 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at No. Summit 2017 in downtown San Francisco. 800 people hanging out at the Mission Bay Conference Center talking about development and really monumental growth curve. I mean, one of the earlier presenters had one project last year, I think 15 this year, 22 in development and another 75 kind of toy project. So the development curve is really steep. IBM's here, Microsoft, Google, all the big players. So there's a lot of enterprise momentum as well. And we're happy to have our next guest who's really put, who started the show and one of the main sponsors of the show is Charles Bieler. He's a general partner at Rally Ventures. Charles, great to see you. Good to be back. Good to see you. Yeah, absolutely. So just kind of general impressions. You've been doing this for a number of years. I think when we talked earlier, Mr. Dahl, Ryan Dahl's interview from, I don't even know what year it is. We'll have to look. 2012, January 2012. 2012, still one of our most popular interviews of all the thousands we've done on theCUBE. But now I kind of get it. We got right place to right time, but it was initially a lark in 2011. We were talking about Node. Seemed like a really interesting project, but no one was really using it in any meaningful way. Brian Cantrell from Joint, who I know you all have talked to before, walked me through the Hello World example on our board at my office. And we decided, let's go for it. Let's see if we can get a bunch of enterprises to come and start talking about what they're doing. So January 2012, there were almost none who were actually doing it, but they were talking about why it made sense. And you fast forward to 2017. So HomeAway was the company that actually had no apps. Now 15, 22 in development, like you were mentioning. And right now on stage, you got Twitter talking about Twitter Lite. The breadth, and it's not just the internet companies. You look at Capital One, you look at some of the other big banks and true kind of enterprise companies who are using this. It's been fun to watch. And for us, I mean, we do enterprise investing. So it fits well, but selfishly, this community is just a fun group of people to be around. So as much as this helps for a rally and things, we've always been in awe of what the folks around the Node community have meant and tried to do. And it did start with Ryan and kind of went from there. So yeah, it's fun to be back and see it again for the fifth annual installment. It's interesting, some of the conversations on stage, we're also too about just kind of community development and community maturation and people doing bad behavior and yet are technically strong. And we've seen some of these kind of growing pains in some other open source communities. The one that jumps out is OpenStack as we've watched that one kind of grow and morph over time. So these are good, there's bad problems and good problems. These are good growing pain problems. And that's an interesting one because you read the latest press about the venture industry and the issues you see there. And people talk more generally about the tech industry. And it is a problem, it's a challenge. And it starts with encouraging a broad diverse group of people to be interested in this business and getting into it. And so the node community to me has always been, and I think almost any other open source community could benefit from looking at not just how they've done it but who the people are and what they've driven. For us, one of the things we've always tried to do is bring a diverse set of speakers to come and get engaged. And it's really hard to go and find enough people who have the time and willingness to come up on stage. And it's so rewarding when you start to really expose the breadth of who's out there and engaged in doing the right stuff with them. Last year we had Stacey Kirk who, she runs a company down in the land. Her entire team pretty much is based in Jamaica. Brought the whole team out. And it was so much fun to have. Like a whole new group of people, the community just didn't know, get to know. And be in awe of what they're building. So yeah, I thought the electron conversation they were talking about community, that was Jacob from GitHub. It's an early community there, they're trying to figure it out. On the open stack side, it's very corporate driven. It's harder to have those conversations. In the Node community, it's still more community driven. And as a result, they're able to have more of the conversation around how do we build a very inclusive group of people who can frankly do a more effective job of changing development. So. Well, kudos to you. I mean you opened the conference in your opening remarks talking about the code of content, or code of conduct. And it's kind of like good news, bad news. Like really we have to talk about what should basically be common sense. But you have to do it and that's part of the program. It is Women in Tech Wednesday today. So we've got a boatload of cards going out today with a lot of the women. And it's been proven time and time again that a diversity of opinions tackling any problem is going to lead to a better solution. And hopefully this is not new news to anybody either. And we have a few scholarship folks from Women Who Code over here. We've done that with them for the last few years. But there's so many organizations that anyone who actually wants to spend a little time figuring out how can I be a part of the, I don't know if I'd call it solution, but help with a challenge that we have to face. It's Women Who Code, it's Girls Who Code, it's Black Girls Code. But it's not just women. I mean there's a broad diverse set of people we need to engage. We have a group here, Operation Code, who's working with veterans who would like to find a career and are starting to become developers. And we have three or four sponsored folks from Operation Code 2. And again, it's just rewarding to watch people who were some of the key folks who helped really make Node happen. Walking up to some stranger who's sort of staring around, hasn't met anybody, introduced himself, say, hey, what are you interested in? How can I help? And it's one of the things that, frankly, brings us back to do this year after year. It's rewarding. Well it's kind of an interesting piece of what Node is. Again, we keep hearing time and time again. It's an easy language. He's the same language for the front end of the back end. He's a bunch of preconfigured modules. Aunt Monica from Intel said, she said that a lot of the code, AC's 2% is your code and everything else you're leveraging from other people. And we see in all these tech conferences that the way to have innovation is to enable more people to contribute than have the tools and the data. And that's really kind of part of what this whole ethos is here. And making it, I mean, just generally the ethos around making it easier to develop and deploy. And so when we first started, Google was nowhere to be found. Microsoft was actually already here. IBM wasn't here yet. And now you look at those folks, the number of submissions we saw for talk proposals, the depth of engagement within those organizations. Obviously Google's got their go and a bunch of other, but Node is a key part of what they're doing. Node on, I think, for both IBM and also for Google is the most deployed, you know, language. The most deployed stack, in terms of what they're seeing on their cloud, which is why they're here. And they're seeing just continued growth. So yeah, it drives that view of like, how can we make software easier to work with, easier to put together, create and deploy. And it's fun to watch, you know, erstwhile competitors sitting, comparing notes and ideas. And someone said to me, one of the Google folks, Miles Lawrence, had said, you know, mostly I love coming to this because the hallway chatter here is just always so fascinating. So you go hear these great talks and you walk out and the speakers are there. You get to talk to them and really learn from them. So I want to shift gears a little bit. Always great to get a venture capitalist on it. Everybody wants to hear your thoughts and you see a lot of stuff come across, you know, your desk. You just look at the constant crashing of waves and innovation that we keep going through here. And I know that's part of why you live here and why I do too. And, you know, cloud clearly is probably past the peak of the wave, but we're just coming into IoT and Internet of Things and 5G, which is going to be, you know, start to hit in the near future. As you look at it from an enterprise perspective, you know, what's getting you excited? What are some of the things that maybe people aren't thinking about that are less obvious? And really, you know, the adoption of enterprises of these cutting edge technologies, of getting involved in open source is really a phenomenal kind of environment for startups. Yeah, and what you're seeing is as the companies, I mean, the original enterprises that were interested in node who decided to start deploying, the next question is, all right, this worked, what else can we be doing? And this is where you're seeing the advent of, so first cloud, but now how people are thinking about deployment, you know, so there's a lot of conversation here this week about serverless, right? So we're talking about containers, microservices, and next thing you know, people are saying, well, okay, what else can we be doing to kind of push the boundaries around this? So from our perspective, what we think about when we think of enterprise and sort of infrastructure and DevOps, et cetera, it is an ever-changing thing. So cloud, as we know it today, is sort of, it's done, but it's not close to being finished when you think about how people are making, creating apps, deploying them, how that keeps changing, questions they keep asking, but also now to your point, when you look at 5G, when you look at IoT, the deployment methodology, they're going to have to change, right? The development languages are going to change, and that will once again result in further change across the entire infrastructure of how am I going to go deploy? So I would say that we have not stopped seeing innovative stuff in any of those categories. You asked about where do we see kind of future things that we like, like any VC, if I don't say AI and ML, and what are the other ones I'm supposed to say? Virtual reality, augmented reality. Drones, obviously, are huge. No, it's anti-drone. Sorry, no drones. Drone detection. So we look at those as enabling technology. We're more interested from a rally perspective in applied use of those technologies, so there's some folks from Grail Bio here today, and I'm sure you know Grail, right? They raised the billion dollars, and the first question I asked to the VP was here, I said, did you cure cancer yet? Because it's been like a year and a half. They haven't yet, sorry. Shoot. But what's really interesting is when you talk to them, what are they doing? So first they're using Node, but the approach they're taking to try to make their software get smarter and smarter, smarter about the stuff they see, how they're changing. It's just fundamentally different than things people were thinking about a few years ago. So for us, the applied pieces, we want to see companies like a Grail come in and say, here's what we're doing, here's why, and here's how we're going to leverage all of these enabling technologies to go accomplish something that no one has ever been able to do before. And that's what gets us excited. I mean, the idea of artificial intelligence, it's cool, it's great, I love talking about it. Walk me through how you're going to go do something compelling with it. Blockchain is an area that we're spending, it have been, but continue to spend a lot of time looking around, not so much from a currency perspective. It's just very compelling technology and the breadth of applicability there is incredible. And we've met in the last week, I met four entrepreneurs, there's three of them over here, talking about just really novel ways to take advantage of a technology that is still just kind of early stages from our perspective of getting to a point where people can really deploy within large enterprise. And then I'd say the final piece for us, and it's not a new space, but kind of sitting over all of this is security. And as these things change constantly, the security needs are going to change, right? The footprint in terms of what the attack surface looks like, it gets bigger and bigger, it gets more complex. And the unfortunate reality of simplifying the development process is you also sometimes sort of move out of the security thought process from a developer perspective, from a deployment perspective. You assume, I mean, I've heard companies say, well, you don't need to worry about security because we keep our stuff on Amazon. Right, right. From as a security investor, I love hearing that as a user of some of those solutions that scares me to death. And so we see this constant evolution there. And what's interesting, you have today, I think we have five security companies who are sponsoring this conference, right? I mean, the first few years, no one even wanted to talk about security. And you have five different companies who were here really talking about why it matters if you're building note apps and deploying in the cloud, what you should be thinking about from a security perspective. The security is so interesting because, to me, it's kind of like insurance, right? How much is enough? And ultimately, you could just shut everything down and close it off, but that's not the solution. So where's the happy medium? And the other thing that we were over and over is, it's got to be baked in all the layers of the cake. It can't just be the castle and moat in methodology anymore. So how much do you have? Where do you put it in? But where do you stop? Because ultimately, it's like insurance, you could just keep buying more and more and more. Yeah, and recognizing the irony of sitting here in San Francisco while Black Hat's taking place, and we should both be out there talking about it too. Well, no, because you can't go there with your phone, your laptop. Now, you're just supposed to bring your car in. This is the first year and four years that my son won't be at DEF CON. He just turned seven. So he set the record at four, five, and six as the youngest DEF CON attendees. A little bitter we're not going this year, but, and shout out because he was first place in the kid's capture the flag last year until he decided to leave and go play video games. But no, so the way we think about the question you just asked on security is, and this is actually, I give a lot of credit to Art Covey, he's one of our venture partners. He was the CEO at RSA for a number of years, ran a post-EMC acquisition as well, is what, it's not so much of a, okay, I've got this issue. It could be, pay it ransomware, whatever it is. People come in and say, well, we solved that. You might solve the problem today, but you don't solve the problem for the future typically. The question is, what is it that you do in my environment that covers a few things? One, how does it reduce the time and energy my team needs to spend on solving these issues so that I can use them? Because the people problem in security is huge. And if you can reduce the amount of time people are doing, what could be automated tasks, manual tasks, and instead get them focused on higher order bits up, you get to cover more. So, how does it reduce the stress level for my team? What do I get to take out? So, great, I don't have an unlimited budget. I'm not just going to keep buying point solutions. What is it that you will allow me to replace so that the net cost to me to add your solution is actually neutral or negative so that I can simplify my environment. And again, going back to making it easier for the people. And then what is it that you do beyond claiming that you're going to solve the problem I have today? Walk me through how this fits into the future. They're not a lot of the thousands of... Those are not easy questions. They're not easy questions. And so when you ask that and apply that to every company who's a black hat today, every company at RSA, there's not very many of the companies who can really answer that in a concise way. And you talk to CISOs, those are the questions they're starting to ask. Great, I love what you're doing. It's not a question of whether I have you in my budget this year or next. What do I get to do in my environment differently that makes my life easier, my organization's life easier, and ultimately nets it out at a lower cost? So it's a theme we've been investing about. 25% of our investments have been in the security space. And I feel like so far, every one of those deals fits in some way in that category. We'll see how they play out, but so far so good. Yeah, well, very good. So before we let you go, just a shout out, I think we talked before, he's sold out of sponsorship, so people that want to get involved in Node 2018, they better step up pretty soon. 2018 will happen. It's the earliest we've ever confirmed and announced next year's conference. It usually takes me five months before I really think about it again. It'll happen, it'll probably happen within the same one-week timeframe, two-week timeframe. I actually, as someone put a ticket tier up for next year where if you buy tickets during the conference, the next two days, you can buy a ticket, I don't know, $395, I think for today, they're a thousand bucks. So it's a good deal if people want to go, but the nice thing is we've never had a team that outreach us to sponsors. It's always been inbound interest. People who want to be involved and it's made the entire thing just a lot of fun to be a part of. But yeah, we'll do it next year and it'll be really fascinating to see how much additional growth we see between now and then because based on some of the enterprises we're seeing here, I mean, true Fortune 500, nothing to do with technology from a revenue perspective, they just use it internally. You're seeing some really cool development taking place and we're going to get some of that on stage next year, so. Good, well congrats on a great event. Thanks and thanks for being here. It's always fun to have you guys. All right, it's Charles Bieler. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE, Noats Summit 2017. Thanks for watching.