 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit 2016, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation and headline sponsors Red Hat and Cisco. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back to theCUBE. SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program, go out to all the big enterprise shows, help extract the signal from the noise. Happy to have on the program a first time guest which is hard to believe. Kyle McDonald who is a founding board director of OpenStack, he's now an advisor and investor in Miniman's space. Kyle, thanks for joining Brian and me. Thank you guys for having me. He's essentially the OpenStack OG, that's him. Sure, I'll take that. Yeah, so we've said many times at this event, the first OpenStack which was around the corner, there were only 75 people, you were one of those 75. I was. We just had two of the other 75 were here. So from 75 to 7,500, give us a little reflection back. When you sat with those people sitting on the floor, everybody's banging out code, is this what you thought it would be in 2016? No, absolutely not. I mean, so I think it's far exceeded what I expected would have happened in such a short span of time. I think when we first got together and we were thinking about OpenStack, I mean it's funny, I was actually working for a different company. I was working for cloud.com at the time and we were well on our way. We deployed CloudStack, we'd built some great clouds with it. It was actually very hard to imagine a world where something that we would work so hard on at that time could be supplanted and have sort of something competitive that was made up of a number of different entities coming together. That seemed very hard, but yet, sitting in that room with 75 other people that, I guess 74, but was kind of looking around, it was like, well, there's something to this, right? We all have a component piece, we all have an invested reason to sort of be doing this. And although CloudStack is a great thing and it's got great implementation, can we take some of that pattern and that work and bring it to combine with other companies? That seemed super powerful. Now I did not expect 7,500 people five years later, code bases, almost every unifying company in the enterprise computing ecosystem has now, in some way, shape or form, jumped on board and said sort of yes. I had not expected that level of cohesiveness to come together. Yeah, initially I remember when the first couple of announcements came out, and again, it was just Nova and Swift at the time, but there was a kind of collective, at least amongst the vendor community, kind of an oh moment where they went, whoa, hang on a second, they're going to give away this thing that people have been building like crazy. You know, there was a time when OpenStack and CloudStack competed with each other and one was open and one wasn't and then they were both open, and if you look back over the last few years, like what were the things that sort of strategically things did people did well and what were some of the things that you went, oh, if I had that one to do over again, maybe I either would have told someone to do something differently or that was a really smart move. I mean, I think the list of things we would do differently could be miles, miles long. I think the things that really, if we look back, there were two bursts of sort of ecosystem companies that sort of got created, right? In the early days of sort of cloud, there was the cloud.com guys, people like Anomaly, I mean, I've heard in the last couple of days blasts from the past names, right? Abiquo, eucalyptus, we just could sit here and name that list of 20 companies, right? And they sort of all, there was a huge set of competition between differing approaches, right? And then we looked at sort of, and there was a meltdown, I would argue a meltdown in that space, right? A couple of successful exits, but not a lot of people who walked away and said, successful exit that I'm going to continue using, right? Cloud Stack being a rare moment of that, but that even didn't last until last year when Citrix has now sold it, so that kind of happened. We look at the OpenStack ecosystem, something very similar happened. There were a ton of companies at the beginning, Piston, Nebula, a lot of these guys with very lofty and heavy valuations and sort of expectations, right? You know, any of us might have remembered any of those parties, right, that happened. And to see some of those companies exiting at very different valuations than we'd expected and sort of see that kind of mellow out, it just pains me because, A, I think we just had a lot of wasted engineering and a lot of wasted time with people competing and so I'm really glad to see a lot of the foundation approaches now kind of helping to mitigate that. It's definitely a mellow or OpenStack. A lot of the folks who are sort of the original PT Barnums, they're no longer around, their companies are no longer around, and at the end of the day, OpenStack is plumbing. I mean, it's sexy API driven plumbing, but it's plumbing and to a certain extent you've got to get to where that mellows out a little bit. You just, you want it to be reliable, you want it to do certain things and it's reached that point where that balance has sort of found itself a little bit. I think this is the first time I've ever heard plumbing actually referred to as sexy, so I'm going to... I mean, I think the, what we're really not talking about, so it's sexy plumbing, that's the interesting angle here. The more interesting angle I think is the destruction of the entire enterprise computing industry that's sort of actually happening in front of us. These giant companies are at major risks. We're actually seeing these workloads going to the public cloud now. There was an article out last week, I was reading with an Intel vice president mentioning that there were too many workloads moving too quickly to the public cloud for their comfort, right? This is something that as an enterprise, companies at enterprise scale have been thinking about for a while, right? What's going to happen? This is a risk. How do we mitigate that risk? We're watching all of those games being played out right now in ecosystems like OpenStack, and I think that's the really critical story here, right? That's the future of all of these giant companies, and where does that innovation sort of come from? And really, how do they map that to the next level? I don't... So Kyle, what's your pulse on kind of the startup environment these days? You're out in San Francisco. I talked to a couple of VCs here at the show. There's not a lot of money flowing into some of the OpenStack related stuff, say valuations are high, everybody throws around the bubble term. What's your take on things? I mean, I think there were a lot of companies that sort of entered into both the OpenStack ecosystem and then following on, I'll go with the DevOps sort of mode to enablement space, right? We're going to follow the Gartner trend, right? Also something I never expected to see, a Gartner lead keynote at OpenStack, right? When I look at a lot of that ecosystem, there were a lot of benefits that were sort of promised to end users and a lot of value that was going to be created. And I think there have been a lot of attempts to sort of show that value, but with all of the different ecosystems, there have not been a lot of companies that have actually been able to go from that sort of series A early stage company and get it to the next level with very broad adoption. And I think that as a result, we're not seeing companies come out and be like, yes, we're growing at this massive space in the DevOps world. We're seeing it in software as a service, we're seeing it in different parts of cloud services. But frankly, I just think that container ecosystem is so fragmented, so bursty, and frankly with a lot of the foundation approaches, sort of minimizing their ability to differentiate and create value, you know, they're just, that's a tough market to be in. Yeah, yeah. Well, if you're advising a customer today, you're thinking about it from an investment perspective, you're advising what's, aside from the five guys in a garage, right? Let's say, you know, large automotive company came to you and said, hey, look, you've got a ton of technology background. We need to figure out how to be in connected cars, we're afraid of automation, you know, or autonomous. Like, what's your advice to them in terms of saying, like, do you build things yourself? Do you use the public cloud? You know, how do you think about resources? How do you think about that for the non-greenfield startup kind of companies? I mean, so that's an interesting question. I think the, so not a single one of the Fortune 500 sort of customers that I've gone and visited doesn't have a chief digital or chief sort of innovation or chief shake things up officer, right? That's now a very common title. And job function some day, I think that could be a great job to have, right? But they're tasked with this sort of like innovation, right? And currently that innovation starts with, let's go out and look at, you know, how can we engage with bursty sort of companies in different approaches? But frankly, I mean, I think the best advice you can have is to not look back. One of the companies I work with has a saying where it's just, we don't look back. And it is that perspective. And so that goes to everything from, all right, we're working with our legacy software vendors and we've asked them to do this thing and they have given us a comment about what is supported. And we've said, all right, well, the options were ask you to do it or do it ourselves. So, well, I guess we'll do it ourselves, right? And I think that that's a very powerful, right sort of approach because when you start just only looking at what can you do with what you've got and you can build, you have a lot more flexibility and freedom. And so if you're looking at how to do a driverless car, if you start with all of the legacy stuff, you're gonna be looking at legacy bio systems, crazy old operating systems, managing the seats and integrating them into the, like you could go down a rat hole of spending 50 parts looking at the legacy. But one of the lessons we've all learned from things like OpenStack is the best things get built by looking future and looking forward. So Kyle, unfortunately, we're running short on time here. Want to give you the last word though, it's always great having kind of the hallway conversations here, anything that's kind of not talked about publicly that much that you'd want to share with people, kind of look at it OpenStack in general or some of these environments. I mean, I think the thing we're still looking for is really there's, we need to see the large OpenStack public cloud presence kind of focus still. I still think we're too much in the enterprise, we're still too much in the private cloud markets. These are all great things. I think that's great enablement technology, but the future's forward. The future is public clouds. The future's how do those workloads get there? And frankly, anything that creates friction to getting those workloads into what is the future? That's, I think we're all looking around saying what games are people playing to keep those workloads inside of enterprises today? You know, and inside the private cloud. All right, well Kyle, really appreciate you joining. We'll be back with more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2016, Austin, Texas. This is theCUBE.