 Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of the CUBE Co-Founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We are here at Erika Brescia to see co-founder and chief operating officer, Bitnami. It's the app store for the cloud. They do automated packaging of an application provider. Great to see you, CUBE alumni. Great to have you in the studio. Thanks for coming in. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So much going on. You've been in the CUBE multiple times. We see each other at conferences and you made some time. Thanks for coming down. Appreciate it. Yeah. So Bitnami is doing some great things. So give us the update. What's going on with the company? Sure. So we just launched our new offering called StackSmith, which is our first enterprise offering that basically takes all the tooling that we've built to deliver the application catalog that we have onto all the major cloud vendors and allows enterprise IT departments to package up their own applications, both for cloud and cloud native platforms, as well as for whatever they're running in the enterprise today. So it kind of meets them where they are, helps them automate the application packaging and maintenance in place today, and then sets them up to successfully move to the cloud and Kubernetes and containers over time. It's kind of a reverse of this journey to the cloud. You go to where the user customers are, help them put it together. And make the journey really. So what we find is a lot of the more traditional orchestration and packaging tools just aren't well suited to cloud and containers in particular. And so enterprises are looking for new tools to help them solve current problems, which is we need to support all these different platforms. We might have some things running internally in VMware, we're running some things on Amazon, maybe using cloud formation, and now they're trying to get to Kubernetes, and they're trying to figure out how they can do that without having a separate pipeline for everything. And that's the problem that Bitnami solves. Yeah, and that's been, we've identified a problem on Amazon. I want Azure, I want Google Cloud, I got to hire a different development team, different stacks. So there's kind of this problem of multi-cloud. How are you guys talking to customers about that? Cause this seems to be the hybrid cloud main problem today, it's like, okay, I see the cloud, I understand I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff in the cloud or the cloud's going to be on-prem and it's going to be in the cloud. How do I get ready for the cloud? That seems to be a number one question. Yeah, and I think what people are struggling with is there are a lot of companies out there, particularly in the cloud native space, that just say, if you just rebuild everything, then your life will be so much better, right? But that's not really realistic for most companies. They need to be able to take what they have and be able to package it in such a way that they get a lot of the benefits of the cloud and containers without completely re-architecting everything. Because it might be practical for say a new startup or a company like Netflix or Spotify to do that, but let's face it, most companies are not that. Most companies have too many demands on their IT and ops teams already. Hiring talent is hard even for the startups working at the forefront of Kubernetes. So you really need tools that are approachable and solve current problems. But again, I think the key is set you up for success in the future. And I think we help people kind of bridge the gap between what they're doing today and what they're doing in the future without trying to push them in one direction, which might not make sense for them. Yeah, and Netflix and the Googles of the world are potentially future scenarios of what they might look like, but they got to take care of the current move from IT to cloud, get ready for it. Yeah, maybe. And you know, for a lot of these internal applications, it doesn't make sense to completely re-architect and rewrite them. Like the ROI isn't there. And there are companies out there that have thousands of Java or .NET applications that they just need to be able to move perhaps out of their data center. In many cases, it's being shut down and onto cloud platforms. And so we try to find that nice balance between helping you get the advantage of the automation of cloud without having to invest in re-architecting apps that just aren't worth re-architecting. I got to ask you, Erica, we've had a couple of conversations. I forget what year you were founded at Bitnami, but you had a great journey. A lot of things have changed. When did you guys found it? 2010 or 2019? So we started Bitnami in 2013. The company before Bitnami was Bitrock and we went through a Y Combinator in 2013 and that's when we really started growing out the company. First around the app catalog that we deliver both via bitnami.com as well as all the major cloud platforms. And that's allowed us to bootstrap the business up to this point. And then obviously we took all of the learnings and the technology from delivering 140 applications across 14 different platforms, native and cloud, and productized that in StackSmith. So our enterprise users, we have over a million deployments a month, but people have only been consuming the things that we build. Now they can use our tooling that we've been building out over the years to automate the packaging of their own applications. And just to kind of put some color commentary around that time, it wasn't the most calm waters in the cloud world. It's been massive growth. A lot of things have happened. You saw containers come to the scene with Docker and then become standardized. Now you got Kubernetes, you got service meshes right around the corner. Kind of now sets a perfect opportunity for you guys to bring customers with this app store concept. For you guys. And we see this great, we call it kind of the great unbundling, right? Where apps used to be distributed with the operating system and they kind of were this one cohesive piece. And now with Kubernetes and cloud APIs, the applications are very separate. And so there's kind of this new operating system coming together, which is the operating system of containers and Kubernetes and cloud. And it allows you to combine these different pieces in ways that you never could before. Before, you know, you would just go to your OS repo to pull in the app that you wanted. And you see in the trends, I mean, Google has the SRE concept, Site Reliability Engineer. The operators on the VMware side are dealing with VMs. Kind of all converging together. So I got to ask you, I mean, how does that impact your customers so with your new Stacksmith offering? What's the impact of the customers? Is it ease of use, is it ease of deployment? What's the main value add? So I think the most important thing is, as you said, there are all these new technologies coming out and there's also cloud formation on AWS and there's ARM on Azure and each cloud vendor is coming out with their own tooling. And then like you said, there's operators for Kubernetes. The advantage that you get with Bitnami is you don't have to understand the intricacies of how to package for all of those different platforms because we do that for you. We abstract a way having to understand how to build a cloud formation template versus a home chart helps the Kubernetes package manager essentially. And we've been very involved in helping define and further that project. We're actually the top provider of the official helm charts. So we see a lot of promise there but what's interesting about Bitnami is at the end of the day we're platform agnostic. And once you start using Bitnami and Stacksmith you can very easily add support for other platforms. So we have a customer who started out on AWS for example, they wanted to give a try to running some things on Azure and they essentially just had to flip a switch and then they get an ARM template instead of- What was their alternative to that? If they didn't do that, what would they have to do? They would have had to do it either manually or find system specific tools for each platform to do it. So there's no other like singular tool chain that lets you build natively for all the different platforms. And that's the key. We don't try to abstract away ARM or any of these other orchestration technologies by giving you some kind of layer on top of them. We just make it really easy to build for those technologies and also to maintain those applications and templates over time. So this isn't a point in time thing. We track all of the updates in everything that goes into that image or set of images and allow you to automatically rebuild and redeploy across any of those platforms you need to support. You guys have been very successful in the cloud but also have scar tissue like everybody else that's been through the cloud wars. And now as it starts to hit kind of an inflection point how has cloud changed now? What are we seeing now in cloud versus say 2014, 2015 timeframe? So I think the most interesting thing is how quickly Azure in particular has evolved. If I had to pick one thing that has been incredibly impressive and important in the changing cloud landscape, it's you go back to 2014. It was pretty much all AWS all the time, right? And Amazon isn't quite the Goliath that used to be anymore. I mean, they're still huge. Yeah, absolutely. But I'll tell you what, the others are gaining a lot of ground and they have really interesting and different advantages, right? Google will send all of their amazingly smart engineers in to help you architect applications or move them over. I have heard of a lot of workloads moving off of AWS onto Google because Google is giving them so much love and support in trying to attract those workloads over but Azure's advantage is their ecosystem, right? They really understand partnering in a way that Amazon's retail DNA just it doesn't lend itself to that. And so I think Microsoft's approach to building out a really great ecosystem around Azure coupled with their huge field sales team which Amazon has just been building. They'd never had an enterprise sales team is making things really interesting and creating for us a great dynamic in the market because we'd like to see a number of cloud vendors for it. Yeah, exactly. Whatever you want, any cloud. I don't know if our CMO would want me to put it that way, but... Dave Volante's favorite term, by the way. It's going to be an arms deal or be Switzerland as they, to be more... Yeah, we go with Switzerland. Azure's interesting. I was just having a conversation with Dave about this because you got the consumerization of IT and digital transformation have been the biggest buzzwords in IT for the past decade. First was a consumerization of IT, now it's digital transformation. Think about Amazon and Google that really the consumer companies. Azure's the enterprise company with the ecosystem. So it's going to be very interesting to see if consumerization is the winning formula or is it digital transformation on the enterprise side? It's going to be watching that pretty closely. Your thoughts. So I would say on the consumerization of IT site, I mean that is absolutely happening and we could talk for hours probably on why that trend is here and why it's not going away. Expectations in general have changed with the advent of the iPhone and app stores and convenience across every aspect of our lives. So I think even Microsoft gets that and I don't think that the consumer DNA of those companies actually gives them a real edge in this case. What is interesting is every company is starting to really focus on their app stores and their marketplace strategies and trying to provide a frictionless buying experience and there are a bunch of announcements coming both on the AWS side and the Azure side in particular around things that they're doing to ease the enterprise buying process. Well we identify the three things. SaaS business is table stakes, IoT is coming, connected devices and then you got the mobile. Knock on those things. Those three things are 20 year runs. Talk about Bitnami's update. You mentioned StackSmith. You have some new stuff there. You guys are hiring. It's the ramp up, funding, cash flow, upline revenues, go ahead and share. I'm not giving you all that. But yeah, it's a really exciting time for us obviously bringing this enterprise product to market. We're gearing up to scale quite significantly. So Bitnami is kind of unusual in the valley in that we're bootstrapped and we're very heavily engineering driven. So no outside funding. A million dollars in total which pretty much doesn't even count in Silicon Valley and that was really just a number of key individual folks involved in the company. No venture. No institutional funding. So we are just getting ready to build out the whole go to market team around the StackSmith product which is very new in the market just launched in the last couple months. So is it generally available? Oh yes, generally available, customers, lots of great things to talk about but we don't have the full sales team in place. And what's the benefits of StackSmith? What's the bottom line value proposition? It's really helping you to automate the packaging and maintenance of your applications whether internal or external, third party commercial apps that you're using internally and deploying them on any of the platforms that you need to support. Absolutely for the cloud. I love that. So let's talk about what you're working on. One of the things I'm really impressed with what you've done with Bitnami. I love it. Thank you. Love the bootstrapped stories. We're bootstrapped as well as everyone knows Silicon Angle. So it's great in Silicon Valley. I think that's like the top tier player. If you can bootstrap and take economic visibility around scale, that's a success. So congratulations. But you also have something exciting going on with venture investing. Yes. X factor. This is super impressive. You've raised a small little fund, X factor investing in women entrepreneurs. Take a minute to explain what X factor is and you have some news coming. Another fund coming. Sure. Yeah, it's been very exciting. So in the free time that I really don't have but this is such a good cause that it's worth it. We put together a $3 million fund to invest $100,000 in 30 different companies with at least one female founder. And this actually was spun out of Flybridge. We have our token guy as we call him Chip Hazard who's a career venture investor who's doing a lot of interesting things. But he basically led the charge with a woman named Anna Palmer to put together a group of female founders. That's what really differentiates us I think from the rest of the market who are operating their own companies to invest in these very early stage female founded companies. And I think that gives us a really unique advantage in the market of venture in that first we have an incredible pipeline and deal flow because we know these folks who are starting the companies. And we also have a unique perspective on the challenges of getting a new venture off the ground. And I think we can really be an ally to the entrepreneurs that we're funding and helping them get that first bit of funding in the door. We typically help them with their series A rounds and beyond. And they really see us as a peer and someone that they can relate to and come to for advice. And so I think it's a pretty unique value prop that we have as a VC fund. Operating experience brings a lot to the table. So they want to get those first three steps going, get the venture off the ground, trust. Yeah, and we have a very diverse range of experiences that we can bring to bear too. I mean, some of us have deep infrastructure experience. Some folks are on the consumer side. We've got a few East Coast people, a few West Coast people, a few people scattered in other areas. And we all have different areas of expertise, right? I'm pretty strong on the business development side and on business models, SaaS, enterprise software. Some of the other women are much more familiar with like distribution deals or hardware deals or other consumer businesses as well. So I think we have a really unique range of experiences and expertise that we can bring to bear in supporting our founders. And mentoring too and being there for, you know, don't give up, you know. Yeah, and we've had founders go through things and they'll call us at one of our founders I was just on the phone with and she was looking at changing her role within the company to take on more responsibility. And we had a great conversation around that and it resulted in her becoming the COO, which was fantastic. Another founder was going through a difficult time where she and her co-founder were splitting up when I was able to talk her through that. And we have a lot of those stories where I think, you know, we have really been seen as an ally who can help founders get through those times because we've been there and we can empathize. And it's an interesting dynamic because everybody knows that we're not going to invest in the next round. So there's never any posturing to make sure that, you know, they're still selling us on investing in the company. It's all about once we're in, we're in and we'll do anything we can do to help you scale successfully over time. And the key is get that next round or get clear line of sight on visibility on the unit economics or scale. Exactly. All right, so how much is coming in the next fund? Can you talk about the new amount or? Yeah, so we're not raising yet. We're just about to start raising. We're going to be expanding the number of investment partners on the team, which is fantastic. And I'm really excited to bring some amazing new women on board. So, you know, for the women out there who are maybe interested in starting to learn a little bit more about venture and have raised funding and built their own companies, please send us an email. Hello at X Factor Ventures. The fund should be about $10 million. How is it structured? They structure has limited partners, general partners. How is it? So if someone comes on board as you expand the partnership, what does it look like? Sure, so we all do invest our own money, but the fund has LPs just like any other fund. So there's a number of great folks who have backed up X Factor. We do bring in some of our own folks along the way. You know, I had people that I know who have invested in the fund and I'm sure that will be the case in the next one. But it's not like the fund is only funded by the investment partners. We have LPs just like any other fund. But you guys are taking profits out of it through the carry, right? So typically venture capital. It's typical venture capital. You know, it's a fairly small fund to start as we work through things, but we expect it to grow quite significantly over time. And I'll tell you without giving away too much that we have quite grand ambitions for the long term. All right, well, let's keep in touch on the deal flow. Congratulations on Bitnami. And we'll see you at the cloud shows, Amazon, Microsoft Ignite, Google Next. Everywhere. Yep, I'll be there. Erica, thanks for coming and spending some time here in theCUBE. CUBE Conversations here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. You're watching CUBE Conversations. Thanks for watching.