 from the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Hoshokon 2018. Brought to you by Hoshokon. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live here at Hoshokon in Las Vegas, the first security conference for Blockchain. It's an inaugural event, and we're here with Gabriel Shepherd VP of strategy, a global strategy for Hoshokon. They're the hosts of the event, although it's an industry conference for the entire community all coming together. Gabriel, thanks for coming on and spending the time. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for supporting the event, and we appreciate your team coming out and covering what we're trying to build here. Well, we think it's super important. Obviously, you guys are doing a great service for the industry in stepping up and putting the event together, and so props to you guys. Thank you. This is not a host show sales-like conference. You guys aren't selling anything. You're doing a service for the community, so props to you guys and the team. Great stuff, and we know this is a kernel of all the smartest people. And it's really an industry event, so it shows in the session, so appreciate that. We think it's important because we see a lot of trends. theCUBE has a unique advantage in how we cover hundreds of events, and so we get to go, we see a horizontal observation space in the industry, and when you have formation like this with the community, this is important. You guys have up-leveled the conversation, focused the conversation around Blockchain where security is the top-level conversation. That's it. Now, I see all pitches, so for the folks watching, this is really one of those events where it's not a huge number of people here, like the thousands and thousands of other Blockchain shows that make money off events. This is about community, and around getting the conversations and having substantive conversations. So, great job. So, for the folks watching, the content agenda is super awesome. Hostshowcon.com, you can go browse it, but give us some color commentary on some of the types of speakers here, the diversity. Yeah, I think the first thing that we wanted to accomplish with Hostshowcon was we wanted to put front and center the conversations that were not taking place at other events. There were plenty of platforms and opportunities for companies, early-stage companies, to go pitch. There are other great conference organizers that do events and have their own wheelhouse. But what we wanted to do was put together a conference that was focused around a type of conference that we ourselves would want to attend as a cybersecurity firm. And, you know, after traveling the world, I mean, you know, you and Harteja spoke many times and Hostshow has sponsored quite a few events around the world. After attending, by the end of 2018, we'll have attended something like 100 plus events in some capacity. And so, it was clear to us early on that conferences weren't going to focus on security or at least put them on the main stage where I believe that they should be, at least with all the hacks happening. So, what we wanted to do was bring together thought leadership with respect to security, technical leadership with respect to developers and security engineers. And we wanted to bridge those two. What I mean by that is we wanted thought leadership that could get executives to start, non-technical people, to start thinking about security in the larger format and how it's applicable to their company. But what we also wanted to do is we wanted to connect these non-technical people with the technical people in an intimate setting where they could learn. Think about the brain power that we have in this hotel for Hoshokan. You've got the minds of Andreas Antonopoulos, Diego Zaldiar of RSK, Michael Perklin of Shapeshift, Yoseb Kwan of Hoshok, you've got Ron Stone from C4, you've got Anand Prakash, a world-class white hat, bug bounty hunter. Consider one of, he's top five bug bounty hunter for Facebook five years in a row. The level of, or the caliber of technical talent in this building has the potential to solve problems that enterprises been trying to solve individually for years. But those conversations don't take place in earnest with the non-technical people. And so the idea behind Hoshokan was to bridge those two, provide education. That's what we're doing, things like workshops. Sure, we have keynotes and panels, but we also have the ability to teach non-technical people how to enable two-factor authentication. How to set up PGP for your email. How to set up your hardware wallet. These conversations are not taking place. The bridge is clearly established. We interview people from the compliance side all the way down to custodial services, which, again, the diversity, this is not a group think event, just giving them more props here because I think you guys did a great job worthy of promotion because you not only bridge the communities together, you're bringing people in cross-functionally, cross-pollinizing, and the asset test for me is simple. The group think event is when everyone's kind of rah-rah in each other. No, no, this is good conversations. We got Andrea saying, hey, if you put database, substitute database for blockchain and it reads well, it's not a real revolutionary thing. And oh, all you custodian services, you're screwed. I mean, so you have perspectives on both sides. That's right. And there's contentious conversations. That's right. And that to me proves it. And as well as the sessions are highly attended. Sure, we don't want a panel of everybody in a group because we know that's not reality. I mean, you bring up the issue of custody. Our prime example is we had a great talk of a four-person panel led by Joe Kelly, who's the CEO of Unchained Capital. He had a panel with traditional equities custodian, Paul Pooie from Edge Wallet, Joseph Kwan is the CEO of HOSHO, and there was clear differences of opinion with respect to custody, and it got a little contentious. But isn't that the point? Yeah. It's to have these conversations in earnest and let's put them out in the public on what's right and what's wrong for the community and let the community decide the best way forward. That's exactly what you want to do. I got to ask you, what are the big surprises for you? What have you learned? What's the big reveal for you that you've surprised you? Or things you expected? What were some of the things that went on here? Yeah, I think the biggest surprise to me was the positive feedback that we received. I understand that people maybe looked at HOSHO con year when it said HOSHO, they're a cybersecurity firm. What are they doing running a conference? But my background is I've produced conferences, I have a former employee of South by Southwest, I believe a big inexperience. And so when we started to put this together, we thought we knew we would make mistakes and we certainly made mistakes with respect to programming and schedule and just things that we didn't think about attention to detail. But we had planned so far in that the mistakes were mitigated that they weren't exposed to the public, right? They're behind the scenes fires. It's kind of like a wedding or a party. Yeah, they're behind the scenes fires. You notice the details but no one actually really notices it. Sure, we put them out behind the scenes and nobody, our guests don't notice. And that was my biggest concern. I'm pleasantly surprised at the positive feedback. We've yet to get any negative feedback publicly on Twitter, Telegram, anecdotally, individually people. Now they may just be nice to my face but I feel good about the response that we've gotten. It's been good vibes here. So I got to ask you about obviously the DJs were great last night. Thank you, thank you. Good experience and knowledge and networking has been a theme too. Correct. Tell us about some of the networking dynamics. I saw a lot of people, I had ran into some people I met for the first time. We've had great outreach with the cubes integrated in. People are very friendly. Talk about the networking that's been going on here. Yeah, I mean, panels are great. I'd love to hear from panels and solo presentations but a lot of work gets done in the hallways. We have a saying in the conference business, hallway hustlers, right? The ones that are hustling in the hallways are those early stage entrepreneurs who are trying to close deals, trying to figure out how to get in front of the right person. Serendipitously are at the bars at the same time as somebody they want to meet. That is to meet conference 101. That is the stuff I grew up on. And so we wanted to make sure that we were encouraging those interactions through traffic flow so you'll notice that the content rooms are strategically placed so that when you're changing rooms, people are forced to cross interact with each other because they're forced to bump into each other. And if you look at the programming, we purposefully, to our demise to be honest, year one, put a lot of programming that was conflicted with each other. We made people make a decision about what talk they wanted to go to because there were two really compelling people at the same time or 10 minutes off. And so you had to make a decision. You had to vote with your feet. You got to vote with your feet. And from a conference perspective, we call that FOMO, right? We want our guests to FOMO, not because we want them to miss a particular talk, but because we want them to be so overwhelmed with content and opportunity, with networking that when they walk away, they've had a good experience, they're fulfilled, but they think I got to go back year two because that thing I missed, I'm not going to miss this. Yeah, I will point out too that you guys made a good call on filming all the sessions. So everything's going to be online. We'll help you guys do that. So the video's going to be available for everyone to look on demand. You also had some good broadcast here. We had a couple of shows. The queue's been here. You have multiple people. You mentioned the DJs. Yeah, so good stuff. So, okay, hallway conversations are lobby con, as we call it. When people are hanging on a lobby, lobby con is always good, hallway con. So what, Gabriel, in your mind as you walked around, what were some of the hallway conversations that you overheard and that you thought were interesting? And what hallway conversations were you personally involved in? The personal conversations I was involved with is, why isn't somebody not at this station? Why is someone not guarding this door? But I will tell you, from what I heard from conference attendees, the conversations that I heard taking place were, and I hope Jonathan doesn't mind, but Jonathan Nelson from Hack Fund spoke on our main stage. And I hope he doesn't mind me speaking out of turn, but he came to me and said, this is one of the best run blockchain conferences I've ever been to. To have somebody like Jonathan say that, who has done hundreds of talks, maybe not thousands, was really meaningful. But what was more important is to talk to him and him feel comfortable enough to sit down with me and just talk generally. That's the vibe we want for every attendee. We want you to feel comfortable meeting with people in the hallway who you've never met and be vulnerable from a security perspective. Michael Turpin, for example, sitting down and talking proactively about being the AT&T hack, right? These are opportunities for people to really talk about what's happened and be vulnerable and have the opportunity to educate us all how to get better as an industry. Yeah, the other thing I want to get your thoughts on is obviously the program's been phenomenal on the content side. Thank you. But community is really important. We're a community model at theCUBE. You guys care about the community aspect of this. And as an inaugural event, you want to have an ongoing year after year and hopefully it'll get bigger. I think it will based on the results we're seeing. Talk about the community impact because what you're really talking about there is community. That's right. Well, I mean, Vegas, we talk about there's multiple communities, right? Regionally, Ho Show is a Vegas-based company. We're born here. We close, I think, 40-some employees all based here in Las Vegas, which is our home. So the first thing that we did with respect to community is we created a local price. If you're a Nevada resident, we didn't want you to have to invest a significant amount of money to come to something in your own town. The second thing we did is we invited the local Vegas Bitcoin Meetup and Ethereum Meetups to come and partake and not only participate, but contribute to the content and opening day. In fact, there was so much influx of people from those Meetups. It wasn't like a program where we had an actual AV tech set up. It thought it was going to be like a Meetup. There were so many people that attended. We had to on the fly provide AV because we were overwhelmed with the amount of people that showed up. So that's a regional community. But with respect to the community from blockchain community, what we wanted to do was make sure we brought people of all ethnicities, all countries. We have 26 countries represented in the first blockchain security conference. And you have some big names, celebrities here. Neil Kittleson, Max Kaiser, Ego Okomama, Anand Prakash, Yoko Barensky, Alex Blair from your side, Pavel Karanenko, Karchenko. Some big names. Now see Andreas here, keynoting. Yeah, Michael Perklin, Andreas Diego Zaldivar. I mean, Alina... What does it say? Alina V. Ranova. I mean, these are big names. Yeah, these are big names. Okay, so what's your takeaway as you look back? My takeaway is that there's a yearning for this type of event. My takeaway is that we're doing something right. We have the luxury as Ho Show in that we're not an events company. People think that might be a disadvantage to run a conference, or you're not an event company. I think it's an advantage. Because it holds my feet to the fire much closer than an event organizer who doesn't have a company reputation and brand to protect. Ho Show, as you know, has a good brand in the cybersecurity world with respect to blockchain. We don't have the luxury of throwing a poor event, giving you a bad experience, because that would tarnish Ho Show's brand. Well, also you're in the community too, so you're going to have direct feedback. That's right. And the other thing too, I will say, I'm good at a lot of events, and there are people who are in the business of doing events, and they have a profit motive. That's right. So the lanyards are all monetized, everything's monetized, and that sometimes takes away from the community aspect. Correct. And I think you guys did a good job of not being profligate on the event. Obviously you want to make a little bit of cash, but you didn't over-focus on money-making and grinding people for the cash. You really made it about the content and the experience for and with the community. And I think that's a formula that people want. Yeah, I would like to see the model, I would like to see the model changed over time, if I'm being honest. A majority of cryptocurrencies today are paid to play, so a lot of the content you're getting is sponsored. So I'm okay with that, but I think it should be delineated between content and sponsored content. You need disclosure, you need disclosure, you don't want to water down the content program. But the conference circuit and crypto is not ready for that. It hasn't reached, in my opinion, hasn't reached that level of maturation yet. Like I told you, I'm a former South by Southwest guy. Like my belief is you create the content and the sponsors will come. I don't begrudge conference organizers for sponsoring out events because they're really, really expensive. Cost per attendee. And this demand to this hype out there. Yeah, hundreds of dollars per attendee are the cost. I get it, I understand why they do it. But what I would like to see is the model change over time, where as we get more sophisticated as a technology space, we should also grow as a event and conference circuit as well. What I mean by that is let's change the model that eventually someday it's free for all attendees to come. And those conferences and the costs associated with them are subsidized by companies that want access to the people that are attending them. It sounds like an upstream open source project. Sure, of course. I mean, that's how open source became so popular. You don't screw with the upstream, but you have downstream opportunity. So if you create a nice upstream model, that's the cube philosophy as well. We totally agree with you. And I think you guys are onto something pioneering with the event. I think that you're motivated to do it. The community needs it. I think that's ultimately the self governing aspect that I think you're onto something really good. Co-creation, obviously we believe in that. And the results speak for themselves. Congratulations. Thank you so much. I appreciate you guys coming here and investing your time. And I hope that all our staff has been accommodated and the hard rock has treated you well. You guys have been great, very friendly. But I think again, outside of you guys it's a great company and great brand. And you guys, and speaks for itself, the results. This is an important event. Agreed. Because of the timing, because of the security focus, it's crypto, it's crypto revolution, it's cybersecurity and fintech all kind of coming together through huge global demand. I mean, we haven't got into IoT and supply chain, all the hacks going on with China and these things being reported. This is serious business, there's a lot on the line. There's a lot. And you guys having a clear focus on that is really service to society. Thank you so much for doing it. Our Q coverage here in Las Vegas for Hoshokon, this is the first conference of its kind where security is front and center. It is the conference for security and blockchain, bringing the worlds together, building the bridges and building the community bridges as well. We love that. That's our belief as well as the Q coverage here in Vegas. Stay with us more after this short break.