphors, I'll share one with you from the final season. So Prano is where Tony's Prano is being hit over the head with a bunch of nostalgia from one of his associates. And he goes, remember when is the lowest form of conversation? And which is I kind of, I think what you were talking about and what Andy is talking about is that the thing that makes great leadership and what I look for is that when you invest in somebody or you put somebody in a leadership position to build something, 50% of their experience is really important. And 50% of it is not applicable in the new situation. And the hard leadership initiative is to understand which 50 matters and which 50 doesn't matter. So I think the issue is that, yeah, I think it is lead follower or get out of the way, but it's also, what am I doing? Am I following a pattern for a technology, a market, a customer base or a set of people I'm managing that doesn't really exist anymore? That the world has moved on. And I think that we're gonna be kind of permanent war time on some level. We're gonna be, because I think the economy's gonna shift, we're gonna have other shocks to the economy and we don't get back to a traditional normal anytime soon. So I think that is the part that leadership in technology really has to adopt. And I mean, the first great CEO of Intel reminded us, right, that only the paranoid survive, right? Is that it's you, some things work and some things don't work. And that's the hard part on how you parse it. So I always like to say that you always have to have a crisis and if there is no crisis, you create the crisis. And you can't even put it back. You said, don't let a good crisis go to waste. As a manager, you take advantage of the crisis. Yeah, I mean, look, it wouldn't have been bad to be in the Peloton business this year, right too, right? Which is like, when people stayed home and that will fade, people will get back on their bikes and go outside on the cyclist. But a lot more people are gonna look at that as an alternative way to exercise or exercising when it's dark or when the weather is in climate. So what I think is that you see these things they go in waves, they crest, they come back but they never come back all the way to where they were. And as a manager and as a builder in the technology industry, you may not get like, okay, maybe we will not spend as much time on Zoom in a year from now, but we're gonna still spend a lot of time on Zoom and it's gonna still be very important. What I would say, for example, and looking at the COVID crisis and for my own personal investments, what I look at, one thing is clear, we're gonna get our arms around this virus, but if you look at the history of airborne illnesses, they are accelerating and they're coming every couple of years. So being able to be in that position to more react, more rapidly create vaccines, the ability to foster trials more quickly, to be able to use that information to make decisions. So the duration when people are not covered by therapeutics or vaccines shortness, that is going to be really important. So that form of resilience and that kind of speed is gonna happen again and again in healthcare. There is gonna be increasing pressure across in part of the segment. Food supply, right? I mean, the biggest problem on our food supply today is actually the lack of labor. And so you have farm, I mean, farmers have had a repurpose, they don't sell to their traditional, so you're gonna see increased amount of automation and mechanization. Well, had We Farm, We Farm was on the keynote today talking about how their marketplace is a collective, people working together. Given that big ideas, let's just end the segment here. Let's connect big ideas and the democratization of, I mean, you know the old expression, it's like, go big or go home. Well, I think now we're at a time where you can actually go big and stay and be big or get to be big at your own pace because the mantra has been thinking big in years, execute, plan in months and execute weekly and month daily. You can plan around, there's a management technique potentially to leverage cloud and AI to really think about the big idea. If I'm a manager, whether I'm in public sector or commercial or any vertical industry, I can still have that big idea of that North Star and then work backwards and figure that out. That's obviously the Amazon way. What's your take on how people should be? What's the right way to think about executing down that path so that someone who's say, trying to reimagine education. And I know of some people that I've talked to here in California are looking at it saying, hey, I don't need to have silos of students, faculty, alumni and community. I can unify them together. That's an idea. I mean, execution of that is, you know, move all these events that have been supplying siloed systems to them. Because people want to interact online. The Peloton is a great example of health fitness. So everyone's out there waiting for this playbook. Yeah, unfortunately, John, if I had the playbook, I'd mail it to you. But I think there's a couple of things that are really important that may be good to help, that is one. Where is there structural change in an industry or a segment or something like that? And sorry to just, I'm home today, right? So everybody's running out of the door. And, you know, so I talked about the structural change. We talked about the structural change in healthcare. We talked about maybe some of the structural change that's coming to agriculture. There's a change in people's expectations and how they're willing to work and what they're willing to do. As you pointed out, the traditional silos, right? Because we have so much, you know, information in our fingertips, you know, people's responsibility, as opposed to having products and service to deliver them, what they're willing to do on their own is really changed. I think the other thing is that leadership is ultimately the most important aspect. And we have built a lot of companies in the industry based on forms of structural relation industry background. I'm a product manager. I'm a salesperson. I'm a CEO. I'm a finance person. And what we're starting to see is more whole thinking, particularly in early stage investors, where they think less functionally about what people's jobs are and more about what the company's trying to get done, what the market is like. And it's infusing a lot more how people do that. So ultimately, most of this comes down to leadership. And that's what people have to do. They have to see themselves as a leader in their company, in the business they're trying to build, not just in their function, but in the market they're trying to win, which means you go out and you talk to a lot more people. You take a lot fewer things for granted. You read less textbooks on how to build companies and you spend more time talking to your customers and your engineers. And you start to look at enabling, so we have, I mean, between machine learning, computer vision and the amount of processing power that's available from things like AWS, including the services that you could just click box in places like the Amazon store. You actually have to be much more expansive in how you think about what you can get done without having to build a lot of things because it's actually right there at your fingertips. Hopefully that kind of gets a little bit to where you were asking it. Well, Alan, it's always great to have you on and great insight and always a pleasure to talk candidly. Normally we're a little bit more boisterous, but given how terrible the situation is with COVID, I'm working at home usually in person, but you've been great. Take a minute to give a plug for the data collective venture capital firm, DCVC. You guys have a really unique investment thesis. You're in applied AI, computational biology, computational care, enterprise enablement, geospatial, you talk about space and Capella, which was featured, carbon health, smart agriculture, transportation. These are kind of like not on, these are off the beaten path of like traditional herd mentality of venture capital. You guys are going after big problems. Give us an update on the firm. I know that firm has gotten bigger lately. You guys have some successes. The firm has gotten bigger, I guess since Matt and Zach started it about a decade ago. So we have about $2.3 billion under management. We also have a bio fund, kind of a sister fund that's part of that. I mean, obviously we are traditionally an early stage investor, but we have gone much longer now with these additional investment funds and the confidence of our LPs. We are looking for, as you said, John, really large intractable industry problems and transitions. We tend to back very technical founders and work with them very early in the creation of their business. And we have a huge network of some of the leading people in our industry who work with us. It's a little bit of our secret weapon. We call it our equity partner network. Many of them have been on theCUBE. And these are people that work with us in the creation of this. We've never been more excited because there's never been more opportunity and you'll start to see, you're starting to hear more and more about them. We'll probably be a couple of years before we're a household name, but we're a wash and deal flow. And the good news is I think more people want to invest in and build the things that we've, so we're less niching, more people want to do what we're doing. And I think some of the large exits that started to come our way will attract more great entrepreneurs in that space. Yeah, you guys really saw the data models, data trend early. You saw where it's impacted. And I'll say that's front and center on Amazon, web services reinvent this year. You guys were early, super important firm. I'm really glad you guys exist and you guys will be soon a household name, if not already. Thanks for coming on. All right, Alan, thank you. Great spending time. Thank you, appreciate it. Take care. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. You're watching Reinvent Coverage. This is the CUBE live portion of the coverage, three weeks, wall to wall. Check out thecube.net. Also go to the CUBE page on the Amazon event page. There's a little click through the bottom on the metadata main stage. Tons of video on demand and live programming there too. Thanks for watching.